Samsu-iluna

329
Samsu-iluna bigraphy, stories - King of Babylonia

Samsu-iluna : biography

Samsu-iluna (Amorite Shamshu, c. 1792 – 1712 BC) was the seventh king of the founding Amorite dynasty of Babylon, ruling from 1750 BC to 1712 BC middle chronology. He was the son and successor of Hammurabi by an unknown mother. His reign was marked by the violent uprisings of areas conquered by his father and the abandonment of several important cities (primarily in

Footnotes

Depopulation of Sumer

It is worth noting that Samsu-iluna’s campaigns might not have been solely responsible for the havoc wreaked upon Uruk and Ur, and his loss of Sumer might have been as much a calculated retreat as defeat.

Records in the cities of Ur and Uruk essentially stop after the 10th year of Samsu-iluna’s reign, their priests apparently continued writing, but from more northerly {} Larsa’s records also end about this time. Records keep going in Nippur and Isin until Samsu-iluna’s 29th year, and then cease there as well. These breaks are also observed in the archeological record, where evidence points to these cities being largely or completely abandoned for hundreds of years, until well into the {}

Reasons for this are hard to come by. Certainly the constant warfare cannot have helped matters, but Samsu-iluna appears to have campaigned just as hard in the north, and that region was thriving during the {} The rise of Babylon marks a definite end to Sumerian cultural dominance of Mesopotamia and a shift to Akkadian for government and popular perhaps people who claimed cultural ties to the Sumerian past retrenched around the southerly cities which Iluna-ilu controlled. Several members of his dynasty took Sumerian names, and it appears they consciously strove to return to the region’s Sumerian {} It is also possible that economic or environmental factors were involved; it is known that both Hammurabi and Rim-sin I had instituted policies which altered the economies of the {} perhaps these proved unsustainable in the long-term.

Fragmentation of the Empire

Map showing the Babylonian territory upon Hammurabi’s ascension in c. 1792 BCE and upon his death in c. 1750 BCE

In the 9th year of Samsu-iluna’s reign a man calling himself Rim-sin (known in the literature as Rim-sin II, and thought to perhaps be a nephew of the Rim-sin who opposed raised a rebellion against Babylonian authority in Larsa which spread to include some 26 cities, among them Uruk, Ur, Isin and Kisurra in the south, and {} in the north.

Samsu-iluna seems to have had the upper-hand militarily. Within a year he dealt the coalition a shattering blow which took the northern cities out of the fight.An inscription commemorates the defeat of “26 usurping kings”. In the aftermath the king of Eshnunna, Iluni, was dragged to Babylon and executed by {} Over the course of the next 4 years, Samsu-iluna’s armies tangled with Rim-sin’s forces up and down the borderlands between Babylon, Sumer and Elam. Eventually Samsu-iluna attacked Ur, pulled down its walls and put the city to the sack, he then did the same to Uruk, and Isin as {} Finally Larsa itself was defeated and Rim-sin II was killed, thus ending the {}

Unfortunately the flood gates had opened. A few years later a pretender calling himself Iluma-ilu and claiming descent from the last king of Isin raised another pan-Sumerian revolt. Samsu-iluna marched an army to Sumer and the two met in a battle which proved indecisive; a second battle sometime later went Iluma-ilu’s way and in its aftermath he founded the {} which would remain in control of Sumer for the next 300 years. Samsu-iluna seems to have taken a defensive approach after this, in the 18th year of his reign he saw to the rebuilding of 6 fortresses in the vicinity of which might have been intended to keep that city under Bablyonian control. Ultimately this proved fruitless, by the time of Samsu-iluna’s death Nippur recognized Iluma-ilu as {}