Ancient Iraq

by Georges Roux

  The reign of Bilalama was followed by a period of repeated setbacks during which Eshnunna was sacked by the King of Dêr (modern Badrah, about one hundred kilometres east of Tell Asmar), defeated in war by the ruler of Kish and deprived of most of its possessions. But the fortune of the kingdom was eventually restored, and in about 1850 B.C., with ‘the enlarger of Eshnunna’, as Ipiq-Adad II called himself, began a new period of expansion marked by the occupation of Rapiqum on the Euphrates (somewhere near Ramâdi). The situation of this town clearly indicates that the king of Eshnunna aimed at establishing a bridgehead on that river in order to control one of the main ‘tin roads’ which from the north and west converged towards his capital city in the general direction of Susa. The strenuous efforts made by his successors were at first successful, but they finally met with failure since three other major powers, Babylon, Larsa and the great ‘Upper Mesopotamian Kingdom’, were soon to encircle Eshnunna and oppose a strong barrier to the ambitions of its rulers.

  The birth and development of the Assyrian kingdom which, from the thirteenth century onwards was to play an ever increasing role in the history of Mesopotamia and the whole Near East, are worth retracing here. The city which gave its name to this kingdom, Assur14 (or, more exactly, Ash-shur)* lay in a strong strategic position: built on a hill overlooking the Tigris just upstream of the point where it enters the Fat-ha gorge through Jabal Hamrin, protected on one side by the great river, on the other by a canal, and strongly fortified, it commanded the road which, from Sumer or Akkad, went up the Tigris valley either to Kurdistan or to Upper Jaziah. Successively Sargon, Narâm-Sin and the kings of Ur had occupied this key place, the origins of which went back to the Early Dynastic period and probably earlier, and there is no evidence that Assur was independent before the second millennium B.C. Yet the northern equivalent of the Sumerian King List, the great Assyrian King List found at Khorsabad and published by A. Poebel in 1942,15 gives a series of seventeen kings of Assur who, if we were to take the list at its face value, would have lived in Early Dynastic times. But here, as in the Sumerian list, dynasties recorded as successive may have been in fact parallel; in addition, our document states that these kings ‘lived in tents’, which may mean that they did not actually govern the city of Assur but some important tribe in the neighbourhood; and finally, it must be noted that the names of several early Assyrian monarchs – such as Tudia, Ushpia, Sulili or Kikkia – are neither Semitic nor Sumerian, but belong to some other ethnic stratum, possibly Hurrian.16

  After the fall of the Sumerian Empire Assur, like many other cities, became independent. Puzur-Ashur I, who must have reigned about 2000 B.C., opens a new line of kings bearing such genuine Akkadian names as Sargon or Narâm-Sin. Two of them, Ilushuma and Erishum I, have left inscriptions mentioning the building of temples for Ashur, Adad and Ishtar in the city.17 Moreover, Ilushuma is known to have raided deep into southern Iraq during the reign of Ishme-Dagan of Isin (1953-1935 B.C.). But the true founders of the future Assyrian might were the Western Semites, who during the first centuries of the second millennium flooded northern Iraq as they flooded the southern regions. Halê, the chief of an Amorite tribe, pitched his tent somewhere between the Khabur and the Tigris, and his alleged descendants made of northern Mesopotamia (Assyria included) a large, prosperous and powerful kingdom in which the true Assyrians played a very small role.

  Mari and the Kingdom of Upper Mesopotamia

  The reader may remember that we left Mari at the time when Narâm-Sin of Akkad seized this town on his way to northern Syria. Thereafter, for about three centuries Mari was governed by rulers who called themselves shakkanakku (literally ‘military governor’, a title they had initially received from their Akkadian overlords and continued to use, although they behaved as kings). Little is known about the history of Mari during this long period, but recent excavations on the site have brought to light the palace of the shakkanakku – a vast building with impressive underground tombs – and inscriptions from which could be drawn a list of these rulers in chronological order, from 2266 to 1920 B.C., when we lose their trail.18

  When light shines again on Mari, we find it, and the greatest part of northern Mesopotamia, occupied by a large group of Amorites called the Hanaeans (Hana) divided into two main tribes: the Beni-Iamina or Iaminites (literally ‘sons of the right’, i.e. the South) and the Beni-Sima'al or Simalites (‘sons of the left, i.e. the North).19 The majority of Iaminites were semi-nomads in the desert west of Mari, but several of their clans lived in villages and towns on the Euphrates and the lower Khabur river. In contrast, most of the Simalites were settled in clusters of small or medium-sized ‘kingdoms’ in the region called Idamaras, the very fertile triangle formed by the many tributaries of the Khabur. The eastern part of Jazirah and the Tigris valley were also populated by Amorite tribes.

