by Eckart Frahm
Assyria’s massive western expansion under Tiglath‐pileser III (744–727 BCE) brought Assyrian troops again into direct contact with Arabs (Eph‘al 1984: 81–100). In 738, after his annexation of Unqi and Ḫatarikka, Tiglath‐pileser received “tribute” from numerous rulers from the southwest, including “Zabibe, queen of the Arabs.” Her gifts were probably sent in the hope of preventing the Assyrians from intervening in the overland trade controlled by the Arabs. Five years later, the Assyrian king campaigned at Mount Saqurri, to the south of Damascus, against another Arab queen, Samsi, burnt her tents, and seized camels, aromatics, and other goods from her as booty (Tadmor 1994: 222–30). Tiglath‐pileser’s main goal in all this was to consolidate his control over southern Syria. Realizing that he did not have the means to eliminate Samsi’s tribal proto‐state, Qedar, which was centered in and around the Wādī Sirḥān in northern Arabia, he allowed Samsi to remain in office, but with an Assyrian political agent (qēpu) close by who was to guide her political moves.
Zabibe and Samsi are the first of altogether six women (the others are Yati’e, Te’elḫunu, Tabua, and Adia) who, according to Assyrian royal inscriptions, served as Arab “queens” (šarratu) during the period from the reign of Tiglath‐pileser III to that of Assurbanipal. Given that the title šarratu is accorded in Assyrian texts to “reigning queens” and goddesses only, not to the main wives of kings, there can be no doubt that women played a vital political role among the early Arabs, even though Shalmaneser’s Kurkh Monolith and several later inscriptions also mention a number of male Arab rulers. In addition to their political tasks, and probably closely connected to them, the Arab queens held certain religious functions – according to Sennacherib’s inscriptions, one of them, Te’elḫunu, served as apkallatu‐priestess (= ʾfklt) of her people (see Maraqten 2000). The Arab queens of the eighth and seventh centuries seem to have fascinated the patriarchal societies of first millennium Western Asia – the Biblical story about the queen of Sheba (1 Kings 10:1–13) may well draw on encounters of Judeans with female leaders of north Arabian tribes (Frahm 1999: 85; see also Avanzini 1991–93). Based on the etymologies of their names, some scholars have suggested that a one‐time main wife of Tiglath‐pileser, Yabâ, and a main wife of the later Assyrian king Sargon II, Atalia, might have been of Arabic origin (see Frahm 2014: 187 with further literature), but this remains highly uncertain.
Tighlath‐pileser received gifts not only from Qedar, but also from a number of politically less well‐organized Arab tribes, whose territories stretched from the Syro‐Arabian desert to northern Sinai. Some of them, such as the Massa, are also mentioned in the Bible, as “sons of Ishmael” (Gen. 25:12–15). In order to stabilize the border region between Palestine and Sinai and foster international trade, Tighlath‐pileser installed a certain Idibi’ilu (a tribal name identical with that of Ishmael’s son Adbeel in Gen. 25:13) as “gate‐keeper towards Egypt” in the region between Gaza and El‐Arish (Elat 1998: 48).
Sargon II and Sennacherib
After the short and poorly documented reign of Shalmaneser V, the energetic Sargon II (721–705 BCE) ascended the Assyrian throne. Assyrian policies towards the Arabs remained largely the same under this king, and no attempt was made to control the caravan routes in northern Arabia directly. In 715, however, the king ordered his troops to deport numerous members of Arab tribes that had been troublemakers in the preceding years, among them the Tamudi (Ṯamūd) and Ḫayapa (‘Ephah), and to settle them in the newly created province of Samaria in Israel (Eph‘al 1984: 105–7).
In the same year, Sargon received gifts from an unnamed Egyptian pharaoh (probably Osorkon IV, the king of Tanis and Bubastis in the eastern Nile delta, see Fuchs 1998: 131), the Arab queen Samsi – who had already been in office under Tiglath‐pileser – and It’amra, the king of Sheba. It’amra, whose presents were undoubtedly geared towards improving commercial relations with Assyria, is the first ruler of Sheba named in a cuneiform text. He can be identified with the powerful Sabaean ruler (mukarrib) Yiṯa‘’amar Watar bin Yakrubmalik, who is known from a recently excavated monumental inscription from Ṣirwāḥ in Yemen (Nebes 2007; Arbach 2014). The inscription provides information on some of Yiṯa‘’amar’s military campaigns and is, as far as we know, the first of its kind. It is tempting to hypothesize that its creation was inspired by the encounter of Sabaean diplomats and traders with monumental annalistic inscriptions in Assyrian palaces. Perhaps, this encounter with Assyria also had an impact on the formation of the Sabaean state at large, a development that can be dated to the second half of the eighth century BCE.
