At this point, Sargon’s behavior towards the Chaldean warrior-chief stands in remarkable contrast to his attitude towards Israel. Rather than executing Merodach-baladan, Sargon II accepted his surrender and (unwisely) allowed him to remain as vassal chief of Bit-Yakin. Apparently Sargon II was not entirely sure that the Chaldeans would be as easy to defeat as the Israelites had been, and preferred to leave his complete control of the far south untested.
Despite this hovering presence in the south, Sargon now celebrated complete victory over his enemies. The reliefs in his new palace at Sargon City show his greatness; his huge figure pushes even the forms of the gods into the background. He was the second Sargon, the second founder of the empire, the king of a second Assyria with new borders, a new capital city, and a newly fearsome power.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Spectacular Defeat
From 704 to 681 BC,
Sennacherib of Assyria defeats almost every enemy
but is remembered for one unsuccessful siege
FIVE YEARS AFTER HIS DEFEAT of Babylon, Sargon II died and left his throne to a son who hated him. In none of his inscriptions or annals does Sennacherib even acknowledge the existence of his father.
Sargon had, apparently, not been reticent in spreading his opinion of his son abroad. When Sennacherib came to the throne, the provinces—convinced that the crown prince was boneless and inadequate—celebrated their coming freedom from Assyrian rule. The old Philistine cities in the west began to plan revolt; and down at the head of the Gulf, Merodach-baladan started to make preparations for independence.
Not everyone agreed that Sennacherib was a weakling. A wise man in Jerusalem advised his king against joining the mutiny that was fomenting a little farther south. “The rod that struck them may be broken,” the Hebrew prophet Isaiah warned, “but the Philistines should not rejoice; the snake has given birth to a dragon.”1
The Babylonians were less circumspect. Sennacherib had not bothered to go through the ritual of “taking the hand of Marduk” in formal submission to the god; he had simply announced himself to be king of Babylon without ceremony, an insult to both Babylon and its chief deity.2 Almost as soon as Sennacherib’s coronation ceremonies had ended, the son of a Babylonian official declared himself king of Babylon.
He remained on the throne for one whole month. Old Merodach-baladan came hobbling up from his southern swamp, his kinsmen behind him, and removed the new king (with the help of eighty thousand archers and mounted soldiers, helpfully sent by the king of Elam, who was always ready to do Assyria a bad turn).3
52.1 Sennacherib’s Campaigns
Once again, Merodach-baladan announced that he was the true restorer of the ancient Babylonian traditions: “The great lord, the god Marduk,” one of his inscriptions reads, “…looked with favour upon Marduk-apla-iddina II,134 king of Babylon, prince who reveres him…. The king of the gods said, ‘This is indeed the shepherd who will gather the scattered people.’”4
Sennacherib, irate, sent his chief general and a detachment of soldiers down to restore order in Babylon. Merodach-baladan made hasty arrangements with the other Chaldean tribes, the Aramaeans to his west, and the Elamites on the east. He marched out at the head of this combined force to meet the Assyrians at Kish, and drove them back.
That was the last straw. Sennacherib himself came sweeping down like the wrath of Assur and broke through the allied front line, barely pausing. Merodach-baladan ran from the battlefield and crept into the marshes of the Sealand, which he knew well, to hide himself; Sennacherib marched the rest of the way to Babylon, which prudently opened its gates as soon as it saw the Assyrian king on the horizon. Sennacherib came through the open gate, but chose to send Babylon a message: he ransacked the city, took almost a quarter of a million captives, and destroyed the fields and groves of anyone who had joined the alliance against him.
He also spent almost a week hunting through the marshes for Merodach-baladan himself, but the aged fox had gone to ground and could not be found.
THE OLD PHILISTINE CITY of Ekron, taking no warning from Babylon’s fate, now decided to mount a full rebellion, and put their Assyrian-loyal king in chains. The Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon had also revolted; King Hezekiah of Judah still sat undecided in the middle, considering Isaiah’s warning.
