* The question concerning Milukhkha and Magan has exercised Assyriologists for twenty years. The prevailing opinion appears to be that which identifies Magan with the Sinaitic Peninsula, and Milukhkha with the country to the north of Magan as far as the Wady Arish and the Mediterranean; others maintain, not the theory of Delitzsch, according to whom Magan and Milukhkha are synonyms for Shumir and Akkad, and consequently two of the great divisions of Babylonia, but an analogous hypothesis, in which they are regarded as districts to the west of the Euphrates, either in Chaldaean regions or on the margin of the desert, or even in the desert itself towards the Sinaitic Peninsula. What we know of the texts induces me, in common with H. Rawlinson, to place these countries on the shores of the Persian Gulf, between the mouth of the Euphrates and the Bahrein islands; possibly the Makse and the Melangitso of classical historians and geographers were the descendants of the people of Magan (Makan) and Milukhkha (Melugga), who had been driven towards the entrance to the Persian Gulf by some such event as the increase in these regions of the Kashdi (Chaldaeans). The names, emigrated to the western parts of Arabia and to the Sinaitic Peninsula in after-times, as the name of India passed to America in the XVIth century of our era. How long did it take to bring this people out of savagery, and to build up so many flourishing cities? The learned did not readily resign themselves to a confession of ignorance on the subject. As they had depicted the primordial chaos, the birth of the gods, and their struggles over the creation, so they related unhesitatingly everything which had happened since the creation of mankind, and they laid claim to being able to calculate the number of centuries which lay between their own day and the origin of things. The tradition to which most credence was attached in the Greek period at Babylon, that which has been preserved for us in the histories of Berossue, asserts that there was a somewhat long interval between the manifestation of Oannes and the foundation of a dynasty. The first king was Aloros of Babylon, a Chaldaean of whom nothing is related except that he was chosen by the divinity himself to be a shepherd of the people. He reigned for ten sari, amounting in all to 36,000 years; for the saros is 3600 years, the ner 600 years, and the soss 60 years. [Illustration: 041.jpg TWO FISH-LIKE DEITIES OF THE CHALDAEANS.] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from an intaglio in the British Museum.