Ancient Iraq

by Georges Roux

  Iraq under Kassite Rule

  The Hittite campaign, if it had been followed by the permanent occupation of Babylon, might have changed the course of Oriental history. It proved, however, to be no more than a daring razzia. Soon after his victory Mursilis returned to Hattusas, where dangerous palace intrigues required his presence, and never came back. After the withdrawal of the Hittite army the fate of Babylon is not known with certainty. It would appear that the Kassite ruler of those days – most probably the eighth king of the dynasty, Agum II (Kakrime) – sat on the throne left vacant by the death of Samsu-ditana, and from then on a long line of Kassite monarchs was to govern Mesopotamia or, as they called it, Kar-Duniash for no less than four hundred and thirty-eight years (1595 – 1157 B.C.).12

  Established in Iran from time immemorial, the Kassites (Akkadian kashshû) originally occupied the central part of the Zagros range known today as Luristan, immediately to the south of Hamadan. Unlike their northern neighbours, the Guti and the Lullubi, they played no part in Near Eastern politics during the third millennium. Their sudden aggressiveness, in the middle of the eighteenth century, seems to have been stimulated by the Indo-European warriors who had come from the east a century or two before, taught them the art of horse-rearing and taken control of their tribes. Since we possess no text entirely written in Kassite, but only Akkadian texts containing Kassite words and expressions, a short bilingual list of gods and a list of personal names, all we can say about the Kassite language is that it was agglutinative and perhaps distantly related to Elamite.13 The Indo-European element is attested by the presence in the Kassite pantheon of Aryan gods such as Shuriash (Ind. Surya), Maruttash (Ind. Marut) and Buriash (perhaps identical with Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind), side by side with Sumero-Akkadian deities and with Kassite gods proper (Kashshu, Shipak, Harbe, Shumalia, Shuqamuna). On such scanty evidence rests our knowledge of the ethnic and cultural background of these highlanders.

  Unfortunately, we are not much better off as regards the period of Kassite domination in Iraq. As archaeological excavations progress no doubt more documents will come to light, but all we have at present is about two hundred royal inscriptions – most of them short and of little historical value – sixty kudurru (see below) and approximately 12,000 tablets (letters and economic texts), less than 10 per cent of which has been published. This is very little indeed for four hundred years – the length of time separating us from Elizabeth I. The bulk of our information derives, in fact, from sources foreign to the kingdom of Babylon, such as the el-Amarna correspondence found in Egypt (see Chapter 16) or the ‘Synchronous History’, a chronicle written by an Assyrian scribe in the seventh century B.C.14 This silence makes the Kassite period one of the most obscure in Mesopotamian history, and the words ‘dark age’ and ‘decadence’ come easily to mind. Nevertheless, if we make full use of our sources and if we take into account the monuments erected by the Kassite kings, these long years of political stagnation appear, compared with the last years of the First Dynasty of Babylon, as an epoch of revival and even of progress, at least in some fields. There is no doubt, for instance, that the Kassites restored order, peace and unity in a country devastated by half a millennium of war, kept up with Mesopotamian traditions and behaved in every way like good, sensible Mesopotamian monarchs. Thus one of the first acts of Agum Kakrime (c. 1570 B.C.) after he became King of Babylon was to bring back from Hana the statues of Marduk and Sarpanitum and to reinstate them in their temples lavishly furnished for the occasion.15 This gesture was calculated to win him the heart of his subjects, but it had a deeper significance: it meant that the foreigner recognized Marduk as the master of his new kingdom and intended to pose as the legitimate successor of the extinct dynasty. Some eighty years later Ulamburiash defeated Ea-gâmil, King of the Sea-Land, thereby recovering for Babylon the entire country of Sumer (after 1500 B.C.). Whether there were other, unrecorded and less successful wars between Babylonia and Assyria, or whether the Kassites gave up all hopes of imposing their authority over the former northern provinces of Hammurabi's empire, we do not know; but one of Agum's successors, Burnaburiash I, signed an agreement with the Assyrian prince Puzur-Ashur III concerning the frontier which, somewhere around Samarra, separated the two kingdoms. A century or so later, a similar treaty was signed between Kara-Indash and Ashur-bêl-nisheshu (1419 – 1411 B.C.).16 Thus was consecrated the division of Mesopotamia into two parts: Assyria and Babylonia, a dichotomy whose effects were to be felt for nearly a thousand years. In their own domain the Kassite kings undertook to rebuild and embellish the old and famous sanctuaries of Nippur, Larsa, Ur and Uruk. One of them, Kara-Indash, has left in the E-Anna precinct of Uruk a very interesting piece of work: a temple, the façade of which was made of bricks moulded in such a way that, when put together, they made up life-size figures of divine beings in low relief.17 This ingenious technique – perhaps a substitute for rock carving – was then new in Mesopotamia; it was used later by the Chaldean dynasty in Babylon and by the Achaemenians in Susa and Persepolis. The most enthusiastic of Kassite builders, however, was Kurigalzu I (c. 1400 B.C.), who not only restored the sacred city of Ur destroyed under Samsu-iluna but founded a new and important town, now represented by the ruins of ‘Aqar Quf.