Sennacherib prepared to leave Babylon and march on the rebels. He appointed a puppet-king to rule Babylon for him; this new ruler, Bel-ibni, had been raised in the Assyrian court. “He grew up like a puppy in my own house,” Sennacherib observes in one of his letters, a simile which implies loyalty, if not fierce and competent government.5
The Assyrian army then moved towards the troublesome west. Sennacherib’s annals report that he conquered and sacked his way through the Western Semitic lands until cities were rushing to submit to him. However, the time that it took him to work his way through the rebel lands suggests that he found the western frontier a more difficult challenge than expected.135
And then, suddenly, an unexpected threat appeared on the horizon. “Sennacherib received word,” 2 Kings 19:9 reports, “that Tirhakah, the Kushite king of Egypt, was marching out to fight against him.”
In fact, Tirhakah was not exactly the pharaoh yet. He was the younger son of the pharaoh Piankhe, who had died about fifteen years before. Piankhe’s brother, Shabaka, had then succeeded to the throne, despite the fact that Piankhe had two living sons; it was a Nubian custom for brothers to trump sons in royal successions.6 After Shabaka’s death, Tirhakah’s older brother inherited; Tirhakah served him as his general, and was also his appointed heir.
When Tirhakah and the Egyptian army appeared on the horizon, Hezekiah seems to have decided to throw in his lot with the anti-Assyrian forces. Merodach-baladan had been courting him with messages from hiding for some time. When Hezekiah fell sick with boils, Merodach-baladan even “sent Hezekiah letters and a gift, because he had heard of Hezekiah’s illness.”7
Hezekiah, who knew perfectly well what had really motivated this get-well gesture, accepted the presents and offered to show the Chaldean ambassadors around: “There was nothing in his palace,” 2 Kings says, “that Hezekiah did not show them.” This included the armory; Hezekiah was telling them just how much of a fight he could put up.
The court prophet Isaiah was horrified. “What did you show them?” he asked the king. When Hezekiah answered, “I showed them everything,” Isaiah predicted doom: “Everything in your palace,” he said, “and all that your fathers have stored up, and your own descendants, will be carried away.”
Hezekiah was unworried. “This is good,” he told Isaiah, and the writer of Kings adds, “He thought, ‘There will at least be peace in my lifetime.’” Bolstered by this shortsighted hope, Hezekiah agreed, as his first anti-Assyrian gesture, to take charge of the imprisoned king of Ekron. The leaders of the Ekron rebellion were afraid that the king’s continued presence in the Ekron dungeons might encourage other pro-Assyrian forces in the city to mount a countercoup; Assyria’s fearsome reputation meant that there was always a strong countervoice in every plot, suggesting that it would really be better not to bring down destruction on their own heads.
The king of Ekron was escorted to Jerusalem and put under guard. When he heard of this act of defiance, Sennacherib—who was at the city of Lachish, directing a siege—sent messengers to Hezekiah. They were not just any envoys but Sennacherib’s own general, chief officer, and field commander; and they arrived at the head of a large army. Three officials from Hezekiah’s court came out to meet them.
Apparently Sennacherib had instructed them to try a bit of psychological warfare before launching an attack. The Assyrian officers stood on the grass in front of Jerusalem’s walls, which had half the city’s population hanging over it to hear what was going on, and announced (loudly, in Hebrew), “Tell Hezekiah that the king of Assyria has a message for him. You have no one to depend on; no strategy, no strength of your own. You may be depending on Egypt for chariots and horsem
en, but Egypt is a splintered reed that you would try to use for a staff. It will pierce your hand if you lean on it.”8
At this, Hezekiah’s three representatives begged the commander to speak to them not in Hebrew, but in Aramaic, the language of the Aramaeans, which they understood (as did most Assyrians who had served in the outer parts of the empire). “Don’t speak to us in the hearing of the people on the wall,” they begged. But the Assyrian commander refused, in blunt and vulgar words: “The message is for them too. Like you, they will have to eat their own dung and drink their own urine.”
