by Georges Roux
Above: samples of the so-called ‘Khabur pottery’ (16th century B.C.), from Chagar Bazar. Below, samples of the so-called ‘Nuzi pottery' (15th century B.C.), from Alalah and Nuzi.
After M.E.L. Mallowan, Iraq, III (1936) and Sir Leonard Woolley, A Forgotten Kingdom, 1953.
If the contribution of the Hurrians to the civilization of Mesopotamia was negligible, their impact on the less advanced cultures of Syria must have been considerable, though difficult to define. In any case, their large-scale intrusion in the latter country seems to have started a series of political disturbances and ethnic movements, the effects of which were felt as far away as Egypt.
Syria and Egypt
A line corresponding roughly to the present western and southern borders of the Syrian Republic divides ancient Syria* into two parts – the rolling plains of the north and the mountains, hills and deserts of the south – which in prehistory followed a different development. Space does not allow us to describe it, however briefly,19 but what we think is of interest to our subject is the fact that from very early days the north was wide open to Mesopotamian influences, as it was the link between the Tigris–Euphrates valley, the Mediterranean and, to some extent, Anatolia. If the north, with its hundreds of tells, had been as thoroughly explored as Lebanon or Palestine, the discovery at Ebla of a large and powerful kingdom, dating to the middle of the third millennium B.C., and which owed much to the Sumero-Akkadian civilization (see above, page 142) would not have come as a complete surprise. What could not have been expected, however, is that the people of Elba spoke a hitherto unknown Semitic dialect, akin to Akkadian though definitely West-Semitic.
During that time, the south – certainly inhabited by other Semites – looked towards Egypt.20 Relations between that country and Lebanon or Palestine, already attested in the Pre-Dynastic period, are well documented under the Old Egyptian Kingdom (c. 2800 – 2400 B.C.). This was the time of the great pyramids, and Egypt looked like its monuments: lofty, massive, apparently indestructible. Docile to the orders of Pharaoh – the incarnate god who sat in Memphis – and of his innumerable officials, toiled a hard-working people and an army of foreign slaves. But if the Nile valley was rich, it lacked an essential material: wood. The mountains of Lebanon, within easy reach, were thick with pine, cypress and cedar forests. Thus a very active trade was established between the two countries to their mutual profit. Byblos (Semitic Gubla, Egyptian Kepen), the great emporium of timber, became strongly ‘Egyptianized’, and from Byblos Egyptian cultural influence spread along the coast. The relations between the Egyptians and the populations of the Palestinian hinterland, however, were far less friendly. The nomads who haunted the Negeb, in particular, repeatedly attacked the Egyptian copper mines in the Sinai peninsula and on occasion raided the Nile delta, obliging the Pharaohs to retaliate and even to fortify their eastern border. The downfall of the Old Kingdom left Egypt unprotected, and we know of the large part played by the ‘desert folk’, the ‘Asiatics’, in the three hundred years of semi-anarchy which followed.
