A Companion to Assyria

by Eckart Frahm

  Inscriptions from Dur‐Šarrukin indicate that Sargon elevated his brother Sîn‐aḫu‐uṣur to the influential position of “Grand Vizier” and allowed him to reside in a palace next to his own. The king, it seems, relied increasingly on members of his immediate family, besides Sîn‐aḫu‐uṣur also his son (and crown prince) Sennacherib, at the expense of the traditional elites (May 2015).

  Between 716 and 713, Sargon’s military activities focused on territories in western Iran – from where Assyria received its war horses – and Anatolia. Assyria’s main opponent and strategic rival in this region was Urartu, which sought to wrest control over the Iranian buffer state of Mannaya from Assyrian hands. In 714, Sargon scored a major victory when he defeated the Urartian king Rusa I in the region of mount Wauš in the vicinity of Lake Urmia. Assyrian troops marched all around that lake and then back, wreaking havoc in the Urartian core area (but without establishing long‐term control) and plundering the temple of the Urartian state god Ḫaldi in Muṣaṣir. The campaign is described at great length and in highly elaborate language in a well‐preserved “letter” that Sargon sent to the god Assur after the successful completion of the campaign (Foster 2005: 790–813; Mayer 2012).

  While such literary letters are highly exceptional, the royal archives of Nineveh and Kalḫu have yielded some 1200 regular letters sent to Sargon from all over the empire by his provincial governors, military and civilian officials, and political agents. These letters demonstrate that Assyria’s power was not only based on her impressive military machine but also on a widespread network of informants, who would write to the king about the intentions of foreign rulers, movements of enemy troops, important events in Assyrian provinces, and other matters of political interest (Dubovský 2006a). Well‐kept roads with numerous postal stations facilitated the speedy delivery of such letters (see SAA 1: XIII–XIV). A letter written to Sargon by his son and crown prince Sennacherib can serve as an example of the messages outside informants sent to the king. The letter quotes a missive from Aššur‐reṣuwa, an intelligence agent reporting on Urartian affairs who was based in Kumme, a city not far from the Urartian border (SAA 1: no. 31, obv. 21 – rev. 3):

  Aššur‐reṣuwa has written to me (Sennacherib) thus: “The previous report I sent about the Urartians was that they had suffered a terrible defeat (against the Cimmerians). Now his country is quiet again, and each of his magnates has gone to his province. Kaqqadanu, his Field Marshal, has been taken prisoner; the Urartian king is in the province of Wazaun.”

  The letter also quotes a number of other reports on the situation in Urartu, written by additional informants. Having recourse to the opinions of a variety of sources allowed the Assyrian king and his advisors to engage in more realistic political decision‐making.

  Assyria’s geographical and cultural horizon widened significantly during the reign of Sargon. In the years between 716 and 713 alone, besides fighting against Urartu, Assyrian troops and their allies conducted campaigns against the Medes in the east, defeated a number of Arab tribes (some of which were resettled in Samaria), attacked Ionian pirates in the eastern Mediterranean, and had encounters in central Anatolia with king Mita of Mušku, whom the Greeks knew as Midas of Phrygia and credited with a legendary “golden touch.” Moreover, in the same years, It’amra, the ruler of Sheba in south Arabia, and Osorkon IV, the ruler of Tanis in Lower Egypt, brought presents to the Assyrian court. Osorkon, it seems, remained on Sargon’s side when a certain Yamani led a popular uprising against Assyrian rule in Ashdod on the Mediterranean in 711. As mentioned in Isaiah 20:1, the Assyrian Field Marshal managed to quell the rebellion, Ashdod became an Assyrian province, and, in 707, Yamani was extradited to Assyria by Shebitku, a Nubian ruler of the 25th Egyptian dynasty who had brought Lower Egypt under control a little earlier (Kahn 2001).

  During the last years of his reign, Sargon shifted his attention back to Babylonia. The coalition with Elam that had kept the Chaldaean ruler Marduk‐aplu‐iddina on the Babylonian throne for twelve years had slowly disintegrated, and Sargon faced little resistance when he led his troops southwards in 710 (SAA 15: XIV–XXII). Marduk‐aplu‐iddina fled, and the citizens of Babylon opened their gates for Sargon to welcome him, ostensibly with great enthusiasm. Sargon’s troops pursued Marduk‐aplu‐iddina to the city of Dur‐Yakin, capital of his ancestral homeland Bit‐Yakin, and after prolonged negotiations reached an agreement with the Yakinites that allowed the Assyrians to destroy the walls of Dur‐Yakin, while Marduk‐aplu‐iddina and his family and supporters were granted free passage to go into exile to Elam.

