Ancient Iraq (38 page)

Ashurbanipal

The change of reign took place smoothly, and the two princes sat upon their respective thrones: Ashurbanipal in Nineveh one month after his father's death, Shamash-shum-ukîn in Babylon one year later. The empire, however, was not divided. In all probability, the purpose of the arrangements made by Esarhaddon was to satisfy his Babylonian subjects by granting them sovereignty, though it had been made clear to all concerned that Ashurbanipal took precedence over his brother. The latter had full authority within his own kingdom; the former held sway over Assyria proper, the distant provinces and the vassal rulers, and was responsible for the conduct of war and the foreign policy of the empire as a whole. It was perhaps an awkward solution, but it worked perfectly well for sixteen years.

With the crown of Assyria Ashurbanipal
*
(668 – 627
B.C.
)
³¹
inherited the task, interrupted by his father's death, of repressing the Egyptian revolt.
³²
The commander-in-chief (
turtânu
) was at once dispatched to that remote country with a small army corps which met Taharqa and his troops in the plain south of Memphis. The Assyrians won the battle and recovered the city, but Taharqa escaped them as he had escaped Esarhaddon's army. Ashurbanipal then ordered the formation of a larger armed force composed of Assyrians, Phoenicians, Syrians and Cypriots, but also of Egyptian soldiers recruited in the Nile delta. This army left Memphis and began marching towards Thebes (Assyr.
Ni
’), but it stopped on its way when the news broke that the princes of Lower Egypt were about to revolt:

All the kings… talked about rebellion and came, among themselves, to the unholy decision: ‘Taharqa has been driven out of Egypt, how can we, ourselves, stay?’ And they sent their mounted messengers to Taharqa, King of Nubia, to establish a sworn agreement: ‘Let there be peace between us and let us come to mutual understanding; we will divide the country between us, no foreigner shall be ruler among us!
³³

Betrayed by one of them, the conspirators were captured. Some were executed and others – notably Necho, King of Sais – were sent to Nineveh. The Assyrians knew that they could not proceed with their long march leaving behind them an ebullient Delta. Moreover, they were now some
two
thousand kilometres away from their homeland, in the heart of an unknown and hostile country with utterly foreign languages, customs and religion and which, in any case, they could not rule directly for a lack of administrators and troops in sufficient numbers. The only solution was to forgive and indeed cajole the kings of the Delta and win them over to their side, hoping that their hatred for Taharqa the Kushite (i.e. the Sudanese) would do the rest. Ashurbanipal, therefore, released the prisoners and put his stake on Necho, whose ancestors had reigned over the whole of Egypt. He sent him back to Sais, ‘clad in a brilliant garment’ and loaded with rich presents.

Two years elapsed, during which Taharqa died in exile. In 664
B.C
, his son Tanutamûn (whom the Assyrians called
Tanda-mane
) entered Thebes amidst rejoicing, then sailed down the Nile to Memphis, in the vicinity of which he hit a thin screen of enemy troops, mostly Egyptians, and easily beat them. Necho was killed in the skirmish; the other kings of the Delta took refuge in the marshes whence they could not be dislodged. It was then that the large Assyrian army, stationed somewhere south of Memphis, began to move and march on Thebes. Entering that great and beautiful city at long last, they ransacked and destroyed it ‘as if by a floodstorm’ and carried away ‘booty heavy and beyond counting’, including two tall electrum-coated obelisks, each weighing almost thirty-eight tons. The metropolis of Southern Egypt never recovered from the devastation.

Although the inscriptions of Ashurbanipal are written in the first person, it is very unlikely that he visited Egypt. On the other hand, it seems certain that on two occasions he intervened personally in Phoenicia: in 667
B.C.
to ‘put under his yoke’ Iakinlu, King of Arvad, who forced foreign vessels to unload their cargo in his own port instead of the Assyrian port, then in 662
B.C.
against Ba'alu of Tyre who refused to continue paying tribute. Tyre which, like Arad, was built on an island but much closer to the Lebanese coast was reputed impregnable: it was besieged, reduced to famine and obliged to surrender. Similar tactics were probably used against Arvad, bringing the same results. Yet the rulers of these two cities were treated with astonishing leniency, no doubt because Ashurbanipal, whose army was fully engaged in the Egyptian venture, could neither afford to lose his Phoenician vassals nor spare troops for other fronts. He merely received the homage of the rebels as well as their presents and their daughters for his harem. For the same reason, he remained deaf to the calls of Gyges (
Gugu
), King of Lydia in western Anatolia – ‘a distant country whose name the kings, my fathers, had never heard’ – harassed by the Cimmerians. Gyges defended his kingdom alone and proved his success by sending two prisoners of war to Nineveh.
³⁴

