Ancient Iraq (33 page)

The Dark Age of Mesopotamia

After their victory over the Kassites the Elamites did not occupy Babylonia for long, either because the conquest of vast territories in western Iran absorbed all their energy or because they already felt the presence of the newly arrived Medes and Persians as a dagger in their back. However this may be, the Elamite garrisons withdrew or were expelled, and princes native of Isin founded the Fourth Dynasty of Babylon, also called ‘Second Dynasty of Isin’.
¹⁹
Soon the new kings were powerful enough to interfere in Assyrian domestic affairs, and when Elam sank into anarchy after the brilliant reign of Shilak-Inshushinak, the Babylonian Nebuchadrezzar I
*
(
c
. 1124 – 1103
B.C.
) attacked that country. A first campaign met with failure – Elamite followed and I fled before him; I sat down on the bed of weeping and sighing’
²⁰
– but the defection of one of the Elamite lords, Shitti-Marduk, who fought on the Babylonian side, made the second campaign a glowing success. The account of the war, written on a
kudurru
granting privileges to Shitti-Marduk as a reward for his assistance, is one of the most poetic military records of antiquity.
²¹

From Dêr, the holy city of Anu, he (the King of Babylon) made a leap of thirty double-leagues. In the month of Tammuz (July – August) he
took the road. The blades of the picks burn like fire; the stones of the track blaze like furnaces; there is no water (in the wadis) and the wells are dry; stop the strongest of the horses and stagger the young heroes. Yet he goes, the elected king supported by the gods; he marches on, Nebuchadrezzar who has no rival…

The battle was fought on the banks of the River Ulaia (Karun):

At the command of Ishtar and Adad, the gods of the battle, Hulteludish, King of Elam, fled and disappeared for ever, and King Nebuchadrezzar stood up in victory: he took Elam and plundered its treasures.

Among the booty was the statue of Marduk, taken to Elam at the end of the Kassite dynasty. This gave Nebuchadrezzar an aura of glory, and perhaps enabled Marduk to reach the top of the Mesopotamian pantheon,
²²
but his victory had no lasting political results. Elam was not truly conquered, and Nebuchadrezzar's successors had to fight not for the possession of foreign lands but for the protection of their own kingdom against the eternal rival: Assyria.

Despite a serious crisis of succession and the temporary loss of their eastern provinces to Shilak-Inshushinak, the eleventh century as a whole was for the Assyrians an epoch of prosperity. Ashur-dân I, ‘who attained to grey hair and a ripe old age‘,
²³
and Ashur-rêsh-ishi, both contemporaries of the first kings of the Fourth Dynasty of Babylon, received tribute from the Sutû, kept the Ahlamû at bay, won a few battles over the Babylonians and did a considerable amount of repair work on the palace and temples of their capital-city. But at the end of the century storms gathered at the four points of the compass, which could have destroyed Assyria had it not been for the restless energy of one of the two or three great Assyrian monarchs since the days of Shamshi-Adad: Tiglathpileser I (1115 – 1077
B.C.
).
*
To the north the Mushki – perhaps related
to the Phrygians – had crossed the Taurus with twenty-thousand men and were marching down the Tigris valley in the direction of Nineveh; to the east the Zagros tribes were hostile; to the west the Aramaeans – now mentioned for the first time – were established in force along the Euphrates and had started crossing the river; and to the south Marduk-nadin-ahhê, King of Babylon, had captured Ekallatum, bringing his frontier up to the Lower Zab, thirty kilometres only from the city of Assur. Tiglathpileser first marched against the Mushki and massacred them and their allies. Then, anxious to secure his northern frontier, he went up ‘to the heights of the lofty hills and to the top of the steep mountains’ of the land of Nairi, penetrated into Armenia and set up his ‘image’ at Malazgird, far beyond Lake Van, while one of his armies chastised, the lands of Musri and Qummani at the foot of the Taurus range. The Aramaeans were forced beyond the Euphrates and pursued to their stronghold Jabal Bishri, west of Deir-ez-Zor, but the Syrian desert was swarming with this new, tough enemy:

‘Twenty-eight times,’ says the king, ‘I fought the Ahlamû-Aramaeans; (once) I even crossed the Euphrates twice in a year. I defeated them from Tadmar (Tidmur, Palmyra), which lies in the country Amurru, Anat, which lies in the country Suhu, as far as Rapiqu, which lies in Kar-Duniash (Babylonia). I brought their possessions as spoils to my town Assur.’
²⁴