  In about 1830 B.C., a ‘Simalite’ chief named Iaggid-Lim established friendly relations with another Amorite, Ilâ-kabkâbu, who reigned over the small kingdom of Ekallâtum, an as yet unidentified town on the banks of the middle Tigris. The two chiefs exchanged ‘solemn oaths’, but for some untold reason the friendship was broken. Ilâ-kabkâbu attacked Iaggid-Lim, destroyed his fortress and seized his son Iahdun-Lim. A few years later the king of Ekallâtum died, leaving the throne to one of his two sons, Samsi-Addu (the Amorite form of Akkadian Shamshi-Adad).* We do not know when Iaggid-Lim passed away, nor when his son was set free, but in c. 1820 Iahdun-Lim took possession of Mari and proclaimed himself ‘king of Mari and of the country of the Hanaeans’, that is to say the Khabur basin. The renown of the old city, its wealth as the major trading station between Syria and Babylonia and, probably, the ‘charisma’ of the new king enabled him to exert a kind of benevolent protection over a large number of small independent states in Jazirah. Iahdun-Lim rebuilt the city wall of Mari and its neighbour Terqa, opened canals, founded a town bearing his name and erected a temple to the sun-god Shamash. He also embarked on an adventurous military and economic expedition in northern Syria, up to the Mediterranean Sea. In a long inscription repeated on nine large bricks used as foundation deposits for the temple of Shamash, he says that he offered sacrifices to the ‘Ocean’, had his soldiers bathe in it and removed quantities of trees from the high mountains, then imposed a perpetual tribute on countries bordering the sea.20 This must have frightened the chiefs of other Amorite tribes, for three of them attacked him in the same year and, not surprisingly, Sumu-Ebuh, King of Iamhad (the region of Aleppo) and master of northern Syria, whose territory had been invaded and plundered, lent them his support. In the same inscription Iahdun-Lim claims to have defeated them all.

  Meanwhile, on the eastern side of Jazirah a series of momentous events had taken place. Soon after Samsi-Addu ascended the throne of Ekallâtum, Narâm-Sin, the king of Eshnunna who had succeeded Ibiq-Adad, took his army across the Diyala River into the Tigris valley, seized Ekallâtum and other towns further north, and occupied the Euphrates valley up to the vicinity of Mari. Samsi-Addu fled and took refuge in Babylon whence he returned after a while to reconquer his capital-city (c. 1815 B.C.).21 Five years later, he liberated Assur. In 1800 B.C.or thereabouts Iahdun-Lim, who had defeated Samsi-Addu at Nagar, was assassinated by his own son (?) and successor Sumu-Iaman, who reigned for barely two years before being murdered by his servants. This gave Samsi-Addu an opportunity to seize Mari without shooting an arrow and to put his younger son Iasmah-Addu in charge of the town and its territory (c. 1796). Five years earlier, he had appointed another of his sons, Ishme-Dagan, viceroy of Ekallâtum. As for him, he seems to have moved from place to place; towards the end of his reign, he took up residence in the third-millennium town of Shehna which he renamed Subat-Enlil, now definitively identified as Tell Leilan, a large mound between two eastern tributaries of the Khabur.22 The son of Ilâ-kabkâbu had solidly established his power on two pillars: the Tigris and the Euphrates.

  The first task of Samsi-Addu was to obtain, by diplomacy or by force, the submission of the n
umerous princes of the Hanaeans and to consolidate his authority over the inhabitants of Northern, or Upper, Mesopotamia. It was most probably at that time that Nineveh, hitherto an independent city-state, was made subservient to Assur. As far as they can be reconstructed, the frontiers of the new kingdom at its greatest extent roughly followed the present Syro-Turko-Iraqi border from the great bend of the Euphrates to the extreme north of modern Iraq, ran along this river down to the vicinity of Ramadi and, in the east, skirted the foothills of the Zagros range to reach the Diyala River. In modern terms, they embraced the northern half of Iraq and the whole of Transeuphrataean Syria. This vast territory has been, and is still frequently referred to as ‘Assyria’ or ‘The First Assyrian Empire‘, but it should be called the ‘Kingdom of Upper Mesopotamia’ because, as a Danish Assyriologist put it briefly: ‘Shamshi-Adad's empire did not originate in, and was not built upon the men and the power of the city-state Assur’.23 Besides, although Samsi-Addu figures (as Shamshi-Adad) on the Assyrian King List, he was in fact a usurper, later rejected by the Assyrian tradition.