  From 710 to 707, Sargon spent most of his time in the city of Babylon. He participated in the annual Akitu festival and received delegations from such far away places as Dilmun (modern Bahrain) and Yadnana (Cyprus). The king’s enthusiasm for everything Babylonian can be gauged from the prominent references found in his later inscriptions to his new Babylonian titles and various Babylonian deities (Fuchs 1994: 373–6). Not all Assyrians seem to have approved of Sargon’s pro‐Babylonian leanings. An Assyrian text presumably written under Esarhaddon explicitly criticizes them (see the remarks on Esarhaddon further below in this section), and Sennacherib, Sargon’s son and heir, who took charge of political affairs in Assyria during Sargon’s absence, appears to have found them questionable as well.

  In 707, Sargon returned to Assyria. One year later, at the age of roughly sixty‐five, he was able to move the royal court to Dur‐Šarrukin, which he inaugurated, according to an eponym chronicle, in the second month of 706. But the magnificent new capital was not destined to serve as royal residence for long. In 705, Sargon started off on another and, as it turned out, final campaign. The Assyrians had sought in vain for quite some time to bring the belligerent people of Tabal in central Anatolia under their control (Melville 2010), and Sargon was now eager to finally subdue this region. But his plans were thwarted and the campaign ended in disaster. Somewhere in Anatolia, the troops of a certain Gurdi (Gordias) of Kulumma seized the Assyrian camp and killed Sargon. The Assyrians who survived the rout proved unable to recover their king’s body (Frahm 1999a: 74–6).

  More than a military catastrophe, the death of their powerful ruler was a major psychological blow for the Assyrians. What probably raised the greatest concern was that Sargon’s body had not been buried – and was therefore likely, in the view of many, to henceforth haunt the living. When news of the end of the king reached the Assyrian heartland, the influential scribe and royal advisor Nabû‐zuqup‐kenu – who may have been the author of several royal inscriptions (Frahm 2003: 157–9) – copied the twelfth and final tablet of the epic of Gilgamesh, which ends with a dialogue between Enkidu and Gilgamesh about the circumstances of the dead in their afterlives. The text’s last lines mention a man killed in battle, one whose corpse was left in the open countryside, and one whose ghost had no provider and who therefore had to eat crumbs of bread thrown in the street (George 2003: 734–5, lines 148–53). It seems obvious that Nabû‐zuqup‐kenu had Sargon in mind when he studied these scenarios, and that he must have been deeply distressed. The Biblical prophet Isaiah, in contrast, was prompted by the events to compose a mocking dirge to ridicule Sargon’s hubris – provided the foreign ruler chided in Isaiah 14 is indeed modeled on that king (Frahm 1999a: 76–82, 86).

  Imperial Heydays: From Sennacherib to Assurbanipal (704–631)

  After Sargon’s son Sennacherib (Assyrian: Sîn‐aḫḫe‐eriba) had ascended the Assyrian throne on the 12th of Abu (V) 705, he did everything he could to distance himself from his father. Fearing contamination, he moved the royal residence from Dur‐Šarrukin to Nineveh on the Tigris and, with one possible exception (Frahm 1997: 194–5), never mentioned Sargon’s name in his inscriptions. One of the first building projects Sennacherib commissioned was the restoration of the temple of the netherworld god Nergal in Tarbiṣu (RINAP 3/2: 292–303; Frahm 2003: 129–51) – undoubtedly an attempt to pacify a deity that, due to its close links with war and violen
t death, was considered deeply involved with Sargon’s fate.

  Like that of his predecessor, the reign of Sennacherib (r. 704–681) is well documented, even though we lack the large number of political letters that have survived from the reign of Sargon.16 For the first time, an important political event, Sennacherib’s 701 campaign against the Levant and Judah, is not only described at considerable length in Assyrian royal inscriptions, but also in the Hebrew Bible and classical sources (Richardson 2014), indicating that by now Assyria had been truly transformed into a budding “world empire.”

