It had raised Bel-Merodach, the god of Babylon, to the head of the pantheon, and it had lasted for 304 years.
It was followed by a Sumerian dynasty from the south, which governed the country for 368 years, but of which we know little more than the names of the kings composing it and the length of their several reigns.
It fell before the avalanche of an invasion from the mountains of Elam.
The Kassites poured into the Babylonian plain, and Kassite kings ruled at Babylon for 576 years and a half.

During their domination the map of western Asia underwent a change.

The Kassite conquest destroyed the Babylonian empire; Canaan was lost to it for ever, and eventually became a province of Egypt.

The high-priests of Assur, now Kaleh Sherghat, near the confluence of the Tigris and Lower Zab, made themselves independent and founded the kingdom of Assyria, which soon extended northward into the angle formed by the Tigris and Upper Zab, where the cities of Nineveh and Calah afterwards arose.

The whole country had previously been included by the Babylonians in Gutium or Kurdistan.
The population of Assyria seems to have been more purely Semitic than that of Babylonia.