INTRODUCTION

From the fifteenth to the thirteenth centuries B.C., Babylonia participated actively in the cosmopolitan life of Western Asia. Babylonian monarchs of the Kassite dynasty enjoyed widespread diplomatic, commercial, and cultural contacts with Egypt, Syria-Palestine, and Khatti. Royal messengers and merchant caravans plied the roads between the courts of the ‘great kings’ in Amarna, Thebes, Boğazköy, Babylon, Dur-Kurigalzu, and later Ashur; and many of the royal families further strengthened their ties by diplomatic marriage. But the decline or collapse about 1200 B.C. of the major powers surrounding the eastern end of the Mediterranean (notably Egypt and Khatti), followed a century later by devastating Aramaean invasions, seriously debilitated the Babylonian and Assyrian states. Before the end of the eleventh century, the Aramaeans controlled a substantial portion of Western Asia, including southern Syria, the important middle Euphrates trade route, and the western reaches of Babylonia and Assyria.

By the year 1000 B.C., the political and economic horizons of Babylonia had narrowed considerably. The country found itself hemmed in, especially by the Aramaeans on the west and north. For the opening decades of the tenth century, no contacts are attested even with Assyria and Elam, Babylonia's closest neighbours. Babylonian history during the first quarter of the first millennium B.C. may be characterized as a period of obscurity or ‘dark age’, with the land frequently overrun by foreign invaders and with the central government often unable to assert its jurisdiction in many areas. Little source material has survived from these turbulent times, and this little is sometimes quite difficult to date.