Adad-shuma-usur
Adad-shuma-usur took Babylon back from the Assyrians and reigned through the collapse of the world he had won it in. A generation earlier the Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta I had taken Babylon, carried off the statue of Marduk and the king with it, and ruled Babylonia through governors for seven years. Adad-shuma-usur, presented in the records as a son of the deposed king, led the Babylonian recovery, drove out the Assyrian appointees and restored the Kassite line for another sixty years. He then had the rare satisfaction of intervening in Assyria's own succession. Tukulti-Ninurta was murdered by his son, and a letter attributed to Adad-shuma-usur addresses a later Assyrian king with open contempt, telling him he is not fit for the throne he sits on. Whether the letter is authentic or a Babylonian literary exercise is argued, and either way it records how the relationship was remembered. His three decades cover the years around 1200, when the eastern Mediterranean came apart. The Hittite empire ceased to exist, the Mycenaean palaces burned, Ugarit was destroyed and never reoccupied, and Egypt fought off the coalitions its records call the Sea Peoples and survived diminished. Babylonia was inland and largely escaped that particular wave, which is one reason cuneiform administration continued unbroken while the Aegean lost writing altogether. It did not escape what followed. The Kassite dynasty was ended some thirty years after his death by an Elamite invasion that carried away the stele of Hammurabi's laws. His dates, like all of these, are middle chronology and approximate.
- Nationality: Babylonian
- Roles: head_of_state, royalty
