Ancient Iraq

by Georges Roux

  Or again:

  They have prepared wheat and gú-nunuz (grain) as a confection, but an Amorite will eat it without even recognizing what it contains!29

  Against these savages who raided villages and attacked the caravans frequent police operations were directed, and on occasion a full-scale campaign was launched. Thus one of the years of Shar-kali-sharri, the last great king of Agade, was named, after his victory over the MAR.TU ‘in mount Basar’, i.e. Jabal Bishri, between Palmyra and Deir-ez-Zor, and there are references to Amorite prisoners of war in texts of Shulgi and Amar-Sin. But the situation was now reversed: the Sumerians were on the defensive; somewhere between Mari and Ur they had to build a fortress in order to keep the nomads at bay.

  For a time this measure must have proved effective, since we do not hear about the Amorites during the next ten years. Meanwhile, Shu-Sin died and was succeeded in 2028 by his son, Ibbi-Sin.* What happened during the change of reign we shall probably never know, but no sooner was the new king enthroned than the empire literally disintegrated.30 One by one, the eastern provinces – beginning with Eshnunna in the second year of Ibbi-Sin and Susa in his third year – declared themselves independent and broke away from Ur. At the same time the Amorites were exerting an ever-increasing pressure on the borders of the kingdom. In the fifth year they broke through the defences and penetrated deep into the heart of Sumer. How critical the situation had become is shown by two letters exchanged between the king and one of his generals, Ishbi-Irra, a native from Mari, who had been ordered to buy a large quantity of grain in Nippur and nearby Isin and to convey it to Ur. Ishbi-Irra declares himself unable to carry out his mission because the MAR.TU have ravaged the country and cut off all roads leading to the capital city, and are ready to attack Isin and Nippur; he asks to be formally entrusted with the defence of the two cities. In his reply the king agrees, advises his officer to seek the help of other ensis and offers to buy the grain at double its normal price. Soon afterwards Ibbi-Sin succeeded in defeating the MAR.TU, but his subjects were starving and his authority was challenged by his own officials. In the eleventh year (2017) Ishbi-Irra proclaimed himself king in Isin – the very city he had pledged to protect on behalf of his lord – and a few years before, an Amorite sheikh called Nablânum had been crowned in Larsa, only twenty-five miles from Ur. To make matters worse, the Elamites took advantage of the situation to invade Sumer, as they had done so often in the past. Abandoned by the gods, beset with famine, attacked on two fronts, practically reduced to the capital city and its immediate neighbourhood, the great Sumerian empire was by now only the shadow of a kingdom. Ibbi-Sin fought to the last and apparently attempted to secure the alliance of the Amorites against the Elamites and the troops of his rival Ishbi-Irra. But this plan also failed. In 2004 B.C. the Elamites were at the walls of Ur – those walls which Ur-Nammu had built ‘as high as a shining mountain’. They attacked the great city, took it, sacked it, burned it down and withdrew, leaving behind a small garrison. The unfortunate Ibbi-Sin was taken prisoner to Iran, ‘to the end of Anshan whose cities he himself, like a bird, had devastated’, and died there. Years later, when Ur was again a flourishing city, its destruction was still remembered and lamented by the Sumerians as a national catastrophe:

  O Father Nanna, that city into ruins was made…

  Its people, not potsherds, filled its sides;

  Its walls were breached; the people groan.

  In its lofty gates, where they were wont to promenade, dead bodies were lying about;

  In its boulevards, where the feasts were celebrated, scattered they lay.

  In all its streets, where they were wont to promenade, dead bodies were lying about;

  In its places, where the festivities of the land took place, the people lay in heaps…

  Ur – its weak and its strong perished through hunger;

  Mothers and fathers who did not leave their houses were overcome by fire;

  The young lying on their mothers' laps, like fish were carried off by the waters;

  In the city, the wife was abandoned, the son was abandoned, the possessions were scattered about.

  O Nanna, Ur has been destroyed, its people have been dispersed!31

  CHAPTER 11

  THE AMORITES

  The fall of Ur at the close of the third millennium B.C. is one of the major turning-points in the history of ancient Iraq: it does not only ring the knell of a dynasty and of an empire, it marks the end of the Sumerian nation and type of society. Intervening at the last moment, the Elamites had taken the capital-city, but the secession of entire provinces, the revolt of Ibbi-Sin's officials and the Amorite invasion were the real causes of the Sumerian defeat. The Elamites were soon expelled from Iraq; the Semites remained. From then on they were to hold the reins of government for nearly fifteen hundred years.

