The Reception of the “Marduk Prophecy” in Seventh-Century B.C. Assur

Abstract

One of the Akkadian literary predictive texts, the so-called “Marduk Prophecy,” describes the travels of the Babylonian supreme god Marduk to the lands of Hatti, Assur, and Elam. It concludes with the prediction that a future king will lead Marduk back from Elam. The hoped-for king can be safely identified with Nebuchadnezzar I (r. 1125-04 B.C.), who marched into Elam and repatriated the stolen statue of Marduk. The “Marduk Prophecy” is therefore presumed to have been composed to glorify this monarch during his reign. However, all the extant manuscripts of the text are from 7th-century B.C. Assyn'a. Taking the case of the copy found in Assur, this article considers under what circumstances the “Marduk Prophecy” was transcribed and read in that city more than 400 years after its composition.
 The copy in question was uncovered in a house of exorcists serving the Assur Temple. 0. Pedersén made an inventory of the tablets discovered at this dwelling. Apart from the “Marduk Prophecy,” the inventory includes no text relevant to Nebuchadnezzar’s Elamite campaign which is likely to have been the primary concern of the author of our text, but there are some texts proclaiming the superiority of the Assyrian chief deity Assur over Marduk (e.g. the “Marduk Ordeal”). This suggests that the owner (5) of the Assur exemplar had far more interest in theological reflection on the relationship between the Assyrian and the Babylonian state gods, which was presumably stimulated by the Assyrian abduction of the Marduk statue under Sennacherib (689 B.C.), than in the triumph of Nebuchadnezzar. On the basis of the above evidence, it would seem that the “Marduk Prophecy” was being read in 7th-century Assur in connection with a question as to how Marduk should be evaluated in relation to the god Assur.