sight the very striking fact that the fragments break off the Assyrian dynasty before Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Samuges, who certainly belong to it, and fill up the chasm thus made in the succession of dynasties by the 140 years which the canon of Ptolemy show to have preceded the accession of Nebuchadnezzar--a canon which has no historical object in view, no dynasties to tabulate, but is merely intended to fix the years from which observations made by the Chaldæans were in existence. If this is the right method[327] of ascertaining the first established starting-point for the history of the lower land upon the two streams, the beginnings of civilisation in these districts may be placed not much below the year 3000 B.C. Life must have become richer in Babylonia before the tribes of the Iranian uplands were roused to obtain the sovereignty of that country. Still it remains a remarkable fact that the history of Babylonia begins with the dominion of strangers, and that the native tradition, as we can show from the fragments of it remaining to our times, had nothing to place before the strangers, except the two mythical dynasties of Babylonian princes before and after the flood. In the fragments the first native dynasty of historical times, the dynasty of the Chaldæan princes, comes in the fifth place; according to the calculation given above, their supremacy began in the year 1976 B.C., and already in 1518 B.C. it gave place first to the nine Arabian, and then to the Assyrian kings. The statement of the fragments, that forty-nine native kings reigned, in the 458 years from 1976 B.C. to 1518 B.C., is also remarkable, since it allows for the reign of each of the kings of this dynasty the brief average of a little more than nine years.