The victory over Tanuatamûn and the Phoenicians gave Ashurbanipal a few years of respite during which he was able to devote his attention to the northern and eastern frontiers. The chronology of the reign is extremely uncertain, but it is probably between 665 and 655
B.C.
that must be placed the campaign against the Mannai and the Medes described in the royal records, perhaps the alliance with Madyes, chief of the Scythians, which was to prove so useful a few years later, and the war against Urtaki, King of Elam, ‘who gave no thought to the good done to him’ by Esarhaddon and ‘overran Akkad like a dense swarm of grasshoppers’
³⁵
and was repelled. It seems that the alliance of the Cimmerians with the king of Tabal, their victory over Lydia and the death of Gyges killed in the battle, as well as their foray towards Mesopotamia, checked by the Assyrians, took place between 650 and 640
B.C.

Shortly before the middle of the seventh century the gods, who had always stood at Ashurbanipal's side, suddenly seemed to abandon him. About 655
B.C.
Psamtik (
Psammetichus I
) – possibly a son of Necho – raised the flag of independence in the Nile Delta and, with the help of Ionian and Carian mercenaries, expelled the Assyrians from Egypt, pursuing them as far as Ashdod in Palestine. We owe this information to Herodotus,
³⁶
for there is naturally no mention of this disaster in the cuneiform records, except for a passage in the ‘Rassam cylinder’ where Ashurbanipal states that Gyges ‘sent his force to the aid of Tushamilki, King of Egypt, who had thrown off the yoke of his (Ashurbanipal's) sovereignty’. In other times an army would have been sent against Psammetichus, and Egypt would not have slipped so easily out of Assyrian hands. But it so happened that the bulk of the Assyrian army was engaged in a fierce struggle with the Elamites, and Ashurbanipal had to give up Egypt in order to save Mesopotamia. The King of Elam was then Tept-Humban (the
Teumman
of Assyrian inscriptions), a usurper who, six or seven years before, had seized the throne, obliging the sons of Urtaki to take refuge in Nineveh. War broke out when Teumman demanded their extradition, which
Ashurbanipal refused. The Elamites attacked, aided by the unfaithful Gambulû. Driven back into their own country, they were defeated at Tulliz on the Kerkha river. Teumman was killed in the battle; his head was cut off and triumphantly taken to Nineveh, where – as shown in a famous bas-relief – it was hung on a tree in the garden of the royal palace.
³⁷
The Gambulû were punished, and Elam was divided between two members of the Urtaki family: Humbanigash and Tammaritu. There, as in Egypt, the Assyrians would not or could not put the vanquished country directly under their rule, and the half-measures they adopted left ultimately no choice but withdrawal or utter destruction.

This episode of the Elamite war was hardly concluded when Babylonia revolted. For sixteen years Shamash-shum-ukin had behaved as a faithful brother, but gradually the virus of Babylonian nationalism overtook him and he came to think that, after all, Babylon was as much entitled to world domination as Nineveh. In 652
B.C.
he closed the gates of Sippar, Babylon and Barsippa to the Assyrians and contrived a huge coalition comprising Phoenicia, the Philistines, Judah, the Arabs of the Syrian desert, the Chaldaeans of southern Iraq, the Elamites and even Lydia and Egypt. Had all these peoples attacked simultaneously, Assyria would have been overwhelmed. Fortunately, the plot was discovered in time. In a strongly worded proclamation Ashurbanipal warned the people of Babylon:

‘Regarding the empty words which this false brother told you, I have heard all that he has said. They are nothing but wind. Do not believe him… Do not, for a moment, listen to his lies. Do not contaminate your own good name, which is unsullied before me and before the whole world, nor make yourselves sinners against the divinity.’
³⁸

