every king individually including the number of years that they reigned. Especially the
years for earlier kings are within the realm of fantasy: the first king of the city of Eridu
is said to have reigned for 28 , 000 years! Moreover, at least the Old Babylonian version
(c. 1800 BC) begins with listing kings that ruled before the ‘Flood’, thus connecting
mythical with historical times. All the dynasties that are mentioned in the SKL are
listed as having reigned consecutively; even those dynasties that we now know were
contemporaneous. Moreover, the dynasties of the city-state of Lagash were not men-
tioned at all, possibly indicating a rivalry between the authors of the SKL and the city-
state of Lagash.
The early Mesopotamian concept of a royal dynasty was closely tied to the city that
was its power base; this differs strongly from modern conceptions of royal dynasties,
which are mainly defined through blood ties. Both royal inscriptions and the SKL only
rarely give information on parentage of kings; instead, kings stated that their rule was
legitimised through divine favour.
It has been suggested that the SKL created a fiction that southern Mesopotamia was
always ruled by a single dynasty and therefore served as a tool of legitimisation for the
Old Babylonian dynasty of Isin, who laid claim to a hegemonic rule over Mesopotamia
(Michalowski 1983 ; Wilcke 1988 ). Although the new Ur III manuscript does not
invalidate this claim, the differences between the two versions show that the Old
Babylonian scribes took some liberties in transmitting the kinglist (Steinkeller 2003 ).
The passages of the SKL relating to what otherwise might be identified with the Early
Dynastic I–II period seem particularly unreliable as historical sources: after the flood
had swept over southern Mesopotamia, kingship first went to Kisˇ, then to Uruk, listing
legendary kings of Uruk, such as Lugalbanda, Dumuzi and Gilgamesh. Because we are
lacking information from other sources, such as royal inscriptions, that these kings ever
existed (although they are mentioned in Sumerian myths, see Vanstiphout 2003 ), they
have to be considered mythical. Moreover, as Steinkeller ( 2003 : 285 – 286 ) has suggested,
it is likely that the mythical kings of Uruk and other dynasties were only inserted into
the SKL in the Old Babylonian period, in order to break up the long dynasty of Kish
and show a higher turn-over rate between dynasties and cities, which then offered
greater legitimacy to the kings of Isin, who saw themselves as the heirs to the Ur III state.
With the Early Dynastic III period, the fog of prehistory slowly begins to lift. The
subdivision of the ED III period into a and b was made on the basis of texts,
archaeologically there is no break between the two sub-phases (Porada et al. 1992 :
111 – 112 ). However, the different terminology for ED IIIa and b is still unclear and ill
defined (Porada et al. 1992 : 108 – 109 ).
The two most important archives of ED III come from the cities of Fara (ancient
Shurrupak) and Tell Abu Salabikh (possibly ancient Eresh). They are roughly con-
temporary and commonly dated to the ED IIIa period. Shurrupak is mentioned in the
Old Babylonian version of the SKL as the last dynasty before the flood (Krebernik 1998 :
241 ), yet no year dates or royal names appear in the archives. The language of the
Fara and Abu Salabikh texts is overwhelmingly Sumerian, as are the personal names
mentioned in these archives, but the first Semitic texts and personal names appear
(Krebernik 1998 : 260 – 270 ). Based on palaeography, it has been suggested that the
archives are contemporary to king Mesalim (or Mesilim) of Kish (Krebernik 1998 :
158 f.). We know from royal inscriptions that Mesalim predates the kings mentioned in
Table 6. 3 , but at this stage he cannot be placed within a relative or absolute chronology.
–– History and chronology ––