The Xenophile Historian

900 to 627 B.C.

	Hatti: The Migration to the Northeast
	Assyria: The Calah Period
	Israel vs. Judah vs. Aram (Syria)
	The Calm Before the Storm
	The New Assyrian Empire
	The Rise of Lydia and the Chaldean Empire
	Assyria Triumphant
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The Anatolian nation woke up, after six centuries of dormancy, in the tenth century B.C. At that point the Anatolian people lived over quite a large area; from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea and east into Armenia. But much of the territory was under foreign rule; the charioteer elite of Mitanni ruled northern Syria and the lands to the north and east. The southern part of Turkey, an area known to classical history as Cilicia, was divided between city-states and a petty kingdom named Kizzuwatna. Western Turkey was open, but not for long--other peoples like the Phrygians, Carians, and Greeks were starting to settle there. Only the land of Cappadocia, shielded from other areas by mountains, remained to the Anatolians, so it was from here that they restored their nation.

The first kings of the new Hatti were preoccupied with Kizzuwatna. They did their utmost to destroy this troublesome state, because it controlled the mountain pass known as the Cilician gates, the easiest path between Turkey and Syria. We have treaties from this time that suggest Kizzuwatna handed over territory to Hatti. Then came the first Anatolian king since Telepinus that we know anything about, Tudkhaliyas II, who founded a new dynasty in or near the city of Kanesh in 948 B.C. During his reign most of Syria came under Egyptian rule. Nevertheless, Tudkhaliyas crossed the Taurus mts. and took Aleppo, presumably with Egyptian approval (there is some evidence that Thutmose III and Tudkhaliyas were allied against Mitanni at this point). He did not hold Aleppo for long; it passed first into Mitannian hands, then to the Egyptians, and finally to the Assyrians during the next century; meanwhile the Carians overran Cilicia. In the short run this was a political disaster, made worse by a marriage alliance between Egypt and Mitanni. However, the exploit of Tudkhaliyas announced to the rest of the Middle East that Hatti was back on the world stage.

The most effective Anatolian monarch during this period was Suppiluliumas I (860?-840? B.C.). He was a sure-handed administrator and diplomat, who restored good relations with Egypt, and was also the only warrior who could beat the Assyrians at their own game. His first military expedition, an attempt to retake Aleppo, ended in failure, but he prepared carefully, and in 848 B.C. he struck directly across the Euphrates, took Carchemish, and attacked both Mitanni and Assyria in the rear. Mitanni, which had declined in the century since Tudkhaliyas, got the worst of the fighting. The Anatolians conquered Armenia and devastated the Mitannian capital; the king of Mitanni fled and was put to death by disgusted members of his own court. Then Suppiluliumas went home by a different route, took Aleppo and persuaded the cities near it to submit to him. The king of Assyria, Shalmaneser III, tried to retaliate by sending an army in pursuit across northern Syria, but they never got past the Taurus mts., so we will chalk that up as a successful defense by Suppiluliumas.

After Suppiluliumas the center of the Anatolian realm moved from Cappadocia into the rich highlands of Armenia, called "Urartu" by the Assyrians and "Ararat" in the Old Testament. Details concerning how and why this was done are not available, but around 840 B.C. inscriptions from a certain King Sardur I start appearing around Lake Van. As it turned out this move saved the nation, because not long after that northern Syria came under Assyrian domination. Here for just over a century the Anatolians not only survived but prospered, until their Assyrian rivals crippled their kingdom and forced them to move again, this time to the west.

Assyria: The Calah Period

In theory, Assyria was a nation of serfs with a king who enjoyed absolute rule; economic, political, diplomatic, military and religious authority were supposed to be his. The king was supposed to be an earthly representative of the god Ashur, but even for him satisfying the gods was no easy task. He regularly underwent such rituals as fasting or living for a week at a time in a crude reed hut. He could not make a major decision without consulting the priests, oracles, exorcists, diviners, astrologers and soothsayers who, in effect, became powers behind the throne. Even the crown prince could only see the monarch when the omens were good. The most evil sign was a solar or lunar eclipse, which they saw as a warning of the monarch's upcoming death. When that happened, the king applied the ancient Sumerian solution; he abdicated and put a surrogate on the throne, giving the substitute king responsibility for whatever angered the gods. At the end of 100 days the real king returned, and they executed both the substitute and the substitute's wife, presumably to give the gods the previously predicted death of the king.

Assyrian thought was both conservative and superstitious. Astronomy, mathematics, law, medicine, the arts, etc., had been borrowed almost completely from the Babylonians. They built huge libraries containing up to 25,000 clay tablets, to collate and store the knowledge of earlier civilizations (one of the last kings, Ashurbanipal, boasted that he liked to read what was written before Noah's flood). The only real improvement made in any of these areas was art; superb relief sculptures have come down to us showing the main events in Assyrian history, often in minute detail. On the whole the Assyrians believed that anything old was good and must be preserved; innovation was dangerous and should be avoided.

