Ancient Iraq

by Georges Roux

  Whether merchants, peasants, shepherds, soldiers or bandits, the Aramaeans were originally uncouth bedouins and contributed nothing to the civilizations of the Near East. Whatever their ancestral religion, it appears from their inscriptions as well as from their own names that they worshipped Sumero-Akkadian and Canaanite gods, such as Hadad (Adad), the storm-god, El, the supreme deity of Canaan, Sin, Ishtar (whom they called ‘Attar), the Phoenician goddess ‘Anat (‘Atta) and others. Nor was there originality in the field of the arts, the Aramaeans following the traditions of the countries where they settled. The King of Damascus, for instance, employed Phoenician sculptors and ivory-carvers, and Sam‘al under its new masters retained all the features of a Neo-Hittite city. Archaeological excavations at Tell Halaf-Guzana have brought to light the palace of Kapara, an Aramaean ruler who probably lived at the beginning of the ninth century B.C.17 It was a building of the bît hilani type, decorated with orthostats perhaps cruder than the contemporary sculptures of northern Syria, and with strange-looking, almost morbid statues which, on analysis, display a mixture of Mesopotamian, Hittite and Hurrian influences, as would be expected in a region – the Khabur valley – where the three cultures converged.

  Yet to these barbaric Aramaeans befell the privilege of imposing their language upon the entire Near East. They owed it partly to the sheer weight of their number and partly to the fact that they adopted, instead of the cumbersome cuneiform writing, the Phoenician alphabet slightly modified, and carried everywhere with them the simple, practical script of the future. As early as the eighth century B.C. Aramaic language and writing competed with the Akkadian language and script in Assyria, and thereafter gradually spread throughout the Orient.18 About 500 B.C., when the Achaemenian monarchs looked for a tongue which could be understood by all their subjects, they chose Aramaic, which became the lingua franca of their vast empire. At the close of the pre-Christian era Sumerian and even Hebrew were already dead languages, Akkadian was dying and Greek, introduced by the Macedonian conquerors, was mostly used for official purposes, but Aramaic – the language spoken by Jesus – reigned unchallenged as the common dialect of all the peoples of the Near East and was to remain so until the Arab invasion (seventh century A.D.). The Arabic script itself derives from a cursive form of Aramaic, as do all present and past alphabets used in Asia. Moreover, during the sixth century A.D. the Aramaic language gave birth in northern Mesopotamia to the extremely rich Syriac literature which the Nestorian missionaries carried as far as Mongolia, and Syriac has survived as the liturgic tongue of several Oriental Churches. Indeed, Aramaic dialects are still spoken in some parts of the Near East, in particular among the Christian communities of northern Iraq. Few languages in the world can claim such a long and continuous tradition.

  But it is time for us to return to our subject, Iraq, which we have left at the end of the Kassite dynasty, nearly twelve hundred years before Christ.

  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 an
d 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.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE RISE OF ASSYRIA

  Towards the end of the tenth century B.C. Assyria was at her lowest ebb. The lack of unity among her enemies had saved her from rapid destruction, but economic collapse was impending. She had lost all her possessions west of the Tigris, and her vital arteries, the great trade routes that ran across Jazirah and through the mountain passes, were in foreign hands. Hostile highlanders occupied not only the heights of the Zagros but the foothills down to the edge of the Tigris valley, while Aramaean tribes pitched their tents almost at the gates of Assur. Her territory consisted of no more than a narrow strip of land, hardly 1, 600 kilometres long and 800 kilometres wide alongside the river, mostly on its left bank. Yet reduced, cornered and exposed as she was, Assyria was still a compact, solid and tough nation. Her main cities were free; she had chariots, horses and weapons; her men, trained by years of almost constant fighting, were the best warriors in the world; above all, her dynastic line remained unbroken, the crown having passed from head to head in the same family for more than two centuries.1 In the fragmented and chaotic Near East of the time no other kingdom could claim such privileges: Babylonia was partly occupied and regularly plundered by the Aramaeans; since the victory of Nebuchadrezzar I over ‘Hulteludish’ (Hutelutush-Inshushinak), Elam had disappeared from the political stage; Egypt, ruled by Libyan princes in the Nile delta and by priests of Amon in Thebes, was almost powerless; the latest invaders – the Phrygians in Anatolia, the Medes and Persians in Iran – were still remote and relatively harmless competitors, and in Armenia, the great rival kingdom of tomorrow, Urartu, was not yet fully grown. Of all these nations Assyria, despite appearances was undoubtedly the strongest, and many must have thought that if only she could awake and fight back, she would be second to none.2

  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.