A Companion to Assyria

by Eckart Frahm

  During the last years of Sennacherib’s reign, people in most parts of the empire lived under the pax assyriaca (which for the Babylonians was of course more like a peace of the graveyard). The situation at the royal court in Nineveh, however, was far from peaceful. For many years, Sennacherib had groomed his son Urdu‐Mullissi to become his successor. But at some point around 683, he changed his mind and nominated another son, Esarhaddon (Assyrian: Aššur‐aḫu‐iddina), as his crown prince (Šašková 2010). The decision might have been influenced by Esarhaddon’s mother Naqia, who had become increasingly powerful during this period. Unsurprisingly, Urdu‐Mullissi and his supporters resented the new arrangement and exercised pressure on the king to reverse it. They managed to force Esarhaddon into exile somewhere in the west, but failed to convince Sennacherib to reinstate Urdu‐Mullissi. So they orchestrated a coup and, late in 681, killed the king in a temple in Nineveh (Parpola 1980). Their actions were to no avail, however. Encouraged by a host of auspicious signs, Esarhaddon returned to the Assyrian capital in mid‐winter with his own army and put the regicides to flight. Two months after Sennacherib’s murder, Esarhaddon ascended the Assyrian throne.

  Esarhaddon ruled from 680 to 669. His reign is documented by numerous royal inscriptions, oracle queries, letters, and other texts.18

  Esarhaddon considered the violent deaths of his grandfather Sargon and his father Sennacherib as divine punishment for two opposite offenses: the first had worshipped the Babylonian gods excessively, while the second had neglected and humiliated them. This, at least, seems to be the message of a text probably composed during the reign of Esarhaddon in which Sennacherib seems to be speaking from beyond the grave (Tadmor, Landsberger, and Parpola 1989; Frahm 1999a: 84–6; SAA 3: no. 33). Eager to avoid the sins of his fathers, Esarhaddon strived, from early on, to establish a new “balance of power” between Assur and Marduk. He began to rebuild Babylon (Porter 1993; Streck 2002), but at the same time made sure that the cult of Assur in the city of Ashur was not neglected (Novotny 2014). Indirect evidence suggests that, in an attempt to exorcise the past, Esarhaddon set a stone slab inscribed with a text about the “sins” of his forefathers in the floor of the cella of the Assur temple and used it to prostrate himself before the deity (Frahm 1999a: 85–6).

  Even though apparently of a sickly disposition, as indicated by the correspondence with his physicians (Parpola 1983: 231–6), Esarhaddon undertook a number of successful military campaigns, some in far‐away regions. He defeated insurgents in Cilicia and drove the Cimmerians (who would a little later destroy the Phrygian state) westwards (679), conquered the Phoenician city of Sidon, renaming it Kar‐Aššur‐aḫu‐iddina (“Emporium of Esarhaddon”) (677), and took the cities of Kundu and Sissû in the region northeast of the Cilician plain (676). Following battles with the Medes in the Zagros, Esarhaddon went with his troops further eastwards than any preceding king, reaching the salt‐deserts of the Dasht‐e‐Kavir in the middle of the Iranian plateau. The king’s armies also invaded eastern Arabia, conquering Diḫranu, modern Dhahran, and a number of other cities. But the greatest triumph Esarhaddon achieved was his conquest of Egypt (see Onasch 1994: 16–59), which was probably motivated by renewed attempts by Egypt’s Nubian rulers to interfere in the Levant. In 674, the Assyrian king had made a first attempt to invade the land on the Nile, but a short entry in the Babylonian Chronicle indicates that his efforts had remained futile. A second campaign three years later, however, proved successful. Rather than following the via maris along the Mediterranean, Esarhaddon, logistically supported by Arab tribes, crossed central Sinai on a difficult route and thus took the Egyptian defenders by surprise (Radner 2008). After three major battles with the troops of the Nubian ruler Taharqa, who eventually fled to Upper Egypt, Esarhaddon conquered the Egyptian capital Memphis. He left most of the local rulers of Lower Egypt in place, but deployed representatives of his own to oversee their activities. In the hope that this arrangement would suffice to keep Egypt under control, Esarhaddon eventually returned to Assyria, bringing with him a large booty and numerous Egyptian craftsmen and religious experts uprooted from their country.

