Kings of Babylon

Dynasties

As with other monarchies, the kings of Babylon are grouped into a series of royal dynasties, a practice started by the ancient Babylonians in their king lists. The generally accepted Babylonian dynasties should not be understood as familial groupings in the same vein as the term is commonly used by historians for ruling families in later kingdoms and empires. Though Babylon's first dynasty did form a dynastic grouping where all monarchs were related, the dynasties of the first millennium BC, notably the dynasty of E, did not constitute a series of coherent familial relationships at all. In a Babylonian sense, the term dynasty, rendered as palû or palê, related to a sequence of monarchs from the same ethnic or tribal group (i.e. the Kassite dynasty), the same region (i.e. the dynasties of the Sealand) or the same city (i.e. the dynasties of Babylon and Isin). In some cases, kings known to be genealogically related, such as Eriba-Marduk (r. c. 769–760 BC) and his grandson Marduk-apla-iddina II (r. 722–710 BC and 703 BC), were separated into different dynasties, the former designated as belonging to the Dynasty of E and the latter as belonging to the (Third) Sealand dynasty.