  The 57 metre high tower of ‘Aqar Quf, casting its shadow over the plain and standing a conspicuous landmark thirty-three kilometres due west of Baghdad, is the core of a huge ziqqurat which once rose in the middle of Dûr-Kurigalzu, the fortified city (dûru) and royal residence of King Kurigalzu. Excavations carried out at ‘Aqar Quf have unearthed the base of the ziqqurat with its monumental staircase, three temples and part of a palace.18 The palace was decorated with frescoes and comprised an ambulatory with square pillars, another architectural novelty. The temples were dedicated to the divine family Enlil, Ninlil and their son Ninurta. The presence of these Sumerian gods in a city founded by a Kassite king shows to what degree the foreigners had been assimilated. Various objects of interest were found in the temples and the palace, including a more than life-size statue of Kurigalzu engraved with a long Sumerian inscription, painted terracotta figurines modelled with considerable skill, and splendid gold jewels.

  The Kassites are sometimes credited with the introduction of the horse into Mesopotamia. This is not strictly correct. The ‘ass from foreign countries’ (anshe-kur-ra), as the Sumerians called it, appears sporadically in texts of the Ur III period, and horses are mentioned under their Akkadian name sîsû in the royal correspondence from Mari.19 But the use of the horse as a draught animal was certainly made more common during the Kassite period by the Hurrians and by the Kassites themselves. The appearance on Near Eastern battlefields of fast horse-driven chariots created, as expected, a revolution in warfare, while the replacement of load-carrying donkeys by horse-driven wagons made commercial transport easier and faster. Several other

  Terracotta heads of a man and a lioness from Dûr-Kurigalzu (‘Aqar Quf), Kassite period.

  After Taha Baqir, Iraq, VIII, 1946.

  major or minor changes were wrought by the Kassites or, at least, took place during their reign. They range from the way of measuring fields to the fashion of dressing and cannot be described here in detail. Two of them, however, are of particular interest to the historian. One is the substitution for the old dating system of year-names of a simpler system, whereby the years of each reign, counting from the first New Year following coronation, were expressed in figures, e.g. ‘first, second, etc., year of King N’. The other novelty is the kudurru. The Akkadian word kudurru means ‘frontier, boundary’, and these little steles are often called ‘boundary stones’, although they were in reality donation charts, records of royal grants of land, written on stone and kept in temples, while copies on clay were given to the landowners.20 A kudurru was usually divided into two parts: on the recto or on the upper part of the stele were sculptured in low relief the images of the gods – often replaced by their symbols: a sun-disc for Shamash, a moon-crescent for
Sin, a hoe for Marduk, etc. – under whose guarantee was placed the donation made by the king,21 on the verso or under the sculptures was engraved a long inscription giving the name of the person who benefited from the grant, the exact location and measurements of the estate, the various exemptions and privileges attached to it, a list of witnesses and finally, multiple and colourful maledictions against ‘whosoever in the future should deface, alter or destroy’ the kudurru.

