by Georges Roux
Camels were bought within my country for less than one shekel of silver on the market place. The sutammu-workers received camels and (even) slaves as a present, the brewer as baksheesh, the gardener as an additional payment!43
The Arabs subdued, Ashurbanipal sent his troops against his former protégé the King of Elam, who had accepted bribes from the rebellious King of Babylon and given him assistance. The vicissitudes of this long Elamite war, and the plots and revolutions which brought three princes in succession to the throne in Susa, are wearisome details that have no place here.44 Suffice it to say that in 639 B.C. the Assyrians won the last battle. The entire land of Elam was devastated and its capital-city thoroughly plundered. This, incidentally, was mere retaliation, for among the spoil were found ‘the silver, gold, property and goods of Sumer and Akkad and of the whole of Babylonia, which the former Kings of Elam had carried off in some seven raids’. The ziqqurat of Susa was destroyed, its sanctuaries violated, its gods taken captive or ‘thrown to the winds’. The vanquished Elamites were even chased beyond the grave, and their country symbolically erased from the map:
‘The sepulchre of their earlier and later kings who did not fear Assur and Ishtar, my lords, and who had plagued the kings, my fathers, I destroyed, I devastated, I exposed to the sun. Their bones, I carried off to Assyria. I laid restlessness upon their shades. I deprived them of food-offerings and libations of water.
‘For a distance of a month and twenty-five days’ journey I devasted the provinces of Elam. Salt and sihlu (a prickly plant) I scattered over them… The dust of Susa, Madaktu, Haltemash and the rest of their cities I gathered together and took to Assyria… The noise of people, the tread of cattle and sheep, the glad shouts of rejoicing, I banished from its fields. Wild asses, gazelles and all kinds of beasts of the plain I caused to lie down among them, as if at home.’45
Thus were avenged countless insults and settled a three-thousand-year-old quarrel between Elamites and Mesopotamians.
Shortly after the sack of Susa Ashurbanipal celebrated his triumph. From his sumptuous palace at Nineveh this learned, magnificent and ruthless monarch could contemplate ‘the whole world’ prostrate at his feet. Three Elamite princes and a ‘King of Arabia’ were, literally, harnessed to his chariot. His treacherous brother had met with a death appropriate to his crimes, and he himself governed the Babylonians. The proud merchants of Tyre and Arvad, the stiff-necked Jews,46 the restive Aramaeans, had been subjugated. The Mannai had been ‘smashed’ and the Cimmerians kept at bay. The rulers of Tabal and Cilicia, at first hostile, had brought their daughters to the royal couch. For having aided Psammetichus, Gyges of Lydia had seen his country set afire by the wild warriors of the north and lost his life, but now Ardys, his son, was asking as a favour to bear the Assyrian yoke. Nineveh was overflowing with the booty taken in Memphis, Thebes, Susa and countless other cities, and the ‘great name of Ashur’ was respected and feared from the green shores of the Aegean to the burning sands of Arabia. Never had the Assyrian empire looked so strong, the Assyrian might so invincible. And yet how many shadows were there to this dazzling picture! The rich land of Egypt lost for ever; Elam conquered but turned into ruins; Babylonia devastated and, with the exception of a pro-Assyrian party of unknown size, inflamed with hatred for the Assyrians; the Phoenicians enslaved and losing their maritime and colonial empire to their Greek rivals; the vassal princes unreliable; the Assyrian army tired and depleted by a century of hard and bloody wars; the frontiers brought back from the Nile to the Dead Sea, from Mount Ararat to the first folds of the Taurus, from the Caspian Sea to the Zagros range; and beyond the Zagros, doubtful allies – the Scythians – and redoubtable foes – the Medes. The Assyrian empire, despite appearances, was weaker than it had ever been, and many must have thought secretly what the Israelite prophets dared to proclaim:
And it shall come to pass
that all they that look upon thee shall flee from thee,
and say: Nineveh is laid waste: who will bemoan her?…
There shall the fire devour thee;
the sword shall cut thee off,
it shall eat thee up like a cankerworm…
There is no healing of thy bruise;
thy wound is grievous:
all that hear the bruit of thee shall clap the hands over thee:
for upon whom hath not thy wickedness passed continually?47
CHAPTER 21
THE GLORY OF ASSYRIA
The reign of Ashurbanipal, like the reign of Hammurabi, is a momentous period in the history of ancient Iraq and calls for a pause. Having described at length how the Assyrian empire was formed, to be logical we should now examine what went on behind the façade of wars and diplomatic moves. What was, for instance, the social and economic structure of this vast political unit embracing the entire Fertile Crescent and stretching – at least for a while – from the Caspian Sea to the Nile valley? What were the materials, the routes and the volume of its internal and external trades? What ties linked in time of peace Nineveh with the vassal-states? What influence did the Assyrian domination have on the material and spiritual life of the Babylonians, Syrians, Iranians and other subject peoples and on the life of the Assyrians themselves? In short, what was the Assyrian empire?
