“in their faithful counsel to Kudur-laḫgumal, king of the land of Elam ... said ‘Descend.’The thing which unto them was good (he performed, and) he exercised sovereignty in Babylon, the city of Kar-Duniaš.”
It would therefore appear that this Elamite ruler, by the will of the gods (such was the way with conquerors in those days—they annexed other countries to their dominions by the will of the gods of the lands annexed), took possession of Babylon, capital (such seems to be the meaning of the phrase) of Kar-Duniaš. This is followed by a long passage in which animals and birds, apparently the favourites of the Elamite king, are referred to, and the idea which one gains by reading it is, that he attended to these rather than to the welfare of his realm. This being the case, it is natural that something about the remissness of the king should follow, and this seems to be, in fact, intended in the next line, where some one whose name is lost seems to ask: “What king of Elam is there who has (erected?) the chapel (?) (it was something made of wood, as the determinative prefix shows) of E-saggil?” It was the Babylonians, the text seems to say, who had done things of this kind. The speaker then seems to begin to talk of “their work,” when another gap destroys the remainder of the phrase. He then speaks about “(a let)ter (?) which thou hast written thus: ‘I [pg 226] am a king, the son of a king,’ ” but whether it is the same personage who says that he is “the son of the daughter of a king, who has sat on the throne of dominion,” is doubtful—it may be a similarly boasting reply to the statement put into the mouth of the first speaker. The line which follows has the name of Durmaḫ-îlāni, son of Êri-Ekua (Êri-Eaku of the other historical text), who seems to have carried away spoil, but whether it is he who is referred to in the next line as having sat on the throne of dominion is doubtful. This is followed by the expression of the wish that the king might come who from eternal days ... was proclaimed lord of Babylon. The closing lines of the obverse, which is here described, do not give any clear sense, but there is a reference to the months Kislev and Tammuz, probably in connection with festivals, also (apparently) to certain priests, and to the taking of spoil. The remains of the reverse are too scanty to gather what the text inscribed upon it really refers to.
It is naturally difficult to judge which of these two inscriptions came first. Both of them seem to have a kind of peroration at the end containing similar phrases referring to the city of Babylon and its well-being, and either might therefore be the last tablet of a series. To all appearance, the order of the two records turns upon the question whether Durmaḫ-îlāni is the one who is referred to as having written a certain communication, or whether it is about him that some one has written. As he seems to be referred to in the third person, the probability is that “Durmaḫ-îlāni, son of Êri-Eaku, who (carried away?) the spoil of ... ,” is not the person speaking, but the person spoken of. In this case he was not necessarily alive at the time, and the order of the two tablets as here printed may be the correct one.
How far the record which they contain may be [pg 227] true is with our present knowledge impossible to find out. The style of the writing with which they are inscribed is certainly very late—later, in all probability, than the Persian period, and the possibility that it is a compilation of that period has been already suggested. That it is altogether a fiction, however, is in the highest degree improbable. If we have in the three names which these two tablets contain the Babylonian prototypes of Tidal, Arioch, and Chedorlaomer, they must refer to the events which passed between the first and thirty-first years of the reign of Amraphel or Ḫammurabi, in which it would seem that both Durmaḫ-îlāni and Tudḫula attacked and spoiled Babylon, cutting the canals so that the town and the temple were both flooded. Both of these royal personages, who, be it noted, are not called kings, were apparently killed by their sons, and Kudur-laḫmal seems to have been a criminal of the same kind, if we may judge from the words “Kudur-laḫmal, his son, pier(ced?) his heart with the steel sword of his girdle.” That three royal personages, contemporaries, should all dispose of their fathers in the same way seems, however, in the highest degree improbable. It also seems to be in an equal degree impossible that (as has been suggested) the tablets in question should refer to Tidal, Arioch, and Chedorlaomer, but not the same Tidal, Arioch, and Chedorlaomer as is spoken of in Genesis, unless it be meant thereby that the Biblical personages of that name are the historical ones, whilst those of the two tablets belong to the realm of fiction. The greater probability is, that they are the same personages, but that the accounts handed down to us on these two tablets are largely legendary.
And that this is the case is made more probable by the third document, couched in poetical form, which I have entitled The Legend of Chedorlaomer. The following are extracts from this remarkable piece—
“... and they pressed on to the supreme gate.
He threw down, removed, and cast down the door of Ištar in the holy places,
He descended also, like Ura the unsparing, to Dû-maḫa;
He stayed also in Dû-maḫa, looking at the temple;
He opened his mouth, and spake with the children (of the place).