To the Manda or Medes, also, I would, as has been suggested, attribute the first imagining of the astronomic emblem common to Ahura and Assur--that of the divine Being presiding over the circle of the ecliptic. Berosus mentions a Median dynasty as having reigned in Babylon for one or two hundred years. Let us now suppose that the Manda for more than a thousand years held power in _Northern_ Mesopotamia, but that at last the tide of conquest turned, and after many struggles with the Semites in the south the Aryans were finally driven from the land now known as Assyria, and a Semite race firmly settled in the regions from whence in Sargon’s time the Umman Manda had threatened the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Accad. That this was the case about 2,200 B.C. may perhaps be gathered from the monuments of Ḫammurabi, the Semitic king of Babylon, for he refers in his letters to his troops in _Assyria_, and in a lately discovered inscription of this king he speaks of restoring to the city of _Assur_ its propitious genie, and of honouring Istar in the city of Nineveh. To account for the existence of the Assyrian nation, their close resemblance in language and race to the ruling Semitic class in Babylon, and yet to explain the great difference in the religion of these two peoples, has always been a difficulty. The Assyrians worshipped, and worshipped with enthusiasm, all the Babylonian gods; but high above the whole Babylonian Pantheon they placed as their supreme and great Lord Assur--Assur whose very name is not to be met with in Babylonian mythology. This difficulty I would explain in the following manner. When the Medes had, by Ḫammurabi or his successors, been driven out of Northern Mesopotamia, they were replaced by Semitic settlers who (like the settlers sent into Samaria more than a thousand years later by a king of Assyria) adopted, to a certain extent, the religion of the nation whom they had dispossessed. In 2 Kings xvii. we read that in this parallel instance “the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel: and they possessed Samaria, and dwelt in the cities thereof.” Later in the same chapter we read that in order to appease, as they believed, the wrath of the “God of the land,” these idolatrous settlers, retaining in full the worship of all their own gods, added to it a worship of the Lord of the dispossessed Israelites. I would suppose then that the polytheistic Semites, who in Ḫammurabi’s time were settled in Northern Mesopotamia, had acted in a similar manner. Coming into a region where for nearly 2,000 years the monotheistic Medes or Manda had been established, they, to avert the wrath of the _god of the land_, adopted to a certain extent his worship. In fact, like the Samaritans, “they feared the Lord [Asura], and served their own gods.”