Babylonian Chronicle 1 (from Nabonassar to Shamash-shuma-ukin)

The Babylonian chronicles are terse year-by-year records, written in Akkadian on clay tablets, of what happened to the kings of Babylon and their neighbours. Chronicle 1 in A. K. Grayson’s edition (ABC 1) runs from the Babylonian king Nabonassar to the accession of Shamash-shuma-ukin. It survives in two copies in the British Museum. The better preserved is a large tablet with two columns on each side. Its colophon says that it was written at Babylon in the twenty-second year of Darius I, which is 500/499 BC (iv.39–43).

For the history of Israel and Judah three entries matter. The chronicle says that Shalmaneser V “ravaged Samaria” (i.27–28), which is the only event it records for his reign and the Babylonian counterpart to the Fall of Samaria. It dates the accession of Sargon II to the twelfth day of the month Tebetu (i.31). And it reports that Sennacherib was killed by his son in a rebellion on the twentieth of Tebetu (iii.34–35), a death that Kings and Isaiah also report, naming two sons (2 Kings 19:37) (Isaiah 37:38). The chronicle is written from Babylon’s point of view and has no stake in either the Assyrian or the biblical telling.