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Patriarchal Palestine by Archibald Henry Sayce
page 57 of 245 (23%)
the time of Amraphel, king of Shinar." Chedor-laomer the Elamite was the
leader of the expedition; he too was the suzerain lord of his allies;
and nevertheless the campaign is dated, not in his reign, but in that of
one of the subject kings. That the narrative has been taken from the
Babylonian annals there is little room for doubt, and consequently it
would follow from the dating that Amraphel was a Babylonian prince,
perhaps that he was the ruler of the city which, from the days of
Khammurabi onward, became the capital of the country. In that case we
should have to find some way of explaining the difference between the
Hebrew and the Babylonian forms of the royal name.

Lagamar or Lagamer, written Laomer in Hebrew, was one of the principal
deities of Elam, and the Babylonians made him a son of their own
water-god Ea. The Elamite king Chedor-laomer, or Kudur-Lagamar, as his
name was written in his own language, must have been related to the
Elamite prince Kudur-Mabug, whose son Arioch was a subject-ally of the
Elamite monarch. Possibly they were brothers, the younger brother
receiving as his share of power the title of "father"--not "king"--of
Yamutbal and the land of the Amorites. At any rate it is a son of
Kudur-Mabug and not of the Elamite sovereign who receives a principality
in Babylonia.

In the Book of Genesis Arioch is called "king of Ellasar." But Ellasar
is clearly the Larsa of the cuneiform inscriptions, perhaps with the
word _al_, "city," prefixed. Larsa, the modern Senkereh, was in Southern
Babylonia, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, not far from Erech, and
to the north of Ur. Its king was virtually lord of Sumer, but he claimed
to be lord also of the north. In his inscriptions Eri-Aku assumes the
imperial title of "king of Sumer and Akkad," of both divisions of
Babylonia, and it may be that at one time the rival king of Babylon
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