It was probably in the course of these campaigns that Tiglath-pileser ‘conquered’ Syria and reached the Phoenician coast, where he received tribute from Arvad, Byblos and Sidon. Finally, came the victorious war against Babylon:

‘I marched against Kar-Duniash… I captured the palaces of Babylon belonging to Marduk-nadin-ahhê, King of Kar-Duniash. I burned them with fire. The possessions of his palace I carried off. The second time, I drew up a line of battle chariots against Marduk-nadin-ahhê, King of Kar-Duniash, and I smote him.’
²⁵

To these military exploits, the King of Assyria added hunting activities, and he was out for big game: four wild bulls ‘which were mighty and of monstrous size’ killed in the country of Mitanni, ten ‘mighty bull elephants in the country of Harran and in district of the River Khabur‘, 120 lions slain on foot, 800 lions laid low from the royal chariot and even a narwhal ‘which they call sea-horse’ killed in Mediterranean waters near Arvad.

The murder of Tiglathpileser, however, put an end to this glorious period. The mounting tide of Aramaean invasion, the desperate efforts made by the Assyrians to dam it up, the irremediable decadence of Babylon, Sumer and Akkad wide open to the Sutû and the Aramaeans, foreign wars, civil wars, floods, famine, such is the pitiful picture offered by Iraq during the tenth and ninth centuries
B.C
. If ever there was a time of ‘troubles and disorders’,
²⁶
of confusion and hardship, a dark age rendered even darker by the paucity of our sources, it was the 166 years which elapsed between the death of Tiglathpileser I (1077
B.C
.) and the advent of Adad-nirâri II (911
B.C
.).

Through the fragmentary annals of the Assyrian kings we can follow in broad outline the Aramaean progression in northern Mesopotamia. Under Ashur-bêl-kala (1074 – 1057
B.C
.) they were still on the right bank of the Euphrates, but fifty years later they had crossed the river and advanced as far as the Khabur. A few decades later, during the reign of Tiglathpileser II (967 – 935
B.C
.), we find them around Nisibin, half-way between the Khabur and the Tigris. Ashur-dân II (934 – 912
B.C
.) tried to push them back and claimed great success, but it appears clearly from the annals of Adad-nirâri II and of his successors (see next chapter) that at the dawn of the ninth century the Aramaeans had settled
en masse
all over the steppe of Jazirah: there were Aramaean kingdoms on the Euphrates (Bit-Adini) and on the Khabur (Bit-Bahiâni, Bît-Hadipé), and powerful Aramaean tribes occupied the mountain Tûr ‘Abdîn, north of Nisibin, and the banks of the Tigris. Caught between the nomads and the highlanders, Assyria was threatened with asphyxia.

In Babylonia the situation was even worse, as shown by the ancient chronicles.
²⁷
Under the reign of Nebuchadrezzar's fourth successor, Adad-apal-iddina (i..1067 – 1046
B.C.
), the Sûtu plundered and ruined one of the greatest sanctuaries of Akkad: the temple of Shamash in Sippar – an event which probably gave rise to the great Babylonian poem of war and destruction known as the Erra epic.
²⁸
Between 1024 and 978
B.C.
Babylon had seven kings divided between three dynasties. The first of these dynasties (Babylon V) was founded by a Kassite born in the Sea-Land; the second (Bit-Bazi), probably by an Aramaean; the third, by a soldier, also born in the Sea-Land but bearing an Elamite name. Under Nabû-mukin-apli (977 – 942
B.C.
), the first King of Babylon VIII, all kinds of bad omens were observed and ‘the Aramaeans became hostile’. They cut off the capital-city from its suburbs, with the result that for several years in succession the New Year Festival (which required the free movement of divine statues to and from Babylon) could not be celebrated: ‘Bêl (Marduk) went not forth and Nabû went not (from Barsippa to Babylon)’.
²⁹
The following monarchs are hardly more to us than mere names on a list, but in all probability it was during this obscure period that a number of Aramaean tribes known from later Assyrian inscriptions – the Litaû, Puqudû, Gambulû – settled between the lower Tigris and the – frontier of Elam, and that the Kaldû (Chaldeans) invaded the land of Sumer.
³⁰
No one could have then imagined that three hundred years later the Kaldû would give Babylon one of its greatest monarchs, the second Nebuchadrezzar. But in that short interval the Assyrian empire had grown, reached its peak and collapsed.