The first centuries of the second millennium witnessed the expansion of the Western Semites in Syria as well as in Mesopotamia, as proved by a break between the Early Bronze and Middle Bronze cultures, and by the predominance of West-Semitic names among the population of Syria-Palestine. While Amorite dynasties rose to power in many Mesopotamian towns, northern Syria was divided into several Amorite kingdoms, the most important being those of Iamhad (Aleppo), Karkemish and Qatna. Around the palaces of local rulers large fortified cities were built, and the objects and sculptures discovered in the palace of Iarim-Lim, King of Alalah, for instance, are by no means inferior in quality to those found in the contemporary palace of Zimri-Lim, King of Mari. We have already seen that the archives of Mari offer ample proof of intimate and sometimes friendly contacts between Mesopotamia and Syria, and indeed, one cannot escape the impression of a vast community of Amorite states stretching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. At the same time commercial relations between Syria and Crete were intensified. A colony of Minoan traders established itself in the port of Ugarit (Ras Shamra)21 and the exquisite Kamares crockery found its way to the tables of Syrian monarchs. Egypt, then in the full revival of its Middle Kingdom (2160 – 1660 B.C.), renewed and consolidated the ties which attached it to the Lebanese coast and endeavoured to counter the growing Hurrian influence in northern Syria by lavishing presents on the Amorite courts. This, at any rate, is a possible explanation for the vases, jewels and royal statues sent to Byblos, Beirut, Ugarit, Qatna and Neirab (near Aleppo) by the Pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty.22
The region to the south of the Lebanon presents us with a very different picture. Much poorer than northern Syria and less open to foreign influences, Palestine in the Middle Bronze Age (2000 – 1600 B.C.) was a politically divided and unstable country ‘in the throes of tribal upheaval’23 where the Egyptians themselves had no authority and apparently little desire to extend their political and economic ascendancy. The arrival among those restless tribes of Abraham and his family – an event whose after-effects are still acutely felt in the Near East – must have passed almost unnoticed. Small clans or large tribes constantly travelled in antiquity from one side to the other of the Syrian desert, and there is no reason to doubt the reality of Abraham's migration from Ur to Hebron via Harran as described in Genesis xi. 31. A comparison between the biblical account and the archaeological and textual material in our possession suggests that this move must have taken place ‘about 1850 B.C., or a little later’,24 perhaps as the result of the difficult conditions which prevailed then in southern Iraq, torn apart between Isin and Larsa. The historical character of the Patriarchal period was further reinforced – so it was thought some years ago – by the mention in cuneiform and hieroglyphic texts dating mostly from the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries B.C. of a category of people, generally grouped in bellicose bands, called habirû (or ‘apiru in Egyptian), a name which sounded remarkably like biblical ‘Ibri, the Hebrews. There was at last the long-awaited appearance in non-hebraical sources of Abraham's kin! Unfortunately, recent and thorough reappraisals of these sources have shown beyond any doubt that the Habiru have nothing in common with the Hebrews but a similitude of name. They were neither a people nor a tribe, but a class of society made up of refugees, of ‘displaced persons’ as we would now say, who frequently turned into outlaws.25
In about 1720 B.C. the Palestinian chieftains, whose turbulence and hostile attitude had already worried the last Pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty, succeeded in invading Egypt, which they governed for nearly one hundred and fifty years. They are known as Hyksôs, the Greek form of the Egyptian name hiqkhase, ‘chieftain of a foreign hill-country’. Although they never occupied more than the Nile delta, their influence on the warfare, the arts and even the language of that country was considerable. In the end, however, the kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty overthrew the Hyksôs, chasing them up to the gates of Gaza, and with this exploit opens what we call the New Empire (1580 – 1100 B.C.), undoubtedly the most glorious period in the history of ancient Egypt. By contrast, Mesopotamia fell, at about the same time (1595 B.C. into the hands of other foreigners, the Kassites, and entered into a long period of political lethargy.
CHAPTER 15
THE KASSITES
After this broad, if sketchy, survey of the Near East, we must now return to Mesopotamia, which we left, it will be remembered, at the end of Hammurabi's reign, in the middle of the eighteenth century B.C.
The ethnic movements just described were then about to bear fruit: the Hittites were enforcing their rule upon the indigenous populations of Anatolia; the Hurrians were peacefully invading northern Syria and northern Iraq; and behind the Zagros range an Aryan aristocracy was organizing the Kassites into a nation of warriors. If the Babylonian court was aware of these changes, it probably saw in them little cause for alarm, since none of these peoples yet appeared to constitute an immediate danger to Iraq, and indeed, the first cracks
in the edifice erected by Hammurabi resulted not from foreign aggression, but from its own intrinsic weakness. The empire of Babylon was the work of one man and rested almost entirely upon his powerful personality. Built up in a few years through the aggregation of five sovereign states, each of them with a long tradition of independence, it had been forcefully and prematurely centralized. The efforts made by the king to concentrate in Babylon the political, economic and spiritual life of the country might in the long run have benefited Mesopotamia as a whole, but their immediate effect was to ruin the provinces and to create a considerable amount of discontentment particularly in the once prosperous cities of Sumer and in Assyria, where the memory of Shamshi-Adad's great deeds was still alive. Small wonder, therefore, that the death of Hammurabi (1750 B.C) was followed by an outburst of revolts leading to the rapid disintegration of his kingdom. These revolts were relatively easy, three of the four states annexed by Hammurabi being vassal kingdoms, and they were also popular since the king of Babylon had purchased or simply taken vast estates, the market was in the hands of rapacious businessmen, and the provinces, notably in southern Mesopotamia, were getting increasingly poorer to the benefit of the capital-city and its immediate surroundings.
