Page:Miscellaneous Babylonian Inscriptions.djvu/16

 Kesh. While the occasion of the inscription appears, therefore, to have been historical, the inscription itself is of the nature of an incantation.

The script in which it is written is that of the dynasty of Agade. It is slightly more archaic than the business documents of this period, but similar differences are observable between the business scripts and those of religious texts in every period of Babylonian writing. As the dynasty of Agade ruled from about 2800 to 2600 B. C., the incantation here recorded is of equal if not greater antiquity than the Pyramid Texts of Egypt.

During the excavations a pavement of the temple terrace at Nippur laid by Naram-Sin and his successor Shargalisharri was found. It is, in the absence of definite information as to where Dr. Haynes found this cylinder, plausible to conjecture that it was written at the time of this reconstruction. The probability that our text comes from one of the two great kings of Agade mentioned above is increased by the fact that the hold of the later rulers of the dynasty upon Nippur seems to have been uncertain, and there is no evidence that they did any building there. We now know that these two monarchs belonged to the dynasty of Kish and Agade that ruled Babylonia for 197 years, and the data published in 1914 by Dr. Poebel and in 1915 by Professor Clay enable us to fix this period as from 2794 B. C. to 2597 B. C. Naram-Sin ruled for