The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

Furuli’s Second Book 545
Babylonian period is, of course, pure guesswork and a game that no scholar who wants to
be taken seriously would run the risk of becoming involved in. The name, written in
Hebrew characters, is either Assyrian or Babylonian, and if the inscription found at Mizpah
dates from the 6 th century BCE, he (or his son) may perhaps have been one of the
Babylonian officials known to have been stationed there after the destruction of Jerusalem.
(J. Zorn, op. cit., pp. 38, 66)
Ayadara
The name of the second individual was found on a fragment of a slender bronze circlet with
an incised cuneiform inscription that originally consisted of 30-35 characters, of which only
11 are preserved. The inscription was not discovered until 1942 in Berkeley, when some
supposedly unimportant metal fragments were cleaned in a hot bath with caustic soda and
zinc. Jeffrey Zorn states:
“Since only a small part of the inscription survives, its translation is
problematic. It may have read ‘… Ayadara, king of the world, for (the
preservation of) his life and …’ This is clearly a dedicatory inscription of
sorts, but the words indicating what is being dedicated, and to whom, have
been lost. Even the identification of Ayadara is unknown; no one with his
name bearing the title ‘king of the world’ is known from any period. What is
remarkable is that such a dedicatory inscription should turn up on a small tell
in ancient Judah.” – Zorn, op. cit., p. 66.
A photo of the inscription, held at the Badè Museum of Biblical Archaeology in Berkeley,
California
Referring to the two inscriptions, Furuli believes he has found two more “unknown kings”
here who may have been ruling during the Neo-Babylonian period. He says:
“Babylonian kings by the names Mar-šarri-uşur and Ayadara are unknown in
the period covered by Ptolemy’s canon, but the discovery of these names
suggests that two kings with these names reigned in Babylon.” (Furuli, p. 80)
The discovery of the two names suggests nothing of the kind.
To find out if the name “Ayadara” really is totally unknown to scholars, a correspondent of
mine wrote to several Assyriologists and asked them if they knew anything about this king.
One of them, Dr. Stephanie Dalley at the Oriental Institute in Oxford, England, who turned
out to be working on texts from the Sealand dynasties, answered in an email dated 10
October 2007:
“The king is Aya-dara, abbreviation for Aya-dara-galam-ma, of the First
Sealand dynasty [dated to the mid-second millennium BCE]. I am editing a
very large archive of that king plus a few texts of his predecessor. The
abbreviated form of the name is known from King-list A.”