The growth of Kassite Babylonia, also called Karduniash, continues apace. Just like last week, Kassite Babylonia is very poorly documented, and thus we are going to cover all the way from Pharaoh Thutmose III to Pharaoh Akhenaten. That’s right, Kassite Babylonia has so little history that we make our bookmarks against Egyptian history instead of Babylonian, but this does mean that we will start looking at the famous Amarna letters, the diplomatic correspondence between Kadashman-Enlil and the Egyptian Pharaoh. It is a little bit of war, a little bit of construction, and a thirty five hundred year old missing person case.
I should note that some people think Kara-Indash’s name invokes a Kassite version of the Indo-Iranian god Indra. I don’t have an opinion either way, and discussion of the Aryans is too often unpleasantly political, so I will just mention it here as a possibility in the notes where no one will see it and move on.
Kadashman-Harbe could well be Kadashman-Enlil, of which there are two. Burna-Buriash I and II are very difficult to tell apart. Which king attacked who among the Elamites is nearly impossible to untangle. The chronology of this whole episode is an absolute mess, with different sources reconstructing everything in very different ways. I have done what I can to untangle it, but I am keenly aware that there are some seeming contradictions here.
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