  In the whole history of ancient Iraq few periods are as well documented as the reign of Samsi-Addu and his sons. Moreover, our information is derived not from the usual official inscriptions, but from the most accurate and reliable documents that an historian can expect: the letters exchanged between the three princes and between Iasmah-Adad and other rulers, and the reports from various officials to their masters; in all, more than five thousand tablets forming part of the royal archives found in the palace of Mari.24 While these letters are generally undated and therefore difficult to arrange in chronological order, they throw an invaluable light on the daily routine of the court and on the relationship between the governments of Assur, Mari and Ekallâtum and the various peoples, kingdoms and tribes surrounding them. Besides – and this is not the least of their interest – they offer a first-hand moral portrait of the three rulers. For the first time we are in the presence not of mere names but of living persons with their qualities and defects: Ishme-Dagan, a born warrior like his father, always ready to go to battle and proud to announce his victories to his brother – ‘At Shimanahe we fought and I have taken the entire country. Be glad!’25 – but on occasion taking him under his wing:

  Do not write to the king. The country where I stay is nearer the capital city. The things you want to write to the king, write them to me, so that I can advise you…

  Iasmah-Adad of Mari, on the contrary, docile, obedient, but lazy, negligent, cowardly:

  You remain a child, writes his father, there is no beard on your chin, and even now, in the ripeness of age, you have not built up a ‘house’…

  Or again:

  While your brother here is inflicting defeats, you, over there, you lie about amidst women. So now, when you go to Qatanum with the army, be a man! As your brother is making a great name for himself, you too, in your country, make a great name for yourself!

  And finally, Samsi-Addu the father, wise, cunning, meticulous, sometimes humorous, who advises, reprimands or congratulates his sons and keeps Mari under very close control.

  The kingdom of Samsi-Addu was more rigidly organized than that, more modest, of his predecessor. It was divided into provinces with, in the main cities, governors assisted by professional civil servants and controlled by the king, his sons and royal inspectors. Iasmah-Adad lived in the palace of Iahdun-Lim which he had received intact (an inventory had even been made on that occasion). The scribes of the kingdom wrote the purest Old Babylonian language introduced by Iahdun-Lim to replace the archaic Mari dialect loosely related to the language of Ebla.

  The main internal problems faced by the governors, the viceroys and, when needed, the great king himself were of two kinds: on the one hand, the rivalries, disputes and even wars between the petty rulers of Upper Mesopotamia (notably in Idamaras and the Jabal Sinjar region), which could be solved by arbitration, and occasional rebellions which had to be crushed; on the other hand, the unruly behaviour of certain semi-nomadic clans in the vicinity of Mari,26 and in particular the Iaminites, always ready for a razzia, who tried to escape control, dodged the royal census and recruitment, and sometimes even lent assistance to foreign invaders, not to mention the Sutû, inveterate bandits who attacked caravans and ravaged entire districts. In Ekallâtum, Ishme-Dagan had to fight on frequent occasions against the Turukkû of what is now Kurdistan, people more feared than had ever been their predecessors, the Lullubi and Guti, and who raided all the way to the rich Idamaras.

