Marduk-ahhe-eriba

Marduk-aḫḫe-eriba
King of Babylon
Hilprecht’s line art for the Marduk-aḫḫē-erība kudurru
Reign	ca. 1046 BC
Predecessor	Adad-apla-iddina
Successor	Marduk-zer-X
House	2nd Dynasty of Isin

Marduk-aḫḫē-erība, inscribed in cuneiform contemporarily as ^mdAMAR.UTU-ŠEŠ-MEŠ-SU, meaning: “Marduk has replaced the brothers for me,” a designation given to younger sons whose older siblings have typically predeceased them, ca. 1046 BC, ruled as 9th king of the 2nd Dynasty of Isin and the 4th Dynasty of Babylon, but only for around 6 months using the date formula: MU 1 ITI 6, which first appears in Kassite times and is open to interpretation. According to the Synchronistic Kinglist he was a contemporary of the Assyrian king Aššur-bêl-kala where only the beginning of his name appears below that of his immediate predecessor Adad-apla-iddina.

The only contemporary source is a kudurru (line art pictured), or gray limestone boundary marker, in a private collection in Istanbul, which records a land grant to a certain Kudurrâ, a “Ḫabiru” and servant of the king, in a region of northern Babylonia called Bīt-Piri’-Amurru. The term Ḫabiru may represent a socio-economic rather than ethnic designation as the name Kudurrâ is possibly not linguistically of semitic derivation. The field was surveyed by a diviner, a scribe named Nabû-ēriš the son of (i.e. descendant of) Arad-Ea, an administrator and a mayor.

It has been suggested that he is the 5th king represented in the Prophecy A by the single line, “A prince will arise, and his days will be short. He will not rule in the land.” This is a late Assyrian tablet found at Assur and first published in 1923, which narrates a sequence of 12 Babylonian kings.