Chronicle of Early Kings

The Chronicle of Early Kings, Chronicle 20 in Grayson’s Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles and Mesopotamian Chronicle 40 in Glassner’s Chroniques mésopotamiennes is preserved on two tablets, tablet A is well preserved whereas tablet B is broken and the text fragmentary. Episodic in character, it seems to have been composed from linking together the apodoses of omen literature, excerpts of the Weidner Chronicle and year-names. It begins with events from the late third-millennium reign of Sargon of Akkad and ends, where the tablet is broken away, with that of Agum III, c.a 1500 BC.

A third Babylonian Chronicle Fragment B, Mesopotamian Chronicle 41 deals with related subject matter and may be a variant tradition of the same type of work.

Tablet A begins with a lengthy passage concerning the rise and eventual downfall of Sargon of Akkad, caused by his impious treatment of Babylon:

He dug up the dirt of the pit of Babylon and
made a counterpart of Babylon next to Agade.
Because of the wrong he had done the great lord Marduk became angry and
wiped out his people by famine.
They (his subjects) rebelled against him
from east to west
and he (Marduk) afflicted [him] with insomnia.

This seemingly anachronous reference to Babylon reproduces text from the Weidner Chronicle. Little is known of the city of Babylon in the third-millennium with the earliest reference to it coming from a year-name of Šar-kali-šarri, Sargon’s grandson. In contrast, the Chronicle devotes a mere six lines to his nephew, Naram-Sin, and two campaigns against Apišal, a city located in northern Syria, and Magan, thought to be in ancient Oman. That of Apišal appears as an apodosis to an omen in the Bārûtu, the compendium of sacrificial omens.

Šulgi receives short shrift from Marduk, who wreaks a terrible revenge for his expropriation of the property of Marduk’s temple, the Ésagil, and Babylon, as he “caused (something or other) to consume his body and killed him” in a passage that, despite its perfect state of preservation, remains unintelligible.Erra-Imittī’s legendary tale of his demise and that of Enlil-bāni’s ascendency occupies the next passage, followed by a terse observation that “Ilu-šūma was king of Assyria in time of Su-abu”, who was once identified with Sumu-abum, the founder of the First Dynasty of Babylon until a consideration of the relative chronologies made this identification unlikely. The tablet concludes with the label or mark GIGAM.DIDLI which may have been a scribal catalog reference or alternatively denote continuing disruption, as GIGAM represents ippiru, “strife, conflict.”

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