Babylonian History: every king, scribe and turning point, from Sumer to the ruins of Babylon

Uruk and the invention of writing (c. 3400 to 3000 BC)

In the late fourth millennium BC Uruk, on the Euphrates in southern Iraq, grew into the largest urban centre in the world; at its height in the late fourth millennium BC it may have held 25,000 to 50,000 people, with tens of thousands more in its hinterland. Its heart was the walled Eanna precinct of the goddess Inanna, beside an older district sacred to the sky god Anu. Around 3400 to 3200 BC clay tablets with signs drawn and pressed into them appear there, the earliest stage of the script later called cuneiform. For centuries writing was almost entirely bookkeeping, tallying grain, livestock and labour, before scribes learned to use signs for sounds as well as things. Babylon did not yet matter; the world it would inherit, of cities, temples, scribes and kings, was being invented here.

• The name Kushim appears on several Uruk-period barley accounts and may be the oldest recorded name of a person, although scholars cannot rule out that it was an official title or an institution.
• Crude, mould-made 'beveled-rim bowls' turn up by the thousands across Mesopotamia and as far away as Mari; they seem to have held the ration paid to workers and were often thrown away after one use.
• Uruk had an extraordinarily long life: the last cuneiform tablet known from the city is an astronomical almanac dated to AD 79 or 80, more than three thousand years after writing began there.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): Uruk; World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): Cuneiform; Wikipedia: Uruk

Gilgamesh (if historical, reigned some time c. 2800 to 2500 BC)

Bilgames (Sumerian), Gilgamesh, lord of Kulaba, King of Uruk (First Dynasty of Uruk, legendary and possibly historical) · Uruk

Gilgamesh was remembered as a king of Uruk in the Early Dynastic period; scholars who accept him as historical place him somewhere between about 2800 and 2500 BC, but no inscription of his own survives. The Sumerian King List, compiled centuries later, gives him a reign of 126 years and calls his father a phantom, while a historiographic text from Nippur, the Tummal inscription, credits him with building the Numunburra in the house of Enlil at Nippur. His fame grew enormously under the Third Dynasty of Ur. Five separate Sumerian poems tell his adventures, and later Babylonian scribes reworked them in Akkadian into the Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of his friendship with Enkidu and his failed search for immortality.

How they rose: Tradition makes him the son of the goddess Ninsun and of Lugalbanda, an earlier king of Uruk. Whether he won the throne by inheritance or force is not recorded.

How they died: Unknown. The Sumerian King List says his son Ur-Nungal succeeded him and ruled 30 years.

• The Sumerian poem 'Gilgamesh and Aga' tells how envoys of Aga, son of En-me-barage-si of Kish, demanded Uruk's submission; En-me-barage-si (c. 2700 BC) is a king known from other sources, which helps anchor Gilgamesh in time.
• King Shulgi of Ur (c. 2094 to 2046 BC) claimed Ninsun and Lugalbanda as his divine parents and Gilgamesh as his brother, borrowing the hero's glory for his own dynasty.
• An archaic text from Ur includes a personal name meaning roughly 'Gilgamesh is the one whom Utu has chosen', which may show that he was already honoured not long after his supposed lifetime.

Sources: ETCSL (Oxford): Gilgamesh and Aga, translation; ETCSL (Oxford): The Sumerian King List, translation; World History Encyclopedia: Gilgamesh, the historical and mythical king; ORACC Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses: Ninsumun (Ninsun); Wikipedia: Gilgamesh

Puabi and the Royal Tombs of Ur (buried c. 2550 BC (the Penn Museum dates her tomb goods c. 2500 BC))

Puabi (once misread Shub-ad), nin of Ur, Queen or high priestess, First Dynasty of Ur · Ur

Between 1922 and 1934 Leonard Woolley, digging for the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, excavated more than 2,000 burials at Ur, most of them simple, but sixteen stood out for their rich goods and the bodies of attendants buried with the dead. The best preserved belonged to a woman named on her cylinder seals as Puabi, with the title nin, which can mean queen or priestess. Her tomb, PG 800, held a headdress of gold leaves, ribbons and rings, gold and silver vessels, necklaces of lapis lazuli and carnelian, and a lyre with a bull's head. Her seal names no husband, so some scholars think she ruled in her own right; others suggest she was a wife of King Meskalamdug. Many of her objects are now in the Penn Museum in Philadelphia.

How they rose: Unknown. Nothing about her family or how she reached her position survives beyond the title on her seals.

How they died: The date and cause of her death are not recorded. She was buried with 52 attendants, guards and animals; Woolley thought such attendants drank poison, but later study of skulls from the Royal Cemetery found blunt-force injuries, suggesting at least some were killed.

• The Penn Museum counts about 28,000 objects recovered by Woolley's team from the Royal Tombs of Ur.
• The lapis lazuli in her jewellery probably came from far-off Afghanistan, a sign of how far Sumerian trade already reached.
• In a typical royal burial the dead person lay on a wooden bier or in a coffin inside a chamber with three or four personal attendants, while the larger retinue was laid out in the open pit outside.

Sources: Penn Museum, Expedition Magazine: Ur and Its Treasures; Penn Museum, Expedition Magazine (E. Tamur, 2022): Goddesses, Mothers, Rulers; Wikipedia: Puabi

Eannatum of Lagash (fl. c. 2450 BC)

Eannatum, ensi of Lagash, First Dynasty of Lagash · Girsu and Lagash

Eannatum ruled the city-state of Lagash in the mid-third millennium BC, when Sumer was a patchwork of rival cities. His border war with neighbouring Umma over Gu-edina, a strip of farmland between the two cities, ended in victory over Ush, ruler of Umma. He celebrated it on the Stele of the Vultures, a limestone monument 1.8 metres high found in fragments at Girsu (Tello) in the 1880s and now in the Louvre. One side shows the god Ningirsu with a net full of naked captives; the other shows Eannatum leading a tight block of spearmen behind large shields while vultures fly off with the heads and arms of the dead. It is the earliest known war monument, a reminder that the cities that would one day form Babylonia fought each other for centuries.

How they came to power: He belonged to the dynasty founded by Ur-Nanshe; the stele itself names Akurgal, son of Ur-Nanshe, as king of Lagash, and Eannatum is usually held to be Akurgal's son and successor.

How it ended: Unknown; how and when his reign ended is not recorded.

• The stele's inscription boasts that the god Ningirsu himself measured Eannatum's stature at five cubits and a span.
• Of the seven known fragments, one reached the British Museum through the antiquities trade in 1898; after two refusals it was given to the Louvre in 1932 so the stele could be reassembled.
• Military historians single out the stele's packed formation of shield-bearers with projecting spears as one of the earliest pictures of soldiers fighting in ranks.

Sources: CDLI: RIME 1.09.03.01 (P222399), Stele of the Vultures, transliteration and record; Ancient World Magazine (J. Brouwers): Stele of the Vultures; Musée du Louvre: inscribed brick of Eannatum from Girsu (AO 353); Wikipedia: Stele of the Vultures

Urukagina of Lagash (c. 2378 to 2368 BC (some put him c. 2350 BC))

Uru-inimgina (Urukagina), king of Lagash and Girsu, First Dynasty of Lagash · Girsu

Urukagina was the last ruler of the First Dynasty of Lagash, in the generation before Sargon of Akkad. Clay cones from Girsu, two of them now in the Louvre, record his claim to have ended the abuses of earlier times, when officials and priests helped themselves to people's goods. These texts are often called the first law reform, but they are not a law code: they are short lists of claims in building inscriptions, and many lines are still hard to translate. His reign ended in disaster when Lugal-zage-si of Umma destroyed Lagash, and Urukagina was left holding only Girsu.

How they came to power: He followed Lugalanda on the throne, claiming that the god Ningirsu had chosen him. Older views that he seized power in a coup are now doubted, since he made regular offerings to the spirits of Lugalanda's family.

How it ended: Unknown. After Lugal-zage-si sacked Lagash, a lament blamed the ruler of Umma and declared Urukagina without fault; nothing is known of his end.

• One reform cut burial fees: where the undertaker had taken seven jugs of beer and 420 loaves of bread for a burial, he now took three jugs and 80 loaves.
• His wife Sagsag organised the funeral of her predecessor Baranamtarra, attended by 177 slave-girls and 92 lamentation singers, and a statue of Sagsag was still being honoured in Ur III times.
• Both Louvre cones (AO 3149 and AO 3278) are about 27 to 28 centimetres tall and come from Girsu, modern Tello.

Sources: Musée du Louvre: Cone C of Urukagina (AO 3149); Musée du Louvre: Cone of Uru-KA-gina recording his reforms (AO 3278); Wikipedia: Urukagina

Sargon of Akkad (c. 2334 to 2279 BC (the traditional middle-chronology figure; other recent reckonings give somewhat later dates, e.g. c. 2324 to 2285 or c. 2316 to 2277 BC; king lists credit him with 40 or 54 to 56 years))

Sharru-kin (Sargon), king of Akkad, king of Kish, Dynasty of Akkad (Sargonic) · Akkad (Agade)

Sargon founded the dynasty of Akkad, which ruled most of Mesopotamia for about a century and is often called the first empire. From his capital Akkad (Agade), whose ruins have never been located, he defeated Lugal-zage-si of Uruk, who had united Sumer, and campaigned against Elam, Mari and the lands up the Euphrates toward Syria. His inscriptions, known mostly from later copies, say ships from Meluhha (the Indus), Magan and Dilmun moored at Akkad and that 5,400 men ate daily before him. Later Babylonian and Assyrian kings looked back to him as the model of a world ruler.

How they came to power: The Sumerian King List calls him the son of a gardener and cupbearer to Ur-Zababa, king of Kish, before he became king; how he took power is not recorded in his own time. A Sumerian legend copied centuries later adds dreams sent by Inanna foretelling Ur-Zababa's fall.

How it ended: Unknown. A much later Babylonian chronicle says he crushed a revolt in his old age and that Marduk punished him with sleeplessness for building a rival to Babylon, which is later Babylonian propaganda, not evidence. His son Rimush succeeded him.

• The famous birth story, in which his mother, a priestess, sets him adrift in a reed basket sealed with bitumen and a water-drawer raises him, is a legend known from Neo-Assyrian copies some 1,600 years after his time, not a record of his life.
• Dated documents survive for only four of his year-names, recording campaigns against Elam, Mari, Simurrum and Uru'a, although king lists credit him with up to 56 years.
• According to later copies of his inscriptions he led the defeated Lugal-zage-si to Enlil's temple at Nippur in a neck-stock.

Sources: Livius: Chronicle of Early Kings (ABC 20), after Grayson 1975 and Glassner 2004; ETCSL (Oxford): The Sargon legend, translation; World History Encyclopedia: Sargon of Akkad; World History Encyclopedia: Akkad and the Akkadian Empire; Wikipedia: Sargon of Akkad

Enheduanna (fl. c. 2300 to 2250 BC)

Enheduanna, en-priestess of Nanna, daughter of Sargon, High priestess · Ur

Enheduanna was a daughter of Sargon of Akkad, installed as en-priestess of the moon god Nanna at Ur, the highest religious office in the Sumerian south. The name Enheduanna is probably a Sumerian priestly title she took at Ur rather than her birth name. Later tradition credited her with a cycle of 42 temple hymns and with poems to the goddess Inanna, above all the 'Exaltation of Inanna', in which she speaks in the first person. Because the copies we have were written centuries later, in the Ur III and Old Babylonian periods, scholars still debate how much she actually composed, but she is widely called the earliest named author in world literature.

How they rose: Her father Sargon appointed her to Ur, a Sumerian city he had conquered, which tied the southern cult centres to the new Akkadian dynasty.

How they died: Unknown. She seems to have served into the reign of her nephew Naram-Sin; the date and manner of her death are not recorded.

• In the 'Exaltation of Inanna' the speaker, naming herself as Enheduanna, complains that a rebel, Lugal-ane, drove her from her temple and begs the moon god to tell An of her fate; the rebellion seems to belong to the great revolt against Naram-Sin.
• An alabaster disc found by Woolley's team in the gipar (priestess's residence) at Ur in the 1920s shows a priestess, usually identified as Enheduanna, at a libation; the inscription on its back names her as Sargon's daughter. It is now in the Penn Museum.
• The hymn collection survives on 37 tablets from Ur and Nippur, and the line that seems to credit her with composing it may belong only to the last, 42nd hymn.

Sources: ETCSL (Oxford): The exaltation of Inana (Inana B), translation; Penn Museum, Expedition Magazine (E. Tamur, 2022): Goddesses, Mothers, Rulers; World History Encyclopedia: Enheduanna; ORACC Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses: Inana/Ishtar; Wikipedia: Enheduanna

Naram-Sin of Akkad (c. 2254 to 2218 BC (middle chronology))

Naram-Sin (Naram-Suen), god of Akkad, king of the four quarters, Dynasty of Akkad (Sargonic) · Akkad (Agade)

Naram-Sin, grandson of Sargon, brought the Akkadian empire to its greatest extent, from the Zagros mountains to northern Syria, where he destroyed Ebla. Early in his reign the cities of Kish, Uruk and others rose together in what later scribes called the Great Revolt; his inscriptions claim nine victories in a single year. Afterwards he became the first Mesopotamian king known to claim divinity in his lifetime, writing his name with the sign for a god and calling himself 'god of Akkad' and 'king of the four quarters'. His Victory Stele, carved at Sippar, shows him, wearing a horned helmet of divinity, climbing a mountain above the defeated Lullubi.

How they came to power: He succeeded his father Manishtushu, Sargon's son, and had to suppress rebellions before he could govern, as his father and uncle Rimush had done.

How it ended: Unknown; he died around 2218 BC and was succeeded by his son Shar-kali-sharri. The Sumerian poem 'The cursing of Agade' blames him for the fall of Akkad, but no evidence shows he ever attacked Enlil's temple at Nippur.

• In the 12th century BC the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte carried the Victory Stele from Sippar to Susa as war booty and added his own inscription; Jacques de Morgan's team found it at Susa on 6 April 1898.
• 'The cursing of Agade', composed long after his time, tells how Naram-Sin defied Enlil and the gods sent the Gutians to ruin his city; historians read it as a lesson about kings and gods, not as history.
• Some 1,700 years later Nabonidus of Babylon, a royal antiquarian, dug for Naram-Sin's foundation deposits at Sippar and proudly recorded finding them.

Sources: Musée du Louvre: Victory Stele of Naram-Sin (Sb 4); ETCSL (Oxford): The cursing of Agade, translation; World History Encyclopedia: Naram-Sin, the god-king of Akkad; Wikipedia: Naram-Sin of Akkad

Babylon first appears in writing (c. 2217 to 2193 BC (reign of Shar-kali-sharri))

The earliest reasonably firm mention of Babylon is a year-name of Shar-kali-sharri, Naram-Sin's son and one of the last kings of Akkad, recording that he founded temples to the goddess Annunitum and the god Ilaba in KA.DINGIR, 'gate of the god', thought to be Babylon. At this stage it was a minor town on the Euphrates inside the Akkadian empire, not an independent city. After Akkad fell it passed under the Gutians and then the Third Dynasty of Ur, and later came under the city-state of Kazallu until an Amorite chief, Sumu-abum, took it around 1894 BC. Its god Marduk was still obscure; only with Hammurabi did the city and its god rise to the top.

• The Akkadian name Bab-ili was understood as 'gate of god', but some scholars, following I. J. Gelb in 1955, think the original name was an older word, Babilla, of unknown meaning, later reinterpreted by folk etymology.
• The Babylonian Chronicle of Early Kings, written long afterwards, claims that Sargon dug soil from Babylon to build a rival city beside Akkad and that Marduk punished him for it; modern editors treat the mention of Babylon in Sargon's day as an anachronism.
• The same chronicle accuses Shulgi of Ur of carrying off the property of Babylon and of Marduk's temple Esagila, a sign of how later Babylonian scribes rewrote the past around their own city.

Sources: Livius: Chronicle of Early Kings (ABC 20); World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): Babylon; ORACC Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses: Marduk; Wikipedia: Babylon

The fall of Akkad and the Gutians (c. 2193 to 2112 BC (length of Gutian rule uncertain; the World History Encyclopedia gives c. 2141 to 2050 BC))

After Shar-kali-sharri the Akkadian empire broke apart; the Sumerian King List simply asks who was king and lists four rivals in quick succession. The Gutians, a people from the Zagros mountains already at war with Akkad under Shar-kali-sharri, held power over parts of Sumer for several decades, though how widely is disputed. Historians today blame a mix of causes: revolts by the old Sumerian cities, pressure from Gutians, Amorites and Elamites, and probably a severe drought linked to the climate shift known as the 4.2-kiloyear event. Cities such as Lagash regained their independence, and Utu-hengal of Uruk (c. 2119 to 2112 BC) led the revolt that defeated the last Gutian king, Tirigan.

• The poem 'The cursing of Agade' describes the Gutians as an unbridled people, not counted as part of the Land, with human minds but the instincts of dogs; almost everything known about them comes from their enemies.
• In the same poem, once the Gutians are loose, messengers stop travelling the highways and courier boats stop sailing the rivers.
• The Sumerian King List gives the last Gutian king, Tirigan, a reign of just 40 days before the army of Gutium was defeated and the kingship was taken to Uruk.

Sources: ETCSL (Oxford): The cursing of Agade, translation; ETCSL (Oxford): The Sumerian King List, translation; World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): Gutians; Wikipedia: Akkadian Empire

Gudea of Lagash (c. 2144 to 2124 BC (the Louvre dates his cylinders c. 2120 to 2110 BC))

Gudea, ensi (ruler) of Lagash, Second Dynasty of Lagash · Girsu

Gudea ruled Lagash from Girsu (modern Tello) in the decades between the fall of Akkad and the rise of Ur. Unlike Sargon he boasted little of conquest; most of his inscriptions dwell on canals, temples and gifts to the gods. His greatest project was the Eninnu, the temple of the city god Ningirsu, built with cedar from the Amanus mountains, diorite from Magan (Oman) and timber from Dilmun (Bahrain). Two large clay cylinders found at Tello in 1877 tell how a dream ordered him to build it, in the longest surviving text in the Sumerian language. His hard stone statues show him seated or standing with hands clasped in prayer.

How they came to power: He succeeded Ur-Baba, whose daughter Ninalla he had married, so he probably owed the throne to his father-in-law.

How it ended: He died around 2124 BC and was succeeded by his son Ur-Ningirsu II; nothing is recorded about how he died.

• Cylinder A, 60 centimetres tall, tells of a dream in which a giant figure with wings and lions orders Gudea to build the Eninnu, while a goddess with a stylus and a hero with a lapis tablet show him the plan; he sails to the goddess Nanshe to have it explained.
• In the hymn Ningirsu promises that his temple's fame will draw even Magan and Meluhha down from their mountains.
• Ernest de Sarzec found the cylinders in a drain beneath the Eninnu during the first season of French excavations at Tello in 1877; both are in the Louvre. They are the largest cuneiform cylinders known.

Sources: Musée du Louvre: Cylinder A of Gudea (MNB 1512); ETCSL (Oxford): The building of Ningirsu's temple (Gudea cylinders A and B), translation; J. Paul Getty Museum: Mesopotamia, Civilization Begins (statue of Gudea, c. 2120 BC); Wikipedia: Gudea; Wikipedia: Gudea cylinders

Ur-Nammu (c. 2112 to 2094 BC (middle chronology))

Ur-Namma, king of Ur, king of Sumer and Akkad, Third Dynasty of Ur (Ur III) · Ur

Ur-Nammu founded the Third Dynasty of Ur, which ruled Sumer and Akkad for about a century and is often called the Sumerian Renaissance. He conquered Lagash and was recognised at a coronation in Nippur as ruler of Ur, Eridu and Uruk; his inscriptions call him king of Sumer and Akkad. He built at Nippur, Larsa, Kish, Adab and Umma and began the great ziggurat of the moon god Nanna at Ur. Two of his year-names celebrate putting justice in order, and the law collection that bears his name is the oldest that survives.

How they came to power: He rose under Utu-hengal of Uruk, who led the revolt against the Gutians and is said to have been his father-in-law; when Utu-hengal died around 2112 BC, Ur-Nammu took the leadership and moved the kingship to Ur.

