Relations with Assyria dominated from the tenth to the late seventh century. Marduk’s reputation was tarnished as Babylon lost power. Tribes of Chaldeans and Arameans moved into the Sealand, where some settled, becoming literate and powerful. Iron gradually replaced bronze. Fine stone carving continued. Warlike Assyrian kings venerated Babylon, incorporated its gods into their pantheon, and treated the city separately from the rest of Babylonia; but Assyria and Babylon clashed east of the Tigris at Der. Chaldeans intermittently took the throne. Tiglath-pileser III, the first Assyrian king to become king of Babylon, took part in the New Year festival; Sargon II, the second, deposed a Chaldean and deported many disloyal groups, but invested in the city. When Sennacherib ruled Assyria, various rulers of Babylon and interference from Elam ended when he sacked Babylon, which remained kingless for seven years. His patricidal son Esarhaddon made some restitution. At his early death, Esarhaddon’s elder son took the throne, dominated by his younger son, Ashurbanipal, whose library at Nineveh included many Babylonian texts. Betrayed by his brother under Elamite influence, Ashurbanipal sacked Babylon. Royal records end, and three subsequent kings are poorly attested. Nabopolassar, a Babylonian general working in the Assyrian army, defected and took the throne of Babylon.

This chapter argues that a motif in the mythological prologue to the Hurro-Hittite Song of Emergence, according to which the early divine rulers Anu and Kumarbi are each said to have served as cup-bearer to the previous ruler before taking power, is likely to derive from older Mesopotamian legends revolving around the historical king Sargon of Akkad. While the Song of Emergence adapts the Sargonic motif to a narrative on the earliest divine kings, the same motif later emerges in connection with a human ruler, Cyrus the Great, in Persian legends that were known to the Greek writer Ctesias; Herodotus avoided the motif in his account of Cyrus, perhaps because he appears to have adopted it at an earlier point of the Histories, in the Lydian tale of Candaules and Gyges. In all instances the motif of the cup-bearer served to explain the emergence of a powerful human or divine dynasty seemingly from nowhere, but with much scope for local adaption.