ABSTRACT

Having laid out the theoretical approach that the author will take to first Nebuchadnezzar, it remains to introduce the materials that will receive our scrutiny. Much of the interest that Nebuchadnezzar has attracted has been due to the attention given to the god Marduk. A brief consideration needs to be given to the way in which first Nebuchadnezzar's name was written in the sources and the problems surrounding the chronology of the late second millennium. The problems with the chronology are not as pronounced as the challenges that still face attempts to reconstruct the chronology of the first half of the second millennium. The available secondary sources pertaining to first Nebuchadnezzar range from historical texts in which both the king and the god Marduk featured to texts from an array of genres. For our purposes, tertiary sources are those sources that relate to the greater arc of events in which first Nebuchadnezzar was considered to have been a crucial actor.