** Nabonidos, for instance, the last king of Babylon before the Persian conquest, has left us a memorial of his excavations.  He found in this manner the cylinders of Shagashaltiburiash at Sippara, those of Khammurabi, and those of Naramsin.

We act in a similar way to-day, and our excavations, like those of the Chaldaeans, end in singularly disconnected results:  the materials which the earth yields for the reconstruction of the first centuries consist almost entirely of mutilated records of local dynasties, isolated names of sovereigns, dedications of temples to gods, on sites no longer identifiable, of whose nature we know nothing, and too brief allusions to conquests or victories over vaguely designated nations.* The population was dense and life active in the plains of the Lower Euphrates.  The cities in this region formed at their origin so many individual and, for the most part, petty states, whose kings and patron gods claimed to be independent of all the neighbouring kings and gods:  one city, one god, one lord—­this was the rule here as in the ancient feudal districts from which the nomes of Egypt arose.  The strongest of these principalities imposed its laws upon the weakest:  formed into unions of two or three under a single ruler, they came to constitute a dozen kingdoms of almost equal strength on the banks of the Euphrates.  On the north we are acquainted with those of Agade, Babylon, Kuta, Kharsag-Kalama, and that of Kishu, which comprised a part of Mesopotamia and possibly the distant fortress of Harran:  petty as these States were, their rulers attempted to conceal their weakness by assuming such titles as “Kings of the Four Houses of the World,” “Kings of the Universe,” “Kings of Shumir and Akkad.”  Northern Babylonia seems to have possessed a supremacy amongst them.  We are probably wise in not giving too much credit to the fragmentary tablet which assigns to it a dynasty of kings, of which we have no confirmatory information from other sources—­Amilgula, Shamashnazir, Amilsin, and several others:  this list, however, places among these phantom rulers one individual at least, Shargina-Sharrukin, who has left us material evidences of his existence.  This Sargon the Elder, whose complete name is Shargani-shar-ali, was the son of a certain Ittibel, who does not appear to have been king.  At first his possessions were confined to the city of Agade and some undetermined portions of the environs of Babylon, but he soon succeeded in annexing Babylon itself, Sippara, Kishu, Uruk, Kuta, and Nipur:  the contemporary records attest his conquest of Elam, Guti, and even of the far-off land of Syria, which was already known to him under the name of Amuru.  His activity as a builder was in no way behind his warlike zeal.  He built Ekur, the sanctuary of Bel in Nipur, and the great temple