Reasons for this are hard to come by. Certainly the constant warfare cannot have helped matters, but Samsu-iluna appears to have campaigned just as hard in the north, and that region was thriving during the The rise of Babylon marks a definite end to Sumerian cultural dominance of Mesopotamia and a shift to Akkadian for government and popular perhaps people who claimed cultural ties to the Sumerian past retrenched around the southerly cities which Iluna-ilu controlled. Several members of his dynasty took Sumerian names, and it appears they consciously strove to return to the region's Sumerian It is also possible that economic or environmental factors were involved; it is known that both Hammurabi and Rim-sin I had instituted policies which altered the economies of the perhaps these proved unsustainable in the long-term.