How it ended: He died around 2094 BC after 18 years, the length given by the Sumerian King List. A later poem, 'The death of Ur-Namma', laments that he was abandoned like a broken jar. The World History Encyclopedia says he was killed fighting the Gutians, but the poem's account is damaged and metaphorical, so how he died remains uncertain. His son Shulgi succeeded him.

• One of his year-names records the devastation of Gutium, the homeland of the mountain people who had ruled Sumer.
• Year-names are known for 17 of his 18 years, but their order is still uncertain.
• He and his son Shulgi called the goddess Ninsun their mother and the hero Gilgamesh their brother, tying the new dynasty to the legends of Uruk.

Sources: ETCSL (Oxford): The death of Ur-Namma (Ur-Namma A), translation; ETCSL (Oxford): The Sumerian King List, translation; World History Encyclopedia: Ur-Nammu, founder of the Sumerian Renaissance; Wikipedia: Ur-Nammu

The Sumerian King List (first versions c. 2100 BC (Ur III); best copy, the Weld-Blundell Prism, c. 1800 BC)

The Sumerian King List presents Mesopotamian history as a single kingship that 'descended from heaven' and moved from city to city: Eridu, Kish, Uruk, Ur, Akkad and on to Isin. Its earliest versions date from the Third Dynasty of Ur, and it was revised later, as rulers of Isin added their own dynasty to claim the inheritance. In reality many of the dynasties listed one after another ruled at the same time in rival cities, so the list cannot be used as a timeline without checking it against inscriptions. The most complete copy, the Weld-Blundell Prism of about 1800 BC, was found in the ruins of Larsa in 1922; most modern translations rely on it.

• Before the Flood, the list says, eight kings in five cities ruled for 241,200 years; afterwards reigns shrink gradually toward human lengths.
• The only woman in the list is Kug-Bau (Kubaba) of Kish, a tavern-keeper credited with making the foundations of Kish firm and with a reign of 100 years.
• It gives Gilgamesh of Uruk 126 years and Utu-hengal of Uruk, who expelled the Gutians, a fantastic 427 years in the main manuscript (other copies give about seven and a half years), showing how figures were copied, garbled and inflated.

Sources: ETCSL (Oxford): The Sumerian King List, translation; World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): Sumerian King List; Wikipedia: Sumerian King List

The laws of Ur-Nammu (c. 2100 BC (reign of Ur-Nammu, c. 2112 to 2094 BC; some scholars credit his son Shulgi))

The laws of Ur-Nammu are the oldest law collection known to survive, written in Sumerian about three centuries before Hammurabi. A long prologue describes the moon god Nanna choosing Ur-Nammu as king, his war against Lagash and his reforms: he removed officials who seized citizens' oxen, sheep and donkeys and fixed honest weights and measures. The laws follow the 'if a man does this, then that' pattern later used by Hammurabi, but many injuries are punished by fines in silver rather than by bodily retaliation, while murder, robbery, adultery and rape carried death. Some scholars think the collection was issued, or completed, by his son Shulgi.

• The first copy was identified by F. R. Kraus, curator at the Istanbul Museum of the Ancient Orient, who joined two fragments from Nippur as tablet Ni 3191; Samuel Noah Kramer read it there in 1952 and recognised the oldest law code then known.
• Kramer could make out only five laws on that badly damaged tablet; one set a fine of 10 shekels of silver for cutting off a man's foot.
• The prologue boasts that under Ur-Nammu the orphan was not handed over to the rich, the widow not to the powerful, and the man of one shekel not to the man of one mina (sixty shekels).

Sources: Penn Museum Bulletin (S. N. Kramer): Law and Love, a Hymn, a Prayer, and a Word to the Wise; World History Encyclopedia: Ur-Nammu; Wikipedia: Code of Ur-Nammu

The Great Ziggurat of Ur (begun c. 2100 BC under Ur-Nammu, finished under Shulgi (died c. 2046 BC))

Ur-Nammu began a stepped temple tower for Nanna, the moon god and patron of Ur, and his son Shulgi completed it. Built of a solid core of mud brick faced with baked brick set in bitumen, it measured about 64 by 45 metres at the base and stood perhaps 30 metres high. Its Sumerian name, E-temen-ni-guru, means roughly 'house whose foundation creates terror'. Babylon's own later ziggurat, Etemenanki, belonged to the same tradition. The ruins were excavated by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s and 1930s.

• By the sixth century BC the tower had crumbled, and Nabonidus, last king of Babylon, rebuilt it, with seven stages rather than the original three.
• In the 1980s, under Saddam Hussein, the lower façade and the great staircase were partly reconstructed.
• Ur-Nammu's reign produced many dedications to the moon god, and among Ur III year-names that concern the moon god, the commonest record the installation of his high priestesses at Ur.

Sources: ORACC Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses: Nanna/Suen/Sin; World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): Ur; World History Encyclopedia: Ur-Nammu; Wikipedia: Ziggurat of Ur

Shulgi (c. 2094 to 2046 BC (48 years, the length shown by his year-names; king-list copies give 46, 48 or 58))

Shulgi (formerly read Dungi), king of Ur, king of the four quarters, Third Dynasty of Ur (Ur III) · Ur

Shulgi, son of Ur-Nammu, ruled for nearly half a century and turned his father's conquests into a tightly run state. He completed the ziggurat of Ur, campaigned again and again in the Zagros, destroying Simurrum and the Lullubi lands nine times between his 26th and 45th years, and married daughters to rulers in Iran. Like Naram-Sin he had himself deified, and his name was written with the sign for a god. Sumerian poets composed hymns in his praise, and he reformed the scribal schools and their curriculum.

How they came to power: He succeeded his father Ur-Nammu around 2094 BC, after Ur-Nammu's death, possibly in battle.

How it ended: He died around 2046 BC, in his 48th year, and was succeeded by Amar-Sin, traditionally his son, though Amar-Sin is a throne name and his parentage is not certain. How Shulgi died is not recorded (some scholars suspect assassination, partly on the basis of omen texts); a Babylonian chronicle written much later claims Marduk killed him for plundering Babylon's temple, a story that reflects later Babylonian ideology rather than evidence.

• His seventh year was named for the king's round trip between Ur and Nippur, more than 150 kilometres each way, in one day; a hymn has him racing back through a storm.
• In one of his hymns he claims to speak Elamite as well as Sumerian.
• Shulgi called Lugalbanda and Ninsun his divine parents and Gilgamesh his brother, placing himself in the family of Uruk's legendary kings.

Sources: ETCSL (Oxford): A praise poem of Shulgi (Shulgi A), translation; Livius: Chronicle of Early Kings (ABC 20); World History Encyclopedia: Shulgi of Ur; ORACC Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses: Ninsumun (Ninsun); Wikipedia: Shulgi

The fall of Ur (reign of Ibbi-Sin c. 2028 to 2004 BC; Ur sacked c. 2004 BC (middle chronology; short chronology c. 1940 BC))

Under Ibbi-Sin, last king of Ur, the empire built by Ur-Nammu and Shulgi came apart. Amorite groups raided the farmland, provinces broke away, and one of his own officials, Ishbi-Erra, made himself independent at Isin. Grain prices soared and Ibbi-Sin was left holding little more than Ur itself. Around 2004 BC an army from Elam and the Shimashki lands in the Zagros sacked the city and led the king away to Elam, where he died at an unknown date. Rival kingdoms at Isin and Larsa fought over the inheritance, and about a century later an Amorite dynasty took Babylon.

• In Ibbi-Sin's seventh and eighth years grain cost sixty times its normal price, a sign of how raids had wrecked irrigation and harvests.
• His 17th year was optimistically named for the submission of the Amorites, described in the year-name as a people who had never known cities.
• The 'Lament for Ur' has the moon god and his wife Ningal abandon their city, and says the Elamites valued the great temple of Nanna at only thirty shekels as they broke it up with pickaxes.

Sources: ETCSL (Oxford): The lament for Urim, translation; ETCSL (Oxford): The lament for Sumer and Urim, translation; ETCSL (Oxford): The Sumerian King List, translation; Wikipedia: Ibbi-Sin

Sumu-abum (c. 1894 to 1881 BC (middle chronology))

Sumu-abum (Su-abu), Amorite chief, First Dynasty of Babylon (Amorite) · Babylon

After the fall of Ur, power in southern Mesopotamia was split between Isin, Larsa and many smaller Amorite-ruled states. Around 1894 BC an Amorite leader named Sumu-abum took a small district that included Babylon away from the city-state of Kazallu. Babylon was still a minor administrative town, and neither he nor the next three kings even called themselves 'king of Babylon'. He fortified nearby Dilbat, gained control of Kish, and one of his year-names records the building of the great city wall of Babylon. Later Babylonians counted him as the first king of the First Dynasty, though his successor Sumu-la-El is often treated as its real founder.

How they came to power: He was one of many Amorite chiefs who set up states in the land after Ur's collapse; he won Babylon and its surroundings by freeing them from Kazallu.

How it ended: Unknown. He ruled about 14 years and was followed by Sumu-la-El, whose relationship to him is not clear.

• About 14 of his year-names survive, among them one for building the great city wall of Babylon and one for destroying or seizing Kazallu.
• Almost nothing of his Babylon has been excavated, because the Old Babylonian levels of the city lie below today's water table; he is known from documents found at Dilbat, Sippar, Kisurra and elsewhere.
• A late Babylonian chronicle notes in passing that Ilu-shumma was king of Assyria in the time of Su-abu, one of the few synchronisms for his reign.

Sources: Livius: Chronicle of Early Kings (ABC 20), after Grayson 1975 and Glassner 2004; World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): Babylon; Wikipedia: Sumu-abum

The naditu women of Sippar (first attested c. 1880 BC; known only from the Old Babylonian period (to c. 1600 BC))

At Sippar, the city of the sun god Shamash, families dedicated some daughters as naditu, women who were forbidden to marry or bear children and who lived in a walled quarter, the gagum or 'cloister', beside the temple. Unlike nuns they were not shut away: contracts show them buying houses and fields, leasing land, lending silver at interest and running businesses, and some owned taverns. About 200 lived in the quarter at a time, with officials, weavers and servants. They came from every level of free society, including royal families: daughters of Sumu-la-El, Sin-muballit and Zimri-Lim of Mari, and a sister of Hammurabi, were naditu. Naditu of Marduk at Babylon, by contrast, were allowed to marry.

• Hammurabi's laws regulate them closely; in L. W. King's 1910 translation, law 110 orders that a 'sister of a god' who opens a tavern or enters one to drink shall be burned.
• A naditu could not have children of her own, so in old age many adopted a younger woman who looked after them and inherited their property.
• A new naditu received a rope of Shamash on her arm at a festival of the god, and often took a name such as Amat-Shamash, 'servant of Shamash'.

Sources: A. H. Podany, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings (Oxford, 2022), ch. 12 'Naditums and Scribal Students' (abstract); Avalon Project (Yale Law School): The Code of Hammurabi, translated by L. W. King (1910); Wikipedia: Naditu

Rim-Sin I of Larsa (c. 1822 to 1763 BC (middle chronology; some give 1823 to 1763))

Rim-Sin (Rim-Suen), king of Larsa, Dynasty of Larsa · Larsa

Rim-Sin ruled Larsa, the richest city of the south and master of the Gulf trade, for about sixty years. Early on he beat a coalition of Isin, Uruk and Babylon, then sacked Uruk and in about 1792 BC captured Isin, Larsa's old rival, an event so important to him that his scribes counted every later year from it. For decades he was Babylon's chief competitor for the south. When Elam invaded Mesopotamia he failed to send the troops he had promised Hammurabi, and around 1764 BC Hammurabi, helped by soldiers from Mari, turned on him.

How they came to power: He succeeded his brother Warad-Sin. Their father Kudur-Mabuk, like Rim-Sin's grandfather and his daughter, bore an Elamite name.

How it ended: After a siege of about six months Larsa fell; Rim-Sin escaped but was caught and died soon afterwards. A Babylonian chronicle says Hammurabi captured Ur and Larsa, took their property to Babylon and brought Rim-Sin there as a prisoner.

• His sister En-ane-du served as high priestess of the moon god at Ur, the office Sargon's daughter Enheduanna had held five centuries earlier.
• Before taking Isin he destroyed Der in about 1802 BC and sacked Uruk in about 1801 BC, sparing its inhabitants.
• The chronicle's dates show the problem of ancient chronology: its modern editors give his defeat as 1762 BC, while other reckonings give 1763 BC.

Sources: Livius: Chronicle of Early Kings (ABC 20), after Grayson 1975 and Glassner 2004; World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): Hammurabi; Wikipedia: Rim-Sin I

Sin-muballit (c. 1812 to 1793 BC (middle chronology))

Sin-muballit, king of Babylon, First Dynasty of Babylon (Amorite) · Babylon

Sin-muballit, fifth king of the Amorite dynasty, ruled a small kingdom overshadowed by Larsa in the south and by stronger neighbours to the north and east. He was the first ruler of the city to style himself king of Babylon and the first to enlarge its territory. His year-names record repelling an army of Larsa in his 13th year and taking possession of Isin in his 17th. No royal inscription of his survives; his reign is known from 19 year-names and legal documents such as land divisions from Sippar.

How they came to power: He succeeded his father Apil-Sin, the fourth king of the dynasty.

How it ended: He handed the throne to his son Hammurabi around 1792 BC and died about then. Some accounts link the hand-over to failing health; the World History Encyclopedia says he was forced to abdicate after his defeat by Larsa.

• A clay tablet from Sippar dated to his reign, still sealed in its clay envelope and now in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, records land divided among several sons, a glimpse of family law in his kingdom.
• The World History Encyclopedia notes that Larsa, enriched by the Gulf trade, controlled most cities of the south during his reign, and that his campaign against it ended in defeat.
• Neither he nor his father has left a single known royal inscription, so his reign is reconstructed from dating formulas and private documents.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): Hammurabi; World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): Babylon; Wikipedia: Sin-Muballit

Shamshi-Adad I (c. 1808 to 1776 BC (middle chronology))

Samsi-Addu (Shamshi-Adad), king of Upper Mesopotamia, Amorite kingdom of Upper Mesopotamia · Ekallatum, Assur and Shubat-Enlil

Shamshi-Adad (Samsi-Addu in his own Amorite) was the great power of northern Mesopotamia in the youth of Hammurabi. Driven out of his home by the king of Eshnunna, he spent years in exile in Babylonia, then seized Ekallatum, took the throne of Assur from its native king Erishum II and went on to conquer Mari and much of Upper Mesopotamia, ruling from a new capital at Shubat-Enlil. He placed his sons as kings beneath him: Ishme-Dagan at Ekallatum and Yasmah-Adad at Mari. His letters, found in the Mari palace archive, are among the liveliest from the ancient world. His realm, like Hammurabi's, helped shape the system of large territorial states of the second millennium BC.

How they came to power: According to the Assyrian King List, in the time of Naram-Sin of Eshnunna he went to Babylonia, then came back, seized Ekallatum, stayed there three years, and removed Erishum II from the throne of Assur.

How it ended: He died around 1776 BC; the cause is not recorded. His kingdom fell apart almost at once: Yasmah-Adad lost Mari to Zimri-Lim, and Ishme-Dagan kept only a reduced realm to the east.

• In letters to Yasmah-Adad he compared him unfavourably with his successful brother, asking whether he had no beard on his chin and complaining that he lay about among the women while his brother won victories.
• The Assyrian King List gives him 33 years of kingship and an unusually long, chronicle-style entry, probably because the list was shaped at his own court to justify his rule.
• A later king of Assur, Puzur-Sin, denounced him and his descendants as foreigners who were not of Assur's own flesh.

Sources: ORACC, Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online (RIAo): Samsi-Addu I; World History Encyclopedia: Mari; Wikipedia: Shamshi-Adad I

Beer, bread and the Hymn to Ninkasi (tablets of the Old Babylonian period, c. 1800 BC; brewing itself far older)

Beer brewed from barley was the favourite everyday drink of Mesopotamia. The Hymn to Ninkasi, known from Old Babylonian tablets, praises the goddess of beer while describing her at work: mixing dough with aromatics, baking beer-bread in the oven, soaking and spreading malt, handling the sweet wort and setting the fermenting vat, which gurgles pleasantly, over a collecting vat before the filtered beer pours out like the Tigris and Euphrates. It is often called the oldest beer recipe, but that framing is disputed: recent work by Adelheid Otto, Martin Zarnkow and Walther Sallaberger finds that the usual translation does not fully match what is known of Mesopotamian brewing, the honey and wine it mentions may be poetic touches, and the beer-bread (bappir) may have been a kind of sourdough. Taverns, some of them kept by women, were regulated by Hammurabi's laws.

• In 1989 the Anchor Brewing Company of San Francisco brewed a beer inspired by the hymn, sweetened with dates, which was reported to have a champagne-like sparkle and an aroma of dates.
• Hammurabi's law 108, in L. W. King's 1910 translation, punishes a female tavern-keeper who refuses grain by full weight as payment for drink, takes money instead and gives less value than the grain was worth, by having her thrown into the water.
• A receipt for beer delivered by a brewer named Alulu at Ur, dated about 2050 BC, shows that brewing was already a commercial business centuries before the hymn was written down.

Sources: ETCSL (Oxford): A hymn to Ninkasi, translation; Avalon Project (Yale Law School): The Code of Hammurabi, translated by L. W. King (1910); World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): The Hymn to Ninkasi, Goddess of Beer; Wikipedia: Ninkasi

Babylonian mathematics: Plimpton 322 and YBC 7289 (c. 1800 BC (Plimpton 322); c. 1800 to 1600 BC (YBC 7289))

Old Babylonian scribes counted in base 60 with a place-value system, writing every number with just two wedge signs for one and ten, but without a zero, so the size of a number had to be understood from context. Two tablets show how far this took them. YBC 7289 at Yale, a small round tablet with a square and its diagonals, gives the square root of two as 1;24,51,10, equal to 1.41421296 against the true 1.41421356. Plimpton 322 at Columbia University, probably from Larsa, lists pairs of numbers that, as Otto Neugebauer and Abraham Sachs showed in the 1940s, belong to Pythagorean triples, whole-number sides of right triangles. What the table was for is still debated: older claims that it is a trigonometric table are generally rejected, since Babylonian scribes do not seem to have measured angles, and many scholars now see it as a teacher's aid for setting problems.

• On YBC 7289 the side of the square is marked 30 and the diagonal 42;25,35, which is 30 times the square root of two: the scribe knew the rule, not just a measurement.
• The New York publisher George Arthur Plimpton bought Plimpton 322 from the dealer Edgar J. Banks around 1922 and left it to Columbia University in the mid-1930s; Banks said it came from Senkereh, ancient Larsa.
• YBC 7289, about 8 centimetres across, was bought around 1912 by an agent of J. P. Morgan and given to Yale as part of the founding of its Babylonian Collection.

Sources: W. Casselman (University of British Columbia): The Babylonian tablet Plimpton 322; W. Casselman (University of British Columbia): YBC 7289; W. Casselman (University of British Columbia): Analysis of YBC 7289; Wikipedia: Plimpton 322

Hammurabi (c. 1792 to 1750 BC (middle chronology; 43 years; other chronologies shift these dates by decades, the ultra-low chronology by about a century))

Hammu-rapi, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, First Dynasty of Babylon (Amorite) · Babylon

When Hammurabi came to the throne Babylon was one middling kingdom among many, overshadowed by Larsa, Eshnunna and the northern empire of Shamshi-Adad. For most of his first three decades he built canals and temples and kept alliances. Then, in a few years, he defeated an Elamite invasion with his allies, conquered Larsa and its king Rim-Sin in about 1763 BC (some reckon 1764 or 1762), beat Eshnunna, and around 1761 BC turned on his former ally Zimri-Lim, captured Mari and by about 1759 BC destroyed it, bringing almost all of Mesopotamia under Babylon. Near the end of his reign he set up the stele of laws that made his name. Under him Babylon and its god Marduk rose to the first rank in Mesopotamia.

How they came to power: He succeeded his father Sin-muballit around 1792 BC, as the sixth king of the Amorite dynasty. His age at accession is unknown.