Genesis of an Empire

Assyria awoke in 911
B.C.
The prince who ascended the throne that year, Adad-nirâri II (911 – 891
B.C.
), does not rank among the illustrious, and his name did not go down to posterity, as did those of Sargon and Ashurbanipal. But it is he who loosened the grip of Assyria’s enemies and unknowingly opened the last and most brilliant chapter in the history of the northern kingdom. The war he waged and won was, in his own view, a war of national liberation.
³
The Aramaeans were driven out of the Tigris valley and dislodged from the Kashiari mountains (Tûr ‘Abdin, a rugged volcanic massif lying to the east of Mardin) from which they threatened Nineveh. Several cities in eastern Jazirah, which had been ‘torn away from Assur‘, were recovered and their walls either dismantled or fortified against possible counter-attacks. Other campaigns saw the Assyrian army in Kurdistan, whose inhabitants were ‘cut down in heaps’ and pushed back to the mountains. Finally, the King of Babylon – who was then Shamash-mudammiq, of the eighth dynasty – was twice attacked, twice defeated and lost not only a large piece of land to the north of the Diyala river, but also Hit and Zanqu, border-towns on the Middle Euphrates.
⁴
Another campaign against his successor, Nabû-shuma-ukin, was apparently less successful but ended in a treaty which ensured peace between the two kingdoms for about eighty years.
⁵
Tukulti-Ninurta II (890 – 884
B.C.
), apparently as energetic as his father, did not live long enough to substantially enlarge the royal domain, but he rebuilt the wall of Assur ‘from its foundation to its top‘, and a circular expedition in the south-western districts reconquered by Adad-nirâri won him the respect of the Aramaeans settled therein.
⁶
When he died the frontier of Assyria encompassed the whole of northern Iraq from the Khabur to the Zagros and from Nisibin to Anat and Samarra. His son, the
young Ashurnasirpal II, inherited this already large and powerful kingdom and took the first steps towards transforming it into what we call an empire.

It would be a mistake, however, to think of the Assyrian empire as a planned enterprise, an organized body formed by the deliberate addition of land after land, province after province to the original nucleus. The wars which the Assyrian monarchs waged year after year and which eventually resulted in the conquest of the greater part of the Near East, these wars which fill their annals and make us almost forget their other achievements, had different, though closely interwoven motives.
⁷
There can be no doubt that some of them were defensive or preventive measures aimed at protecting from avowed or potential enemies the relatively narrow plain on either side of the Tigris which formed the core of Assyria and to keep open the vital trade roads that traversed the Jazirah towards Syria, crossed the Taurus and the Zagros towards Anatolia and Iran, and ran southward along the Tigris. At the end of the tenth century
B.C
., some of these roads were blocked by tribes from the steppe or the mountains and others by the Babylonians, the rulers and soldiers of a large country which the Assyrians coveted for its riches, revered as the holder of the great Sumero-Akkadian traditions but also feared, for since the days of Narâm-Sin of Akkad the kings of the South had never ceased claiming possession of the North, as witnessed by the multiple ‘border wars’ they had deliberately started. To fight on all these fronts was the price the Assyrians had to pay for their political and economic freedom, but if they won, then there would be no limit to their ambitions, including to obtain access to the Mediterranean Sea or the Gulf. It must be borne in mind that Assyria was the only country of the Near East that had no ‘window’ on a sea.

But it was not enough for the Assyrians to survive: they had to become wealthy in order to finance major architectural or agricultural projects, to provide their kings and their gods with the luxury to which they were entitled. During most of the
second millennium
B.C
., Assyria had obtained the surplus she needed first from the fruitful operations of her merchants in Cappadocia, then from the ‘royal trade’ which flourished in the 15th and the 14th centuries, until the economic equilibrium of the entire Orient was toppled by the great invasions that took place around 1200
B.C
. But since that time, the campaigns of Tukulti-Ninurta I and Tiglathpileser I had shown how much bold armed expeditions could pay and how useful it was to possess a vast hunting ground, ‘a geographical area through which one could raid without encountering effective opposition’,
⁸
bringing back a heavy booty. As long as foreign countries could be plundered and/or persuaded to pay the ransom of their independence, there was no need to annex and govern them directly.

To these economic motives must be added, of course, the greed and ambition of the Assyrian kings, their typically oriental desire to cover themselves with glory, to pose as invincible demi-gods in front of their subjects.

