A Companion to Assyria

by Eckart Frahm

  Under Assurbanipal (668–631 BCE), Assyrian military pressure against Qedar and other Arab tribal states reached its peak (Weippert 1973/74; Eph‘al 1984: 142–69; Lanfranchi 2004: 239–44; Bagg 2011: 265–8). Assurbanipal’s numerous inscriptions provide detailed information on the events, but a lack of chronological specification and a tendency among royal scribes to heavily re‐edit earlier accounts (see Gerardi 1992) make it occasionally difficult to obtain a historically reliable picture from the sources.

  One can divide Assurbanipal’s campaigns against the Arabs into two phases. During the first phase, dated by Eph‘al to 652 at the very latest, Assurbanipal’s troops fought against the Qedarite leader Yauta son of Ḫaza’il, who had again broken away from Assyria. After battles in Transjordan and southern Syria, Yauta fled to the land of Nabayatu in northwestern Arabia (whose ruler, Natnu, did not grant him asylum, however) and was replaced by Abiyate (Abiyaṯe‘) son of Te’ri. A tablet from Nineveh preserves a treaty the latter had to sign with the Assyrian king on this occasion (SAA 2, no. 10) – evidently, the Assyrians tried to “domesticate” the Arabs by integrating them into the world of international diplomacy. In a highly hyperbolic passage in one of his inscriptions, Assurbanipal claims that his troops seized so many camels and took so many prisoners in the course of their Arab campaigns that people in Assyria paid gardeners, brewers, and tavern‐keepers with camels and captives. The Arabs, in the meantime, paid for their insurrection, according to the Assyrian king, with a terrible famine, imposed upon them by the gods (Borger 1996: 244).

  During the years of the Šamaš‐šumu‐ukin rebellion in Babylon, which lasted from 652 to 648 BCE, Qedarite troops sent by U’aite (U’aiṯe‘) son of Birdada supported Assurbanipal’s faithless brother. They were led by the aforementioned Abiyate (whom the treaty had not prevented from almost immediate defection) and his brother Ayam(m)u. All these men remained at large for quite some time. It was only after he had defeated both Babylon and Elam, probably in 645, that Assurbanipal was finally able to take his revenge against them, by initiating a second phase of campaigning in Arab territories. After various battles in a region that stretched from Palmyra to al‐Laǧā south of Damascus, Abiyate, Ayam(m)u, U’aite, and eventually also Natnu of Nabayatu were captured and brought to Nineveh. U’aite, like other Arab rulers before him, was brutally tortured and exposed to the public in the gate that led to the citadel of Nineveh, while Ayam(m)u was flayed. Assurbanipal considered his battles against the Arabs important enough to celebrate them in a long letter to the god Assur (Borger 1996: 76–82, with earlier literature) and to represent them on bas‐reliefs in his palaces in Nineveh (see, e.g., SAA 1, p. 68; SAA 2, p. 69).

  Due to an increasing paucity of sources, we do not know what happened in the Arab territories in southwestern Syria and northern Arabia in the aftermath of the “second phase” of Assurbanipal’s Arab campaigns. In all likelihood, they slipped away from Assyrian domination almost immediately. In contrast to the Babylonian king Nabonidus, who, roughly one century later, resided for ten years in the oasis town of Tema, Assurbanipal never controlled the region over an extended period of time.

  Like his father Esarhaddon, Assurbanipal was also engaged in eastern Arabia and the Persian Gulf region. In an inscription from Uruk written some time before 652 BCE, the king marks the boundaries of his realm by referring, on one hand, to Tyre “in the midst of the Upper Sea” (i.e., the Mediterranean) and, on the other, to Dilmun “in the midst of the Lower Sea” (i.e., the Persian Gulf) (RIMB 2, p. 226). A number of letters provide evidence that Ḫundaru, the king of Dilmun, did indeed pay Assurbanipal tribute, even though there were suspicions, during the time of the Šamaš‐šumu‐ukin rebellion, that he sided with the Babylonians (Frame 1992: 135, 177, 209). In one of his latest inscriptions, a fragmentary text from the Ištar temple in Nineveh, Assurbanipal confirms that he received tribute from Ḫundaru. The inscription refers, moreover, to gifts sent to the Assyrian king by Šiḫum (or Šilum) of Ḫasmanu, a land situated next to Dilmun, [(…)]‐ra‐a‐BAD‐te king of  Luppi (location unknown), and Pade king of Qade, “who lives in Izke” (Fuchs in Borger 1996: 283–4, 294). Qade is identical with ancient Magan (Oman), and Izke with Izki, an old city in the northeast of Oman (Potts 1990: 393–4). It allegedly took Pade’s emissaries six months to arrive in Nineveh.

  The Ištar Temple inscription is the latest text that provides significant information about Assyro‐Arabian relations. During the last years of Assurbanipal’s reign and the reigns of his successors, Assyria was shaken by internal conflict and all‐out war with the Babylonians and Medes, who destroyed the Assyrian empire in 612 BCE. Whether any Arabs were involved in Assyria’s downfall is unknown to us.

