by Eckart Frahm
The Urartian kings tried to avoid another war against the southern superpower, but even so their moves in Syria, in the Taurus, and in western Iran were seen by their Assyrian counterparts as most insolent challenges. Plagued as they were by domestic troubles, however, there was not much the Assyrian rulers could do to stop the Urartian progress effectively. A lengthy war in the 770s remained inconclusive, whereas Aššur‐nirari V apparently even suffered some sort of defeat, the nature of which remains, however, unclear.
In this period the Urartian kings left detailed records of their military deeds and they realized ambitious building projects, which besides the usual fortress building included sophisticated irrigation systems, temples, and huge fortified palaces like those of Erebuni and Argištiḫinili.
However, Urartu’s success depended on Assyria’s weakness, which came to a sudden end when Tiglath‐pileser III ascended the Asyrian throne. In 743, Sarduri II suffered a disaster west of the Euphrates, in the battle of Kištan and Ḫalpi, which forced him to abandon all hope of establishing Urartian overlordship in Syria. In 739 and 736, Tiglath‐pileser counterattacked in the Taurus and strengthened the Assyrian positions all along his northern frontier. The war fought between Rusa I (attested 719–713) and Sargon II in western Iran culminated in yet another terrible defeat suffered by the Urartians in 714, in a battle near mount Wauš (probably mount Sahend). As a result, Rusa was abandoned by his former allies among the Mannean kings.
While the Urartians lost their outlying positions and zones of influence in Syria, in the Taurus, and in western Iran, their kingdom as such survived, despite two deep Assyrian incursions. First, in 735, Ṭušpa, the Urartian main fortress, withstood an attack by Tiglath‐pileser III. Then, in 714, Sargon II laid waste irrigation systems, gardens, settlements, and a number of fortresses around Lake Urmia that had been evacuated by the Urartians. But none of the defended strongholds fell and the inhabitants of the invaded areas, informed in time by an early warning system, managed to escape with their flocks long before the Assyrians could get at them. The subsequent sack of Muṣaṣir and the local shrine of the god Ḫaldi was certainly a heavy blow for the Urartians, but Muṣaṣir as such was not part of the Urartian state and its defense system.
After one and a half centuries of warfare, the stalemate between Assyria’s offensive power and Urartian defensive strength was accepted as a matter of fact by both sides. Still there was no love between the two powers, with intrigues, small scale raids, and ambushes continuing along the common border. But after 714, both Assyria and Urartu avoided open war on a larger scale. When the murderers of Sennacherib found refuge in Urartu, the Urartian king did not use these exiled Assyrian princes to destabilize Esarhaddon’s rule (Fuchs 2012: 142–4), and he abstained from doing so even when Esarhaddon annexed the contested kingdom of Šubria. Likewise, Assurbanipal left an Urartian attack on the Šubrian city of Upumu unanswered.
In the seventh century BCE, the official image of the Urartian king underwent a fundamental change. Argišti II (attested in 709) was the last Urartian king to leave detailed records of his military achievements, whereas his successors commemorated their building activities only. Since Assyrian sources are likewise uninformative for that period, no more than the most basic facts of Urartu’s later political history are known. Even the exact sequence of the late Urartian rulers has recently become a matter of debate (see Seidl, Roaf, and Fuchs in: Kroll et al. 2012).
In the first half of the seventh century, the extensive building activities of Rusa, son of Erimena, and of Rusa, son of Argišti, at Toprakkale, Karmir‐blur, Bastam, Ayanis, and Kef Kalesi, with their splendid fortification works, palaces, and temples, probably marked the apogee of the Urartian kingdom.
This high‐water mark was followed by sharp and rapid decline. Neither the exact reasons nor the course of the events resulting in Urartu’s downfall are known, but the Assyrians apparently had no part in it. Already in the late 640s, the situation of Sarduri (III/IV?), the last Urartian king mentioned in Assyrian sources, had become so desperate that he took the humiliating step to acknowledge Assyrian superiority by sending tribute to Assurbanipal. The kingdom of Biainili/Urartu as such must have ceased to exist soon afterwards, since the Urartians were not involved in the prolonged struggles between 627 and 610, which eventually led to Assyria’s own demise (Hellwag 2012).
