Esarhaddon, Samas-suma-ukin and Nebuchadnezzar I

The efforts of Esarhaddon and his sons can be viewed as a single, protracted undertaking, inaugurated by Esarhaddon, to reverse the actions of Sennacherib and create a narrative that mitigated royal involvement in any sacrilege.

Marduk's return to Babylon from Assur in the second month of 668 was met with great pageantry throughout the land,⁴⁴ and Samas-suma-ukin's inaugural akitu festival, in which he grasped the hand of Marduk, almost a year later in 667 would have been equally momentous. On both occasions all in the assembled throngs would have been aware of the magnitude of events - after a 20-year exile, Marduk was returning to his city and after 21 years, the akitu festival was being celebrated - and many would have been mindful of the tumult of the preceding decades.

Samas-suma-ukin began his first full regnal year as king of Babylon with Assyrian backing. However, the success of his reign also rested on his being accepted by his Babylonian subjects. Scribes in Assyria and Babylonia had attempted to explain the contemporary situation by turning both to previous destructions of Babylon and abductions of Marduk as well as to revivals of Babylon and restorations of Marduk for precedence.⁴⁵ The discourse that resulted survives in an interrelated matrix of letters, royal inscriptions, literary-historical compositions and scholarly texts which provide insights into how the Assyrian royal family and networks of Babylonian and Assyrian scholars made sense of the past and created an ideological justification for both the destruction and rebuilding of Babylon and the departure and return of Marduk. In this light, Marduk's return and Samas-suma-ukin's accession can be understood as the culmination of an attempt to create an ideological understanding of the recent past and the more distant past that was responsible to earlier events and achieved a sufficiently broad agreement among the many strands of memory that comprised Babylonian cultural memory.

A figure from Babylonia’s distant past who would have been relevant to this ideology was Nebuchadnezzar I. There is not abundant evidence of Nebuchadnezzar I’s immediate presence within the Assyrian and Babylonian discourse, the one exception being a court astrologer’s report to Esarhaddon from late in his reign that references the omen series, ‘When Nebuchadnezzer Broke Elam’.⁴⁶ No copies of this series survive,⁴⁷ but its title is a clear indication that the series took an interest in Nebuchadnezzar I and his war with Elam.⁴⁸ During Nebuchadnezzar’s reign, Babylonia experienced a revival of fortunes after Elamite invasions had toppled the last kings of the Kassite dynasty in the mid-twelfth century.

It is unknown when these traditions began, but the earliest exemplars date from the seventh century. The appeal of Nebuchadnezzar I in the seventh century may have been based on the belief that he, like Samas-suma-ukin, was responsible for the return of Marduk to Babylon after a period of divine abandonment. Significant to this argument are the many literary-historical compositions celebrating Nebucahdezzar I’s return of Marduk known from Assyrian contexts. And while the Nebuchadnezzar tradition does not figure explicitly in Assyrian royal inscriptions - a positive portrayal of a non-Assyrian king would be out of place in the genre - Assyrian interest in Nebuchadnezzar I found expression in a composition known as ‘The Marduk Prophecy', the sentiments of which appear as subtext in Esarhaddon's inscriptions and those of his successors.

In comparison to the primary sources that describe Nebuchadnezzar I's campaign against Elam, the literary-historical compositions inspired by those events place Marduk firmly at the centre.

Significantly, none of the tablets on which these compositions survive date from the late twelfth century, and the archaeological provenances of these tablets also reveal that many of them were not found in Babylonian contexts. Instead, many of the tablets date from the seventh century and were excavated at the mound of Kuyunjik, making them part of Ashurbanipal's palace library at Nineveh.⁵⁶ Colophons on a few of the tablets identify them as part of Ashurbanipal's library and their presence in the collection introduces chrono­logical problems stemming from the fact that a significant portion of the library was assembled after Ashurbanipal had put down his brother's rebellion in 648 bc.⁵⁷ These tablets would have been in Assyrian hands two decades after Samas-suma-ukin's installation, far too late to influence Assyrian scribes if this was the first introduction of the Nebuchadnezzar tradition in an Assyrian context. However, the existence of these tablets suggests that there was active interest in the tradition in the previous decades.

I - from scholars in Assyria and Babylonia who maintained their own archives of scholarly texts.⁵⁸ Even if some of the tablets featuring Nebuchadnezzar I entered Ashurbanipals library after 648, the aforementioned reference to the omen series ‘When Nebuchadnezzar Smashed Elam' by Nabu-muse^i, himself an Assyrian astrologer at the court of Nineveh, indicates that there were scholars familiar with the Babylonian king present at the court well before the library reached its final state.⁵⁹

But despite the preponderance ofliterary works concerning Nebuchadnezzar I from Assyria, the tradition had Babylonian origins: one of the tablets contains a colophon identifying it as a copy made from an original in Babylon and one composition has been found on multiple exemplars from both Assyrian and Babylonian contexts. The fact that tablets closer in date to Nebuchadnezzar I’s reign do not exist today does not mean that they did not exist in antiquity; the date of a tablet cannot be equated with the date of textual composition. However, it is apparent that scribes in Babylonia and Assyria with access to Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal were looking at tablets and other texts that mentioned Nebuchadnezzar I, they were copying and perhaps even creating compositions that were based on that tradition, and, most importantly, their interest was drawn to Nebuchadnezzar I.

The literary-historical traditions surrounding Nebuchadnezzar I as they pertained to the theological explanation for the Assyrian removal of Marduk from Babylon are summed up in the ‘Marduk Prophecy’, a short compo­sition in which Marduk describes his many sojourns away from Babylon.⁶⁰ His first desire had been to go to Hatti, an allusion to the sack of Babylon by Murshili I that brought Hammurabi’s dynasty to a close.⁶¹ Marduk eventually returned from this visit and spent some time in Babylon before becoming pleased with the king of Assyria, a reference to Tukulti-Ninurta I, and going to Assur to deliver the lands into the king’s hands.⁶² Finally, Marduk states that he left Babylon for Elam, a decision that brought great suffering to the Babylonians.

The pro-Assyrian tone of the ‘Marduk Prophecy' and the archaeological provenance of the copies suggest that the ‘Marduk Prophecy’, as it survived, spoke to Assyrian interests in Babylon prior to Marduk's return in 668.⁶⁷ Significantly, elements in the text even parallel phrases and themes in Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal's own inscription pertaining to Der and Babylon.⁶⁸ The ‘Marduk Prophecy' reassured an Assyrian audience that, throughout the past, Marduk had never departed from Babylon involuntarily and that his previous visit to Assyria was not an Assyrian sacrilege, but rather a gesture of divine favour that granted the Assyrians imperial domination. Such precedence cleared Sennacherib of any sin and justified Assyrian rule over Babylonia. However, the survival of similar and identical textual tradi­tions about Nebuchadnezzar I in both Assyrian and Babylonian contexts indicates that the past upon which the ‘Marduk Prophecy' drew originated from traditions that had been preserved in Babylonia, most likely by the Babylonian priests in the cult of Marduk who had an undeniable interest in seeing Babylon and the Esagil temple rebuilt and Marduk returned,⁶⁹ but also possibly by some of the broader populace. If, as seems likely, these traditions originated in Babylonia, then the Assyrian programme in Babylon repre­sented a repackaging of those traditions for broader public consumption as Esarhaddon and then his sons extended the discourse to the general citizenry of Babylon.