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]