How it ended: He died around 1750 BC, in the 43rd year of his reign, apparently of illness or old age after several years of declining health from about his 40th year. A text dates the handover to his son Samsu-iluna to the tenth day of the fifth month.

• Most of what we know of his middle years comes from the archive of Mari, which documents his 18th to 32nd years, and from letters left by Babylonian officials in conquered Larsa.
• A Babylonian chronicle says he captured Ur and Larsa, carried their property to Babylon and brought the defeated Rim-Sin there as a captive.
• The prologue to his laws says the gods Anu and Enlil gave Marduk 'Enlil-ship' over humanity, an early step in Marduk's rise to head of the pantheon.

Sources: Livius: Chronicle of Early Kings (ABC 20), after Grayson 1975 and Glassner 2004; Musée du Louvre: Code of Hammurabi stele (Sb 8); World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): Hammurabi; ORACC Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses: Marduk; Wikipedia: Hammurabi

Zimri-Lim and the archives of Mari (c. 1775 to 1761 BC (middle chronology))

Zimri-Lim, king of Mari, Lim dynasty · Mari (Tell Hariri, Syria)

Zimri-Lim ruled Mari on the middle Euphrates, in today's Syria, in the generation when Hammurabi rose to power. His great palace, with nearly 300 rooms, held an enormous archive: French excavators led by André Parrot recovered some 20,000 tablets and fragments from the palace, beginning in the 1930s. Most date from the last fifty years of Mari's existence, and they cover war, diplomacy, religion and the running of a palace whose large female staff was led by Queen Shibtu, a princess of Aleppo. Zimri-Lim and Hammurabi were long allies, joining forces against an Elamite invasion, but in 1761 BC Babylon turned on Mari, captured it and later destroyed it.

How they came to power: A member of the family of the earlier king Yahdun-Lim, he spent about fifteen years in exile under the protection of the king of Aleppo after Shamshi-Adad seized Mari. When Shamshi-Adad died around 1776 BC he drove out Shamshi-Adad's son Yasmah-Adad and was crowned in the temple of Dagan at Terqa.

How it ended: Unknown. He disappears from the record when Hammurabi took Mari around 1761 BC; whether he died in battle, in captivity or otherwise is not known.

• A tablet in the Louvre copies an inscription commemorating his building of an ice-house at Terqa.
• About twenty princesses called his daughters appear in the texts, and he married several of them to his vassal kings to bind them to him.
• He consulted oracles often and kept himself informed of prophecies about him, including messages from a prophet of the storm god Addu of Aleppo.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Mari; World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): Hammurabi; Wikipedia: Zimri-Lim

The Code of Hammurabi (c. 1755 to 1750 BC, late in Hammurabi's reign)

Near the end of his reign Hammurabi had about 282 laws inscribed on a basalt stele 2.25 metres tall, framed by a prologue and an epilogue in which he presents himself as the king chosen by the gods to bring justice. At the top Shamash, the sun god and judge, sits enthroned before the standing king. The laws cover trade, loans, tavern-keepers, farming, marriage, inheritance, adoption, doctors, builders and slaves, each in the form 'if someone does this, then that follows'. Punishments depended on rank: injuries to a man of the upper class were often repaid in kind, while harm to commoners or slaves was settled with silver. Whether the code was ever applied as statute law, or was a model of royal justice, is still debated.

• In L. W. King's 1910 translation the prologue says the gods called Hammurabi to bring righteousness to the land 'so that the strong should not harm the weak'.
• The stele was carried off as war booty to Susa in Elam in the 12th century BC; French archaeologists of Jacques de Morgan's mission found it there in 1901 to 1902, and Jean-Vincent Scheil published a translation at once. It is in the Louvre.
• Laws 215 to 218 (King 1910) pay a physician ten shekels for saving a man's eye with an operation, five for a commoner (King's 'freed man') and two for a slave, but order his hands cut off if the patient dies or loses the eye. Over 50 copies show that scribes studied the laws for more than a thousand years.

Sources: Musée du Louvre: Code of Hammurabi stele (Sb 8); Avalon Project (Yale Law School): The Code of Hammurabi, translated by L. W. King (1910); World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): The Code of Hammurabi; Wikipedia: Code of Hammurabi

The tablet house: Old Babylonian scribal schools (c. 1750 to 1700 BC (House F at Nippur dates to the early reign of Samsu-iluna))

Scribes were trained in the edubba, the 'tablet house', where pupils learned to press cuneiform signs into clay, then copied word lists, model contracts, proverbs, mathematical tables and finally whole works of literature. In the Old Babylonian period teaching often happened in private houses. At Nippur, a house excavated as House F yielded nearly 1,500 tablet fragments from the early reign of Samsu-iluna, most of them pupils' exercises; at Ur, houses known as No. 7 Quiet Street and No. 1 Broad Street held smaller school collections. Pupils studied Sumerian as well as Akkadian, and much of the Sumerian literature known today was preserved through copies made in such schools.

• A group of fourteen compositions found together at House F, the 'House F Fourteen', included the Cursing of Agade, the Lament for Ur, a hymn to Shulgi, a Gilgamesh poem and the satirical 'Schooldays'.
• 'Schooldays' pokes fun at a pupil's life of early starts and beatings for talking, leaving without permission or untidy handwriting; the head of the school was called the 'father of the tablet house'.
• Podany follows one Nippur pupil, Elletum, whose tablets from House F show his training from forming signs to writing long literary works; scribes of the period also learned sexagesimal mathematics, and many studied an early version of the Gilgamesh story.

Sources: A. H. Podany, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings (Oxford, 2022), ch. 12 'Naditums and Scribal Students' (abstract); World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): Mesopotamian Education; Wikipedia: Eduba

Samsu-iluna (c. 1749 to 1712 BC (middle chronology; short chronology c. 1686 to 1648 BC))

Samsu-iluna ('the sun is our god'), king of Babylon, First Dynasty of Babylon (Amorite) · Babylon

Samsu-iluna inherited an empire that began to unravel almost at once. Elam and Assyria broke away, and in his ninth year a rebel calling himself Rim-Sin (Rim-Sin II) raised the south; Samsu-iluna defeated and killed him, but a second rebel, Iluma-ilu (Ilum-ma-ili), who claimed descent from the kings of Isin, beat his army and founded the Sealand dynasty, which held the far south for some three centuries. Records at Ur and Larsa stop during his reign, and those at Nippur and Isin stop in his 29th year; archaeology suggests these cities were largely abandoned for centuries. Yet he held on to the core of the kingdom around Babylon, which kept its leading place.

How they came to power: He was Hammurabi's son and succeeded him around 1749 BC, after his father's final years of declining health.

How it ended: He died around 1712 BC after about 38 years on the throne; nothing is recorded about how. His son Abi-eshuh succeeded him and, a chronicle says, tried in vain to catch Iluma-ilu by damming the Tigris.

• In his ninth year he turned back an invading Kassite army, the earliest known mention of the Kassites, who would rule Babylon after the fall of his dynasty.
• He issued a rule forbidding Babylonians to buy as slaves citizens of the often-raided towns of Idamaras and Arrapha.
• About twenty of his letters have been published, one of them addressed to Abban, king of Aleppo; letters he received are lost because Old Babylonian Babylon lies below the water table.

Sources: Livius: Chronicle of Early Kings (ABC 20), after Grayson 1975 and Glassner 2004; World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): Hammurabi; Wikipedia: Samsu-iluna

Ammi-saduqa, his edict and the Venus tablet (c. 1646 to 1626 BC (middle chronology; low-middle chronology 1638 to 1618 BC))

Ammi-saduqa, king of Babylon, First Dynasty of Babylon (Amorite) · Babylon

Ammi-saduqa, tenth king of the Amorite dynasty, ruled a kingdom much smaller than Hammurabi's. He is remembered above all for a misharum ('justice') edict, the only such Old Babylonian decree whose text survives almost complete. It cancelled arrears and interest-bearing debts of ordinary 'Akkadians and Amorites', freed people sold into debt slavery, and threatened death to any creditor who sued, while leaving genuine business partnerships and foreigners and slaves outside its scope. His reign also gave its name to the 'Venus tablet', a record of the first and last appearances of the planet Venus over 21 years, which survives in later copies and helps astronomers fix the absolute dates of the whole period.

How they came to power: He was the great-great-grandson of Hammurabi and the fourth king after him, and inherited a kingdom that had been shrinking since Samsu-iluna's time.

How it ended: Unknown; the manner of his death is not recorded. Samsu-ditana, the dynasty's last king, followed him around 1625 BC.

• Babylonian kings issued such debt-release edicts at their accession and sometimes again later, so often that historians debate whether they were real relief or royal propaganda.
• The best-known copy of the Venus record, Tablet 63 of the omen series Enuma Anu Enlil, comes from the 7th-century BC library at Nineveh and was first published in 1870 by Henry Rawlinson and George Smith; the oldest copy, found at Kish in 1924, goes back to a tablet written at Babylon in the reign of Sargon II of Assyria.
• The observations fit several possible starting dates, such as 1702, 1646, 1638 or 1582 BC, which is why rival high, middle and low chronologies of the second millennium BC exist; Franz Kugler first saw the tablet's value for dating in 1912.

Sources: Encyclopedia.com (World Eras): Ammi-saduqa; Encyclopedia.com (World Eras): Justice and Reform, with a translation of the edict of Ammi-saduqa; Wikipedia: Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa

The Hittite sack of Babylon (c. 1595 BC (middle chronology; other chronologies place it decades later))

In the reign of Samsu-ditana, last king of the Amorite dynasty, the Hittite king Mursili I, having already conquered Aleppo, marched some 2,000 kilometres into Mesopotamia and sacked Babylon. A Babylonian chronicle says only that in the time of Samsu-ditana the Hittites marched against Akkad. The Hittites did not stay; the raid was too far from home to hold. But it ended three centuries of the dynasty founded by Sumu-abum, and after a confused interval a Kassite dynasty took over Babylon, beginning a long new era.

• Why Mursili attacked is unclear: suggestions include a deal with the Kassites, a wish to outdo his predecessor Hattusili I, or a search for grain.
• Mursili did not long enjoy his triumph: back home he was murdered in a plot led by his brother-in-law Hantili, who took the throne.
• The same chronicle goes on to tell how Ea-gamil, king of the Sealand, fled to Elam and Kassite princes, Ulam-Buriash and then Agum, conquered the Sealand.

Sources: Livius: Chronicle of Early Kings (ABC 20), after Grayson 1975 and Glassner 2004; World History Encyclopedia: The Hittites; World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): Hammurabi; Wikipedia: Mursili I

The Kassites take over Babylonia (c. 1595 to c. 1475 BC (middle chronology; the first century after the Hittite raid is very poorly documented))

Modern historians use the Hittite raid on Babylon, dated 1595 BC in the middle chronology, as the line between the Old and Middle Babylonian periods. A later Babylonian chronicle simply says that in the time of Samsu-ditana the Hittites marched against Akkad. The Kassites, thought to have come from the Zagros Mountains, had already been in Babylonia for about a century and a half as soldiers, allies and enemies, and kings with Kassite-language names eventually took power around Babylon. Their language has no known relatives, but their royal inscriptions were written in Sumerian and their everyday documents in Akkadian. They called their kingdom Karduniash, and their rule lasted until about 1155 BC.

• The earliest person with a Kassite name found in a Babylonian document dates to the 53rd year of Rim-Sin I of Larsa, around 1770 BC.
• In the same years, cities in the far south broke away from Babylon and were ruled by what modern scholars call the First Sealand Dynasty.
• The statue of Babylon's god Marduk had been carried off, perhaps by the Hittites; the Kassite kings got it back, returned it to Babylon and honoured Marduk alongside their own god Shuqamuna.

Sources: Metropolitan Museum of Art (Elizabeth Knott): The Middle Babylonian / Kassite Period (ca. 1595-1155 B.C.) in Mesopotamia; Livius.org: ABC 20 (Chronicle of Early Kings), after Grayson 1975 and Glassner 2004; Wikipedia: Kassites

Agum II (Agum-kakrime) (c. 1500 BC (reign length unknown; even his place in the king list is uncertain))

Agum-kakrime, 'shepherd' of the Kassites and Akkadians, Kassite (Third) Dynasty · Babylon

Almost everything known about Agum II comes from one long text, the Agum-kakrime inscription, which tells how he recovered the statues of Marduk and his consort Zarpanitum from the land of Hana and reinstalled them in a refurbished Esagila temple. The inscription calls him a caring shepherd of both Kassites and Akkadians and claims overlordship of mountain peoples in the Zagros, including the Guteans. It survives only in two later copies from Nineveh written in Neo-Assyrian script, one from the library of Ashurbanipal, and it lists rich gifts to the temple, a purification by a snake charmer and protective demons for the doorway. Some scholars think it is a later piece of propaganda for Marduk's priests, while others, most recently Susanne Paulus in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies (2018), lean towards accepting it as a copy of a genuine old text.

How they came to power: The inscription names him as a son of Urzigurumash, the sixth king of the dynasty, and the Synchronistic King List has broken places where he may have been the eighth or, more likely, the ninth Kassite king.

How it ended: Unknown. No contemporary record of his death or successor survives.

• A much later text, the Marduk Prophecy, says Marduk's statue stayed away 24 years before returning to Babylon of its own will, which would put the Kassite takeover of the city around 1507 BC.
• The Ashurbanipal copy carries a scribal note saying that such knowledge should pass only from one learned person to another.
• Kassite royal inscriptions were normally written in Sumerian, one reason some scholars doubt that this Akkadian text is a faithful copy of a real Kassite original.

Sources: Wikipedia: Agum II; Wikipedia: Kassites; KeiBi, University of Tubingen: Susanne Paulus, 'Fraud, Forgery, and Fiction: Is There Still Hope for Agum-kakrime?', Journal of Cuneiform Studies 70 (2018), 115-166

Ulam-Buriash conquers the Sealand (c. 1475 BC for the conquest (the Met, matching the usual end date of the First Sealand Dynasty); Wikipedia's article gives c. 1480 BC in its infobox but 'the second half of the 16th century BC' in its text. Dates this early are uncertain by decades.)

Ulam-Buriash, 'son of (the god) Buriash', king of the Sealand, Kassite (Third) Dynasty · Sealand and Babylon

The Sealand dynasty had ruled the marshes and cities of the far south since before the fall of Babylon. A Babylonian chronicle copied centuries later says that its last king, Ea-gamil, fled to Elam, and that Ulam-Buriash, brother of the Kassite Kashtiliash, raised an army, conquered the Sealand and became master of the land. With this the Kassite kingdom stretched over all of southern Mesopotamia, from the Babylon area to the Persian Gulf. A stone mace head (or possibly a door knob) found during the German excavations at Babylon calls him 'King of the Sealand' and is now in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin.

How they came to power: He was a member of the Kassite royal family, brother of Kashtiliash (III), and he may have ruled Babylon itself before or after his brother as well as the Sealand.

How it ended: Unknown. The same chronicle says a later Kassite, Agum, son of Kashtiliash, campaigned again in the Sealand and destroyed Enlil's temple at Dur-Enlil.

• An onyx weight shaped like a frog, inscribed '1 shekel, Ulam-Buriash, son of Burna-Buriash', was found in a rich burial at Metsamor in the Ararat valley of Armenia.
• The Metropolitan Museum dates the Kassite conquest of the southern cities held by the Sealand dynasty to around 1475 BC.
• The chronicle that tells the story survives on two tablets in the British Museum, BM 26472 and BM 96152.

Sources: Livius.org: ABC 20 (Chronicle of Early Kings), after Grayson 1975 and Glassner 2004; Metropolitan Museum of Art (Elizabeth Knott): The Middle Babylonian / Kassite Period; Wikipedia: Ulamburiash; Wikipedia: First Sealand dynasty

Karaindash (c. 1440 to c. 1405 BC (Wikipedia); the Berlin museum dates his Uruk temple to the late 15th century BC and ISAW dates a facade brick to c. 1413 BC)

Karaindash, King of Babylonia, King of Sumer and Akkad, King of the Kassites, King of Karduniash, Kassite (Third) Dynasty · Babylon

Karaindash built a small temple for the goddess Inanna in the Eanna precinct at Uruk, about 22.5 by 17.5 metres, whose outer wall was made of moulded baked bricks showing mountain gods and water goddesses holding vessels from which water flows in wavy streams. The temple stood until the Seleucid period. German excavators under Julius Jordan uncovered it in 1928-29, and a section of the facade was rebuilt in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin; pieces kept in the Iraq Museum disappeared in the looting of 2003. Karaindash also made a boundary treaty with the Assyrian king Ashur-bel-nisheshu, sealed by an oath, according to a later Assyrian chronicle.

How they came to power: His origins are not recorded. A building tablet gives him the full Kassite royal title, including 'King of Karduniash', the earliest known use of that name for Kassite Babylonia.

How it ended: Wikipedia dates his death to about 1405 BC; how his reign ended is unknown.

• Burna-Buriash II later wrote to Pharaoh Akhenaten (Amarna letter EA 10) that friendly exchanges of messengers between Babylon and Egypt began in the time of Karaindash.
• The Berlin museum reads the mountain gods and water goddesses as the source of the life-giving rivers, and perhaps also as a nod to the Kassites' own origins in the eastern mountains.
• Moulded and glazed brick decoration, tried out by Kassite builders, was developed much further in Neo-Babylonian and Persian architecture.

Sources: Google Arts & Culture / Vorderasiatisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Ralf-B. Wartke): Facade of the Inanna Temple, VA 10983; ISAW, New York University: Brick with the head of a water goddess (VA 16740), Inanna Temple facade, Uruk; Livius.org: ABC 21 (Synchronic Chronicle), after Grayson 1975 and Glassner 2004; Metropolitan Museum of Art (Elizabeth Knott): The Middle Babylonian / Kassite Period; Wikipedia: Karaindash

Nippur's archives: Kassite everyday life (c. 1400 to 1155 BC (most dated tablets))

Most of what is known about Kassite daily life comes from Nippur, Babylonia's religious centre, where excavators found thousands of administrative and legal texts, letters and seal inscriptions. About 12,000 Kassite-period documents are known, but only around a tenth have been published, including hundreds of Nippur tablets in the Istanbul museum. Babylon itself is little known for this period because later buildings lie on top and groundwater is high. Even a short reign like that of Kashtiliash IV has some 177 dated texts, covering chariot parts, rations of flour, dates, oil and salt for offerings, and deliveries of butter and oil.

• Two letters found at Nippur were sent by a Kassite official in Dilmun (Bahrain) to the governor of Nippur, complaining that local tribesmen had stolen his dates and that there was nothing he could do.
• Albert T. Clay published many Kassite temple documents from Nippur in 1906; among them tablets now in the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, such as CBS 11265.
• Rosters from Burna-Buriash II's reign mark some labourers as escapees or as fettered, a glimpse of forced labour on temple and state estates.

Sources: Metropolitan Museum of Art (Elizabeth Knott): The Middle Babylonian / Kassite Period; CDLI: BE 14, 106b (P266428), Kassite-period tablet from Nippur, Penn Museum CBS 11265; Wikipedia: Kassites; Wikipedia: Kashtiliash IV; Wikipedia: Burna-Buriash II

Kudurrus: land grants carved in stone (a new form of the Kassite period, still made in the 7th century BC (start year approximate))

Kudurrus are inscribed stone monuments recording grants and transfers of land, many of them royal gifts, and they are among the most distinctive Kassite creations. Despite their modern name, 'boundary stones', they were set up inside temples, while the new landowner kept the sealed clay deed; the stone in the temple added the gods' protection. Their carvings show rows of divine symbols, mostly Mesopotamian gods but also some introduced by the Kassites, and many texts end with curses on anyone who moves or damages them. About 160 are known, ranging from 10 centimetres to a metre high, with 39 to 390 lines of text.

• About a third of all known kudurrus were found at Susa in Iran, carried off as booty when Elamite armies raided Babylonia in the 12th century BC.
• The best-preserved, a grant by Meli-Shipak II found at Susa in 1899 (Louvre Sb 22), has 387 lines of text and 24 divine symbols in five registers; its curse asks the healing goddess Gula to fill the offender's body with sores so he bathes in blood and pus.
• The custom outlived the Kassites; kudurrus continued to be made in southern Mesopotamia for several centuries.

