ORIGIN OF BABYLONIAN CIVILIZATION, FROM ARCH /EOLOGY. 425 
people and whether they developed their mythology in a land of rivers and swamps 
and fertile bottoms, or in another kind of surroundings. Our sources of informa- 
tion must go back of Hammurabi, who is comparatively late, back of Gudea, 
back even of the Elder Sargon, and must reach back at least as far as Eannadu and 
Lugal-zaggisi, to an unrecorded antiquity. 
And yet there are certain clues from the written monuments that are not to be 
entifely overlooked and which point to an extreme or equal antiquity for Elam as 
compared with Babylonia. The physical conditions of Elam were quite different 
from those of Babylonia. ‘There the river-bottom reached to the forest foot-hills 
of high mountains, with their entirely different plant and animal life. As early in 
the second chiliad B. C. the Kassites from Elam overran Babylonia, so these hardy 
men did the same thing at the earliest historical period. The first inscriptions of 
Babylonian rulers record wars with Elam, implying a conflict with races whose 
rivers flowed down from not very distant hills and forests. Further, the oldest 
legends are related to Elam. Gilgamesh himself, conqueror of Erech, appears to 
have come from Elam; and as ruler of Erech he fought with Khumbaba, the Elam- 
ite king, whose palace was in a garden of cedars, trees that do not grow in Baby- 
lonia. Equally Etana, in his search for the plant of birth, went to the mountains, 
doubtless of Elam. For aught that historical research shows, Elam may have had 
a civilization as old as that of Babylonia, or older. It is the purpose of this chapter 
to show that there are indications that Babylonian art and religion had their origin 
in Elam. 
The ordinary representation of the Sun-god, Shamash, in the period of the 
Middle Empire, say from 2800 B. C. downward, was that of a standing figure, in 
a long garment, with one leg thrown forward and bare, and the foot resting on a 
low stool (see fig. 262). ‘That stool was the conventional suggestion of a moun- 
tain. In the earliest period in which we find this god represented, going back to 
an archaic period, we find the Sun-god, holding a flint-studded weapon, standing 
sometimes with one foot stepping on a mountain, sometimes between two moun- 
tains and lifting himself up by his hands resting on them both. He comes out 
from the gates of the East and rises out of the mountains (see Chapter x11). 
Now there are no mountains in Babylonia. The eastern mountains are not 
visible from the valley of the Tigris. One has to go east into Elam, to the region of 
the city of Susa, to find mountains in the landscape. ‘To be sure there were travel 
and trade, no doubt, and visitors to and from Babylonia might tell of high moun- 
tains, but in Babylonia itself it would not be likely for a conception of the Sun-god 
to be developed which would connect him with mountains. Indeed, there is another 
frequent figure of the Sun-god seated (Chapters xiv, xv), and yet another of the 
god in a boat (figs. 110a, 293), which might very well have arisen in Babylonia. 
But Shamash was not the only Sun-god, although the one most worshiped. 
There were Sun-gods of various seasons of the day and year. Another figure of a 
Sun-god, perhaps Nergal, represents him as fighting an enemy and pushing him 
against mountains (Chapter 1x). This also is a very early and archaic design, and in 
the later art, as the god was conventionalized, the mountains were quite lost. They 
had been forgotten. Here the thought seems to be that the Sun-god rising towards 
noon attacks the cloud-spirits hovering over the mountains and drives away the 
mists; or it may be that he drives away the storm-demons of winter, as he passes the 
