Samsu-ditana
Samsu-ditana was the last king of Hammurabi's dynasty, and it ended when an army walked eight hundred miles to sack his city and then went home. He was the sixth successor of Hammurabi and reigned for about thirty-one years over a kingdom that had been shrinking for a century. The south had already gone: Sumer and the old cities of Ur and Uruk had broken away under a rival dynasty, taking the temples and the trade with the Gulf. What was left was Babylon and its immediate hinterland, and even there the records thin out - his surviving documents are mostly religious and legal formulae rather than the administrative flood of his ancestors. In about 1595 the Hittite king Mursili I came down the Euphrates from Anatolia, an extraordinary distance for a Bronze Age army, took Babylon, carried off the statue of Marduk and the king's treasury, and withdrew immediately. He had no intention of ruling Mesopotamia and was assassinated on his return. The raid destroyed a dynasty as a side effect. Into the vacuum came the Kassites, a people from the Zagros who had been settling in Babylonia as labourers and soldiers for generations, and who then ruled it for over four centuries - the longest single dynasty in Mesopotamian history. His dates are approximate. Everything in Mesopotamia before about 900 BC is dated by competing chronologies tied to a set of observations of Venus, and the middle chronology used here can be sixty years later than the short one. The sack of Babylon is the event those chronologies are anchored to, so his reign is dated more securely than most and still not securely.
- Nationality: Babylonian
- Roles: head_of_state, royalty
