the event of greatest importance which occurred in that year.  This event might be the cutting of a canal, when the year in which this took place might be referred to as “the year in which the canal named Ai-khegallu was cut;” or it might be the building of a temple, as in the date-formula, “the year in which the great temple of the Moon-god was built;” or it might be “the conquest of a city, such as the year in which the city of Kish was destroyed.”  Now it will be obvious that this system of dating had many disadvantages.  An event might be of great importance for one city, while it might never have been heard of in another district; thus it sometimes happened that the same event was not adopted throughout the whole country for designating a particular year, and the result was that different systems of dating were employed in different parts of Babylonia.  Moreover, when a particular system had been in use for a considerable time, it required a very good memory to retain the order and period of the various events referred to in the date-formulae, so as to fix in a moment the date of a document by its mention of one of them.  In order to assist themselves in their task of fixing dates in this manner, the scribes of the First Dynasty of Babylon drew up lists of the titles of the years, arranged in chronological order under the reigns of the kings to which they referred.  Some of these lists have been recovered, and they are of the greatest assistance in fixing the chronology, while at the same time they furnish us with considerable information concerning the history of the period of which we should otherwise have been in ignorance.

From these lists of date-formulae, and from the dates themselves which are found upon the legal and commercial tablets of the period, we learn that Kish, Ka-sallu, and Isin all gave trouble to the earlier kings of the First Dynasty, and had in turn to be subdued.  Elam did not watch the diminution of her influence in Babylonia without a struggle to retain it.  Under Kudur-mabug, who was prince or governor of the districts lying along the frontier of Elam, the Elamites struggled hard to maintain their position in Babylonia, making the city of Ur the centre from which they sought to check the growing power of Babylon.  From bricks that have been recovered from Mukayyer, the site of the city of Ur, we learn that Kudur-mabug rebuilt the temple in that city dedicated to the Moon-god, which is an indication of the firm hold he had obtained upon the city.  It was obvious to the new Semitic dynasty in Babylon that, until Ur and the neighbouring city of Larsam had been captured, they could entertain no hope of removing the Elamite yoke from Southern Babylonia.  It is probable that the earlier kings of the dynasty made many attempts to capture them, with varying success.  An echo of one of their struggles in which they claimed the victory may be seen in the date-formula for the fourteenth year of the reign of Sin-muballit, Hammurabi’s father