Kabti-ilāni-Marduk
c. 750 BCE · Babylon
Kabti-ilāni-Marduk is the named author of the Akkadian Poem of Erra, the five-tablet work in which the violent god Erra is roused to devastate Babylonia until his vizier Išum calms him. In a closing passage the poem itself names Kabti-ilāni-Marduk, of the Dabibi family, declaring that the composition came to him entire in a dream at night — one of the very few Mesopotamian literary works to name its author. Beyond this self-naming little is securely known of him, and the poem's date (often placed around the 8th century BCE) is debated.
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One of the rare ancient authors who signed his work
The Poem of Erra, a Babylonian composition usually dated to around the 8th century BCE, names its own author in its closing lines — the scribe Kabti-ilāni-Marduk. By the poem's own account, the work came to him in a dream at night, and he set it down without omitting a word. Either way, he is one of the very few ancient Mesopotamian authors preserved by name at all, since most of the literature is anonymous.
How we know
Kabti-ilāni-Marduk, named author of the Poem of Erra (Erra and Ishum), floruit c. 8th century BCE (von Soden's early-8th-c. dating; range debated); dream-revelation and self-naming stated in the poem's colophon (Britannica; Encyclopedia.com).
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Babylon
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About Babylon
Babylon, whose ruins lie at modern Hillah in Iraq, about 85 km south of Baghdad, was the great city on the Euphrates that gave its name to Babylonia. Hammurabi made it his capital, and it was capital again under the Neo-Babylonian kings, when Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilt it. After his capture of Jerusalem in 587 BCE many Judeans were deported there, the exile remembered in the Hebrew Bible, and Babylonia remained a major centre of Jewish life for centuries. Cyrus of Persia took the city in 539 BCE. In the early third century BCE the priest Berossus wrote a Greek history of Babylonia. The site is a UNESCO World Heritage Site; the pin marks the excavated city.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Kabti-ilāni-Marduk’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
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