To sum up, Assyria and Urartu were expansionist rivals from the middle of the ninth up to the end of the eighth century, and they coexisted in the seventh century. Urartu was never a deadly threat to the Assyrian empire. Usually the conflict between the two powers was restricted to the Taurus and to western Iran; only for a short period in the eighth century Urartu managed to infiltrate northern Syria. Whilst their own core area around Lake Van was raided at least twice by the Assyrians, the Urartians stayed on their, i.e. on the northern side of the Taurus, and never, not even in the heyday of their power and influence during the first half of the eighth century, did they dare to come down to the Mesopotamian lowlands to attack Assyria proper.
The Urartians certainly had dangerous foes other than just Assyria. In 714, when Sargon II after a large detour fell upon the remote eastern parts of the Urartian kingdom, which never before had been reached by Assyrian armies, he ran into an elaborate defense system consisting of fortresses, a warning system, and perfectly functioning evacuation procedures. These precautionary measures could not have been implemented for fear of Assyrian attacks, simply because the Urartians had no reason to expect the Assyrians at so far a distance from their usual attack zones. The enemy against whom the Urartians had protected these border sections in the first place is still unknown.
At least one danger the kings of Urartu had to cope with is identified by Assyrian sources: in 709 BCE, the Assyrian secret service reported on a heavy defeat suffered by the Urartian king from the hands of a strong Cimmerian warrior group in the course of a campaign somewhere beyond Urartu’s northern borders (Fuchs 2012: 155), and Urartian territory was raided by Cimmerians soon afterwards. Eventually, the crisis passed and, in the reign of Esarhaddon, Cimmerians are even mentioned as allies or auxiliaries of the Urartian king. But the relationship must have changed again dramatically in the second half of the seventh century: according to the archaeological evidence, nomadic horsemen of Cimmerian and Scythian origin were involved in the final destruction of quite a number of Urartian fortresses.
The Western Taurus and Central Anatolia
In the Old Assyrian period, merchants from Ashur were busy in central Anatolia, but their caravan trade and the existence and survival of their trading colonies (kārum) − among them the well documented kārum of the Anatolian city of Kaniš (modern Kültepe) − depended entirely on the good will of the local rulers, with no chance whatsoever for the early rulers of Ashur to exert political or military power (Veenhof and Eidem 2008).
In the Middle Assyrian period, central Anatolia was at first the core of the mighty Hittite empire and as such far beyond reach even for the comparatively powerful Assyrian rulers of the 13th century. At the beginning of the 12th century, Ḫatti disintegrated at last, but the Assyrians could not exploit the fall of their former rival, since they were in dire straits themselves.
It was not before the ninth century, the reign of Shalmaneser III, that central Anatolia got involved into the power politics of Assyria, but in this particular part of the world, even the most powerful of the Neo‐Assyrian kings were faced with insurmountable problems. Within or beyond the western Taurus, the Neo‐Assyrian provincial system was never established and even the most basic forms of indirect rule had to be maintained with substantial efforts. Furthermore, any change of the local situation regularly resulted in the complete loss of Assyria’s influence.
For the most part, these difficulties were, of course, caused by the mountains of the western Taurus and their inaccessibility. Deeply hidden in these mountains was the land of Ḫilakku, the name of which was also used in the Assyrian sources as a
synonym for the western Taurus as such. To the Assyrians, Ḫilakku offered no specific resources; the local settlements were numerous but none of them was worth to be mentioned by name. Politically, Ḫilakku was a mere nuisance for Assyria, difficult to reach and even more difficult to control. Several kings claimed to have defeated the people of Ḫilakku, but these victories were short‐lived at best, and no lasting relationship with Assyria could ever be established.
There were two main routes the Assyrian armies used to cross the western Taurus: one led from Que (the Cilician lowlands) via the Cilician gates to the area of modern Ereǧli and Niǧde; the other went from Meliddu (near modern Malatya) via Til‐Garimmu (modern Gürün?) to the area of modern Kayseri.
As far as central Anatolia beyond the western Taurus mountains is concerned, the name Tabal is prominent in the Assyrian sources. Unfortunately it is used with two different meanings: in a broader geographical sense, the term sums up all of central Anatolia, whereas in political terms, Tabal designates a specific kingdom in the region of modern Kayseri, whose kings claimed supreme rank over all their neighbors.
