388 FISH IN OFFERINGS, AUGURIES, ETC. 
““My lowly mother conceived me, in secret she brought me forth : 
She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she closed my 
door : 
She cast me into the river, which rose not over me: 
The river bore me up, unto Akki the irrigator it carried me. 
* * * * * 
And for . . . four years I ruled the kingdom.” 
The assertion that the Old Testament is fairly saturated with 
Babylonian culture and folklore, and that even in the days 
of the New Testament we have not passed beyond the sphere 
of its impression hardly overshoots the mark, when the simi- 
larity of these and other instances is borne in mind. 
The earliest point of contact between Babylon and Palestine 
is recorded in Genesis xiv. 1, which makes Abraham the 
contemporary of “‘Amraphel King of Shinar,’’ who most 
probably can now be identified with Hammurabi in the light of 
the recent discoveries of Kugler.! 
The first connection of Israel with Assyria proper occurs in 
the reign of Shalmaneser IJ., in whose Monolith Inscription 
figures, as one of the allies of Benhadad I. of Damascus, the 
name of Ahabbu Sir’lai, generally identified with Ahab, King 
of Israel. 
Fish are discovered playing a part in auguries and divinations 
very similar to their v6le in Rome. Augury in both nations 
was regarded with deep veneration. It reached in Assyria a 
very high plane. It was practised as a recognised science by 
1 From Astronomy many Assyrian dates have been ascertained. Kugler 
by stellar researches has settled the vexed question of the date of Hammurabi, 
and probably that of Abram, at about 2120 B.c., which unites within one year 
the latest conclusions of King, Jastrow, and Rogers, and so establishes an 
important degree of accord among Assyriologists on events subsequent to 2200 
B.C. as regards which they have hitherto been wide apart. Then again modern 
astronomers have worked out that there was a total eclipse of the sun at Nineveh 
on June 15, 763 B.c. The importance of the fixing of this date can as regards 
Assyrian chronology hardly be exaggerated. The Assyrians, rejecting the 
Babylonian system of counting time, invented a system of their own, by naming 
the year after certain officers or terms of office, not unlike the system of the 
Archonates at Athens, and the Consulates at Rome. These were termed 
limus: a list of these functionaries during four centuries has come down to 
us. In the time of one of them, Pur Sagali, there is a mention of the eclipse 
of the sun. As this eclipse has now been fixed for the year 763 B.c., we possess 
an automatic date for every year after of the limus, 
