pal took Susa in 660. All antiquity declares that the Babylonians
and the Syrians had a taste for chronology at a very early period. This is
proved by the eponymous system of the Assyrians, a system much to be
preferred to the Egyptian habit of dating their monuments with the year of
the current reign only.[61] Moreover, have not the ancients perpetuated the
fame of the astronomical tables drawn up by the Chaldaeans and founded upon
observations dating back to a very remote epoch? Such tables could not have
been made without a strict count of time. We have, then, no reason to doubt
the figure named by Assurbanipal, and his chronicle may be taken to give
the oldest date in the history of Chaldaea, B.C. 2,295, as the year of the
Susian conquest.

The Elamite dynasty was succeeded, according to Berosus, by a native
Chaldaean dynasty. Berosus--and his dates are held in great respect--places
the appearance of this new royal family in 2,047, giving it forty-nine
sovereigns and 458 years of duration. We are thus brought down to the
conquest of Mesopotamia by the Egyptian Pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty.
The names of the Chaldaean princes have been transcribed by those Byzantine
chroniclers to whom we owe the few and short fragments of Berosus that are
still extant.

On the other hand, inscriptions dug up upon the sites of the Chaldaean
cities have furnished us with fifty royal names which may, it is thought,
be ascribed to the period whose chief divisions we have just laid down.
Assyriologists have classed them as well as they could--from the more or
less archaic characters of their language and writing, from the elements of
which the proper names are composed, and from the relationships which some
of the texts show to have existed between one prince and another--but they
are still far from establishing a continuous series such as those that have
been arranged for the Pharaohs even of the Ancient Empire. Interruptions
are frequent, and their extent is beyond our power even to guess. Primitive
Chaldaea has unluckily left behind it no document like the list of Manetho
to help us in the arrangement of the royal names with which the monuments
are studded.

We do not even know how the earliest royal name upon the inscriptions
should be read; it is more to avoid speaking of him by a paraphrase than
for any other reason that the name Ourkam has been assigned to the prince
whose traces are to be found sprinkled over the ruins of m