Moreover, as vicars and representatives on earth of their national god regarded as standing well above all other gods, they felt it their duty to impose the cult of Ashur in what was for them the whole world.
⁹
This in general could only be achieved by force, but it did not matter since the king's enemies were
ipso facto
the god's enemies and therefore wicked devils who deserved to be punished whatever they had done.
¹⁰
Thus, brigandry and occasional massacres were justified by the politico-religious ideology of the Assyrians; each of their campaigns was a measure of self-defence, an act of gangsterism but also a crusade.

Almost every year, usually in the spring, the King of Assyria mustered his troops ‘at the command of Ashur’ and led them on the dusty tracks of the Mesopotamian plain or on the perilous paths of the Taurus and of the Zagros. In the early days his opponents in those regions were merely chiefs of tribes or local princelings. Some fought bravely, though rarely with success; others fled to the desert or hid on inaccessible mountain peaks;
others ‘embraced the feet’ of the Assyrian war-lord, brought presents, promised to pay regular tribute and were spared. But woe to those who failed to keep their promise! In the course of another campaign a punitive expedition was directed against them and a storm swept over their country: the rebels were tortured, the population massacred or enslaved, the towns and villages set on fire, the crops burned, the trees uprooted. Terror-stricken, the neighbouring chieftains hastened to offer gifts and to swear allegiance. Then, its duty accomplished, loaded with spoil, trailing behind it human captives, flocks and herds, the army returned home and disbanded. As an example of what Assyria gained from these wars, here is a list of the
tamartu
(the ‘spectacular gift for display’) taken by Ashurnasirpal in one single, small district of Bit-Zamâni, the region of modern Diarbakr.

not counting the ruler's sister, the ‘daughters of his nobles with their rich dowries’ and his 15,000 Ahlamû-Aramaean subjects ‘snatched away and brought to Assyria’. The local prince was put to death, and an annual tribute was imposed on his successor, consisting of 1,000 sheep, 2,000
gur
of grain, 2 minas of gold and 13 minas of silver.
¹¹
In the same campaign Ashurnasirpal gathered presents and spoil from no less than five countries and nine major cities.

As years went by, the boundaries of the Assyrian hunting ground were pushed farther and farther afield. Behind the petty states of their immediate neighbourhood, the kings of Assur found larger and more powerful kingdoms: Urartu in Armenia, the Medes in Iran, Elam and Egypt. The raids of rapine became wars of conquest. Assyria had grown stronger, but her opponents were bigger and tougher. The increased distances rendered more difficult the collection of tribute and the suppression of revolts. In most places it became necessary to replace the native rulers and their courts by Assyrian governors and civil servants and to extend to these far-away regions the division into provinces which had prevailed in Assyria proper since very early days. In this way an empire took shape with its huge, complex and perfectly organized administrative machinery. But the original objectives were never forgotten, and the extortion of taxes remained the foundation of Assyrian government. It is certain that the Aramaean merchants and the Phoenician sailors and craftsmen benefited to a certain extent from the facility and security of communications throughout this vast territory and from the ever-increasing demands of the Assyrian palaces for luxury goods. It is probable that some of the more backward districts received a thin varnish of civilization.
¹²
But outside Assyria proper – which now included the entire steppe between the Euphrates and the Tigris – there is no evidence that the conquerors made much effort to diffuse their highly advanced culture, to care for the economic development of the distant provinces and satellite states, to improve, even indirectly, the welfare of their populations. The silence on this subject of the royal correspondence found at Nineveh and at Nimrud, the almost complete absence of Assyrian texts in Syria, Palestine, Armenia and Iran, the generally poor character of the Assyrian level in excavated sites of these countries, the frequent references to spoil, massacres and destruction in the royal annals (however exaggerated they may be), everything points to impoverishment or, at best, stagnation. The men, horses, cattle and sheep brought into Assyria by the thousand, the enormous yearly
income in silver, gold, copper, iron, grain and other commodities so accurately registered by the palace scribes, all this was generally not purchased but taken by force. Wealth was constantly being transferred from the periphery to the centre, from the dependencies and ‘protectorates’ to the Mesopotamian homeland.
¹³
The Assyrians took much and gave very little, with the result that if the state was rich its distant subjects were destitute and in almost constant rebellion. The system upon which the empire was founded had in itself the germs of its own destruction.