Ea, exalted him among the Igigu deities, named the city of Babylon with its
august name and made it supreme within the regions of the world, and established
for him within it eternal kingship whose foundations are fixed as heaven and
earth.
(Roth 1995 : 76 )The god gradually absorbed the identities of a number of different deities as he
gained importance. One of the first gods to lose his identity to Marduk was Asalluhi,
the god of incantation, the divine exorcist, and the local deity of Ku’ar a village
near Eridu. Asalluhi was the son of Enki/Ea, the god of the underground waters,
wisdom, and magic and third in rank after An/Anu and Enlil in the Mesopotamian
pantheon.^4 Although the process of the Marduk = Asalluhi syncretism may have
started already in the early second millennium, it was probably only fully established
late in the reign of Hammurabi. Through the syncretism with Asalluhi, Marduk
gained the position as the son of Enki/Ea in the Mesopotamian pantheon. By the end
of the Middle Babylonian period, Marduk assumed 50 names, such as Tutu, Shazu,
and Enbilulu in addition to Asalluhi.^5 Like Asalluhi, they were originally the names
of different deities, but after the syncretism with Marduk, each name presented
different aspects of Marduk, such as the god of water, the god of fertility, and the
saviour.
From the late Old-Babylonian period onwards, Marduk gained popularity among
the populace. For instance, the personal names containing the divine name Marduk
came to form the second largest group after the god Sin in the theophoric names
known from the late Old-Babylonian period.^6 He is also featured in Kassite private
cylinder seals, with short prayers to different deities seeking personal benefit, welfare,
and salvation. More than 60 out of around 150 available prayers of this kind are
addressed to Marduk.^7 It is remarkable too that 15 such cylinder seals from the Kassite
period Nippur, the city of Enlil, bear prayers to Marduk while only one cylinder seal
contains a prayer to Enlil.^8 Incidentally, although Enlil at that time still occupied
the highest position in the Babylonian pantheon Marduk is often invoked as the
‘creator’ or ‘chief of the heavens and the earth’ in these short prayers. This fact suggests
that the notion of Marduk as the god of supremacy first started at the level of personal
belief during the Kassite period^9 and became the official view of the Babylonian court
later, probably in the twelfth century.
After the relatively long and stable period under the Kassite kings, Babylonia
suffered foreign aggressions of two other great powers – the Assyrians and the Elamites.
Tukulti-Ninurta I ( 1244 – 1208 ) was the first to attack Babylon. He destroyed the
city wall of Babylon, captured the statue of Marduk, and controlled Babylon for three
decades.^10 The series of raids launched by the Elamite kings were even more traumatic.
They brought chaos and destruction to the cities of Babylonia. The Elamites under
Shutruk-Nahhunte I ( 1185 – 1155 ) plundered the great cities of Mesopotamia and
carried away ancient monuments such as Hammurabi’s Law Code and the statues of
the gods from the sanctuaries of Mesopotamia including Marduk and his consort
Zarpanitu as booty.^11 Shutruk-Nahhunte also put an end to the Kassite dynasty by
taking the last king, Enlil-nadin-ahi, into captivity.
After some decades of political chaos, Nebuchadrezzar I ( 1124 – 1103 ), from the
Second Dynasty of Isin, ascended the Babylonian throne. Although the historical fact
— The Babylonian god Marduk —