Khammu-rabi eventually succeeded in overthrowing the king of Elam, in crushing his rival Eri-Aku and his Elamite allies, and in making himself master of an independent Babylonia, which was henceforth a united kingdom, with its centre and sovereign city at Babylon. Recent excavations have brought letters of his to light which were written to his faithful vassal Sin-idinnam, Sin-idinnam had been the king of Larsa whom Eri-Aku and his Elamite troops had driven from the city of his fathers, and he had found refuge and protection in the court of Khammu-rabi at Babylon. When the great war finally broke out, which ended in leaving Khammu-rabi sole monarch of Babylonia, Sin-idinnam rendered him active service, and after the conclusion of the struggle he was reinstated in his ancestral princedom. Khammu-rabi loaded him with other honours as well; and one of the letters which have been recovered refers to certain statues which were presented to him as a reward for his ‘valour on the day of Kudur-Laghghamar’s defeat.’ This was an Oriental anticipation of the statues which the Greek cities of a later age bestowed upon those they would honour.[36] It has been suggested that the reverse sustained by Kudur-Laghghamar in Palestine at the hands of the ‘Amorites,’ under the leadership of ‘Abram the Hebrew,’ may have given the king of Babylon his opportunity for successfully revolting from his liege lord. If so, the Hebrew patriarch would have influenced the destinies of the country he had forsaken. What is more certain is that his victory gave him a commanding position in the country of his adoption. Syrian legend in after days made him a king in Damascus;[37] and when he buys the rock-tomb of Machpelah, the owners of the land tell him that he is no ‘stranger and sojourner’ among them, but ‘a mighty prince,’ ‘a prince of Elohim.’ From henceforth the ‘Hebrew’ occupies a recognised place in ‘the land of the Amorites.’ The figure of Melchizedek, king of Salem, loomed large upon the imagination of later ages out of the mists that enveloped the history of Canaanitish Jerusalem. But the romance is now making way for sober history. The letters on clay tablets in the Babylonian language and writing, found at Tel el-Amarna in Upper Egypt, have come to our help. Several of them were sent to the Pharaoh from Ebed-Tob, king of Jerusalem, and they show that Jerusalem was already the dominant state of Southern Palestine. Its strong position made it a fortress of importance, and it was the capital of a territory which stretched away towards the desert of the South. Its name was already Jerusalem or Uru-Salim, ‘the city of Salim,’ the God of Peace, and the hieroglyphic texts of Egypt accordingly speak of it simply as Shalama or Salem, omitting the needless Uru, ‘city.’[38]