Built into the structure of a temple,
or buried beneath the edifice, one of their principal objects was to
preserve the name and deeds of the writer from oblivion. Like similar
documents found on the sites of Assyrian and Babylonian cities, they
sometimes include curses upon any impious man, who, on finding the
inscription after the temple shall have fallen into ruins, should in
any way injure the inscription or deface the writer's name. It will be
obvious that the writers of these inscriptions intended that they should
be intelligible to those who might come across them in the future. If,
therefore, they employed the Babylonian as well as the Elamite language,
it is clear that they expected that their future readers might be either
Babylonian or Elamite; and this belief can only be explained on the
supposition that their own subjects were of mixed race.
It is therefore certain that at this early period of Elamite history
Semitic Babylonians and Elamites dwelt side by side in Susa and retained
their separate languages. The problem therefore resolves itself into the
inquiry: which of these two peoples occupied the country first? Were the
Semites at first in sole possession, which was afterwards disputed by
the incursion of Elamite tribes from the north and east? Or were the
Elamites the original inhabitants of the land, into which the Semites
subsequently pressed from Babylonia?
A similar mixture of races is met with in Babylonia itself in the
early period of the history of that country.
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