with his fellow-craftsman, the
gardener Ishullanu, and he becomes king, we know not by what means.

* The phrase "Black Heads," _nishi salmat hahhadi_, has been
taken in an ethnological sense as designating one of the
races of Chaldaea, the Semitic; other Assyriologists consider
it as denoting mankind in general. The latter meaning seems
the more probable.

** Smith had already compared the infancy of Sargon with
that of Moses; the comparison with Cyrus, Bacchus, and
Romulus was made by Talbot. Traditions of the same kind are
frequent in history or folk-tales.

The same inscription which reveals the romance of his youth, recounts
the successes of his manhood, and boasts of the uniformly victorious
issue of his warlike exploits. Owing to lacunae, the end of the account
is in the main wanting, and we are thus prevented from following the
development of his career, but other documents come to the rescue and
claim to furnish its most important vicissitudes. He had reduced the
cities of the Lower Euphrates, the island of Dilmun, Durilu, Elam, the
country of Kazalla: he had invaded Syria, conquered Phoenicia, crossed
the arm of the sea which separates Cyprus from the coast, and only
returned to his palace after an absence of three years, and after having
erected his statues on the Syrian coast. He had hardly settled down to
rest when a rebellion broke out suddenly; the chiefs of Chaldaea formed
a league against him, and blockaded him in Agade: Ishtar, exceptionally
faithful to the end, obtains for him the victory, and he comes out of a
crisis, in which he might have been utterly ruined, with a more secure
position than ever. All these events are regarded as having occurred
sometime about 3800 B.C., at a period when the VIth dynasty was
flourishing in Egypt. Some of them have been proved to be true by recent
discoveries, and the rest are not at all improbable in themselves,
though the work in which they are recorded is a later astrological
treatise. The writer was anxious to prove, by examples drawn from the
chronicles, the use of portents of victory or defeat, of civic peace
or rebellion--portents which he deduced from the configuration of the
heavens on the various days of the month: by going back as far as Sargon
of Agade for his instances, he must have at once increased the respect
for himself on account of his knowledge of antiquity, and the difficulty
which the common herd