through Kadesh-barnea, overthrowing the Amalekites and the Amorites on their way.  Then came the battle in the vale of Siddim, which ended in the defeat of the Canaanites, the death of the kings of Sodom and Gomorrha, and the capture of abundant booty.  Among the prisoners was Lot, the nephew of Abram, and it was to effect his rescue that the patriarch armed his followers and started in pursuit of the conquerors.  Near Damascus he overtook them, and falling upon them by night, recovered the spoil of Sodom as well as his “brother’s son.”

Arioch is the Eri-Aku of the cuneiform texts.  In the old language of Chaldea the name signified “servant of the Moon-god.”  The king is well known to us from contemporaneous inscriptions.  Besides the inscribed bricks which have come from the temple of the Moon-god which he enlarged in the city of Ur, there are numerous contract tablets that are dated in his reign.  He tells us that he was the son of an Elamite, Kudur-Mabug, son of Simti-silkhak, and prince (or “father”) of Yamut-bal on the borders of Elam and Babylonia.  But this is not all.  He further gives Kudur-Mabug the title of “father of the Amorite land.”  What this title exactly means it is difficult to say; one thing, however, is certain, Kudur-Mabug must have exercised some kind of power and authority in the distant West.

His name, too, is remarkable.  Names compounded with Kudur, “a servant,” were common in the Elamite language, the second element of the name being that of a deity, to whose worship the owner of it was dedicated.  Thus we have Kudur-Lagamar, “the servant of the god Lagamar,” Kudur-Nakhkhunte, “the servant of Nakhkhunte.”  But Mabug was not an Elamite divinity.  It was, on the contrary, a Mesopotamian deity from whom the town of Mabug near Carchemish, called Bambyke by the Greeks, and assimilated by the Arabs to their Membij, “a source,” derived its name.  Can it be from this Syrian deity that the father of Arioch received his name?

The capital of Arioch or Eri-Aku was Larsa, the city of the Sun-god, now called Senkereh.  With the help of his Elamite kindred, he extended his power from thence over the greater part of Southern Babylonia.  The old city of Ur, once the seat of the dominant dynasty of Chaldaean kings, formed part of his dominions; Nipur, now Niffer, fell into his hands like the seaport Eridu on the shores of the Persian Gulf, and in one of his inscriptions he celebrates his conquest of “the ancient city of Erech.”  On the day of its capture he erected in gratitude a temple to his god Ingirisa, “for the preservation of his life.”

But the god did not protect him for ever.  A time came when Khammurabi, king of Babylon, rose in revolt against the Elamite supremacy, and drove the Elamite forces out of the land.  Eri-Aku was attacked and defeated, and his cities fell into the hands of the conqueror.  Khammurabi became sole king of Babylonia, which from henceforth obeyed but a single sceptre.