Another far away place in the south from where Sargon claims to have received gifts was Dilmun, modern Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. Sargon’s inscriptions mention two kings of Dilmun, Uperi and Aḫundari, who, in the wake of the Assyrian ruler’s reconquest of Babylonia in 710 BCE, subsequently came to bring him presents. Both names are Elamite (Zadok 1984: 13, 16), reflecting the close ties that have always existed (and still exist today) between Iran and Bahrain. The name Aḫundari corresponds to that of another ruler of Dilmun, Ḫundaru, who held his office during the time of Assurbanipal (Potts 1990: 335–6). Sargon emphasizes Dilmun’s remoteness (“an island thirty double hours away located in the sea of sunrise like a fish”) in order to show how far his fame had spread (Fuchs 1994: 390–8).
While Sargon’s royal inscriptions draw a picture of total control, several letters from his political correspondence indicate that Assyria’s relations with Arab bedouins were, in fact, often quite tense. SAA 1, no. 84 mentions an Arab raid on Sippar. In SAA 1, no. 175, Adda‐ḫati, the Assyrian governor of Hamath, reports that Arabs had attacked a caravan carrying booty from Damascus to Assyria and had escaped with their loot. In SAA 1, no. 179, Bel‐liqbi, the governor of Ṣupat (in southern Syria), quotes from a letter of Sargon that strictly forbade the sale of iron to the Arabs – an early attempt at non‐proliferation of materials that might help a political opponent to enhance his military capacities. At the same time, as indicated by SAA 1, no. 177, Assyrian officials were eager to promote peaceful relations with the Arabs in order to facilitate trade with them (see Fales 1989; Elat 1998: 44–5).
Assyro‐Arabian trade continued to be of significant economic importance after the accession of Sargon’s son Sennacherib (704–681 BCE) – so much so, in fact, that the “Desert Gate,” a new monumental city gate built by the new king in 694 in Nineveh, received the additional name “The gifts of the people of Sumu’il and Tema enter through it” (Frahm 1997: 273–5).
Both Sumu’il and Tema played key roles on the Arabian Peninsula during the Late Assyrian period. Tema’s trade relations with Assyria had their roots in the mid‐eighth century (see above, “From the Beginnings to the Reign of Tiglath‐pileser III”). Over time, the contacts seem to have led to certain changes in the western Arabian caravan town. A fragmentary relief found at Tema shows features of Neo‐Assyrian style, suggesting that Tema’s local elites sought to emulate Assyrian culture (Potts 1991).
Sumu’il, represented in the Bible by Abraham’s son Ishmael, was the designation of a tribal confederation that had established a powerful proto‐state in the Wādī Sirḥān in northern Saudi‐Arabia. The federation was led by the Qedarites, who had already interacted with Tiglath‐pileser III. The federation’s political and religious center was the oasis town of Dūmat al‐Gˇandal, in the Jawf region, which the Assyrians called Adummatu, Duma, or Dumeti (genitive with Assyrian vowel harmony) (Knauf 1989; Frahm 1999: 86–9; Anthonioz 2015). According to a recent study (Avanzini 2012), the culture of the Jawf area and other regions along north Arabian trade routes was strongly influenced by Sabaeans who had moved northwards from Yemen.
Despite ongoing trade activities, relations between Assyria and Sumu’il became increasingly hostile under Sennacherib (Eph‘al 1984: 112–25). In 703, Assyrian soldiers fighting in Babylonia captured a certain Basqanu, brother of the Arab (and most likely Qedarite) queen Yati’e, along with his tro
ops (RINAP 3/1: 34). Basqanu had provided military support to Assyria’s Chaldaean arch‐enemy Marduk‐aplu‐iddina II, who had usurped the Babylonian throne in the wake of Sargon II’s death in 705. Marduk‐aplu‐iddina’s contacts with the Arabs probably began much earlier – the tribute he paid Tiglath‐pileser III in 731 included gold and precious stones (RINAP 1: 137), items he had most likely received from Arabs (Elat 1998: 46).
According to the Bible (2 Kings 20:12–15), Marduk‐aplu‐iddina was also allied with Hezekiah of Judah, whom the Assyrians attacked in 701 in his capital in Jerusalem. Some scholars believe that Hezekiah enjoyed support from Arabs as well, but the matter is debated. Sennacherib’s annals report that one of the conditions under which Hezekiah was allowed to stay in office after he surrendered to the Assyrian king was the release of his “urbi troops” (RINAP 3/1: 66), a term that refers either to some kind of Ḫabiru‐like irregular auxiliary force or to a group of Arabs (see Frahm 1997: 104–5; Lipiński 2000: 423; Na’aman 2000: 621–4; Retsö 2003: 155–6, among others). All in all, the former possibility is slightly more likely. In Herodotus’s account of Sennacherib’s western campaign, it is, incidentally, the Assyrian ruler himself who is associated with Arabs – the Greek historian calls him “king of the Arabs and the Assyrians” (Hist. 2.141). This inaccurate designation may have been the result of conflation with later stories about Esarhaddon’s conquest of Egypt (see below, “From Esarhaddon to the Downfall of the Assyrian Empire”).
In 694, in the wake of a failed attempt to conquer Elam by sending a fleet along the Persian Gulf, Sennacherib lost control over Babylonia. In the course of the following years, while seeking to reestablish Assyrian power in the south, the Assyrian king campaigned again against Sumu’il and the Qedarites, who continued to side with anti‐Assyrian forces. This time, Sennacherib carried the fight into the heart of the rising Arab state and further south than any Assyrian army had ever ventured before. In 690, Assyrian troops defeated the Arab queen Te’elḫunu and her male associate, a certain Ḫaza’il, in some unspecified desert region, attacked and conquered Adummatu (Dūmat al‐Gˇandal), and forced the Arab dignitaries to flee to Kapanu, modern Kāf further northwest in the Wādī Sirḥān. Te’elḫunu was captured and brought to Nineveh, together with a large booty that comprised divine statues, camels, spices, and precious stones (Frahm 1997: 129–36).
Some of the precious stones seized by the Assyrian troops in Adummatu, beads made of banded agate that were inscribed by the conquerors with short cuneiform texts labeling them as “booty from Duma,” were found in the course of modern excavations at Nineveh (Frahm 1999: 86–9). Other agate beads discovered at Nineveh had reached the Assyrian royal court, according to their inscriptions, as “audience gifts of Karibili, king of Sheba.” This ruler is most likely to be identified with Karib’il Watar, a mukarrib of Sheba who ruled shortly after Yiṯa‘’amar Watar, the aforementioned contemporary of Sennacherib’s father Sargon II. Like the latter, Karib’il Watar left a long inscription in Ṣirwāḥ, which deals with his campaigns and hydraulic construction works. Since both these topics are prominently covered in Sennacherib’s royal inscriptions, one can again speculate that Assyrian monumental texts, encountered by the Sabaean delegation in Nineveh, might have been imitated by the royal scribes of Sheba (Frahm 1999: 84–6; for a more skeptical view, Potts 2003). This would be in line with the observation that a Sabaean bronze relief from the region of Mārib in Yemen and a few fragmentary stone reliefs from unknown locations in South Arabia seem to be inspired by Assyrian and Syro‐Palestinian art of the Late Assyrian period (Gerlach 2000; Lanfranchi 2004: 248–51).
Sennacherib claims in one of his inscriptions that he deposited some of the precious stones sent to him by Karibili of Sheba in the foundations of his new Akitu temple in Ashur (RINAP 3/2: 248–9), which was built a few years after the Assyrian king’s 689 BCE conquest of the city of Babylon. Another southern monarch who showed his support for the Assyrian cause in the wake of this momentous event was an unnamed king of Dilmun, who, according to the same Sennacherib inscription, saw the debris of Babylon carried all the way to his coasts, became frightened, and sent not only an audience gift, but also men with spades and other implements to participate in Babylon’s further destruction. The passage is obviously marked by a significant amount of hyperbole, but the contacts with Dilmun were most likely real.
