Marduk-apla-uṣur, inscribed
dAMAR.UTU-A-ŠE small>Š[''Dynastic Chronicle'' (ADD 888) vi 3’-5’.] or
mdŠID-A- [''Synchronistic King List'' fragment VAT 11345 (KAV 13), 3’.] meaning 'O Marduk, protect the heir' was an 8th century BC
Chaldea
Chaldea () refers to a region probably located in the marshy land of southern Mesopotamia. It is mentioned, with varying meaning, in Neo-Assyrian cuneiform, the Hebrew Bible, and in classical Greek texts. The Hebrew Bible uses the term (''Ka� ...
n tribal leader who ruled as King of
Babylon
Babylon ( ) was an ancient city located on the lower Euphrates river in southern Mesopotamia, within modern-day Hillah, Iraq, about south of modern-day Baghdad. Babylon functioned as the main cultural and political centre of the Akkadian-s ...
after the reign of
Marduk-bēl-zēri. He is known only from three inscriptions and ruled during a period of chaos.
He should not be confused with the Marduk-apla-uṣur who ruled
Suḫi on the middle
Euphrates
The Euphrates ( ; see #Etymology, below) is the longest and one of the most historically important rivers of West Asia. Tigris–Euphrates river system, Together with the Tigris, it is one of the two defining rivers of Mesopotamia (). Originati ...
and paid tribute to
Salmānu-ašarēdu III a generation or so earlier.
[
]
Biography
His Assyria
Assyria (Neo-Assyrian cuneiform: , ''māt Aššur'') was a major ancient Mesopotamian civilization that existed as a city-state from the 21st century BC to the 14th century BC and eventually expanded into an empire from the 14th century BC t ...
n contemporaries were probably Salmānu-ašarēdu IV (783 - 773 BC) and/or Ashur-dan III (773 - 755 BC) and the latter one is known to have campaigned in northern Babylonia on three occasions: 771 BC (against Gannanāti), 770 BC (against Marad) and 767 BC (against Gannanāti again). Into the vacuum created by the devastation, the southern Chaldeans were able to rise to power and he seems to have been the first member of the tribal group to have made pretensions to the Babylonian throne. His place in the sequence of kings is known from a ''Synchronistic King List'' fragment.[ His length of reign and dynastic affiliation are unknown, as he was recorded as belonging to a separate one from his predecessor and successor, but the Dynastic Chronicle records that "the dynasty of Chaldea was terminated. Its kingship was transferred to the Sealand,"][ and, as his successor was Erība-Marduk, the archetypal ancestor figure of the later Chaldean monarchs, it is surmised his origins were with a different Chaldean group than that of Erība-Marduk's Bīt-Yakin tribe.
He is mentioned in a fragmentary Neo-Babylonian narrative text from Uruk][''Chronographic document concerning Nabu-šuma-iškun'' a]
Livius
excavation number W 22660/0, published as SpTU III no. 58 and CM 52 in J. J. Glassner's "Chronique Mésopotamiennes," 1993, pp. 235–240. ("The Crimes and Sacrileges of Nabu-šuma-iškun") which provides no further enlightenment about his time apart from a passing observation that "forced labor and corvée
Corvée () is a form of unpaid forced labour that is intermittent in nature, lasting for limited periods of time, typically only a certain number of days' work each year. Statute labour is a corvée imposed by a state (polity), state for the ...
were imposed."
Inscriptions
References
{{Babylonian kings
8th-century BC kings of Babylon
Chaldean kings