One area where the Assyrians were not afraid to try something new was in their specialty--war. The army put iron weapons to use when the technology to make them became available, and siege weapons like the battering ram and the catapult were either invented or perfected by them, making the capture of cities much easier. From the nomads of Russia they learned the art of riding on horseback. This was an improvement over the chariot, because horses can go in many places a chariot cannot go, and a rider is less vulnerable to accidents and enemy weapons (it only takes one well-placed arrow against one of the horses pulling a chariot to overturn the whole thing). Around 900 B.C. Assyria became the first civilized nation with a cavalry, and in the years to come they would enlarge and improve it, though the chariot would remain in use until the end of Assyria's history.⁽²⁾

An otherwise obscure king, Adad-nirari II (911-891 B.C.), opened the next chapter in Assyrian history. He first defeated the Aramaeans, driving them from their outposts on the west bank of the Tigris. Then he marched into the hills of Kurdistan, where tribes allied with Mitanni were "cut down in heaps" and driven back into the Zagros mts. Presumably this marks the end of Mitanni's domination over Assyria, but for safety's sake the Assyrians chose to keep their late masters alive as a buffer state when the Anatolians advanced across the Euphrates. Finally they defeated the king of Babylon; the border between Babylonia and Assyria was pushed back to the Diyala River, a tributary of the Tigris, and a treaty was signed between the two powers that brought peace between them for the next eighty years.

The next king, Tukulti-Ninurta II (891-884), only lived long enough to rebuild the wall around Assur. His successor, Ashurnasirpal II (884-859), broke completely with the past by moving the capital to Calah, building a magnificent palace there. Ashurnasirpal was also the first outstanding war leader the Assyrians had seen in two centuries. Every spring he marched forth on campaigns resembling the grand hunting expeditions of peacetime. The most important of these campaigns, in 877 B.C., went from Carchemish to Lebanon, making him the first Assyrian king since Tiglath-Pileser I to reach the Mediterranean. When he got there he symbolically washed his weapons in "the Great Sea." The nations trembled with fear, because Ashurnasirpal, the cruelest of all Assyrian monarchs, committed a ghastly series of atrocities that eclipsed the dread deeds of his forbears. Unlike modern day dictators, who hide most of their sins from public view, the Assyrians were proud of their butchery, and wrote it down so that everybody would know about it:

"I built a pillar against his city gate and I flayed all the chiefs who had revolted, and I covered the pillar with their skin. Some I walled up within the pillar, some I impaled upon the stakes, and others I bound to stakes round about the pillar . . . And I cut off the limbs of the officers, the royal officers who had rebelled . . . "
"Many captives from among them I burned with fire, and many I took as living captives. From some I cut off their noses, their ears and their fingers, of many I put out their eyes. I made one pillar of the living and another of heads, and I bound their heads to tree trunks round about the city. Their young men and maidens I burned in the fire."
"Twenty men I captured alive and I immured them in the wall of his palace . . . "

This continues in too many royal inscriptions. Saying which is more shocking is difficult: the atrocities themselves, or the detailed, self-gratifying way in which the chief executioner describes them.

There was no "Geneva Convention" in the ancient Middle East, and cruelty in warfare was nothing new. The Assyrians, however, made it a key ingredient of their state policy. Everywhere they marched they mutilated, flayed, impaled, burned, and heaped up the heads of their victims, to spread terror and encourage submission through fear. Yet as one might expect, from the start the policy was a dismal failure. Often the mangled survivors of a vanquished nation would rise in revolt when the Assyrian army went somewhere else, and new rebellions would break out whenever a new king came to the throne. Eventually the Assyrians would exhaust their kingdom because of this, conquering and reconquering lands that should have been theirs after the first invasion. Is it any wonder that the Old Testament prophet Jonah did not want to preach to the Assyrians of Nineveh?

Shalmaneser III (859-824), the next king, continued in the footsteps of Ashurnasirpal. 31 years of his 35-year reign were spent in warfare. Expeditions went farther from Assyria than ever before: against the Zagros tribes to the east, southward to the Persian Gulf against the ever-rebellious Babylonians, northward against the new Anatolian kingdom of Urartu, and westward into Syria and Cilicia against the Egyptians, Aramaeans, Anatolians and even the Phrygians. They eliminated what was left of Mitanni around 835 B.C., since it no longer served a useful purpose; its people moved south and east and became the Medes and Persians, whom we will hear from again in the future. The Assyrians constantly celebrated victory, whether they won or not; constant victory was the condition that kept the Assyrians going.

Despite the propaganda, Shalmaneser made more raids than permanent conquests. The neighboring states were no longer taken by surprise, as they had been in Ashurnasirpal's day, and they joined against the Assyrian threat whenever it came their way (e.g., see the battle of Karkar in the next section). The end of his reign saw a serious rebellion from his eldest son, Ashurdaninapal. It was put down by a loyal son, Shamshi-Adad V, but Shalmaneser died before it was over. As a result Shamshi-Adad inherited a weakened state that would stagnate for nearly a century.

Israel vs. Judah vs. Aram (Syria)

Half the kings of Judah are described as good ones in 1 & 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles, but all of Israel's monarchs are rated badly, because they did nothing to stop idolatry in the north; in fact, some actively encouraged it. The northern kingdom's government was less stable as well, going through a total of nine dynasties during the 208 years of its existence. Jeroboam's son Nadab was assassinated by a usurper named Baasha in 909 B.C. Baasha moved the capital from Shechem to Tirzah, and fought with Judah and Aram, losing ground on both fronts. Baasha's son, a drunkard named Elah, was in turn killed by an officer named Zimri. Zimri lasted for only a week and then went up in flames when a rival general, Omri, attacked his palace. Omri (885-874) was even more evil than his predecessors, but he managed to hold on for life and bequeath the throne to his son Ahab. Omri's main accomplishment was to build a permanent capital for the kingdom, Samaria. The site was easily defended, and it impressed even the Assyrians; Assyrian records always called Israel Bit-Humri (the House of Omri), even after the dynasty of Omri became extinct.