  With the conquest of Egypt, Esarhaddon had not only defeated a land of great wealth and cultural prestige, the Assyrian empire had also reached the largest geographic extent of its history until then. All this, one would expect, should have made Esarhaddon’s initially precarious position as king unassailable among the Assyrian elite. The reality, however, was quite different. During the period of the Egyptian conquest, several high‐profile insurgencies against the king occurred, and not just somewhere in the periphery, but in three of Assyria’s most important urban centers. The letter SAA 10: no. 179 informs us that in Nineveh, the Assyrian Chief Eunuch had forced a high‐profile Babylonian, who was held as a hostage, to drink large quantities of wine and then establish through oil divination that the eunuch would replace Esarhaddon as king. In Ḫarran, according to another letter (SAA 16: no. 59), a prophetess had announced that the god Nusku would “destroy the name and seed of Sennacherib (i.e., Esarhaddon).” And in Ashur, as reported by a third letter (Frahm 2010 and Figure 8.3), the overseer of the city, after dreaming of a child rising from a tomb and handing him a staff, apparently a symbol of power, had instigated a plot against Esarhaddon as well.

  Figure 8.3 Letter to the Assyrian king Esarhaddon reporting a conspiracy in the city of Ashur (YBC 11382).

  Source: Frahm 2010: 134. Reproduced with permission of Yale Babylonian Collection.

  Esarhaddon eventually uncovered all these attempted coups and in 670 put numerous high‐ranking officials involved in them to death. He owed his political and physical survival to a highly developed domestic intelligence apparatus comprised of spies, finks, and professional agents provocateurs who wrote numerous letters to him (most of them published in SAA 16) in which they denounced a host of actual and imaginary political enemies. These letters represent the domestic counterpart to the messages from the reign of Sargon that deal with political developments in the empire’s periphery or in foreign countries (see above, “Genesis of an Empire”). The domestic spies, much like informers anywhere, were apparently not much beloved. One of them writes: “because of what I hear and see and betray to the king my lord, many people hate me and are plotting to kill me” (Frahm 2010: 94). Incidentally, this complaint also demonstrates to what extent the Assyrian spies resembled the informers of the Achaemenid rulers from a few centuries later whom Greek authors such as Herodotus and Plutarch called the “eyes and ears of the king.”

  In order to stifle the opposition, Esarhaddon took other measures as well. When, early in 672, he formally nominated his son Assurbanipal (Assyrian: Aššur‐bani‐apli) as his future successor on the Assyrian throne, and another son, Šamaš‐šumu‐ukin, as future king of Babylon, he forced everyone in the empire, from members of the royal house to vassals in far away countries, to swear a solemn oath to respect the succession arrangement and report on anyone who failed to do so, including members of the oath taker’s own family (SAA 2: no. 6, lines 115–16). Copies of these oaths, which may have influenced the covenant theology of the Biblical book of Deuteronomy (see Chapter 29), were found in Kalḫu, Ashur, and Tell Tayinat on the Orontes (SAA 2: no. 6; KAL 3: 135–6; Lauinger 2012).

  The measures taken by the king to ensure a smooth transition of power after his passing were not entirely in vain. In 669, after Esarhaddon had died from an illness while on another campaign to Egypt, Assurbanipal did in fact ascend the Assyrian throne. One year later, Šamaš‐šumu‐ukin became king of Babylon, assuming a position conceived as largely ceremonial, with Assurbanipal holding the actual reins of power. Even though we know nothing about specific attempts to thwart this arrangement, there was apparently some dissatisfaction with it – otherwise, there would not have been a need for Esarhaddon’s mother Naqia, who retained much of her considerable potestas indirecta during the transition period, to force members of the royal family and the nation at large to swear a
nother oath of allegiance to Assurbanipal (SAA 2: no. 8).

  The reign of Assurbanipal (668–631), the last “great” king of Assyria, is abundantly documented, both by the king’s own inscriptions, more numerous and diverse than any other Mesopotamian ruler’s, and by considerable numbers of state letters and other texts.19 Under Assurbanipal, the Assyrian military machine spread its terror throughout Western Asia one more time. In 667 and 664, in each case in the wake of anti‐Assyrian rebellions, Assyrian troops again invaded Egypt, defeated the last rulers of the 25th dynasty, Taharqa and Tantamani, and eventually conquered the Upper Egyptian capital of Thebes, from where huge amounts of booty – including two large obelisks made of electron – were sent to Assyria (Onasch 1994: 61–158).

