* We can determine the rank occupied, by the tartanu at court by the positions they occupy in the lists of eponymous limmu:  they invariably come next after the king—­a fact which was noticed many years ago.

The more influential of these functionaries bore, in addition to their other titles, one of a special nature, which, for the space of one year, made its holder the most conspicuous man in the country; they became limmu, and throughout their term of office their names appeared on all official documents.  The Chaldaeans distinguished the various years of each reign by a reference to some event which had taken place in each; the Assyrians named them after the limmu.* The king was the ex-officio limmu for the year following that of his accession, then after him the tartan, then the ministers and governors of provinces and cities in an order which varied little from reign to reign.  The names of the limmu, entered in registers and tabulated—­just as, later on, were those of the Greek archons and Roman consuls—­furnished the annalists with a rigid chronological system, under which the facts of history might be arranged with certainty.**

* According to Delitzsch, the term limu, or limmu, meant at first any given period, then later more especially the year during which a magistrate filled his office; in the opinion of most other Assyriologists it referred to the magistrate himself as eponymous archon.

** The first list of limmu was discovered by H. Rawlinson.  The portions which have been preserved extend from the year 893 to the year 666 B.C. without a break.  In the periods previous and subsequent to this we have only names scattered here and there which it has not been possible to classify:  the earliest limmu known at present flourished under Ramman-nirari I., and was named Mukhurilani.  Three different versions of the canon have como down to us.  In the most important one the names of the eponymous officials are written one after another without titles or any mention of important events; in the other two, the titles of each personage, and any important occurrences which took place during his year of office, are entered after the name.

The king still retained the sacerdotal attributes with which Cossaean monarchs had been invested from the earliest times, but contact with the Egyptians had modified the popular conception of his personality.  His subjects were no longer satisfied to regard him merely as a man superior to his fellow-men; they had come to discover something of the divine nature in him, and sometimes identified him—­not with Assur, the master of all things, who occupied a position too high above the pale of ordinary humanity—­but with one of the demi-gods of the second rank, Shamash, the Sun, the deity whom the Pharaohs pretended to represent in flesh and blood here below.  His courtiers, therefore, went as far as to call him “Sun” when they addressed him, and he himself adopted this title in his inscriptions.*