Kadashman-Turgu
Kadashman-Turgu promised the Hittite king an army against Egypt and did not have to send it. He was a Kassite king of Babylon in the generation of the battle of Kadesh, the largest chariot engagement recorded and the one after which Egypt and Hatti spent sixteen years working out how to stop fighting. Babylon was not at Kadesh. It was doing something more useful: choosing sides in a system of four or five great powers where nobody could be beaten outright and everything turned on alignment. His treaty with Hattusili III of Hatti is known from a long letter the Hittite king later wrote to his son. Kadashman-Turgu had broken off relations with Egypt and offered infantry and chariots if Egypt attacked, and the Hittite records his terms with evident satisfaction. The offer cost him nothing in the end, because Hatti and Egypt signed the earliest surviving international peace treaty instead, in about 1259, and both copies of it survive - one in Egyptian on a temple wall, one in Akkadian on a clay tablet. The real problem was closer. Assyria under Adad-nirari I and then Shalmaneser I was expanding westward and pressing on Babylonia's northern frontier, and Kadashman-Turgu's successors lost ground to it steadily until an Assyrian king carried a Babylonian king off in chains. His reign is dated here on the middle chronology, like the rest of the Mesopotamian material in this corpus, and the figures could be shifted by decades on another scheme. The Hittite correspondence fixes him relative to Hattusili III firmly, which is more than can be said for most Kassite kings.
- Nationality: Babylonian
- Roles: head_of_state, royalty
