In the first lecture, we began by examining the way in which the late Palaeo-Babylonian period has been treated in historiography; we then described the main sources available to the historian, before outlining the general event framework of this period.
The political history of Mesopotamia, as it is generally portrayed, was marked by several cycles of growth and decline: in the third millennium, the fall of Agadeh brought to a close the imperial adventure inaugurated by King Sargon. Or the fall of Ur, which put an end to the third Ur dynasty around 2004. As far as the second millennium is concerned, the main break came with the end of the 1st dynasty of Babylon in 1595 B.C. The falls of Akkad or Ur cannot be said to have been as significant as that of Babylon around 1600: they were politico-military events, but were not followed by a long period devoid of written evidence. On the other hand, the fall of Babylon in 1595 marked a turning point. The question of absolute chronology remains: did the end of the 1st Babylonian dynasty really usher in an obscure age of a century and a half, of which no written text has come down to us, as the so-called average chronology suggests? Or does the chronology need to be shortened, which would reduce this phase of silence in the sources to half a century, as Hermann Gasche proposed? It's still too early to settle the debate with any certainty. What remains certain is that the fall of Babylon marks a caesura, which is not simply due to chance discoveries, before texts dating the Kassite kings become more numerous. The recent discovery of several hundred texts dated to the first kings of the Land of the Sea, in the 16thcentury , nuances the traditional vision of a radical break: but the major sites such as Uruk, Ur, Larsa, Nippur and Isin did not deliver any texts between the second half of the 18thcentury and the beginning of the 14th.
