9. The annals of the Assyrian king Asshurbanipal (the founder of the great Library at Nineveh) have established beyond a doubt the first positive date that has been secured for the History of Chaldea. That king was for a long time at war with the neighboring kingdom of ELAM, and ended by conquering and destroying its capital, SHUSHAN (Susa), after carrying away all the riches from the royal palace and all the statues from the great temple. This happened in the year 645 B.C. In the inscriptions in which he records this event, the king informs us that in that temple he found a statue of the Chaldean goddess NANA, which had been carried away from her own temple in the city of URUKH (Erech, now Warka) by a king of Elam of the name of KHUDUR-NANKHUNDI, who invaded the land of Accad 1635 years before, and that he, Asshurbanipal, by the goddess's own express command, took her from where she had dwelt in Elam, "a place not appointed her," and reinstated her in her own sanctuary "which she had delighted in." 1635 added to 645 make 2280, a date not to be disputed. Now if a successful Elamite invasion in 2280 found in Chaldea famous sanctuaries to desecrate, the religion to which these sanctuaries belonged, that of the Cushite, or Semitic colonists, must have been established in the country already for several, if not many, centuries. Indeed, quite recent discoveries show that it had been so considerably over a thousand years, so that we cannot possibly accept a date later than 4000 B.C. for the foreign immigration. The Shumiro-Accadian culture was too firmly rooted then and too completely worked out--as far as it went--to allow less than about 1000 years for its establishment. This takes us as far back as 5000 B.C.--a pretty respectable figure, especially when we think of the vista of time which opens behind it, and for which calculation fairly fails us. For if the Turanian settlers brought the rudiments of that culture from the highlands of Elam, how long had they sojourned there before they descended into the plains? And how long had it taken them to reach that station on their way from the race's mountain home in the far Northeast, in the Altai valleys?