First Sealand dynasty

Conquest of the Sea-Land by the Kassites. 20th century reconstruction.

The First Sealand dynasty (URU.KÙKI[nb 1][1]), or the 2nd Dynasty of Babylon (although it was independent of Amorite-ruled Babylon), very speculatively c. 1732–1460 BC (short chronology), is an enigmatic series of kings attested to primarily in laconic references in the king lists A and B, and as contemporaries recorded on the Assyrian Synchronistic king list A.117. Initially it was named the "Dynasty of the Country of the Sea" with Sealand later becoming customary.[2][page needed]

The dynasty, which had broken free of the short lived, and by this time crumbling Old Babylonian Empire, was named for the province in the far south of Mesopotamia, a swampy region bereft of large settlements which gradually expanded southwards with the silting up of the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (the region known as mat Kaldi "Chaldaea" in the Iron Age). Sealand pottery has been found at Girsu, Uruk, and Lagash but in no site north of that.[3]

The later kings bore pseudo-Sumerian names and harked back to the glory days of the Dynasty of Isin. The third king of the dynasty was even named for the ultimate king of the dynasty of Isin, Damiq-ilišu. Despite these cultural motifs, the population predominantly bore Akkadian names and wrote and spoke in the Akkadian language. There is circumstantial evidence that their rule extended at least briefly to Babylon itself. In later times, a Sealand province of the Neo-Babylonian Empire also existed.[4]


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  1. ^ Oppenheim, A. Leo (1977). Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization. University of Chicago. p. 414. ISBN 978-0-22663186-8 – via The Internet archive.
  2. ^ King, L.W., "Chronicles concerning Early Babylonian Kings", vol. 2. London: Luzac, 1907
  3. ^ Al-Hamdani, A. (2020). The Settlement and Canal Systems During the First Sealand Dynasty (1721–1340 BCE). In S. Paulus & T. Clayden (Ed.), Babylonia under the Sealand and Kassite Dynasties, Berlin, pp. 28–57.
  4. ^ Paul-Alain Beaulieu, Ea-dayān, Governor of the Sealand, and Other Dignitaries of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, Journal of Cuneiform Studies, vol. 54, pp. 99–123, The American Schools of Oriental Research, 2002

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