1.
Kassites
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The Kassites were a people of the ancient Near East, who controlled Babylonia after the fall of the Old Babylonian Empire c.1531 BC and until c.1155 BC. The endonym of the Kassites was probably Galzu, although they have also referred to by the names Kaššu. They gained control of Babylonia after the Hittite sack of the city in 1595 BC, the horse, which the Kassites worshipped, first came into use in Babylonia at this time. The Kassite language has not been classified, however, several Kassite leaders bore Indo-European names, and they might have had an Indo-European elite similar to the Mitanni, who ruled over the Hurro-Urartian-speaking Hurrians of Asia Minor. The original homeland of the Kassites is not well known, but appears to have located in the Zagros Mountains. However the Kassites were – like the Elamites, Gutians and Manneans who preceded them – linguistically unrelated to the Iranian-speaking peoples who came to dominate the region a millennium later. They first appeared in the annals of history in the 18th century BC when they attacked Babylonia in the 9th year of the reign of Samsu-iluna, the son of Hammurabi. The Hittites had carried off the idol of the god Marduk, but the Kassite rulers regained possession, returned Marduk to Babylon, the circumstances of their rise to power are unknown, due to a lack of documentation from this so-called Dark Age period of widespread dislocation. No inscription or document in the Kassite language has been preserved, Babylon under Kassite rulers, who renamed the city Karanduniash, re-emerged as a political and military power in Mesopotamia. A newly built capital city Dur-Kurigalzu was named in honour of Kurigalzu I and their success was built upon the relative political stability that the Kassite monarchs achieved. They ruled Babylonia practically without interruption for almost four hundred years— the longest rule by any dynasty in Babylonian history, Kassite kings established trade and diplomacy with Assyria. Egypt, Elam, and the Hittites, and the Kassite royal house intermarried with their royal families, There were foreign merchants in Babylon and other cities, and Babylonian merchants were active from Egypt to Assyria and Anatolia. A further treaty between Kurigalzu I and Ashur-bel-nisheshu of Assyria was agreed in the mid 15th century, Babylon was sacked by the Assyrian king Ashur-uballit I ) in the 1360s after the Kassite king in Babylon who was married to the daughter of Ashur-uballit was murdered. Ashur-uballit promptly marched into Babylonia and avenged his son-in-law, deposing the king and installing Kurigalzu II of the royal Kassite line as king there and his successor Enlil-nirari also attacked Babylonia and his great grandson Adad-nirari I annexed Babylonian territory when he became king. Tukulti-Ninurta I not content with merely dominating Babylonia went further, conquering Babylonia, deposing Kashtiliash IV, the Kassite kings maintained control of their realm through a network of provinces administered by governors. Almost equal with the cities of Babylon and Dur-Kurigalzu, the revived city of Nippur was the most important provincial center. Nippur, the great city, which had been virtually abandoned c.1730 BC, was rebuilt in the Kassite period. In fact, under the Kassite government, the governor of Nippur, the prestige of Nippur was enough for a series of 13th century BC Kassite kings to reassume the title governor of Nippur for themselves
2.
