History of Various Areas (5)(as of 1900)

In reference to this most interesting stele of Narim-Sin we may here mention another inscription of this king, found at Susa and published only this year, which throws additional light on Narim-Sin's allies and on the empire which he and his father Sargon founded. The new inscription was engraved on the base of a diorite statue, which had been broken to pieces so that only the base with a portion of the text remained. From this inscription we learn that Narim-Sin was the head of a confederation of nine chief allies, or vassal princes, and waged war on his enemies with their assistance. Among these nine allies of course the Princes of Sidur, Saluni, and
Lulubi are to be included. The new text further records that Narim-Sin made an expedition against Magan (the Sinaitic peninsula), and defeated Manium, the lord of that region, and that he cut blocks of stone in the mountains there and transported them to his city of Agade, where
from one of them he made the statue on the base of which the text was inscribed. It was already known from the so-called "Omens of Sargon and Narim-Sin" (a text inscribed on a clay tablet from Ashur-bani-pal's library at Nineveh which associates the deeds of these two early rulers
with certain augural phenomena) that Nar?m-Sin had made an expedition to Sinai in the course of his reign and had conquered the king of the country. The new text gives contemporary confirmation of this assertion and furnishes us with additional information with regard to the name of the conquered ruler of Sinai and other details of the campaign.

That monuments of such great interest to the early history of Chaldea should have been found at Susa in Persia was sufficiently startling, but an easy explanation was at first forthcoming from the fact that Narim-Sin's stele of victory had been used by the later Elamite king,
Shutruk-Nakhkhunte, for an inscription of his own; this he had engraved in seven long lines along the great cone in front of Narim-Sin, which is probably intended to represent the peak of the mountain. From the fact that it had been used in this way by Shutruk-Nakhkhunte, it seemed permissible to infer that it had been captured in the course of a campaign and brought to Susa as a trophy of war. But we shall see later on that the existence of early Babylonian inscriptions and monuments in the mound of the acropolis at Susa is not to be explained in this way, but was due to the wide extension of both Sumerian and Semitic influence throughout Western Asia from the very earliest periods.

The upper surface of the tell of the acropolis at Susa for a depth of nearly two metres contains remains of the buildings and antiquities of the Achemenian kings and others of both later and earlier dates. In these upper strata of the mound are found remains of the Arab, Sassanian, Parthian, Seleucian, and Persian periods, mixed indiscriminately with one another and with Elamite objects and materials of all ages, from that of the earliest patesis down to that of the
Susian kings of the seventh century B.C.

The reason of this mixture of the remains of many races and periods is that the later builders on the mound made use of the earlier building materials which they found preserved within it. Along the skirts of the mound may still be seen the foundations of the wall which formed the
principal defence of the acropolis in the time of Xerxes, and in many places not only are the foundations preserved but large pieces of the wall itself still rise above the surface of the soil.

The plan of the wall is quite irregular, following the contours of the mound, and, though it is probable that the wall was strengthened and defended at intervals by towers, no trace of these now remains. The wall is very thick and built of unburnt bricks, and the system of fortification seems to have been extremely simple at this period.

A roughly hewn sculpture of a lion standing over a fallen man was found at Babylon.
The group probably represents Babylon or the Babylonian king triumphing over the country's enemies. The Arabs regard the figure as an evil spirit, and it is pitted with the marks of bullets shot at it. They also smear it with filth when they can do so unobserved; in the photograph some newly smeared filth may be seen adhering to the side of the lion.