A Companion to Assyria

by Eckart Frahm

  Despite Assyria’s endorsement of key elements of Babylonian culture and continuing trade relations with the south (Faist 2001: 207–12), political tensions with Babylonia did not ease. Border skirmishes between the two countries occurred under Enlil‐nirari (1317–1308) and Adad‐nirari I (1295–1264). The situation escalated during the reign of Tukulti‐Ninurta I (1233–1197). Claiming that his Babylonian opponent Kaštiliaš had violated an earlier Assyro‐Babylonian treaty, Tukulti‐Ninurta sent his armies against Babylonia, conquered the city of Babylon, and assumed the Babylonian title “King of Sumer and Akkad,” a move that indicates the special status accorded to Babylonia by Assyria’s political elite (Kravitz 2010; Llop 2011). The Assyrian king celebrated his victory in a long epic written in Babylonian language and replete with tropes from Babylonian literary texts (Machinist 1978; Foster 2005: 298–317), and commissioned a Sumero‐Akkadian poem to praise his deeds (Foster 2005: 318–23).

  To some extent, Tukulti‐Ninurta’s scribes may have owed their knowledge of Babylonian scholarship and literature, which they deployed so skillfully in the aforementioned works, to an act of “booknapping” undertaken during the king’s Babylonian campaigns. According to the Tukulti‐Ninurta Epic, Assyrian troops returned from the south with numerous clay tablets inscribed with religious and scholarly texts. Many of the Middle Babylonian tablets found in Ashur may have been part of this booty (see Chapter 20). According to later sources, the Assyrians also brought the statue of Marduk to Assyria. A Middle Assyrian cultic text found in Ashur (Köcher 1952) provides instructions for a ritual celebrated in honor of Marduk, but it is unclear whether the ceremony described took place in Ashur or Babylon. Middle Assyrian administrative texts reveal that significant numbers of Kassite deportees had to work on royal building projects in Assyria.

  Direct Assyrian rule over Babylonia proved to be short‐lived, and for much of the 12th century, Babylonia gained again the upper hand (see, inter alia, Bloch 2012). As part of the power play between the two states, Babylonian and Assyrian kings seem to have exchanged numerous letters during this time. A few of them, perhaps in reedited versions, entered Assyria’s scribal “stream of tradition,” as indicated by copies found in Assurbanipal’s libraries in Nineveh (see, e.g., Llop and George 2001/2002). Given that the Babylonian correspondents call certain Assyrian kings drunkards and claim that Assyrian men were like women, the prolonged study of this letter corpus by Assyria’s intellectual elites is a rather remarkable phenomenon.

  Roughly a century after Tukulti‐Ninurta’s war against Babylonia, in the 20th and 21st regnal years of Tiglath‐pileser I (1114–1076), Assyrian troops moved again into the Babylonian heartland, but were forced to retreat almost immediately to ward off attacks on their homeland by Aramaic tribal groups. Two of Tiglath‐pileser’s sons were killed in connection with this war, under circumstances that remain unclear (Llop 2003).

  The Synchronistic History claims that in 1069 BCE, Aššur‐bel‐kala (1073–1056) put Adad‐apla‐iddina on the Babylonian throne and married one of his daughters, initiating a period in which “the peoples of Assyria and Karduniaš (i.e., Babylonia) were joined together” (Grayson 1975: 165, ii 25’–37’). By this time, both Assyria and Babylonia were equally affected by the onslaught of the aforementioned Aramaeans, who had begun to infiltrate Mesopotamia in the wake of the ecological and political breakdown that marked the end of the Late Bronze Age. The newly formed alliance between Assyria and Babylonia may have been inspired by a desire on the part of both sides to keep the Aramaean intruders at bay (Fuchs 2011: 260–2).

  The First Millennium BCE

  Both Assyria and the kingdom of Babylon found themselves reduced to their core areas during the crisis years at the turn of the millennium. Apparently, Babylon managed to keep its possessions in the northeast, but elsewhere, the regions formerly ruled by it turned into a motley hodgepodge of political actors. Semi‐nomadic Aramaeans roamed the countryside and disrupted attempts to engage in transregional exchange. Aramaean sub‐groups known as Chaldaeans founded a number of proto‐states in the Mesopotamian south, including Bit‐Yakin (lit. “House of Yakin”), Bit‐Dakkuri, and Bit‐Amukani (Berlejung and Streck 2013). Ancient cities such as Babylon, Uruk, and Nippur remained largely autonomous but were politically weak, even though they managed to maintain much of their ancient cultural and religious prestige.