Babylon
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Babylon was a major city of ancient Mesopotamia in the fertile plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The city was built upon the Euphrates and divided in parts along its left and right banks. Babylon was originally a small Semitic Akkadian city dating from the period of the Akkadian Empire c.2300 BC, the town attained independence as part of a small city-state with the rise of the First Amorite Babylonian Dynasty in 1894 BC. Babylon grew and South Mesopotamia came to be known as Babylonia, the empire quickly dissolved after Hammurabis death and Babylon spent long periods under Assyrian, Kassite and Elamite domination. After being destroyed and then rebuilt by the Assyrians, Babylon became the capital of the Neo-Babylonian Empire from 609 to 539 BC, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. After the fall of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, the city came under the rule of the Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian, Roman, and Sassanid empires. It has been estimated that Babylon was the largest city in the world from c.1770 to 1670 BC and it was perhaps the first city to reach a population above 200,000. Estimates for the extent of its area range from 890 to 900 hectares. The remains of the city are in present-day Hillah, Babil Governorate, Iraq, about 85 kilometres south of Baghdad, comprising a large tell of broken mud-brick buildings, the English Babylon comes from Greek Babylṓn, a transliteration of the Akkadian Babili. The Babylonian name in the early 2nd millennium BC had been Babilli or Babilla, by the 1st millennium BC, it had changed to Babili under the influence of the folk etymology which traced it to bāb-ili. The Gate of God or Gate of El being from the Aramaic Hebrew Bab for Gate and El for God and this being similar to the Hebrew word for confusion Balal. In the Bible, the name appears as Babel, interpreted in the Hebrew Scriptures Book of Genesis to mean confusion, the modern English verb, to babble, or to speak meaningless words, is popularly thought to derive from this name, but there is no direct connection. The remains of the city are in present-day Hillah, Babil Governorate, Iraq, about 85 kilometers south of Baghdad, comprising a large tell of broken mud-brick buildings and debris. The site at Babylon consists of a number of mounds covering an area of about 2 by 1 kilometer, oriented north to south, along the Euphrates to the west. Originally, the river roughly bisected the city, but the course of the river has since shifted so that most of the remains of the western part of the city are now inundated. Some portions of the city wall to the west of the river also remain, remains of the city include, Kasr—also called Palace or Castle, it is the location of the Neo-Babylonian ziggurat Etemenanki and lies in the center of the site. Amran Ibn Ali—the highest of the mounds at 25 meters, to the south and it is the site of Esagila, a temple of Marduk which also contained shrines to Ea and Nabu. Homera—a reddish colored mound on the west side, most of the Hellenistic remains are here
3.
Adad-shuma-usur
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Adad-šuma-uṣur, inscribed dIM-MU-ŠEŠ, meaning O Adad, protect the name. 1216–1187 BC, was the 32nd king of the 3rd or Kassite dynasty of Babylon and the country contemporarily known as Karduniaš. His name was wholly Babylonian and not uncommon, as for example the later Assyrian King Esarhaddon had a personal exorcist, or ašipu, there is surprisingly little contemporary evidence for this king considering the purported length of his reign, which was the longest recorded in the Kassite dynasty. The tablet known as King List A shows him following Adad-šuma-iddina and his predecessor-but-one, Enlil-nadin-šumi, brinkman argues that this is for stylistic purposes but the Walker Chronicle suggests a simpler explanation. Adad-šuma-uṣur was elevated to the position of king in the south of the years before he conquered Babylon. It is a trait of this tablet that concurrent kings. The brevity of his reign over Babylon proper also explains the contemporary inscriptions found. Only sixteen dated economic or legal texts attest to his reign and these are inscribed 7 KAM3 KAM and 9 KAM3 KAM, speculated to represent his 27th and 29th years. Twelve of the extant tablets have provenance from excavation at Ur, the earliest of these is dated to his 3rd year and records that Šamaš-zēra-šubši had inspected and “plucked”103 sheep. Much of the remainder concern cattle, their sale and the actions taken to secure recompense for their theft. The determination of innocence or guilt was often arbitrated by “river ordeal, bricks from Isin were excavated in 1975/76 with a Sumerian inscription recording his work on the Egalmaḫ and also earlier from Nippur recording work on the Ekur. He had been credited with rebuilding the walls of Nippur in the Walker Chronicle, Tukulti-Ninurta I, the king of Assyria, had captured Adad-šuma-uṣurs predecessor, Kaštiliašu IV, on one of his two campaigns and conquered Babylon during the second one, perhaps around 1225 BC. He had taken the Babylonian kingship and then ruled there probably through governors, there is an economic text from Nippur dated to his accession year. When exactly the three kings, Enlil-nādin-šumi, Kadašman-Ḫarbe II and Adad-šuma-iddina succeeded one another is still uncertain. Yamada, for example, argues that Tukulti-Ninurta only ascended the Babylonian throne after their reigns, others place his rule before them, or propose the first two ruled in the two-year period between Tukulti-Ninurta’s two campaigns. Adad-šuma-uṣur had been “put on his father’s throne” by a rebellion against Tukulti-Ninurta among the Akkadian officers, most of the contemporary economic texts dated to his reign come from Ur, suggesting the location of his investiture. The identity of his father is never stated in the chronicle. A Luristan bronze dagger in the Foroughi Collection is inscribed with his filiation to this king, and this claim may have helped reinforce his legitimacy
4.
