A Companion to Assyria

by Eckart Frahm

  Merchants and Empires (2300–2000 BCE)

  A few years after the burning of Ebla, Mari suffered the same fate, and the palace, the temples of Ištar and Ninḫursag, artisans’ houses, and other areas of the city went up in flames (Margueron 2004). It is always difficult to determine the culprit in the case of an archaeological destruction level, and it is not entirely excluded that no militaries were involved. Many historians, however, blame a representative of a new power in Southern Mesopotamia, Sargon of Akkad, who certainly boasted of destroying Mari in his inscriptions. For a little more than a century, Sargon and his descendants ruled an empire that united the fractious city‐states of Southern Mesopotamia and some of the kingdoms of Northern Mesopotamia, before it collapsed and the north again experienced a decline in settlement.

  It seems that some time in the late 24th century, Sargon (2334–2279 BCE) managed to usurp power in the city of Kiš. He then moved the center of his rule to Akkad, which may have been a new foundation. The ruins of Akkad have never been found, but may lie under the suburbs of Baghdad (Reade 2002). Sargon’s royal inscriptions boast of extensive campaigns in both North and South Mesopotamia. He was the first king to transform the traditional title “King of Kiš” into the more bombastic, “king of the world,” relying on a word play between the name of the city and the Akkadian term for “everything” (Van de Mieroop 2007). Although Sargon united the south, he may have done no more than pillage the cities in the north, rather like his predecessors at Ebla, Mari, and Kiš (Steinkeller 1993). There is more evidence in northern Mesopotamia for control by his sons, Rimuš and Maništušu (2278–2255 BCE, the order of their reigns is uncertain). However, it seems likely that Northern Mesopotamia was only integrated into the Akkadian imperial structure under the rule of Naram‐Sin, Sargon’s grandson, who also propagated an ideology of power and unity. He deified himself, proclaiming that he was chosen as the city god of Akkad, and adopted a new title: “king of the four corners (of the universe)” (Van de Mieroop 2007). These ideological changes were part of a political strategy that sought to unify the empire politically and economically. During his reign, standardized accounting and measurement systems were employed across the empire to collect revenue efficiently (Foster 1993). In Northern Mesopotamia, there is evidence that Akkadian intervention in economy and politics became stronger during his reign.

  Texts from the early second millennium BCE claim that Maništušu built a temple to Ištar, the most important goddess of the Mesopotamian pantheon, at Nineveh, but there are few other signs of an Old Akkadian presence here (Westenholz 2004). A bronze head of an Akkadian ruler, perhaps Naram‐Sin, was found associated with this temple, although it probably was brought to Nineveh as booty later (Reade 2005: 361). Better documented is an imperial presence at five other cities in Northern Mesopotamia: Gasur, Ashur, Šeḫna, Nagar, and Mari. Each of these cities probably had an Akkadian governor, at least from the reign of Naram‐Sin. Administrative texts excavated from Gasur (modern Yorgan Tepe, near Kirkuk) resemble those found in Southern Mesopotamia (Foster 1982). At Nagar, a large administrative building, built out of bricks stamped with the name of Naram‐Sin, served as a storage depot for the Akkadian kings, perhaps a redistributive center that received grain from the many centers of Northern Mesopotamia and sent it downstream to Southern Mesopotamia (Mallowan 1947: 63–70; Sommerfeld, Archi et al. 2004). A bulla found at Nagar that had been sealed by the governor of Gasur attests to connections between these officials (Matthews 1997: seal 317). Excavations at Šeḫna have revealed another administrative building, probably related to the control of the rich wheat fields of the Jezirah (Ristvet, Guilderson et al. 2004). An intriguing recent discovery at Šeḫna is a schoolroom near the palace, where students were instructed in Akkadian language and script (and perhaps taught imperial history and ideology) (De Lillis‐Forrest, Milano et al. 2007). A sealing found nearby contains the name of a šabra‐official, the main imperial civilian office (Weiss, deLillis et al. 2002). At Ashur, the temple of Ištar was certainly patronized by the Akkadian kings, who donated precious objects to it (Bär 2003). A life‐size stone statue, perhaps depicting the Akkadian king Maništušu, was found in Ashur, near a temple to the gods Anu and Adad (Harper, Klengel‐Brandt et al. 1995). A (possibly post‐Akkadian) fragmentary list from Ur mentions a governor of Ashur with the Akkadian name Ilaba‐andul, and an inscription from the Ištar temple in Ashur refers to an “overseer” (waklum) named Ititi, who may also have served as a governor of Mari, with the title of a šakkanakkum (Foster 2016: 63–4). At Mari, Naram‐Sim appointed governors to rule the city, and his daughters donated gifts to a temple, although this city and other places in the west seem to have been of less importance to the Akkadians (Sallaberger 2007). Beyond architectural and art historical evidence, changing settlement patterns in the Khabur basin may indicate that the Akkadian empire sought to streamline the administration of this region. Near Leilan several towns were abandoned and the number of village increased, perhaps due to an imperial policy that eliminated lower levels of administration and encouraged increased agricultural production (Ristvet and Weiss 2005).

