It is in this country, be it remembered, in the Tigro-Euphrates basin, that the Bible places the earliest history of the human race. ‘And it came to pass that as they journeyed from the East they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.’[47] Here, too, is placed the building of Babel, and the subsequent dispersion of the human family. Here ruled Nimrod, ‘the son of Cush,’ the first of the kings of this region of whom any authentic mention is made; though we have dynastic lists of supernatural beings who were supposed to have reigned in Chaldæa in far distant ages of the world, as we have in the case of Egypt. Even of Nimrod’s reign no monumental records have yet come to light. The cities which Nimrod built, says the Bible, were Erech [in Accadian, Ounoug, or Ûrûk] and Ur [Accad. Urû]--these two are the present Warkah and Mugheir,--Accad [Agadê] and Calneh. But the earliest human king of whom we have anything like an authentic date is either Sargon I., who may have reigned as early as 3800 B.C., or Ûrbagûs, who seems to have ruled over all Mesopotamia, contemporaneously with the fifth Egyptian dynasty (3900 or 2900 B.C.).
The Chaldean buildings of this period, like the contemporary Egyptian ones, are of gigantic proportions, and like them seem to recall bygone days, the grandiose conceptions of the later stone-age, those _tumuli_ and cromlechs which, spread over the face of the world, most undoubtedly have suggested to subsequent nations of mankind the belief in a giant race which had preceded them on earth--
‘The far-famed hold, Piled by the hands of giants For god-like kings of old.’
And thus, as has already been often said, this earliest civilization in the world looks back to pre-historic days as much as forward to historic ones.
Close beside Chaldæa, in the more mountainous country to the east, but not far from the Persian Gulf, rose another civilization, that of the Elamites, which may possibly have been not much later than the Chaldæan. This, too, we may believe, was in its origin Turanian. The capital of the country of Elam was Susa. Between 2300 and 2280 B.C., a king of Susa, Kurdur-Nankunty, conquered the reigning king of Chaldæa, and henceforward the two districts were incorporated into one country. The accession of strength thus gained to his crown induced one of the kings of the Elamitic line, Kudur-lagomer (Chedorlaomer) by name, to aspire towards a wider empire (c. 2200 B.C.). He sent his armies against the Semitic nations on his west, who were now beginning to settle down in cities, and to enjoy their share of the civilization of Egypt and Chaldæa. These he subdued, but after sixteen years they rebelled; and it was after a second expedition to punish their recalcitrancy, wherein he had conquered the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, and had among the prisoners taken Lot, the nephew of Abraham, that Chedorlaomer was pursued and defeated by the patriarch. ‘And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them unto Dan. And he divided himself against them, he and his servants, by night, and smote them, and pursued them unto Hobah, which is on the left hand of Damascus. And he brought back all the goods, and also brought again his brother Lot, and his goods, and the women also, and the people.’[48]