by H A CULLEY
‘I had an understanding with the previous king of Eshnunnan, but now that it is allied with Babylon the new king, Dadusha, is challenging my right to keep the income generated by the crossing over the Tigris at Mankisum, which is a part of Dadusha’s kingdom. No doubt he and his advisors are emboldened by the treaty with Hammurabi.’
‘Why don’t we just seize Mankisum? Babylon is a long way away and the recent war has weakened Eshnunna,’ Yasmah-Addu suggested.
His father gave him a withering look. He didn’t have a high opinion of his younger son’s abilities as a leader and every time he opened his mouth the young man confirmed his father’s view of him.
‘Because I want to build a relationship with Hammurabi to secure my southern border, then I can concentrate on Mari.’
He sat back in the wooden chair and glanced around him. The council chamber at Assur was far larger and grander than its counterpart at Babylon. The walls were covered in murals, some depicted hunting scenes and some battles he had won, but his particular favourite was a scene depicting the siege of Nuzi to the south-east of Assur. It wasn’t a particularly large city but the walls were quite high. The gates stood at the top of a slope and so trundling a battering ram into them hadn’t been feasible. He had come up with the idea of building wooden towers which could be hauled into place against the walls. It had been expensive in manpower to get them into position because of the archers on the walls but, once there, his men could swarm up the ladders inside the towers and jump down onto the parapet that ran along the top of the wall.
‘Why Mari?’ his elder son was asking.
‘Because of its strategic position.’
Both sons still looked puzzled, so he sighed and took them over to a mural which had been freshly painted on the far wall. This was a map showing Assyria and Mesopotamia in approximate relation to the Zagros Mountains, northern Syria and the Hittite lands in the Taurus Mountains.
He pointed at the kingdom of Mari. ‘Because Mari sits between Syria and Mesopotamia.’ He looked in despair at the uncomprehending looks on his sons’ faces. ‘It will give me control of the trade route from the East to Phoenicia,’ he explained impatiently.
~#~
As soon as they met, the two women regarded each other with hostility. Ashlatum was hoping that her son would have found himself a queen who was meek and submissive. She didn’t want one who would be a threat to her position as the king’s mother. For her part, Adiar resented the influence that Ashlatum still wielded over Hammurabi. When she had married him, she envisaged the two of them ruling together; she hadn’t bargained on a triumvirate.
The royal couple had been married in the temple of Tishpak, the god of sky and storm, at Eshnunnan. Both high priests had officiated; the local one and Mannui-Qipi, Babylon’s high priest of the god Marduk. When Ashlatum had found out she had been furious, not because he had married Adiar – she hadn’t met the Eshnunnan princess at that stage – but because she had wanted to organise her son’s wedding in Babylon.
Nothing would satisfy her but a second wedding in the temple of Marduk. However, as far as Adiar was concerned, she was already married and was Queen of Babylon. She wasn’t about to be told what to do by a former concubine.
Hammurabi came to the conclusion that he would never understand women. He had expected his mother to be pleased that he had found someone after all the years of her nagging him about it. He now realised that she had also wanted to choose his bride and that was something he would never have allowed.
He had proposed a compromise: a ceremony at which Adiar was confirmed as queen, but that satisfied neither woman. Ashlatum pointed out that it wasn’t a wedding and Adiar told him that, as she had become queen as soon as she had married him, no confirmation of the fact was necessary. At this point he came to the conclusion that seeking a compromise was a waste of time, so he set off to speak to his mother.
Ashlatum was talking to her younger son, Arishaka, and his tutor when the king entered her room. Arishaka was now a boy of nine and the thought crossed Hammurabi’s mind that he had rather neglected him since coming to the throne. Brothers of kings could be a threat when they got older unless bonds of loyalty were developed from an early age. What the king was about to say to his mother would infuriate her and he didn’t want her to see Arishaka as a more malleable alternative to him as king.
The tutor bowed and left the room as soon as Hammurabi appeared.
‘Ah, Hammurabi, have to come to tell me that you agree that the people of Babylon need to see you properly married?’