  These small monuments are, with cylinder-seals and terracotta statues and figurines, about the only works of art of the Kassite period that have survived. While the sculpture on kudurru is predominantly symbolic and static, the designs on the seals comprise novel geometric figures (lozenges, crosses, crescents) and a variety of animals previously not represented, such as the fly, the bee, the grasshopper, the dog or the monkey, usually ‘in motion’. Many seals bear a relatively long inscription giving the name, father's name and profession of the owner sometimes followed by a prayer or an incantation.22 In literature the Kassite period was marked by considerable efforts to salvage the cultural heritage handed down from more creative ages and by a new, typically priestly approach to ethical problems. Scientific works, such as medical and astronomical observations compiled during the Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian periods were copied and grouped into collections; dictionaries and lists of cuneiform signs were composed. Under the First Dynasty of Babylon, most of the great Sumero-Akkadian myths and legends had been rethought, recast into a simple, clear, elegant language and rejuvenated; under the Kassite rule they were edited by generations of temple scribes and couched in a rather sophisticated dialect, ‘Standard Babylonian’, markedly different from the vernacular ‘Middle Babylonian’. The religious and philosophical concepts traditional in Mesopotamia were preserved, but in the relationship between men and gods the stress was put on resignation rather than on confidence, on superstition rather than on faith. Pieces of wisdom literature, such as Ludlul bêl nêmeqi (see p. 101), are highly representative of the new spirit,23 while the current bigotry is reflected in ‘hemerologies’ (i.e. calendars of propitious and ill-fated days) and in collections of incantations against demons. All this was perhaps not very original, but at least the erudite priests of Babylon saved the Mesopotamian culture from oblivion, just as the European monks in the Middle Ages saved the Graeco-Roman culture. Such was the prestige of Mesopotamian literature in the ancient Near East that it was adopted in many countries from Anatolia to Egypt: the Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance, was translated into Hittite and Hurrian, and copies of Babylonian legends were found on the banks of the Nile. Moreover, the Babylonian language was lingua franca in all Oriental courts and diplomatic circles throughout the second half of the second millennium, at a time when Babylonia was, politically speaking, almost inactive. Thus if in the new international concert Mesopotamia played only third or fourth fiddle, she still ranked very high in the field of civilization.

  CHAPTER 16

  KASSITES, ASSYRIANS AND THE ORIENTAL POWERS

  Three out of the four centuries covered by the Kassite period were occupied by violent conflicts between the great nations of the Near East. The main reasons for these conflicts were the conquest of Syria by the Egyptians, the renewed claims of the Hittites over that country and the formation of a large Hurri-Mitannian Kingdom extending from the Mediterranean to the Zagros and acting as an obstacle to Egyptian, Hittite and, later, Assyrian ambitions. But while the territories disputed – Syria and Jazirah – lay within a short distance of Babylon, the Kassite monarchs were either too weak or too wise to allow themselves to become involved in the conflagration, and it was not until the middle of the fourteenth century that Assyrian pressure forced them into war. From 1600 to 1350 B.C. in round figures the Babylonians enjoyed almost complete peace, with the exception of their victorious war against the Sea-Land and of skirmishes along their northern frontier; and when the whole Orient after 1480 B.C. went up in flames they alone sat back, watching what has been aptly described as ‘a scrum of empires’. Because of the comparatively minor role played by Babylonia and, for a long time, by Assyria in the great political turmoil of the second millennium, we need not give here more than a summary of these intricate events, the details of which can be found in any history dealing with the wider aspects of the ancient Near East. Some emphasis, however, will be placed on those events which took place in Mesopotamia proper or influenced the destinies of that country.1

  Egypt versus Mitanni

  The effects of the new political situation arising from the invasion of Egypt by the Hyksôs (c. 1700 B.C.) and from the fall of the First Dynasty of Babylon (1595 B.C.) were not felt immediately. In the light of the few available data, the sixteenth century appears as a relatively stable period during which the nations whose armies were later to stand face to face on the battlefields of Syria were dressing their wounds or furbishing their weapons. In the reign of Amosis I (1576 – 1546 B.C.) the Hyksôs were driven out of the Nile delta, but the first Pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty were too busy enforcing their authority within their own country to engage in foreign adventures, and even the famous campaign of Tuthmosis I across Syria up to the Euphrates (c. 1520 B.C.) was a raid without lasting consequences. In Anatolia the Old Hittite Kingdom was slowly crumbling, undermined by palace revolutions no less than by foreign attacks. The king who had taken Aleppo and Babylon, Mursilis I, was assassinated in 1590 B.C., and his successors surrendered all claims over the territories south of the Taurus mountains. In Assur reigned the descendants of Adasi, the prince who had shaken off the Babylonian yoke; but for a few building inscriptions and for a reference to Puzur-Ashur III in the Synchronistic History2 these princes would remain for us mere names on a list. As for Babylonia, she was being reunited and reorganized by the Kassites, obviously unwilling or unable to indulge in dreams of expansion. Perhaps the most active of all Oriental peoples during that period were the Hurrians and their Mitannian war-lords. While the complete absence of textual evidence precludes any positive statement, we may at least surmise, on the basis of subsequent events, that the Hurri-Mitannians were taking advantage of the vacuum created in northern Syria and northern Iraq by the collapse of the Ham-murabian empire and the withdrawal of the Hittites to build themselves a great kingdom in those regions.

