For the majority of its existence as an independent kingdom, Babylon ruled most of southern Mesopotamia, composed of the ancient regions of Sumer and Akkad.

Throughout the city's nearly two-thousand year history, it was ruled by kings of native Babylonian (Akkadian), Amorite, Kassite, Elamite, Aramean, Assyrian, Chaldean, Persian, Greek and Parthian origin.

A king's cultural and ethnic background does not appear to have been important for the Babylonian perception of kingship, the important matter instead being whether the king was capable of executing the duties traditionally ascribed to the Babylonian king: establishing peace and security, upholding justice, honouring civil rights, refraining from unlawful taxation, respecting religious traditions, constructing temples, providing gifts to the gods in the temples and maintaining cultic order.

Though Babylon never regained independence after the Achaemenid conquest, there were several attempts by the Babylonians to drive out their foreign rulers and re-establish their kingdom, possibly as late as 336/335 BC under the rebel Nidin-Bel.

[3] The Babylonian kings derived their right to rule from divine appointment by Babylon's patron deity Marduk and through consecration by the city's priests.

The high priest removed the regalia from the king, slapped him across the face and made him kneel before Marduk's statue.

[18] Through being a patron of Babylon's temples, the king extended his generosity towards the Mesopotamian gods, who in turn empowered his rule and lent him their authority.

[16] Babylonian kings were expected to establish peace and security, uphold justice, honor civil rights, refrain from unlawful taxation, respect religious traditions and maintain cultic order.

[23] Among all the different types of documents uncovered through excavations in Mesopotamia, the most important for reconstructions of chronology and political history are king-lists and chronicles, grouped together under the term 'chronographic texts'.

Since the capitals of the Assyrian and Achaemenid empires were elsewhere, these foreign kings did not regularly partake in the city's rituals (meaning that they could not be celebrated in the same way that they traditionally were) and they rarely performed their traditional duties to the Babylonian cults through constructing temples and presenting cultic gifts to the city's gods.

Xerxes also divided the previously large Babylonian satrapy into smaller sub-units and, according to some sources, damaged the city itself in an act of retribution.

[17] The last Achaemenid king whose own royal inscriptions officially used the title 'king of Babylon' was Xerxes I's son and successor Artaxerxes I (r. 465–424 BC).

The only known official explicit use of 'king of Babylon' by a king during the Seleucid period can be found in the Antiochus cylinder, a clay cylinder containing a text wherein Antiochus I Soter (r. 281–261 BC) calls himself, and his father Seleucus I Nicator (r. 305–281 BC), by the title 'king of Babylon', alongside various other ancient Mesopotamian titles and honorifics.

[43] Under the Parthian Empire, Babylon was gradually abandoned as a major urban centre and the old Babylonian culture diminished.

Archaeological evidence and the writings of Abba Arikha (c.  AD 219) indicate that at least the temples of Babylon may still have been active in the early 3rd century.

[45] If any remnants of the old Babylonian culture still existed at that point, they would have been decisively wiped out as the result of religious reforms in the early Sasanian Empire c.  AD 230.

[50] Due to a shortage of sources, and the timing of Babylon's abandonment being unknown, the last ruler recognised by the Babylonians as king is not known.

Spar and Lambert (2005) did not include any rulers beyond the first century AD in their list of kings recognised by the Babylonians,[36] but Beaulieu (2018) considered 'Dynasty XIV of Babylon' (his designation for the Parthians as rulers of the city) to have lasted until the end of Parthian rule of Babylonia in the early 3rd century AD.

Up until the reign of Burnaburiash II (r. c. 1359–1333 BC) of the Kassite dynasty (Dynasty III), Sumerian was the dominant language for use in inscriptions and official documents, with Akkadian eclipsing it under the reign of Kurigalzu II (r. c. 1332–1308 BC), and thereafter replacing Sumerian in inscriptions and documents.

[56][57] To examplify this, the table below presents two ways the name of Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 605–562 BC) was spelt in Akkadian (Nabû-kudurri-uṣur).

The entry for this dynasty's name in BKLa is lost, but other Babylonian sources refer to it as palû Kaššī ('dynasty of the Kassites').

[76] The reconstruction of the sequence and names of the early rulers of this dynasty, the kings before Karaindash, is difficult and controversial.

[77] Babylonia was not fully consolidated and reunified until the reign of Ulamburiash, who defeated Ea-gamil, the last king of the first Sealand dynasty.

BKLa dynastically separates Mar-biti-apla-usur from other kings with horizontal lines, marking him as belonging to a dynasty of his own.

[22] BKLa also assigns individual dynastic labels to some of the kings, though thus not in the same fashion as is done for the more concrete earlier dynasties.

[22] The palê designation associated with each king (they are recorded in the list up until Mushezib-Marduk) is included in the table below and follows Fales (2014).