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 the event of grea