The people on the walls, forewarned by the king not to answer back to any threats, kept their silence. But the warnings, broadcast to the entire population of Jerusalem with a bristle of Assyrian spears standing stock still and threatening just beyond, shattered Hezekiah. He “rent his garments” and (less poetically) sent Sennacherib, at Lachish, eleven tons of silver and nearly a ton of gold as a bribe. He also unchained the king of Ekron and let him go; presumably the unfortunate man fled to the Assyrian camp and fielded a few hard questions about just how he had let the noblemen of Ekron overpower him.
For the moment, this lifted the crisis. Sennacherib had not forgiven Hezekiah, but he had to deal with the Egyptians. The two armies met at Eltekeh; details of the battle have not survived, but although the Egyptian army turned back home afterwards, Sennacherib did not follow them, which probably signals a very hard-won victory indeed.
However, now he could pay attention to the rebellious cities of the west without distraction. He besieged Ekron, which fell; and then he turned back to Jerusalem.
What followed was a siege that ended, abruptly, for some unknown reason, without Assyrian victory. Sennacherib does his best to claim triumph, with the sort of corroborative detail that Assyrian kings generally lavished only on less-than-successful campaigns.9 “As for Hezekiah the Jew,” the annals boast, “I levelled the cities around him with battering rams and siege engines, I gave them to the king of Ekron instead; I took off two hundred thousand of his people and animals without number. Himself, like a caged bird I shut up in Jerusalem, his royal city. I threw up earthworks against him and turned him back into his misery. And the terrifying splendor of my majesty overcame him.”10
Well, not exactly. When Sennacherib marched back home to Assyria, the siege had lifted, Jerusalem’s walls were still standing, and the city was still free.
According to 2 Kings, an angel of the Lord struck 185,000 of Sennacherib’s men dead in the night: “When the people got up the next morning,” the writer tells us, “there were all the dead bodies. So Sennacherib king of Assyria broke camp and withdrew. He returned to Nineveh and stayed there.” Herodotus relays a slightly different version of events, which he says he heard from the priests of Egypt: Sennacherib decided to give up and go home because the Assyrian camp was overrun by mice, who “gnawed quivers and bows and the handles of shields.”11
The host of Sennacherib was suffering from an invasion of rodents, and died in their tents. The combination suggests that the plague had arrived outside Jerusalem’s walls, and that the king of Assyria retreated in the face of mounting deaths.
Back home, Sennacherib appointed the city of Nineveh to be his capital—a position which the city held for all the rest of Assyrian history—and built new palaces in it, decorating their walls with tremendous reliefs of battles won and cities besieged. The city of Jerusalem does not appear in the reliefs.
A year later, Babylon was back in his sights. The Chaldeans had soon realized that the puppy-ruler Bel-ibni was no Sennacherib, and were running the south as they pleased. After an Assyrian official or two went to check up on the situation, Sennacherib himself arrived to straighten things out.
He found, much to his frustration, that Merodach-baladan was once again busily attempting to put together an invasion force to take the throne back. At Sennacherib’s approach, Merodach-baladan ran to the Sealand. But this time, Assyrian soldiers fanned out through the marsh, searching for the old man. With his hiding places in danger of discovery, Merodach-baladan collected his allies and made for the water, to sail for Elam. This did not give Sennacherib the satisfaction of striking Merodach-baladan’s head off, but at least he had driven the man temporarily off the scene: “He fled alone to the Sealand,” Sennacherib’s account tells us, “with the bones of his fathers who lived before him, which he gathered from their coffins, and his people, he loaded on ships and crossed over to the other side of the Bitter-Sea [Persian Gulf].”12
Sennacherib ordered Bel-ibni back to Babylon and appointed his own oldest son Ashur-nadin-shumi, whom he loved, to rule Babylon instead. Then he started to make preparations to go across the water to Elam, after the thorn in his flesh. He hired Phoenician shipbuilders to make him a fleet of ships, and staffed them with mercenary sailors from Tyre and Sidon and from the island of Cyprus. Then he had to sail them down the Tigris river from Assur into the Gulf. But, wary of Elamite forces on the banks of the Tigris, he floated the ships down to the Tigris until they were level with the Arahtu canal, which ran into the Euphrates. He then ordered the ships hauled up onto the land and pulled over rollers to the canal, where they were relaunched and continued down to the head of the Persian Gulf by way of the Euphrates. (Sennacherib himself decided to stay on land the entire time).13
The journey across to Elam was successful. So were the campaigns; the Assyrian ships captured every city where they docked. But when Sennacherib arrived at Merodach-baladan’s city of refuge, after this titanic expenditure of manpower and money, he learned that Merodach-baladan had died, of old age, just before his arrival.
