[184] See above, p. 39.
[185] See above, p. 68 ff.
[186] It maybe noted that this fully corroborates the statement of Herodotus (I., 180) that the streets of Babylon were straight, particularly those that ran at right angles and led to the river. As little more than the foundations of the houses are preserved, it is not possible to control his further statement that the houses were three or four stories high.
[CHAPTER III]
THE DYNASTIES OF BABYLON: THE CHRONOLOGICAL SCHEME IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT DISCOVERIES
It has often been said that chronology is the skeleton of history; and it will be obvious that any flaw in the chronological scheme must react upon our conception of the sequence and inter-relation of events. Perhaps the most serious defect from which Babylonian chronology has suffered hitherto has been the complete absence of any established point of contact between the Babylonian dynasties and those earlier lines of rulers who exercised authority in cities other than Babylon. On the one hand, with the help of the Babylonian List of Kings, we could build up from below a scheme of the rulers of Babylon itself. On the other hand, after the discovery of the Nippur Kings' List, it was possible to establish the succession of the earlier dynasties of Ur and Nîsin, and to conjecture their relation to the still more remote rulers of Akkad and other cities in the north and south. The two halves of the skeleton were each articulated satisfactorily enough, but the few bones were wanting which should enable us to fit them together. It is scarcely necessary to say that there was no lack of theories for filling in the gap. But every one of the schemes suggested introduced fresh difficulties of its own; and to writers of a more cautious temperament it seemed preferable to avoid a detailed chronology for those earlier ages. Approximate dates only were suggested, for, in spite of the obvious temptations presented by the Nippur List, it was realized that any attempt to work out the earlier dates in detail was bound to be misleading. Such writers were content to await the recovery of new material and meanwhile to think in periods.[1]
It is thus with some satisfaction that the announcement may be made that the connecting link, for which we have been waiting, has quite recently been established, with the result that we have now in our hands the necessary material for reconstructing the chronology on a sound basis and extending it back without a serious break, into the middle of the third millennium. The effect of the newly recovered point of contact between the earlier and the later phases in the country's history is naturally of greater importance for the former, so far as strict chronology is concerned.[2] But the information afforded, as to the overlapping of additional dynasties with that of the West-Semitic kings of Babylon, throws an entirely new light upon the circumstances which led to the rise of Babylon to power. Our picture of the capital's early history, as an independent city-state struggling for the mastery of her rivals, ceases to be an abstraction, and we may now follow her varying fortunes to their climax in Hammurabi's reign. This will form the subject of the following chapter; but, as the new historical material is only now in course of publication, it will be advisable first to give some account of it and to estimate its effects upon the chronological scheme.
It has long been recognized that certain kings of Larsa, the city in Southern Babylonia now marked by the mounds of Senkera, were contemporaneous with the First Dynasty of Babylon. The greatest of these, Rîm-Sin, a ruler of Elamite extraction, was the contemporary of Hammurabi, and his signal defeat by Babylon was commemorated in the date-formula for the thirty-first year of the latter's reign.[3] This victory was, indeed, the chief event of Hammurabi's reign, and at one time it was thought that it freed Babylon once for all from her most powerful enemy. But the discovery of a chronicle of early Babylonian kings, while substantiating the fact of Hammurabi's victory, and affording the additional information that it was followed by the capture of Ur and Larsa, proved that Rîm-Sin survived into the reign of Samsu-iluna, Hammurabi's son, by whom he was finally defeated.[4] Another king of Larsa, Warad-Sin, formerly identified with Rîm-Sin, was correctly recognized as his brother, both of them sons of the Elamite Kudur-Mabuk, and successively kings of the city.[5] The names of other rulers were known from votive texts and foundation-records, and from this source it was possible to incorporate in the dynasty Gungunum, probably Sumu-ilum (a king of Ur), and Nûr-Adad or Nûr-Immer and his son Sin-idinnam. It was realized that Sin-idinnam, the correspondent to whom Hammurabi addressed his letters, was not to be identified with the king of Larsa of that name,[6] and all four rulers were provisionally regarded as having preceded Warad-Sin upon the throne.[7]