Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph in Peters.
He found a well-disposed ally in Elani. From very ancient times the masters of Susa had aspired to the possession of Mesopotamia or the suzerainty over it, and fortune had several times favoured their ambitious designs. On one occasion they had pressed forward their victorious arms as far as the Mediterranean, and from that time forward, though the theatre of their operations was more restricted, they had never renounced the right to interfere in Babylonian affairs, and indeed, not long previously, one of them had reigned for a period of seven years in Babylon in the interval between two dynasties. Our information with regard to the order of succession and the history of these energetic and warlike monarchs is as yet very scanty; their names even are for the most part lost, and only approximate dates can be assigned to those of whom we catch glimpses from time to time.* Khumban-numena, the earliest of whom we have any record, exercised a doubtful authority, from Anshân to Susa, somewhere about the fourteenth century B.C., and built a temple to the god Kirisha in his capital, Liyan.**
* These names are in the majority of cases found written on
stamped and baked bricks. They were first compared with the
names contained in the Annals of Sargon and his successors,
and assimilated to those of the princes who were
contemporary with Sennacherib and Assur-bani-pal; then they
were referred to the time of the great Elamite empire, and
one of them was identified with that Kudur-Nakhunta who had
pillaged Uruk 1635 years before Assur-bani-pal. Finally,
they were brought down again to an intermediate period, more
precisely, to the fourteenth or thirteenth century B.C. This
last date appears to be justified, at least as the highest
permissible, by the mention of Durkurigalzu, in a text of
Undasgal.
** Jensen was the first to recognise that Liyan was a place-
name, and the inscriptions of Shilkhak-Inshusinak add that
Liyan was the capital of the kingdom; perhaps it was the
name of a part of Susa. Khumban-numena has left us no
monuments of his own, but he is mentioned on those of his
son.
His son Undasgal carried on the works begun by his father, but that is all the information the inscriptions afford concerning him, and the mist of oblivion which for a moment lifted and allowed us to discern dimly the outlines of this sovereign, closes in again and hides everything from our view for the succeeding forty or fifty years.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Marcel
Dieulafoy.