Assur
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Aššur, also known as Ashur and Qalat Sherqat, was an Assyrian city, capital of the Old Assyrian Empire, Middle Assyrian Empire, and for a time, the Neo-Assyrian Empire. It lies 65 km south of the site of Nimrud and 100 km south of Nineveh, exploration of the site of Assur began in 1898 by German archaeologists. Excavations began in 1900 by Friedrich Delitzsch, and were continued in 1903–1913 by a team from the German Oriental Society led initially by Robert Koldewey, more than 16,000 tablets with cuneiform texts were discovered. Many of the objects found made their way to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, more recently, Ashur was excavated by B. Hrouda for the University of Munich and the Bavarian Ministry of Culture in 1990, during the same period, in 1988 and 1989, the site was being worked by R. Dittmann on behalf of the German Research Foundation. Today the Assyrians are still found throughout the Middle East, particularly in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey, Archaeology reveals the site of the city was occupied by the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. This was still the Sumerian period, before Assyria emerged in the 25th to 21st century BC, the oldest remains of the city were discovered in the foundations of the Ishtar temple, as well as at the Old Palace. In the subsequent period, the city was ruled by kings from the Akkadian Empire, during the Third Dynasty of Ur, the city was ruled by Assyrian governors subject to the Sumerians. The native Akkadian speaking Assyrian kings were now free while Sumer fell under the yoke of the Amorites, the temple likely dates to the original settlement of the site when the people of Ashur established their nation under the patronage of the citys god. Prosperity and independence produced the first significant fortifications in this period, as the region enjoyed relative peace and stability, trade between Mesopotamia and Anatolia increased, and the city of Ashur greatly benefited from its strategic location. Merchants would dispatch their merchandise via caravan into Anatolia and trade primarily at Assyrian colonies in Anatolia, with Shamshi-Adad Is capital at Assur, he magnified the citys power and influence beyond the Tigris river valley, establishing what some regard as the first Assyrian Empire. In this era, the Great Royal Palace was built, not long after, the native king Adasi expelled the Babylonians and Amorites from Assur and Assyria as a whole around 1720 BC, although little is known of his successors. Temples to the moon god Sin and the sun god Shamash were built, the city was subsequently subjugated by the king of Mitanni, Shaushtatar in the late 15th century, taking the gold and silver doors of the temple to his capital, Washukani, as spoils. Ashur-uballit I emulated his ancestor Adasi and overthrew the Mitanni empire in 1365 BC, the Assyrians reaped the benefits of this triumph by taking control of the eastern portion of the Mitanni Empire, and later also annexing Hittite, Babylonian, Amorite and Hurrian territory. The following centuries witnessed the restoration of the old temples and palaces of Assur, tukulti-Ninurta I also constructed a new temple to the goddess Ishtar. The Anu-Adad temple was established later during the reign of Tiglath-Pileser I, the walled area of the city in the Middle Assyrian period made up some 1.2 square kilometres. In the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the residence was transferred to other Assyrian cities. With the reign of Sargon II, a new capital began to rise, dur-Sharrukin on a scale set to surpass that of Ashurnasirpals
5.