Under Ahab (874-853) and his Phoenician wife, the infamous Jezebel, Baal worship became a serious challenge to the original faith of Israel. The ministry of the prophet Elijah during this time was the only check against the tide of Baal-worship. Meanwhile, Ahab faced serious trouble from Aram's king, Ben-Hadad II. When the first Syrian attack on Samaria failed, Ben-Hadad's troops concluded that Israel's God was "a god of the hills" (1 Kings 20:23), and that a battle fought on flat ground would result in a Syrian victory. This was faulty logic, though. At Aphek, a town just east of the Sea of Galilee, Ben-Hadad was soundly beaten. Syria returned cities taken from Israel in the first invasion, and gave Israel commercial privileges in Damascus. After that a prophet criticized Ahab for sparing a king that deserved to be killed.

Ahab had his reasons. In 854 B.C. the Assyrian ruler, Shalmaneser III, led an army into Syria. The quarrelsome kings of the Levant all put aside their differences and formed a coalition army to deal with an enemy that could destroy them all. At Karkar on the Orontes River, they met and stopped the Assyrian onslaught. Shalmaneser tells us that twelve kings opposed him and that Ahab brought to the battle two thousand chariots and ten thousand foot soldiers. Although Shalmaneser claimed yet another great victory, he went home again. Things promptly returned to "normal" in the Holy Land, and the alliance was forgotten as quickly as it was made. Ahab and Ben-Hadad met in battle at Ramoth-Gilead, east of the Jordan. Ahab disguised himself as an ordinary officer, but was mortally wounded by an arrow.

Ahab's contemporary in Judah, Jehoshaphat (873-848), ruled the southern kingdom well, but he made a big mistake in his friendship with Ahab. Early in his reign, he married his son Jehoram to Athaliah, the daughter of Ahab and Jezebel. This act gave Baal worship a strong foothold in the south, with grave consequences for the next generation.

The alliance almost got Jehoshaphat killed in the Battle of Ramoth-Gilead. Shortly after this Moab revolted from Israelite rule under a leader named Mesha. Then Edom revolted, and invaded Judah in a coalition with Ammon and Moab. Jehoshaphat marched to meet them, with his musicians praising God in the front of his army. Before the opposing forces met, the invaders began fighting among themselves, and Jehoshaphat won without drawing his sword. As a result, Judah regained control over Edom, and held it for the rest of Jehoshaphat's reign. In the tradition of Solomon, Jehoshaphat built a fleet of commercial ships at his Red Sea port, but a storm wrecked the fleet before it sailed.

In the north, the second king after Ahab, Jehoram, tried to reconquer Moab. He persuaded Jehoshaphat to help him, and they went around the south side of the Dead Sea, nearly perishing of thirst before they met the prophet Elisha (Elijah's successor), who promised them rain for Jehoshaphat's sake. They invaded Moab and surrounded its capital, but the attackers went home in disgust after Mesha sacrificed his son to the god Chemosh.

A furious charioteer named Jehu brought the dynasty of Omri to a violent end in 841 B.C.. He vigorously persecuted Baal-worshipers in Israel, but failed to stamp out idolatry completely; because of his efforts, though, Elisha promised that Jehu's family would hold the throne for four generations. Shortly after that Shalmaneser III attacked Aram, and Jehu chose to pay tribute to the Assyrians rather than fight them. This event is recorded on a stone known as the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser, and is the oldest known picture of a Biblical character. The new king of Aram, Hazael, never forgave Israel for that, and attacked more aggressively than his predecessors had. The loss of all Israelite territory east of the Jordan marked an ominous end to Jehu's career. Under his son Jehoahaz, Israel was reduced to a city-state centered on Samaria, and Hazael even made a successful raid on Judah.⁽³⁾

Meanwhile to the south, a counterrevolution took place. Queen Athaliah seized the throne and exterminated the entire dynasty of David except for an infant named Joash, who was hidden and raised in the Temple by his aunt and the high priest, Jehoiadah. This was a really low point for Judah, now ruled by the daughter of Ahab & Jezebel and the granddaughter of a Sidonian priest-king of Baal. When Joash reached the age of six, Jehoiadah revealed him to the public and crowned him; Athaliah was killed when she tried to interfere. Joash's early years as king went well; with Jehoiadah as his advisor, they gave the Temple some much-needed repair work. Jehoiadah lived to the ripe old age of 130, and was buried among the kings of Judah; with this positive influence gone, Joash was rapidly corrupted into idolatry, and eventually assassinated by two of his servants.

In 806 B.C., a raid from Assyria's Adad-nirari III broke Aramaean strength. Elisha made his last prophecy around this time, predicting that the next king of Israel, Jehoash, would defeat, but not destroy, his Syrian foe. Sure enough, Jehoash recovered all the lost territory and then some. His successor, Jeroboam II, conquered Ammon, Moab, and nearly all of Syria, making Samaria the capital of the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the area since Solomon's day. We sometimes call this half-century of prosperity of prosperity in the early 8th century B.C. "the Indian Summer of Israel," because Israel's downfall came afterwards.

In the south, an overconfident king of Judah named Amaziah reconquered Edom and picked a fight with Jehoash; Jehoash came out the winner. For the only time in Judah's history Jerusalem surrendered to an army from the northern kingdom. Jehoash removed the treasures of the Temple and 600 feet of Jerusalem's wall; Amaziah spent the rest of his life as a hostage of Israel. Amaziah's righteous son, Uzziah, gave Judah a long period of prosperity that outlasted what Israel enjoyed at the time.

