splendours of Babylonian courts in the later days of Esther and Haman and Mordecai, is made evident by the Biblical references to the gorgeous palace, which had “white, green, and blue hangings, fastened with cords of fine linen and purple to silver rings and pillars of marble; the beds were of gold and silver, upon a pavement of red, and blue, and white, and black marble “.[145] Beyond Elam were the plains, plateaus, and grassy steppes occupied by the Medes and other peoples of Aryan speech.  Cultural influences came and went like spring winds between the various ancient communities.

For ten long centuries Sumer and Akkad flourished and prospered ere we meet with the great Hammurabi, whose name has now become almost as familiar as that of Julius Caesar.  But our knowledge of the leading historical events of this vast period is exceedingly fragmentary.  The Sumerians were not like the later Assyrians or their Egyptian contemporaries—­a people with a passion for history.  When inscriptions were composed and cut on stone, or impressed upon clay tablets and bricks, the kings selected as a general rule to record pious deeds rather than to celebrate their victories and conquests.  Indeed, the average monarch had a temperament resembling that of Keats, who declared: 

                       The silver flow
    Of Hero’s tears, the swoon of Imogen,
    Fair Pastorella in the bandits’ den,
    Are things to brood on with more ardency
    Than the death day of empires.

The Sumerian king was emotionally religious as the great English poet was emotionally poetical.  The tears of Ishtar for Tammuz, and the afflictions endured by the goddess imprisoned in Hades, to which she had descended for love of her slain husband, seemed to have concerned the royal recorder to a greater degree than the memories of political upheavals and the social changes which passed over the land, like the seasons which alternately brought greenness and gold, barrenness and flood.

City chronicles, as a rule, are but indices of obscure events, to which meagre references were sometimes also made on mace heads, vases, tablets, stelae, and sculptured monoliths.  Consequently, present-day excavators and students have often reason to be grateful that the habit likewise obtained of inscribing on bricks in buildings and the stone sockets of doors the names of kings and others.  These records render obscure periods faintly articulate, and are indispensable for comparative purposes.  Historical clues are also obtained from lists of year names.  Each city king named a year in celebration of a great event—­his own succession to the throne, the erection of a new temple or of a city wall, or, mayhap, the defeat of an invading army from a rival state.  Sometimes, too, a monarch gave the name of his father in an official inscription, or happily mentioned several ancestors.  Another may be found to have made an illuminating statement regarding a