Like the Babylonians and Assyrians of a later day, Sargon and his subjects belonged to the Semitic stock, and were therefore related to the Hebrews and the Arabians. But they were really intruders in Chaldea. The primitive inhabitants of the country, the builders of its cities, the inventors of the cuneiform system of writing, and the founders of the culture and civilization which was afterwards borrowed by the Semites, were of a wholly different race. They spoke an agglutinative language of the same character as that of the modern Turks or Finns, and were originally divided into two sections—the inhabitants of Sumir or Shinar, the plain country, and the Accadians or “Highlanders,” who had descended from the mountains of Elam subsequently to the first settlement of their kinsfolk in Shinar. At some date between B.C. 3000 and 2000, the Semitic population which bordered upon Babylonia on the west, and had long been settled in some of its western cities, such as Ur (now Mugheir), conquered Shinar or Sumir. The Accadians, however, maintained their independence for a considerable time after this conquest, until, finally, Accad also was reduced under the sway of the Semitic kings. The old population of the country was gradually absorbed, and its language became extinct. The extinction of the Accadian or Sumerian language had already taken place—at all events among the educated classes—at the time that Sargon founded his library at Agané, and one of the chief reasons which led to the compilation of the great work on astronomy, was the necessity of preserving the astronomical and astrological observations recorded in a language which was beginning to be forgotten. At the same time Semitic translations of other portions of the old Accadian literature were made. The library at Agané, however, was not the only place where the work of translation went on; many other libraries existed, and their scribes and readers had alike become Semites, who required works written in their own tongue. The Semitic translations of Accadian works which were made for the library of Erech, one of the earliest seats of Semitic power, must have been considerably older than those made for the library of Sargon. The extinction of the Accadian language and the translation of Accadian works into Semitic Babylonian are important facts for settling the chronology of a document or inscription. Wherever we can show that a Babylonian or Assyrian text is translated from an Accadian original, or wherever we have a copy of that original itself, we may feel pretty sure that we are dealing with something older than the eighteenth century before the Christian era. Mr. Smith believed that the “Exploits of the God Dibbara” was one of the oldest of the mythological texts which have come down to us, though he admitted that the mention of Assyria in it was in favour of a somewhat later date.