The economic and political gains achieved by Jeroboam II of Israel and Uzziah of Judah were not matched with spiritual progress. The prophets of the day (Hosea and Amos in the north, Isaiah and Joel in the south) preached against the hypocrisy they saw. They carefully observed sacrifices and holidays, but oppression, bloodshed and greed were commonplace; the rich got richer while the poor got poorer. The prophets started declaring that God would judge and scatter His chosen people because they had forgotten their creator and protector.

The Calm Before the Storm

The most capable Assyrian monarch during this period was Adad-nirari III (811-783). As seen earlier in this chapter, he succeeded where Shalmaneser failed by defeating Syria; he also took tribute from the Phoenicians, Philistines, Edomites, Israelites, Medes, Persians, and Anatolians. Nevertheless, Assyrian power was limited, having suffered a severe setback in the civil war of 827-822. Campaigns failed more often than they succeeded, Assyria's borders shrank back toward the core territory, and there were epidemics and an ominous eclipse of the sun. It was sometime during this period that the prophet Jonah visited Nineveh. While Assyria was in eclipse, the rest of the Middle East enjoyed a time of peace.

We mentioned the prosperity of Israel and Judah during this time in the previous section. Another nation that did well was Urartu, the Anatolian kingdom in Armenia. Gradually it expanded from Lake Van to dominate everything from the Caucasus mts. to the northern border of present-day Iraq, and west to the upper Euphrates River. Beyond its borders tribute came from the Anatolian city-states of Cappadocia, the Cimmerian tribes in Russia, and the nearest of the Medes in Iran. According to the tablets found so far, Urartu prospered because of rich farmlands along the Araxes River, the cow pastures near Mt. Ararat, and most of all, from copper and iron mines within its territory.

Urartu's power peaked under Sardur II (749-734), who persuaded the Aramaeans of Syria to transfer their allegiance to him. This made Urartu a northern rival to Assyria, which threatened to surround the Tigris kingdom on three sides (east and west as well as north). A series of raids launched by Assyria at this time all met with failure, and would continue to be while Urartu was stronger in Syria and Iran. To change the situation, Assyria would have to conquer and firmly hold those areas first. The time of quick and easy raids was over; Assyria had no choice but to become an empire or perish.

Before I continue with the history of the Fertile Crescent, a few words on the areas to the west would be useful to bring us up to date in that area. The western half of Anatolia (Turkey) received civilization not from a Middle Eastern state but from the Greeks. As early as 1050 B.C., Greek colonies took root on Cyprus, absorbing both the original Cypriot (Alashian) population and the Phoenician settlers. In the years to come the outgoing tide of Greek settlers increased, spurred on by the Dorian invasion of their homeland. We now see the Trojan War as one such early colonizing effort by the Greeks. After 800 B.C., Greek colonies appeared all along the eastern shore of the Aegean, creating the classical city-states of Ionia.

In the Anatolian interior, a little-known people called the Phrygians set up a kingdom of their own; the founding date is uncertain, but it was no later than 800 B.C. Their exact origins are also unknown, except that we know they were an Indo-European people. The Greeks claimed they migrated out of the Balkans around the time of the Trojan War. The Assyrians called them Mushki, suggesting an origin from the east, but there is no way of telling whether these were the same people as the Mushki who lived north of Assyria a few centuries earlier. Their nation contained rivers bearing deposits of both gold and silver, making the Phrygians (and their successors, the Lydians) rich from the start. Their capital was Gordium, near modern Ankara, and the most famous Phrygian king was Midas (yes, the Midas of Golden Touch fame in Greek myths). They worshiped Sabazius (the Greek Dionysus) and a mother goddess named Cybele; their religious practices later influenced both the Greeks and the Romans. They traded extensively with the Greeks, and learned the alphabet from them.

The New Assyrian Empire

Tiglath-Pileser also reorganized the Assyrian army to make it the largest, most formidable fighting machine the world had seen up to that time. Previously they had called up a new army every time there was a campaign or national emergency; because it was made up of Assyrians, it never exceeded 50,000 men, and everybody in it went home at harvest time. Now in its place came a permanent standing army whose core was still Assyrian but included foreign mercenaries and conscripts from vassal states and annexed provinces. The new army at times had a total of 200,000 men, but its ill-assorted and often untrustworthy foreign elements were inferior in endurance and courage to the tough Semitic peasants from northern Iraq.

To deal with the ever-present problem of rebellions, Tiglath-Pileser introduced deportation; he would remove the entire population of a troublesome area to a distant region, while Assyrians and conquered peoples from elsewhere moved in to take their place. The idea behind this final solution was to break up ethnic groups and with them their will to resist. This cruel policy, like the atrocities, had the opposite effect: it did not prevent rebellions from breaking out and it led to a general dislike of the Assyrians everywhere. In the next century a Babylonian civil servant from Nippur dared to write to King Esarhaddon, "The king knows that all lands hate us on account of Assyria."

The campaigns of Tiglath-Pileser went forth in all directions, leaving no stone unturned. First an expedition to the south drove the Aramaeans away from Babylon and reminded the Babylonians that Assyria was still in charge. Then he charged to the west and defeated the Anatolian and Aramaean city-states in northern Syria, and their protector, Sardur II of Urartu, who fled ingloriously on a mare. The surviving princes, including Rezin of Damascus, Menahem of Israel, and a certain Zabibe (the "queen of the Arabs"), rushed to bring presents and tribute. Three campaigns to the east conquered the Medes, and in 735 B.C. the capital of Urartu was besieged, but not taken.