  Another target of Assyrian military action was Elam (Waters 2000: 42–80). Under Esarhaddon, relations with this country had been fairly amicable, to the extent that the king and his Elamite counterpart apparently signed a peace treaty at some point. When Assurbanipal ascended the throne, this treaty remained initially in place, and Assurbanipal claims that, early in his reign, he sent grain to Elam when there was a famine. But in 664, a surprise attack on Babylonia by the Elamite king Urtak ushered in a period of renewed hostility.20 In 653, after a ten year long stalemate, Assyrian troops defeated the Elamite king Teumman in a battle along the Ulay river in Khuzestan. The head of the enemy ruler, whom Assurbanipal seems to have hated more than any other of his opponents, was brought to Nineveh and displayed to the public. On the famous bas‐relief from the North Palace that shows Assurbanipal banqueting with his queen, it hangs from a nearby tree, recognizable by its characteristic receding hairline (Chapter 24, Figure 24.9). Elam, however, far from being vanquished for good, continued to provoke Assyria and act against her interests. In 652, when Šamaš‐šumu‐ukin initiated a rebellion against his brother Assurbanipal to gain his independence, several Elamite kings supported him.

  The war between Assurbanipal and Šamaš‐šumu‐ukin went on for four years (see Frame 1992: 131–90). An attempt by their sister Šerua‐eṭirat to restore peace between them remained futile. Assurbanipal finally prevailed. In 648, after a long siege that caused a terrible famine, his troops conquered Babylon and devastated the city. Šamaš‐šumu‐ukin died in the flames of his burning palace, and Assurbanipal replaced him with a puppet ruler by the name of Kandalanu. In 647, Assyrian troops also conquered and ravaged the Elamite capital Susa, desecrating sanctuaries and graves and returning a statue of the goddess Nanaya allegedly stolen centuries earlier by the Elamites to her home city Uruk.

  Assurbanipal participated only rarely in person in the military campaigns undertaken by his armies, but his inscriptions suggest that, once his enemies had been captured and brought to Nineveh, he devised with great enthusiasm elaborate choreographies of terror to humiliate and torture them (see, e.g., Borger 1996: 227–8). With even greater passion than such somewhat sadist pursuits, the king followed yet another interest: the study of Mesopotamia’s ancient literary culture. Already as a youth, according to one of his inscriptions, Assurbanipal had read difficult Sumerian and Akkadian texts, including complicated extispicy commentaries (Frame and George 2005: 279–80). When he became king, his love of cuneiform lore did not decrease. Using the massive resources now at his disposal, Assurbanipal created in Nineveh what in some respects can be described as the first “universal” library in the history of mankind. Besides texts from Assyrian cities, it included hundreds of clay tablets and wooden writing boards from Babylonia, which were initially sent to Assurbanipal as gifts or in exchange for money, and subsequently brought to Nineveh by Assyrian agents as war reparations (see Fincke 2003/04 and Chapter 21 of the present volume). Some 500 years later, in the second century BCE, nostalgic Babylonian scholars would still copy letters pertaining to the library that had allegedly once been exchanged between their predecessors and the learned Assyrian king (Frame and George 2005; Frahm 2005a).

  In his inscriptions, Assurbanipal presents Assyria as the uncontested hegemon of Western Asia, claiming that even nature was affected by the imposing aura of his kingship, with barley stalks growing taller and cattle producing more offspring than ever before (Borger 1996: 205). In reality, however, the gigantic Assyrian ship of state began, first slowly and then more rapidly, to show cracks during the king’s long reign. Shortly after 656, Psammetichus I of Sais, a former Assyrian ally who had spent some time in Nineveh as a hostage, expelled the Assyrians from Egypt, founding the 26th Egyptian dynasty. Another unfaithful one‐time vassal, the Lydian ruler Guggu – who had a remarkable “afterlife” as Gyges among the Greeks and as Gog in the Bible – supported Psammetichus’s revolt. The numerous campaigns against Arab tribes on the Arabian peninsula and in the southern Levant wasted valuable resources while failing to consolidate Assyrian control over these regions (see Gerardi 1992 and Chapter 16 in the present volume). Last but not least, Assurbanipal’s decision to ravage yet again the ancient city of Babylon fanned the flames of hate there and intensified the anti‐Assyrian resentment many Babylonians felt.

  From the time after 639, only two Assurbanipal inscriptions have survived (Novotny 2003: 215). This paucity of royal res gestae from Assurbanipal’s later years – which contrasts sharply with an overabundance of such records especially from the 640s – may in part result from the chances of discovery, but probably also reflects to some extent the beginnings of a serious political crisis. Unfortunately, no Assyrian eponym lists are extant beyond 649 (a Babylonian chronicle covering Assyrian history breaks off in 667), and so it remains unclear what really happened towards the end of the king’s time in power. But it is noteworthy that several documents from Assurbanipal’s reign record large land grants and tax exemptions for eunuchs, who apparently became more powerful than ever before during this period (Deller 1999: 306–7). Moreover, in an unprecedented move, the king nominated his chief singer, a certain Bulluṭu, as eponym at some point late in his reign. All this suggests a growing disconnect between Assurbanipal and members of the traditional Assyrian elites and it brings to mind some of the legendary stories about Sardanapallus, the decadent last king of Assyria of Greek tradition, whose name and character were modeled on Assurbanipal (Reade 1998: 263).

