244 Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa. 
is only the Ilnd and Ilird columns that have to be dealt with in what' 
follows. 
If my reading be correct, and the Tablet when complete had sixty-five 
lines to a column, there must be thirty-three lines missing or only partially 
legible on the bottom of the Ilnd column, and forty-six lines missing from 
the top of the Ilird column ; or in all a gap of seventy-nine lines missing 
between the last legible line of column II to the first legible line of 
column III. But if, as is probable, the Tablet when complete was longer 
than 6 inches, then the number of missing lines may be considerably over 
a hundred. 
The first point to be considered is, Is this record to be read as 
indicating the occurrence of an eclipse of the sun ? 
There is some uncertainty on this point, for the event is not recorded 
in the words usually employed to denote an eclipse of the sun. Mr. King 
thus deals with this question : — 
" It will be noted that the word for an eclipse, atalil, usually expressed 
by the composite ideogram AN-MI, ' heaven-darkness,' is not employed 
in the passage in question, and only the effect of an eclipse of the sun is^ 
recorded in the words, ' the day was turned to night.' It might, there- 
fore, be urged that the cause of the portent should be traced to atmo- 
spheric rather than to astronomical conditions. It is true that an 
exceptionally severe thunderstorm might have darkened the heavens 
sufficiently to justify a poet using the language employed in the Chronicle; 
but the document is not a poetical composition, and in another of the 
portents which was undoubtedly caused by a thunderstorm, the Chronicle 
ascribed the phenomenon to the agency of Adad, the storm-god.'" The 
only other possibility would be to trace the cause of the portent to a dust- 
storm. But any one acquainted with Mesopotamia will have vivid recol- 
lections of the frequent occasions on which he has experienced the 
discomfort arising from storms of this nature, and to an inhabitant of the 
country even a severe dust-storm would have little of novelty about it. 
In fact, there is small probability that so common an occurrence would 
have been regarded as a special sign from heaven, and incorporated in a 
register of portents alongside of such wonderful happenings as the visible 
appearance of divine beings and the slaughter of wild beasts in the streets 
of Babylon. 
" We are thus forced to accept the occurrence of a solar eclipse as the 
most probable explanation of the phrase that the day was turned to night. f 
* Column III, line 19. 
f Of course the absence of the actual word for an eclipse from the passage in the 
Chronicle renders the objection, that the turning of day into night must have been due to 
other than astronomical conditions, incapable of disproof. The question is one of greater- 
or less probability. ... 