This extremely difficult question could only be answered if the Assyrian empire were apprehended in its entirety and in great detail, but this would require much more material than is at present available. The peripheral areas, in particular, are poorly documented, since very few Assyrian administrative centres in Syria, Phoenicia, Anatolia, Armenia and Iran have been excavated, or even located on the map. For the moment, the bulk of our information comes from the state archives of Assur, Nineveh and Kalhu and from various official or private documents found in a few other cities of Assyria proper and Babylonia. Numerous and interesting as these texts are, they only provide occasional glimpses at the distant provinces, and, even with regard to the heart of the empire, the knowledge that can be derived from them on such topics as social and economic conditions, land tenure and internal trade, for example, remains very limited and full of gaps or uncertainties.1 All things considered, the subjects on which we are best informed are the king and his court, the central and regional administration, the army and, of course, the arts, and as these subjects constitute, after all, the main components of Assyria's vanished might and everlasting glory, it is on them that we shall concentrate. In a second chapter we shall take advantage of Ashurbanipal's famous library to describe the stage reached by the various Mesopotamian sciences in the seventh century B.C. By so doing we hope to dispel an impression which is all too readily gained from the reading of endless war-records: it would be utterly wrong to regard as a pack of wolves2 an intelligent and often highly civilized people less thirsty of blood than of knowledge and culture.
The Assyrian State
‘Great king, mighty king, king of the Universe, king of the country of Assur’, the man who sat on the throne in Nineveh embodied all the overwhelming power of a preying nation and assumed the highest religious and governmental responsibilities. The officials who assisted him, the provincial governors who obeyed his orders, the ambassadors who conveyed his messages were not his ministers but merely his ‘servants’. In many ways the king was the state. Yet the difference between an Ashurbanipal, absolute master of millions of people, and the ensi of an early Sumerian city-state, who ruled over a few acres of land, lay in the extent of their authority, not in its nature, and ideally the King of Assyria was only a human being selected among others to act on behalf of the gods for the benefit of the community.3 He was the earthly representative and instrument of Ashur, just as Gudea of Lagash was the representative and instrument of Ningirsu. Indeed, before Shamshi-Adad I in the eighteenth century B.C. took the title of ‘king’ (sharrum) all the early rulers of Assyria called themselves ishakkum (= ensi) of the god Ashur, and this appellation remained for a long time in the long list of Assyrian royal titles.
The pr
inciple of divine election was much too old and theoretical ever to be questioned, but a principle of co-optation, which probably went back to the times when the Assyrian king ‘lived in a tent’ and was just a sheikh among others, explains both the limmu system – whereby high officials gave their name to reignal years – and the relative instability of the monarchy. The sovereign chose his successor from among his sons, yet his choice – although allegedly inspired by Ashur and confirmed by Sin and Shamash through oracles – had to be endorsed by other members of the royal family and by the nobility of the empire, and the domestic peace of the kingdom depended on whether they accepted it or not. The palace revolutions which, as we have seen, followed upon the reigns of Ashur-nirâri V and Sennacherib were essentially due to jealousy between brothers and to some high officials supporting other princes than the king designate. On the whole, however, the hereditary system was respected, and in their inscriptions several Assyrian monarchs take great pride in their long line of royal ancestors going back, in some cases, to the mythical hero Adapa.
