the edifice, one of their principal objects was to preserve the name and deeds of the writer from oblivion.  Like similar documents found on the sites of Assyrian and Babylonian cities, they sometimes include curses upon any impious man, who, on finding the inscription after the temple shall have fallen into ruins, should in any way injure the inscription or deface the writer’s name.  It will be obvious that the writers of these inscriptions intended that they should be intelligible to those who might come across them in the future.  If, therefore, they employed the Babylonian as well as the Elamite language, it is clear that they expected that their future readers might be either Babylonian or Elamite; and this belief can only be explained on the supposition that their own subjects were of mixed race.

It is therefore certain that at this early period of Elamite history Semitic Babylonians and Elamites dwelt side by side in Susa and retained their separate languages.  The problem therefore resolves itself into the inquiry:  which of these two peoples occupied the country first?  Were the Semites at first in sole possession, which was afterwards disputed by the incursion of Elamite tribes from the north and east?  Or were the Elamites the original inhabitants of the land, into which the Semites subsequently pressed from Babylonia?

A similar mixture of races is met with in Babylonia itself in the early period of the history of that country.  There the early Sumerian inhabitants were gradually dispossessed by the invading Semite, who adopted the civilization of the conquered race, and took over the system of cuneiform writing, which he modified to suit his own language.  In Babylonia the Semites eventually predominated and the Sumerians as a race disappeared, but during the process of absorption the two languages were employed indiscriminately.  The kings of the First Babylonian Dynasty wrote their votive inscriptions sometimes in Sumerian, sometimes in Semitic Babylonian; at other times they employed both languages for the same text, writing the record first in Sumerian and afterwards appending a Semitic translation by the side; and in the legal and commercial documents of the period the old Sumerian legal forms and phrases were retained intact.  In Elam we may suppose that the use of the Sumerian and Semitic languages was the same.

It may be surmised, however, that the first Semitic incursions into Elam took place at a much later period than those into Babylonia, and under very different conditions.  When overrunning the plains and cities of the Sumerians, the Semites were comparatively uncivilized, and, so far as we know, without a system of writing of their own.  The incursions into Elam must have taken place under the great Semitic conquerors, such as Sar-gon and Naram-Sin and Alu-usharshid.  At this period they had fully adopted and modified the Sumerian characters to express their own Semitic tongue, and on their invasion of Elam they brought their system of writing with them.  The native princes of Elam, whom they conquered, adopted it in turn for many of their votive texts and inscribed monuments when they wished to write them in the Babylonian language.