* Sumulailu had built six such large strongholds of brick, which were repaired by Samsuiluna five generations later.  A contract of Sinmuballit is dated the year in which he built the great wall of a strong place, the name of which is unfortunately illegible on the fragment which we possess.

They repaired the temples as a matter of course, and enriched them according to their means; we even know that Zabu, the third in order of the line of sovereigns, occupied himself in building the sanctuary Eulbar of Anunit, in Sippara.  There is evidence that they possessed the small neighbouring kingdoms of Kishu, Sippara, and Kuta, and that they had consolidated them into a single state, of which Babylon was the capital.  To the south their possessions touched upon those of the kings of Uru, but the frontier was constantly shifting, so that at one time an important city such as Nippur belonged to them, while at another it fell under the dominion of the southern provinces.  Perpetual war was waged in the narrow borderland which separated the two rival states, resulting apparently in the balance of power being kept tolerably equal between them under the immediate successors of Sumuabim* —­the obscure Sumulailu, Zabum, the usurper Immeru, Abilsin and Sinmuballit—­until the reign of Khammurabi (the son of Sinmuballit), who finally made it incline to his side.** The struggle in which he was engaged, and which, after many vicissitudes, he brought to a successful issue, was the more decisive, since he had to contend against a skilful and energetic adversary who had considerable forces at his disposal.  Birnsin*** was, in reality, of Elamite race, and as he held the province of Yamutbal in appanage, he was enabled to muster, in addition to his Chaldaean battalions, the army of foreigners who had conquered the maritime regions at the mouth of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

* None of these facts are as yet historically proved:  we may, however, conjecture with some probability what was the general state of things, when we remember that the first kings of Babylon were contemporaries of the last independent sovereigns of Southern Chaldaea.

** The name of this prince has been read in several ways—­ Hammurabi, Khammurabi, by the earlier Assyriologists, subsequently Hammuragash, Khammuragash, as being of Elamite or Cossoan extraction:  the reading Khammurabi is at present the prevailing one.  The bilingual list published by Pinches makes Khammurabi an equivalent of the Semitic names Kimta- rapashtum.  Hence Halevy concluded that Khammurabi was a series of ideograms, and that Kimtarapashtum was the true reading of the name; his proposal, partially admitted by Hommel, furnishes us with a mixed reading of Khammurapaltu, Amraphel. [Hommel is now convinced of the identity of the Amraphel of Gen. xiv.  I with Khammurabi.—­Te.] Sayce, moreover, adopts the reading Khammurabi, and assigns to him an Arabian origin.  The part played