Once chosen, the crown prince left his father's palace and entered the bît redûti, or ‘House of Succession’, situated in Tarbisu (modern Sherif Khan) on the Tigris, a few miles upstream of Nineveh.4 There he was prepared for his royal functions and gradually entrusted with important military and administrative duties, which included replacing the king as head of the state in time of war. Some princes received a very thorough education. Ashurbanipal, for instance, describes his scholarly and military training as follows:
‘The art of the Master Adapa I acquired: the hidden treasure of all scribal knowledge, the signs of heaven and earth… and I have studied the heavens with the learned masters of oil divination; I have solved the laborious problems of division and multiplication, which were not clear; I have read the artistic script of Sumer and the obscure Akkadian, which is hard to master, taking pleasure in the reading of the stones from before the flood… This is what was done of all my days: I mounted my steed, I rode joyfully, I went up to the hunting lodge (?). I held the bow, I let fly the arrow, the sign of my valour. I hurled heavy lances like a javelin. Holding the reins like a driver, I made the wheels go round. I learned to handle the aritu and the kababu shields like a heavy-armed bowman… At the same time I was learning royal decorum, walking in the kingly ways. I stood before the king, my begetter, giving commands to the nobles. Without my consent, no governor was appointed; no prefect was installed in my absence.’5
When the king died, mourned by all Assyrians, he was buried not in Nineveh or Kalhu, but in the oldest capital-city of the kingdom, Assur, where five heavy sarcophagi of stone, which once contained the bodies of Ashur-bêl-kala, Ashurnasirpal, Shamshi-Adad V, and perhaps of Sennacherib and Esarhaddon's wife, Esharhamat, but which had been plundered in antiquity, were found in vaulted chambers underneath the Old Palace. A recently published tablet indicates that the bodies of deceased kings most probably floated in oil in their sarcophagus.6 An idea of the treasures contained in Assyrian royal tombs is provided by the startling discovery made at Nimrud in 1989 by a team of Iraqi archaeologists. There, under the floor of the domestic wing of Ashurnasirpal's palace were three tombs which had not been plundered. One of them yielded the skeleton of a man accompanied by no less than 200 pieces of gold jewellery. In another tomb were two female bodies, tentatively identified as those of Taliya, the wife of Sargon II, and Yaba, probably the spouse of Shalmaneser V. According to one of the most reliable reports,7 this tomb contained some 200 gold jewels, such as necklaces, earrings, rings, bracelets, anklets and garment fasteners, as well as hundreds of small gold dress decorations and three solid gold bowls. To this must be added an ivory box, a bronze and ivory mirror and two alabaster jars with remnants of food for the after-life. The third tomb was that of Ashurnasirpal's wife Mulisu, but the great stone sarcophagus in the middle was empty, suggesting that the queen's body had been transferred elsewhere. Yet, 440 items of gold jewellery, including a royal crown, were found in three bronze coffins surrounded by remains of several skeletons. The total weight of gold found in these three tombs has been estimated at fifty-seven kilos, but the real value of these objects lies in their beauty, the attractive marriage of gold with ivory, alabaster, glass and semi-precious coloured stones and the skill with which they were fashioned: in some pieces of filigree work some threads were so thin that they could be seen only with a magnifying lens. Further excavations in search of other tombs were being planned when the Gulf War broke out.
