Ancient Iraq (48 page)

The Hellenistic Period

The battle of Gaugamela,
¹⁶
on 1 October 331
B.C.
, opened for Alexander the road to Babylonia and Persia, as the battle of Issus, two years before, had opened for him the road to Syria and Egypt. The Persian troops stationed in Babylon surrendered without fighting, and the Macedonian conqueror made a triumphal entry into the old Semitic metropolis. Realizing, like Cyrus, that he could never rule over ‘a hundred different nations’ unless he won their hearts, he made sacrifice to Marduk and ordered the rebuilding of the temples thought to have been destroyed by Xerxes – a gigantic task which was never to be completed.
¹⁷
The Babylonians hailed him as their liberator and immediately acknowledged his kingship. After a month's stay in Babylon he proceeded to Susa and thereafter embarked upon the great armed expedition to the East which took him as far as the River Ganges. When he returned, nine years later, his mind was full of grandiose projects: Babylon and Alexandria in Egypt were to become the twin capital-cities of his empire; they would be linked by sea around the Arabian peninsula, shortly to be conquered; the coasts of the Indian Ocean would be explored; the Euphrates would be rendered navigable up to the Gulf; a great port would be built at Babylon and another at the mouth of the river. But most of these plans remained a dead
letter: on 13 June 323
B.C.
Alexander died in Babylon, probably of malaria, at the age of thirty-two.

At that date Alexander's only son, the future Alexander IV, was not yet born, and it was his brother, Philip Arrhideus, who was proclaimed king in Macedonia. But the authority of this young and mentally retarded prince remained purely nominal. The real power lay in the hands of Alexander's generals – the
diadochi
– who, having divided the empire between themselves, struggled for forty-two years to prevent each other from reconstructing it. During this period – one of the most complex in the history of antiquity – Babylon changed hands several times. At first the seat of a military junta presided over by the regent Perdiccas, it was allotted to Seleucus, chief of the Macedonian cavalry, by his colleagues in 321
B.C
., after they had murdered Perdiccas. In 316
B.C
. Antigonus, the ambitious satrap of Phrygia, dislodged Seleucus from Babylon, forcing him to take refuge with Ptolemy in Egypt. But Seleucus came back in 312
B.C
., recovered his satrapy, and for four years successfully protected it from repeated attacks launched by Antigonus and his son Demetrius. It was a fierce and bitter war which brought terrible suffering upon Babylon and its territory – ‘there was weeping and mourning in the land’ repeats as a leitmotif a Babylonian chronicle describing these events.
¹⁸
Finally, Antigonus was defeated and killed at Ipsus in Phrygia (301
B.C
.), and Seleucus added to Babylonia the satrapy of Syria and the eastern half of Asia Minor. The war, however, continued, this time in the west, between Seleucus, Ptolemy, Demetrius and the Macedonian ruler of Thrace, Lysimachus. In September 281
B.C
.,
¹⁹
a few months after he had defeated Lysimachus at Korupedion (near Sardis), Seleucus was stabbed to death by a son of Ptolemy. He had taken the title of king in 305
B.C
., but for the Babylonians the ‘years of
Silukku
’, the Seleucid era, began on the first New Year's Day following his return from Egypt: 3 April 311
B.C
. It was the first time that a continuous dating system was used in Mesopotamia.