  Even before Ur was captured, the Sumerian empire had collapsed, and Mesopotamia had been shattered into a mosaic of large or small kingdoms, the most important being those of Isin and Larsa in the south, Assur and Eshnunna in the north. For about two centuries (c. 2000 – 1800 B.C.) these kingdoms coexisted, though by no means peacefully, those of the south fighting each other for the possession of Ur and the sovereignty over Sumer and Akkad; those of the north, for the control of the great trade routes which crossed Upper Mesopotamia. Meanwhile, waves of nomadic Semites continued to enter Iraq from the west, pitching their tents up to the foot of the Zagros or founding new kingdoms around the towns they occupied. The rulers of one of these towns, Babylon, soon became powerful enough to compete with their neighbours, and during the first half of the eighteenth century B.C. Hammurabi succeeded in eliminating his rivals and subdued the whole of Mesopotamia. The empire he built alone – the ‘Old Babylonian Empire’ as it may be called – was short-lived, but even after its fall Babylon remained, together with its rival Assur, one of the two poles of Mesopotamian history and civilization.

  The rulers who replaced the Sumerians on the political stage were either Akkadians from Iraq or Western Semites – ‘Amorites’ in the broad sense of the term – from Syria and the western desert. The former were highly civilized; the latter, allegedly uncouth bedouins, assimilated the Sumero-Akkadian culture with remarkable ease and rapidity, partly because they came from regions long under its influence, and partly because the language presented them with no major difficulty. As they spoke Semitic dialects they adopted in writing the Akkadian language, and slowly in the south, rapidly in the north, the latter prevailed over Sumerian in private and official inscriptions. But this linguistic revolution hardly affected the religious, ethical and artistic concepts current in Mesopotamia since proto-historic times. The newcomers worshipped the Sumerian gods and the old Sumerian myths and epic tales were piously copied, translated or adapted with in general only minor alterations. As for the scarce artistic production of the period, there is practically nothing to distinguish it from that of the preceding Ur III period. Generally speaking, the civilization created by the Sumerians outlived them and survived these years of turmoil as it had survived the Akkadian domination and the Gutian conquest.

  The advent of the Western Semites, however, had deep and lasting repercussions on the political, social and economic structure of ancient Mesopotamia.1 The division of the country into kingdoms erased all traces of city-states, and with the city-states disappeared most of the principles upon which they were founded. Men, land and cattle ceased to belong physically to the gods, as in proto-historic times, or to the temples and the king, as under the Third Dynasty of Ur. The new monarchs seized or purchased large pieces of land, parts of which were worked by peasants for the Palace while others were distributed to their families and courtiers who in turn let them out to tenant farmers against payments in kind. Thus emerged a mixed society of big or medium-sized landowners and tenants who made up the bulk of the population. The ‘industrial’ production units inherited from the Third Dynasty of Ur were now much smaller, but craft workshops multiplied. Trade with foreign
countries was in the hands of merchants2 who remained State employees but also worked for themselves: organized into associations (karum), they embarked upon fruitful commercial ventures, sharing capital, risks and profits; they also benefited from government loans, bought the left-overs from the Palace and sold them at a much higher price, and acted as lenders to chronically endebted people. Deprived of their privileges, the temples became ‘land-owners among other land-owners, tax-payers among other tax-payers’.3 The priests assumed the service of the gods and cared for the spiritual needs of the people, while the king governed and cared for the welfare of his subjects, but the economic life of the country was no longer exclusively – or almost exclusively – in their hands. If, as in the past, each kingdom identified itself with its chief-god, if each sovereign claimed to owe his sceptre to divine favour, the traditional view according to which no prince could rule over Sumer and Akkad unless he had been elected by Enlil in Nippur became obsolete. The Sumerian lugals had invoked Enlil's blessings to justify their conquests; to the ruthless sheikhs who had seized the power by the sword and knew no other law than that of razzia, the investiture of the local god appeared sufficient. Thus Nippur lost its importance and Enlil his royal prerogative.

  The period which opens with the fall of Ur and ends with the reign of Hammurabi – the so-called ‘Isin-Larsa period’ – is extremely rich in events. For greater clarity we must treat separately northern and southern Mesopotamia, beginning with the latter.

