He greatly improved the internal condition of his own country, both materially and politically, and carried his conquests to Elam, as had Sargon I, his predecessor by 500 years. But the man above all others who unified these scattered realms under his own sceptre, with Babylon as a centre, was Hammurabi, whose long reign of 55 years began about 2130 BC. The isolated city-kingdoms of Babylonia had already existed for centuries, with here and there a ruler who had been able to gain the supremacy over one or more of his neighbors for a time. by Sumu-abu, are known but slightly, though many contract tablets belonging to this period have been found. Successive kings of the 1st dynasty, founded about 2232 B.C. More recent scholarship assigns the dates 1894-1881 BC to his reign. Pinches assigns to Sumu-abi, the first king named in the emended list, the date of BC 2232. The last ruler whose name is legible is Kan-tal [Assurbanipal - Sardanapalus), who began to reign (Ptolemy) BC 647. Only the breaks in the tablet, and the lack of a statement of the number oi years in two of the longer dynasties, prevent being much more precise. This provides the framework of a history of Babylonia for at least fifteen hundred years. Internal evidence, combined with other monumental data and with the Canon of Ptolemy, makes it certain that most and probable that all of these dynasties were consecutive, and at the same time gives every indication of the trustworthiness of the list. The main tablet is mutilated, so that barely half of these names are now left, but some gaps can be supplied each dynasty is generally summarized at the end, and the summary includes both the number of kings and the number of years covered by the dynasty.
The List of Kings gave originally the names of more than one hundred and twenty Babylonian, monarchs, arranged in nine dynasties, with the length of reign of each king. In the great list of kings the dynasties are arranged one after the other, and it was obvious that its compiler imagined that they succeeded one another in the order in which he arranged them. The beginning of the list which gave the names of the First Dynasty is wanting, but the missing portion has been restored from a smaller document which gives a list of the kings of the First and Second Dynasties only. The names of the kings are arranged in dynasties, and details are given as to the length of their reigns and the total number of years each dynasty lasted. This document was drawn up in the Neo-Babylonian or Persian period, and when complete it gave a list of the names of all the Babylonian kings from the First Dynasty of Babylon down to the time in which it was written. All the schemes of Babylonian chronology that were suggested during the early 20th Century were based mainly on the great List of Kings which is preserved in the British Museum.