But the Babylonians refused to listen, and the King of Assyria marched against his brother. For three years, says a Babylonian chronicle, ‘the war went on and there were perpetual battles’.
³⁹
In the end Shamash-shum-ukin lost hope; the legend has it that he set fire to his own palace and perished in the flames (648
B.C
.).
⁴⁰
Sumer and Akkad were pacified and Ashurbanipal put on the throne of Babylon a shadowy figure called Kandalanu, of obscure origin.
⁴¹
Soon afterwards, he proceeded to punish the other rebels and became at once entangled in a war against the Arabs,
⁴²
who had not only lent their support to Shamash-shum-ukin but were continuously raiding the western vassal-states. It was a difficult war, waged against elusive enemies fighting bravely and vanishing in a dreadful desert ‘where parching thirst is at home, where there are not even birds in the sky’. Yet, here again, the Assyrian Army accomplished marvels: Uate' and his allies, the Nabataeans – who already dwelt around the Dead Sea – were defeated; Abiate' and his Qedar tribe were surrounded, cut off from water wells and forced ‘to cut open their camels and drink blood and filthy water against their thirst’. Another Uate', son of Hazail, was caught and, a ring in his jaw and a collar around his neck, was ‘made to guard the bar at the east gate at Nineveh’. The booty taken in this campaign was such, says Ashurbanipal, that:

Camels were bought within my country for less than one shekel of silver on the market place. The
sutammu
-workers received camels and (even) slaves as a present, the brewer as baksheesh, the gardener as an additional payment!
⁴³

The Arabs subdued, Ashurbanipal sent his troops against his former protégé the King of Elam, who had accepted bribes from the rebellious King of Babylon and given him assistance. The vicissitudes of this long Elamite war, and the plots and revolutions which brought three princes in succession to the throne in Susa, are wearisome details that have no place here.
⁴⁴
Suffice it to say that in 639
B.C
. the Assyrians won the last battle. The entire land of Elam was devastated and its capital-city thoroughly plundered. This, incidentally, was mere retaliation, for among the spoil were found ‘the silver, gold, property and goods of Sumer and Akkad and of the whole of Babylonia, which the former Kings of Elam had carried off in some seven raids’. The ziqqurat of Susa was destroyed, its sanctuaries
violated, its gods taken captive or ‘thrown to the winds’. The vanquished Elamites were even chased beyond the grave, and their country symbolically erased from the map:

Thus were avenged countless insults and settled a three-thousand-year-old quarrel between Elamites and Mesopotamians.

Shortly after the sack of Susa Ashurbanipal celebrated his triumph. From his sumptuous palace at Nineveh this learned, magnificent and ruthless monarch could contemplate ‘the whole world’ prostrate at his feet. Three Elamite princes and a ‘King of Arabia’ were, literally, harnessed to his chariot. His treacherous brother had met with a death appropriate to his crimes, and he himself governed the Babylonians. The proud merchants of Tyre and Arvad, the stiff-necked Jews,
⁴⁶
the restive Aramaeans, had been subjugated. The Mannai had been ‘smashed’ and the Cimmerians kept at bay. The rulers of Tabal and Cilicia, at first hostile, had brought their daughters to the royal couch. For having aided Psammetichus, Gyges of Lydia had seen his country set afire by the wild warriors of the north and lost his life, but now Ardys, his son, was asking as a favour to bear the Assyrian yoke. Nineveh was overflowing with the booty taken in Memphis, Thebes, Susa and countless other cities, and the ‘great name of Ashur’ was respected and feared from the green shores of the Aegean to the burning sands of
Arabia. Never had the Assyrian empire looked so strong, the Assyrian might so invincible. And yet how many shadows were there to this dazzling picture! The rich land of Egypt lost for ever; Elam conquered but turned into ruins; Babylonia devastated and, with the exception of a pro-Assyrian party of unknown size, inflamed with hatred for the Assyrians; the Phoenicians enslaved and losing their maritime and colonial empire to their Greek rivals; the vassal princes unreliable; the Assyrian army tired and depleted by a century of hard and bloody wars; the frontiers brought back from the Nile to the Dead Sea, from Mount Ararat to the first folds of the Taurus, from the Caspian Sea to the Zagros range; and beyond the Zagros, doubtful allies – the Scythians – and redoubtable foes – the Medes. The Assyrian empire, despite appearances, was weaker than it had ever been, and many must have thought secretly what the Israelite prophets dared to proclaim: