haps that he was the ruler of the city which, from the days of
Khammurabi onward, became the capital of the country. In that case we
should have to find some way of explaining the difference between the
Hebrew and the Babylonian forms of the royal name.

Lagamar or Lagamer, written Laomer in Hebrew, was one of the principal
deities of Elam, and the Babylonians made him a son of their own
water-god Ea. The Elamite king Chedor-laomer, or Kudur-Lagamar, as his
name was written in his own language, must have been related to the
Elamite prince Kudur-Mabug, whose son Arioch was a subject-ally of the
Elamite monarch. Possibly they were brothers, the younger brother
receiving as his share of power the title of "father"--not "king"--of
Yamutbal and the land of the Amorites. At any rate it is a son of
Kudur-Mabug and not of the Elamite sovereign who receives a principality
in Babylonia.

In the Book of Genesis Arioch is called "king of Ellasar." But Ellasar
is clearly the Larsa of the cuneiform inscriptions, perhaps with the
word _al_, "city," prefixed. Larsa, the modern Senkereh, was in Southern
Babylonia, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, not far from Erech, and
to the north of Ur. Its king was virtually lord of Sumer, but he claimed
to be lord also of the north. In his inscriptions Eri-Aku assumes the
imperial title of "king of Sumer and Akkad," of both divisions of
Babylonia, and it may be that at one time the rival king of Babylon
acknowledged his supremacy.

Who "Tidal king of Goyyim" may have been we cannot tell. Sir Henry
Rawlinson has proposed to see in Goyyim a transformation of Gutium, the
name by which Kurdistan was called in early Babylonia. Mr. Pinches has
recently discovered a cuneiform tablet in which mention is made, not
only of Eri-Aku and Kudur-Lagamar, but also of Tudkhul, and Tudkhul
would be an exact transcription in Babylonian of the Hebrew Tidal. But
the tablet is mutilated, and its relation to the narrative of Genesis is
not yet clear. For the present, therefore, we must leave Tidal
unexplained.

The name even of one of the Canaanite kings who were subdued by the
Babylonian army has found its confirmation in a cuneiform inscription.
This is the name of "Shinab, king of Admah." We hear from
Tiglath-pileser III. of Sanibu, king of Ammon, and Sanibu and Shinab are
one and the same. The old name of the king of Admah was thus perpetuated
on the eastern side of the Jordan.

It may be that the asphalt