From Esarhaddon to the Downfall of the Assyrian Empire
King Esarhaddon (680–669 BCE), Sennacherib’s successor (Eph‘al 1984: 125–42), initially pursued a far less aggressive policy towards the south. Not only did he seek reconciliation with the Babylonians by rebuilding Babylon, he also tried to win the hearts and minds of the Qedarites in Adummatu by first refurbishing and then returning the divine statues that Sennacherib had seized in 690 BCE (RINAP 4: 19, 30–1). The passage that names the deities, among them ‘Attarsamayīn (a celestial goddess probably identical with Alilat), Nuhay (a solar deity), and Ruḍā (= Orotalt, identified by Herodotus with Dionysus), is one of the most important sources for our knowledge of early north Arabian religion (Knauf 1989: 81–8).
The return of the divine statues was not unconditional, however. Esarhaddon had supplied them with inscriptions that celebrated himself and his god Assur, and he sent them back together with an Arab woman, Tabua, probably a relative of Te’elḫunu (perhaps even her daughter with Sennacherib, even though this is highly speculative), who had been raised in Assyria and was intended to become the new queen of the Arabs. For a short while, this arrangement seems to have worked well for Assyria. The Arab leader Ḫaza’il, whose exact relationship with Tabua is unclear, and, later, his son Ya(u)ta (Yauṯa‘) continued to send tribute. But at some point between 676 and 673 BCE, a certain Uabu (Wahb) rebelled against Ya(u)ta, who had to ask for Assyrian help in order to be reinstalled as leader of the Arabs. Later, to show that he was more than a puppet ruler, Ya(u)ta threw off the Assyrian yoke and ceased to pay tribute, which prompted Esarhaddon to conduct another campaign against the Arabs, briefly described in Assurbanipal’s “letter to the god” (Eph‘al 1984: 125–30).
In 677/76 or slightly earlier (see Eph‘al 1984: 126), Esarhaddon undertook a logistically challenging campaign against Bazu, a politically fragmented district portrayed in his inscriptions as a vast, remote desert region filled with snakes and scorpions. In the course of the attack, the Assyrian ruler defeated six kings and two queens, several of whom bore what seem to be Arab names (Qisu, Akbaru, Ḫabisu), and appointed a certain Layale, king of the city of Yadi’, as Bazu’s new ruler (RINAP 4: 20–1, 31, 155). Layale still held his office in 653 BCE (see PNA 2/II: 650–1).
There has been some discussion about the exact location of Bazu. Potts (1999) identified it with Basianis, which a Latin itinerary from the Azraq Oasis in eastern Jordan locates sixty‐six miles from “Bostra” (modern Busra in southern Syria). All things considered, however, it is more probable, as suggested by Eph‘al (1984: 130–7), that Bazu was located in northeastern Arabia, to the west of the Persian Gulf and in close proximity to Dilmun. To the arguments adduced by Eph‘al one can add that the toponyms Diḫranu, Qaṭaba’, Ga’uanu, and Puda’, cities linked in Esarhaddon’s inscriptions to Bazu, may well live on in the modern place names (aẓ‐)Ẓahrān (Dhahran), (al‐)Qatīf, (‘Ayn) Gˇawān, and Fūda, all located in the area in question. Another clue is provided by Esarhaddon’s claim that he entered Bazu through “Mount Ḫazû, the mountain of saggilmud stone.” Lexical lists equate saggilmud with Akkadian ḫašmānu (a colored stone), which brings to mind that a land called Ḫasmānu was situated “next to (ina aḫi) Dilmun” according to Assurbanipal’s Ištar Temple inscription (Fuchs, in Borger 1996: 283–4, 294). Bazu is also mentioned in the first line of the so‐called “Sargon Geography,” a cosmological‐topographical text known from a Late Assyrian tablet from Assur and a Late Babylonian manuscript (Horowitz 1998: 67–95). Apparently, Esarhaddon also received tribute from Qanâ, the king of Dilmun (RINAP 4: 135), but the
reading of the pertinent line is not entirely certain (Eph‘al 1984: 135–6).
Further west, Esarhaddon had a final encounter with Arabs in 671, on the occasion of his second, successful, campaign against Egypt. In order to enter Egypt from Palestine, the Assyrian troops apparently did not take the so‐called via maris along the Mediterranean coast, but rather a route through the Sinai desert (Radner 2008). This was only possible with the help of Arab bedouins, who provided the Assyrians with camels and logistical aid (Eph‘al 1984: 137–42). A so far unpublished stone stela from Qaqun in central Israel singles out the Arab tribe of Mibsam (one of the sons of Ishmael according to Gen. 25:12–16) as having been instrumental in enabling the Assyrian troops to cross the Sinai Peninsula (RINAP 4: 190).