A new anti-Assyrian coalition formed in the west, forcing Tiglath-Pileser to return there. This time the Philistine prince of Ashkelon was killed in action; his counterpart in Gaza "fled like a bird to Egypt." Ammon, Edom, Moab, Judah, the Greeks of Cyprus and another Arab queen named Shamshi paid tribute. Two years later King Ahaz of Judah, besieged by both Israel and Damascus, called for help; Tiglath-Pileser annexed Damascus and half of Israel, and put a puppet named Hoshea in charge of the latter. In 729 B.C. he went to Babylon and killed a usurper who had taken the Babylonian throne in his absence. At the following New Year festival he "took the hand of Bel (Marduk)" and was proclaimed king of Babylon under the name of Pulu (Pul in the Old Testament). One year later he died, or to use the Babylonian expression, "he went to his destiny."

When the next king, Shalmaneser V (727-722), was crowned, Israel refused to pay tribute. Assyrian troops surrounded Samaria on schedule, but Shalmaneser was assassinated while the siege was still in progress. The killer who took his place, Sargon II (722-705), founded Assyria's last ruling dynasty and lived up to his Akkadian namesake. At the beginning of his reign he finished what Shalmaneser V started, by capturing Samaria. The ten northern tribes of Israel were removed beyond the Euphrates and have not been seen since. In their place came other unfortunates, who mingled with the few Israelites left behind and produced a half-breed people, the Samaritans of New Testament times.

Outside Assyria's borders, Egypt and Elam grew increasingly nervous of the Assyrian advances. They lent men and weapons to rebels in the nearest provinces, and thus joined Sargon's list of enemies that must be destroyed to secure Assyria's borders. The pro-Elamite rebel in Babylonia was one Marduk-apal-idina, called Merodach-Baladan in the Old Testament. When Sargon came against him in 720 B.C., the Babylonians appear to have won, for Merodach-Baladan ruled the south as he pleased for another decade before a second attack forced him to flee to Elam. One amusing detail: Merodach-Baladan's inscription proclaiming the first victory was confiscated from Uruk by Sargon in 710 B.C., taken to Calah, and replaced with a clay cylinder bearing a radically different Assyrian version of the event (evidently propaganda and "cold war" tactics were in use long before our time!). In the west a quick campaign from Syria to Gaza got rid of the Egyptians and their allies. In 717 B.C. he took Carchemish, and invaded Cilicia. Here the main enemy was Midas of Phrygia, and hostilities continued for a decade before Midas agreed to pay tribute.

The campaign to deal once and for all with Urartu got underway in 714 B.C. The march northwards through the mountains of Kurdistan was especially hard, and the geography of the region favored the enemy. However, the Assyrians fought their way around Lake Urmia and captured Urartu's sacred city, Musasir, at the headwaters of the Tigris, taking away the national god, Chaldi. When the king of Urartu, Rusas, heard the news, he committed suicide. Urartu lingered on until the Medes conquered it in 590 B.C., but it never recovered. Thousands of Anatolians were deported to an area along the Persian Gulf that the Assyrians named Kaldu⁽⁴⁾; for that reason they became known as Chaldeans, a name they kept for the rest of their history. Other "Chaldeans" fled west to central Anatolia; there in the next century they would set up their last and greatest kingdom.

The northern campaign also nipped a Median revolt in the bud. Daiakku, the strongest chief among the Median tribes (Herodotus called him Deioces), was captured and deported with his family to Hama in Syria. His spirit lived on, though, and under his son Khshathrita (Phraortes), the Medes united into one state.

Sargon, now victorious everywhere, was at the peak of his career. All attempts to defeat him had failed, leaving Assyria stronger than ever; places as far away as Cyprus and Bahrein were now sending tribute. At home Sargon began to build a new capital, which he named Dur-Sharrukin (modern Khorsabad). During the last ten years of his reign he built a magnificent palace, with huge stone cherubim (winged figures with human heads and the bodies of bulls) guarding the gates, and over a mile of reliefs adorned the walls. However, the city was not in use for long; one year after the king finished it he was slain in battle. The court abandoned his new capital, and moved back to Nineveh.

Sargon's son and successor, the famous Sennacherib (705-681), spent his reign dealing with the various rebellions that broke out when he assumed the throne. Judah's Ahaz had been pro-Assyrian because Israel was anti; now promises of Egyptian aid persuaded Ahaz's successor, Hezekiah, to act otherwise. In 702 B.C. Sennacherib came to deal with this challenge, uprooting rebels along the Mediterranean coast from Sidon to Philistia. An Egyptian army that came to the rescue was stomped at Eltekeh. Then he chastised Judah, taking Lachish (Judah's second largest city) in a siege that went so smoothly that pictures of it were inscribed on the walls of Nineveh, as a model of how future sieges should look. Sennacherib locked Hezekiah in Jerusalem "like a bird in a cage," as he put it, and exiled 200,150 people; he levied so much tribute on Judah that the gold had to be stripped from the doors of Solomon's Temple to pay the bill.

