Ancient Iraq

by Georges Roux

  This new, unpopular policy was no doubt dictated by serious financial difficulties. Nebuchadrezzar had spent fabulous sums in the rebuilding of Babylon and other cities, and the ‘archaeological’ activities of Nabonidus himself were hardly less costly. In addition, the government had to support a large and permanent army. With the exception of Elam, all the northern and eastern countries were now practically closed to Mesopotamian trade, and if Syria – Palestine was still in Babylonian hands, frequent revolts made these distant provinces a burden more than an asset. Moreover, the Phoenician cities had lost much of their former wealth. The sixth century B.C. was precisely the great period of Greek maritime and colonial expansion, and the main commercial centres of the eastern Mediterranean were no longer on the Lebanese coast, but in Greece, Ionia, Lydia, Cilicia and Egypt. Increased expenditures and reduced income drained heavily on the royal treasury and deeply affected the general economy of Babylonia. A study of the hire and sale contracts reveals a marked increase in prices between the beginning and the end of the Neo-Babylonian period. Thus a male slave costing 40 shekels of silver about 600 B.C., cost 50 shekels some fifty years later. Under Nebuchadrezzar 1 shekel could buy from 2 to 4 qa of cultivated land, but only 1 to 2 qa under Nabonidus.24 A similar increase affected foodstuffs, clothes and other daily necessities. For various reasons it is difficult to draw an exact scale of wages, but they seem to have remained fairly low throughout the period. The average monthly salary of an unskilled labourer, for instance, was about 1 shekel; with this, he could purchase 2 bushels of grain and 3 bushels of dates, just enough for him to feed his family. In consequence, people took to borrowing money on a long-term basis, and credit inflation rendered the Babylonian economy even more unhealthy.

  The term ‘money’ here should not be taken in its ordinary sense, for minted coins – said to have been invented by the Lydians in the seventh century B.C. – did not circulate widely in the Near East before the reign of Darius I (521 – 486 B.C.). What the Babylonians used as currency were bits of silver of various shapes and standardized weights: the shiqlu (shekel), weighing about three-tenths of an ounce; the mana (mine or pound) of 67 shekels, weighing about 18 ounces; and the biltu (talent) of 60 mines, weighing about 67 pounds. In current use were also the half-shekel and, occasionally, the she, literally a ‘grain’ of silver. The system was very old, since ingots of bronze stamped with some inscription or image which guaranteed their fineness appear in Mesopotamia as early as the second millennium B.C, and the Assyrians used cast objects of silver, lead and, later, copper in their commercial dealings. What was novel in the Neo-Babylonian period was the adoption of the silver standard, the ratio of silver to gold varying between 14 and 10 to 1. Standardized currency taken as a system of reference made accounting considerably easier and facilitated transactions, but the silver standard also encouraged the development of credit, for the simple reason that silver ‘coins’ were easy to store and manipulate. ‘Usury, mortgages and enslaved debtors followed the new medium of exchange wherever it was introduced.’25 Private business on a scale hitherto unknown flourished in Babylonia during the sixth century B.C., and while most of the population endured considerable hardship, a few ‘dynasties’ of capitalists and businessmen – such as the Egibi family in Babylon – made a fortune in real estate, slave trade, money-lending societies, commercial and agricultural companies and banking operations, such as loans and the handling of deposits on behalf of their clients.26

  The emergence of a monetary system and the development of capitalism are phenomena the importance of which cannot be overstressed; but the resurgence of the temples as major social and economic units is equally important. Both help to explain what happened after Babylonia had lost her political autonomy. Economic depression contributed to the decline of the Mesopotamian civilization, but the temples kept it alive for almost six hundred years. By a remarkable coincidence, this civilization was to die as it was born: under the wings of the gods.

  CHAPTER 25

  DEATH OF A CIVILIZATION

  Not very long ago, the great city which we have just described lay buried beneath a thick blanket of earth, as did all the towns and villages of ancient Iraq. Here and there on these ‘tells’ could be seen a brick inscribed with a writing no scholar could read. Of the monuments of art, of the masterpieces of literature, of the works of science produced in Mesopotamia during three thousand years of history, practically nothing was known. The Mesopotamian civilization was dead and forgotten, and even today no one, when confronted with the most desolate of ruins, can help wondering when, how and why it died.

