the books in great libraries, which he established or enlarged,--the
oldest and most valuable libraries of the ancient world. The scholar Sayce
calls him the Chaldaean Solomon.

CONQUEST OF CHALDAEA BY THE ELAMITES (2286 B.C.).--While the Chaldaean kings
were ruling in the great cities of Lower Babylonia, the princes of the
Elamites, a people of Turanian race, were setting up a rival kingdom to
the northeast, just at the foot of the hills of Persia.

In the year 2286 B.C., a king of Elam, Kudur-Nakhunta by name, overran
Chaldaea, took all the cities founded by Sargon and his successors, and
from the temples bore off in triumph to his capital, Susa, the statues of
the Chaldaean gods, and set up in these lowland regions what is known as
the Elamite Dynasty.

[Illustration: MAP OF THE TIGRIS AND EUPHRATES REGION.]

More than sixteen hundred years after this despoiling of the Chaldaean
sanctuaries, a king of Nineveh captured the city of Susa, and finding
there these stolen statues, caused them to be restored to their original
temples.

The Chedorlaomer of Genesis, whose contact with the history of the Jewish
patriarch Abraham has caused his name to be handed down to our own times
in the records of the Hebrew people, is believed to have been the son and
successor of Kudur-Nakhunta.

CHALDAEA ECLIPSED BY ASSYRIA.--After the Elamite princes had maintained a
more or less perfect dominion over the cities of Chaldaea for two or three
centuries, their power seems to have declined; and then for several