Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/57

 THE HISTORY or CIIALD/KA AND ASSYRIA. 37 early period. This is proved by the eponymous system of the Assyrians, a system much to be preferred to the Egyptian habit of dating their monuments with the year of the current reign only. 1 Moreover, have not the ancients perpetuated the fame of the astronomical tables drawn up by the Chaldaeans and founded upon observations dating back to a very remote epoch ? Such tables could not have been made without a strict count of time. We have, then, no reason to doubt the figure named by Assurbanipal, and his chronicle may be taken to give the oldest date in the history of Chaldaea, i;.c. 2,295, as the y ear of the Susian conquest. The Elamite dynasty was succeeded, according to Berosus, by a native Chalda^an dynasty. Berosus and his dates are held in great respect places the appearance of this new royal family in 2,047, g* vm g it forty-nine sovereigns and 458 years of duration. We are thus brought clown to the conquest of Mesopotamia by the Egyptian Pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty. The names of the Chaldsean princes have been transcribed by those Byzantine chroniclers to whom we owe the few and short fragments of Berosus that are still extant. On the other hand, inscriptions dug up upon the sites of the Chaldsean cities have furnished us with fifty royal names which may, it is thought, be ascribed to the period whose chief divisions we have just laid down. Assyriologists have classed them as well as they could from the more or less archaic characters of their language and writing, from the elements of which the proper names are composed, and from the relationships which some of the texts show to have existed between one prince and another but they are still far from establishing a continuous series such as those that o have been arranged for the Pharaohs even of the Ancient Empire. Interruptions are frequent, and their extent is beyond our power even to guess. Primitive Chaldiea has unluckily left behind it no document like the list of Manetho to help us in the arrangement of the royal names with which the monuments are studded. We do not even know how the earliest royal name upon the inscriptions should be read ; it is more to avoid speaking of him by a paraphrase than for any other reason that the name Ourkam has been assigned to the prince whose traces are to be found 1 LKNORMANT, Manuel de r Histoire ancienne, vol. ii. p. 65, gives an account of the system under which special magistrates gave their name to each year, and of the lists which have been preserved.