years.  The great-grandson of Agum the Great was Agum II, and not until his reign were the statues of Merodach and his consort Zerpanitu^m brought back to the city of Babylon.  This monarch recorded that, in response to the oracle of Shamash, the sun god, he sent to the distant land of Khani (Mitanni) for the great deity and his consort.  Babylon would therefore appear to have been deprived of Merodach for about two centuries.  The Hittite-Mitanni raid is dated about 1800 B.C., and the rise of Gandash, the Kassite, about 1700 B.C.  At least a century elapsed between the reigns of Gandash and Agum II.  These calculations do not coincide, it will be noted, with the statement in a Babylonian hymn, that Merodach remained in the land of the Hatti for twenty-four years, which, however, may be either a priestly fiction or a reference to a later conquest.  The period which followed the fall of the Hammurabi Dynasty of Babylonia is as obscure as the Hyksos Age of Egypt.

Agum II, the Kassite king, does not state whether or not he waged war against Mitanni to recover Babylon’s god Merodach.  If, however, he was an ally of the Mitanni ruler, the transference of the deity may have been an ordinary diplomatic transaction.  The possibility may also be suggested that the Hittites of Mitanni were not displaced by the Aryan military aristocracy until after the Kassites were firmly established in northern Babylonia between 1700 B.C. and 1600 B.C.  This may account for the statements that Merodach was carried off by the Hatti and returned from the land of Khani.

The evidence afforded by Egypt is suggestive in this connection.  There was a second Hyksos Dynasty in that country.  The later rulers became “Egyptianized” as the Kassites became “Babylonianized”, but they were all referred to by the exclusive and sullen-Egyptians as “barbarians” and “Asiatics”.  They recognized the sun god of Heliopolis, but were also concerned in promoting the worship of Sutekh, a deity of sky and thunder, with solar attributes, whom Rameses II identified with the “Baal” of the Hittites.  The Mitannians, as has been stated, recognized a Baal called Teshup, who was identical with Tarku of the Western Hittites and with their own tribal Indra also.  One of the Hyksos kings, named Ian or Khian, the Ianias of Manetho, was either an overlord or the ally of an overlord, who swayed a great empire in Asia.  His name has been deciphered on relics found as far apart as Knossos in Crete and Baghdad on the Tigris, which at the time was situated within the area of Kassite control.  Apparently peaceful conditions prevailed during his reign over a wide extent of Asia and trade was brisk between far-distant centres of civilization.  The very term Hyksos is suggestive in this connection.  According to Breasted it signifies “rulers of countries”, which compares with the Biblical “Tidal king of nations”, whom Sayce, as has been indicated, regards as a Hittite monarch.  When the Hittite hieroglyphics have been read and Mesopotamia thoroughly explored, light may be thrown on the relations of the Mitannians, the Hittites, the Hyksos, and the Kassites between 1800 B.C. and 1500 B.C.  It is evident that a fascinating volume of ancient history has yet to be written.