  Yet Naram‐Sin did not rule all of Northern Mesopotamia directly. He campaigned in the mountains of Turkey, as far north as Pir Huseyn, but probably did not establish any lasting control in this area. Excavations over the last twenty years at the site of Urkeš, near the Syrian‐Turkish border, have revealed a palace that belonged to an independent king, perhaps a client of the Akkadian empire. About two hundred clay sealings, marked with a cylinder seal that once belonged to Tar’am‐Agade, daughter of Naram‐Sin and probably queen of Urkeš, were found in the palace. Clearly, the Akkadian kings, like their predecessors at Ebla, used diplomatic marriage to seal alliances. Tar’am‐Agade’s very name, which means “She loves Agade,” illustrates the strength of Akkadian ideology (Buccellati and Kelly‐Buccellati 2002). We know of other diplomatic marriages from texts, including the union of a princess of Marḫaši, a state in Iran, and Naram‐Sin’s son, Šarkališarri.

  For all of its ambitions, the Akkadian empire’s dominance of Mesopotamia was short‐lived. Sometime during Šarkališarri’s reign (2217–2193 BCE), the Akkadian state collapsed, no longer able to confront internal rebellion or external threats. Šarkališarri’s successors ruled a much less extensive state, perhaps only the area around Akkad, before losing that too. The period between the end of Šarkališarri’s reign and the rise of the Third Dynasty of Ur is one of the least understood epochs in the Ancient Near East. There is little historical and archaeological evidence from it; we do not even know whether it lasted 100 or perhaps as many as 160 years (Sallaberger 2007).

  Paleoclimatology research over the past twenty years has revealed that the collapse of the Akkadian empire occurred at the same time as a major climate event, when rainfall decreased, perhaps by as much as 30 percent (Weiss 2000; Weiss and Bradley 2001; Staubwasser and Weiss 2006). In Northern Mesopotamia, the drought caused much of the population to either move to areas where water was readily available, like riversides, or to change their agricultural practices. Many farmers probably became pastoralists, combining some plant cultivation with a focus on herding sheep and goats. In the area around Šeḫna, this led the number of settlements to decrease by about 75 percent, a precipitous decline (Ristvet and Weiss 2005). Many cities decreased in size, and Nagar’s Akkadian temples and palaces were abandoned and reoccupied by simple houses (Oates, Oates et al. 2001). Northern Mesopotamia was not entirely abandoned, as a few reduced‐size towns and villages remained in the better‐watered northern part of the plain and along the rivers, but the nature of settlement changed dramatically. With the Akkadian empire gone, their client state Urkeš moved to fill the population and political vacuum in the Khabur plains, establishing a “Kingdom of Urkeš and Nawar” probably centered in an area along the modern Turkish/Syrian border, between Urkeš and Nabula (perhaps ancient Nawar). This kingdom remains enigmatic; we know that its elites wrote in Hurrian, perhap
s a Caucasian language, rather than in Akkadian, and we have a few royal names, but little other historical evidence. Recent excavations at Urkeš have exposed the ancient religious and political core of the city, a collection of temples, and the royal palace. The palace was built around 2300 BCE, just when Sargon began campaigning in the north, and was abandoned around or just after 2100 BCE, perhaps enduring a century after the Akkadian empire’s collapse (Buccellati and Kelly‐Buccellati 2004). Nagar also had a ruler with a Hurrian name at this time, attesting to a Hurrian presence. At Mari, the descendants of the Akkadian rulers of the city formed a dynasty that retained the Akkadian title šakkanakku, “governor,” even though its members ruled independently for 350 years (Durand 1985). After the collapse of the Akkadian empire, Mari once again enjoyed a great deal of prosperity and political power, attested both archaeologically and historically.