‘No, mother, I have not. It’s about time that you accepted that Adiar is Queen of Babylon. Consequently, you must defer to her in all things,’ he said bluntly.
‘Never; you are my son and I can advise you much better than a wilful sixteen year old girl ever could.’ Ashlatum’s green eyes blazed with anger.
‘In that case you leave me no choice,’ Hammurabi sighed. He loved his mother but it was obvious that the two women couldn’t go on living under the same roof. ‘I have arranged for you to go to live at Kid-nun, where I have bought you a fine house.’
For a moment Ashlatum was struck dumb. ‘Kid-nun? You are treating me like you did the last queen; except that at least she had something useful to do as a priestess. You can’t mean it. I’m your mother.’ She entreated her son to change his mind for some time but, from the flinty look in his eyes, she realised that he had made his mind up.
‘I have an important job for you to…. ,’ he started to say when he was interrupted.
‘I hate you,’ Arishaka spat at him.
‘No, you don’t, Arishaka,’ Ashlatum admonished him. ‘Your brother is right. Adiar and I could never co-exist here in Babylon; we would always be scheming against each other.’ She turned back to Hammurabi. ‘What is this important job?’
‘But I don’t want to go to Kid-nun. Everyone one says it is little more than a village,’ Arishaka pouted.
‘Be quiet, Arishaka, I know that you are still a child but never speak to me like that again.’ Hammurabi turned to his mother. ‘It’s true that it is a small town now with no walls, but that’s why I want you to go there. It is surrounded by fertile soil and it is our only town on the Tigris. I want you to take charge of its development. I will send you engineers and workmen to improve the irrigation channels and build town walls. As good farming land becomes available, people will flock to swell the population. Eventually, it will be our city on the Tigris.’
‘Thank you, my son. I will enjoy the challenge, much as it will pain me to leave.’
‘Eventually I might even make Arishaka its governor, provided he proves himself worthy and there are no more unseemly outbursts. He can come with you for the next year, but then I want him to return here so I can oversee his education.’
Ashlatum was no fool. She realised that, despite the faith in her that Hammurabi had demonstrated by putting her in charge of the project, her hostility to Adiar meant that he no longer trusted her completely. There was no need for Arishaka to complete his education in Babylon; he could do so in Kid-nun and get to know the city he would govern in due course. By moving him to Babylon, Hammurabi was making sure that she couldn’t turn his brother against him.
~#~
The Assyrian envoys reached Babylon a month later. Hammurabi was intrigued; curious to know why Shamshi-Adad had approached him, but he kept them waiting. It would never appear to be too eager to hear what they wanted. He ran over the possible reasons for their presence. Perhaps his alliance with Eshnunna had alarmed the Assyrian king? He quickly dismissed the thought as Shamshi-Adad would surely prefer an ally of the minor state of Babylon on his southern border to one who had been a client state of Elam, one of the two most powerful kingdoms in Mesopotamia.
Then he worried that the Assyrians were about to threaten him. Again, this seemed highly unlikely as they had enough potential threats to cope with without creating further enemies; in any case, Babylon was too far south to interest them, sure
ly? If they were going to threaten anyone, it was far more likely that their king would have his eye on Mari on Assyria’s western flank. He decided to grasp the bull by the horns.
‘When does Shamshi-Adad intend to attack Mari?’ Hammurabi asked the three emissaries as soon as the customary pleasantries were out of the way.
The three men looked at each other in alarm, startled by the abrupt question. They had been specifically warned not to mention Mari. Shamshi-Adad wanted to offer Babylon the hand of friendship and secure an agreement that neither would attack the other for the next three years. He didn’t want to have to worry about the south whilst he was engaged elsewhere, but he didn’t want his true strategy known.
‘How did you know?’ one of them asked suspiciously.
‘I didn’t; not until you just confirmed it for me. But it is what I would be doing if I were Shamshi-Adad. Mari will give him control of northern Mesopotamia and of the trade routes to the west.’
‘And are you agreeable to a three year pact of neutrality, my lord?’
‘I think you meant to say “my lord king”,’ Hammurabi told him sharply. ‘No, I won’t agree to that, but I might be prepared to make a counter offer. Leave me now and let me think. I’ll send for you again when I am ready.’