  Isin, Larsa and Babylon

  The kingdoms of Isin and Larsa4 were founded within eight years of each other, but for almost a century Isin overshadowed Larsa. While the Amorite prince of Larsa, Naplânum, had to content himself with hardly more than the town he had conquered, Ishbi-Irra of Isin possessed the three important centres of Nippur, Uruk and Eridu. Towards the end of his reign he captured the Elamite garrison of Ur and recovered the ruined, but still prestigious city. His son, Shu-ilishu (1984 – 1975 B.C.) managed to bring back from Elam the statue of Nanna, the moon-god of Ur. The occupation of Sippar by Iddin-Dagan (1974 – 1954 B.C.), brought the frontiers of the kingdom from the Persian Gulf to the latitude of Baghdad; it now extended along the whole course of the Lower Euphrates, the vital artery of Sumer. As for Ishme-Dagan (1953 – 1935 B.C.) he attacked without success the famed city of Kish, then the capital of a small independent kingdom.

  Ishbi-Irra was, it will be recalled, an Akkadian from Mari, and in the names of two of his descendants appears the great god of that city, the wheat-god Dagan. Yet these Semites considered themselves as the true successors of the Sumerian kings of Ur. Most of them were deified, like Shulgi and Amar-Sin, and hymns were composed in their honour.5 They took the titles ‘King of Ur, King of Sumer and Akkad’, restored and embellished the former capital-city, renewed active commercial relations with Dilmun,6 and ironically were obliged to defend their kingdom against those to whom they owed it, fighting the Elamites, building fortresses against the MAR.TU and imposing tribute upon their nomadic tribes. In official inscriptions from Isin the Sumerian language is used exclusively, and it must be emphasized that practically all the great pieces of Sumerian literature found in the famous ‘library’ of Nippur were composed or copied during that period at the request of monarchs craving for Sumerian culture. Sumer in those days was like the declining Roman empire where everything was Latin, save the emperors.

  The supremacy of Isin went on unhindered until the reign of Lipit-Ishtar (1934 – 1924 B.C.), the author of a ‘Code’ of Law of which some forty-three articles and parts of the prologue and epilogue have survived.7 As it happens, these laws deal mostly with succession, real estates, hire contracts and the condition of privately owned slaves, and therefore give us a limited but interesting insight into the society which was then taking shape. Unfortunately, this peaceful legislator entered into conflict with a formidable warrior whose name sounds like the beat of a battle-drum, Gungunum, King of Larsa. Gungunum had already campaigned in the Zagros when, in his eighth year (1924 B.C.), he attacked the kingdom of Isin and occupied Ur, claiming sovereignty over Sumer and Akkad. A few years later Lagash, Susa and perhaps Uruk fell into his hands. Larsa now possessed one-half of southern Iraq and a door on the ‘Lower Sea’.

  The loss of its main town and seaport was for Isin a severe setback further aggravated by the extinction of the ruling family. Lipit-Ishtar – who died the year he lost Ur – was replaced by an usurper, Ur-Ninurta, who in turn was defeated and killed by Abi-sare of Larsa. About twenty years later another usurper called Irra-imitti lost Nippur to his rival Sumu-El, and soon the kingdom was reduced to Isin and its immediate neighbourhood. The story of Irra-imitti's death and succession deserves to be told, since it illustrates a rare and strange Mesopotamian institution: on occasions, when omens were exceptionally sombre and the king feared the wrath of the gods, a commoner was placed upon the throne as ‘substitute king’, reigned for a certain time and was then put to death. This is how a Babylonian chronicle describes what happened in Isin:8

  That the dynasty might not end, King Irra-imitti made the gardener Enlil-bâni take his place upon his throne and put the royal crown upon his head. Irra-imitti died in his palace because he had swallowed boiling broth. Enlil-bâni who was upon the throne did not relinquish it and was installed as king.9

  We must add that the lucky gardener was deified and managed for twenty-four years (1860 – 1837) to govern what little remained of the kingdom of Isin, while Nûr-Adad and Sin-idinnam of Larsa, pushing their troops northwards, conquered city after city. By now, however, the two rivals had in that region a common enemy, Babylon.