The kings who succeeded Hammurabi tried in vain to quell the general rebellion, then resigned themselves to the breaking down of the Babylonian empire, but they proved unable to cope with the new situation by applying the right policies.1 To compensate for their loss of revenues from tenant farmers' rents and taxation, they tried to increase agricultural production in the smaller territory that remained in their possession. To replace the dwindling profits of a declining trade with the Gulf countries, many merchants acted as bankers: in collusion with the Palace, they offered the small farmers and shopkeepers loans for equipment.2 Thousands of families were endebted for ever, while many private lenders were enriched to the point of threatening the power of the State. Moreover, it seems that in order to produce more and more cereals, landowners violated the rule of fallow, thereby reducing the fertility of the soil and accelerating its salinization.3 Thus, within a century (1700 – 1600 B.C. in round figures) Babylonia went from political disintegration to economic disorders and ecological disaster. The kingdom became decrepit and a small blow, a short-lived raid of the Hittites, brought about its collapse and that of its First Dynasty.
Ironically, it was the princes of the Kassites, a people regarded as inferior and semi-barbaric, who ascended the throne left vacant, apparently took the necessary measures and gradually transformed Babylonia into a prosperous kingdom honoured and respected by its powerful neighbours. The Kassites reigned for more than four centuries, and we can only regret that the paucity of our sources makes this long and interesting period one of the least-known in the history of ancient Iraq.
Hammurabi's Successors
Hammurabi's son and heir, Samsu-iluna (1749 – 1712 B.C.), was apparently endowed with some of his father's qualities, for he fought with remarkable endurance against the various enemies of Babylon.4 But it was like mending a ragged cloak: for every rent patched a new one appeared, and the final result was an enormous loss of territory. Thus in the ninth year of the reign an adventurer calling himself Rim-Sin, like the last King of Larsa, led a revolt in the districts bordering Elam and kept afield for at least five years before he was caught and slain.
The King of Eshnunna, who had sided with him, was captured and strangled in Babylon. During the long and bloody war which followed, Samsu-iluna pulled down the walls of Ur, plundered and set on fire all its temples and partly destroyed that city.5 Uruk shared about the same fate, which gave the Elamites a pretext to intervene: Kuturnahhunte I entered that city and took away, among other treasures, a statue of the goddess Inanna which Ashurbanipal recovered a thousand years later. After a few years of respite, a certain Iluma-ilu – pretend-edly a descendant of Damiq-ilishu, the last king of Isin – raised the flag of independence in Sumer, became the master of the entire country south of Nippur and founded the so-called ‘Second Dynasty of Babylon’ or Dynasty of the Sea-Land which lasted until 1460 B.C.6 At about the same time the north-eastern districts, under Babylonian obedience as a result of Hammu-rabi's last campaign, also recovered their freedom probably through the rebellion of one of Shamsi-Addu's obscure successors, Adasi, who remained famous in Assyrian annals for having ‘ended the servitude of Assur’.7 In addition to facing this series of domestic disasters, Samsu-iluna had to protect his kingdom against the threat of foreign invasion: we learn from year-names that he defeated a Kassite army in his ninth year and an Amorite army in his thirty-fifth year – not to mention the frequent incursions of Sutaean raiders who captured men and women and sold them as slaves to the Mesopotamians themselves. At the end of this disastrous reign Babylon was safe, but the kingdom, amputated of its northern and southern provinces, had shrunk back to its original boundaries: those of the country of Akkad.
