CHAPTER III
BABYLONIAN DYNASTS AND KINGS OF SIMASH
The peoples of Gutium who overwhelmed Babylonia in the twenty-fifth century b.c. appear indeed to have been barbarians. Later authors hurl fierce invectives against them, and apparently these were not altogether unwarranted. It was said that they antagonized the gods, carried off the sovereignty of Sumer to the mountains, and established enmity and wickedness in the land.[1] From the viewpoint of the Babylonian, schooled in the virtues of law and order, no greater accusation could be brought against any people than that they lacked the firm hand of a rightful sovereign. Yet it was said of the Guti that they had no ruler before they entered the lowlands.[2] We may attribute this state-
- ↑ Utuhegal inscription; cf. Thureau-Dangin, "La fin de la domination gutienne," RA, IX (1912), 111–20, and X, 98–100; M. Witzel in Babyloniaca, VII (1913), 51–62.
- ↑ King lists, as in Langdon, "Oxford Editions of Cuneiform Texts," II, 18. The assumption that the Guti capital was Arrapha because they carried off to this city the statue of Anunit of Sippar (apparently first stated by Scheil in RT, XXXIII [1911], 216, and recently by Langdon in Cambridge Ancient History, I, 423) is based on a misinterpretation of the "Constantinople" text of Nabu-naid, which is No. 8 in Langdon, Die neubabylonischen Königsinschriften, pp. 276 f.
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