* Hilpreoht calls attention on this point to the fact that no one has yet discovered at Nippur a single ex-voto consecrated by any king of the two first Babylonian dynasties.

The Cossaean rule over the countries of the Euphrates was doubtless similar in its beginnings to that which the Hyksos exercised at first over the nomes of Egypt.  The Cossaean kings did not merely bring with them an army to protect their persons, or to occupy a small number of important posts; they were followed by the whole nation, and spread themselves over the entire country.  The bulk of the invaders instinctively betook themselves to districts where, if they could not resume the kind of life to which they were accustomed in their own land, they could, at least give full rein to their love of a free and wild existence.  As there were no mountains in the country, they turned to the marshes, and, like the Hyksos in Egypt, made themselves at home about the mouths of the rivers, on the half-submerged low lands, and on the sandy islets of the lagoons which formed an undefined borderland between the alluvial region and the Persian Gulf.  The covert afforded, by the thickets furnished scope for the chase which these hunters had been accustomed to pursue in the depths of their native forests, while fishing, on the other hand, supplied them with an additional element of food.  When their depredations drew down upon them reprisals from their neighbours, the mounds occupied, by their fortresses, and surrounded by muddy swamps, offered them almost as secure retreats as their former strongholds on the lofty sides of the Zagros.  They made alliances with the native Aramaeans—­with those Kashdi, properly called Chaldaeans, whose name we have imposed upon all the nations who, from a very early date, bore rule on the banks of the Lower Euphrates.  Here they formed themselves into a State—­Karduniash—­whose princes at times rebelled, against all external authority, and at other times acknowledged the sovereignty of the Babylonian monarchs.*

* The state of Karduniash, whose name appears for the first time on the monuments of the Cossaean period, has been localised in a somewhat vague manner, in the south of Babylonia, in the country of the Kashdi, and afterwards formally identified with the Countries of the Sea, and with the principality which was called Bit-Yakin in the Assyrian period.  In the Tel-el-Amarna tablets the name is already applied to the entire country occupied by the Cossaean kings or their descendants, that is to say, to the whole of Babylonia.  Sargon II. at that time distinguishes between an Upper and a Lower Karduniash; and in consequence the earliest Assyriologists considered it as an Assyrian designation of Babylon, or of the district surrounding it, an opinion which was opposed by Delitzsch, as he believed it to be an indigenous term which at first indicated the district round Babylon, and afterwards the whole