It is naturally difficult to judge which of these two inscriptions came first. Both of them seem to have a kind of peroration at the end containing similar phrases referring to the city of Babylon and its well-being, and either might therefore be the last tablet of a series. To all appearance, the order of the two records turns upon the question whether Durmaḫ-îlāni is the one who is referred to as having written a certain communication, or whether it is about him that some one has written. As he seems to be referred to in the third person, the probability is that “Durmaḫ-îlāni, son of Êri-Eaku, who (carried away?) the spoil of ... ,” is not the person speaking, but the person spoken of. In this case he was not necessarily alive at the time, and the order of the two tablets as here printed may be the correct one. How far the record which they contain may be true is with our present knowledge impossible to find out. The style of the writing with which they are inscribed is certainly very late—later, in all probability, than the Persian period, and the possibility that it is a compilation of that period has been already suggested. That it is altogether a fiction, however, is in the highest degree improbable. If we have in the three names which these two tablets contain the Babylonian prototypes of Tidal, Arioch, and Chedorlaomer, they must refer to the events which passed between the first and thirty-first years of the reign of Amraphel or Ḫammurabi, in which it would seem that both Durmaḫ-îlāni and Tudḫula attacked and spoiled Babylon, cutting the canals so that the town and the temple were both flooded. Both of these royal personages, who, be it noted, are not called kings, were apparently killed by their sons, and Kudur-laḫmal seems to have been a criminal of the same kind, if we may judge from the words “Kudur-laḫmal, his son, pier(ced?) his heart with the steel sword of his girdle.” That three royal personages, contemporaries, should all dispose of their fathers in the same way seems, however, in the highest degree improbable. It also seems to be in an equal degree impossible that (as has been suggested) the tablets in question should refer to Tidal, Arioch, and Chedorlaomer, but not the _same_ Tidal, Arioch, and Chedorlaomer as is spoken of in Genesis, unless it be meant thereby that the Biblical personages of that name are the historical ones, whilst those of the two tablets belong to the realm of fiction. The greater probability is, that they are the same personages, but that the accounts handed down to us on these two tablets are largely legendary. And that this is the case is made more probable by the third document, couched in poetical form, which I have entitled _The Legend of Chedorlaomer_. The following are extracts from this remarkable piece—