ost of the
southern cities. The characters of the texts stamped upon bricks recovered
from buildings erected by him, have, as all Assyriologists know, a peculiar
physiognomy of their own. Ourkam is the Menes of Chaldaea, and his date is
put long before that Susian conquest of which we have spoken above. The
seals of Ourkam (see Fig. 3) and of his son Ilgi[62] have been found. The
name of the latter occurs almost as often as that of his father among the
ruins of Southern Chaldaea.

[Illustration: FIG. 3.--Seal of Ourkam.]

The oldest cities of Lower Chaldaea date from this remote epoch, namely, Ur,
now _Mugheir_ or the _bituminous_, Urukh now _Warka_, Larsam (_Senkerch_),
Nipour (_Niffer_), Sippara, Borsippa, Babylon, &c. Ur, on the right bank of
the Euphrates and near its ancient mouth, seems to have been the first
capital of the country and its chief commercial centre in those early
times. The premiership of Babylon as a holy city and seat of royalty cannot
have been established until much later. The whole country between Hillah
and Bassorah is now little removed from a desert. Here and there rise a few
tents or reed huts belonging to the Montefik Arabs, a tribe of savage
nomads and the terror of travellers. Europeans have succeeded in exploring
that inhospitable country only under exceptional circumstances.[63] And yet
it was there, between two or three thousand years before our era, that the
intermingling of ideas and races took place which gave birth to the
civilization of Chaldaea.

In order to find a king to whom we can give a probable date we have to come
down as far as Ismi-Dagan, who should figure in the fourth dynasty of
Berosus. Tiglath-Pileser the First, who reigned in Assyria at the end of
the twelfth century, has left us an official document in which he recounts
how he had restored in Ellasar (now _Kaleh-Shergat_), a temple of Oannes
founded by Ismi-Dagan seven hundred years before. We are led therefore to
place the latter king about 1800.[64] We learn at the same time that
Assyria was inhabited, in the days of Ismi-Dagan, by a people who borrowed
their gods from Chaldaea, and were dependents of the sovereign of the latter
country. It was in fact upon the shores of the Persian Gulf, far enough
from Assyria, that Oannes made his first revelation, and it is at Ur in the
same region that the names of Ismi-Dagan and of his sons Goun-goun and
Samsibin are to be found stamped upon the bricks. We may, therefore,