ments. These, according to the latest facts disclosed by Smith,
Rawlinson, and others, appear to fix a date of about 1800 B.C. for the
foundation of the Assyrian monarchy proper, and the oldest previous
date given by Assurbampal, who reigned about B.C. 668 to 626, gives
1635 years before his time, or say 2280 B.C., as the date of an
Elamite king Kudarnankundi, who seems to be the leader of a primitive
tribe, one of the oldest in the region, and who has been conjectured
to have been the Chedorlaomer of Genesis, but was probably one of his
predecessors.

We gather from the Assyrian annals that the early Turanian kings,
while mound-builders like their kindred elsewhere, and acquainted with
metals and with the cuneiform writing, yet constituted comparatively
small nations, and were much occupied with hunting and other rude
sports, and with predatory expeditions, so as to answer very nearly to
the Biblical conception of the early Cushite kingdom of the valley of
the Euphrates, which was probably in the same stage of culture with
the nations that in a later period inhabited the valley of the
Mississippi, and are known as the Alleghans.

In connection with the early history of man, much importance has been
attached to the division of the early historic and prehistoric ages
into the periods of Stone, Bronze, and Iron, and of the former into a
Palaeolithic or ancient stone age, and a more modern or Neolithic stone
age. It is plain, however, that too great importance has been attached
to these distinctions, and that they express rather differences of
circumstances and of culture than of age, so that they have really no
bearing on the Biblical chronology.

If palaeolithic or rudely chipped implements are the oldest known, as
they not improbably were the first tools used by man, yet their use
has extended in the case of rude nations all the way up to the present
time; and in America and Northern Asia we know that their antiquity is
but of yesterday, and that they were used with highly finished
implements of bone, and of those softer stones that admit of being
polished. No certain line can therefore be drawn even locally between
a Neolithic and a Palaeolithic period, especially since in localities
where flint implements were extensively quarried and made, as on the
banks of rivers in Northern France and Southern England, and in such
places as "Grimes' Graves" and Cissbury in the latter country, where
mines were sunk in the chalk