,** must have been often tempted to quit their barren domains and to
swoop down on the rich country which lay at their feet. We are ignorant
of the course of events which, towards the close of the XVIIIth century
B.C., led to their gaining possession of it. The Cossaean king who seized
on Babylon was named Gandish, and the few inscriptions we possess of
his reign are cut with a clumsiness that betrays the barbarism of the
conqueror. They cover the pivot stones on which Sargon of Agade or one
of the Bursins had hung the doors of the temple of Nippur, but which
Gandish dedicated afresh in order to win for himself, in the eyes of
posterity, the credit of the work of these sovereigns.***

* Hilprecht has established the identity of Turgu with Bel
of Nippur.

** Strabo relates, from some forgotten historian of
Alexander, that the Cossaeans "had formerly been able to
place as many as thirteen thousand archers in line, in the
wars which they waged with the help of the Elymaeans against
the inhabitants of Susa and Babylon."

*** The full name of this king, Gandish or Gandash, which is
furnished by the royal lists, is written Gaddash on a
monument in the British Museum discovered by Pinches, whose
conclusions have been erroneously denied by Winckler. A
process of abbreviation, of which there are examples in the
names of other kings of the same dynasty, reduced the name
to Gande in the current language.

Bel found favour in the eyes of the Cossaeans who saw in him Kharbe or
Turgu, the recognised patron of their royal family: for this reason
Gandish and his successors regarded Bel with peculiar devotion. These
kings did all they could for the decoration and endowment of the ancient
temple of Ekur, which had been somewhat neglected by the sovereigns
of purely Babylonian extraction, and this devotion to one of the most
venerated Chaldaean sanctuaries contributed largely towards their winning
the hearts of the conquered people.*

* Hilpreoht calls attention on this point to the fact that
no one has yet discovered at Nippur a single ex-voto
consecrated by any king of the two first Babylonian
dynasties.

The Cossaean rule over the countries of the Euphrates was doubtless
similar in its beginnings to that which the Hyksos exercised at first
over the nomes of Egypt. The Cossaean kings did not merely bring with
them an army to protect their p