Sealand Dynasty
The Sealand Dynasty, or the 2nd Dynasty of Babylon, very speculatively c. 1732–1460 BC, 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. The dynasty, which had broken free of the short lived, and by this time crumbling 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 later kings bore fanciful 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.
The King list tradition
The king list references which bear witness to the sequence of Sealand kings are summarized below:| Position | King List A | King List B | Purported reign | Contemporary |
| 1 | Ilima | Ilum-ma-ilī | 60 years | Samsu-iluna and Abi-ešuh |
| 2 | Ittili | Itti-ili-nībī | 56 years | |
| 3 | Damqili | Damqi-ilišu II | 36 years | Adasi |
| 4 | Iški | Iškibal | 15 years | Belu-bāni |
| 5 | Šušši, brother | Šušši | 24 years | Lubaia |
| 6 | Gulki… | Gulkišar | 55 years | Sharma-Adad I |
| 6a | mDIŠ-U-EN | ? | LIK.KUD-Šamaš | |
| 7 | Peš-gal | Pešgaldarameš, his son, same | 50 years | Bazaia |
| 8 | A-a-dàra | Ayadaragalama, his son, same | 28 years | Lullaya |
| 9 | Ekurul | Akurduana | 26 years | Shu-Ninua |
| 10 | Melamma | Melamkurkurra | 7 years | Sharma-Adad II |
| 11 | Eaga | Ea-gam | 9 years | Erishum III |
An additional king list provides fragmentary readings of the earlier dynastic monarchs. The king list A totals the reigns to give a length of 368 years for this dynasty. The Synchronistic King List A.117 gives the sequence from Damqi-ilišu onward, but includes an additional king between Gulkišar and Pešgaldarameš, mDIŠ-U-EN. This source is considered reliable in this respect because the forms of the names of Pešgaldarameš and Ayadaragalama match those on recently published contemporary economic tablets.
Evidence of individual reigns
The sources for this dynasty are sparse in the extreme, with insufficient evidence to enable their placement in absolute chronology or to support the somewhat dubious length of reigns alleged on the king list A.Ilum-ma-ilī
Ilum-ma-ilī, or Iliman, the founder of the dynasty, is known from the account of his exploits in the Chronicle of Early Kings which describes his conflicts with his Amorite Babylonian contemporaries Samsu-iluna and Abi-ešuḫ. It records that he “attacked and brought about the defeat of army.” He is thought to have conquered Nippur late in Samsu-iluna’s reign as there are legal documents from Nippur dated to his reign. Abi-eshuh, the Amorite king of Babylon, and Samsu-iluna’s son and successor, “set out to conquer Ilum-ma-ilī,” by damming the Tigris, to flush him out of his swampy refuge, an endeavor which was apparently confounded by Ilum-ma-ilī’s superior use of the terrain.Damqi-ilišu
The last surviving year-name for Ammi-ditana commemorates the “year in which destroyed the city wall of Der/Udinim built by the army of Damqi-ilišu. This is the only current contemporary indication of the spelling of his name, contrasting with that of the earlier king of Isin.Gulkišar
Gulkišar, meaning “raider of the earth,” has left few traces of his apparently lengthy reign. He was the subject of a royal epic concerning his enmity with Samsu-ditāna, the last king of the first dynasty of Babylon. The colophon of a tablet giving a chemical recipe for glaze reads “property of a priest of Marduk in Eridu,” thought to be a quarter of Babylon rather than the city of Eridu, is dated mu.us-sa Gul-ki-šar lugal-e "year after Gul-kisar king.” A kudurru of the period of Babylonian king Enlil-nādin-apli, c. 1103–1100 BC, records the outcome of an inquiry instigated by the king into the ownership of a plot of land claimed by a temple estate. The governors of Bit-Sin-magir and Sealand, upheld the claim based on the earlier actions of Gulkišar who had “drawn for Nanse, his divine mistress, a land boundary.” It is an early example of a Distanzangaben statement recording that 696 years had elapsed between Nabû-kudurrī-uṣur, Enlil-nādin-apli’s father, and Gulkišar.Pešgaldarameš and Ayadaragalama
Pešgaldarameš, “son of the ibex,” and Ayadaragalama, “son of the clever stag,” were successive kings and descendants of Gulkišar.Recently published tablets mainly from the Martin Schøyen collection, the largest privately held collection of manuscripts to be assembled during the 20th century, cover a 15 to 18 year period extending over part of each king’s reign. They seem to originate from a single cache but their provenance was lost after languishing in smaller private collections since their acquisition on the antiquities market a century earlier. The tablets include letters, receipts, ledgers, personnel rosters, etc., and provide year-names and references which hint at events of the period. Messengers from Elam are provisioned, Anzak, a god of Dilmun appears as a theophoric element in names, and Nūr-Bau asks whether he should detain the boats of Ešnunna, a rare late reference to this once thriving Sumerian conurbation. In addition to normal commercial activity, two omen texts from another private collection are dated to the reign of Pešgaldarameš and a kurugu-hymn mentions Ayadaragalama. A variant version of the Epic of Gilgameš relocates the hero to Ur and is a piece from this period.
Ayadaragalama’s reign seems to have been eventful, as a year-name records expelling the “massed might of two enemies,” speculated to be Elamites and Kassites, the Kassites having previously deposed the Amorites as rulers in Babylon. Another records the building of a “great ring against the Kalšu enemy” and a third records the “year when his land rebelled.” A year-name gives “year when Ayadaragalama was king – after Enlil established the shepherding of the whole earth,” and a list of gods includes Marduk and Sarpanitum, the tutelary deities of the Sealand. Excavations conducted between 2013 and 2017 at Tell Khaiber, around 20 km from Ur, have revealed the foundations of a large mudbrick fortress with an unusual arrangement of perimeter close-set towers and is dated, by an archive of almost 200 administrative tablets, to Ayadaragalama.
A neo-Babylonian official took a bronze band dedicatory inscription of A-ia-da-a-ra, MAN ŠÚ “king of the world,” to Tell en-Nasbeh, probably as an antique curio, where it was discarded to be found in the 20th century.