Hittites
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The Hittites were an Ancient Anatolian people who established an empire centered on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia around 1600 BC. Between the 15th and 13th centuries BC the Hittite Empire came into conflict with the Egyptian Empire, Middle Assyrian Empire, the Assyrians eventually emerged as the dominant power and annexed much of the Hittite empire, while the remainder was sacked by Phrygian newcomers to the region. They referred to their land as Hatti. The conventional name Hittites is due to their identification with the Biblical Hittites in 19th century archaeology. Before the discoveries, the source of information about Hittites had been the Old Testament. Francis William Newman expressed the view, common in the early 19th century. Uriah was a captain in King Davids army and counted among one of his mighty men in 1 Chronicles 11, french scholar Félix Marie Charles Texier discovered the first Hittite ruins in 1834, but did not identify them as Hittite. The first archaeological evidence for the Hittites appeared in tablets found at the Assyrian colony of Kültepe, some names in the tablets were neither Hattic nor Assyrian, but clearly Indo-European. The script on a monument at Boğazköy by a People of Hattusas discovered by William Wright in 1884 was found to match peculiar hieroglyphic scripts from Aleppo, in 1887, excavations at Tell El-Amarna in Egypt uncovered the diplomatic correspondence of Pharaoh Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaton. Shortly after this, Archibald Sayce proposed that Hatti or Khatti in Anatolia was identical with the kingdom of Kheta mentioned in these Egyptian texts, as well as with the biblical Hittites. Others, such as Max Müller, agreed that Khatti was probably Kheta, sayces identification came to be widely accepted over the course of the early 20th century, and the name Hittite has become attached to the civilization uncovered at Boğazköy. He also proved that the ruins at Boğazköy were the remains of the capital of an empire that, at one point, under the direction of the German Archaeological Institute, excavations at Hattusa have been under way since 1907, with interruptions during the world wars. Kültepe was successfully excavated by Professor Tahsin Özgüç from 1948 until his death in 2005, the Hittites used Mesopotamian Cuneiform script. The Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, Turkey houses the richest collection of Hittite, the Hittite kingdom was centred on the lands surrounding Hattusa and Neša, known as the land Hatti. For example, the reward for the capture of a slave after he managed to flee beyond the Halys is higher than that for a slave caught before he could reach the river. To the west and south of the core territory lay the region known as Luwiya in the earliest Hittite texts and this terminology was replaced by the names Arzawa and Kizzuwatna with the rise of those kingdoms. Nevertheless, the Hittites continued to refer to the language originated in these areas as Luwian. Prior to the rise of Kizzuwatna, the heart of territory in Cilicia was first referred to by the Hittites as Adaniya
6.
Hattusa
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Hattusa was the capital of the Hittite Empire in the late Bronze Age. Its ruins lie near modern Boğazkale, Turkey, within the loop of the Kızılırmak River. Hattusa was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1986, the landscape surrounding the city included rich agricultural fields and hill lands for pasture as well as woods. Smaller woods are found outside the city, but in ancient times. This meant the inhabitants had an excellent supply of timber when building their houses, the fields provided the people with a subsistence crop of wheat, barley and lentils. Flax was also harvested, but their source for clothing was sheep wool. They also hunted deer in the forest, but this was only a luxury reserved for the nobility. There were several settlements in the vicinity, such as the rock shrine at Yazılıkaya. Since the rivers in the area are unsuitable for major ships, all transport to, before 2000 BC, the apparently indigenous Hattian people established a settlement on sites that had been occupied even earlier and referred to the site as Hattush. The Hattians built their settlement on the high ridge of Büyükkale. The earliest traces of settlement on the site are from the sixth millennium BC, in the 19th and 18th centuries BC, merchants from Assur in Assyria established a trading post there, setting up in their own separate quarter of the city. The center of their network was located in Kanesh. Business dealings required record-keeping, the network from Assur introduced writing to Hattusa. A carbonized layer apparent in excavations attests to the burning and ruin of the city of Hattusa around 1700 BC, only a generation later, a Hittite-speaking king chose the site as his residence and capital. The Hittite language had been gaining speakers at the expense of Hattic for some time, the Hattic Hattush now became the Hittite Hattusa, and the king took the name of Hattusili, the one from Hattusa. Hattusili marked the beginning of a non-Hattic-speaking Hittite state and of a line of Hittite Great Kings,27 of whom are now known by name. After the Kaskas arrived to the north, they twice attacked the city to the point where the kings had to move the royal seat to another city. Under Tudhaliya I, the Hittites moved north to Sapinuwa, returning later, under Muwatalli II, they moved south to Tarhuntassa but assigned Hattusili III as governor over Hattusa
7.