After Ipsus Seleucus ruled directly or indirectly over a huge
territory extending from the borders of India to those of Egypt and from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf. But this empire lacked cohesion and started disintegrating almost as soon as it was formed. By 200
B.C.
the descendants of Seleucus had lost practically all their provinces and protectorates beyond the Taurus and the Zagros, and after Babylonia had been conquered by the Parthians (126
B.C.
), all that remained was a small state in northern Syria, torn apart by dynastic crises, which fell an easy prey to the Romans in 63
B.C.
In actual fact, ever since Seleucus founded Antioch on the Orontes, in May 300
B.C.
, and made it his favourite residence, the Seleucid kingdom had always been essentially a Syrian kingdom. If we except an unsuccessful attempt made by Antiochus III (222 – 187
B.C.
) to recover the Eastern districts, the diplomatic and military activities of its rulers were almost entirely absorbed in an endless conflict with the Ptolemies of Egypt for the possession of the Phoenician ports and hinterland. This meant peace for the Babylonians who must have been relieved to see the ravages of war removed from their own country to ‘(the country) across the river’ (
ebir nâri
), as they now called Syria, but it also meant that Babylon lost the privileged position it would have held had it remained the capital-city of the Macedonian dominion, as geography and history destined it to be. For many years to come, the world's political, cultural and economic centre had shifted from the banks of the Euphrates to the shores of the Mediterranean.

Undoubtedly the most durable achievement of Alexander and his successors was the foundation in Egypt and Western Asia of numerous cities organized on the model of the Greek
poleis
and populated by Greco-Macedonian settlers as well as by Oriental subjects. Whether by so doing they merely wished to create a network of political and military strongholds, or aimed at promoting the Greek culture and way of life in the Orient is a much debated problem.
²⁰
But the results obtained are obvious: the Near East became ‘hellenized’ to various degrees, and the pattern of urban life in these regions was profoundly altered.
We know of at least a dozen such cities in Mesopotamia
²¹
alone, from Edessa-Antioch in the extreme north to Alexandria-Charax on or near the Gulf. They were, as a rule, built beside or on top of ancient towns and villages, though their layout and architectural characteristics were entirely new. Seleucia-on-the-Tigris (Tell ‘Umar, opposite Ctesiphon), founded by Antiochus I in 274
B.C.
, probably on the site of Semitic Upâ (Opis), was the largest city not only of Mesopotamia but of the whole Seleucid kingdom, with a population of about 600,000. Aerial photographs clearly show its ‘grid-plan’, the blocks of habitations being separated by straight avenues and streets crossing each other at right angles. Excavations conducted there before the war and since 1964 have uncovered a number of buildings and numerous objects (clay figurines, statues, coins, jewels, pottery) in the Seleucian city, the ruins of which were buried under an equally large and rich city of the Parthian period.
²²
A similar situation confronted archaeologists at Dura-Europus (Salahiyeh, on the Euphrates, fifty kilometres upstream of ancient Mari), and here again remains of Greek monuments – a fortress, a palace and at least one temple – could be traced underneath the Parthian buildings.
²³

These Hellenistic cities were all situated on the great trade-routes which linked Central Asia with the Mediterranean, and thrived on transit operations. Seleucia, in particular, was the meeting-point of two land-routes coming from India (one through Bactria and the north of Iran, the other through Persepolis and Susa), of the important sea-route from India through the Gulf, and of several tracks crossing the Arabian peninsula. From Seleucia gold, ivory, spices, incense and precious stones, as well as the products of Mesopotamia itself – wheat, barley, dates, woollens and bitumen – were transported to Syria, either along the Euphrates via Dura-Europus, or along the Tigris and across Jazirah via Nisibin (Antioch in Mygdonia) and Edessa. Commercial intercourse between Europe, Asia and part of Africa was extremely active in Hellenistic times, and there is little doubt as to the prosperity of the
Seleucid kingdom in general – at least during the third century
B.C.
Our information on Babylonia is regrettably scanty, but the few commercial texts published (mainly from Uruk) show that a fair amount of business was carried out even within the older towns, and that prices had fallen much below the levels they had reached in Achaemenian times.
²⁴