In Babylonia the situation was far worse, because Merodach-Baladan, Sargon's old rival, refused to give up. In the year that Sennacherib came to power, he returned from exile in Elam to raise the banner of revolt in Babylon again. Sennacherib had to campaign twice (700 and 694 B.C.), going all the way to the Persian Gulf the second time, before Merodach-Baladan was defeated permanently. In 689 B.C. the Babylonians revolted once more, again with the help of the Elamites. A great battle took place at Hallule, on the Tigris, and the Assyrians were very nearly defeated. Blind with rage, Sennacherib did the unthinkable: he utterly destroyed Babylon, the heart of Mesopotamian civilization, the "bond of Heaven and Earth" which all of his ancestors had treated with patience and respect. The gods whose temples Sennacherib had burned could not let this crime go unpunished; the priests of Sumer and Akkad predicted a violent end for the brutal king, which would be fulfilled eight years later.

Before that could happen, though, there was time for one more campaign in the west. The Old Testament appears to list only one battle between Judah and Assyria, but there must have been two, since Hezekiah had an ally named "Tirhakah of Ethiopia" (Taharqa) and a king by that name did not become pharaoh of Egypt until 690 B.C. An invasion of Egypt was launched in 688 B.C., and the Assyrians advanced to Egypt's easternmost city, Pelusium. Taharqa fled up the Nile; in the following year the Assyrians came to Jerusalem, and outside the walls of the holy city a dramatic debate (recorded in 2 Kings 18-19 and Isaiah 36-37) took place between the representatives of Hezekiah and Sennacherib. What happened next is uncertain, but it must have been dreadful; according to the Biblical account an angel of the Lord went out one night and slew 185,000 Assyrian soldiers. Herodotus quoted an Egyptian account that claims a swarm of mice chewed up everything the Assyrians had that consisted of rope or leather; the Babylonian historian Berosus said a plague wiped out the army; some modern historians like Velikovsky speculate that a meteor fell into the Assyrian camp. Whatever it was, the Assyrians chose to say nothing about this inglorious episode.

The Rise of Lydia and the Chaldean Empire

Assyria was too strong for the Cimmerians to defeat in a one-on-one fight, so the nomads were directed westward into Anatolia, where the main target was Phrygia. They destroyed Gordium and King Midas in 687 B.C., and everyone else in the area was hard hit as well. Finally in the middle of the century Assyria's Ashurbanipal inflicted a crushing defeat upon them in the gorges of Cilicia; the survivors fled and joined up with the Scythian bands.

In western Anatolia a new kingdom named Lydia replaced the Phrygians. Until now Sardis, the Lydian capital, was just another city-state in the region. According to Herodotus, Lydia's path to greatness started when a bodyguard named Gyges usurped the throne of the previous king of Sardis. As king, Gyges had many enemies to deal with. The nearest were the Greeks in the Ionian city-states, and conflicts with them were a major preoccupation of the early Lydian monarchs. Another danger was the Cimmerians, and that forced Gyges to call on Ashurbanipal for aid. Ashurbanipal regarded Gyges as yet another king submitting to Assyria's authority, and saw Lydia's gifts as tribute, but after the danger passed, Gyges started meddling in Egyptian politics, giving aid to Psammetich when he declared Egypt's independence (see below). Consequently the Assyrians stopped supporting Lydia against the Cimmerians, and Gyges was killed when the Cimmerians looted Sardis in 652 B.C.

Like Phrygia, Lydia was fabulously wealthy. The key to Lydia's success was two inventions, money and a capitalist economy. At first (around 700 B.C.) they used lumps of gold and silver stamped with pictures of animals for currency; within a century and a half coins of the shape we are familiar with came into use. Trading with money proved to be much more convenient than estimating the value of precious metals by their weight, and was less complicated than the barter used previously, so it didn't take long for the Phoenicians and the Greeks to adopt coinage for themselves; after the Persians took over they would spread the concept of money to the rest of the known world.

In central and eastern Anatolia, the Anatolians started to make a comeback under a king named Suppiluliumas II (669?-629 B.C.), who was every bit as capable as the first monarch by that name. Suppiluliumas started his activities by building a new capital city, Hattusas (modern Boghazkoy), in the bend of the Halys River. As a mountain stronghold, Hattusas had much at the time to recommend it, but later conquests left it in a remote corner of the kingdom, resulting in the future move to Babylon by the successors of Suppiluliumas. To the north and west he expanded the kingdom considerably, until he encountered a people he called the "Ahhiyawa"; these appear to have been the Achaeans, Homer's Greeks. Throughout his career he played his cards carefully, though, to avoid antagonizing the Assyrians, never using force as a first resort. To procure allies against the Assyrians, he signed many treaties with neighboring states. Whenever possible, he reinforced his treaties by marrying off a relative to the other treaty partner, and then he added remarks to the treaties asserting that his new in-law was an uncouth barbarian who needed to learn how to behave decently.

For example, when he gave his sister to Prince Hukkana of Azzi-Hayasa (a city-state in northwest Armenia), he filled the treaty with this lesson in etiquette:

"Furthermore, my sister, whom I, the Sun, have given you to wife, has many sisters of varying degrees of kinship. They are now your sisters too, because your wife is their sister. But there is an important precept in the land of Hatti: no brother may have sexual intercourse with his own sister or female cousin. This is not seemly. At Hattusas, anyone who does such a thing does not remain alive; he is slain. Your country being uncivilized, it is customary for a sister or female cousin to have intercourse with their own brother. At Hattusas, this is not permitted."

Suppiluliumas goes on in several more paragraphs to mention other sexual perversions that were punishable by death in his country.

Later in his reign, a prince of the Medes named Mattiwaza fled to Hattusas with nothing but the clothes on his back. Recognizing a ripe opportunity for another alliance, Suppiluliumas treated him generously, giving him fine new clothing and promising to help him gain his father's throne in Iran. Since he had another sister available, he married her to Mattiwaza. It appears that the Mattiwaza in the annals of Hattusas is none other than Cyaxares, the liberator of Media in the next generation, so the later alliance between the Medes and Chaldeans (Anatolians) against Assyria, also sealed with a diplomatic marriage, may have been seen as a renewal of good relations that had existed previously.

Finally one special incident deserves mention here. A widowed Egyptian queen named Dakhamun sent Suppiluliumas a cuneiform letter with an unprecedented proposal in it: "My husband, Nib-Khururia⁽⁵⁾, has recently died, and I have no son. But thy sons, they say, are many. If thou wilt send me a son of thine, he shall become my husband."

Such a marriage would have given the Anatolian monarch Egypt, making him as powerful as the Assyrians; it seemed too good to be true. He sent agents to investigate and this offended the queen. In a follow-up letter she reproved the king for his lack of faith: "Why didst thou say, 'They wish to deceive me?' If I had a son, would I of my own accord to the humiliation of my country write to another country? Dost thou not trust me now?. . .Not to any other country did I send, but to thee alone. Thy sons, they say, are many. Give thou one of my sons to me, and he shall be my husband, and furthermore, he shall be king in the land of Egypt."

This convinced Suppiluliumas of the queen's sincerity, and he decided to grant her request. A prince headed for the Nile valley, but he made the mistake of traveling by land through Assyrian territory; before he reached his destination he was waylaid and murdered, presumably by someone who did not approve of the marriage. The Assyrian empire had only a few years left to go, but it was still a dangerous place to visit if you were not on the best of terms with its leaders.

Suppiluliumas never avenged his late son; he died of a pestilence his soldiers brought back from a campaign in northern Syria. His son and heir, Arnuwandas, also succumbed to it after a brief reign, and his youngest son, Mursilis II, took his place. We will cover his career in the next chapter, because it is directly tied in with the downfall of Assyria.

Assyria Triumphant

If he could forgive, he could also punish. Abdi-Milkuti, the king of Sidon, revolted in 677 B.C.; Esarhaddon captured and beheaded him, deported the Sidonians, and gave their territory over to Tyre. Two years later he defeated an Elamite invasion, and scored a diplomatic victory by putting a pro-Assyrian prince on the Elamite throne in Susa. In 672 B.C. he returned to the Phoenician shore and captured Tyre, which had become anti-Assyrian in his absence. The ultimate source of all this trouble in the west was the Ethiopian pharaoh Taharqa, who during the same year had ousted the pro-Assyrian prince in a coup. Esarhaddon now prepared to punish the Egyptians for their insubordination.

In 671 B.C., Esarhaddon led his army out of Syria and across the Sinai desert. Once they entered Egypt the campaign went swiftly: "From the town of Ishupri as far as Memphis, his royal residence, a distance of fifteen days' march, I fought daily, without interruption, very bloody battles against Tarqu (Taharqa), king of Egypt and Ethiopia, the one accursed by all the great gods. Five times I hit him with the point of my arrows, inflicting wounds from which he should not recover, and then I laid siege to Memphis, his royal residence, and conquered it in half a day by means of mines, breaches, and assault ladders; I destroyed it, tore down its walls and burned it down." He chased Taharqa upstream for thirty days, then imposed tribute and Assyrian governors on the land, and returned to Nineveh with prisoners of war and workers who had useful skills: physicians, divination experts, goldsmiths, cabinet makers, cartwrights, and shipbuilders.

They conquered Egypt easily, but it was too far away to hold easily. Only two years later Taharqa returned for a rematch. Esarhaddon was marching back to Egypt when he fell sick in Haran and died (669 B.C.).

Three years earlier Esarhaddon had made his entire court swear loyalty to his son Ashurbanipal; now Ashurbanipal became king of Assyria, while his younger brother Shamash-shum-ukin became king of Babylon. The statue of Marduk finally came home, after a 21-year absence, and Babylon was given local autonomy to keep the Babylonians happy. Once the details of succession were taken care of, he resumed the Egyptian campaign that his father's death had interrupted. In 667 B.C., Taharqa was routed yet another time, and Ashurbanipal pursued him as far as Thebes. The Assyrians were now 1,300 miles from home, in the middle of a strange land where the language, religion and customs were utterly foreign to them. Alexander the Great, in a similar position, would proclaim himself both pharaoh and a living incarnation of the god Amen nearly three and a half centuries later, but Ashurbanipal, as high priest and ambassador of the god Ashur, could not even think of doing this. Since he did not have enough troops and civil servants to govern the country directly, he had to follow his father's policy: the twenty native "kings, governors, and regents" appointed by Esarhaddon were reinstated.

When he returned home, however, the governors began planning rebellion. The Assyrian officers got wind of the plot, arrested the rebels and sent them to Nineveh. All of them were executed, except Necho I, who put on such a good show of repentance that he was forgiven, "clad in brilliant garments," given a royal ring, and sent back to Egypt to be its sole governor. Then Taharqa died and was succeeded by his son-in-law Tantamani. The young Ethiopian came boldly northward, killed Necho and occupied Lower Egypt, which, however, he abandoned when he heard that Ashurbanipal was coming back with the Assyrian army. The Assyrians stopped on the Lebanese coast just long enough to retake Tyre, which had revolted in 665 B.C., and then entered Thebes a second time, this time burning and plundering the Upper Egyptian capital. Twelve new governors were placed over Egypt before the king departed to deal with matters that needed his attention elsewhere.