  If the Persians had dealt with Babylon as the Medes and Babylonians had dealt with Nineveh there would be no problem. The Near East offers, besides Assyria, other examples of nations and cultures which disappeared almost overnight, the victim of devastating wars – the Hittite kingdom of Boghazkoy, Urartu and Phrygia, for instance. But the Persians did not destroy Babylon, nor did they destroy the other cities of Babylonia, and a number of monuments and inscriptions dating from the Achaemenian, Hellenistic and Parthian periods testify to a partial survival of the Mesopotamian civilization down to the first century A.D. How then did it slowly decline and ultimately vanish?

  There are, it seems, two main reasons why this extremely important question has not yet received all the attention it deserves. On the one hand it encompasses three separate fields of scholarly research. Historians of the Semitic Near East, Hebraists or Assyriologists by training, are naturally reluctant to encroach on the domain of Greek and Iranian studies with which they are not fully conversant, while Hellenists and Iranologists, struggling with wider problems, tend to treat Mesopotamia as a marginal subject beyond the normal scope of their work. On the other hand, the decline and fall of a civilization anywhere in the world is always a complicated process, dependent upon multiple political, ethnic, linguistic, religious, economic and even geographical factors which, in this particular case, are too often beyond the grasp of our knowledge. Nevertheless, we feel that, having described at length how the Mesopotamian civilization was born, we should at least endeav-our to examine how it died. Carrying this work a few centuries beyond that fateful date of 539 B.C., when Babylonia lost its independence for ever, we shall give here a condensed account of Mesopotamian history during the three relevant periods of foreign domination:

  the Achaemenian period (539 – 331 B.C.)

  the Hellenistic period (331 – 126 B.C.)

  the Parthian period (126 B.C. – A.D. 227)

  The Achaemenian Period

  To many Babylonians the conquest of their country by the Persians may have appeared as a mere change of dynasty. Soon after Babylon was captured, life between the Tigris and the Euphrates resumed its normal course, and business was carried on as usual, the only difference being that contracts were now dated in the years of ‘Kurash, King of Babylon, King of the Lands’, instead of in the years of Nabû-na'id.1 The government of Babylonia was first entrusted to Nabonidus's former general, Gobryas, but in Nisan 538 B.C. Cyrus's own son, Cambyses (Kambuziya) ‘took the hand of Bel’ in the New Year Festival and from then on acted as viceroy, with headquarters in Sippar and a staff of native officials. In 528 B.C. after Cyrus had been killed on a distant battlefield, Cambyses, already associated with the throne, became King of Persia. We have very little information concerning this period, except that Babylonian soldiers were enrolled in the Persian Army and took part in the conquest of Egypt, but whatever truth there may be in the story of the king's mad behaviour in the Nile valley, it seems certain that Babylonia enjoyed complete peace throughout his reign.

  The death of Cambyses, early in 522 B.C., marks the end of this honeymoon. Bardiya, his brother, who had usurped the throne, was defeated and slain eight months later by Darius;2 but although Darius was of royal blood – he was a descendant of Ariaramnes and therefore belonged to the Achaemenian family – his authority was immediately challenged. Several of the satraps appointed by Cyrus refused to obey the new ki
ng, while a second Phraortes in Media and a pseudo-Bardiya in Persia rallied many supporters. The Babylonians, hitherto submissive, were not slow in joining the rebels, for among them were men in whose hearts the flame of freedom was still burning high. In the long cuneiform inscription in three languages – Old Persian, Babylonian, Elamite – carved in the rock at Behistun (near Kermanshah) to commemorate Darius's victories over his foes,3 the Persian monarch himself tells us how a Babylonian called Nidintu-Bêl recruited an army by declaring that he was ‘Nebuchadrezzar, son of Nabonidus’ and seized kingship in Babylon. Darius in person marched against him, routed the Babylonians on the Tigris and on the Euphrates and pursued the rebel to his capital-city, where he was captured and executed. According to dated receipts, ‘Nebuchadrezzar III’ reigned from October to December 522 B.C. In August 521 B.C., while Darius was fighting for his throne in Media and Persia, the Babylonians ‘broke the truce for the second time’. The pretender – who also claimed to be ‘Nebuchadrezzar, son of Nabonidus’ – was an ‘Armenian’ (Urartian) called Arakha, son of Haldita. Against him Darius dispatched one of his generals, Vindafârna:

