Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/56

 36 A HISTORY OF ART IN CHALD.KA AND ASSYRIA. divine dynasty, which was succeeded by a human dynasty of fabu- lous duration. These legendary sovereigns, like the patriarchs of the Bible, each lived for many centuries, and to them, as well as to the gods who preceded them, certain myths were attached of which we find traces in the surviving monuments. Such myths were the fish- god, Cannes, and the Chaldaic deluge with its Noah, Xisouthros. 1 This double period, with its immoderate duration, corresponds to those dark and confused ages during which the intellect of man was absorbed in the constant and painful struggle against nature, during which he had no leisure either to take note of time or to count the generations as they passed. After this long succession of gods and heroes, Berosus gives what he calls a Medic dynasty, in which, it has been thought, the memory of some period of Aryan supremacy has survived. In any case, we have serious reasons for thinking that the third of the dynasties of Berosus, with its eleven kings, was of Susian origin. Without speaking of other indications which have been ingeniously grouped by modern criticism, a direct confirmation of this hypothesis is to be found in the evidence of the Bible. In the latter we find Chedorlaomer, king of Elam, master of the whole basin of the Tigris and Euphrates in the time of Abraham. Among his vassals were Amraphel, king of Shinar, and Arioch, king of Ellasar, the two principal cities of Assyria. 2 All doubts upon this point have been banished since the texts in which Assurbanipal, the last of the Ninevite conquerors, vaunts his exploits, have been deciphered. In two of these inscriptions he tells us how he took Susa 1,635 years after Chedornakhounta, king of Elam, had conquered Babylon ; he found, he says, in that city sacred statues which had been carried off from Erech by the king of Elam. He brought them back again to Chaldsea and re-established them in the sanctuary from which they had been violently removed. 3 Assurbanipal took Susa in 660. All antiquity declares that the Babylonians and the Syrians had a taste for chronology at a very 1 This account of the fabulous origin of civilization in Chalckea and Assyria will be found in the second book of BEROSUS. See Fragmenta Historicum Grce.corum of Ch. MULLER, vol. i. fr. 4, 13. Book i. is consecrated to the cosmogony, Book iii. to the Second Chaldee Empire. 2 Genesis xiv. 3 F. LENORMANT, Manuel de t Histoire anrienne, vol. ii. p. 24. SMITH (Assyrian Discoveries, p. 224) puts the capture of Susa in 645, and thus arrives at the date 2280 B.C.