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Further Reading
There are very few sources for the earlier post‐imperial period in Assyria. The available evidence was collected in Kuhrt 1995 and Curtis 2005. For the Neo‐Babylonian period see, in general, Jursa 2004 and Baker 2012. As a synthesis on the Achaemenid empire Briant 2002 is unsurpassed. Curtis and Tallis 2005 document Achaemenid material culture. Although challenged by Sherwin‐White and Kuhrt 1993, historians still tend to look at the Seleucid empire with a notable Western bias, but note the important new book by Kosmin 2014. There is no specific review of the Seleucid period in the region. The traditionally rather negative assessment of the Arsacid empire has been challenged in recent years, see Hauser 2012b (with references). The history of Hatra is summarized by Hauser 1998; for newer research see Dirven 2013. Summaries of recent fieldwork by more than thirty international teams in Iraqi Kurdistan were presented at the conference “Archaeological Research in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and the Adjacent Areas,” Athens, November 2013, see Kopanias and MacGinnis 2016
Notes
1 This crossing has always been connected with Cyrus’s famous conquest of Lydia. A new collation shows that the name of the country he is aiming at starts with “U,” not “Lu,” and probably points to battles with Urartu (Heller 2010: 199–206).
2 See the comparative charts in Klinkott 2005: 71–3. Herodotus (7.64) reports that the Assyrians were called Syrians by the Greeks, while he himself uses the name Assyria for Assyrians and Babylonians together. The Babylonian version of the Susa charter likewise replaces “Assyrians” with “people from ‘ebir nāri,’” the area beyond the river Euphrates, i.e. Syria and even Phoenicia. Assyria is mentioned among the provinces that revolted against Darius I in 521 BCE (DB §21), but played apparently no major role in these events, although one of the defeated Median insurgents was later impaled at Arbela (DB §33).
3 Burials within the royal palace at Ashur have been repeatedly considered evidence for a post‐Assyrian re‐use of the ruined building (e.g. Pedde 2008: 51). Recently it has been argued that these burials represent members of the royal household like those entombed beneath the Northwest Palace at Kalḫu/Nimrud (Hauser 2012a: 335–45).
4 This did not hinder the population of the region to keep the memory alive and positively connect with the Assyrian empire in local histories of the Sasanian period, see e.g. Payne 2012.
PART II
The Fringes of Empire: Assyria and its Neighbors
CHAPTER 11
Assyria and the North: Anatolia
Andreas Fuchs
The mountain ranges of the Taurus and the northern Zagros functioned as a barrier, permeable to trade, ideas, and sporadic military forays, but a major obstacle to any long‐term efforts to establish permanent political control in the regions beyond. In fact, the mountain chains running west to east created two separate political theaters, whose actors were most of the time occupied with problems on their own side. As long as Assyria existed, the only ancient Near Eastern power that managed to establish itself firmly north and south of the Taurus was the Hittite empire, which was in control both of central Anatolia and Syria from the late 14th to the early 12th century. None of the states centered in Mesopotamia was able to exercise an equally lasting influence over the people of Anatolia.
The Eastern Taurus Mountains
For most parts of Assyria’s history even the mountain areas closest to the Ashur–Nineveh–Arba’il triangle were under indirect control at best. For many a young Assyrian king for the first time in sole command of his army, campaigning against the tiresome but harmless nearby hillbillies was a welcome opportunity to gain military experience without taking risk.
In the late 13th century, Tukulti‐Ninurta I tried to bring the entire mountain fringes of northern Mesopotamia under Assyrian control, but whatever he achieved was lost again in the early 12th century, when the area was troubled and in part overrun by invading people like the Mušku and the Papḫu (Fuchs 2000: 89f.). By contrast, in the crisis years of the 11th century the northern mountains seem to have been quiet enough to become a refuge for Assyrians, who tried to escape Aramaean raids ravaging the lowlands.
For most of their history, the Assyrians were content to control their mountainous neighborhood indirectly, if at all. Only very late, in the second half of the eighth century, as a countermove to the Urartian expansion from the north, did Tiglath‐pileser III establish Assyrian fortresses and administrative centers in these areas. This permanent presence of the two great powers left the existing local chiefdoms and kingdoms in a precarious situation. More than ever they had to resort to dangerous political maneuvers to survive.
