and removed the winged bulls which stood at the gates of the temples of Elam. Their gods and goddesses I sent into captivity."[337] More than a hundred years after this time the Elamites had not forgotten their independence, and they attempted to recover it by repeated rebellions against the Persians. The inscriptions in which the kings of Persia spoke to the nations of their wide empire are of a triple character. Three different kinds of cuneiform writing repeat the same matter in three different languages. The first gives the inscription in the Persian language, the language of the king and dominant people, the third repeats it in the Babylonian-Assyrian language. The second, we may suppose, gives the inscription in the language of Elam, for the Persian kings resided in Susa, and in the enumeration of the subject territories, Susiana and Babylonia as a rule come after Persia. The forms of the language in cuneiform inscriptions on bricks and tiles discovered in the ruins of Susa are closely related to the language of the cuneiform inscriptions of the second kind in the inscriptions of the Achæmenids.[338] So far as these have been deciphered the language contained in them seems for the most part to be closely related to the Turkish-Tatar languages,[339] while the names of the Elamite gods preserved in Assyrian inscriptions, although different from those of Babylonia and Assyria, and also the names of the kings of Elam, have more of a Semitic than a Turkish-Tatar sound. On Assyrian tablets, beside the Assyrian and Babylonian names of the month, which are also the Hebrew names, we find names in another language unknown to us;[340] and the symbols of the Assyrian cuneiform writing are not only explained by the addition of the phonetic value and actual meaning, but before the substantives, verb-forms, and declensions of the Babylonian-Assyrian language are placed the corresponding words and inflections of another language, which is decidedly of a non-Semitic character, and also seems to belong to the Turkish-Tatar branch of language.[341] If it was considered necessary in Babylonia and Assyria to place another language before or beside their own, the relation of this language to that spoken by the Babylonians and Assyrians must have been very close. The most probable supposition is that it was the language of the ancient population of the land about the lower course of the two streams, which afterwards became subjected to Semitic immigrants. Whatever be the value of this supposition, we may in any case assume that the Semitic races found older inhabitants and an older civilisation on the lower Euphrates and Tigris. This older population was even then in possession of a system of writing, and this civilisation and writing was adopted by the Semitic races, just as at a later time the Armenians, Medes, and Persians borrowed their cuneiform writing from the inhabitants of Babylonia, Assyria, and Susiana.