SENNACHERIB went home to Nineveh in mixed victory and exasperation. But he had laid the foundation for disaster. The Elamites now knew where the Assyrian crown prince was stationed, and they were plotting revenge for the cities Sennacherib had sacked, and the unarmed families he had killed.
The plans took some time to lay; Elamite agents had to be installed in Babylon. But six years later, when Ashur-nadin-shumi was a little north of the city, an Elamite army under the energetic King Kahllushu charged across the border and captured him. They hauled him off to Elam and, before Sennacherib could arrive in fury, stormed into Babylon itself and threw their weight behind a Babylonian claimant to the throne.
It took Sennacherib almost three months to arrive at the scene. When he did, his army defeated the Babylonians outside the city, and took the pretender captive. But inside the city, a Chaldean named Musezib-Marduk seized the throne, stripped the temple of gold, and hired more Elamites.
This produced a full-blown war between Assyria, Babylon, and Elam. Fighting went on for four years. Sennacherib invaded Elam twice; the Elamite king himself came over to lead a retaliatory attack on the banks of the Tigris.
Sennacherib’s account of the battle was the single most graphic description of Assyrian warfare ever made:
With the dust of their feet covering the wide heavens like a mighty storm…they drew up in battle array before me…on the bank of the Tigris. They blocked my passage and offered battle…. I put on my coat of mail. My helmet, emblem of victory, I placed upon my head. My great battle chariot which brings low the foe, I hurriedly mounted in the anger of my heart. The mighty bow which Assur had given me I seized in my hands; the javelin, piercing to the life, I grasped…. I stopped their advance, succeeding in surrounding them. I decimated the enemy host with arrow and spear. All of their bodies I bored through.…I cut their throats, cut off their precious lives as one cuts a string. Like the many waters of a storm I made the contents of their gullets and entrails run down upon the wide earth. My prancing steeds, harnessed for my riding, plunged into the streams of their blood as into a river. The wheels of my war chariot, which brings low the wicked and the evil, were bespattered with filth and blood. With the bodies of their warriors I filled the plain, like grass. Their testicles I cut off, and tore out their privates like the seeds of cucumbers of June.14
The Babylonian Chronicle simple no
tes, laconically, that Assyria lost.
Sennacherib returned to Nineveh, leaving Babylon in the hands of the Chaldean king and his Elamite allies. Sennacherib’s army had fought on every front of his empire, and there was simply a limit to how many men he could throw at the Babylonian problem, over and over again. Something needed to shift in the balance before Sennacherib could reclaim Babylon.
The shift came the next year. News began to filter out of Elam that the king who had led his forces into Babylonia had been struck down by illness; he could no longer speak or give commands. Probably he had had a stroke.
Sennacherib took the opportunity of Elamite absence to try once again. This time he succeeded, and Babylon’s gates were broken down. Sennacherib captured the Chaldean pretender and sent him in chains back to Nineveh. And then he ordered the troublesome city razed:
I destroyed, I devastated, I burned with fire. The wall and the outer-wall, temples and gods, temple-towers of brick and earth, as many as there were, I razed and dumped them into the Arahtu canal. Through the midst of the city I dug canals, I flooded its site with water…. That in days to come, the site of that city, and its temples and gods, might not be remembered, I completely blotted it out with floods of water and made it like a meadow.…I removed the dust of Babylon for presents to be sent to the most distant peoples and in that Temple of the New Year’s Feast, I stored (some) of it in a covered bin.15
Turning Babylon into a lake—covering the civilized land with water, returning the city of Marduk to the primordial chaos—was an insult to the god. Sennacherib compounded this by ordering the state of Marduk hauled back to Assyria. The dust was by way of dreadful warning to the gods of other peoples.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 39