  ‘I said to him: “Go forth! Fight this Babylonian army which does not declare itself for me!” Vindafârna marched against Babylon with the (Persian) army. Ahuramazda lent me his assistance. By the will of Ahuramazda, Vindafârna fought the Babylonians and took them captive. Twenty-two days of the month Margazana had elapsed when he captured Arakha and the nobles, his main followers. Whereupon, I gave an order: “This Arakha and the nobles, his main followers, shall be impaled in Babylon!”’4

  ‘Nebuchadrezzar IV’ was put to death on 27 November 521 B.C. He had ‘reigned’ only four months.5 At the beginning of 520 B.C. Darius, finally rid of all his enemies, was recognized as king throughout most of the Near East and immediately set out to promote a number of major reforms aimed at consolidating his power and cementing together the various regions of his vast empire. The administrative system was re-shaped, largely on the Assyrian model. The number of satraps was increased and their authority further limited by the creation of military governors, tax collectors and royal inspectors. Royal couriers rode swiftly from the Aegean to the Gulf on an admirable network of roads. A common law, reminiscent in style of the Code of Hammurabi, was imposed upon all subject peoples. The monetary systems were unified and based on a gold standard, the coinage used in trade and banking now being the gold daric worth twenty shekels of silver. Reorganized, cleared of corruption, heavily taxed and subjected to tight royal control, Babylonia remained quiet during the rest of Darius's long reign (522 – 486 B.C.).

  In the fourth year of Xerxes, however, the Babylonians made a last attempt at recovering their freedom (482 B.C.). Contracts from Dilbat, Barsippa and Babylon show that Bêl-shimanni and Shamash-eriba were successively accepted as kings, the former in August, the latter in September, while we learn from other sources that the satrap Zophyrus was killed and that Xerxes, greatly angered, sent his brother-in-law Megabysus to crush the revolt.6 The repression was brutal, the rebels were tortured and slain, but the exact amount of damage inflicted upon Babylon itself is difficult to assess. If Herodotus really visited, some twenty years later, the city which he describes, we may conclude that it had suffered very little harm – indeed, the ‘Father of History’ merely states that Xerxes took from Esagila the colossal golden statue of Marduk. Yet Arrian, Ctesias and Strabo suggest that the city-walls were dismantled and the temples razed to the ground. Since Esagila and other sanctuaries are mentioned in later texts, it is probable that they were only partly damaged and that they fell into ruin through lack of maintenance in the course of the following centuries rather than through violent destruction.

  The failure of the Babylonians to restore a national monarchy had consequences that went far beyond a simple loss of prestige. From time immemorial the Mesopotamian kings had been responsible to the gods for the welfare of their subjects. The cities owed to them their temples, their palaces, their fortifications and often their parks and gardens. They had never failed to ensure that canals were dug, kept open and extended, that dykes and dams were built, that land rights were safeguarded. In a country like ancient Iraq these functions were of vital importance. No matter what the temples could achieve in their own spheres, only a king residing permanently in the country and constantly aware of its needs could raise the funds and mobilize the labour required for such undertakings on a nationwide scale. Without her own rulers Mesopotamia was to a great extent paralysed. Sooner or later, it could be predicted, buildings left unattended would crumble down, canals would become silted-up and part of the land would revert to desert.

