[Illustration: Fig 56.--White marble vase, engraved with the name and title of Urumush, King of Kish. From Niffer.--Pennsylvania Museum, No. 8870.]
We have but a few short inscriptions of Urumush, and those of a votive character, but they enable us to form some estimate of the extent and condition of his empire. The only designation he assumes in those of his inscriptions that have been recovered is "King of Kish," so that we are without the information which might have been derived from a study of his subsidiary titles. Such titles would no doubt have been added in any lengthy text, and their absence from his known inscriptions is simply due to their brevity. On the other hand, the fact that these short inscriptions have been found on sites so widely scattered as Abû Habba, Niffer, and Tello, is probably significant. The inscriptions from Abû Habba[23] and Tello consist simply of his name and title engraved on fragments of stone vases, and, since they bear no dedication to a local deity, they might possibly have been carried there as spoil from Kish. But fragments of precisely similar vases, bearing the same inscription, have been found at Niffer, and, as the texts upon two other vases from the latter place prove that they were deposited there by Urumush himself, it is a fair assumption that their presence on the other two sites is to be explained in the same way. We may therefore conclude that both Sippar and Lagash were under the control of Urumush. In other words, it is not improbable that the limits of his authority in Babylonia extended from the extreme north of Akkad to the south of Sumer.
It is fully in accordance with this view that Urumush should have controlled the central sanctuary at Nippur, and his vases found upon that site, which bear dedications to Enlil, prove that this was so. From one of them we learn too that the power of Kish was felt beyond the limits of Sumer and Akkad. The text in question states that the vase upon which it is inscribed formed part of certain spoil from Elam, and was dedicated to Enlil by Urumush, "when he had conquered Elam and Barakhsu."[24] It is possible that the conquest of Elam and the neighbouring district of Barakhsu, to which Urumush here lays claim, was not more than a successful raid into those countries, from which he returned laden with spoil. But even so, the fact that a king of Kish was strong enough to assume the offensive against Elam, and to lead an expedition across the border, is sufficiently noteworthy. The references to Elam which we have hitherto noted in the inscriptions from Tello would seem to suggest that up to this time the Elamites had been the aggressors, and had succeeded in penetrating into Sumerian territory from which they were with difficulty dislodged. Under Urumush the conditions were reversed, and we shall shortly see reason for believing that his success was not a solitary achievement, but may be connected with other facts in the history of Kish under the Semitic rulers of this period. Meanwhile we may note the testimony to the power and extent of the kingdom of Kish, which is furnished by the short inscriptions of his reign. Later tradition relates that Urumush met his end in a palace revolution;[25] but the survival of his name in the omen-literature of the later Babylonians and Assyrians is further evidence of the important part he played in the early history of their country.