Doubtless other local kingdoms arose during the period following Babylon's temporary disappearance as a political force, but we have recovered no traces of them,[29] and the only fact of which we are certain is the continued succession of the Sea-Country kings. To one of these rulers, Gulkishar, reference is made upon a boundary stone of the twelfth century, drawn up in the reign of Enlil-nadin-apli, an early king of the Fourth Dynasty. On it he is given the title of King of the Sea-Country, which is also the late chronicler's designation for E-gamil, the last member of the dynasty, in the account he has left us of the Kassite invasion. Such evidence seems to show that the administrative centre of their rule was established at those periods in the south; but the inclusion of the dynasty in the Kings' List is best explained on the assumption that at least some of its later members imposed their suzerainty over a wider area.[30] They were evidently the only stable line of rulers in a period after the most powerful administration the country had yet known had been suddenly shattered. The land had suffered much, not only from the Hittite raid, but also during the continuous conflicts of more than a century that preceded the final fall of Babylon. It must have been then that many of the old Sumerian cities of Southern and Central Babylonia were deserted, after being burned down and destroyed; and they were never afterwards re-occupied. Lagash, Umma, Shuruppak, Kisurra and Adab play no part in the subsequent history of Babylonia. Of the fortunes of Babylon at this time we know nothing, but the fact that the Kassites should have made the city their capital shows that the economic forces, which had originally raised her to that position, were still in operation. The Sumerian elements in the population of Southern Babylonia may now have enjoyed a last period of influence, and their racial survival in the Sea-Country may in part explain its continual striving for independence. But in Babylonia as a whole the effects of three centuries of West-Semitic rule were permanent. When, after the Kassite conquest, Babylon emerges once more into view, it is apparent that the traditions inherited from her first empire have undergone small change. [Footnote 1: We may assume that they owed the partial success of the raid to their mobility, although on this occasion, their earliest invasion of Babylonian territory, the horse probably played a still more useful part in the retreat; see further, p. 215 f.] [Footnote 2: Such appears to be the most probable explanation of the duplicate copies of the sale-contract from Tell Ṣifr, in the neighbourhood of Larsa, with their variant dates by formulæ of Rîm-Sin and Samsu-iluna; see above, p. 98.] [Footnote 3: Cf. "Chronicles concerning early Babylonian Kings," II., p. 18.]