KASSITES  , an Elamite tribe who played an important

part in the history of Babylonia . They still inhabited the north-western mountains of Elam, immediately south of Holwan, when Sennacherib attacked them in 702 B.C . They are the Kossaeans of Ptolemy, who divides Susiana between them and the Elymaeans; according to Strabo (xi . 13, 3, 6) they were the neighbours of the Medes . Th . Nbldeke (Gott . G . G., 1874, pp . 173 seq.) has shown that they are the Kissians of the older Greek authors who are identified with the Susians by Aeschylus (Choeph . 424, Pers . 17, 120) and Herodotus (v . 49, 52) .

We already hear of them as attacking Babylonia in the gth

year of Samsu-iluna the son of Khammurabi, and about 178o B.C. they overran Babylonia and founded a dynasty there which lasted for 576 years and nine months . In the course of centuries, however, they were absorbed into the Babylonian population; the kings adopted Semitic names and married into the royal family of Assyria . Like the other languages of the non-Semitic tribes of Elam that of the Kassites was agglutinative; a vocabulary of it has been handed down in a cuneiform tablet, as well as a list of Kassite names with their Semitic equivalents . It has no connexion with Indo-European, as has erroneously been supposed . Some of the Kassite deities were introduced into the Babylonian pantheon, and the Kassite tribe of Khabira seems to have settled in the Babylonian plain . See Fr . Delitzsch, Die Sprache der Koss¢er (1884) . (A . H . S.) and better known for the defence maintained by Bryennius against Alexis I. in 1084 . A Byzantine wall with round towers runs across the peninsula .