Sources: Metropolitan Museum of Art (Elizabeth Knott): The Middle Babylonian / Kassite Period; Wikipedia: Kudurru; Wikipedia: Land grant to Marduk-apla-iddina I by Meli-Shipak II

Kurigalzu I (c. 1388 to c. 1375 BC (Wikipedia); Britannica gives c. 1400 to 1375 BC)

Kurigalzu ('shepherd of the Kassites'), king of Karduniash, Kassite (Third) Dynasty · Dur-Kurigalzu

Kurigalzu I carried out one of the largest building programmes known in Babylonia, with building work attested in at least eleven Babylonian cities, among them Ur, Nippur and Kish. His greatest project was Dur-Kurigalzu, 'Fortress of Kurigalzu', a new royal city with a ziggurat, temples and a palace near the meeting of the Tigris and Diyala, about 30 kilometres west of central Baghdad. A Babylonian chronicle tells how the Elamite king Hurbatila challenged him to battle at Dur-Shulgi, was defeated and captured, and how the Kassite army went on into Elam; many scholars now credit this campaign, and a sack of Susa, to Kurigalzu I, although Chronicle P tells it under Kurigalzu II and the question is not settled. His kingdom reached south to Dilmun, modern Bahrain.

How they came to power: His inscriptions name him as the son of Kadashman-Harbe I, whom he succeeded.

How it ended: He died around 1375 BC and was followed by Kadashman-Enlil I; nothing is known of the manner of his death.

• Because two kings called Kurigalzu reigned about 45 years apart and Babylonians did not number their kings, it is often impossible to tell which one an inscription belongs to.
• The city's name appears in a list of places carved in the funerary temple of Pharaoh Amenhotep III at Kom el-Hettan in Egypt.
• Western travellers from the 17th century onward often mistook the ziggurat of Aqar Quf for the Tower of Babel; it was excavated by Taha Baqir and Seton Lloyd in 1942-45 and partly restored by Iraqi archaeologists in the 1960s and 1970s.

Sources: Livius.org: ABC 22 (Chronicle P), after Grayson 1975 and Glassner 2004; Metropolitan Museum of Art (Elizabeth Knott): The Middle Babylonian / Kassite Period; Britannica: Kurigalzu I; Wikipedia: Kurigalzu I; Wikipedia: Dur-Kurigalzu

Kadashman-Enlil I (c. 1375 to c. 1360 BC)

Kadashman-Enlil, king of Karduniash, Kassite (Third) Dynasty · Babylon

Kadashman-Enlil I is known mainly from five clay letters found at Amarna in Egypt (EA 1 to 5), three written by him and two by Amenhotep III. In EA 1 the pharaoh insists that Kadashman-Enlil's sister, a daughter of Kurigalzu I in the Egyptian harem, is alive and well, and mocks the Babylonian envoys as people who could not recognise her anyway. Kadashman-Enlil complains that Egypt never sends its own princesses abroad, asks for a beautiful woman instead, and offers one of his own daughters in exchange for gold he needs for a building project. In EA 5 Amenhotep lists the gifts he will send for the bride, and the marriage is agreed.

How they came to power: He succeeded Kurigalzu I around 1375 BC.

How it ended: He died around 1360 BC; Burna-Buriash II, probably his son, followed him.

• In EA 3 he invites the pharaoh to come and eat and drink at the opening of his new palace, after complaining that he had not been invited to an Egyptian festival.
• The letters address Amenhotep III by forms of his throne name Neb-Maat-Ra, written in cuneiform as Nibmuareya and similar spellings.
• Inscriptions of Kadashman-Enlil I are hard to tell apart from those of Kadashman-Enlil II, who reigned about a century later.

Sources: Wikipedia: Kadashman-Enlil I; World History Encyclopedia: Amarna Letters; Britannica: Kurigalzu I (Kassite history; gives Kadashman-Enlil I c. 1375-c. 1360 BC); Wikipedia: Amarna letters

The Amarna letters: Babylon in the club of great kings (c. mid-14th century BC (no more than about 30 years); found at Amarna around 1887)

Around 1887 local people at el-Amarna in Egypt, the site of Akhenaten's capital Akhetaten, secretly dug up clay tablets and sold them on the antiquities market. The archive holds 382 known tablets and fragments, about 350 of them letters, written in cuneiform, mostly in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the age. Babylon appears in it as one of the great powers, with Egypt, Hatti, Mitanni and Assyria, whose kings called one another 'brother' and traded gold, horses, lapis lazuli and princesses. Letters EA 1 to 14 belong to the Babylonian correspondence of Kadashman-Enlil I and Burna-Buriash II.

• Jorgen Knudtzon numbered the tablets and published 358 of them in Die El-Amarna-Tafeln (1907 and 1915), still the standard edition.
• Besides letters, the archive held school texts, word lists and Babylonian myths, including the myth of Adapa and the South Wind (EA 356).
• Letter EA 9, from Burna-Buriash II asking for more gold, is in the British Museum (E29785), bought in Egypt by Wallis Budge.

Sources: British Museum: tablet E29785, Amarna letter EA 9 from Burna-Buriash II; World History Encyclopedia: Amarna Letters; Wikipedia: Amarna letters; Metropolitan Museum of Art (Elizabeth Knott): The Middle Babylonian / Kassite Period

Burna-Buriash II (c. 1359 to 1333 BC (27 regnal years))

Burna-Buriash ('protege of the Lord of the lands' in Kassite), king of Karduniash, Kassite (Third) Dynasty · Babylon

His correspondence with Egypt fills Amarna letters EA 6 to 14, most of them written by him to Amenhotep III, Akhenaten and probably Tutankhamun (EA 14 is an Egyptian gift list sent to him, EA 12 a letter from a princess). He sent horses, lapis lazuli and a lapis necklace for the birth of Akhenaten's first daughter, and in return asked for gold, complaining in EA 10 that a shipment was underweight. When a daughter of his went to Egypt as a bride he grumbled that only five carriages were sent for her; the inventory of her wedding gifts filled 307 lines on tablet EA 13. In EA 8 he demanded justice after Babylonian merchants were robbed and killed in Egyptian-ruled Canaan, and in EA 9 he protested that Assyrian envoys were being received in Egypt although the Assyrians, he claimed, were his vassals.

How they came to power: He was the 19th Kassite king and succeeded Kadashman-Enlil I, probably his father.

How it ended: He died around 1333 BC after 27 years. His successor Kara-hardash, son of an Assyrian princess, was soon murdered in a revolt.

• Another daughter probably married the Hittite king Suppiluliuma I; his son Mursili II later condemned her in prayers as a scheming and murderous queen.
• About 87 dated administrative texts from his reign, mostly from Nippur, include rosters of forced labourers marked as 'escapee' or 'fettered'.
• In one letter he pretends not to know how far away Egypt is, a four-month caravan journey, apparently to shame the pharaoh into sending more gold.

Sources: British Museum: tablet E29785, Amarna letter EA 9 from Burna-Buriash II; Wikipedia: Burna-Buriash II; World History Encyclopedia: Amarna Letters; Wikipedia: Amarna letters

Murder of Kara-hardash and Assyria's kingmaking (c. 1333 BC for the coup (Wikipedia; the Livius notes date the revolt to 1323); Kurigalzu II reigned c. 1332 to 1308 BC)

Kara-hardash was probably the son of Muballitat-Sherua, daughter of the Assyrian king Ashur-uballit I. Soon after he came to the throne the Kassite army rebelled and killed him, raising a man called Nazi-Bugash (or Shuzigash), whom both Babylonian and Assyrian chronicles describe as 'son of a nobody'. Ashur-uballit marched into Babylonia, killed the usurper and installed Kurigalzu II. The Assyrian Synchronic Chronicle calls the new king a son of Burna-Buriash, while the Babylonian Chronicle P calls him son of Kadashman-Harbe and gives the murdered king's own name as Kadashman-Harbe, son of Karaindash, probably a scribal slip for Kara-hardash; it is one of several points where the two accounts disagree. Kurigalzu II later turned against Assyria and fought it at Sugagu on the Tigris, a battle each side's chronicle claims as its own victory.

• Chronicle P credits the murdered king (under the name Kadashman-Harbe) with campaigns against the Suteans, new fortresses and wells, and settling people on good land.
• About 167 administrative texts, mostly from Nippur, are dated to Kurigalzu II, running up to his 24th year.
• The Synchronic Chronicle survives on tablets from Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh and has a strong pro-Assyrian slant.

Sources: Livius.org: ABC 21 (Synchronic Chronicle), after Grayson 1975 and Glassner 2004; Livius.org: ABC 22 (Chronicle P), after Grayson 1975 and Glassner 2004; Wikipedia: Kara-hardash; Wikipedia: Kurigalzu II

Ludlul bel nemeqi: the Righteous Sufferer (set in the reign of Nazi-Maruttash, c. 1307 to 1282 BC; the composition is usually dated to that time)

Shubshi-meshre-Shakkan, high official and narrator of 'I will praise the Lord of Wisdom', Governor of the land under Nazi-Maruttash · Babylonia

Ludlul bel nemeqi, 'I will praise the Lord of Wisdom', is an Akkadian poem of about 480 lines on four tablets in which a rich official tells how his life fell apart. Bad omens, the king's anger and a plot by seven courtiers strip him of property and friends, and illness brings him so close to death that his family begins his funeral. Marduk then sends an incantation priest to announce his recovery, and the poem ends in thanks to the god. Because it asks why a just man suffers, it is often compared with the biblical Book of Job.

How they rose: A man of the same name appears in real records: a Nippur tablet lists grain for his messenger in Nazi-Maruttash's fourth year, and a court order from Ur in the king's sixteenth year gives him the title 'governor of the land'.

How they died: Unknown. The poem ends with his restoration to health; nothing is recorded about his real death.

• W. G. Lambert published the first modern edition in 1960; Alan Lenzi and Amar Annus published a new edition in 2010 (State Archives of Assyria Cuneiform Texts 7) that uses all known tablets.
• Nazi-Maruttash himself is named in the poem, on line 105 of tablet IV, which is why it is dated to his reign.
• The poem was still being copied in the 7th century BC; a copy from Nineveh is shown in the Louvre on deposit from the British Museum.

Sources: University of the Pacific Scholarly Commons: Lenzi and Annus, Ludlul Bel Nemeqi: The Standard Babylonian Poem of the Righteous Sufferer (SAACT 7, 2010); Wikipedia: Ludlul bel nemeqi; Wikipedia: Nazi-Maruttash

Sin-leqi-unninni and the standard Gilgamesh (c. 1300 to 1000 BC (sources differ: 13th to 10th century BC))

Sin-leqi-unninni ('the moon god Sin accepts my prayer'), incantation priest, Scholar and exorcist (mashmashshu) · Uruk tradition

Sin-leqi-unninni is traditionally credited with compiling the Standard Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, known from its first line as 'He who saw the deep'. The Old Babylonian epic, centuries older, was titled 'Surpassing all other kings'; how much the later editor changed is unknown, but scholars such as Andrew George think he gave the poem its final fixed form. His version includes Utnapishtim's story of the Flood in tablet XI and adds a twelfth tablet based on a Sumerian Gilgamesh story. About two-thirds of this 12-tablet version has been recovered.

How they rose: Almost nothing is known of his life. Unusually for cuneiform literature his name is attached to the work, and a list of the 1st millennium BC even calls him the wise counsellor of Gilgamesh, which suggests he became partly legendary.

How they died: Unknown.

• Several scribal and priestly families of Uruk in Neo-Babylonian, Persian and Seleucid times claimed him as their ancestor.
• The British Museum's Flood Tablet (K.3375), tablet 11 of the epic from Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh, caused a sensation in the 19th century because its flood story resembles the one in Genesis.
• George Smith of the British Museum read his translation of flood fragments to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in 1872.

Sources: British Museum: The Flood Tablet, K.3375; Wikipedia: Sin-leqi-unninni; Wikipedia: Epic of Gilgamesh

Tukulti-Ninurta I of Assyria takes Babylon (c. 1225 BC (the Met); Kashtiliash IV reigned c. 1232 to 1225 BC; Assyrian rule lasted about seven years)

War between Assyria and Babylon ended in disaster for the Kassite king Kashtiliash IV, who was captured and taken to Assyria; Tukulti-Ninurta boasted he had trodden on his neck like a footstool. According to the Babylonian Chronicle P, the Assyrian destroyed the wall of Babylon, killed many of its people, looted the Esagila temple and sent the statue of Marduk to Assyria. He ruled Babylonia through governors for seven years and took titles such as king of Karduniash and of Sumer and Akkad. Then Babylonian officers rebelled and put Adad-shuma-usur on the throne, and in Assyria Tukulti-Ninurta's own son and nobles deposed him, locked him in his new city of Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta and killed him.

• An Assyrian poem, the Tukulti-Ninurta Epic, celebrates the war and blames Kashtiliash for breaking an old treaty; modern scholars treat it as royal propaganda.
• A letter found at Dur-Katlimmu in Syria reports a captive Babylonian king, possibly Kashtiliash, being escorted to exile with his wife and a large retinue of women.
• Chronicle P says Marduk's statue stayed in Assyria until the time of Ninurta-tukulti-Ashur, about 66 years later by its count.

Sources: Livius.org: ABC 22 (Chronicle P), after Grayson 1975 and Glassner 2004; Metropolitan Museum of Art (Elizabeth Knott): The Middle Babylonian / Kassite Period; World History Encyclopedia: Tukulti-Ninurta I; Wikipedia: Kashtiliash IV; Wikipedia: Tukulti-Ninurta Epic

Meli-Shipak II and Princess Hunnubat-Nanaya (c. 1186 to 1172 BC (15 years))

Meli-Shipak (Melishihu), king of Babylon, Kassite (Third) Dynasty · Babylon

Meli-Shipak II, son of Adad-shuma-usur, ruled for 15 years and was the last king with a fully Kassite name. Some 36 kudurrus are attributed to his reign by their style, eight naming him. One records about a thousand acres of land and three settlements given to his daughter Hunnubat-Nanaya, with tax and labour exemptions for the villages; its carving shows the king presenting her, holding a nine-stringed harp, to the enthroned goddess Nanaya. Another grants rich land near Agade to a Marduk-apla-iddina, probably his son and successor.

How they came to power: He succeeded his father Adad-shuma-usur, the king who had restored Babylonian independence after Assyrian rule.

How it ended: He died around 1172 BC; the cause is unknown. His son Marduk-apla-iddina I followed him.

• The Hunnubat-Nanaya stone shows the king buying land to give away, which contradicts the older idea that all land in Kassite Babylonia belonged to the king.
• Both his kudurrus were found at Susa by Jacques de Morgan's French expedition, having been taken there as Elamite booty, and are now in the Louvre.
• His reign is a key fixed point for the chronology of the ancient Near East, because from here on the links between Babylonian and Assyrian king lists become firm.

Sources: Wikipedia: Meli-Shipak II; Wikipedia: Land grant to Hunnubat-Nanaya kudurru; Wikipedia: Land grant to Marduk-apla-iddina I by Meli-Shipak II; Metropolitan Museum of Art (Elizabeth Knott): The Middle Babylonian / Kassite Period

Shutruk-Nahhunte of Elam loots Babylonia (c. 1158 BC (middle chronology))

Shutruk-Nahhunte, king of Elam, reportedly married to a daughter of the Kassite king Meli-Shipak, invaded Babylonia around 1158 BC and ended the brief reign of Zababa-shuma-iddina. His troops carried off monuments from temples in Babylon, Sippar, Eshnunna and other cities to Susa. Among them was the victory stele of Naram-Sin of Akkad, already about a thousand years old, on which he carved his own Elamite inscription saying he had brought it from Sippar. He returned home and left his son Kutir-Nahhunte to rule the conquered land.

• The Naram-Sin stele was found on the acropolis of Susa on 6 April 1898 and is now in the Louvre (Sb 4).
• The basalt stele of the Code of Hammurabi was found at Susa in 1901-02 by Jacques de Morgan's mission; its first editor, Jean-Vincent Scheil, thought Shutruk-Nahhunte had brought it there and had several columns of laws erased to make room for his own inscription.
• The Met notes that these raids are one reason the archaeological record of the Kassite period is so uneven: many of its monuments ended up in Iran.

Sources: Musee du Louvre: Stele de Naram-Sin, Sb 4; Musee du Louvre: Code de Hammurabi, Sb 8; Metropolitan Museum of Art (Elizabeth Knott): The Middle Babylonian / Kassite Period; Wikipedia: Shutruk-Nakhunte; Wikipedia: Code of Hammurabi

Enlil-nadin-ahi, the last Kassite king (c. 1157 to 1155 BC (three years))

Enlil-nadin-ahi ('Enlil gives a brother'), king of Sumer and Akkad, Kassite (Third) Dynasty · Babylon

Enlil-nadin-ahi, the 36th and last king of the Kassite dynasty, took the throne while Elamite forces under Kutir-Nahhunte were occupying Babylonia. A single kudurru recording a royal land grant, a grain list from Ur and a few tablets from Babylon are the only direct evidence for his three-year reign. Later Babylonian texts say he went to war against the Elamites, was crushed, and was deported to Susa with Kassite nobles and treasures from the temples, above all the statue of Marduk. The Met dates the collapse of the Kassite dynasty to 1155 BC; power then passed to the Second Dynasty of Isin.

How they came to power: He was proclaimed king of Sumer and Akkad after Shutruk-Nahhunte ended the rule of Zababa-shuma-iddina, possibly in defiance of the Elamite occupation.

How it ended: He was defeated by Kutir-Nahhunte and carried off to Susa; what happened to him there is unknown.

• A later poem in the voice of a Babylonian king, probably Nebuchadnezzar I, says Kutir-Nahhunte's crimes were worse than all his fathers' and that he swept over Akkad like a flood.
• The disaster was remembered in temple ritual: a ritual prayer for the month Simanu laments a wicked enemy who plundered the flocks and laid waste the countryside.
• His one known kudurru, recording a royal land grant, is in the British Museum (BM 113891).

Sources: Wikipedia: Enlil-nadin-ahi; Metropolitan Museum of Art (Elizabeth Knott): The Middle Babylonian / Kassite Period; Wikipedia: Kassites

Nebuchadnezzar I (c. 1125 to 1104 BC (the Met and older scholarship); Beaulieu (2018) revises this to c. 1121 to 1100 BC. He ruled 22 years.)

Nabu-kudurri-usur ('Nabu, protect my eldest son'), king of Babylon, Second Dynasty of Isin · Babylon

Nebuchadnezzar I, fourth king of the Second Dynasty of Isin, is best remembered for his war against Elam, which had carried off Marduk's statue when the Kassite dynasty fell. A charter he granted to the Kassite chieftain Shitti-Marduk (also read Ritti-Marduk), carved on a kudurru found at Sippar and now in the British Museum (BM 90858), tells how the army set out from the frontier city of Der in high summer, suffered from heat and lack of water, and defeated the Elamites on the banks of the Eulaeus (Ulai) river. Another kudurru says he brought back the statue of Marduk, and later hymns and poems celebrated the return as a defining moment. The Met says he sacked Susa around 1100 BC, but Wikipedia notes that no surviving source actually records a sack of Susa.

How they came to power: He succeeded his father Ninurta-nadin-shumi; the dynasty had taken power in southern Mesopotamia after the Elamites ended Kassite rule.

How it ended: Unknown; he was followed by his son Enlil-nadin-apli and then his brother Marduk-nadin-ahhe.

• The charter rewarded Shitti-Marduk, who it says struck the decisive blow in the battle, with freedom from taxation.
• The Assyrian Synchronic Chronicle says he twice attacked Assyrian border forts despite an agreement with Ashur-resha-ishi I; the first time he burned his own siege engines and fled.
• Some scholars think the story of Marduk's return was shaped by later, first-millennium literary tradition rather than by contemporary records.

