Abstract In the early 1850s, the pioneering stage of the decipherment of Mesopotamian cuneiform writing, the hallmark of the urban culture of ancient Iraq, was completed. Since then, several hundreds of thousands of clay tablets with this writing have been excavated and are now deposited in various museums of Europe, North America, and the Near East; of these, some tens of thousands have been published. In a sense, we suffer from having too much evidence, textual and archaeological, and, as we shall see, a major problem concerning the chronology of the early second millennium b. c. is the assignment of priorities among the various arguments that have been advanced. I thought that I might best serve the purposes of this meeting if I attempt to give a sketchy outline of the types of evidence, the nature of the results, and some of the complex problems in the field of the chronology of ancient Mesopotamia.