  Assyria’s Downfall (631–609)

  When Assurbanipal died, probably in 631,21 Assyria faced some serious problems. But those who witnessed the king’s passing had little reason to suspect that the Assyrian empire would last for no longer than two more decades. After all, Elam and Urartu, Assyria’s old enemies, were severely weakened at this point, and Babylonia was calm. Assyria’s sudden collapse came unexpectedly and was a dramatic spectacle that left a deep impression on the neighboring nations. Biblical and classical authors reflected extensively on it (Machinist 1997), providing different explanations. The former suggested that god had decided to destroy Assyria in order to punish Assyrian hubris, while the latter blamed the personal shortcomings of the last Assyrian king for the empire’s demise.

  Modern scholarship has focused more on structural factors such as “imperial overstretch,” but without reaching a consensus either on what really brought about Assyria’s collapse (Liverani 2001). In fact, even the apparently simple task of reconstructing the main events of the empire’s deadly struggle for survival has proven difficult. The Biblical and classical sources cannot be considered reliable, Assyrian royal inscriptions are, unsurprisingly, rare and largely silent on the political and military history of the last two decades of the empire, and the inscriptions of the victorious Babylonian king Nabopolassar, even though more numerous (see Da Riva 2013), have likewise little to say on the momentous historical events of this age, focusing instead, in accordance with Babylonian tradition, on construction work and religious matters. The most important sources for the reconstruction of the history of the last decades of the Assyrian empire are therefore, on one hand, the Babylonian chronicles that cover the first years of Nabopolassar and the years 616–09 (Glassner 2004: 214–25) and, on the o
ther, the archival documents from Assyrian and especially Babylonian cities whose date formulas help establish the changing fortunes of the warring parties (Na’aman 1991; Oelsner 1999). Based primarily on these sources, various attempts have been made in the past decades to reconstruct the events that led to Assyria’s fall (e.g., Zawadzki 1988; Oates 1991; Beaulieu 1997a). The following sketch is mainly based on Fuchs 2014.

  Assurbanipal’s successor to the Assyrian throne was his son Aššur‐etel‐ilani (630–627), who was probably a minor when he became king (for references to him and some important bibliography, see PNA 1/I: 183–4 (J. Brinkman)). According to the preamble of a royal grant from Nineveh (SAA 12: no. 35), he had been installed, against considerable opposition, by the Chief Eunuch Sîn‐šumu‐lišir, who in all likelihood held the actual reins of power.

  That some high official governed the state on behalf of the king was not an unprecedented situation in Assyria. But in 627, when Aššur‐etel‐ilani, under unclear circumstances, disappeared from the scene, a dramatic new development took place – Sîn‐šumu‐lišir ascended the throne himself, effectively ending more than a thousand years of uninterrupted rule by members of the Adasi dynasty.22 This event must have exacerbated the looming crisis of legitimacy the Assyrian state experienced.

  The problems did not go away when Sîn‐šumu‐lišir, after a few months in office, disappeared as well, to be succeeded by another son of Assurbanipal by the name of Sîn‐šarru‐iškun (references to him are collected in PNA 3/I: 1143–5 (J. Novotny); for a historical sketch, see RlA 12: 522–4 (H. Schaudig)). Things became more critical, in fact, due to the situation in Babylonia, where the death of the pro‐Assyrian Babylonian puppet king Kandalanu, likewise in 627, bolstered Babylonian hopes to shake off the Assyrian yoke. A certain Nabû‐aplu‐uṣur, better known as Nabopolassar, took the lead of those who sought to fight for independence. His background has long been unclear – in his inscriptions, Nabopolassar calls himself a “son of a nobody.” Recently, Michael Jursa (2007), based on a new analysis of the letter ABL 469, suggested that Nabopolassar was a scion of a family from Uruk who had held a number of high positions in that city on behalf of the Assyrians in the seventh century BCE. Nabopolassar himself, according to Jursa, might have served as governor of Uruk at some point. Even though there is currently no final proof for this scenario, it is all but obvious that Nabopolassar had indeed a close relationship with Uruk.