  The first Persian kings, conscious of their duties towards one of their richest and most civilized provinces, carried out some of the royal tasks traditional in Mesopotamia. We know, for instance, that Cyrus restored the precinct of the temple of Sin at Ur and that he and Darius repaired the E-Anna of Uruk. In Babylon, his winter residence, Darius built an arsenal, a palace for the crown prince and an apadana (i.e. a hall supported by columns, in the Persian style) for his own palace.7 But Xerxes and his successors, engaged in an endless and costly war against Greece, do not seem to have cared much for their Babylonian satrapy. The entire period between the accession of Xerxes (485 B.C.) and the conquest of Alexander (331 B.C.) is exceedingly poor in architectural remains and building inscriptions. In southern Iraq business documents found in situ prove that Babylon, Barsippa, Kish, Nippur, Uruk and Ur – to mention only the main cities – were alive, some of them even fairly prosperous,8 but none of their monuments appears to have been rebuilt or repaired. As for the North, it was still suffering from the great destructions of the years 614 – 609 B.C. We learn from a letter9 that in about 410 B.C. five ‘towns’ in that region were administrative centres and that a Persian nobleman possessed a domain there, but with the exception of Arba'il (Erbil), these were only big villages away from the Tigris valley. Xenophon, who marched through Assyria in 401 B.C. with ten thousand Greek mercenaries, describes Nimrud (which he calls ‘Larissa’) as ‘deserted’, and did not even recognize the walls of Nineveh in the ‘large undefended fortifications’ which he saw near Mescila (Mosul).10

  Adverse economic conditions perhaps contributed to the decline of the Mesopotamian civilization. The main artery of the Persian empire, the ‘Royal Road’ from Sardis to Susa, ran at the foot of the mountains and by-passed Babylon. Trade with India and the East in general was monopolized by the Persians, nearer to these countries. Syria had been detached from Mesopotamia by Darius or Xerxes. Babylonia and Assyria, forming together the ninth satrapy, were grossly overtaxed: they paid to the Crown an annual tribute of one thousand talents of silver and supplied the Persian court with food during four months of the year. In addition, they had to bear the full burden of a greedy local administration.11 If we are to believe Herodotus, the satrap of Babylonia received daily the content of an artaba (about 57 litres) of silver and kept 800 stallions and 16,000 mares, while his Indian dogs were fed by four villages!12 For all these reasons, the upward trend of prices, already noticed during the Neo-Babylonian period, continued under the Achaemenians: within the century following the death of Darius the cost of living doubled without corresponding increase in wages, and the rent of an average house passed from fifteen shekels per month under Cyrus to forty shekels under Artaxerxes I (464-424 B.C.13 Naturally, the great bankers and usurers benefited from these conditions. The Murashû family of Nippur, for instance – a powerful firm which operated in southern Mesopotamia between 455 and 403 B.C. – specialized in farming out the lands which Persian officials and collectives (hatru) of soldiers and civil-servants owned but refused to cultivate; they supplied oxen, agricultural tools and water for irrigation and took a share in the revenues. They also lent clothes, food and equipment to people called up for war duties and money (at 40 – 50 per cent interest) to those who could not pay their debts or taxes.14

  No less important were the ethnic and linguistic changes
brought about by the Achaemenian domination. The population of Babylonia, already mixed with Medes, Arabs, Jews, Egyptians, Urartians and other foreigners in Assyrian and Babylonian times, received a strong influx of Persian blood under Darius and Xerxes: many Persians were granted estates by the king; others were appointed judges or given major or minor administrative posts.15 With these men the gods of Iran entered the Tigris – Euphrates valley. There is, it is true, no evidence that they were at that time the object of an organized cult, and the decree of Xerxes forbidding the worship of deities other than Ahuramazda was never obeyed; but the mere fact that a number of Babylonians changed their Semitic name for a name composed with Aryan gods betrays a certain dwindling of private devotion. For all these people of various origins and tongues there could be only one common language: Aramaic. Already widely spoken in Western Asia, easy to learn, eminently suitable for writing on papyrus or parchment, officially adopted by Darius as the lingua franca throughout the empire, Aramaic replaced Babylonian in the homes, streets and shops. Only learned men and temple scribes could still read and write the Akkadian and Sumerian languages in their cuneiform script. The numerous literary, religious and historical texts copied during the Achaemenian period, as well as the remarkable works of astronomers such as Nabû-rimâni and Kidinnu (see above, p. 365) are proof that the traditional culture of Mesopotamia was still very much alive in these restricted circles; yet for the great majority of the population inscriptions on clay were meaningless, and history tells us that a nation which forgets its language forgets its past and soon loses its identit.