  Relations between the Upper Mespotamian kingdom and its neighbours varied with time and circumstances. Iamhad (Aleppo), the greatest kingdom in the west was hostile, mainly because Samsi-Addu supported Qatna and even sent troops there in a protracted conflict between this smaller state and Aleppo.27 The marriage of Iasmah-Adad to the daughter of the King of Qatna could only increase the hostility of the Aleppine monarch, but there is so far no evidence that war broke out between the two main major powers. Conversely, Iasmah-Adad entertained excellent relations with, for example, Karkemish whose king Aplahanda sent ‘very good wine’, food, ornaments and fine clothing to his ‘brother’, granted him the monopoly over certain copper mines in his territory and offered to give him ‘whatever he desired’.28

  The situation was very different in the East, where the kings of Eshnunna were as keen as ever to enlarge their domain, both to the north in the ‘corridor’ between the Tigris and the Zagros range in the direction of Assur and Ekallâtum, and to the west along the Euphrates towards Mari. The chronology here remains uncertain. Assuming that Narâm-Sin withdrew his troops from the middle Euphrates when Samsi-Addu conquered Upper Mesopotamia, hostilities in that region were probably resumed either by him or by his successor Dadusha, causing panic in Mari, since Iasmah-Adad wrote to his brother ‘promptly send me numerous troops, the distance is long’.29 Then we have an inscription of Samsi-Addu, who seems to have tried, without much success, to dislodge the Eshnunaeans from the key-town of Qabra which commanded the passage of the Lower Zab, coming from the south. In this inscription, the king says that he ‘crossed the Zab, made a razzia in the land of Qabra, destroyed the harvest in that land, captured the fortified cities in the land of Urbêl (Erbil) and established garrisons everywhere’.30 At an as yet undetermined date, an attack of Eshnunna was stopped, and a peace treaty was signed by the two belligerents. A recently found but not yet fully published stele of Dadusha tends to support the hypothesis of an alliance between the man of Eshnunna and the powerful north Mesopotamian monarch. This inscription, thought to have been written one year before Dadusha's death, describes a war against one Bunnu-Eshtar, King of Urbêl, and curiously states that Dadusha abandoned the territory conquered to Samsi-Addu, ‘King of Ekallâtum’.31

  Finally, we come to Babylon, the third powerful neighbour of Assyria. With Babylon relations were cold but polite, since neither Sin-muballit (1812 – 1793 B.C.) nor Hammurabi (1792-1750 B.C.) – both contemporaries of Samsi-Addu – had yet turned their ambition towards the north. Thus Shamshi-Adad dispatched to Hammurabi tablets copied at his request, and Iasmah-Adad returned to Babylon a caravan which had been delayed in Mari and a Turrukû captive who had escaped and sought refuge in that city.32 In only one letter do we feel a shadow of anxiety: apparently, Iasmah-Adad had been informed of certain unfriendly projects of ‘the man of Babylon’, but after inquiry one of his officials reassures him:

  Now, may my lord's heart be at ease, for the man of Babylon will never do harm to my lord.33

  Some thirty years later, however, Hammurabi was to take and destroy Mari.

  CHAPTER 12

  HAMMURABI

  The victory over four powerful princes and the unification of Mesopotamia are in themselves remarkable achievements sufficient to single out Hammurabi* as one of the greatest Mesopotamian monarchs. But the King of Babylon was not merely a successful war leader: his handling of his opponents reveals the qualities of a skilful diplomat; his Code of Law displays a passion for j
ustice which, to a great extent, balances the repulsive cruelty of punishments; his inscriptions show a genuine concern for the welfare of his subjects and a deep respect for the traditions of a country which was, after all, foreign to his race; his letters prove that the descendant of an Amorite sheikh could administer a vast kingdom with the same care and attention to detail as the ruler of a Sumerian city-state. Hammurabi raised Babylon to the rank of a major capital-city and made its god Marduk one of the greatest deities.

  Moreover, his forty-three years’ long reign (1792 – 1750 B.C.) marked the peak of a series of cultural changes which had started in the previous century and were to last until the abrupt fall of the First Dynasty of Babylon, 155 years after his death. These changes deeply affected the art, language, literature and philosophy of the Mesopotamians. The official sculpture, directly derived from that of the Akkad and Ur III period, remained frozen in a sober and powerful beauty,1 but a ‘popular’ art had emerged which was characterized by its realism and its love of movement. It was expressed in some bronze statuettes (such as an unnamed, four-headed god from Ischali who was astonishingly shown walking), in certain steles and sculptures in the round (a roaring lion's head, a goddess smelling a flower), in parts of the beautiful frescoes in the royal palace of Mari (a date-gatherer climbing a palm-tree, a bird about to fly away) and above all, in a large number of terracotta plaques depicting scenes of daily life, such as a carpenter at work, a peasant on his zebu, a bitch feeding her puppies and even couples making love).2 In no other period has the art of Mesopotamia been so lively and free.