Nabu-shuma-ukin I

Biography

The circumstances of his ascendancy and his relationship with his predecessor are not known. The beginning of his reign was marked by war with Assyria when Adad-Nārāri II swept down on his second campaign and supposedly defeated him according to the Assyrian version, apparently sacking several cities and hauling their "vast booty" back home. The outcome may not have been quite so one-sided as described as the Assyro-Babylonian border was pushed back north to the basin of the Lesser Zab.

His relations for the remainder of Adad-Nārāri’s time and with the next Assyrian monarch, Tukulti-Ninurta II, in contrast were good, and he made an entente cordiale and exchanged daughters in marriage with one of them, the Synchronistic Chronicle being too fragmentary here to be sure which one, auguring in an extended period of peaceful relations.