The reverse of the Uruk Prophecy (W 22307/7) predicts a series of unnamed kings and highlights the removal and the later return of "the protective goddess of Uruk." It is widely accepted that the second king, who will remove the goddess, and the next-to-last one, who will return her, should be identified with Nabu-šuma-iškun and Nebuchadnezzar II respectively, on the basis of other historical sources. There is, however, no consensus about the identification of the kings in between. When addressing this issue, the question of how to interpret the repetition sign KIMIN, which is written five times in line 8, must first be resolved, because on it depends the answer to the question of how many kings are mentioned on the reverse.

   Given that the surviving exemplar of the text is presumed to date to the Achaemenid period, this article proposes the following hypotheses: (1) The fivefold KIMIN indicates a succession of five kings, and so the reverse of the text refers to eleven kings in total ; (2) the fivefold KIMIN was not in the original text, but the result of an Achaemenid alteration ; (3) the copyist re-identified king 2 with Nabonidus, who gathered the statues of Babylonian deities, including Ištar of Uruk, to Babylon ; and (4) the copyist replaced the repetition of the same phrase describing a reign of a wicked king with a sequence of the iterative sign KIMIN and changed (probably reduced) the number of reigns by adjusting that of KIMIN in order that kings 3-9 would be identified with Cyrus II, Cambyses II, Darius I, Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I, Darius II and Artaxerxes II. Thus, the successor to Artaxerxes II (i.e. king 10) would be the one who would arise in Uruk and restore the city as well as its goddess. If these hypotheses are correct, the Uruk Prophecy was updated during Artaxerxes II's reign to foretell that soon the Achaemenid domination would end and a native Urukaean dynasty be founded.