Nippur
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Nippur was among the most ancient of Sumerian cities. It was the seat of the worship of the Sumerian god Enlil. Nippur was located in modern Nuffar in Afak, Al-Qādisiyyah Governorate, Nippur never enjoyed political hegemony in its own right, but its control was crucial, as it was considered capable of conferring the overall kingship on monarchs from other city-states. It was distinctively a sacred city, important from the possession of the shrine of Enlil. According to the Tummal Chronicle, Enmebaragesi, a ruler of Kish, was the first to build up this temple by kish His influence over Nippur has also been detected archaeologically. It also indicates that the practice was revived in Neo-Sumerian times by Ur-Nammu of Ur, on their votive offerings, some of these rulers designate themselves as ensis, or governors. Originally a village of reed huts in the marshes, Nippur was especially prone to devastation by flooding or fire. For some reason, settlement persisted at the spot, and gradually the site rose above the marshes - partly from the accumulation of debris. As the inhabitants began to develop in civilization, they substituted, at least in the case of their shrine, there is evidence of the succession on the site of different peoples, varying somewhat in their degrees of civilization. This people gave way in time to another, markedly inferior in the manufacture of pottery, in one of these earlier strata, of very great antiquity, there was discovered, in connection with the shrine, a conduit built of bricks in the form of an arch. At some point, Sumerian inscriptions began to be written on clay, the shrine at this time stood on a raised platform, and apparently contained a ziggurat. Naram-Sin rebuilt both the temple and the city walls, and in the accumulation of debris now marking the ancient site, his remains are found about half way from the top to the bottom. One of the few instances of Nippur being recorded as having its own ruler comes from a tablet depicting a revolt of several Mesopotamian cities against Naram-Sin, the tablet goes on to relate that Naram-Sin defeated these rebel cities in nine battles, and brought them back under his control. The Weidner tablet suggests that the Akkadian Empire fell as divine retribution, Ur-Nammu gave the temple its final characteristic form. Partly razing the constructions of his predecessors, he erected a terrace of bricks, some 12 m high, near the northwestern edge, towards the western corner, he built a ziggurat of three stages of dry brick, faced with kiln-fired bricks laid in bitumen. On the summit stood, as at Ur and Eridu, a small chamber, access to the stages of the ziggurat, from the court beneath, was by an inclined plane on the south-east side. To the north-east of the ziggurat stood, apparently, the House of Bel, and in the courts below the ziggurat stood various other buildings, shrines, treasure chambers, the whole structure was oriented with the corners toward the cardinal points of the compass. Ur-Nammu also rebuilt the walls of the city on the line of Naram-Sins walls, the restoration of the general features of the temple of this, and the immediately succeeding periods, has been greatly facilitated by the discovery of a sketch map on a fragment of a clay tablet
8.
Ur
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Ur was an important Sumerian city-state in ancient Mesopotamia, located at the site of modern Tell el-Muqayyar in south Iraqs Dhi Qar Governorate. The city dates from the Ubaid period circa 3800 BC, and is recorded in history as a City State from the 26th century BC. The site is marked by the restored ruins of the Ziggurat of Ur. The temple was built in the 21st century BC, during the reign of Ur-Nammu and was reconstructed in the 6th century BC by Nabonidus, the Assyrian born last king of Babylon. The ruins cover an area of 1,200 metres northwest to southeast by 800 metres northeast to southwest, archaeologists have discovered the evidence of an early occupation at Ur during the Ubaid period. These early levels were sealed off with a deposit of soil that was interpreted by excavators of the 1920s as evidence for the Great Flood of the Book of Genesis. The further occupation of Ur only becomes clear during its emergence in the third millennium BC, the third millennium BC is generally described as the Early Bronze Age of Mesopotamia, which ends approximately after the demise of the Third Dynasty of Ur in the 21st century BC. There are two sources which inform scholars about the importance of Ur during the Early Bronze Age. The first is a body of cuneiform documents, mostly from the empire of the so-called Third Dynasty of Ur. This was the most centralized bureaucratic state the world had yet known, concerning the earlier centuries, the Sumerian King List provides a tentative political history of ancient Sumer. The second source of information is archaeological work in modern Iraq, although the early centuries are still poorly understood, the archaeological discoveries have shown unequivocally that Ur was a major urban center on the Mesopotamian plain. Especially the discovery of the Royal Tombs have confirmed its splendour and this wealth, unparalleled up to then, is a testimony of Urs economic importance during the Early Bronze Age. Archaeological research of the region has contributed greatly to our understanding of the landscape. Imports to Ur came from parts of the world. The imported objects include precious metals such as gold and silver and we know that Ur was the most important port on the Persian Gulf, which extended much further inland than it does today. All the wealth came to Mesopotamia by sea had to pass through Ur. So far evidence for the earliest periods of the Early Bronze Age in Mesopotamia is very limited, Mesh-Ane-pada is the first king mentioned in the Sumerian King List, and appears to have lived in the 26th century BC. That Ur was an important urban centre already then seems to be indicated by a type of cylinder seal called the City Seals and these seals contain a set of proto-cuneiform signs which appear to be writings or symbols of the name of city-states in ancient Sumer
9.