The coronation followed the royal funeral after a short interval and took place in Assur. It was a simple ceremony. Carried on a portable throne and preceded by a priest who called out ‘Ashur is king! Ashur is king!’, the crown prince went to Ekur, the temple of the national god. He entered the sanctuary, offered a golden bowl full of oil, a mana of silver and a richly embroidered garment. Prostrate before the deity, he was anointed by the high-priest and given the insignia of kingship: ‘the crown of Ashur and the sceptre of Ninlil’,* while these words were prononounced:
‘The diadem on thy head – may Ashur and Ninlil, the lords of the diadem, put it upon thee for a hundred years.
Thy foot in Ekur and thy hands stretched towards Ashur, thy god – may they be favoured.
Before Ashur, thy god, may thy priesthood and the priesthood of thy sons find favour.
With thy straight sceptre make thy land wide.
May Ashur grant thee quick satisfaction, justice and peace.’8
The new king then proceeded to the palace, where the nobles and officials did homage to him and relinquished their badges of office. In most cases this gesture was purely symbolic, but it was meant to remind all those present that they were the king's servants and could be dismissed at any time. We may safely assume that the ceremony was followed by public rejoicing.
The King of Assyria governed in much the same way as all Mesopotamian monarchs, although the state letters suggest that more initiative was left to local authorities than, for instance, in the days of Hammurabi. Day by day he was kept informed of all matters of importance arising within the empire and in foreign countries; he gave orders and advice, appointed administrators, dealt with complaints, received and entertained high officials and foreign ambassadors, and carried on a voluminous correspondence with the aid of an army of scribes. As the supreme chief of the army, he drew up plans for military campaigns, inspected the troops and often personally conducted the operations. Off the battlefield he displayed his courage and skill by shooting wild game with the bow from his chariot, or by fighting lions with the spear in the palace grounds. Office work, receptions, hunting, these activities would be comparable to those of a modern head of state but for the fact that the King of Assyria was also a priest and as such was the slave of a complicated system of magico-religious practices which took much of his time and added to the heavy burden of his daily tasks. As the first servant of the gods and head of the clergy, he saw that temples were built or maintained, appointed some of the priests and took an active part in the main religious ceremonies of Assyria and Babylonia, such as the feast of the New Moon or the New Year Festival, as well as in certain rituals which seem to have been designed especially for him, in particular the tâkultu (‘eating’) ritual – a banquet offered to all the gods in exchange for their protection – and the bit rimki (‘bathhouse’) ritual – a royal bath during which prayers were addressed to various deities.9 As the representative of his people, the king was ‘manipulated like a talisman – or he became the scapegoat charged before the gods with all the sins of the community’.10 He had to submit to occasional fasting, ritual shaving and other humiliations, and when the omens were desperately bad for Assyria he escaped death only through the subterfuge of a ‘substitute king’. We have already seen (p. 183) an example of this strange Mesopotamian institution in the Isin-Larsa period. A letter written during the reign of Ashurbani-pal alludes to a similar situation:11 it appears that to save the life of Shamash-shum-ukin a certain Damqi, the son of
the superintendent of Akkad, had been chosen by a prophetess in a trance, given a lady of the court in marriage and put to death with his wife after a short ‘reign’. This was but an extreme and exceedingly rare application of a widespread belief. The Mesopotamians believed that the gods expressed their will in many ways and were constantly on the watch for signs and portents. Whether it was based on the movements of stars and planets, the interpretation of dreams and of natural phenomena, the configuration of the liver of sacrificed sheep, the flight of birds, the birth of monsters, the behaviour of drops of oil thrown on water, or the aspect of flames, divination was in Assyria a highly developed and offical ‘science’.12 The king was duly warned, verbally or by letter, of favourable and unfavourable omens, and no decision of importance was taken without first consulting the barû-priests (or diviners) or the royal astrologers. Here are two examples taken from the royal correspondence. Bêl-ushezib writes to Esarhaddon:
When a star shines forth like a torch from the sunrise and in the sunset fades away, the army of the enemy will attack in force.
When the south wind rises suddenly and having risen continues, and as it continues becomes a gale, and from a gale increases to a tempest – a day of destruction – the prince, on whatever expedition he goes, will obtain wealth.13
