31. Khudur-Lagamar, of whom the spirited Biblical narrative gives us so life-like a sketch, lived, according to the most probable calculations, about 2200 B.C. Among the few vague forms whose blurred outlines loom out of the twilight of those dim and doubtful ages, he is the second with any flesh-and-blood reality about him, probably the first conqueror of whom the world has any authentic record. For Egypt, the only country which rivals in antiquity the primitive states of Mesopotamia, although it had at this time already reached the height of its culture and prosperity, was as yet confined by its rulers strictly to the valley of the Nile, and had not entered on that career of foreign wars and conquests which, some thousand years later, made it a terror from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. 32. The Elamitic invasion was not a passing raid. It was a real conquest, and established a heavy foreign rule in a highly prosperous and flourishing land--a rule which endured, it would appear, about three hundred years. That the people chafed under it, and were either gloomily despondent or angrily rebellious as long as it lasted, there is plenty of evidence in their later literature. It is even thought, and with great moral probability, that the special branch of religious poetry which has been called "Penitential Psalms" has arisen out of the sufferings of this long period of national bondage and humiliation, and if, as seems to be proved by some lately discovered interesting fragments of texts, these psalms were sung centuries later in Assyrian temples on mournful or very solemn public occasions, they must have perpetuated the memory of the great national calamity that fell on the mother-country as indelibly as the Hebrew psalms, of which they were the models, have perpetuated that of King David's wanderings and Israel's tribulations.