Elamite
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Elamite is an extinct language spoken by the ancient Elamites. Elamite was a used in present-day south-western Iran from 2800 to 550 BC. The last written records in Elamite appear about the time of the conquest of the Achaemenid Empire by Alexander the Great, Elamite has no demonstrable relatives and is usually considered a language isolate. The lack of established relatives is one reason that interpretation of the language is difficult, Elamite cuneiform, adapted from Akkadian cuneiform, was used from ca.2500 to 331 BC. Elamite cuneiform was largely a syllabary of some 130 glyphs at any one time and retained only a few logograms from Akkadian, but over time, the complete corpus of Elamite cuneiform consists of c.20 thousand tablets and fragments. The majority belong to the Achaemenid era, and contain primarily economic records, two earlier scripts of the area remain undeciphered but plausibly have encoded Elamite, Proto-Elamite is the oldest known writing system from Iran. It was used during a period of time, clay tablets with Proto-Elamite writing have been found at different sites across Iran. It is thought to have developed from early cuneiform and consists of more than 1,000 signs and it is thought to be largely logographic. Linear Elamite is attested in a few monumental inscriptions and it is often claimed that Linear Elamite is a syllabic writing system derived from Proto-Elamite, but it cannot be proven. Linear Elamite was used for a brief period of time during the last quarter of the third millennium BC. Elamite was a language, and Elamite grammar was characterized by a well-developed. Animate nouns had separate markers for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person, documents from the Old Elamite and early Neo-Elamite stages are rather scarce. Neo-Elamite can be regarded as a transition between Middle and Achaemenid Elamite, with respect to language structure, because of the limitations of the languages scripts, phonology is not well understood. As for the vowels, Elamite had at least /a/, /i/, and /u/ and may also have had an /e/, roots are generally of the forms CV, VC, VCV and, more rarely, CVCCV. Elamite is agglutinative, and predominantly suffixing, the inanimate 3rd singular -me forms abstracts. In noun phrases and pronoun phrases, the suffixes referring to the head are appended to the modifier, sometimes the suffix is preserved on the head as well. g. The suffix -na, which originated from the inanimate agreement suffix -n followed by the nominalizing particle -a. The personal pronouns distinguish nominative and accusative case forms and they are as follows, In general, no special possessive pronouns are needed in view of the construction with the noun class suffixes
10.
Shutruk-Nakhunte
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Šutruk-Nakhunte was king of Elam from about 1185 to 1155 BC, and the second king of the Shutrukid Dynasty. Elam amassed an empire that included most of Mesopotamia and western Iran, under his command, Elam defeated the Kassites and established the short-lived Elamite Empire, conquered within about 40 years by Nebuchadnezzar I of Babylon, in 1120 BC. Šutruk-Nakhunte was married to the daughter of a Kassite king named Meli-Šipak, the quote from the film is, I am Shutruk Nahunte, King of Anšan and Susa, Sovereign of the land of Elam. By command of Inshushinak I destroyed Sippar, Took the Stele of Niran-Sin, and brought it back to Elam, D. T. Potts, The Archaeology of Elam, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999, 232-237
11.