  Assyria recovered from the crisis more quickly. At the beginning of the reign of Adad‐nirari II (911–891), Assyrian armies, penetrating regions previously under Babylonian control, managed to seize the important city of Arrapḫa, which became a new base for Assyrian operations in the east and south. Towards the end of the king’s reign, a formal treaty between Assyria and Babylonia confirmed the newly drawn border separating the two states in the eastern Tigris region. Inscriptions of several ninth century Assyrian kings mention the border’s main sectors (Fuchs 2011: 263–4).

  When Shalmaneser III (858–824) ascended the Assyrian throne, he not only renewed the border treaty with Babylonia but reached a kind of “entente cordiale” with his Babylonian counterpart, King Nabû‐aplu‐iddina. In 851–50 BCE, after the latter had died and his son and legitimate heir, Marduk‐zakir‐šumi, found himself embroiled in a civil war with one of his own brothers, Shalmaneser intervened and helped Marduk‐zakir‐šumi secure the Babylonian throne. The Assyrian king visited the sanctuaries of various Babylonian deities, including Marduk, and supported Babylon militarily by fighting against the Chaldaean state of Bit‐Dakkuri in the south. A bas‐relief on a throne‐base from Kalḫu depicts Shalmaneser in the act of shaking hands with Marduk‐zakir‐šumi, a unique motif that highlights the special relationship that existed between Assyria and Babylonia (Miglus 2000).

  For a short while, during the unrest that broke out in Assyria in 826 BCE, two years before Shalmaneser’s death, Babylonia gained again the upper hand. After helping one of Shalmaneser’s sons, Šamši‐Adad V (823–811), on the Assyrian throne, Marduk‐zakir‐šumi and the new Assyrian king signed a treaty (the only one between the two countries that has actually survived) whose stipulations clearly favored Babylonia (SAA 2, no. 1). But the advantage was short‐lived, and in a series of campaigns undertaken between 815 and 811, Šamši‐Adad reestablished Assyrian predominance. He annexed significant portions of the Babylonian territory in the eastern Tigris region, made incursions into Chaldaean lands in the south, and even conquered the city of Babylon (Fuchs 2011: 269–77). Babylon was left for a while without a king, and when the city eventually made a political comeback, it was under rulers belonging to the Chaldaean “tribes” of the south.

  Šamši‐Adad’s heir, Adad‐nirari III (810–783), confirmed the redrawing of the borders with Babylonia through another treaty. He also commissioned the so‐called “Synchronistic History,” which sketches Assyro‐Babylonian relations between the 15th and eighth century BCE from a markedly pro‐Assyrian viewpoint, probably in an attempt to justify the recent territorial gains Assyria had made (Galter 1999). Copies of this text are known from Assurbanipal’s libraries in Nineveh, testifying to the continuing interest it held for the Assyrian elites.

  The Assyrian ability to intervene in Babylonia became increasingly limited during the reigns of Adad‐nirari III and his immediate successors, all of whom were forced to share their power with a number of influential high officials. For several decades, Assyria had to focus its military attention on other regions, especially Urartu, and besides skirmishes with Aramaean semi‐nomads in the Assyro‐Babylonian border area, little Assyrian activity in the south is recorded.

  All this changed with the accession of Tiglath‐pileser III (744–727), when Assyro‐Babylonian relations entered an entirely new phase. For more than a century, until the collapse of the Assyrian state in 612/609 BCE, the political and cultural interaction with its southern neighbor became a central concern for Assyria’s rulers (see Frame 2008), and large numbers of sources are available to shed light on it. The following paragraphs
provide only a very bare outline of the political history of this period; more detailed information can be found in Chapter 8.

  The reign of Tiglath‐pileser’s marked the beginning of a new imperial age for Assyria. During his first fifteen years on the throne, the king’s ambitions were primarily focused on Syria and the Levant, where several previously independent states were fully or partially annexed. But in 729, Tiglath‐pileser turned his attention to Babylonia. After defeating Mukin‐zeri, a Chaldaean from Bit‐Amukani who had usurped the Babylonian throne two years earlier, he conquered the city of Babylon and assumed the title “king of Sumer and Akkad,” the first Assyrian king to do so after Tukulti‐Ninurta I. Through his two‐time participation in the Akitu festival in Babylon, Tiglath‐pileser showed his respect for Marduk and other Babylonian deities (Brinkman 1984: 39–44).