  Beside unsettling the Assyrian elites, Sargon’s violent death in 705 had encouraged attempts among some of the recently conquered polities on the margins of the empire to reestablish their independence. In Babylon, Assyria’s old arch‐enemy Marduk‐aplu‐iddina, backed by his Elamite allies, regained the throne, while in the Levant, several Assyrian provinces and vassal states ceased to pay taxes and tribute. It took Sennacherib several years to respond to these insurrections. His first military enterprise was aimed at taking revenge for his father’s death. In 704, he sent an army led by high officials to Anatolia to attack Gurdi of Kulumma, but apparently without any measurable results, since the episode is recorded only in an Assyrian eponym chronicle and not in Sennacherib’s inscriptions (Frahm 1999a: 83–4). The king’s subsequent assault on Babylonia, launched in all likelihood towards the end of 704, was more successful. After nearly two years of warfare, Sennacherib regained control over the region, defeating a coalition of Babylonians, Elamites, Aramaeans, Chaldaeans, and Arabs that had resisted the Assyrian advance with great stubbornness (Fuchs/Parpola, SAA 15: XXXII–XXXIII). Marduk‐aplu‐iddina fled yet again and was replaced on the Babylonian throne with Bel‐ibni, a scion of an old family from Babylon who had been raised at the Assyrian court (Dietrich 1998). The Assyrians deported huge numbers of people from southern Mesopotamia and seized large amounts of cattle.

  In 701, Sennacherib, reacting to the uprisings that had occurred in the Levant early in his reign, led his troops westwards to reconsolidate Assyrian control in this region as well (Bagg 2011: 244–52). Lulî, the anti‐Assyrian king of Sidon, fled to Cyprus and was replaced by the more amenable Tuba’lu. Numerous local rulers, including those of Byblos, Ashdod, Moab, and Edom, brought Sennacherib the tribute they had withheld during the previous four years. The people of Ekron, who had deposed their pro‐Assyrian king Padî and delivered him to Hezekiah of Judah, asked for, and received, help from the Nubian rulers of Egypt. But an Assyrian army defeated the Egyptian and Nubian troops in a pitched battle at Eltheke, putting an end to Egyptian ambitions to shape events in the Levant. Finally, the Assyrian army attacked Judah, destroyed numerous of her cities, and deported significant portions of her population. The capital Jerusalem was spared, but only after the Judean ruler Hezekiah agreed to release Padî of Ekron, pay a heavy tribute to Sennacherib, and become his vassal.

  Because it is also described in some detail in the Bible (2 Kings 18:13–19:36; Isaiah 36:1–37:37; 2 Chronicles 32:1–23) and by Herodotus (2.141), Sennacherib’s campaign to Judah was remembered even after Mesopotamian civilization came to an end, and modern scholarship has likewise shown great interest in it (see Gallagher 1999; Grabbe 2003; Kalimi and Richardson 2014). A key question has been how to reconcile Sennacherib’s accounts of the campaign – which present it as a great success – and the rather different Biblical ones, with their insistence that Sennacherib suffered a debilitating defeat in Jerusalem. All in all, there is now a wide consensus that the Biblical authors, driven by theological concerns, actually paint a rather distorted picture of the outcome of the campaign, despite the fact that they report several details accurately.

  Another debate about the campaign was initiated several years ago by Stephanie Dalley, who argued that Sennacherib abstained from conquering and destroying Jerusalem because his father Sargon was married to a woman whom Dalley identified as a Judean princess: a certain Atalia, whose mortal remains were uncovered, together with those of Tiglath‐pileser’s wife Yabâ and an impressive golden treasure, in a tomb in Nimrud (see, most recently, Dalley 2008).17 Dalley’s views have not been universally accepted. Atalia’s actual background remains uncertain, and there is no reason to assume that Sennacherib treated Judah with particular leniency (see Frahm 2014: 206–8). But there are indications that the king regarded his campaign to Judah as particularly important. In Sennacherib’s annals edition from 700, which is known from more exemplars than any other version of his res gestae, the campaign is described at considerable length and presented as the final climax of the section on the king’s military achievements.

  While Sennacherib campaigned in the west, the situation in Babylonia deteriorated again. The notorious Marduk‐aplu‐iddina, together with another Chaldaean, Mušezib‐Marduk of Bit‐Dakkuri, plotted against Bel‐ibni, who, as an Assyrian puppet‐king, lacked the authority his position required. In 700, Sennacherib invaded Babylonia, forced the two Chaldaean troublemakers into exile in Elam, and replaced Bel‐ibni on the Babylonian throne with his own eldest son, Aššur‐nadin‐šumi.