  Then, suddenly, at the dawn of the fifteenth century, trouble broke out in the Near East, coming from an unexpected direction. Sheltered by the deserts which border the Nile valley, Egypt had lived for two thousand years isolated politically, though not commercially, from the rest of the Orient. Its north-eastern frontier, it is true, was vulnerable, and on several occasions the ‘vile ‘Amu’, the ‘Sand-farers’, the hated Asiatics had crossed the isthmus of Suez, made armed incursions into the delta and given cause for serious concern; they had, however, never succeeded in gaining full control of the country. But the long and humiliating Hyksôs episode had taught the Egyptians a lesson: in order to avoid a similar invasion, they must fight the Asiatics in their country of origin and reduce them to servitude. It was with this idea in mind that Tuthmosis III in 1480 B.C. undertook the conquest of Syria, opening new fields to Egyptian ambitions and setting a pattern of Egyptian politics which can be followed throughout history down to the present day. The fact that it took him seventeen years to become the master of Palestine and of the coastal strip of Lebanon and Syria proves that he was up against forces far superior to those of the Syro-Palestinian princelings, or that his opponents received all the support in men, horses and weapons that only a powerful state could afford. The true enemies of Egypt in Syria were neither the Canaanites nor the Amorites, but the Hurri-Mitannians, long entrenched in those regions and now strongly organized. The kingdom of Mitanni occupied the region called Hanigalbat by the Assyrians, that is the steppe between the Euphrates and the Tigris, to the south of the Taurus range, and somewhere in this area – possibly near the head of the Khabur river – lay its capital Washukkanni, the exact location of which has not yet been determined.3 Its nor
thern and southern frontiers were probably as ill-defined for the Hurri-Mitannians as they are for us, though we know from Hittite sources that the Hurrians were established in Armenia, threatening the Hittite kingdom. During the fifteenth century northern Syria to the west and Assyria to the east were under Mitannian allegiance. The first king of Mitanni whose name has survived, Paratarna (c. 1480 B.C.), is mentioned in the statue inscription of Idrimi, King of Alalah, who refers to him as his overlord, as well as in a tablet found at Nuzi, near Kirkuk.4 Also found in this city was the seal of Paratarna's successor, Shaushatar.5 In addition, there is ample evidence of a Hurri-Mitannian political influence in Ugarit, in Qatna and, indirectly, in Palestine. An even greater influence can be detected in northern Iraq, and there is every reason to believe that all the Kings of Assur who reigned between 1500 and 1360 B.C. were the vassals of the King of Mitanni: when one of them dared to revolt, Shaushatar, we are told, plundered Assur and took to Washukkanni ‘a door of silver and gold’.6

  The victories of Tuthmosis III put only part of this vast kingdom under Egyptian domination. In Syria the Mitannians kept Alalah and Karkemish, whence they were able to foster in the districts they had lost rebellions serious enough to justify three Egyptian campaigns under Amenophis II. Under Tuthmosis IV (1425 – 1417 B.C.), this state of permanent though indirect hostility came to an end, and the most friendly relations were established between the courts of Thebes and Washukkanni: ‘seven times’ the pharaoh asked Artatama I of Mitanni for the hand of his daughter,7 and Amenophis III (1417 – 1379 B.C.) married Shutarna's daughter Kilu-Hepa.8 The fear of the Hittites is often given as the reason for this sudden and complete change in politics, but this is by no means certain. In about 1450 B.C. Tudkhaliyas II in Anatolia had founded a new dynasty and immediately reasserted Hittite rights upon the districts south of the Taurus by taking Aleppo – possibly acting in collusion with Tuthmosis III.9 His immediate successors, however, entangled as they were in Anatolian wars, could hardly be considered so dangerous for both Egypt and Mitanni as to provoke a rapprochement between the two countries. The truth, in all probability, is that the Egyptians realized their inability to occupy the whole of Syria, and the Mitannians their inability to regain ground in Palestine and on the Syrian coast; both accepted the status quo and turned an old enmity into a friendly alliance.