Sources: British Museum: kudurru of Nebuchadnezzar I for Ritti-Marduk, BM 90858; Livius.org: ABC 21 (Synchronic Chronicle), after Grayson 1975 and Glassner 2004; Metropolitan Museum of Art (Elizabeth Knott): The Middle Babylonian / Kassite Period; Wikipedia: Nebuchadnezzar I

Enuma Elish, the Babylonian epic of creation (probably composed under the Second Dynasty of Isin, c. 12th to 11th century BC (a late Kassite date is also proposed); earliest copy 9th century BC)

Enuma Elish, 'When on high', is a poem of about a thousand lines on seven tablets that tells how the world was made and how Babylon's god Marduk rose to rule the gods. Marduk defeats the primeval sea Tiamat, builds the universe from her body, and humans are created to serve the gods; the poem ends by reciting Marduk's fifty names and titles. Most scholars now date its composition to the Second Dynasty of Isin, when Marduk's statue was brought back from Elam by Nebuchadnezzar I, rather than to Hammurabi's time as was once thought. It may have been recited at Babylon's New Year (Akitu) festival.

• Austen Henry Layard recovered the first fragments in 1849 in Sennacherib's South-West Palace at Nineveh, among the tablets later known as Ashurbanipal's library, and George Smith first published a version of the myth in 1876.
• L. W. King published an English edition, The Seven Tablets of Creation, in 1902; even today most of Tablet V has never been recovered.
• The oldest surviving manuscript was dug up at Assur and dates to the 9th century BC; some later Assyrian copies replace Marduk with the god Ashur.

Sources: L. W. King, The Seven Tablets of Creation (1902), sacred-texts.com; Wikipedia: Enuma Elish; Wikipedia: Nebuchadnezzar I

Arameans, Suteans and Chaldeans arrive (c. 1100 to 850 BC (Arameans and Suteans from c. 1100 BC; Chaldeans settled by the 850s BC))

From about 1100 BC West Semitic-speaking groups, first Suteans and Arameans and a century or so later the Kaldu (Chaldeans), moved into Babylonia. In the reign of Adad-apla-iddina a later chronicle says Arameans and a usurper sacked Der, Nippur, Sippar and Dur-Kurigalzu, and that Suteans carried off the plunder of Sumer and Akkad. The Sun God Tablet from Sippar recalls that the Sutu had destroyed the sun temple Ebabbara there, which lay neglected through several reigns. The Chaldeans settled in the marshy south-east as tribes named after ancestors, chief among them Bit-Yakin, Bit-Dakkuri and Bit-Amukani, and they first appear clearly in the records of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III in the 850s BC.

• Aramaic, the Arameans' language, became the common language of the Assyrian empire in the 8th century BC, and Babylonians and Assyrians gradually shifted to it in public life.
• The Greek name Chaldaea comes from the Akkadian 'land of Kaldu', and in the Hebrew Bible the Chaldeans are the Kasdim.
• Assyria, in the north, repelled these migrations more successfully than Babylonia, whose kings were too weak to stop new groups settling on their land.

Sources: British Museum: The Sun God Tablet, BM 91000; Wikipedia: Adad-apla-iddina; Wikipedia: Chaldea; Wikipedia: Arameans

Esagil-kin-apli and the Diagnostic Handbook (under Adad-apla-iddina, c. 1067 to 1046 BC (Beaulieu's revised dates are c. 1064 to 1043 BC))

Esagil-kin-apli, chief scholar (ummanu) of King Adad-apla-iddina, Chief scholar and exorcist · Borsippa and Babylon

Esagil-kin-apli gathered the scattered tablets of diagnostic omens and produced the edition of the series Sakikku (SA.GIG), 'Symptoms', that became the standard text in the first millennium BC. The handbook moves from a patient's symptoms to their cause, often a god or demon, and to the likely outcome. In his own catalogue he explains the new edition and pairs it with Alamdimmu, a physiognomic series that reads a person's fate from their body and appearance. He is also named as the author of part of the 'Exorcist's Manual', a reading list of everything a trainee exorcist had to master.

How they rose: He was a leading citizen of Borsippa from a learned family that traced itself to a sage of Hammurabi's time, and a much later Uruk list of sages and scholars (165 BC) names him beside King Adad-apla-iddina.

How they died: Unknown.

• His catalogue survives in a Neo-Assyrian and a Neo-Babylonian copy and lists the opening line and number of lines of every tablet in the series.
• A later Catalogue of Texts and Authors credits both series to the god Ea; Esagil-kin-apli's own catalogue shows the human editor behind them.
• Irving Finkel published a key study of Adad-apla-iddina, Esagil-kin-apli and the series SA.GIG in 1988, and a 2018 volume edited his catalogue together with other Babylonian medical catalogues.

Sources: Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2020.02.13: review of Assyrian and Babylonian Scholarly Text Catalogues: Medicine, Magic and Divination (2018); KeiBi, University of Tubingen: Finkel, 'Adad-apla-iddina, Esagil-kin-apli, and the Series SA.GIG' (1988); Wikipedia: Esagil-kin-apli; Wikipedia: Adad-apla-iddina

Saggil-kinam-ubbib and the Babylonian Theodicy (c. 1000 BC (dated on language; Wikipedia gives a wider range of 1600 to 900 BC))

Saggil-kinam-ubbib, incantation priest (mashmashu), Scholar · Babylon

The Babylonian Theodicy is a dialogue between a sufferer and a learned friend about injustice, piety and whether the gods are fair. The sufferer, orphaned young, points to the wicked who prosper while he declines; the friend insists the order of the world must be just because the gods made it. The poem has 27 stanzas of exactly 11 lines, and the first signs of each stanza spell out an acrostic: 'I, Saggil-kinam-ubbib, the incantation priest, am adorant of the god and king'. Like Ludlul, it is often compared with the biblical Book of Job.

How they rose: He is known only as the poem's author and as a renowned scholar: the Uruk list of sages and scholars names him alongside King Adad-apla-iddina, and a later literary catalogue places the poem in that king's reign.

How they died: Unknown.

• The earliest surviving copies date from the reign of Ashurbanipal (669 to 631 BC).
• Takayoshi Oshima published a new edition in 2013 for the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project (State Archives of Assyria Cuneiform Texts 9), in which the Sufferer's speeches alternate with the Friend's counterarguments stanza by stanza.
• It has also been called the Babylonian Ecclesiastes, after another biblical book that questions whether the world is just.

Sources: Eisenbrauns / Penn State University Press: Takayoshi Oshima, The Babylonian Theodicy (SAACT 9, 2013); Wikipedia: Babylonian Theodicy; Wikipedia: Adad-apla-iddina

Nabu-apla-iddina and the Sun God Tablet (c. 886 to 853 BC (at least 32 years))

Nabu-apla-iddina ('Nabu has given an heir'), king of Babylon, Dynasty of E · Babylon

Nabu-apla-iddina reigned for more than three decades while Assyria grew strong under Ashurnasirpal II, avoiding open war and losing little territory, and later made a treaty with Shalmaneser III. At home he rebuilt temples and presided over a literary revival in which many older works were copied anew. His best-known monument is the Sun God Tablet from Sippar: its relief shows the king led by a priest and a goddess before the enthroned sun god Shamash, and its text tells how the temple Ebabbara, wrecked by the Sutu, was restored after a clay model of the lost cult statue was found by the Euphrates. A new statue was made from the model and the temple's priests, offerings and festal garments were set down in ordinances.

How they came to power: He succeeded his father Nabu-shuma-ukin I; his mother may have been an Assyrian princess.

How it ended: He died around 853 BC and was followed by his son Marduk-zakir-shumi I.

• Hormuzd Rassam excavated the Sun God Tablet at Sippar (Abu Habba) for the British Museum, which registered it in 1881; it is limestone, about 29 by 18 centimetres.
• The tablet was found in an earthenware box together with two clay impressions of its relief; the British Museum records an added inscription of Nabopolassar and says the tablet was reburied by Nabonidus.
• Nabu-apla-iddina once sent troops under his brother to help rebels in Suhu on the middle Euphrates against Assyria.

Sources: British Museum: The Sun God Tablet, BM 91000; Wikipedia: Tablet of Shamash; Wikipedia: Nabu-apla-iddina

Marduk-zakir-shumi I (c. 855 to 819 BC (Wikipedia); his father's reign is usually said to end c. 853 BC, so these dates are approximate)

Marduk-zakir-shumi ('Marduk pronounced the name'), king of Karduniash, Dynasty of E · Babylon

Early in his reign Marduk-zakir-shumi's younger brother Marduk-bel-usati rebelled and set up a rival regime in the Diyala region. In 851 and 850 BC the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III marched south to help him, besieged Ganannate and hunted the rebel down; his Black Obelisk records the campaign. Shalmaneser then sacrificed in Babylon, Borsippa and Kutha, climbed up to Marduk's temple Esagila, and took tribute from Chaldean chiefs, the first clear mention of Bit-Dakkuri, Bit-Amukani and Bit-Yakin. A throne dais of Shalmaneser III, now in the Iraq Museum, shows the two kings clasping hands as allies.

How they came to power: He succeeded his father Nabu-apla-iddina around 855 BC.

How it ended: He died around 819 BC and was succeeded by his son Marduk-balassu-iqbi, who soon came into conflict with Assyria.

• When Shalmaneser's son Ashur-danin-apli revolted in about 826 BC, Marduk-zakir-shumi returned the favour by helping the crown prince Shamshi-Adad V.
• A kudurru from his second year grants land to a lamentation priest of the Eanna temple at Uruk and names a governor of Nippur, an office not seen since Kassite times.
• A lapis lazuli seal made in his name shows Marduk's statue standing on the dragon mushhushshu; it was meant to hang around the neck of a god's statue.

Sources: British Museum: The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, BM 118885; Wikipedia: Marduk-zakir-shumi I; Wikipedia: Shalmaneser III

Nabonassar and the start of exact history (747 to 734 BC)

Nabu-nasir ('Nabu protects'), king of Babylon, Dynasty of E · Babylon

Nabonassar took the throne in 747 BC after a period of Chaldean rule and became a vassal of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III. His reign marks the start of a new age of record-keeping: the Babylonian Chronicle series begins with him, and so does the Canon of Kings later used by the astronomer Ptolemy. Systematic records of the sky also increased under him, helping Babylonian scholars recognise the 18-year Saros cycle of lunar eclipses. The chronicle notes that Borsippa turned against Babylon during his reign but that the scribe could find no written account of the battle.

How they came to power: His origin is unknown, though he seems to have been a native Babylonian; he replaced the Chaldean king Nabu-shuma-ishkun.

How it ended: The Babylonian Chronicle says that in his fourteenth year he fell ill and died in his palace; his son Nabu-nadin-zeri was killed in a revolt two years later.

• Nabonassar's reign is linked with a reform of the calendar that inserted extra months on a regular calculated pattern.
• One copy of the chronicle that begins with his reign was written at Babylon in 499 BC, the 22nd year of Darius I, and names the scribe and his family.
• The Dynastic Chronicle, which may have been composed in his time, records that the 'dynasty of Chaldea' ended with his predecessor.

Sources: Livius.org: ABC 1 (From Nabu-Nasir to Shamash-shuma-ukin), after Grayson 1975 and Glassner 2004; Livius.org: ABC 1, column iv (colophon); Wikipedia: Nabonassar; Wikipedia: Babylonian astronomical diaries

Tiglath-pileser III takes Babylon's crown (king of Babylon 729 to 727 BC (king of Assyria 745 to 727 BC))

Tukulti-apil-Esharra ('my trust is in the son of Esharra'), called Pul or Pulu in the Babylonian King List, Ptolemy's Canon and the Bible, Neo-Assyrian Empire · Assyria and Babylon

In 731 BC the Chaldean chief Nabu-mukin-zeri of the Bit-Amukani tribe seized the throne of Babylon. Tiglath-pileser III blockaded the Elamite border, defeated Aramean and Chaldean groups, and in 729 BC captured Babylon; the Babylonian Chronicle records that he ravaged Bit-Amukani, captured Nabu-mukin-zeri and 'ascended the throne in Babylon'. He received tribute from the strongest Chaldean tribes, Bit-Dakkuri and Bit-Yakin, the latter led by the future rebel Marduk-apla-iddina II. Babylonia was kept as a separate kingdom joined to Assyria in the person of the king, not split into provinces, and he took part twice in the New Year festival.

How they came to power: He came to the Assyrian throne in 745 BC, probably through a coup, and his reforms ended a long period of Assyrian weakness.

How it ended: He died in the month Tebetu of 727 BC, after two years as king of Babylon, and his son Shalmaneser V succeeded him in both kingdoms.

• Later sources (the Babylonian King List, Ptolemy's Canon and the Bible) call him Pul or Pulu. No Assyrian or Babylonian text of his own time uses the name, but a Phoenician inscription from Incirli, published in 2007, confirms that Pul and Tiglath-pileser were the same man; whether Pulu was his birth name or a nickname is only a guess.
• Before the final attack, Assyrian envoys stood outside Babylon offering amnesty and tax privileges if the citizens opened their gates; the Babylonians refused.
• Nabu-mukin-zeri lost his home city of Sapia in 729 BC, but documents dated to his fourth year suggest he held out into 728.

Sources: Livius.org: ABC 1 (From Nabu-Nasir to Shamash-shuma-ukin), after Grayson 1975 and Glassner 2004; World History Encyclopedia: Tiglath Pileser III; Wikipedia: Tiglath-Pileser III

Marduk-apla-iddina II (Merodach-baladan) (king of Babylon 722 to 710 BC (the Babylonian Chronicle puts his accession in Nisannu, early 721 BC) and again for nine months in 703 to 702 BC; died in exile c. 697 to 694 BC)

Marduk-apla-iddina ('Marduk has given an heir'), chief of Bit-Yakin, king of Babylon; Merodach-baladan in the Bible, Chaldean, Bit-Yakin tribe · Babylon

Marduk-apla-iddina, leader of the Chaldean Bit-Yakin tribe in the old Sealand, seized Babylon in 722 BC as Sargon II came to the Assyrian throne. With his Elamite ally he held Babylonia for twelve years; at the battle of Der in 720 BC the Elamites drove the Assyrians back, though both sides, and Marduk-apla-iddina himself, later claimed the victory. In 710 BC Sargon marched south; Marduk-apla-iddina fell back to Dur-Yakin and, after a siege, went into exile in Elam in 709 BC. After Sargon's death he returned and was king again for nine months, until Sennacherib beat him near Kish and plundered his palace in Babylon.

How they came to power: He was a Chaldean tribal chief who had paid tribute to Tiglath-pileser III; he took the throne of Babylon in the confusion of Assyrian succession in 722 BC.

How it ended: After his second defeat he escaped to Elam, where he died in exile a few years later, around 697 to 694 BC.

• The Bible remembers him as Merodach-baladan (Isaiah 39:1; spelled Berodach-baladan in 2 Kings 20:12 in the King James Version), who sent letters and a gift to Hezekiah of Judah after hearing of his illness, and the prophet Isaiah rebuked Hezekiah for showing the envoys his treasures.
• A clay cylinder of his from Uruk records that he rebuilt a temple of the god Ningishzida beside the Eanna ziggurat.
• The Babylonian Chronicle notes that his army arrived too late to join the Elamite king at Der and withdrew.

Sources: Livius.org: ABC 1 (From Nabu-Nasir to Shamash-shuma-ukin), cols. i-ii; The Bible: Isaiah 39 (King James Version), Bible Gateway; The Bible: 2 Kings 20 (King James Version), Bible Gateway; Wikipedia: Marduk-apla-iddina II

Sennacherib destroys Babylon (689 BC (Babylon captured on 1 Kislimu, late in the year, after a siege of more than 15 months))

Babylon rebelled repeatedly against Sennacherib, and in about 694 BC the Elamites seized his son Ashur-nadin-shumi, whom he had made king there; the prince was never seen again. After years of war the Assyrians besieged Babylon for over fifteen months, and the Babylonian Chronicle records that on the first day of Kislimu the city fell and its king Mushezib-Marduk was taken to Assyria. Sennacherib's own inscription says his men smashed the gods' statues, that he razed walls, temples and the ziggurat into the Arahtu canal, and that he dug channels to drown the ruins. Marduk's statue went to Assyria: Sennacherib's own accounts do not say so, but Esarhaddon's inscriptions and the chronicles do.

• The chronicle that records the capture does not mention the destruction; it later dates an event to 'the eighth year of there not being a king in Babylon'.
• Marduk's statue stayed in Assyria through the rest of Sennacherib's reign and all of Esarhaddon's, twenty years by a Babylonian count in which the New Year festival could not be held.
• The Babylonian Chronicle says Sennacherib was killed by his son in a rebellion in 681 BC; the World History Encyclopedia reports the view that the murder was linked to his destruction of Babylon, while Wikipedia ties it to his replacing his elder son Arda-Mulissu as heir with Esarhaddon.

Sources: Livius.org: ABC 1, column iii, after Grayson 1975 and Glassner 2004; Livius.org: ABC 16 (Akitu Chronicle); World History Encyclopedia (Joshua J. Mark): The Mutual Destruction of Sennacherib & Babylon; Wikipedia: Sennacherib

Esarhaddon rebuilds Babylon (681 to 669 BC; rebuilding announced in 680 BC)

Ashur-aha-iddina, king of Assyria, governor of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, Neo-Assyrian Empire (Sargonid) · Assyria and Babylon

Esarhaddon made the rebuilding of Babylon one of the great projects of his reign: clearing the debris, bringing back Babylonians who had been enslaved or scattered, restoring the Esagila temple, the Etemenanki ziggurat and the inner walls. In his Babylon inscriptions he never blames his father, saying instead that Marduk grew angry with the city, that the Arahtu river rose like the Flood and swept it away, and that the gods flew off to heaven. Marduk, he wrote, had decreed 70 years of abandonment but relented and reversed the numbers, ordering it resettled after 11. By rebuilding temples he took on the role Babylonians expected of their own kings.

How they came to power: His father Sennacherib named him crown prince in 684 BC over older brothers; after they murdered Sennacherib in 681 BC, Esarhaddon won a short civil war and took the throne.

How it ended: He fell ill on the way to Egypt and died in 669 BC; under his succession plan his sons Ashurbanipal and Shamash-shum-ukin became kings of Assyria and Babylon.

• His inscription on the rebuilding survives in several copies, clay prisms now in London (British Museum), Geneva (Musee d'art et d'histoire) and Berlin, and calls him 'governor of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad'.
• Fearing evil omens, he used the ancient 'substitute king' ritual, in which a stand-in sat on the throne to take the danger on himself.
• The Babylonian Chronicle says that in his sixth year the king of Elam entered Sippar and a massacre took place.

Sources: ORACC, RINAP 4: Esarhaddon 104 (Q003333), Babylon inscription; Livius.org: ABC 1, column iv, after Grayson 1975 and Glassner 2004; World History Encyclopedia: Esarhaddon; Wikipedia: Esarhaddon

Naqia (Zakutu), the king's mother (most prominent 681 to 669 BC; born before c. 728 BC, last attested 669 BC)

Naqia, in Akkadian Zakutu ('pure one'), 'Mother of the King', Queen mother · Neo-Assyrian court, Nineveh

Naqia was a wife of Sennacherib and the mother of Esarhaddon, whom she bore around 713 BC. Her West Semitic name, possibly Aramaic, alongside the Akkadian Zakutu suggests she came from outside Assyria proper, perhaps Babylonia or the Levant. Under her son she held the title 'Mother of the King', owned estates across the empire, received letters addressed with royal formulas, and commissioned building works in her own name, including a palace for Esarhaddon at Nineveh. She may have administered lands around the Babylonian city of Lahiru.

How they rose: She rose with her son: in 684 BC Sennacherib made Esarhaddon crown prince over older brothers, perhaps under her influence, though scholars dispute how much she shaped the choice.

How they died: Unknown. After Esarhaddon's death in 669 BC she issued a treaty binding the royal family, nobles and all Assyria to Ashurbanipal, and then disappears from the record.

• The Zakutu Treaty is the only known Assyrian treaty issued by someone other than a king.
• She is one of very few Assyrian women shown in art, on a relief made in her lifetime, and one of the few to have courtiers write her letters full of praise.
• Whether she was ever Sennacherib's official queen is debated, since another wife, Tashmetu-sharrat, held that title.