Susa
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Susa was an ancient city of the Proto-Elamite, Elamite, First Persian Empire, Seleucid, and Parthian empires of Iran, and one of the most important cities of the Ancient Near East. It is located in the lower Zagros Mountains about 250 km east of the Tigris River, the modern Iranian town of Shush is located at the site of ancient Susa. Shush is the capital of the Shush County of Irans Khuzestan province. It had a population of 64,960 in 2005, in Elamite, the name of the city was written variously Ŝuŝan, Ŝuŝun, etc. The origin of the word Susa is from the city deity Inshushinak. Susa was one of the most important cities of the Ancient Near East, Susa is also mentioned in the Ketuvim of the Hebrew Bible by the name Shushan, mainly in Esther, but also once each in Nehemiah and Daniel. Both Daniel and Nehemiah lived in Susa during the Babylonian captivity of the 6th century BCE, Esther became queen there, married to King Ahasueurus, and saved the Jews from genocide. A tomb presumed to be that of Daniel is located in the area, however, the current structure is actually a much later construction dated to the late nineteenth century, ca. Susa is further mentioned in the Book of Jubilees as one of the places within the inheritance of Shem and his eldest son Elam, Greek mythology attributed the founding of Susa to king Memnon of Aethiopia, a character from Homers Trojan War epic, the Iliad. The site was examined in 1836 by Henry Rawlinson and then by A. H. Layard, in 1851, some modest excavation was done by William Loftus, who identified it as Susa. In 1885 and 1886 Marcel-Auguste Dieulafoy and Jane Dieulafoy began the first French excavations, jacques de Morgan conducted major excavations from 1897 until 1911. These efforts continued under Roland De Mecquenem until 1914, at the beginning of World War I, French work at Susa resumed after the war, led by De Mecquenem, continuing until World War II in 1940. Archaeological results from the period were very thinly published and attempts are underway to remedy this situation. Roman Ghirshman took over direction of the French efforts in 1946, together with his wife Tania Ghirshman, he continued there until 1967. The Ghirshmans concentrated on excavating a single part of the site, the pottery found at the various levels enabled a stratigraphy to be developed for Susa. During the 1970s, excavations resumed under Jean Perrot, archeologists have dated the first traces of an inhabited Neolithic village to c 7000 BCE. Evidence of a civilization has been dated to c 5000 BCE. Painted ceramic vessels from Susa in the earliest first style are a late, in urban history, Susa is one of the oldest-known settlements of the region
12.
Adad-shuma-iddina
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Adad-šuma-iddina, inscribed mdIM-MU-SUM-na, and dated to around ca. 1222–1217 BC, was the 31st king of the 3rd or Kassite dynasty of Babylon, in many respects, the reign of Adad-šuma-iddina was indistinguishable from other Kassite monarchs. The same iconography of an animal, a characteristic metaphor for the Kassite king’s care for his subjects, is used on a light green. It reads, Kidin-Ninurta, administrator for Enlil and Ninlil, chief cup-bearer for Enlil, chief exorcist of Ekurra, exalted exorcist of Adad-šuma-iddina, king of the world, anointed one, butler, son of Ilum-bun, descendant of Amel-. Exalted exorcist of Enlil, the man of, a weight is inscribed, “1 true mina, of Adad-šuma-iddina, son of priest-of-Adad” which may be this individual, as regnal inscriptions were often used to authenticate such measures. Two or three legal texts from the archive of the family of Dayyanatu and some other brewers of the temple of Sîn in Ur have come to light dated to his accession year. The estate of Takil-ana-ilīšu kudurru, a kudurru of Meli-Šipak, relates the history of litigation affecting a family estate over three reigns beginning with that of Adad-šuma-iddina. It begins with Takil-ana-ilīšu dying intestate, his son being illegitimate, and then proceeds with the tale of the rival claims. Although considered a puppet of Tukulti-Ninurta by many historians, this case shows his decisions were honored by later kings. Babylon, again felt the predations of the Elamites under Kidin-Hutran, who seized the city of Isin and crossed the Tigris and it is unclear if the seven-year period of Tukulti-Ninurta’s rule preceded or followed his, or whether his reign is counted amongst the years of Assyrian governorship. The journey to Dūr-Katlimmu seems to have traveled via Jezireh, although his name was not an uncommon one over the millennia, it is tempting to identify him with an individual of the same time. The text is fragmentary and the events could equally be ascribed to his predecessor Kaštiliašu IV or later successor Marduk-nādin-aḫḫē
