In Assyria the results of the recent discoveries, so well known through many learned and popular works, strikingly confirm the Hebrew chronology. They indicate no slow emergence from barbarism, but show that in Assyria as in Egypt implements of stone and metal were used together by a primitive people, already far advanced in civilization; and the oldest historical names only carry us back to cities and sovereigns of the Abrahamic age, while the story of the primitive empire of Nimrod and the traditions of the deluge seem to have survived in more or less mythical legends. The earliest Assyrian monuments would seem to belong to a Turanian race, of which comparatively little is known, but which may correspond with the primitive Cushites of Biblical story. To these, it is true, Berosus attaches a fabulous antiquity; but this is not confirmed by the monuments. These, according to the latest facts disclosed by Smith, Rawlinson, and others, appear to fix a date of about 1800 B.C. for the foundation of the Assyrian monarchy proper, and the oldest previous date given by Assurbampal, who reigned about B.C. 668 to 626, gives 1635 years before his time, or say 2280 B.C., as the date of an Elamite king Kudarnankundi, who seems to be the leader of a primitive tribe, one of the oldest in the region, and who has been conjectured to have been the Chedorlaomer of Genesis, but was probably one of his predecessors. We gather from the Assyrian annals that the early Turanian kings, while mound-builders like their kindred elsewhere, and acquainted with metals and with the cuneiform writing, yet constituted comparatively small nations, and were much occupied with hunting and other rude sports, and with predatory expeditions, so as to answer very nearly to the Biblical conception of the early Cushite kingdom of the valley of the Euphrates, which was probably in the same stage of culture with the nations that in a later period inhabited the valley of the Mississippi, and are known as the Alleghans. In connection with the early history of man, much importance has been attached to the division of the early historic and prehistoric ages into the periods of Stone, Bronze, and Iron, and of the former into a Palaeolithic or ancient stone age, and a more modern or Neolithic stone age. It is plain, however, that too great importance has been attached to these distinctions, and that they express rather differences of circumstances and of culture than of age, so that they have really no bearing on the Biblical chronology.