HAMILTON SCIENTIFIC ASSOCIATION. 65 



The question that faces us now is : What is likely to have been 

 the influence of this highly advanced civilization of Babylonia on 

 the races inhabiting Canaan ? Perhaps the best way to deal with 

 this question is to consider some of the events that took place in 

 the reign of Khammurabi, king of Babylon, a name that has be- 

 come familiar to all Old Testament students. Khammurabi seems 

 to have been the first king who made Babylon the chief city of 

 Babylonia. His became the ruling dynasty of the country. He 

 threw off the yoke of the non-Semitic Elamites and from this 

 time forward the central authority for the whole country was 

 settled, not at Accad in the north, nor at Ur in the south, nor at any 

 of the cities which dominated temporarily, but at Babylon. 

 Khammurabi was not only a great leader in war. He was also a 

 great ruler in time of peace. He promoted commerce, manu- 

 facturers, literature and religion. Temples, palaces, canals 

 were all built on an extensive scale during his fifty-five years of 

 rule. The dynasty to which Khammurabi belonged had eleven 

 kings in all. Khammurabi himself was the sixth and his son, 

 Samsu-iluna, the seventh king of this dynasty. Professor Fritz 

 Hommel of Munich has an ingenious and most interesting theory 

 with regard to this dynasty, namely, that the etymology of their 

 names proves that they were not of Babylonian stock but of Arabian. 

 The following is a sample of the kind of proof he gives. " The 

 seventh name is ' Samsu-ilu-na ' ; namely, ' Samas ' is our deity. 

 In Babylonian this name would be ' Samsu-ilu-ni ' ; in Canaanite it 

 would be ' Samsu-ilenu'. Only the Arabs would say 'Iluna' for 

 'our god.' " Hommel has a mass of proof of this kind which only 

 an expert in oriental languages would be in a position to test. 

 Hilprecht maintains that Hommel has "convincingly proved " his 

 point. If this is granted, Hommel's deductions are worth noting. 

 "This completes the chain of evidence which goes to prove that 

 every one of the eleven kings of the Khammurabi dynasty was 

 from first to last of Arabian origin." Also, "we are warranted 

 in assuming that what has been said about South Arabian names 

 applies with equal force to the Arabian names of the Khammurabi 

 epoch : these names indicate that their owners possessed a far purer 