  The first kings of Isin had kept the Amorites at bay, but after their decline the latter once again crossed the Euphrates in large numbers and poured into Iraq. In Kish, Uruk, Sippar, Marad10 and other towns their chiefs proclaimed themselves kings, adding to the political confusion. In the first year of Sumu-El of Larsa (1894 B.C.) one of these sheikhs, Sumuabum, chose for his capital a city a few miles to the west of Kish, on the left bank of the Euphrates, in that ‘waist’ of Mesopotamia the historical importance of which has already been stressed. This city had been governed by an ensi at least under the Third Dynasty of Ur, but had never played a part in Sumerian politics. Its name in Sumerian was KÁ.DINGIR.RA, in Akkadian Bâb-ilâni, both meaning ‘The Gate of the Gods’; we call it, after the Greeks, Babylon. It was clear from the start that the energetic and clever rulers of Babylon were strongly determined to make it not only a great and rich city but the capital of the whole country. The war waging between Isin and Larsa and the multiplicity of small Amorite kingdoms gave them all the pretexts they needed. It took them nearly sixty years, but with infinite patience, using sometimes diplomacy and sometimes brute force, the first five kings of the First Dynasty of Babylon piece by piece, conquered the whole country of Akkad. They were approaching Nippur, key of Sumer, when they met with the strongest resistance from the foreign princes who now held the sceptre in Larsa.

  The Elamites, as we well know, never missed an opportunity of interfering in Mesopotamian affairs. In 1834 B.C. the throne of Larsa was vacant, Silli-Adad having been killed in the war with Babylon after a brief reign. Kudur-Mabuk, an Elamite official who controlled the Amorite tribes established between the Tigris and the Zagros, occupied Larsa and appointed one of his sons king in that city, contenting himself with the title ‘Father (i.e. protector) of Amurru’. It is remarkable that the two sons of Kudur-Mabuk, Warad-Sin (‘slave of Sin’) and Rim-Sin (‘bull of Sin’), who reigned successively in Larsa, bear Semitic and not Elamite names. Even more remarkable is the fact that these freshly imported foreigners behaved in every respect like genuine Mesopotamian monarchs, building no less than nine temples and a dozen important monuments in the city of Ur alone. In other times they would have been great pacific rulers like Ur-Nammu, but as long as Isin was still alive and Babylon active there could be no peace in Sumer. Rim-Sin defeated a dangerous coalition led by his Babylonian rival and in 1794 B.C. succeeded
in taking Isin, overthrowing at last Larsa's oldest enemy. Two years later, Hammurabi ascended the throne of Babylon.

  At this point we must leave the south for a while and turn our attention towards the northern half of Iraq. There again we meet with ‘warring kingdoms’ in fierce competition, but the cultural setting and the political and economic motives of the conflict are markedly different.

  Eshnunna and Assur

  Situated between the Tigris and the Zagros mountains, sixteen kilometres to the east of the Diyala River, Eshnunna (Tell Asmar) was a relay on the road from Upper Mesopotamia to Elam, and as such was subject to a triple current of influences: it lay within the sphere of the Sumero-Akkadian civilization, had close contact with the northern countries – its main god Tishpak was probably identical with the Hurrian god Teshup – and was linked to Elam by strong economic, political and cultural ties.11 It was therefore perhaps not mere coincidence if Eshnunna was, with Susa, the first city-state to break away from Ur in the second year of Ibbi-Sin (2027 B.C.). As far as we know, the passage to freedom was swift and smooth: the rulers of Eshnunna called themselves ‘servant of the god Tishpak’ instead of ‘servant of the King of Ur’ and replaced by local names the names of months and years in use throughout the Sumerian empire; in the capital-city the temple once built for the deified King of Ur Shu-Sin was secularized, and a large palace was erected beside it; in official inscriptions Akkadian replaced the Sumerian language. These early rulers, who responded to Semitic or Elamite names, immediately enlarged their kingdom far beyond its original boundaries: with the help of Amorite bands they occupied the entire valley of the lower Diyala, including the important centre of Tutub (Khafaje), and went as far north as the region of Kirkuk. One of them, Bilalama – a contemporary of the second king of Isin – is credited by some scholars with a ‘Code’ of Law, written in Akkadian, which antedates by about one century the Code of Hammurabi and has with it many points in common.12 The ‘Laws of Eshnunna’, incidentally, were not found at Tell Asmar but at Tell Harmal, a small mound at the outskirts of Baghdad, excavated by the Iraqis between 1945 and 1949.13 Tell Harmal (ancient Shaduppum) was the administrative centre of an agricultural district of the kingdom of Eshnunna, and a copy of the royal laws was kept in the ‘town-hall’ for easy reference. The same site has also yielded a number of interesting tablets, in particular date-lists and mathematical problems.