often swore an oath to observe their contract by the name
of one or more gods and of the reigning king. Hence, very often, when the
date is not preserved at all, we know what reign was concerned. On the
other hand, in some reigns we have dated tablets from almost every year.
If all the tablets were published, the witnesses and other parties would
enable us to fix the sequence of the years. As these year-names each give
a prominent event for the year we could thus reconstruct a skeleton
history of the reign. Indeed, the present writer had already determined
the order of several years, in more than one reign, from consideration of
the persons named in each. Of course, no assurance could thus be had that
some intermediate years were not omitted in such a scheme, since there is
no certainty that we know the name-dates for each year of a reign. The
order of the kings themselves and the lengths of their reigns were already
known from the King List published by Dr. T. G. Pinches.(33)

(M33) It seemed probable that the scribes of those days would have made
lists of the year-names, in order to know how much time had elapsed since
a given event had occurred. Hence great was the excitement and delight
when in _C. T. VI._ was published a tablet which once contained a list of
year-names from Sumuabu to Ammizaduga. This was followed by the
publication in Mr. L. H. King's _Letters of Hammurabi_ of a duplicate,
which served to restore and complete the list down to the tenth year of
Ammizaduga's reign. Mr. King further added the year-names actually used on
the dated tablets then published; thus showing how the year-names of the
list were quoted and either abbreviated or expanded. He very appropriately
called this the _Chronicle of the Kings of Babylon_. In the meantime
Professor A. H. Sayce had given a translation of the first published
list.(34) In the fourth volume of the _Beitraege zur semitischen
Sprachwissenschaft_,(35) Dr. E. Lindl has given a full discussion of the
first published list. He further adds a small list of the same character
giving the year-names in order for part of the reigns of Hammurabi and
Samsuiluna.(36) Dr. Lindl used the published dates of the contracts to
complete and restore the first list. Thus a great deal of excellent work
has been done on these lists. None of them are complete for the whole
dynasty, nor even for the part which they originally covered, and the
known dated documents do not serve to fully re