It was thickly strewn with walled towns and villages; the latter, perched upon the precipitous mountain summits, and surrounded by deep ravines, owed their security solely to their position, and, indeed, needed no fortification. The country abounded in woods and pastures, interspersed with cornlands; access to it was gained by one or two passes on the eastern side, which thus permitted caravans or armies to reach the districts lying between the Erythræan and Caspian Seas. The tribes who inhabited it had been brought early under Chaldæan civilization, and had adopted the cuneiform script; such of their monuments as are still extant resemble the bas-reliefs and inscriptions of Assyria.* It is not always easy to determine the precise locality occupied by these various peoples; the Guti were situated near the upper courses of the Turnât and the Badanu, in the vicinity of the Kashshu;** the Lulumê had settled in the neighbourhood of the Batîr, to the north of the defiles of Zohab;*** the Namar separated the Lulumê from Elam, and were situated half in the plain and half in the mountain, while the Arapkha occupied, both banks of the Great Zab. * Pinches has published an inscription of a king of Khani, named Tukultimir, son of Ilushaba, written in Chaldeo-Assyrian, and found in the temple of Shamash at Sippara, where the personage himself had dedicated it. Winckler gives another inscription of a king of the Guti, which is also in Semitic and in cuneiform character. ** The name is written sometimes Quti, at others Guti, which induced Pognon to believe that they were two different peoples: the territory occupied by this nation must have been originally to the east of the Lesser Zab, in the upper basins of the Adhem and the Diyaleh. Oppert proposes to recognise in these Guti “the ancestors of the Goths, who, fifteen hundred years ago, pushed forward to the Russia of the present day: we find,” (he adds), “in this passage and in others, some of which go back to the third millennium before the Christian era, the earliest mention of the Germanic races.” *** The people of Lulumô-Lullubi have been pointed out as living to the east of the Lesser Zab by Schrader; their exact position, together with that of Mount Padîr-Batîr in whose neighbourhood they were, has been determined by Père Scheil. Budîlu carried his arms against these tribes, and obtained successes over the Turuki and the Nigimkhi, the princes of the Guti and the Shuti, as well as over the Akhlamî and the Iauri.*