The palace of Kûyunjik belongs to the last age of Assyrian history. But the shadûf in Babylonia went back to the Sumerian period, as we know from the references to it in the lexical tablets. It was called _dulâtum_ in Semitic Babylonian, the pole or poles being _kakritum_, and the bucket _zirqu_ or _zirqatum_ (Sumerian _sû_),[114] and an old Sumerian collection of agricultural precepts describes how the irrigator “fixes up the shadûf, hangs up the bucket and draws water.”[115] The “irrigator” was naturally an important personage in early Babylonia, and legend averred that the famous Sargon of Akkad, the founder of the first Semitic Empire, had been rescued as a child from a watery grave, and brought up by one. In both Babylonia and Egypt the shadûf was closely associated with a system of irrigation which went back to the dawn of their several histories. What explanation must we give of its identity in the two countries? There are three possibilities. In the first place, it may have been invented independently on the banks of both the Euphrates and the Nile. Similar conditions tend to produce similar results. But against this is the fact that the shadûf was not the only kind of irrigating machine that was suggested by the nature of the two rivers and the lands through which they flowed. In modern Egypt, besides the shadûf there are the _saqia_, or water-wheel, and an irrigating contrivance which is in use in the Delta. The water-wheel, we know, was a Babylonian invention which was imported into Egypt in comparatively recent times; the irrigating contrivance of the Delta, which consists of a bucket suspended on a rope swung by two men who stand facing each other, is a primitive instrument which might have been invented anywhere. Its survival is due to the fact that in the flat marshes of the Delta, the shadûf, though saving labour, is not necessary, and it therefore continued to be employed there after the shadûf was known. But this implies that the shadûf was not the oldest instrument for raising the water of the Nile. Then there is the second possibility that the shadûf was borrowed by Egypt from Babylonia or by Babylonia from Egypt in historical times. In Babylonia, however, we can trace its history back to the Sumerian epoch, and in both countries it was intimately connected with a system of irrigation the origin of which must be sought in the prehistoric age, and which was probably carried from the valley of the Euphrates to that of the Nile. There remains the third possibility that it came to Egypt along with the system of irrigation itself.