by Marie Antonia Parsons

Created on: December 09, 2009

The Kassite people ruled Babylonia in the longest dynasty of all in the King-List—thirty-six kings over more than five hundred years, from the sixteenth through to the twelfth centuries BCE. They came from the north of Babylonia, [erhaps in the Zagros Mountains of modern Iran, where the arable land bordered the steppes. The northern state of Hana, known around Hammurabi’s time, may have been ruled by the Kassites.  Their language was distinct from other peoples in the region. Males were called the sons of an ancestor, according to the form “House of X, Bit <name>.”

Kassites Control Babylonia

History does not know much more until a Kassite named Agum became king in 1570. He ruled the northern half of Mesopotamia, while the southern section was controlled by the dynasty of Sealand.  In 1595, Mursili I of the Hittites sacked Babylon, taking the statue of its patron god Marduk back to his capital. Babylon remained without a leader in the political vacuum that overcame the region, until Agum took the throne. 

By 1560 BCE, the Kassites had control over most of Babylonia, and within fifty years had consolidated their northern border with Assyria. By 1475, while Tutmosis III ruled in Egypt, the Kassites unified all Mesopotamia under Kassite rule. Agum acquired diplomatic connections with the Hittites, and was able to have the statue of Marduk returned to Babylon. While they honored the Babylonian gods, the Kassites had their own pantheon. While a chapel for the patron deities of the king, Shuqamuna and Shumaliya, was added in the palace, most of their other gods are only known from inscriptions.

The Kassite dynasty ended the old Akkadian practice of numbering years by naming events from that year or the prior year. In about 1500 they began to number years according to the regnal years of each king, beginning with the first New Year’s day of his reign. This system remained in place until the Seleucids came to power after the death of Alexander the Great in 323.

By the 1300s, the Kassites expanded their territory beyond Babylonia. A Kassite governed Dilmun, modern Bahrain, the Persian Gulf, and the Diyala region east of the Tigris River.   An extensive archive of 12,000 inscribed tablets, no doubt concerning administrative matters, was found in Nippur. The archive has been dated to about 1360-1225 BCE, the highlight of Kassite power in the region. Only a small percentage of these tablets has been published, or

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