With the advent of the First Dynasty in Babylon Elam found herself face to face with a power prepared to dispute her claims to exercise a suzerainty over the plains of Mesopotamia.  It is held by many writers that the First Dynasty of Babylon was of Arab origin, and there is much to be said for this view.  M. Pognon was the first to start the theory that its kings were not purely Babylonian, but were of either Arab or Aramaean extraction, and he based his theory on a study of the forms of the names which some of them bore.  The name of Samsu-imna, for instance, means “the sun is our god,” but the form of the words of which the name is composed betray foreign influence.  Thus in Babylonian the name for “sun” or the Sun-god would be Shamash or Shamshu, not Samsu; in the second half of the name, while ilu ("god”) is good Babylonian, the ending na, which is the pronominal suffix of the first person plural, is not Babylonian, but Arabic.  We need not here enter into a long philological discussion, and the instance already cited may suffice to show in what way many of the names met in the Babylonian inscriptions of this period betray a foreign, and possibly an Arabic, origin.  But whether we assign the forms of these names to Arabic influence or not, it may be regarded as certain that, the First Dynasty of Babylon had its origin in the incursion into Babylonia of a new wave of Semitic immigration.

[Illustration:  240.jpg BRICK STAMPED WITH AN INSCRIPTION OF KUDUR-MABURG]

The invading Semites brought with them fresh blood and unexhausted energy, and, finding many of their own race in scattered cities and settlements throughout the country, they succeeded in establishing a purely Semitic dynasty, with its capital at Babylon, and set about the task of freeing the country from any vestiges of foreign control.  Many centuries earlier Semitic kings had ruled in Babylonian cities, and Semitic empires had been formed there.  Sargon and Naram-Sin, having their capital at Agade, had established their control over a considerable area of Western Asia and had held Elam as a province.  But so far as Elam was concerned Kutir-Nakhkhunte had reversed the balance and had raised Elam to the position of the predominant power.

Of the struggles and campaigns of the earlier kings of the First Dynasty of Babylon we know little, for, although we possess a considerable number of legal and commercial documents of the period, we have recovered no strictly historical inscriptions.  Our main source of information is the dates upon these documents, which are not dated by the years of the reigning king, but on a system adopted by the early Babylonian kings from their Sumerian predecessors.  In the later periods of Babylonian history tablets were dated in the year of the king who was reigning at the time the document was drawn up, but this simple system had not been adopted at this early period.  In place of this we find that each year was cited by