'248 Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa. 
thing occurred, (11) and the appointed offering was made. In the month 
Tammuz in the sixteenth year a hon whose entrance into the city none 
(12) had beheld, on the western bank (of the Euphrates) in the eighth 
plantation (13) they beheld and they slew him.'' But here it is simply as 
an addition to the event of the eighth year, that it mentions that the same 
religious irregularity occurred also in the nineteenth year, and then the 
record goes on to take the subsequent events in their due sequence. But 
there is no such connection between the events mentioned on lines 19-23 
of column II as occurring in the seventeenth, and that mentioned on 
line 26 as happening in the fourteenth year. Hence it would appear the 
more probable that there has occurred a change from one reign to another 
between lines 23 and 26, such as Mr, King regards as possible. 
In the portion of column III which has been preserved, the whole' of 
the events appear to have happened during the thirty-six years of the 
reign of Nabu-mukin-apli. The fourth line of those decipherable refers to 
his seventh year, and the nineteenth line to an event of his twenty-sixth 
year, or fifteen lines cover the events of nineteen years. On column II, 
we have seen that eleven lines cover the events of ten years. Judging 
from this, the average would seem to be about a line to a year : hence the 
missing eighty to over a hundred lines between the end of the text in 
column II and the beginning of the text in column III might be expected 
to cover a period of at least a century rather than the short period of 
twelve years to the fourteenth year of Eulbar-shakin-shum, or the thirty- 
one years to the seventeenth year of Simmash-shikhu. It would rather 
suggest that the unknown king of column II was more probably Mero- 
dach-nadin-akhi, whose seventeenth year was about seventy years earlier 
than the first year of Nabti-mukin-apli, or even the king whose name 
began with Merodach . . ., whose seventeenth year must have preceded 
this epoch by from one hundred and thirty to one hundred and seventy 
years. 
The only drawback to this reading is that Mr. King states that on 
lines 4 and 5 of the short portion legible of the text near the bottom of the 
IVth column there occurs the end of the name of the king Nabu-mukin- 
apli."^' (" Chronicles," &c., vol. i., p. 222.) From this Mr. King concludes 
that the whole of column IV, like the preserved portion at the end of 
column III, refers to the events of the reign of this king. As the missing 
upper portion of column IV contained forty to fifty lines of text, this 
would cause it to appear as if though fifteen lines sufficed to deal with the 
events between the seventh and twenty-sixth years of his reign, yet forty 
* From the reproduction of the inscription ("Chronicles," &c., vol. ii., p. 177) it 
would appear that though only the end of the name appeared on line 4, yet that the 
whole of the name could be deciphered on the fifth line. If so there could be no doubt 
about the name of the king being the same as that occurring so often in column III, 