‘Do you think I should accept Shamsi-Adad’s offer?’ Hammurabi asked Adiar in bed that night. He discussed every major decision with her. In the year they had been married they had forged a strong partnership born out of mutual respect for the other’s intellect. Her belly had swollen too, indicating that their first baby would soon be making an appearance.
‘What do you think?’ she countered.
‘I think he wants to buy my neutrality for now but he could just as easily turn against Eshnunna or Babylon in the future.’
‘So you need to bind him closer to you?’
‘In a nutshell, yes.’
How?’
‘By offering to help him capture Mari. That way we will be allies, and I can use that to dissuade Sumeria or Elam from attacking us; especially Elam as they are sheltering Zuuthusu.’
‘What are you going to do about Ibbi-Addad? I know that he was passing information to Zuuthusu when your half-brother was a guest of my father.’
‘You don’t know, Adiar, you suspect it was him. There is a difference.’
‘I’m certain in my own mind that it must have been him.’
‘I can’t convict him on your suspicions, however much I love you. I need evidence.’
‘My father never did. He executed plenty of people because he suspected they were up to no good.’
‘Yes, lots of rulers do that. It doesn’t mean that it’s right. I intend to make judgements based on facts and to deal with people according to a scale of punishment that everyone knows. What deterrent is there if one person gets executed and the next person to do the same thing gets off lightly? If someone commits a crime, they must know what the penalty is; then they might think twice before committing it.’
‘You really do care about this don’t you?’
‘Yes. I’m working on a code of crime and punishment that can be carved into steles erected in every city in the kingdom, then everyone will be aware of what is expected of them and what the penalty for transgression is. The trouble is, there is so much to cover and I keep getting distracted.’
‘Distracted?’ She began to tickle him, ‘like this?’
‘Yes,’ he laughed, ‘like that,’ and he kissed her passionately on the lips so that she stopped tickling him and started to caress him instead.
~#~
Nutesh and Uhar sat drinking in the room that they shared in the small house that Zuuthusu had been allocated in Susa. Since they had thrown in their lot with Hammurabi’s half-brother their fortunes seem to have sunk lower and lower. One minute they had been the commander of Babylon’s army and captain of the palace guard respectively; then they were honoured guests in Eshnunna. Now they were a barely tolerated embarrassment in Elam. The fact that Zuuthusu’s wife, Adiar’s elder sister, had died of a mysterious illness within a month of their arrival hadn’t helped his mood either.
Susa, Elam’s main city, was the seat of government for the eastern part of the kingdom. It was three times the size of Babylon, but it wasn’t where the king, Siwe-Palar-Khuppak, lived. He ruled his vast lands from the city of Ashnan in the Zagros Highlands. Whilst he might have felt safest in his mountain fastness, it made ruling the whole kingdom, which stretched from the Zagros Mountains to the Tigris and from the border with Eshnunna in the north to the east coast of the Gulf in the south, extremely difficult. So the sub-king of Susa had a great deal of autonomy in ruling the eastern half.
Eshnunna had been almost a client state and its loss to the Babylonians’ sphere of influence was a real concern. However, Siwe-Palar-Khuppak was not prepared to go to war over the matter. Zuuthusu’s arrival was therefore unwelcome, but the king realised that he might well be a useful political pawn in the future.
Nutesh and Uhar rose to their feet respectfully when Zuuthusu re-joined them.
‘Did you manage to see the chamberlain, lord king?’ Nutesh asked respectfully. Although Zuuthusu had been deposed, his officers kept up the pretence that he was still the King of Babylon.
‘No, yet again I was told that he and the king want to see me, but they will send for me when that time comes.’ He picked up the pottery cup that Uhar had filled with wine for him and threw it against the wall. ‘It’s been over three years since my slimy little half-brother managed to worm his way onto my throne and I’m even further away from recovering it than ever,’ he moaned peevishly.
Not for the first time, Nutesh regretted choosing the wrong side. He had considered making his way back to Babylon and throwing himself on Hammurabi’s mercy, but he knew that, as one of the people who had murdered his father, he would probably face a slow and painful death if he did so.
