[350] Much of it, however, was the amygdaloid greenstone, called in English ‘toad-stone,’ a corruption of the Germ. Todstein.
[351] Speaker’s Commentary, i. 831.
[352] This term seems first to have been used by Orosius (i. 2) in our fourth century.
[353] In chap. ix. I shall attempt to show that Naharayn (the dual of Nahr, a river) is also applied to Palestine in such phrases as ‘Tunipe (Daphne-town) of Naharayn.’
[354] Dr. Percy found that certain Assyrian bronzes had been cast round a support of the more tenacious metal, thus combining strength with lightness.
[355] M. F. Lenormant (‘Les Noms d’Airain et du Cuivre dans les deux Langues ... de la Chaldée et de l’Assyrie, Trans. Soc. Bibl. Archæology, vi. part 2) renders parzillu, iron; abar, lead; shiparru (Arab. صفر, brass), bronze; anaku, tin; eru or erudu, copper or bronze (Arab. ايار, copper or brass); kashpu, silver; and kurashu, gold. The learned author discovers in the cuneiforms repeated mention of the ‘ships of Mákan’ and the Kur Makannata (mountain of Makná), which he translates ‘Pays de Mákan’: finding it a great centre of copper, he is inclined to confound it with the so-called Sinaitic Peninsula. I have only to refer readers to ‘Makná’ in my three volumes on the Land of Midian.
[356] Akkad is upper, Sumir lower Babylonia.
[357] The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World, vol. i. p. 62. London, 1871.
[358] The first period extended from b.c. 1500 to 909. The second from b.c. 909 to 745: the most marking names being Assurnazirpal = ‘Ashur (arbiter of the gods) protects his son,’ who built the north-west palace of Nimrúd, b.c. 884; and his son Shalmanezer II. of the Black Obelisk (Brit. Museum), b.c. 850. The third period (b.c. 745–555) numbered Tiglath-Pileser II., b.c. 745–727 (a single generation before the first Olympic, b.c. 776, when the mythic age of Greece emerges into the historical); Sennacherib (705–681); Esarhaddon (680–668), Assur-bani-pal (668–640); Nebuchadnezzar in 604–561, a contemporary of Solon (b.c. 594); Nergalsharuzur (b.c. 557); and the last Nabonidus (b.c. 555). Herodotus (b.c. 450) wrote about a century after the end of the third period, Ctesias in b.c. 395, and Berosus in b.c. 280. We have, it is clear, absolutely no historic proof that ‘the patriarchal system of communities first locally developed itself at the mouth of the Euphrates Valley,’ or began in any part of the great Mesopotamian plain.
[359] Rev. B. H. Cooper (loc. cit.) would derive ‘Ida’ from the Semitic יר (yad, hand), and make the Daktyls, or fingers, its peaks.