  For a while, Sennacherib had thus restored peace in the empire, at least by and large. In 697, he accompanied his army to mount Nipur (modern Judi Dagh in southeastern Anatolia) and conquered the city of Ukku in the buffer region between Assyria and Urartu. In 696 and 695, Assyrian troops led by high military officials conducted campaigns in the north and northwest, quelling, among other things, a rebellion in Cilicia that was supported by Anchiale and Tarsus and is mentioned not only in Assyrian but also in Greek sources (Lanfranchi 2000: 22–31). But such fairly minor threats did not prevent Sennacherib from focusing his attention on non‐military matters, particularly his building program in Nineveh, in the years between 699 and 695 (Reade, RlA 9: 388–433; Matthiae 1999).

  Located close to an important ford across the Tigris and the departure point of a vital traffic route to the west, Nineveh was an ideal capital for the Neo‐Assyrian imperial state. Sennacherib’s most ambitious project in the city was the construction of a gigantic new residence, the so‐called Southwest Palace, whose various wings covered a surface of some 40,000 square meters, with the throne room alone measuring 13 × 56 meters (Russell 1991). In addition, Sennacherib built a wall around Nineveh that was roughly 12 kilometers long and 25 meters high and had eighteen massive gates. It has been claimed that the park Sennacherib created in the vicinity of his palace at Nineveh was the model for the Greek story of the “Hanging Gardens of Babylon” (see, most recently, Dalley 2013), but the matter is contested (Bichler and Rollinger 2004).

  After several years mostly spent at home, Sennacherib felt it was time for him to once again advance his status as a military leader. In 694, he sailed along the coast of the Persian Gulf with a fleet of boats built by Phoenician and Greek shipwrights to attack Elamite territories from the sea. Despite Sennacherib’s protestations to the contrary, the ambitious project turned out a major strategic blunder, initiating a catastrophic escalation in Assyria’s relations with Elam and Babylonia. The disaster began with the Elamite king Ḫallušu‐Inšušinak cutting off the Assyrian troops in the south by marching into Babylonia. When the people of Babylon realized what had happened, they seized Sennacherib’s son Aššur‐nadin‐šumi, who served as their king, and extradited him to Elam. Aššur‐nadin‐šumi was probably killed in Elam, and a certain Nergal‐ušezib, a member of an influential Babylonian family, ascended the Babylonian throne. Sennacherib managed to defeat and capture him within a few months in a pitched battle in the vicinity of Nippur, but proved unable to restore Assyrian control over Babylon, where the Chaldaean troublemaker Mušezib‐Marduk (Frahm 1997: 209–10) became king late in 693. Suspecting that Sennacherib was eager to inflict a severe punishment on Babylon, he began immediately to gather a large coalition of allies.

  In 691, Sennacherib fought a massive battle with Mušezib‐Marduk and his Chaldaean, Aramaean, Elamite, and Persian supporters not far from the modern
city of Samarra on the Tigris. The battle, described in Sennacherib’s inscription with great rhetorical force, resulted in a draw, but one that held Sennacherib back only temporarily. In 690, he defeated and captured the influential Arab queen Te’elḫunu in northern Arabia, thereby eliminating the threat of further attacks from the southwest. One year later, in the ninth month of 689, he finally conquered Babylon. The Assyrian troops destroyed large parts of the city, captured Mušezib‐Marduk, and smashed or took away numerous divine statues, an act with far‐reaching theological consequences (Richardson 2012).

  In the following years, Assyrians employed different strategies to cope with Sennacherib’s brutal assault on Babylon – a city that many of them considered sacred and from where much of Assyria’s literature and scholarship derived. Some Assyrian theologians justified the attack by ridiculing Babylonian religion. They produced a polemical cultic commentary (SAA 3: nos. 34 and 35) that presents the Babylonian god Marduk as a criminal and claims, of course falsely, that the Babylonian Akitu festival commemorated Marduk’s imprisonment, and not his triumph over the forces of chaos. But since Babylonian religion, with its portrayal of Marduk as the all‐powerful king of the gods, offered such an excellent theological blueprint for the autocratic imperial state, Sennacherib decided to focus on a different strategy: an Assyrianizing adaptation of Babylon’s religious ideology and institutions. Assyrian scholars created a revised version of the Babylonian Epic of Creation (Enūma eliš), which celebrated Assur’s, and no longer Marduk’s, rise to supreme power; and Assyrian architects remodeled the sacred infrastructure of their own holy city, Ashur, after that of Babylon (Machinist 1984–85; Frahm 1997: 282–8; Vera Chamaza 2002: 71–167).