Central Anatolia was politically divided into more than a dozen highly developed city states, whose Luwian‐speaking inhabitants continued the practice of writing the hieroglyphic script of the Hittites, which at that time was widely used also in northern Syria. Unfortunately, this script usually seems to have been written on perishable materials, and the few hieroglyphic stone inscriptions preserved provide just glimpses of the local culture(s) and history. For the Assyrians, central Anatolia was a rich source of precious metals and stones, and as a horse breeding area second in rank only to western Iran.
When Shalmaneser III crossed the western Taurus in 836 and in 835 BCE, he found the people of central Anatolia in no mood to fight. The local kings followed the example of king Tuwatis (Tuatti in the Assyrian sources) of Tabal, who sent his son with presents to buy the Assyrians off. Soon afterwards, however, Shalmaneser’s overextended empire crumbled, and so Assyria’s debut in central Anatolia was but a short intermezzo with no consequences.
The aforementioned king Tuwatis of Tabal might have been a representative – or perhaps even the founder – of a local dynasty wielding some sort of supreme power over the whole region. To the Urartians, Tabal was the “land of Tuate,” on which the Urartian king Argišti I enforced a pay‐off in the 770s (Salvini 2008: A 8–3 II 15–16). Somewhat later, another Tuwatis as well as his son and successor Wasusarmas both claimed the title of “great king” according to inscriptions from the latter’s reign (Hawkins 2000: 451ff. X.12 and X.13).
Wasusarmas was a contemporary of Tiglath‐pileser III, whose reign was to become the peak of Assyria’s influence in central Anatolia. Already in 738, five kings from this region, among them “Wassurme the Tabalean,” sent presents or tribute to Assyria, but their submissiveness cannot be explained by Assyrian pressure, since in central Anatolia Tiglath‐pileser’s military power was not felt before the end of the 730s. It is more likely that those local rulers tried to buy Assyrian help against the powerful kingdom of Mušku, better known as Phrygia, whose eastward expansion might have been well under way in the early 730s.
Pressed by Mušku from the west and by Assyria from the east, the Anatolian kings struggled to survive. They even tried to exploit the rivalry between the two powers to their own benefit, but the results of their machinations were rather mixed and sometimes disastrous.
Wasusarmas was among the first victims of the difficult situation: When he stopped his payments to Assyria around 730 BCE, he was deposed by Tiglath‐pileser, whose inscriptions ridicule the presumptuousness of the great king: “Wassurme, the Tabalean, who acted as if he were the equal of Assyria” was arrested by just one of Tiglath‐pileser’s eunuchs, and, as a further humiliation, he was replaced by Ḫulli, who was a “son of a nobody,” i.e. not of royal descent. Thus, the dynasty of Tuwatis was replaced by the “house of Purutaš.” The price Ḫulli had to pay for his enthronement, 10 talents of gold, 1000 talents (32 tons) of silver and 2000 horses, bears witness to Tabal’s wealth (Tadmor and Yamada 2011: no. 47 rev. 14’–15’; no. 49 rev. 27).
However, Tabal was not to come to rest. Ḫulli was deposed by Shalmaneser V and exiled to Assyria, where he became friends with Shalmaneser’s brother Sargon. As soon as the latter had usurped Assyria’s throne, Ḫulli was reinstated in Tabal, and when he died, his son and successor Ambaris was given Sargon’s daughter in marriage. Even so, Ambaris forged an alliance with both Mušku and Urartu and attacked Assyrian territory. In 713, the troops of Assyria’s western provinces were sent in and soon the members of the house of Purutaš dragged themselves to Assyria in chains, among them Sargon’s treacherous son‐in‐law who, unlike his father, got no second chance.
The events in Tabal were just one episode in the much larger conflict between Assyria and Mita, king of Mušku, who was known to the Greeks as Midas, king of Phrygia. With the core area of his kingdom and his capital Gordion far off in the west, in the area around the Sangarios river, Mita had the advantage to act from a safe distance.
Time and again Mita succeeded to win over Sargon’s vassals or allies to his own side, in spite of harsh Assyrian reactions. In 718 the king of Šinuḫtu was punished for his defection to Mita. In 713, as we have seen, Ambaris of Tabal, Sargon’s most favored vassal, had to be deposed for the same reason. In the next year, Mita not only thwarted Sargon’s plan to reestablish Tabal as an Assyrian province, he even succeeded to win over the king of Meliddu, another Assyrian vassal, whose kingdom was annexed by Sargon in 711. Fortifying Til‐Garimmu (modern Gürün?), a place along the road leading from Meliddu to Tabal, in order to block further Phrygian advances, Sargon resigned himself to the complete loss of all his former positions in central Anatolia.
