1. ONE OF THE MOST spectacular steps in the study of ancient chronology during recent years is the correction, by not less than 275 years, of the date of one of the most important and best known periods of oriental history, the time of Hammurabi of Babylon. This drastic change became necessary when Thureau-Dangin in 1937 recognized 1 that the archives from Mari (on the middle Euphrates) proved Hammurabi a contemporary of the Assyrian king Shamshi-Adad I, thus opening the way for applying Assyrian chronological material to the problem of dating the First Babylonian Dynasty. This consequence was first noted by Albright in 1938, who placed 2 Hammurabi's accession tentatively at " about 1870 B. c." Two years later the same author gave a more detailed report on the new chronology of Western Asia,3 dating Ham~murabi still later, at 1800 B. c. The present monograph by Smith, written without the benefit of Albright's revised results, arrives at essentially the same date, proposing for Hammurabi the years 1792-1750 B. c., and hence 1894-1595 for the First Babylonian Dynasty. Smith's book is divided into two sharply distinct parts. The first gives the arguments for the new chronology. The second draws conclusions about the history of Alalakh (a city on the lower Orontes near Antioch). The first part alone is the subject of this review, the purely historical problems being only touched upon in passing. My present aim is merely to discuss the validity of arguments adduced especially in their connection with astronomical datings. As to the historical proof, everything seems to me to depend entirely on the following two arguments: 4 first, Assyrian chronology (starting with Tiglath-Pileser I, TukultiNinurta I and Shalmaneser I) puts Shamshi-Adad I at about 1820 + 40; secondly, lack of reference to Egypt in the Mari correspondence, and evidence from Ugarit 5 place this period after the Twelfth Dynasty, thus after, say, 1780. These two time-limits are so narrow that the synchronism Mario-Shamshi Adad I-Hammurabi places Hammurabi within a small margin in 1800 B. c. The evidence from the stratification in Alalakh, as discussed by Smith, doubtless fits excellently with the chronology thus obtained, but it alone could never provide such sharp time-limits as the two above-mentioned arguments.