Uhar, on the other hand, was quite happy with his lot. He had been promoted from the palace guard and now, instead of dreary sentry duty and military training, he enjoyed slothful days of drinking and whoring, all at someone else’s expense. He wasn’t even worried that his waistline was a good four inches larger than it had been in Babylon.
‘I did hear some gossip in the market that you might be interested in, lord king,’ Nutesh began diffidently; unsure if now was the right time to mention it, given Zuuthusu’s foul mood.
‘Go on then,’ Zuuthusu dragged himself out of the black depression that he had fallen into.
‘It is said that Siwe-Palar-Khuppak is very unhappy about the transfer of Eshnunna’s allegiance from Elam to Babylon and has invited Dadusha to come to Susa to meet him. It is also said that he is recruiting tribesmen in the Zagros Mountains to join an army he is raising.’
‘And how much of that do you believe? Siwe-Palar-Khuppak hasn’t stirred outside Ashnan for years, let alone travelled the four hundred miles to Susa,’ Zuuthusu sneered.
‘Well I don’t believe that Dadusha is fool enough to come to Susa in the first place. So I don’t suppose that the King of Elam has any intention of coming here to meet him,’ Nutesh replied, nettled by Zuuthusu’s tone. ‘He is merely testing the Eshnunnans’ alliance with Babylon.’
‘You may well be right, but we need to use the situation to drive as much of a wedge between Elam and Eshnunna as possible. Then Babylon will be drawn into the fight and I might have a chance to regain my throne. But, if I can’t even get to see the chamberlain I can’t see how I can do that.’
The situation changed two days later when a certain merchant arrived. He traded between Babylon and Susa on a regular basis and so his visits aroused no suspicion, or so he thought. He knocked on the door of Zuuthusu’s house just after dark and was admitted by a slave who kept him waiting whilst he went and found Uhar. After a short delay the man was shown in to see Zuuthusu.
‘Lord king,’ the man bowed low as he spoke. ‘I have a message for you.’ He stopped and looked pointedly at Uhar
and Nutesh.
‘If I can’t trust them, I can’t trust anyone,’ Zuuthusu said with a sigh. ‘Get on with it.’
‘Yes, lord, I come from Ibbi-Addad, your faithful servant. He wants you to know that Babylon has concluded a treaty with Assyria.’
‘What? Hammurabi has got into bed with Shamshi-Adad? My half-brother is a bigger fool than I took him for. What on earth does Hammurabi hope to get out of this alliance?’
‘He hopes to gain the protection of Assyria against Elam, lord.’
‘Yes, that makes sense; but why should Assyria help Babylon? I would have expected Assyria to be casting covetous eyes at Eshnunna but, if so, it doesn’t explain why they would ally themselves to Eshnunna’s protector.’
‘Assyria wants your brother’s support when they invade Mari, lord.’
‘He’s only my half-brother,’ Zuuthusu muttered, annoyed by the reminder of their relationship. ‘Mari? Yes, I can see why Assyria would want to expand westwards but that will mean that Shamshi-Adad would become Babylon’s neighbour. Perhaps that is something I can use to my advantage.’ He gave the merchant a bag of silver coins; the man bowed low and left as quietly as he had arrived.
He was too busy weighing the pouch of silver in his hand as he left the house to notice the beggar sitting in the shadows a little further down the lane but, even if he had done so, he would have ignored him. Had he taken a closer look at him he might have recognised a fellow merchant from Babylon under the rags and grime.
~#~
The night after the meeting between Hammurabi, his council and the Assyrian emissaries, a boy in the pay of Sin-Bel-Alim, the Babylonian foreign minister, kept watch outside the house of Ibbi-Addad. The spot he had chosen was far from comfortable but, even so, he was close to sleep when the door opened and a cloaked figure slipped out. Although the boy couldn’t see the man’s face he was sure that it was the chief minister by his distinctive rolling gait. Someone had likened his walk to that of a sailor, though in Ibbi-Addad’s case it was due to a weak knee.