One of those was the changing situation in Iran. In Esarhaddon's day the Scythians had pursued the Cimmerians out of Russia, made a wrong turn in the Caucasus, and came out in Iran instead of Anatolia. The Scythian presence meant that Assyria was cut off from its main source of horses, but Esarhaddon turned the situation to his advantage with an Assyrian-Scythian alliance against the Medes. In 653 B.C. Khshathrita, the king of the Medes, lost his life in an unsuccessful attack against Nineveh. The Iranian plateau fell under Scythian domination for the next 28 years.

In 655 B.C., a governor of Egypt, Psammetich I, the son of Ramses I, deposed his rivals, recruited Ionian and Carian mercenaries from Lydia, and raised the flag of independence. Normally the Assyrians would have crushed such an upstart without hesitation, but now of the Assyrian army was tied up in a bloody struggle with the Elamites. Ashurbanipal was forced to give up Egypt to save Iraq, and he allowed Psammetich to rule Egypt on condition that he support Assyria in future conflicts. The first of these involved the rebellious Philistine city of Ashdod. Psammetich sent an Egyptian army to Ashdod, but lacking the siege equipment of the Assyrians, it took 29 years to capture the city (Herodotus called this the longest siege on record).

In the east, Assyria triumphed and divided Elam between two different members of its royal family. Then Babylonia revolted; like Kurigalzu centuries earlier, Shamash-shum-ukin had become a Babylonian nationalist. He launched a huge conspiracy to bring Phoenicia, Philistia, Judah⁽⁷⁾, the Arabs, Elam and even Lydia and Egypt against Assyria. Fortunately for the Assyrians, they discovered the plot in time to stop it. Then Ashurbanipal marched against his brother. For three years the war went on (651-648), until Shamash-shum-ukin lost hope, set fire to his palace and perished in the flames. Then Ashurbanipal marched into the Arabian desert, conquering the Arabs in a campaign that was remarkably successful, considering the environment the fighting took place in.

The Arabs subdued, Ashurbanipal went against Elam, which had accepted bribes from his rebellious brother and given him assistance. The war went on for nearly a decade, until the Assyrians won the last battle in 639 B.C. They devastated and thoroughly plundered the entire land of Elam; the Elamites disappear from history at this point. The rivalry between Elam and Mesopotamia, which had lasted for more than two thousand years, was finally over.

At Nineveh Ashurbanipal greatly enlarged his capital and celebrated his triumph. To him, the whole world was now defeated and under his rule. Nineveh was overflowing with tribute taken from other cities, and the Assyrians were feared from the shores of the Aegean Sea to the sands of Arabia. Never did Assyria look so invincible, but there were clouds on every horizon. Egypt and Media were lost forever; Elam was destroyed; Babylonia was devastated and no longer loyal; the Phoenicians were losing their commerce to the Greek competition; the Anatolians under Suppiluliumas II had advanced as close as Carchemish without meeting serious resistance. The Scythians, supposedly allies, marched and raided through the Assyrian empire as if it were their own, advancing as far southwest as Israel before the Egyptians bought them off.⁽⁸⁾ The Assyrian army was exhausted, bled white from a century of unending warfare. Despite appearances, Assyria was now weaker than it had ever been. When Ashurbanipal died in 627 B.C., massive revolts broke out everywhere, and the empire collapsed.

2. This is a good place to point out that the wars of Assyria were not motivated by greed, nor were the conquests planned at every step. The first battles of this period were no doubt defensive actions, to improve the security of a land that had no natural defenses. Later on there was a religious motivation; conquest was the divine mission of kings; anyone who opposed the king opposed the gods as well. This provided the justification for what happened next.

3. At this point, the Aramaeans were the most widespread people in the Middle East. Outside of Syria, they made up a significant portion of the Fertile Crescent's population, especially in Babylonia. In addition, the Aramaeans were fine traders, and they established a land trading network that mirrored the network the Phoenicians had on the seas. For these reasons, around 800 B.C. Aramaic replaced Akkadian as the international language of diplomacy. It would still be widely used for centuries after the Aramaeans were gone; it became the official language of the Persian Empire; in the time of Jesus the Jews used it for everyday conversation, while the Gentiles used Latin or Greek. It is still used today in the liturgies of the (Nestorian) Church of the East. Another Aramaean contribution to us is their alphabet; cursive forms of it eventually became the Arabic and Farsi (Persian) scripts.

4. The origin of the name Kaldu is uncertain, but it could mean "land of Chaldi." Nowadays the area is known as Kuwait.

5. Nib-Khururia is identified as Tutankhamen in most texts; more likely he was the Ethiopian pharaoh Taharqa, since one of his other names was Khu-ra.

6. The cuneiform symbol for 70 looks like 11 when flipped over, just as our figure 9 becomes a 6.

7. Judah's role in the revolt is implied from what happened to its king, Manasseh. According to the Old Testament, he ruled for 55 years and his reign was as evil as that of his father Hezekiah had been good. The Assyrians took him away and threw him in a Babylonian prison, where he repented of his wicked ways and was eventually allowed to return to Jerusalem. The Bible does not say whether he was pro or anti-Assyrian, but he must have been at least pro-Egyptian; his son was blatantly named Amon, after the chief Egyptian god (also spelled Amen or Amun).

8. The Israelite city of Beth-Shan was renamed Scythopolis at this point because a Scythian camp was set up there.

© Copyright 2000 Charles Kimball