Sources: CDLI: bronze relief AO 20185 (Louvre), RINAP 4 Esarhaddon x2010, showing Esarhaddon with Naqia; KeiBi, University of Tubingen: S. C. Melville, The Role of Naqia/Zakutu in Sargonid Politics (SAAS 9, 1999); KeiBi, University of Tubingen: A. Parrot and J. Nougayrol, 'Asarhaddon et Naqi'a sur un bronze du Louvre (AO 20.185)', Syria 33 (1956); World History Encyclopedia (Joshua J. Mark): Zakutu; Wikipedia: Naqia

Shamash-shum-ukin and the brothers' war (668 to 648 BC; revolt 652 to 648 BC)

Shamash-shuma-ukin ('Shamash has established the name'), king of Babylon, Neo-Assyrian Empire (Sargonid) · Babylon

Esarhaddon left Assyria to his younger son Ashurbanipal and Babylonia to the elder, Shamash-shum-ukin, calling them 'equal brothers'. At his accession in 668 BC Marduk's statue returned from Assyria to Babylon, and the New Year festival resumed after twenty years. Shamash-shum-ukin behaved as a true Babylonian king, rebuilding Sippar's walls and restoring shrines, but Ashurbanipal kept him closely watched. In 652 BC he rebelled with Elamites, Chaldeans, Arameans and others; the chronicles record defeats, a siege of Babylon from 650 BC, and years in which the gods' processions could not be held.

How they came to power: He was probably Esarhaddon's second son; after the crown prince Sin-nadin-apli died in 674 BC, his father named him heir to Babylonia and Ashurbanipal heir to Assyria.

How it ended: Babylon fell to Ashurbanipal in 648 BC after a long siege and Shamash-shum-ukin died; the exact circumstances are unclear. Afterwards his images were deliberately defaced.

• His royal inscriptions use Babylonian imagery and language far more than those of any other Assyrian ruler of the south.
• In 651 BC, according to a Babylonian chronicle, he took the city of Kutha and carried the statue of its god Nergal to Babylon.
• The Akitu Chronicle notes year after year from 651 to 648 BC that the god Nabu did not come from Borsippa and Marduk did not come out for the New Year procession.

Sources: Livius.org: ABC 16 (Akitu Chronicle), after Grayson 1975 and Glassner 2004; Livius.org: ABC 15 (Shamash-shuma-ukin Chronicle); World History Encyclopedia: Ashurbanipal; Wikipedia: Shamash-shum-ukin

The Astronomical Diaries (earliest surviving diary 652 BC; the series runs to 61 BC)

The astronomical diaries are cuneiform tablets in which Babylonian scholars recorded what they saw in the sky night by night, together with the weather, the level of the Euphrates, market prices of barley, dates, mustard, cress, sesame and wool, and notable events such as wars, epidemics and royal visits. The earliest surviving diary dates from 652 BC and the latest from 61 BC, a record kept for about six centuries. Each tablet usually covers four to six months, divided by month. Most of the several hundred surviving tablets, many of them fragmentary, are in the British Museum, and for late Persian and Hellenistic Babylonia they are the main contemporary source.

• Abraham Sachs and Hermann Hunger published the standard edition; its first volume, covering 652 to 262 BC, appeared from the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna in 1988.
• Systematic observation had increased from the reign of Nabonassar (747 to 734 BC), and Babylonian scholars used such records to find the 18-year Saros cycle of lunar eclipses.
• Diaries record the eclipse before Gaugamela in 331 BC and the death of Alexander in 323 BC, the latter in four words: the king died; clouds.

Sources: Cuneiform Commentaries Project, Yale: Sachs and Hunger, Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia, vol. I, Diaries from 652 B.C. to 262 B.C. (1988); Wikipedia: Babylonian astronomical diaries; Livius.org: A Contemporary Account of the Death of Alexander (astronomical diary); Eleanor Robson, 'Who wrote the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries?' (2019), UCL Discovery

Kandalanu, the shadow king (647 to 627 BC)

Kandalanu, king of Babylon, Vassal of the Neo-Assyrian Empire · Babylon

After crushing Shamash-shum-ukin, Ashurbanipal installed Kandalanu as vassal king of Babylon in 647 BC. His reign is known almost only from the date formulas on contracts and from chronological texts. Historians have suggested he was a younger brother of Ashurbanipal, a Babylonian noble who had sided with Assyria, or a man chosen because he was weak and unlikely to lead a revolt; an older theory that Kandalanu was simply Ashurbanipal's Babylonian name is now thought unlikely. His death in 627 BC opened the way to the struggle in which Nabopolassar founded the Neo-Babylonian empire.

How they came to power: Ashurbanipal proclaimed him king of Babylon after the fall of the city in 648 BC.

How it ended: He died in 627 BC; how is not recorded. The Akitu Chronicle notes insurrections in Assyria and Akkad in the year after him, before Nabopolassar's accession.

• For most of the time since Tiglath-pileser III conquered it less than a century earlier, Babylonia had been ruled by the Assyrian king or his vassals.
• He continued to be recognised in Babylonian dating under Ashurbanipal's successor Ashur-etil-ilani.
• Under his predecessor, inscriptions suggest that any order given in Babylon first had to be checked and approved by Ashurbanipal.

Sources: Livius.org: ABC 16 (Akitu Chronicle), after Grayson 1975 and Glassner 2004; Wikipedia: Kandalanu; World History Encyclopedia: Ashurbanipal

Adad-guppi (born c. 649/648 BC; died 547 BC (Nabonidus' 9th year))

Adad-guppi (Greek Addagoppe), mother of Nabonidus, Votary of the moon god Sin · Harran

Adad-guppi was born at Harran in upper Mesopotamia in about the twentieth year of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, and spent her long life in the service of Sin, the moon god of Harran. Her son Nabonidus became king of Babylon in 556 BC and rebuilt Sin's temple at Harran, the E-hulhul, which had been wrecked in 610 BC. Her funerary inscription, written in her own voice, lists the kings she lived under from Ashurbanipal to Neriglissar and credits Sin with calling her son to the throne. It is one of the very few long first-person texts in a Mesopotamian woman's name, though scholars think it was composed at court after her death to support her son's right to rule.

How they rose: She was not of the Babylonian royal line; her standing came from her lifelong devotion to Sin at Harran and, from 556 BC, from being mother of the reigning king. Whether she descended from the Assyrian royal family is argued: Stephanie Dalley thought it likely, Michael Dick disagreed.

How they died: The Nabonidus Chronicle records that the queen mother died on the 5th of Nisanu in Nabonidus' ninth year at Dur-karashu on the Euphrates above Sippar, and that the crown prince and the army mourned for three days. Her stele adds that mourners came from Babylon, Borsippa and distant lands for seven days and nights.

• The stele counts 104 years from her birth in Ashurbanipal's 20th year to her son's ninth year, and the reign lengths it lists add up to that total; on the standard chronology (born 649, died 547 BC) she was about 102, probably because the stele counts overlapping Assyrian reigns one after another.
• She boasts that in old age her eyesight was clear, her mind sound, her hands and feet whole and food and drink agreed with her, and credits the moon god Sin; earlier in the text she says she gave up fine wool, jewels, silver, gold and perfumed oil to calm the god's anger.
• Two copies of her text survive: a broken stele found at Harran by Henri Pognon in 1906, and a second copy found by D. S. Rice in 1956, reused as a paving step at the north entrance of Harran's Great Mosque.

Sources: Adad-guppi stele (Nabonidus inscription 24), English translation with column and line numbers (jhalsey.com); Livius.org: ABC 7 (Nabonidus Chronicle); Encyclopedia.com (after P.-A. Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, 1989): Adad-guppi; Wikipedia: Adad-guppi

Nabopolassar (reigned 626 to 605 BC (crowned 23 November 626 BC; died 15 August 605 BC))

Nabu-apla-usur ("Nabu, protect the son"), king of Babylon, Neo-Babylonian (Chaldean) dynasty · Babylon

Nabopolassar rose in revolt after the deaths of Ashurbanipal and of Kandalanu, Assyria's king in Babylon, and spent his first decade fighting Assyrian armies inside Babylonia, at Babylon, Nippur, Uruk and the Banitu canal. By 616 BC he was carrying the war north, and in 614 BC he met the Median king Cyaxares at the ruins of Assur and made an alliance against Assyria. Together they sacked Nineveh in 612 BC and drove the last Assyrian king out of Harran in 610 BC. He founded the dynasty modern historians call Neo-Babylonian or Chaldean, and began rebuilding Babylon's walls and temples, work his son Nebuchadnezzar finished.

How they came to power: His origins are obscure; in his own inscriptions he calls himself 'son of a nobody', and he may have been a Chaldean or an official from Uruk. The Babylonian chronicle says that for a year there was no king in the land, and then on 26 Arahsamna (23 November 626 BC) Nabopolassar ascended the throne in Babylon.

How it ended: He stayed in Babylon while his son led the army west, possibly because of illness, and died on 8 Abu (about 15 August 605 BC) after reigning 21 years. Nebuchadnezzar hurried back and was crowned three weeks later.

• The chronicle of his early years records that Assyrian troops fought inside Babylon itself, and that on 12 Tashritu the Babylonians came out of the city, beat the Assyrian army and plundered it.
• Berossus, quoted by Josephus, gives him a reign of 29 years, against the 21 years of the Babylonian chronicles; modern chronology follows the chronicles.
• Berossus also reports that the Median alliance was sealed by marrying the crown prince Nebuchadnezzar to a Median princess, Amytis.

Sources: Livius.org: ABC 2 (Chronicle of the Early Years of Nabopolassar); Livius.org: ABC 5 (Jerusalem Chronicle); Josephus, Against Apion 1.19-20 (quoting Berossus), tr. William Whiston, Project Gutenberg; Livius.org (Jona Lendering): Nabopolassar; Wikipedia: Nabopolassar

Fall of Nineveh and the end of Assyria (Nineveh besieged June to August 612 BC; Harran taken 610 BC; last Assyrian counterattack 609 BC)

In 612 BC Nabopolassar and the Median king Cyaxares camped before Nineveh in the month Simanu (May to June) and took the city in Abu (July to August), after about three months. The Babylonian chronicle says the Assyrian king Sin-shar-ishkun died at the time and the city was plundered and turned into a ruin mound. Ashur-uballit II set himself up as king at Harran, but the Medes and Babylonians took Harran in 610 BC, and an attempt by him and his Egyptian allies to retake it in 609 BC failed. Assyria never rose again, and Babylon inherited much of its empire.

• The Fall of Nineveh Chronicle (ABC 3) names the Median ally as Umakishtar, the Akkadian form of Cyaxares.
• The chronicle says only that Sin-shar-ishkun died when the city fell; how he died is not recorded, though modern historians commonly assume he fell defending Nineveh.
• Egypt backed the Assyrian remnant: the chronicle records an Egyptian army helping Ashur-uballit to besiege Harran from Du'uzu to Ululu of Nabopolassar's 17th year, without success.

Sources: Livius.org: ABC 3 (Fall of Nineveh Chronicle); Livius.org (Jona Lendering): Nabopolassar; Wikipedia: Nabopolassar

Battle of Carchemish (605 BC (summer, Nabopolassar's 21st year))

In 605 BC the crown prince Nebuchadnezzar led the Babylonian army to Carchemish, where an Egyptian army under Pharaoh Necho II had been supporting the last Assyrians. He crossed the Euphrates, defeated the Egyptians and pursued the survivors to the district of Hamath in Syria, destroying them there. The victory opened Syria and the Levant to Babylon. While still in the west, Nebuchadnezzar heard that his father had died, and he rushed back to Babylon to claim the throne.

• The Babylonian Jerusalem Chronicle (ABC 5) says that not a single Egyptian escaped home from the pursuit to Hamath.
• The Book of Jeremiah (46:2) dates the defeat of Necho's army 'by the river Euphrates in Carchemish' to the fourth year of Jehoiakim, king of Judah.
• Berossus, quoted by Josephus, says Nebuchadnezzar left his heavy troops and captives to follow and crossed the desert to Babylon with only a few companions.

Sources: Livius.org: ABC 5 (Jerusalem Chronicle); The Bible, Jeremiah 46 (KJV), BibleGateway; Josephus, Against Apion 1.19 (quoting Berossus), tr. William Whiston, Project Gutenberg; World History Encyclopedia: Nebuchadnezzar II

Nebuchadnezzar II (reigned 605 to 562 BC (crowned 1 Ululu, c. 7 September 605; died c. 7 October 562 BC))

Nabu-kudurri-usur ("Nabu, watch over my heir"), also spelled Nebuchadrezzar, Neo-Babylonian (Chaldean) dynasty · Babylon

Nebuchadnezzar II, eldest son of Nabopolassar, ruled for 43 years and turned his father's kingdom into an empire stretching from the Persian Gulf to the borders of Egypt. He campaigned almost yearly in the Levant, took Ashkelon in 604 BC, invaded Egypt in 601 BC but, after a bloody battle, withdrew to Babylon, captured Jerusalem in 597 BC and destroyed it in 587/586 BC, and besieged Tyre. At home he rebuilt Babylon on a vast scale: the Ishtar Gate and Processional Way, the Southern, Northern and Summer palaces, new city walls, the temple Esagila and the ziggurat Etemenanki. He was the longest-reigning king of his dynasty.

How they came to power: As crown prince he commanded the army at Carchemish in 605 BC. When news came of his father's death he hurried back to Babylon and, according to the Babylonian chronicle, took the throne on 1 Ululu, about three weeks later.

How it ended: Berossus says he fell ill and died in the 43rd year of his reign; cuneiform records place his death in early October 562 BC. His son Amel-Marduk succeeded him.

• Berossus, quoted by Josephus, says he built three walls around the inner city and three around the outer, so that no besieger could divert the river to get in.
• The Book of Daniel portrays him as a tyrant driven mad for seven years; no Babylonian source confirms this, and many scholars think the story was transferred from his successor Nabonidus.
• The Josephus tradition that he besieged Tyre for 13 years is not confirmed in cuneiform, and its length is debated.

Sources: Livius.org: ABC 5 (Jerusalem Chronicle); Josephus, Against Apion 1.19-20 (quoting Berossus), tr. William Whiston, Project Gutenberg; World History Encyclopedia: Nebuchadnezzar II; Wikipedia: Nebuchadnezzar II

The Hanging Gardens question (placed by tradition in Nebuchadnezzar II's reign; first described by Berossus c. 290 BC)

Greek and Roman writers listed the Hanging Gardens of Babylon among the Seven Wonders of the World. The earliest account is by the Babylonian priest Berossus, writing about 290 BC and quoted by Josephus, who says Nebuchadnezzar built high terraces on stone pillars and planted them with trees to look like mountains, to please a queen raised in Media. Later writers such as Diodorus, Strabo and Quintus Curtius added details. But Nebuchadnezzar's own long building inscriptions never mention a garden, Herodotus says nothing of one, and excavation has found no clear trace. The Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley has argued in a 2013 book that the gardens were really Sennacherib's at Nineveh, a view that is debated.

• Tradition versus evidence: the story of the homesick Median queen, named Amytis by Berossus, comes only from Greek-language sources written centuries after Nebuchadnezzar.
• Berossus' account, as given by Josephus, also claims the new palace beside the gardens was finished in fifteen days.
• They are the only one of the Seven Wonders whose location has never been firmly established.

Sources: Josephus, Against Apion 1.19 (quoting Berossus), tr. William Whiston, Project Gutenberg; Herodotus, Histories 1.178-187, tr. G. C. Macaulay (1890), Project Gutenberg; World History Encyclopedia: Nebuchadnezzar II; Wikipedia: Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Etemenanki, the ziggurat behind the Tower of Babel (rebuilt under Nabopolassar and completed by Nebuchadnezzar II (605 to 562 BC))

Etemenanki was the ziggurat of Marduk's temple precinct in Babylon. Damaged when Sennacherib sacked the city in 689 BC, it was restored over decades, begun under Esarhaddon, continued by Nabopolassar and completed by Nebuchadnezzar II. A later Babylonian tablet, the Esagila tablet, gives its base as about 91 metres square; modern estimates of its height range from about 66 to 91 metres. Herodotus, who wrote about a century later, describes a solid tower of eight stages climbed by an outside ramp, with a shrine at the top. Koldewey's excavations confirmed the mudbrick core described in the Esagila tablet, but almost nothing of its height survives.

• Tradition versus evidence: Genesis 11 tells of a tower of fired brick 'whose top may reach unto heaven' in the land of Shinar, where God confused human languages; many scholars think the story was shaped by memories of Babylon's ziggurat, but the Bible names no king and gives no date.
• Herodotus (1.181-182) says the shrine at the top held a great couch and a golden table, and that, according to the Chaldean priests, only one woman chosen by the god spent the night there; he adds that he does not believe their further claim that the god himself visits the shrine.
• Alexander the Great planned to rebuild the ruined tower but died in 323 BC before the work was done.

Sources: Herodotus, Histories 1.178-183, tr. G. C. Macaulay (1890), Project Gutenberg; The Bible, Genesis 11:1-9 (KJV), BibleGateway; World History Encyclopedia: Nebuchadnezzar II; Wikipedia: Etemenanki

The Egibi family business (archive c. 600 to 484 BC (five generations))

The Egibi were a Babylonian family whose papers form the largest private archive known from the Neo-Babylonian and early Persian periods, about 1,700 tablets. They begin under Nebuchadnezzar II and run into the reign of Xerxes, covering five generations. The family bought and sold houses, fields and slaves, lent money, financed trade, managed land for others and worked for the palace and temples. The tablets show ordinary contracts, receipts and family settlements, the everyday paperwork of a great city.

• Itti-Marduk-balatu headed the house in the 520s BC; at the division of his estate his eldest son Marduk-nasir-apli received half, and led the business until about 487 BC.
• Under Marduk-nasir-apli, nicknamed Shirku, the family became more involved with Babylon's temples, the palace and royal officials.
• The family took deposits but, unlike a modern bank, financed its business mainly with its own capital; its archive breaks off in 484 BC, when many old Babylonian family archives end after the revolts against Xerxes.

Sources: Encyclopedia.com (World Eras, Gale): Marduk-nasir-apli; Livius.org (Jona Lendering): Bêl-šimânni and Šamaš-eriba; Wikipedia: House of Egibi

Nebuchadnezzar takes Jerusalem (2 Addaru, Nebuchadnezzar's 7th year (February/March 597 BC))

Nebuchadnezzar marched west in winter 598/597 BC and besieged Jerusalem, and the Babylonian Jerusalem Chronicle records that he seized the city on the 2nd of Adar in his seventh year and captured its king. The Bible names the king as Jehoiachin, who had just succeeded his father Jehoiakim. Nebuchadnezzar put Jehoiachin's uncle Mattaniah on the throne under the name Zedekiah, took heavy tribute to Babylon and deported the court, soldiers and craftsmen. It is one of the rare events in the Hebrew Bible dated to the day by an independent cuneiform source.

• 2 Kings 24 says 10,000 captives were taken, including 7,000 fighting men and 1,000 craftsmen and smiths; Jeremiah 52 gives a much smaller figure of 3,023 Judeans for the seventh year.
• The Babylonian chronicle does not name either king, saying only that Nebuchadnezzar captured 'the king' and appointed one of his own choice; it dates the capture to his seventh year, as Jeremiah 52:28 does, while 2 Kings 24:12 says the eighth.
• The prophet Ezekiel was among the exiles of this first deportation.

Sources: Livius.org: ABC 5 (Jerusalem Chronicle); The Bible, 2 Kings 24 (KJV), BibleGateway; The Bible, Jeremiah 52:28-30 (KJV), BibleGateway; Wikipedia: Babylonian captivity

Jehoiachin's ration tablets (c. 592/591 BC)

Among the tablets Koldewey's team found in a vaulted underground building near the Ishtar Gate in Babylon were lists of oil rations issued by the palace. One names Ya'u-kinu, king of the land of Yahudu, that is Jehoiachin of Judah, and his five sons, listed as royal princes. They show the captive king of Judah living at Nebuchadnezzar's court and fed from the royal stores. The tablets are in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin (VAT 16378).

• One list gives 10 sila of oil to Ya'u-kinu (called 'king' on one tablet and, apparently in error, 'son of the king' on another) and 2.5 sila for the five sons of the king of Judah; a sila was about 0.8 litres.
• The Bible (2 Kings 25:27-30) says that in the 37th year of his captivity Jehoiachin was released from prison by Evil-merodach (Amel-Marduk) and given a daily allowance for life.
• The tablets were found during Robert Koldewey's German excavations at Babylon, which ran from 1899 to 1917.

