"Sin raised his head and spoke : 'Go forward, and thou shalt conquer the land.' "He went forward, and he conquered Errypt. The remaining lands which Assur and Sin have not conquered will the king, the lord of kings, conquer. By the command of Assur, Sin, Shamas (Chemosh) and the other gods shall he sit on a throne of generations." If Assur, the god of Assur, the first capital of Assyria, was put at the head of the Assyrian pantheon, Sin was put next, because Assyria did not become a kingdom until it had incorporated Mesopotamia, with its capital city, Harran, and adopted its god Sin.
After the fall of Assyria, Mesopotamia, of course, fell to Babylonia. When the last king of Babylon, Nabonidus, was in danger of losing Mesopotamia by the inroad of the Scythians, who had already invaded Nledia and Assyria, he at tempted to propitiate the gods by rebuilding the temple of Sin in its old glory.
We find, then, that in the very oldest times known to us there was in Mesopotamia, or that northern part of Mesopotamia included in the angle of the Euphrates and the Habor valleys, called in Genesis Padasz-Aram, or Plain of Aram, a kingdom whose capital city was Harran, the Biblical Haran. The difference in spelling comes from the fact that the Hebrew language cannot double the letter r. We find its tutelary god wor shiped in Babylonia as early as 35oo B. C. We find it mentioned several times in an astrological work which was in existence in the second chiliad B. C. When the Assyrian power arose it became united with the latter, and was so in the time of Shalmaneser I, about 13oo B. C. The advance
of the Hittite and other powers reduced the realm of Assyria. but Tiglath-pileser I (about moo B. C.) again extended his limits so that Meso potamia was permanently incorporated with As syria until the overthrow of the empire by Nabo polassar.
Assyria gave no especial culture to the world, but borrowed what she had from Babylonia and Padan-Aram, both older kingdoms, with estab lished art and religion, and it was by union with the latter and by its help that Assyria conquered all the regions about, north to the Black Sea and west to the Mediterranean. (See ASSYRIA, Lit erature; ASSYRIAN AND BABYLONIAN LIBRARIES.) This gives us a new point of view to consider the development of civilization in the ,entire re gion occupied by the Phcenicians, Syrians and Hittites, including the descendants of Abraham.
We see what a distinguished political ancestry the Hebrew had, coming first from Ur of the Chaldees, the capital of the earliest South Baby lonian kingdom, and then from Harran, the cap ital of the nearly equally old and powerful Meso potamian kingdom. From these two cities he brought the best education and civilization of the ancient world; and we can see how reasonable it was for Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to seek wives for their sons among their own kindred, instead of among the inferior races around them. (Csty of Nahor, by William Hayes Ward, D. D., Hom. Rev., Oct., 1894.) (See HARAN.)