It would be tempting to connect the fall of Ur with the sack of the neighbouring city of Erech by the Elamite king Kudur-Nankhundi, which is referred to in an inscription of Ashur-bani-pal. When he captured Susa in 650 B.C., the Assyrian king relates that he recovered the image of the goddess Nanâ, which Kudur-Nankhundi had carried off from Erech sixteen hundred and thirty-five years before.[2] By accepting these figures Kudur-Nankhundi's invasion has been assigned to an approximate date of 2285 B.C., and it was formerly supposed that it was an episode in the Elamite wars of the First Dynasty of Babylon. But, in consequence of the reduction in dates necessitated by recent discoveries, it follows that, if Ashur-bani-pal's figures be accepted as correct, Kudur-Nankhundi's invasion must have taken place before the rise of Babylon. It cannot have occurred at a time when the kings of Ur were all-powerful in Babylonia, and still retained an effective hold on Elam; so that, unless we assign the invasion to some period of unrest during the Dynasty of Isin, no more probable epoch presents itself than that of the Elamite invasion which put an end to the Dynasty of Ur, and allowed Isin to secure the hegemony in Babylonia. The want of some synchronism, or fixed point of contact, between the earlier history of Elam and that of Sumer and Akkad renders it difficult to settle the period of those native Elamite rulers whose names occur in building-inscriptions, recovered during the French excavations at Susa. Some of the texts enumerate a succession of Elamite princes, who had in turn taken part in the reconstruction of buildings in that city,[3] and, although we are thus enabled to arrange their names in relative chronological order, it is not until towards the close of the First Dynasty of Babylon that we can definitely fix the date of any one of them. Of earlier rulers, the members of the dynasty of Khutran-tepti probably reigned at a period subsequent to that of Basha-Shushinak.[4] In addition to Khutran-tepti himself, the names of three of his descendants have been recovered, Itaddu I., and his son Kal-Rukhuratir, and his grandson Itaddu II. Since these rulers bore the title patesi of Susa, it is possible that, like Urkium, Zarik and Belia-rik, who are mentioned on tablets from Tello,[5] they owed allegiance to Babylonia, during the period of the Dynasty of Ur.[6] A later Elamite dynasty was that which traced its descent from Ebarti, or from his son Shilkhakha. Two of Shilkhakha's descendants[7] were Shirukdu' or Shirukdukh, and Simebalar-khuppak, and these were divided from a later group by Kuk-Kirmesh, the son of Lankuku. The later group of his descendants, whose names have yet been recovered, consists of Adda-Pakshu, Temti-khalki and Kuk-Nashur, or Kukka-Nasher, the descendant of Kal-Uli.[8] What intervals of time separated the different members of the dynasty from one another is still a matter for conjecture.