Balih
Mesopotamian · mortal · early dynastic · Recorded classification
Balih exists because his father wanted him. The Etana legend is about a childless king who feeds a starving eagle and is carried toward heaven to find the plant of birth; the Sumerian King List, keeping its own accounts, records that Etana was succeeded by his son Balih, who reigned four hundred years. Nothing outside the lists attests him and no one treats him as historical. He is in this registry because a legend about obtaining a son is incomplete without the son, and because his entry is what gives Etana a kin link at all.
Parentage
- parent: Etana
Domains
- sovereignty
Sources
- Balih is the son and successor of Etana in the Sumerian King List, fourteenth king of the first dynasty of Kish, whose birth is the object of the Etana legend.: Sumerian King List. (primary); Reference treatment of Balih and of the historicity of the early Kish kings. (secondary)