  Conclusion

  During its imperial phase, Assyria interacted with various states, cities, and tribes in southern Syria, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Persian Gulf region. Of particular importance were the Assyrian contacts with the tribal confederation of Sumu’il, which was led by the Arab Qedarites. Its political center was the Wādī Sirḥān in northern Arabia, but, thanks to their skilled use of camels, Qedarites also penetrated Transjordan and southern Syria in the west and Babylonia in the east. In both regions, their raids and political machinations forced the Assyrians to take repeated military action against them.

  Assyrian armies were also active in northeastern Arabia, where they fought against Bazu, a territory located in close proximity to Dilmun (Bahrain). Assyrian encounters with other places in the “far south” were more peaceful and limited to trade and diplomacy. In the east, Assyrian contacts reached from Dilmun to Qade in modern Oman; in the western part of the Arabian Peninsula, the oasis town of Tema played an important role in Arabian‐Assyrian trade; and in the south, in modern Yemen, rulers of the emerging state of Sheba sent emissaries to the Assyrian royal court.

  For the Assyrians, the benefits reaped from their interaction with the Arabian Peninsula were primarily of an economic nature. The Arab‐controlled caravan trade that existed since the domestication of the dromedary camel provided Assyria with incense, spices, precious stones, and metals from sources hitherto inaccessible. In addition, the Assyrians employed members of Arab tribes and used their camels when they campaigned on the Arabian Peninsula or in the Sinai region.

  Less clear is whether Assyria adopted any of the political and cultural practices of the Arabs. It has been observed that the political agency and general visibility of Assyrian royal women increased markedly during the reign of Sennacherib, and one wonders whether such tendencies may not have been, at least in part, a consequence of Assyrian encounters with the remarkably powerful Arabian queens of the eighth and early seventh centuries (Frahm 2014: 214). While this remains conjectural, it is obvious that the Assyrians were fascinated by the Arab world. Assyrian kings described their campaigns against Arabs in long inscriptions and letters to the god Assur, and had them depicted on bas‐reliefs in their palaces. Also worth noting are twelve seals in Assyrian style, unfortunately almost all from unknown locations (one of them was reportedly found in Anah on the Middle Euphrates), that bear inscriptions in the South Semitic script used on the Arabian Peninsula (Sass 1991: 32–76). Interestingly, several personal names inscribed on these seals seem not to be Arabic but rather Assyrian or Babylonian, “indicating either an assimilating South Arabian element in the population, or a custom of Mesopotamians with ties to Arabia to have their seals inscribed in the local languages” (Sass 1991: 32). An Assyrian seal impression with an Akkadian name written in an Arabian alphabet on a tablet from Tell Sheikh Hamad is of particular interest because the tablet can be dated to ca. 634 BCE (Sass 2015).

  The cultural impact the Assyrian empire had on the inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula was in all likelihood more considerable than that of the Arabs on Assyria (Lanfranchi 2004: 244–52). Despite the ultimate failure of Assyrian attempts to subdue the various Arab tribes and fully control the Syro‐Arabian desert and its oases, Assyrian civilization left a clear ma
rk on the region. The formation of a well‐organized Arab proto‐state in the Wādī Sirḥān, with its fortified capital at Dūma, would probably not have occurred without the military pressure exerted by the Assyrians and the model Assyria provided, even though one must take into account that Sabaean influence played a role too (Avanzini 2012). The fact that from the time of Esarhaddon onwards, Assyrian royal inscriptions mention more male than female Arab leaders may reflect changes within the political fabric of the Arab tribes that could have been triggered by Assyrian practices as well. The refurbishment and return of the divine statues of Dūma under Esarhaddon provides an example of Assyrian influence in the religious sphere.

  Assyria presumably also inspired cultural change in other, more distant places on the Arabian Peninsula. Elements of Assyrian style and iconography have been detected on bas‐reliefs from Tema and Sheba, and it seems possible that the elaborate inscriptions of two rulers of Sheba who were contemporaries of Sargon II and Sennacherib, respectively, were inspired by monumental inscriptions in cuneiform writing that Sabaean emissaries had encountered in Assyrian palaces.

  Abbreviations

  PNA

  = K. Radner and H. Baker (eds.), The Prosopography of the Neo‐Assyrian Empire, Helsinki: The Neo‐Assyrian Text Corpus Project 1998–2011.

  RIMA

  = A.K. Grayson, The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Assyrian Periods, 3 volumes, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1987–96.

  RIMB 2

  = G. Frame, Rulers of Babylonia from the Second Dynasty of Isin to the End of Assyrian Domination (1157–612 B.C.), Toronto: Toronto University Press.

  RINAP

  = G. Frame (ed.), The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Neo‐Assyrian Period, Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns 2011–.

  SAA

  = S. Parpola (ed.), State Archives of Assyria, 19 volumes published, Helsinki: Helsinki University Press 1987–.

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