Shamshi-Adad had continued to strengthen his kingdom throughout his life, but upon his death, it had soon begins to crumble.

The empire lacks cohesion and is in a vulnerable geographical position.

When the news of Shamshi-Adad's death spreads, his old rivals at once set out to topple his sons from the throne.

Yasmah-Adad is soon expelled from Mari by Zimri-Lim, and the rest of the empire is soon lost to Hammurabi of Babylon.

Ishme-Dagan I, the son of the Amorite king Shamshi-Adad I, had been put on throne of Ekallatum by his father after a successful military attack.

He rules the area of the upper Tigris, including the city-state of Assur.

After Shamshi-Adad's death in 1791, he has managed to rule for a few years before being ousted from power by local forces.

His brother, …

…Yasmah-Adad, rules at the same time in the city of Mari, where the correspondence between the father and two sons will be found by archaeologists, providing an interesting and at times humorous look into the dynamics of this family. (Jean-Marie Durand, Documents Epistolaires du Palais de Mari, Collection Littérature Ancienne du Proche-Orient, Éditions du Cerf, Paris (2002).)

The founding of the Hittite Empire is attributed by tradition to either Labarna I or Hattusili I (it is debated whether this is the same person or not), who had conquered the area south and north of Hattusa.

Labarna had not been the first in line to the throne.

PU-Sarruma designated Labarna as his successor after his own sons revolted against him.

Upon PU-Sarruma's death, Labarna and Papahdilmah, one of PU-Sarruma's sons, contended for the throne, with Labarna emerging victorious.

What little is known about him is culled mainly from the Edict of Telipinu, which states that he overwhelmed his enemies and "made them borders of the sea", a statement which may refer to conquests as far as the Mediterranean coast in the south, and the Black Sea in the north.

He installed his sons as governors in several cities including Tuwanuwa, Hupisna, Landa, and Lusna (the identities of these cities are uncertain, but thought to perhaps be Tyana, Heraclea Cybistra, Laranda, and Lystra).

Through his conquests, he was responsible for laying the groundwork for the Hittite empire that was to come.

Labarna was actually a title of the early Hittite rulers, rather than a personal name.

Given the lack of contemporary references, and the fact that Hattusili I also used the title Labarna, some modern scholars have proposed that later Hittite historians mistook references to Labarna as being a separate king before Hattusili I.

According to this theory, Labarna and Hattusili I were really one and the same ruler.

Yasmah-Adad had managed to rule Mari for only a short time before being deposed by Zimrilim, the son and heir of Iakhdunlim, who had been forced to flee to Yamkhad when his father was assassinated by his own servants during a coup.

Zimrilim is able to oust Yasmah-Adad from power with the help of Yarimlim, the king of Yamkhad, in 1779 BCE.

Labarnas’s successor Hattusilis, who rules the Hitttites from about 1650, apparently establishes his capital in the fortress city of Hattusa (Boğazkale), the reoccupied site of the Assyrian merchant colony destroyed in 1720.

The Egyptians reveal their use of a decimal system in one of the earliest extant mathematical textbooks, the so-called Rhind papyrus, written about 1650.

Egyptian mathematicians represent the decimal unit by a single line, and tens, hundreds, and thousands by hieroglyphic symbols.

The Egyptians use repeated doubling for multiplication.

Except for the fraction 2/3, for which there is a special hieroglyph, all fractions are written as unit fractions of the form 1/n.

A cooling of world climate, lasting several years and recorded in tree-rings all over the world, begins in the year 1627 BCE.

It might have been caused by the eruption of Thera in the Aegean or the Avellino eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

Sea level peaks at one meter above the twentieth-century level during the Rottnest transgression, beginning in 1600 BCE and lasting for six centuries.

Austronesian peoples are believed to have settled in the Fijian islands some thirty-five hundred years ago, with Melanesians following around a thousand years later.

Most authorities agree that they originated in Southeast Asia and came via Indonesia.

Groups from southeastern Asia, primarily speakers of the languages (now) classified as Malayo-Polynesian, begin to spread out to nearby Pacific Islands from about 1500 BCE.

Human habitation in Saipan, the second largest of the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific Ocean, dates from this time.