Samsu-iluna's four successors, however, managed to preserve their reduced heritage for about a century. Abi-eshuh (1711-1684 B.C.) repelled a second Kassite attack, tolerated or perhaps encouraged the settling of Kassite individuals in Babylonia as agricultural workers, but was unable to prevent the Kassite chief Kashtiliash I from becoming King of Hana in about 1700 B.C.8 In a grandiose effort to dislodge Iluma-ilu from the swamps where he had taken refuge he dammed the Tigris, but failed to catch his rival, who continued to reign unchallenged over Sumer. There is some evidence that Ammi-ditana (1683-1647 B.C.) reconquered, at least temporarily, some of the territories lost by his predecessors. Ammi-saduqa (1646 – 1626 B.C.) is famous not for his military achievements, if any, but for his ‘edict of justice’ (meshârum). This document is of considerable interest for the light it indirectly throws on the economic situation of the time and the efforts made by the king to alleviate the burden of his subjects. It proclaims, for the whole population, the remitting of all debts and an amnesty for arrears, rents due and loans ‘for necessities’, and for some categories of people the suppression or reduction of licences and certain taxes, as well as the abolition of imprisonment for debt, going as far as threatening with death penalty the bailiffs who would dare take debtors to court.9 All that the last king of the dynasty, Samsu-ditana (1625 – 1595 B.C.), has left us is a list of the year-names of his reign. As did all good Mesopotamian kings, all the successors of Hammurabi restored temples, dug canals and built fortified towns in many parts of their reduced and impoverished kingdom. It is doubtful whether these keen, capable and pious monarchs, who year after year offered to the gods their own statues, ever suspected that the storm which was to sweep away their throne was gathering in the distant north-west, far beyond the snow-capped Taurus mountains.
We have said earlier that a Hittite prince of whom very little is known, Labarnas I, had founded in Anatolia and immediately enlarged a kingdom which he ruled from the unidentified city of Kussara. Labarnas II, his son (c. 1650 – 1620 B.C.), added to the royal domain the principality of Hatti, in the great bend of the Kizil-Irmak River, took for residence the then deserted city of Hattusas (modern Boghazkoy) and from then on called himself Hattusilis, ‘the man from Hattusas’. This warlike monarch soon found the frontiers of his kingdom too narrow and looked for other lands to conquer, but the fierce Gasgas tribes who dwelt in the Pontic range to the north, the Luwians to the west and the Hurrians to the east opposed to his ambitions a triple barrier. Only to the south was the road relatively free – it had been opened, it seems, by Labarnas I as far as Cilicia – and it led beyond the Taurus to Syria, and beyond Syria to either Egypt or Mesopotamia, fertile lands where a thousand years of civilization had accumulated an enormous amount of alluring wealth. The Hittites, therefore, marched southwards. The fragmentary annals of Hattusilis,10 mention at least two campaigns in that direction, in the course of which Alalah was destroyed, Urshu (a town on the Euphrates, to the north of Karkemish) besieged and taken, and the troops of Aleppo defeated in Commagene. Aleppo itself (Halpa), then the capital-city of the
powerful Amorite kingdom of Iamhad, could not be conquered, and Hattusilis appears to have lost his life in the war. But his adopted son and successor, Mursilis I (c. 1620 – 1590 B.C.), succeeded where his father had failed:
‘He destroyed the city of Halpa,’ says a Hittite text, ‘and took to Hattusas prisoners from Halpa and its treasures.’11
After Aleppo, Karkemish succumbed. From Karkemish the Hittite army followed the Euphrates downstream and suddenly appeared at the gates of Babylon. Just what happened then we do not know. Babylonian writers are naturally reticent about this painful affair, and only in a chronicle of much later date do we find the laconic entry:
Against Samsu-ditana the men of Hatti marched, against the land of Akkad.
But the Hittite text already quoted is more explicit:
Thereafter he (Mursilis) went to Babylon and occupied Babylon; he also attacked the Hurrians and kept the prisoners and possessions from Babylon at Hattusas.
Thus Babylon was taken and plundered. We know from other sources that the statues of Marduk and his consort, the goddess Sarpanitum, were taken away as booty and, for some obscure reason, left behind at Hana when the Hittites retreated. As for Samsu-ditana, he lost his crown as well, probably, as his life. Thus disappeared in one day and presumably without much resistance the dynasty which an obscure Amorite sheikh had founded and which Hammurabi had made famous. It had lasted three hundred years (1894 – 1595 B.C.).
