According to his inscriptions, Sennacherib, king of Assyria, conquered and razed the city of Babylon in 689 BCE. Previous Neo-Assyrian monarchs had employed a variety of strategies while attempting to deal with what Machinist has dubbed their “Babylonian Problem”. None of these previous tactics, however, approached the level of violence and destruction evidenced in Sennacherib's own descriptions of this campaign. Indeed, as elaborated by Brinkman, the Neo-Assyrian court traditionally venerated Babylonian culture.

Machinist's interpretation, while not dismissing the unprecedented destructiveness of Sennacherib's actions, positions these actions in the context of a larger struggle faced by all the Sargonid monarchs, the struggle of maintaining sovreignty over Babylonia while honoring its religious and cultural traditions. However, such an utter devastation of Babylon, its treatment as one of Assyria's many other de-cultured vassals, is disparate enough from the actions of Sennacherib's predecessors so as to place his son and successor, Esarhaddon, in a difficult position with respect to Babylon and the Babylonian population.

Esarhaddon's decision to abandon his father's extreme tactics and adopt a primarily peaceful policy, comparable in aspects to those of the earlier Neo-Assyrian monarchs, was therefore a risky one. It is, however, a decision he stands by and justifies through many of the compositions produced during his reign. In the wake of the destruction and de-culturation in the service of Assyrian hegemony wreaked by his father, Esarhaddon designs a policy toward Babylonia based on construction and acculturation that influences and affects the cultures of both Assyria and Babylonia.