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When their rule actually ceased we do not yet know. It cannot have been very long, however, before the era of Egyptian conquest. In the Tel el-Amarna tablets they are always called Kassites, a name which could have been given to them only after the conquest of Babylonia by the Kassite mountaineers of Elam, and the rise of a Kassite dynasty of kings.
Or did they represent some fresh wave of Semitic immigration'? That they were not Kassites is proved by the new chronicle which relates how the Country of the Sea was conquered by the Kassites, and how the dynasty founded by Iluma-ilu thus came to an end.
On the east were the Elamites, with Susa for their capital; to the north of these were the warlike Kassites. The Sumerians, who preceded the Semites in the occupancy of Babylonia, were of an unknown stock. They were the founders of Babylonian culture. Even by them the soil was skillfully cultivated with the help of dikes and canals. They were the inventors of the cuneiform writing.
They were wars partly of revenge, partly of natural Egyptian expansion into a neighbouring fertile territory, which at last lay open, and was claimed by no other imperial power, while the weak Kassites ruled Babylon, and the independence of Assyria was in embryo. But the earlier Egyptian armies seem to have gone forth to Syria simply to ravage and levy blackmail.
This dynasty in its turn succumbed before the invasion of the Kassites from the mountains in the western districts of Elam, and, although the city of Babylon retained her position as the capital of the country throughout these changes of government, she was the capital of rulers of different races, who successively fought for and obtained the control of the fertile plains of Mesopotamia.
In like manner, through the Semitic Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Kassites, and the inhabitants of Palestine and Syria, and of some parts of Asia Minor, Armenia, and Kurdistan, all in turn experienced indirectly the influence of Sumerian civilization and continued in a greater or less degree to reproduce elements of this early culture.
This supposition is not inconsistent with the suggestion that the dynasty of the Country of the Sea was Sumerian, and that under it the Sumerians once more became the predominant race in Babylonia. The new chronicle also relates how the dynasty of the Country of the Sea succumbed in its turn before the incursions of the Kassites.
The gradual conquest of the whole of Babylonia by the Kassites no doubt followed the conquest of the Country of the Sea, for the chronicle relates how the process of subjugation, begun by Ulam-Buriash, was continued by his nephew Agum, and we know from the lists of kings that Ea-gamil was the last king of the dynasty founded by Iluma-ilu.
In fact, there are indications that the people of the Country of the Sea are to be referred to an older stock than the Elamites, the Semites, or the Kassites.
Here far-sighted engineers and stronghanded rulers turned the waters of Babylon into waters of life, and the Sawâd became a great heart of civilisation, breathing in man-power Sumerians and Amorites and Kassites and Aramaeans and Chaldeans and Persians and Greeks and Arabs and breathing out the works of man grain and wool and Babylonish garments, inventions still used in our machine-shops, and emotions still felt in our religion.
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