  For a few years, the situation in Babylonia remained stable. But when Sargon II’s accession to the Assyrian throne in 722 BCE met with substantial internal opposition, another Chaldaean leader, Marduk‐aplu‐iddina of Bit‐Yakin, exploited the unrest by ousting the Assyrians and assuming the kingship of Babylon himself. For many years, he would play the role of public enemy number one for the Assyrian rulers (Brinkman 1964). Even the Bible (which calls him Merodach‐baladan) mentions him, claiming that he sought to win Hezekiah, another late eighth century opponent of Assyrian hegemony, as an ally (2 Kings 20:12; Isa. 39:1).

  Marduk‐aplu‐iddina’s first term as Babylonian king came to an end in 710, when he was forced to flee after Sargon had finally managed to reconquer Babylonia. Sargon claims in his inscriptions that the citizens of Babylon received him with great enthusiasm, a statement whose truth is hard to gauge. In contrast, Sargon’s own passion for everything Babylonian is beyond question. The Assyrian king stayed in Babylon for three years, participated in the Akitu festival, granted Babylon tax exemptions of a kind that otherwise only very few cities received, and attributed his kingship not only to Assur but also to Marduk (Vera Chamaza 2002: 43–70). He also revived the tradition, already sporadically attested for the reign of Tukulti‐Ninurta I, of writing the name Assur “An‐šár,” thereby implicitly identifying the Assyrian state god with a Babylonian deity prominently featured as an early leader of the gods in Enūma eliš, the Babylonian epic of creation (Frahm 1997: 282–3). Other elements of Babylonian religion, including prayers and lamentations written in the Sumerian Emesal dialect, were adopted by Assyria’s clerical elite as well (Gabbay 2014).

  After conquering substantial portions of the Mesopotamian south, Sargon established a new administrative structure for Babylonia by dividing it into two provinces, both ruled by Assyrian governors: Babylon in the north and Gambulu in the south. Sargon also appointed new leaders in a number of important cities and temples. Not only Babylon, but other cult centers as well received tax relief and additional privileges, including relief from corvée work, probably in an attempt to ramp up the support of the cities against the Chaldaeans and Aramaeans in the rural hinterland (Brinkman 1984: 50–4).

  In 705 BCE, Sargon was killed on the battlefield in Tabal. As indicated by a text most likely dating to the reign of Esarhaddon (SAA 3, no. 33), at least some members of the Assyrian elite regarded the king’s inauspicious death as a divine punishment for his apparent preference of Babylonian over Assyrian gods (Frahm 1997: 227–9). This, among other things, may explain why Sargon’s successor Sennacherib (704–681) treated Babylonia far less favorably than his father (Brinkman 1973). At the beginning of his reign, the indefatigable Marduk‐aplu‐iddina had again seized the crown in Babylon. Sennacherib eventually managed to drive him away, after Assyrian troops had waged war in various regions in Babylonia between 704 and 702 BCE, but unlike his father, he did not claim the Babylonian throne for himself. Instead, having set the tone by plundering Babylon’s royal palace, he installed as king of Babylon a certain Bel‐ibni, a member of an influential old family from Babylon who had grown up as a hostage at the Assyrian court.

  Apparently, Bel‐ibni never managed to gain full control over his realm. In 700 Sennacherib replaced him with his own eldest son, Aššur‐nadin‐šumi, and forced Marduk‐aplu‐iddina, who had continued his insurrectional activities, into his last exile in Elam. Again, though, Assyrian rule over Babylonia proved to be short‐lived. In 694, the leading circles of Babylon removed Aššur‐nadin‐šumi from office and extradited him to the Elamites, who probably killed him.

  Realizing that all his political experiments to govern Babylonia had failed, and deeply aggrieved about the last act of treason the Babylonians had committed, Sennacherib sought to take bloody revenge. In 691, Assyrian troops fought a pitched battle in the Assyro‐Babylonian border region with the new Babylonian king, Mušezib‐Marduk, and his numerous allies, among them Persians and Elamites. Even though it resulted not in an Assyrian victory but a draw, Sennacherib’s annals describe the battle with great rhetorical fanfare and in a poetic language that seems to be influenced by Enūma eliš and the Tukulti‐Ninurta Epic, thus paving the way, ideologically, for Sennacherib’s final attack on Babylon (Weissert 1997; Frahm 2014: 208–13). In 689, Assyrian troops conquered the city, ransacked it thoroughly, and destroyed (or removed?) the image of the Babylonian god Marduk.