Sources: The Bible, 2 Kings 25 (KJV), BibleGateway; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: Vorderasiatisches Museum collection; Wikipedia: Jehoiachin's Rations Tablets

Destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile (Jerusalem destroyed 587 or 586 BC (sources differ); exile until c. 538 BC)

When Zedekiah of Judah rebelled, Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem for about eighteen months. According to 2 Kings 25, the walls were breached, Zedekiah was caught near Jericho, made to watch his sons killed and then blinded and taken to Babylon; in Nebuchadnezzar's 19th year the captain of the guard Nebuzaradan burned the temple, the palace and the great houses. Judah's leading families were deported to Babylonia, where they lived in their own communities for about two generations. Many scholars think the exile was when much of the Hebrew Bible took its final shape, and it ended when Cyrus of Persia allowed exiles to return after 539 BC.

• No Babylonian chronicle survives for these years, so the date of the temple's destruction, 587 or 586 BC, rests on biblical reckonings.
• Jeremiah 52:28-30 lists three deportations totalling 4,600 people, in Nebuchadnezzar's 7th, 18th and 23rd years.
• Psalm 137 begins, in the King James Version (1611): 'By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.'

Sources: The Bible, 2 Kings 25 (KJV), BibleGateway; The Bible, Jeremiah 52:28-30 (KJV), BibleGateway; The Bible, Psalm 137 (KJV), BibleGateway; World History Encyclopedia: Nebuchadnezzar II; Wikipedia: Babylonian captivity

The Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way (built c. 575 BC (traditional date); a 2024 archaeomagnetic study dates it after the fall of Jerusalem in 587/586 BC, around 569 BC)

Nebuchadnezzar II built the Ishtar Gate, the ritual gate into the northern part of Babylon's inner city, dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, around 575 BC (a 2024 study suggests a little later, about 569 BC). It was faced with glazed bricks, mostly a deep blue, with raised figures of bulls (aurochs) and mushhushshu dragons, the dragon-snake of Marduk. The Processional Way that ran through it was lined with walls showing about 120 striding lions. Its roof and doors were of cedar, according to the king's dedication inscription. Robert Koldewey's German expedition excavated the gate from 1902, and the smaller front gate and part of the Processional Way were rebuilt from the original bricks in Berlin's Pergamon Museum, where they went on show when it opened in 1930.

• The Berlin reconstruction of the front gate is about 14 metres high; Germany took 118 of the Processional Way's lions.
• The dedication inscription, about 60 lines of cuneiform on glazed brick, explains why the king built the gate.
• A smaller replica gate stands at the entrance to the site of Babylon in Iraq; sources disagree on its date, Wikipedia's Babylon article placing it in the 1960s and its Ishtar Gate article linking it to work finished in 1987.

Sources: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: Vorderasiatisches Museum collection; World History Encyclopedia: Ishtar Gate; UNESCO, Final Report on Damage Assessment in Babylon (2009); Wikipedia: Ishtar Gate; A. Di Chiara et al., 'An archaeomagnetic study of the Ishtar Gate, Babylon', PLOS ONE 19 (2024)

Amel-Marduk (reigned October 562 to August 560 BC)

Amel-Marduk ("man of Marduk"; biblical Evil-merodach), born Nabu-shum-ukin, Neo-Babylonian (Chaldean) dynasty · Babylon

Amel-Marduk succeeded his father Nebuchadnezzar II in October 562 BC. Very few cuneiform documents survive from his short reign, so little is known of what he did as king. He is remembered mainly from the Bible, which says he released Jehoiachin of Judah from prison, gave him a seat above the other captive kings and fed him at the royal table for the rest of his life. Later writers judged him harshly.

How they came to power: He was not obviously the heir; one theory, argued by Irving Finkel and widely accepted, identifies him with a prince named Nabu-shum-ukin who had been imprisoned for conspiracy under his father and took the name Amel-Marduk after his release. He succeeded when Nebuchadnezzar died in October 562 BC.

How it ended: Berossus says he ruled lawlessly and was killed in a plot by Neriglissar, his sister's husband, after two years. Contract dates place his death in August 560 BC.

• 2 Kings 25:27 dates Jehoiachin's release to the 27th day of the 12th month in the 37th year of his captivity.
• The Adad-guppi stele, written under Nabonidus, gives Amel-Marduk a reign of two years.
• The biblical form of his name, Evil-merodach, is a Hebrew rendering of Amel-Marduk and has nothing to do with the English word 'evil'.

Sources: The Bible, 2 Kings 25 (KJV), BibleGateway; Josephus, Against Apion 1.20 (quoting Berossus), tr. William Whiston, Project Gutenberg; Adad-guppi stele (Nabonidus inscription 24), English translation (jhalsey.com); Wikipedia: Amel-Marduk

Neriglissar (reigned August 560 to April 556 BC; his son Labashi-Marduk briefly in 556 BC)

Nergal-sharra-usur ("O Nergal, protect the king"), Neo-Babylonian dynasty · Babylon

Neriglissar, son of a man named Bel-shum-ishkun, was a wealthy landowner and senior official under Nebuchadnezzar II, with property around Sippar and Uruk, before he killed Amel-Marduk and took the throne in 560 BC. His one well-documented campaign, in his third year (557/556 BC), went into the mountains of Cilicia in southern Anatolia against Appuashu, king of Pirindu. At home he continued work on Marduk's temple Esagila and repaired the royal palace and the Euphrates embankments. His son Labashi-Marduk succeeded him in 556 BC but was killed within months.

How they came to power: Berossus calls him the husband of Amel-Marduk's sister and says he plotted against and killed the king; he probably married a daughter of Nebuchadnezzar, possibly Kashshaya. He may be the 'Nergal-sharezer' named among Babylonian officers at Jerusalem in the Book of Jeremiah, though this is uncertain.

How it ended: He died in Babylon in spring 556 BC; the last contracts dated by his reign come from April. His son Labashi-Marduk, whom Berossus calls a child and says ruled nine months (cuneiform documents suggest only two or three), was deposed and killed in a court plot that brought Nabonidus to power.

• The Neriglissar Chronicle (ABC 6) says he chased Appuashu through hard mountain country where men had to walk in single file, sacked the royal city Ura, burned Kirshu, and captured the sea-girt place Pitusu with its 6,000 troops, using boats; Appuashu himself escaped.
• The same chronicle has him burning the country from the pass of Sallune to the border of Lydia before returning home in Addaru (February to March 556 BC).
• Berossus gives him a reign of four years, matching the Adad-guppi stele.

Sources: Livius.org: ABC 6 (Neriglissar Chronicle); Josephus, Against Apion 1.20 (quoting Berossus), tr. William Whiston, Project Gutenberg; Adad-guppi stele (Nabonidus inscription 24), English translation (jhalsey.com); Wikipedia: Neriglissar

Nabonidus (reigned 556 to 539 BC (away in Arabia from 553, at Tayma c. 552 to 543 BC))

Nabu-na'id ("May Nabu be exalted"), last native king of Babylon, Neo-Babylonian empire · Babylon, Harran and Tayma

Nabonidus, son of Adad-guppi of Harran, came to the throne in 556 BC after a court coup. He favoured the moon god Sin above Babylon's own god Marduk and rebuilt Sin's temple at Harran, which angered Babylon's priests. For about ten years he lived at the oasis of Tayma in north-west Arabia, leaving his son Belshazzar in charge in Babylonia, and in those years the New Year festival in Babylon could not be held. He restored old temples across the land and searched their ruins for the foundation deposits of earlier kings, which has earned him the name 'the first archaeologist'. In 539 BC Cyrus of Persia defeated his army at Opis and took Babylon.

How they came to power: He was not of royal blood. After the young king Labashi-Marduk was killed in 556 BC, the plotters, among them his son Belshazzar, put him on the throne; Berossus calls him 'a man of Babylon' who had been one of the conspirators.

How it ended: The Nabonidus Chronicle says he fled after Sippar fell and was captured on returning to Babylon. Berossus says instead that he surrendered at Borsippa, was treated kindly by Cyrus and sent to live out his life in Carmania, in southern Iran, where he died; the date is unknown.

• The Nabonidus Chronicle notes, year after year, that 'the king was in Tayma' and that the New Year (akitu) festival did not take place.
• He dated the Akkadian king Naram-Sin about 3,200 years before his own time; the real gap was roughly 1,500 years less, but it was a remarkable attempt at historical chronology.
• A Dead Sea Scrolls text, the Prayer of Nabonidus, says he suffered an illness for seven years; many scholars think a story like this lies behind the madness Daniel 4 gives to Nebuchadnezzar.

Sources: Livius.org: ABC 7 (Nabonidus Chronicle); Josephus, Against Apion 1.20 (quoting Berossus), tr. William Whiston, Project Gutenberg; Livius.org (Jona Lendering): Nabonidus; Wikipedia: Nabonidus

Belshazzar (regent c. 553 to 543 BC; died or vanished 539 BC (unknown))

Bel-sharra-usur ("O Bel, protect the king"), crown prince of Babylon, Crown prince and regent · Babylon

Belshazzar was the son of Nabonidus and probably the leading figure in the coup that put his father on the throne in 556 BC. While Nabonidus lived at Tayma in Arabia, about 553 to 543 BC, Belshazzar governed Babylonia with the army, but he never took the title of king and could not lead the New Year festival. Cuneiform texts, including a clay cylinder of Nabonidus from Ur that asks the moon god to protect the king and his son Belshazzar, confirm that he existed and held high power. He disappears from the record when Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BC.

How they rose: As eldest son of Nabonidus he became crown prince in 556 BC, and the Nabonidus Chronicle repeatedly records that 'the prince, his officers and the army' were in Babylonia while the king stayed in Tayma.

How they died: Unknown. He may have fallen at the battle of Opis, been killed when Babylon was taken, or been deported. Daniel 5 says he was slain on the night of his feast, but that account was written centuries later.

• Tradition versus evidence: Daniel 5 tells of King Belshazzar's feast for a thousand lords, drinking from vessels looted from the Jerusalem temple, when a hand writes 'mene, mene, tekel, upharsin' on the wall; scholars date Daniel to the 160s BC and read the story as a tale, not a record.
• Daniel calls Belshazzar king and the son of Nebuchadnezzar; cuneiform sources show he was the son of Nabonidus and never king.
• Herodotus (1.191), writing about a century after the event, has the Babylonians dancing at a festival while the Persians entered the city along the lowered riverbed, a different story with the same theme of a city caught off guard.

Sources: Livius.org: ABC 7 (Nabonidus Chronicle); The Bible, Daniel 5 (KJV), BibleGateway; Herodotus, Histories 1.191, tr. G. C. Macaulay (1890), Project Gutenberg; Wikipedia: Belshazzar

Ennigaldi-Nanna (installed c. 547 BC; her 'museum' dated c. 530 BC)

Ennigaldi-Nanna ("Nanna requests an entu"), high priestess of the moon god at Ur, En-priestess of Nanna · Ur

Ennigaldi-Nanna was a daughter of Nabonidus, who revived for her the ancient office of entu, high priestess of the moon god Nanna (Sin) at Ur, vacant for centuries. Her father rebuilt her official residence beside the ziggurat of Ur. In 1925 Leonard Woolley's excavators found, in a building of her time at Ur, a collection of objects ranging from about 2100 to 600 BC, among them part of a statue of the Ur III king Shulgi, a stone mace-head and a Kassite boundary stone. Labels explaining some of the pieces led Woolley to call it the earliest known museum.

How they rose: Nabonidus said an eclipse of the moon showed that the god wanted a high priestess, and that he found an old inscription of Nebuchadnezzar I describing the installation of a royal daughter in the post; he then installed his own daughter, around 547 BC.

How they died: Unknown. She is thought to have been the last woman to hold the office.

• The labels were written in three languages, including the long-dead Sumerian.
• Some scholars think the collection served teaching; she is believed to have run a scribal school for young women of the elite.
• Nabonidus also claimed to have recovered the writings of an earlier high priestess, En-ane-du, from the time of Rim-Sin, more than 1,200 years before him; scholars accept this more readily than his claimed find of a Nebuchadnezzar I stele.

Sources: The Conversation (Louise Pryke, Macquarie University): Hidden women of history: Ennigaldi-Nanna, curator of the world's first museum; Livius.org (Jona Lendering): Nabonidus; Wikipedia: Ennigaldi-Nanna

Cyrus takes Babylon (October 539 BC (Babylon entered 16 Tashritu, c. 12 October; Cyrus arrived 3 Arahsamna, c. 29 October))

In autumn 539 BC Cyrus II of Persia defeated the Babylonian army at Opis on the Tigris, where, the Nabonidus Chronicle says, his troops plundered and killed. Sippar surrendered without a fight on the 14th of the month, and two days later Ugbaru, governor of Gutium, entered Babylon with Cyrus' army, also without battle. Cyrus himself arrived on 3 Arahsamna, about 29 October, and the chronicle says there was peace in the city. Babylon became part of the Persian empire, and Nabonidus was the last native king to rule Mesopotamia.

• The chronicle stresses that rites in Esagila and the other temples were not interrupted, though troops from Gutium stood guard at Esagil's gates until the end of the month.
• Herodotus (1.191) says Cyrus diverted the Euphrates so his men could wade in along the riverbed at thigh depth; this does not appear in the Babylonian sources, and historians disagree on how much resistance there really was.
• The chronicle adds that Ugbaru died on the night of 11 Arahsamna, and that the gods Nabonidus had gathered into Babylon were sent back to their own cities over the following months.

Sources: Livius.org: ABC 7 (Nabonidus Chronicle); Herodotus, Histories 1.188-191, tr. G. C. Macaulay (1890), Project Gutenberg; Livius.org: Cyrus Cylinder translation; Wikipedia: Fall of Babylon

Cyrus the Great (king of Anshan from 559 BC; ruled Babylon 539 to 530 BC (died c. December 530 BC))

Cyrus II (Old Persian Kurush), 'king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters', Achaemenid · Persia and Babylon

Cyrus, son of Cambyses I, king of Anshan in south-west Iran, overthrew the Median king Astyages around 550 BC, conquered Lydia in the 540s and in October 539 BC took Babylon, ending its last native dynasty. In Babylon he adopted the old Mesopotamian royal titles, honoured Marduk and sent back to their own cities the divine statues that Nabonidus had gathered into the capital. His building cylinder from Babylon closes with a prayer for himself and his son Cambyses, who succeeded him. Jewish tradition remembers him as the king who let the exiles go home to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.

How they came to power: He became king of Anshan in 559 BC as a vassal of the Medes, rebelled about 550 BC, and when Astyages' general Harpagus deserted to him he captured Astyages and took over the Median kingdom. Herodotus makes him Astyages' grandson, a link that may have been invented to legitimise his rule.

How it ended: He died in 530 BC on campaign in Central Asia; news of his death reached Babylon in December. Herodotus says he was killed in battle by the Massagetae under Queen Tomyris, who put his head in a skin of blood, but other ancient writers told different stories, and he was buried at Pasargadae, where his tomb still stands.

• Herodotus (1.214) calls the battle in which Cyrus died the fiercest ever fought between non-Greeks and says he had reigned 29 years, though he admits many other tales were told of his end.
• The Book of Ezra (1:1-4) opens with a proclamation of Cyrus in his first year allowing Judeans to go up to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple.
• Inscriptions at Pasargadae naming 'Cyrus the Great King, an Achaemenid' were probably added later, under Darius I.

Sources: Livius.org: Cyrus Cylinder translation; Herodotus, Histories 1.188-214, tr. G. C. Macaulay (1890), Project Gutenberg; The Bible, Ezra 1 (KJV), BibleGateway; Livius.org (Jona Lendering): Cyrus the Great; Wikipedia: Cyrus the Great

The Cyrus Cylinder and the return of the exiles (written c. 539/538 BC; found 1879)

The Cyrus Cylinder is a barrel of baked clay about 22 cm long, inscribed in Akkadian cuneiform soon after Cyrus took Babylon and buried as a foundation deposit. Its text accuses Nabonidus of neglecting Marduk and burdening the people, says Marduk searched the world for a righteous king, chose Cyrus and let him enter Babylon without battle, and records that Cyrus returned gods and their peoples to their sanctuaries and repaired the city wall. Hormuzd Rassam found it at Babylon in March 1879, and it is in the British Museum (BM 90920). Its claims are royal propaganda in a long Mesopotamian tradition, and modern historians reject the 1970s description of it as the first charter of human rights.

• In it Cyrus calls himself 'king of the world, great king, mighty king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters'.
• Cyrus says that while rebuilding the wall he saw an inscription of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, an earlier king he presents as a model.
• The cylinder never mentions Jews, Judah or Jerusalem; the link often drawn with the return of the exiles in the Book of Ezra rests on its general policy of restoring displaced peoples and gods.

Sources: Livius.org: Cyrus Cylinder translation; The Bible, Ezra 1 (KJV), BibleGateway; University of Münster, GoviB: A short history of excavations and investigations in Babylon; Wikipedia: Cyrus Cylinder

Darius I and the Babylonian revolts (reigned 522 to 486 BC; Babylon revolted in autumn 522 and again in 521 BC)

Darius I (Old Persian Darayavaush), 'the Great', Achaemenid · Persia and Babylon

When Darius seized the Persian throne in 522 BC, much of the empire rebelled. In Babylon Nidintu-Bel made himself king under the name Nebuchadnezzar (III). Darius marched on Babylon and on 18 December 522 BC destroyed his army at Zazana on the Euphrates, where, he says, the fleeing enemy were carried away by the river. In 521 BC, while Darius was away in Persia and Media, an Armenian named Arakha, son of Haldita, claimed to be 'Nebuchadnezzar, son of Nabonidus' and took Babylon; Darius' general Intaphernes captured him on 27 November 521 BC. Darius recorded both revolts in his great inscription at Behistun in western Iran.

How they came to power: Darius, a distant relative of Cambyses (his father Hystaspes and Cyrus shared a great-grandfather), joined six Persian nobles against the king they called the impostor Gaumata; by the Behistun inscription he killed him on 29 September 522 BC and took the throne.

How it ended: He died in 486 BC, when the Persian empire was at its largest, and was succeeded by his son Xerxes.

• The Behistun inscription says Darius ordered Arakha and his chief followers to be crucified in Babylon.
• Intaphernes, who put down the second revolt, was one of the six Persian nobles who had helped Darius take the throne.
• Herodotus (3.150-159) tells a different, legendary story: a siege of a year and seven months, ended when the noble Zopyrus cut off his own nose and ears and deserted to the Babylonians to betray the city, after which Darius pulled down the walls and impaled about 3,000 leading Babylonians.

Sources: Livius.org: Behistun inscription (Persian text) §19; Livius.org: Behistun inscription (Persian text) §49; Livius.org: Behistun inscription (Persian text) §50; Herodotus, Histories 3.150-159, tr. G. C. Macaulay (1890), Project Gutenberg; Livius.org (Jona Lendering): Darius the Great

Xerxes and the revolts of 484 BC (reigned 486 to 465 BC; Babylonian revolts July to October 484 BC (best estimate))

Xerxes I (Old Persian Khshayarsha), king of Persia, Achaemenid · Persia and Babylon

Early in Xerxes' reign, probably in the summer of 484 BC, two rebels claimed the kingship of Babylon: Shamash-eriba in the north and Bel-shimanni in the country south of Babylon. Within about three months Persian forces restored order. The most striking trace of the revolt is not a chronicle but a silence: many family archives of Babylon's old temple and city elite, including the Egibi archive, stop in that year, while those of cities that stayed loyal, such as Ur and Uruk, carry on. Caroline Waerzeggers has argued that this reflects Persian punishment aimed at the rebels' supporters.

How they came to power: Xerxes, son of Darius I, was crowned in late 486 BC after his father's death.

How it ended: In August 465 BC he was assassinated by Artabanus, commander of the royal bodyguard; his heir Darius was killed too.