Mita was troublesome for his intrigues, but he posed no direct threat. Well aware of his inferior military strength, Mita wisely avoided any major battles, attacking only when he was sure of the dreaded Assyrian army to be busy elsewhere, and due to this military weakness he was never able to hold his gains against counterattacks. In 715, it was a mere sideshow for the Assyrian forces to recover three fortresses Mita had taken in the province of Que (Cilicia). Eventually, it was the governor of that province whose relentless attacks brought the conflict to an end: in the wake of a particularly devastating raid deep into the territory of Mušku in 710, Mita made a peace offer, which was gladly accepted by Sargon in 709.
In the meantime, an enemy even more dangerous than Mita had emerged. Should all those contemporary hints at an Anatolian ruler named Kurtis (Kurti or Gurdi in the Assyrian sources) refer to one and the same person, Sargon and Sennacherib were faced by an adversary of a truly Machiavellian character. In 718, Sargon entrusted Kurtis, the king of (A)tuna, with the kingdom of Šinuḫtu, whose treacherous ruler had just been removed. Soon afterwards, Kurtis went over to Mita of Mušku, but in 713, doubtlessly worried by the fate of Ambaris of Tabal, he made another about‐turn: he sent his messenger to hurry after Sargon, who was campaigning in western Iran, until he caught up with him somewhere deep in Media. In the Assyrian field camp, Kurtis’s diplomat succeeded to reconcile Sargon with his not so loyal master.
This was, however, not the end of the story. In 709, Kurtis’s (A)tunaeans are mentioned fighting for the possession of Tabal, and he must have prevailed against his Anatolian rivals, for soon afterwards he challenged the Assyrians openly, probably by taking their border fortress of Til‐Garimmu. In 705, a punitive expedition was under way against him, but against all expectations, it was Sargon, not Kurtis, who, under circumstances unknown, met his doom in Tabal. This surprising outcome, which provided Kurtis with a prominent place in history, was perhaps not just a matter of bad luck on Sargon’s side. Since another army sent by Sennacherib in the following year achieved nothing either, Kurtis’s skills and his military strength must have been important factors too. Til‐Garimmu was recovered by the Assyrians only much later, in 695 − but since Kurtis was
neither killed nor captured in the event, he must have been still at large afterwards. As far as we know, Sennacherib never attacked him again.
In the 670s, when Esarhaddon resumed the policy of military intervention in central Anatolia, both Kurtis and the kingdom of Mušku had disappeared from the scene. At that time, Anatolia, Urartu, and western Iran had become playing grounds for Cimmerian warrior groups, active as raiders but also as auxiliary troops supporting local rulers. However, in central and western Anatolia they were to become an independent political factor of their own, and only the Cimmerian leaders active in central Anatolia were important enough to be mentioned by name in the inscriptions of Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal. In 679, for instance, “the Cimmerian Teušpa, a barbarian from afar” (Leichty 2011: 1 III 43), was defeated and killed in battle by Esarhaddon’s troops in the territory of Ḫubušna (the region of modern Ereǧli).
The Assyrian victory relieved central Anatolia from the Cimmerian pressure, but did little to strengthen Esarhaddon’s own position in this region. A campaign directed against “Ḫilakku, in the neighborhood of Tabal” (Leichty 2011: 1 iii 47f.), was a temporary success at best, whereas Iškallu, the king of Tabal, did not submit to Esarhaddon at all.
In the 670s, the greatest cause of concern for the Assyrians was Mugallu, an Anatolian warlord whose origins and base of power are still unknown. Every bit as dangerous as Kurtis had been, Mugallu was even more audacious. Unimpressed by Esarhaddon’s recent victory over the Cimmerians, he took by force the city of Meliddu, a cornerstone in Assyria’s northwestern border defenses. In his time, “Mugallu of Melid,” as he was now called, was the only enemy of Assyria, who not only wrested an important stronghold from the Assyrian empire but even managed to hold his ground afterwards: in 675, he withstood a full‐scale Assyrian siege of Meliddu, and in the following years he thwarted all further attempts to dislodge him from this city.
