First Sealand dynasty

[2][page needed] The dynasty, which had broken free of the short lived, and by this time crumbling Old Babylonian Empire, was named for the province in the far south of Mesopotamia, a swampy region bereft of large settlements which gradually expanded southwards with the silting up of the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (the region known as mat Kaldi "Chaldaea" in the Iron Age).

[6] They seem to originate from a single cache but their provenance was lost after languishing in smaller private collections since their acquisition on the antiquities market a century earlier.

[9] The tablets include letters, receipts, ledgers, personnel rosters, etc., and provide year-names and references which hint at events of the period.

Messengers from Elam are provisioned,[i 1] Inzak, a god of Dilmun (ancient Bahrain) appears as a theophoric element in names,[i 2] and Nūr-Bau asks whether he should detain the boats of Ešnunna,[i 3] a rare late reference to this once thriving Sumerian conurbation.

In addition to normal commercial activity, two omen texts from another private collection are dated to the reign of Pešgaldarameš and a kurugu-hymn dedicated to the gods of Nippur mentions Ayadaragalama.

[7] Excavations conducted between 2013 and 2017 at Tell Khaiber, around 20 km from Ur, have revealed the foundations of a large mudbrick fortress with an unusual arrangement of perimeter close-set towers.

This source is considered reliable in this respect because the forms of the names of Pešgaldarameš and Ayadaragalama match those on recently published contemporary economic tablets (see below).

[7] Ilum-ma-ilī,[i 9] or Iliman (mili-ma-an),[i 5] the founder of the dynasty, is known from the account of his exploits in the Chronicle of Early Kings[i 6] which describes his conflicts with his Amorite Babylonian contemporaries Samsu-iluna and Abi-ešuḫ.

[i 14][7] A neo-Babylonian official took a bronze band dedicatory inscription of A-ia-da-a-ra, MAN ŠÚ “king of the world,” to Tell en-Nasbeh, probably as an antique curio, where it was discarded to be found in the 20th century.

Ea-gâmil, the ultimate king of the dynasty, fled to Elam ahead of an army led by Kassite chief Ulam-Buriaš, brother of the king of Babylon Kashtiliash III, who conquered the Sealand, incorporated it into Babylonia and “made himself master of the land.” Agum III, successor to Ulam-Buriaš, is also described as attacking Sealand and destroying a temple in "Dūr-Enlil".

[29] A serpentine or diorite mace head or possibly door knob found in Babylon,[30] is engraved with the epithet of Ulaburariaš, “King of Sealand”.