• Herodotus (1.183) says Xerxes took a solid gold statue twelve cubits high from Marduk's temple precinct and killed the priest who tried to stop him; he admits he did not see it himself.
• Arrian, writing in the 2nd century AD, says Xerxes razed the temple of Bel on his return from Greece; modern scholars such as Amelie Kuhrt doubt any such destruction, and Herodotus speaks only of a statue taken.
• Older studies date Shamash-eriba's revolt to 482-481 BC with a long siege of Babylon; the archive evidence analysed by Waerzeggers places both rebels in the summer of 484 BC.

Sources: Herodotus, Histories 1.183, tr. G. C. Macaulay (1890), Project Gutenberg; Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander 7.17, tr. E. J. Chinnock (1884), Project Gutenberg; Livius.org (Jona Lendering): Bêl-šimânni and Šamaš-eriba; C. Waerzeggers, 'The Babylonian Revolts Against Xerxes and the End of Archives', Archiv für Orientforschung 50 (2003), KeiBi record; Wikipedia: Xerxes I

The Murashu archive of Nippur (c. 455 to 403 BC (mostly 440 to 416 BC); found 1893)

The Murashu family of Nippur ran a business under the Persian kings Artaxerxes I and Darius II, leasing land and water rights from holders of 'bow land', estates granted in return for military service and taxes, and subletting them to farmers with seed, animals and tools. They also lent silver against property and paid rents and taxes for their clients. The archive, nearly 900 tablets and fragments, almost all contracts, was found in 1893 by the University of Pennsylvania's expedition to Nippur. It is one of the best pictures of everyday rural economy in Persian Babylonia.

• In May 1893 workmen clearing a room at Nippur uncovered about 730 tablets within a few hours.
• About eighty names in the archive are distinctively Judean, many built on the divine name Yahweh; their bearers are presumed to be descendants of the exiles living and working around Nippur.
• Part of the find was shipped to Istanbul, where H. V. Hilprecht first identified the firm; the tablets are now scattered among collections in Philadelphia, Istanbul, London, Jena and California.

Sources: Center for Online Judaic Studies: The Murashû Archive, late 5th century BCE; Kesher (Joshua Brumbach, 2021): Jews, Exile, and the Murashu Archive of Nippur; Wikipedia: Murašû Archive

Alexander the Great in Babylon (entered Babylon October 331 BC; died there 11 June 323 BC)

Alexander III of Macedon, called in a Babylonian diary 'king of the world', Argead (Macedonian) · Babylon

After defeating Darius III at Gaugamela on 1 October 331 BC, Alexander marched straight to Babylon. Arrian says the Babylonians came out with their priests and leaders to surrender the city, and that Alexander ordered the temples rebuilt, above all that of Bel (Marduk), and sacrificed as the Chaldean priests directed. A Babylonian astronomical diary records that he sent word from Sippar promising not to enter the people's houses, and his entry into Babylon a few days later. He came back in spring 323 BC, put his soldiers to work clearing the ruined ziggurat for a rebuilding, took up residence in the old royal palace, and died there in June.

How they came to power: As king of Macedon he invaded the Persian empire; his victory over Darius III at Gaugamela, beyond the Tigris, opened Mesopotamia to him.

How it ended: He fell ill in Babylon and died on 29 Ayyaru, 11 June 323 BC, probably in the late afternoon. The astronomical diary for that day notes only that the king died and the sky was cloudy.

• The diary records a total lunar eclipse on 20 September 331 BC, read as an omen against Persia, eleven days before the battle.
• Arrian (7.16) says Chaldean priests met Alexander in 323 BC and begged him not to enter Babylon; he suspected they wanted to keep the temple revenues, since rebuilding the temple of Bel would end their use of them.
• The diary says the Persian king's troops deserted him at Gaugamela, differing from the Greek historians, who say Darius fled.

Sources: Livius.org: A Contemporary Account of the Battle of Gaugamela (astronomical diary); Livius.org: A Contemporary Account of the Death of Alexander (astronomical diary); Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander 3.16 and 7.16-17, tr. E. J. Chinnock (1884), Project Gutenberg; Livius.org (Jona Lendering): Alexander's last days

Seleucus I and the founding of Seleucia (back in Babylon May 311 BC; Seleucia founded c. 305 BC; died September 281 BC)

Seleucus I Nicator ("the Victor"), Seleucid · Babylon and Seleucia on the Tigris

Seleucus, one of Alexander's officers, became satrap of Babylonia around 320 BC, fled to Ptolemy in Egypt in 316 BC when Antigonus moved against him, and won Babylonia back in May 311 BC. The Babylonian Diadochi Chronicle records years of fighting around Babylon with Antigonus' forces, with plunder, high barley prices and 'weeping and mourning in the land'. Seleucus' return was later counted as year 1 of the Seleucid era, a dating system that outlived his dynasty by many centuries. Around 305 BC he founded Seleucia on the Tigris as his capital, and in the following decades Babylon lost people and importance to the new city.

How they came to power: After Alexander's death he was given Babylonia, and in 311 BC he recovered it with a small force; the Diadochi Chronicle says he then ordered scribes to date documents by the years of Alexander IV and himself instead of Antigonus.

How it ended: In September 281 BC, after defeating Lysimachus at Corupedium, he crossed into Europe and was murdered by Ptolemy Keraunos.

• The chronicle says barley rose to 6 litres per shekel during the war, against an ideal price of about 180 litres, and that many houses were destroyed.
• A chronicle and an astronomical diary of about 275 BC record people being moved to Seleucia; van der Spek reads the text as Macedonians leaving Babylon rather than Babylonians, while Pausanias says Seleucus settled Babylonians there.
• Seleucia outlived Babylon as a great city: after the Parthian conquest of 141 BC it became the western capital of the Parthian empire, until Roman armies sacked it in the AD 160s; by 198/199 it was found abandoned.

Sources: Livius.org: BCHP 3 (Diadochi Chronicle); Livius.org (Jona Lendering): Seleucus I Nicator; Wikipedia: Seleucia

Berossus (wrote c. 290 to 278 BC)

Bel-re'ushunu (Greek Berossos), priest of Marduk, Priest and historian · Babylon

Berossus was a priest of Marduk at Babylon who wrote the Babyloniaca, a history of Babylonia in Greek in three books, dedicated to the Seleucid king Antiochus I. Book 1 told of the creation, Marduk's victory over the sea monster and the fish-man Oannes who taught humans writing, farming and the arts; Book 2 listed kings before and after the Great Flood; Book 3 told the history of Assyria, Babylon and Persia. The work is lost and survives only in quotations, notably by Josephus and Eusebius. Through him, Greek and Roman readers learned of Nebuchadnezzar, the Hanging Gardens and the fall of Babylon from a Babylonian point of view.

How they rose: He was a member of the temple elite of Esagila; Livius, following recent research, identifies him with Bel-re'ushunu, recorded as head of the temple administration (shatammu) of Esagila in the 250s BC. Tatian dated the publication of his book to Antiochus I's third year, 278 BC.

How they died: Unknown. Later Greek and Roman writers say he founded a school of astrology on the island of Kos and that the Athenians set up a statue to him, stories many scholars doubt.

• Josephus quotes Berossus' complaint that Greek writers wrongly credited Babylon's great buildings to the legendary queen Semiramis.
• The last event recorded in the surviving fragments of his history is the death of Alexander in Babylon in 323 BC.
• His flood story resembles the flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Sources: Josephus, Against Apion 1.19-20 (quoting Berossus), tr. William Whiston, Project Gutenberg; Livius.org (Jona Lendering): Berossus; Wikipedia: Berossus

The Antiochus Cylinder (20 Addaru, Seleucid year 43 (27 March 268 BC))

The Antiochus Cylinder records that the Seleucid king Antiochus I moulded with his own hands, in the land of Hatti (Syria), the first bricks for Esagila in Babylon and Ezida, Nabu's temple at Borsippa, and laid the foundation of Ezida on 27 March 268 BC. Written in traditional Akkadian in a deliberately old-fashioned script, it gives Antiochus the old titles 'great king, mighty king, king of the world, king of Babylon, king of the lands, caretaker of Esagila and Ezida', and calls his father Seleucus 'the Macedonian, king of Babylon'. It ends with a prayer to Nabu for victory, a long reign and blessings on the king, his son Seleucus and his queen Stratonice. Hormuzd Rassam found it in 1880 in Ezida, apparently still in its original position; it is in the British Museum (BM 36277).

• It is the latest known example of a Mesopotamian royal foundation cylinder.
• Its archaic script contrasts with the ordinary Late Babylonian hand used in the chronicles and astronomical diaries of the same time.
• It shows a Macedonian dynasty presenting itself to Babylonians in the language and rituals of native kingship.

Sources: Livius.org: Antiochus Cylinder (translation and commentary); ORACC, CAMS/Seleucid Building Inscriptions: Antiochus I 1 (Borsippa cylinder), transliteration and translation; Wikipedia: Antiochus cylinder

The Parthians take Babylonia (141 BC)

The Parthian king Mithridates I, having taken Media in the 140s BC, conquered Babylonia and Seleucia on the Tigris in 141 BC, minting coins at Seleucia and holding an investiture there. The Seleucid king Demetrius II tried to win the region back but was defeated and captured in 138 BC. The Parthian empire, which ruled from 247 BC to AD 224, held Babylonia for most of the rest of its history. Babylonian texts from this time show the temple of Esagila still functioning, offering sacrifices for the life of the Arsacid king, while the city had Greek-style officials such as an epistates (governor) and citizen body (politai).

• An astronomical diary of about 135 to 132 BC (BCHP 18C) records sacrifices in Babylon for the life of King Arsaces and of the Parthian prince Bagayasha, who carried out a punitive action against the city.
• Under Parthian rule Seleucia became the western capital of the empire.
• A temple memorandum of 126 BC mentions an astronomer of Esagila serving at the court of Hyspaosines, king of the Gulf kingdom of Characene, who briefly also ruled Babylon.

Sources: Livius.org: BCHP 18C (Astronomical Diary concerning Bagayasha and Timotheus); World History Encyclopedia: Parthian Empire; Eleanor Robson, 'Who wrote the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries?' (2019), UCL Discovery; Wikipedia: Mithridates I of Parthia

The last cuneiform tablets (AD 75 (long cited as the latest); AD 79/80 (Uruk almanac, the latest now known))

From the later first millennium BC cuneiform fell out of everyday use as Aramaic, written in an alphabet, slowly replaced Akkadian, and in the end alphabetic writing replaced it entirely. It survived longest among temple scholars, and the last securely dated tablets are astronomical texts. For decades an astronomical text for AD 75 was cited as the latest datable cuneiform tablet. In 2014 Hermann Hunger and Teije de Jong published an almanac from Uruk (W22340a), dated by its astronomical predictions to year 326 of the Arsacid era, AD 79/80, now the latest datable cuneiform text known.

• The first unequivocal cuneiform documents come from Uruk around 3300 BC, so the last known text comes from the same city where the script was born.
• Hunger and de Jong dated the Uruk almanac from the astronomical phenomena it predicts, and argue that it shows astronomical scholarship continuing in Uruk as well as Babylon far into the first century AD.
• Modern decipherment began with Georg Friedrich Grotefend's work in 1802, and the script was considered successfully deciphered by 1857.

Sources: H. Hunger and T. de Jong, 'Almanac W22340a from Uruk: the Latest Datable Cuneiform Tablet', Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 104 (2014), University of Amsterdam repository; KeiBi (Tübingen): record of Hunger and de Jong 2014; Wikipedia: Cuneiform

Claudius James Rich (surveyed Babylon 1811; Memoir published 1815; died 5 October 1821)

Claudius James Rich, British Resident at Baghdad, East India Company Resident · Baghdad

Claudius James Rich, a gifted linguist in the service of the East India Company, became the Company's Resident in Baghdad in 1808. In 1811 he spent time at the ruins of Babylon, mapping the mounds and making small excavations, and published his results in a Vienna journal and then in London in 1815 as the Memoir on the Ruins of Babylon, which went through further editions by 1818. His work began the modern exploration of the site. He sent home a stele of Nabonidus, cylinder seals, cuneiform tablets and inscribed bricks.

How they rose: Born in 1787 near Dijon and raised in Bristol, he joined the East India Company in 1803, studied Turkish in Constantinople and Smyrna, and married Mary Mackintosh in January 1808, the year he became Resident in Baghdad.

How they died: He died of cholera in Shiraz on 5 October 1821. His widow sold his collections, including some of the earliest cuneiform inscriptions to reach Europe and about 900 manuscripts, to the British Museum.

• Contemporaries called him the most powerful man in Baghdad.
• He also visited Nineveh in 1820; his widow published that journey in 1836.
• The 1818 London edition of the Memoir runs to 67 pages with a frontispiece and two plates.

Sources: C. J. Rich, Memoir on the Ruins of Babylon (London, 1818), Archive of Mesopotamian Archaeological Reports, Stony Brook University; University of Münster, GoviB: A short history of excavations and investigations in Babylon; Wikipedia: Claudius James Rich

Hormuzd Rassam (Babylonian excavations 1879 to 1882 (born 1826, died 1910))

Hormuzd Rassam, excavator for the British Museum, Archaeologist · Mosul, Babylon and Sippar

Hormuzd Rassam, an Assyrian born in 1826 in the Ottoman Empire, began as Austen Henry Layard's paymaster at Nimrud in 1846 and made his own finds at Nineveh, including tablets later recognised as part of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Working for the British Museum from 1877 to 1882, he dug at many sites. At Babylon in 1879 he worked mainly in the temples of Ninmah and Marduk and found the Cyrus Cylinder; at Borsippa in 1880 he found the Antiochus Cylinder; and at Sippar (Abu Habba) he uncovered a temple, a cylinder of Nabonidus and tens of thousands of temple account tablets.

How they rose: Layard hired him in 1846 as a paymaster at Nimrud; his later diplomatic service, including a mission to Emperor Tewodros II of Ethiopia that ended in his captivity from 1866 to 1868, made him known in Britain before the British Museum sent him back to Mesopotamia.

How they died: He lived in Brighton after 1882, wrote on archaeology and on the Christians of the Near East, and died in 1910.

• Sir Henry Rawlinson questioned his role in his discoveries, and in 1893 Rassam won a slander and libel case against the Assyriologist E. A. Wallis Budge.
• Later critics have said his digging was poorly recorded and at times little better than looting.
• Queen Victoria rewarded him with 5,000 pounds after his release from captivity in Ethiopia.

Sources: University of Münster, GoviB: A short history of excavations and investigations in Babylon; Livius.org: Antiochus Cylinder; Wikipedia: Hormuzd Rassam

Robert Koldewey's excavations (26 March 1899 to 7 March 1917)

Robert Koldewey, architect and excavator, Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft · Babylon

Robert Koldewey (1855-1925), an architect, led the German Oriental Society's excavation of Babylon from 26 March 1899 until 7 March 1917, when the First World War ended the work. With often more than 200 workers and a staff including Walter Andrae, Oscar Reuther and Friedrich Wetzel, he dug the Kasr mound with its palaces, the Ishtar Gate and Processional Way, the foundations of Etemenanki, temples, a Greek theatre and private houses. He developed methods for tracing unbaked mudbrick walls, which made it possible to recover the plan of a city built largely of mudbrick. The glazed bricks of the Ishtar Gate and Processional Way were shipped to Berlin and rebuilt in the Pergamon Museum, opened in 1930.

How they rose: The excavation grew out of a preliminary expedition of 1897/98 financed by James Simon, and was backed by the newly founded German Oriental Society, the Royal Museums of Berlin and Kaiser Wilhelm II.

How they died: Work stopped in March 1917 because of the First World War; Koldewey died in 1925.

• Work paused twice: in 1905 during negotiations with the Ottoman authorities, and from October 1915 to January 1916.
• Koldewey believed a vaulted basement in the Southern Palace was the substructure of the Hanging Gardens; other archaeologists argue it was too far from the river and was probably a storeroom.
• Walter Andrae, a member of the expedition, later made the models of Babylon for the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin.

Sources: University of Münster, GoviB: A short history of excavations and investigations in Babylon; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: Vorderasiatisches Museum collection; UNESCO, Final Report on Damage Assessment in Babylon (2009), historical background; Wikipedia: Robert Koldewey

Iraq rebuilds Babylon (project began 14 February 1978; most work 1978 to 1987; first Babylon International Festival September 1987)

The Archaeological Restoration of Babylon Project, ordered by the Iraqi government, began on 14 February 1978 and was carried out mostly between 1978 and 1987 by the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage. Ancient buildings were rebuilt on their excavated foundations, and visitor facilities were placed inside the site; the UNESCO damage report lists the Southern Palace of Nebuchadnezzar, the northern Processional Way, the temples of Ninmah and Nabu-sha-hare, part of the inner wall, Babylonian houses and the Greek theatre among works not done to modern restoration standards. Landscaping added artificial lakes and three artificial mounds about 30 metres high, on one of which, beside the Euphrates, a presidential palace for Saddam Hussein was built. From 1987 the reconstructed theatre and Southern Palace were used for the annual Babylon International Festival.

• Many of the new bricks were stamped with Saddam Hussein's name, in imitation of Nebuchadnezzar's inscribed bricks.
• UNESCO's 2019 evaluation found that some reconstructions were nearly complete rebuildings based on scant evidence, so their height and design are conjecture, and that they harmed the integrity of the property.
• The Greek theatre was rebuilt on concrete foundations, which the UNESCO report calls a clear breach of international restoration standards; the Nabu-sha-hare temple had been uncovered by Iraqi excavations in 1979 to 1981.

Sources: UNESCO, Final Report on Damage Assessment in Babylon (2009); UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Babylon (statement of Outstanding Universal Value); University of Münster, GoviB: A short history of excavations and investigations in Babylon; Wikipedia: Babylon

Military base at Babylon (Camp Alpha) (occupied 21 April 2003; Camp Alpha 2 September 2003 to 22 December 2004)

During the 2003 war the site museums at Babylon were broken into and emptied, and everything in the site's library and archive was destroyed. On 21 April 2003 Coalition units occupied the site, and from 2 September 2003 it became 'Camp Alpha', a base of about 150 hectares in the centre of the ancient city, with Polish-led multinational forces in charge from that September. The site was handed back to Iraq's State Board of Antiquities and Heritage on 22 December 2004. Reports by Iraqi archaeologists, Polish archaeologists attached to the force, John Curtis of the British Museum and a UNESCO committee in 2009 recorded the damage.

• The UNESCO report lists defensive trenches dug through the ancient city, the longest 162 metres long and 2 metres deep in the religious quarter, and one at the corner of the ziggurat that cut into undisturbed archaeological layers.
• On the Ishtar Gate, bricks of nine of the dragon figures were smashed, and heavy vehicles broke the paving of the southern Processional Way, where two-ton concrete blocks were later lifted out by helicopter on 29 November 2004.
• The two site museums lost everything on display, but those objects were plaster replicas, not originals.

Sources: UNESCO, Final Report on Damage Assessment in Babylon (26 June 2009); The Art Newspaper (1 February 2005): US base has caused 'shocking' damage to Babylon; Wikipedia: Babylon

Babylon becomes a World Heritage Site (inscribed 5 July 2019 (World Heritage Committee meeting in Baku))

In July 2019 the World Heritage Committee, meeting in Baku, inscribed Babylon on the World Heritage List under criteria (iii) and (vi). The property covers 1,054.3 hectares, with a 154.5-hectare buffer zone, 85 km south of Baghdad, and includes the ruins of the Neo-Babylonian capital of 626 to 539 BC with its outer and inner walls, gates, palaces and temples, as well as surrounding villages and farmland. UNESCO's statement stresses Babylon's influence on later art, religion and literature, including the Tower of Babel and Hanging Gardens traditions. It also records that the site's fabric was in critical condition at the time of inscription.

• UNESCO says about 85 percent of the property is unexcavated.
• Its statement links the Tower of Babel to the ziggurat Etemenanki and the Hanging Gardens tradition to Nebuchadnezzar's palace complex, both with traces still preserved.
• The listing names threats including illegal building, rubbish dumping and burning, small-scale industrial pollution and urban encroachment.

Sources: UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Babylon (whc.unesco.org/en/list/278); Al Jazeera (5 July 2019): Iraq's Babylon listed as World Heritage Site by UNESCO; NPR via KAXE (5 July 2019): UNESCO adds ruins of ancient Babylon to its list of World Heritage Sites; Wikipedia: Babylon