  From 2112–2004 BCE, Southern Mesopotamian was again ruled by a unified empire, the Third Dynasty of Ur. Unlike the Akkadians, the kings of Ur were not interested in conquering Northern Mesopotamia, parts of which were probably uncultivable during this period. Rather they used gifts and diplomatic marriages to ensure friendly contacts with a range of independent kingdoms, including Nineveh, Mari, Ebla, Uršu, and Šimanum, among others. It is unclear whether an inscription from Ashur written in the name of “Zarriqum, governor (šakkanakkum) of Ashur” and dedicated to “the life of (the Ur III king) Amar‐Suen” indicates that the Ur III empire directly ruled Ashur as a province, or if the local ruler simply recognized the kings of Ur as his overlords as the other kingdoms of the north did (Michalowski 2009). Perhaps 200 years after their destruction by Sargon, Mari and Ebla reemerge as the most important cities in the north in the documents from the Ur III empire. Indeed, a daughter of the king of Mari named Taram‐Uram became a wife of Šulgi, the king of Ur. Members of Mari’s ruling family also filled other important roles in the Ur III state, including that of the temple administrator of the Šamaš temple of Larsa. Other diplomatic marriages include one between a princess of Nineveh and Šu‐Sin of Ur. Urkeš disappears from the records around 2041, as another northern city, Šimanum, which has not yet been located, becomes the dominant center in the region (Sallaberger 2007).

  Archaeological evidence from Mari and Urkeš corresponds nicely with the historical evidence. Evidence for Mari’s wealth during this period includes temple complexes as well as industrial installations and areas of domestic housing. Palaces from this period have been excavated at both Mari and Tell Bi’a (Tuttul), the cult city of the god Dagan, which was probably part of Mari’s kingdom. At Urkeš, part of a large, well‐made building, almost equivalent in size to some Mesopotamian palaces, indicates other contacts between the south and the north. One of the building’s rooms contained more than 250 clay objects bearing an impression of a seal belonging to Pussam, a wealthy merchant from an unknown city. Pussam’s name is Hurrian, like many of the names at Urkeš, but the contents of his “house” as well as its architectural style point to links with the area along the Diyala River, north of Baghdad in Southern Mesopotamia. His seal and a few other seals found here were probably made sometime around 2100 BCE, when Urkeš was still powerful. It is possible that the building was a trading depot, since it is too large to be a residence, and is well‐equipped with store‐rooms, indicating its economic function (Dohmann‐Pfälzner and Pfälzner 2001). This evidence for large‐scale trade between Northern and Southern Mesopotamia is tantalizing, particularly in light of the development of the Old Assyrian trading network, just a few decades later. Outside of Urkeš, little is known archaeologically. Although pottery dating from this period has been found elsewhere, it has usually been from poorly preserved contexts including small houses, industrial installations or pits, as at Brak, Chagar Bazar, and Arbid (Bielínski 2001: 317–18; McMahon and Quenet 2007). The nature of settlement seems different from earlier in the third millennium, perhaps because many residents had more mobile lifestyles. Texts from Southern Mesopotamia report a new pastoralist element in the North, the tribal Amorites. Later, when we have documentation from the north itself, these Amorites have seized control and become the leaders of revitalized cities. Their tribal structures provide one of the models for the regeneration of urban society around 1900 BCE (Ristvet 2008; Wossink 2009). The late third millennium foundations of this regeneration remain to be explicated.

  Conclusion

  During the third millennium BCE, Northern Mesopotamia witnessed a period of social experimentation, when political power shifted from city to city across the region, and social and economic strategies were in flux. The third millennium is bracketed by two poorly understood periods, probably corresponding to episodes of drought when settled agriculture became impracticable in much of this area. During the first period, local people turned to hunting and irrigation to supplement inadequate dry‐farming crop yields, during the second, a more mobile economy with a greater reliance on sheep and goat pastoralism emerged. Political institutions also shifted, from temples and communal storage buildings that emphasized egalitarianism, to strong, palace‐centered polities, to, at the very end of this period, mobile, perhaps tribal groups. The area was home to Hurrian and Akkadian speakers, and by the end of the millennium, Amorite speakers as well. Little is known from the heartland of Assyria, due to the inaccessibility of the layers beneath the extensive buildings from the second and first millennium BCE, but there are hints that Nineveh and Ashur were already important centers. Although Northern Mesopotamia in the third millennium was not yet “Assyria,” several elements were already in place that would contribute to later Assyrian political culture, including kingship, a strong economy based on both agriculture and stock raising, an administrative culture, and perhaps most importantly, a political system flexible enough to incorporate very disparate social groups.

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