This hypothesis appears to be in many ways an advance on any one of Mr. Frazer's hypotheses. It allows us to keep up the Jewish Haman as personating Humman; which seems necessary, for how otherwise is Haman to be explained? We are, moreover, enabled to understand how a victim who represented a vanquished Elamite god, also, and at the same time, represented a victorious Babylonian king. Humman being, by my hypothesis, an Elamite kind of Tammuz, all our anxieties about the appearance of Marduk and Humman, where Tammuz had previously done duty, disappear. Purim, which had been a Tammuz feast (if we accept Jensen's solution) and also a feast where a man died for the king, and then a feast of triumph for the victory of the Babylonian gods, and 'a wholly _secular_ merrymaking,' though, if Purim is a Jewish Tammuz feast, it had been, according to Ezekiel (who perhaps knew best), a religious rite of a false religion, now becomes all these things at once, though some may doubt how Purim could be, simultaneously, both religious and secular. But I would not abandon my theory merely because it involves a contradiction in terms. Add to all this that we can now have a Tammuz death and resurrection in June-July, and another in March-April, and all is translucent. At the summer festival we burn a dummy;[30] at the vernal feast we hang a man.[31] Admirably as my hypothesis colligates the facts, it is not the hypothesis of Mr. Frazer. Though he thinks that 'we can hardly deny the plausibility of' Nöldeke's theory that the Sacæa is a triumph for the victory of the Babylonian over the Elamite gods, and that Purim is an adaptation of the Sacæa,[32] Mr. Frazer does not accept that idea. Nöldeke is plausible, but not sound; and this is ruinous to my hypothesis of the Elamite war-prisoner, slain as Humman, merely in a stage of evolution between the sacrificed prince and the hanged criminal. We have seen how admirably my humble suggestion worked out all round, but it must be abandoned if Nöldeke is wrong.