annals, and astrological and magical formulas had been written. With these aids this ancient Accadian language can now be read with almost as much certainty as Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the records written in it are accumulating rapidly with every fresh exploration. Some idea of the wealth of the materials already found may be formed from the fact that the number of tablets in the different museums of Europe from the Nineveh library alone exceeds 10,000. They present to us a most interesting picture of the religion, literature, laws, and social life of a period long antecedent to that commonly assigned for the destruction of the world by Noah's Deluge, or even to that of the creation of Adam. To some of these we shall have occasion subsequently to refer, but for the present I confine myself to the immediate object in view, that of verifying the earliest historical dates. The first certain date is fixed by the annals of the Assyrian King Asshurbanipal, grandson of Sennacherib, who conquered Elam and destroyed its capital, Susa, in the year 645 B.C. The king says that he took away all the statues from the great temple of Susa, and among others, one of the Chaldæan goddess Nana, which had been carried away from her own temple in the city of Erech, by a king of Elam who conquered the land of Accad 1635 years before. This conquest, and the accession of an Elamite dynasty which lasted for nearly 300 years, is confirmed from a variety of other sources, and its date is thus fixed, beyond the possibility of a doubt, at 2280 _B.C._ A king of this dynasty, Khudur-Lagamar, synchronizes with Abraham, assuming Abraham and the narrative in the Old Testament respecting his defeat of that monarch to be historical.