An early Babylonian cylinder, which came from Erech and originally belonged to a member of the royal family of that city, presents us with a curious picture of a rude nomad tribe apparently arriving in Babylonia. The chief marches in front armed with bow and arrows, and wearing the same kind of boots with turned-up ends as distinguished the Hittites in ancient times and are still worn in Asia Minor and Greece. They indicate that the wearer came from a cold and mountainous country. The animals’ skins which compose the dresses of his three retainers also point to a similar conclusion. Besides the retainers, the wife of the chief is depicted, as well as two slaves who carry some objects on their shoulders. Unfortunately no light is cast upon the group by the inscription, which simply states that the cylinder belonged to “Gibil-dur (or Ne-Zicum), the brother of the king of Erech, the librarian, thy servant.” All we can gather from it is that the famous library of Erech, which furnished Assur-bani-pal and his scribes with the original texts of the Izdubar Epic, was already in existence, and that the office of librarian was considered honourable enough to be borne by a brother of the reigning monarch. If the legendary siege of Erech is not to be referred to the epoch of the Median conquest, it may have fallen at the time when the image of the goddess Nana was carried away from Erech by the Elamite king Kudur-nankhundi, 1635 years before the capture of Shushan, the capital of Elam, by the Assyrians (about B.C. 645), and consequently about B.C. 2280. A fragment which refers to this period in “Cuneiform Inscriptions,” vol. iii. p. 38, relates the destruction wrought in the country by the Elamites, and makes Kudur-nankhundi follow one of the other monarchs of an Elamite dynasty and exceed his predecessors in the injury he did to the country. Putting together the detached notices of this period, the following may approximately represent the chronology, the dates being understood as round numbers. ? B.C. 2750, Elamites (Medes) overrun Babylonia. B.C. 2280, Kudur-nankhundi, king of Elam, ravages Erech. B.C. 1800, Khammuragas conquers Babylonia. Although the dates transmitted through ancient authors are as a rule vague and doubtful, there are many independent notices which seem to point to somewhere about the twenty-third century before the Christian era for the foundation of the Babylonian and Assyrian power. Several of these dates are connected either directly or by implication with Nimrod, who first formed a united empire over these regions. The following are some of these notices:— Simplicius relates that Callisthenes, the friend of Alexander, sent to Aristotle from Babylon a series of stellar observations reaching back 1,903 years before the taking of Babylon by Alexander. This would make 1903 + 331 = B.C. 2234.