  Sennacherib’s efforts to annihilate Babylon were accompanied, somewhat ironically, by an attempt on his part to make Assyrian religion and culture more Babylonian than ever before. The sacred infrastructure of Ashur was refashioned after the model of Babylon, which Assyria’s religious center was apparently meant to replace. Assyrian scribes created a new edition of Enūma eliš, whose protagonist was the Assyrian god Assur instead of the Babylonian Marduk. And a polemical cultic commentary (SAA 3, nos. 34–5) reinterpreted the Babylonian Akitu festival, which celebrated Marduk’s greatness, as a ritual enactment of his imprisonment (Machinist 1984/85; Frahm 1997: 282–8; Vera Chamaza 2000: 71–167).

  While some of the religious reforms implemented by Sennacherib stayed in place after his murder in 681 BCE, the most radical measures the king had taken were soon reversed. Sennacherib’s son and successor Esarhaddon (680–669) followed the example of his grandfather Sargon II in wearing again both the Assyrian and the Babylonian crown, and slowly started to rebuild Babylon. Temples in other Babylonian cities profited from construction work sponsored by the Assyrian king as well. Yet even though Esarhaddon sought to reestablish a balance of power between Assur and Marduk, and between Assyrian and Babylonian gods in general, he clearly believed that in political and military terms, Assyria should remain fully in charge (Porter 1993; Vera Chamaza 2002: 168–237).

  Esarhaddon seems to have remained uneasy about leaving the Assyrian and Babylonian crowns in one hand, and so he determined that one of his sons, Assurbanipal, would succeed him as Assyrian king while another, Šamaš‐šumu‐ukin, would become the new king of Babylon. After their accessions, in 669 and 668 BCE, respectively, the two brothers remained on friendly terms for some sixteen years (Frame 1992: 64–101). Šamaš‐šumu‐ukin ruled as a largely ceremonial leader in the south, engaged in cultivating ancient Babylonian traditions while also patronizing a temple in Babylon that was dedicated to the goddess Ištar of Nineveh (Da Riva and Frahm 1999/2000). In the meantime, Assurbanipal sought to consolidate and enhance Assyria’s hegemonic position through political and military initiatives all over Western Asia. But he also took great interest in Babylonia, especially its culture and religion. Educated in cuneiform writing and eager to collect in his residence in Nineveh as many learned cuneiform texts as possible, he asked the leading scholars and scribes of Babylon and Borsippa, as early as 664/63 BCE, to send him all the tablets they could find (Frame and George 2005). Like his father, Assurbanipal corresponded with Babylonian scholars on a wide range of religious and intellectual topics (see SAA 8 and SAA 10) and offered some of them positions at the Nineveh court (Fincke 2014). A number of Late Assyrian “synchronistic” king lists catalog not only the rulers of Assyria and Babylonia, but also their respectiv
e chief scholars (Grayson, RlA 6: 116–25).

  In 652 BCE, dismayed by the constant interferences by his brother in Babylonian affairs, Šamaš‐šumu‐ukin decided to break away from Assyria. Assurbanipal sought to keep the citizens of Babylon on his side by simultaneously flattering and threatening them in a number of letters (Parpola 2004), but to no avail. The bloody war that ensued between the two brothers lasted four years. Even though Šamaš‐šumu‐ukin received support from various allies, most importantly Elam, the conflict ended with a Babylonian defeat and the death of the king. The city of Babylon, which had been exposed to a long and arduous siege, suffered heavily in the course of the fighting (Frame 1992: 131–90). A number of Babylonians were captured, brought to Nineveh, and killed at the spot where Sennacherib had been murdered some thirty‐two years earlier, serving, in Assurbanipal’s words, as “funerary offerings” for his grandfather (Borger 1996: 44, 235; SAA 3: no. 44).

  Assurbanipal installed a certain Kandalanu as puppet king over Babylonia and ordered the transfer of significant numbers of additional cuneiform texts from Babylonian libraries to Assyria (Parpola 1983). Many tablets from Nineveh are, in fact, written in Babylonian script (Fincke 2003/04). Other Late Assyrian libraries housed texts related to Babylonia as well. Tablets from the library of the influential Baba‐šumu‐ibni family in Ashur, among them the “Sargon Geography” and the “Marduk Prophecy,” suggest that Assyrian intellectuals were engaged in an intense discourse on Babylonian history and religion during the last decades of the Assyrian empire (Frahm, KAL 3: 7–8; Maul 2010).