A Babylonian King List of the Hellenistic Period

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A number of cuneiform tablets containing chronological lists of kings of Babylonia and Assyria from various periods have been published during the last seventy-five years. None, however, of these King Lists deals with the Seleucid period, which is now covered for the first time.The present edition of the King List is intended to be a preliminary one. Once it is subjected to the detailed criticism of the Greek historians and after the one minor philological difficulty that remains is solved by our Assyriological colleagues, we expect to republish it in a more definitive form in a larger work that we are planning on the fragments of Hellenistic history that are embedded in a considerable body of unpublished astronomical texts of the Seleucid and Arsacid periods. On that occasion, we also expect to reconsider in detail the chronological data contained in the date formulas of economic and literary cuneiform texts as well as in astronomical tablets of various types, both published and unpublished. Rather than wait until every scrap of Babylonian, let alone classical, evidence has been sifted, we have thought that the interests of scholarship would best be served by the present prompt publication, particularly since the authors of this article are primarily Assyriologists and their knowledge of Hellenistic history is therefore not very profound.