In the east, Assyrians and Urartians fought for the control of Muṣaṣir (near modern Muǧesir?), a most important cult center of the god Ḫaldi, which was pillaged by Sargon II in 714. North of modern Zakho, Ukku and Kumme were age‐old rivals. The Assyrians favored the cult center of Kumme, the venerated seat of the storm god Teššub, so Ukku looked for help in Urartu. Further west, the Hurrian kings of Šubria tried to preserve their independence by remaining strictly neutral, which also meant that they refused to extradite refugees to either side. In the long run, however, such a safe haven for criminals and for victims of persecution was intolerable to both superpowers. When Esarhaddon conquered the kingdom in 673, the Urartians grudgingly accepted the fait accompli (Radner 2012).
Eastern Anatolia and Urartu
For most of Assyrian history, politically as well as economically, eastern Anatolia − defined here as the lands between the Euphrates and the eastern border of modern Turkey – was beyond Assyria’s political horizon. Those strange lands behind the Taurus could occasionally be reached by military expeditions, and in 1112 BCE Tiglath‐pileser I passed through the whole range, from east to west, up to the city of Milidia (near modern Malatya), but his expedition, albeit spectacular, was an isolated event of no lasting consequence. Within the “lands of Nairi,” as eastern Anatolia is called in his inscriptions, the king boasts to have defeated no fewer than twenty‐three kingdoms, with the kingdom of Dayeni (near the source of the Euphrates) the most important among them.
More than two hundred years later, in the ninth century, Assyria’s attention was focused on the region once more, when a new expansionist power, which already dominated the Nairi‐lands, was about to encroach on Assyria’s sphere of influence. The rulers of this kingdom, which probably had emerged in the 10th century, called themselves in their own language “kings of Biainili” and “kings of Nairi” if they used the Akkadian, i.e. Assyrian language. The Assyrians identified their new rival as the kingdom of Urartu, and due to the predominance of Assyrian sources, modern historians and archaeologists are using the term Urartu rather than Biainili.
The landscape of Urartu was dominated by huge intersecting mountain chains with a number of rather small, island‐like areas suitable for agriculture in between. Due to long and cold winters, the lines of communication between these islands were periodically interrupted by snow and ice (Zimansky 1985). In terms of military strength and economic power, the Urartian kingdom was clearly inferior to Assyria, but the combination of inaccessibility and a harsh climate, which sh
ortened the campaign seasons of the Assyrians and always forced them to retreat before the onset of winter, was a crucial strategic advantage that time and again guaranteed Urartu’s survival, even in the wake of the most disastrous defeats.
The first round of conflicts started soon after 866 BCE, when the Urartian king Arramu (attested between 859 and 844) encroached upon both Šubria and the fertile plains west and south of Lake Urmia, where his advance threatened Gilzanu, Assyria’s most valuable vassal in the east. In 856, Shalmaneser III devastated the Urartian core areas around Lake Van, but Arramu survived. In the years afterwards, he kept a low profile, probably enhancing Urartu’s strong natural defenses by building fortresses. As a result, the Urartians withstood the next Assyrian incursions, which followed in 844 and 830, and even started a new round of open war. After years of inconclusive maneuvering, the succession crisis in Assyria between the sons of Shalmaneser III (826–820) enabled Sarduri I (attested in 830) and Išpueni (attested in 820), Arramu’s immediate successors, to conquer the contested lands west and south of Lake Urmia at last. Sarduri I was the first Urartian king who left inscriptions of his own, in the Akkadian language. For those of his son Išpueni, the Urartian language was used instead. The inscriptions of Išpueni are, moreover, the first to mention Ḫaldi, the supreme god of the Urartian pantheon.
The period between 820 and 745 BCE was Urartu’s age of conquest. No longer hampered by Assyria, which was much less ambitious in this period than it had been in the days of Shalmaneser III, Minua (not attested in Assyrian sources), Argišti I (attested 778–764), and Sarduri II (attested 754–735) were expanding their kingdom continuously. In the west, the valley of the Murat‐Su and the surrounding areas up to the Euphrates river were conquered, and some campaigns even reached into central Anatolia and northern Syria. In the northwest, the old kingdom of Dayeni, last mentioned in 844 as an ally of Assyria, probably fell prey to the Urartian onslaught. In the north, the kings subdued large parts of the Araxes valley and established Urartian power at the shore of Lake Sevan. In the east, their expansion efforts led to more mixed results, due to the fierce resistance offered by the Mannean kingdoms, but occasional forays nevertheless penetrated deeply into western Iran, right into regions of vital importance for Assyria. Southwards, the Urartians were probing into the valleys of the Taurus.