The new economic and demographic conditions prevalent in Seleucid Mesopotamia exerted a deep, though diverse influence upon the older cities. Thus Nimrud owed to its situation on the Tigris route its revival as a small but prosperous village. Similarly, Nineveh, Mari and Arslan-Tash were reoccupied after long years of abandonment.
²⁵
Ur died slowly, probably killed by competition from Alexandria-Charax as much as by hydrographic changes in the region. Babylon was severely affected. It is true that sporadic efforts were made by the Macedonian rulers to revive and modernize the half-ruined city. In the last royal inscription in Akkadian that we possess Antiochus I (281 – 260
B.C
.) calls himself ‘provider of Esagila and Ezida‘, like the Chaldaean kings, and declares that he ‘formed with his august hands’ and brought from ‘Hatti’ (Syria) the first bricks of these temples.
²⁶
A tablet dated in the reign of Seleucus III (225 – 223
B.C.
) shows that regular offerings were still made to a number of Babylonian gods in their own shrines. Remains of Hellenistic architecture were discovered on the mound of Bâbil and on the site of Nebuchadrezzar's palace. Under Antiochus IV (175 – 164
B.C.
) – the king who did most to propagate the Greek culture – Babylon received a gymnasium and a remarkable Greek theatre, later enlarged by the Parthians.
²⁷
Yet not only was Babylon no longer the seat of the royal government, but it was already partly deserted, a great number of its inhabitants having been transferred to Seleucia when the city was founded.
²⁸
We do not know what happened in Sippar, Kish and Nippur, but Uruk seems to have enjoyed considerable prosperity, judging from the impressive monuments erected during the Seleucid period. A huge terrace constructed around the E-Anna ziqqurat completely transformed the sacred area, while in other parts of
the city were built two large temples:
Irigal
(or, better,
Esh-gal
), dedicated to Ishtar, and the so-called
Bît rêsh
, dedicated to Anu.
²⁹
Both had the conventional features of Babylonian temples, though a long inscription on glazed bricks which ran on the walls of the cult-room of Irigal was, significantly, in Aramaic script and language. Equally typical of the period are the Greek names conferred by the kings to the two city-magistrates who built these temples Anu-uballit Nicarachus and Anu-uballit Kephalon. A study of contracts on clay tablets and of
bullae
*
bearing Greek or Aramaic inscriptions shows that Uruk (called by the Greek
Orchoi
) gave shelter to an important Greek community, but retained its ancient laws and customs and was exempted from certain royal taxes. Most of the business transactions were carried out by the temple organization in the activities of which ordinary citizens could be financially interested by means of a system not very different from our modern shareholding.
³⁰
The existence of semi-independent temple-states is well attested in Asia Minor in Hellenistic times, and it is probable that Uruk owed a similar status to the liberal policy of the Seleucids.

It was in temples like those of Uruk, Sippar, Babylon and Barsippa that the Sumero-Akkadian culture was preserved. Throughout the Seleucid period temple astronomers and astrolo-gers continued to record on tablets the motions of celestial bodies, while temple scribes wrote down contemporary events in the form of chronicles and copied a number of very ancient myths, rituals, hymns and omens. It would seem
a priori
that the much-advanced Greek culture, which flourished in cities such as Seleucia, exerted a strong attraction on the less conservative members of the Babylonian
intelligentsia
; but if a long list of Greek authors native from Mesopotamia can be compiled,
³¹
it is often difficult to distinguish between those who were of pure Greco-Macedonian descent and those who, born Babylonian,
had adopted a Greek name. In fact, the evidence available seems to indicate a movement in the opposite direction: the Greeks became interested not so much in Mesopotamian history and literature as in the scientific and pseudo-scientific works of the ‘Chaldaeans’. In the second and third centuries
B.C.
the Babylonian Sudinês translated into Greek the writings of Kidinnu and other astronomers, and Berossus, priest of Marduk, wrote in Greek a strange mixture of astrology and historical narratives called
Babyloniaca
,
³²
which he dedicated to Antiochus I. Limited as they were, these cultural contacts saved for posterity some of the most remarkable achievements of Mesopotamian scientists, while the most objectionable end-product of the Mesopotamian belief in predestination, astrology, permeated and corrupted the religions of the West.