[Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations by Archibald Sayce]@TWC D-Link bookEarly Israel and the Surrounding Nations INTRODUCTION 15/27
Babylonia was for a time under the domination of the Elamites, and while Amraphel or Khammurabi was allowed to rule at Babylon as a vassal-prince, an Elamite of the name of Eri-Aku or Arioch governed Larsa in the south.
Nay more; tablets have recently been found which show that the name of the Elamite monarch was Kudur-Laghghamar, and that among his vassal allies was Tudkhula or Tidal, who seems to have been king of the Manda, or "nations" of Kurdistan.
Khammurabi, whose name is also written Ammurapi, has left us autograph letters, in one of which he refers to his defeat of Kudur-Laghghamar in the decisive battle which at last delivered Babylonia from the Elamite yoke. The story of Chedor-laomer's campaign preserved in Genesis has thus found complete verification.
The political situation presupposed in it--however unlikely it seemed to the historian but a few years ago--has turned out to be in strict harmony with fact; the names of the chief actors in it have come down to us with scarcely any alteration, and a fragment of old-world history, which could not be fitted into the scheme of the modern historian, has proved to be part of a larger story which the clay books of Babylonia are gradually unfolding before our eyes.
It is no longer safe to reject a narrative as "unhistorical" simply on the ground of the imperfection of our own knowledge. Or let us take another instance from the later days of Assyrian history, the period which immediately precedes the first intercourse between Greece and the East.
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