Its mounds of ruin are now known as Muqayyar or Mugheir. Highest among them towers the mound which covers the remains of the great temple of the moon-god. For it was to Sin, the moon-god, that the city had been dedicated from time immemorial, and in whose honour its temple had been built. There was only one other temple of Sin that was equally famous, and this was the temple which stood at Harran in Mesopotamia, and which, like that at Ur, had been erected and endowed by Babylonian kings. It was not only with the Semites of Northern Arabia that Ur carried on its trade. It lay not very far from the mouth of the Euphrates, which in early days flowed into the Persian Gulf nearly a hundred miles to the north of the present coast. We hear in the cuneiform tablets of ‘the ships of Ur,’ and these ships must have been used in the trade that was carried on by water. The products of Southern Arabia could thus be brought to the Chaldean city; perhaps also there was intercourse even with Egypt. The kings of Ur grew in power, and a dynasty arose at last which gained ascendency over the other states of Babylonia. We are beginning to learn something about these kings and the society over which they ruled. During the last few years excavations have been carried on by the Americans, by the French, and even by the Turkish Government, which have brought to light thousands of early cuneiform records, some of which are dated in their reigns. A large proportion of these records are contracts which throw an unexpected light on the commerce and law, the manners and customs and social life of the inhabitants of Babylonia at the time. Among the last kings of the dynasty of Ur were Inê-Sin and Pûr-Sin, whose names, it will be observed, are compounded with that of the patron-god of the state. Inê-Sin not only invaded Elam, but the distant west as well. His daughters married the High-Priests both of Ansan in Elam and of Markhasi, now Mer’ash, in Syria.[11] But it was not the first time that Babylonian armies had marched to the west. Centuries before (about B.C. 3800) another Babylonian king, Sargon of Accad, had made campaign after campaign against the land of the Amorites, as Syria and Palestine were called, had set up images of himself on the shores of the Mediterranean, and had united all Western Asia into a single empire, while his son and successor had marched southward into the Sinaitic Peninsula.[12] A predecessor of Inê-Sin himself, Gimil-Sin by name, had overrun the land of Zabsali, which Professor Hommel is probably right in identifying with Subsalla, from whence an earlier Babylonian prince obtained stone for his buildings, and which, we are told, was in the mountains of the Amorites. The stone, in fact, was the limestone of the Lebanon.[13]