36 OLD BABYLONIAN INSCBIPTIONS 



My reasons for identifying the name in 1. 4 with that of Mili-Shikhu are as fol- 

 lows: (1) The king must have lived after Ramman-shum-usur, because a few bricks 

 of the latter 1 were found in the platform of the temple erected by him. 2 (2) Paleo- 

 graphic reasons point to the end of the Cassite dynasty as the date of his inscription. 

 Apart from a certain difference of appearance between Rarnmtui-shum-usur's legend 

 and that of the king in question, the one having been iuscribed, the other stamped, 

 there is a decided similarity between the characters of the two inscriptions. (3) One 

 of the titles (1. 5), the phraseology of the beginning (1. 1-3), and — what is especially 

 characteristic — that of the end of the two inscriptions (1. 8-11, otherw. 10), in other 

 words, 8 (otherw. 7) lines are absolutely identical. Hence it follows that the king in 

 question must have ruled not long after Ramman-shum-usur ; was possibly his suc- 

 cessor. (4) This result is corroborated by an analysis of the first half of 1. 4. The 

 determinative dingir is not unfrequently found before the names of Cassite kings. 3 

 The second and third characters are to be read SUA (libbuy + ba. The absence of 

 the two inner wedges in SUA is due to the shallowness with which the characters of 

 the stamp were carved. They are found on another (badly preserved) brick, of the 

 same king, the legend of which was written with the hand, and differs slightly in 

 other respects. 5 As the inscription is written in Sumerian, the syllable ba indicates 

 that the Sumerian value of the preceding sign ended in b, in other words, was the 

 dialectic form of a word ending in g — probably shag. As the personal proper names 

 occurring in the later Sumerian inscriptions are, as a rule, not to be read Sumerian, 

 but as they were actually pronounced, 6 we read the ideogram (shaba) with one of its 

 common Semitic equivalents, Mrbu, libbu, milu, etc. 7 



Only one of the Semitic ideographic values of this character fulfills the require- 

 ment of forming the beginning of one of the well-known names of the last four Cassite 

 kings, i. e., milu or mili. As, on the other hand, there is only one Cassite king of 

 that period who begins with Mili, I confidently believe the last group of cuneiform 

 characters in 1. 4 to be an ideogram for the god Marduk, or his Cassite equivalent 

 Shikhu, and read the whole name accordingly MUi-ShiMu. 



The following list is an attempt at restoring part of the broken List b, and giv- 

 ing the chronology and succession of the last twenty-four kings of the Cassite 



1 Together with a few of Ur-Ninib, Kurigalzu, and one of Bur-Sin I. 



-Cf. above, p. 27, and "Table of Contents," PL 29, No. 82. 



3 Cf. Hilprecht in Z. A. VII, pp. 308-310. 



4 Cf. Brunnow, I. c, 7983. 



5 Cf. Vol. I, Part 2. 



6 Cf. also Jensen in Schrader's K. B. Ill, Part 1, p. 117, notes 6-9. 



'Cf. Brunnow, I. c, 7985-7992. 



