Ancient Iraq

by Georges Roux

  From Zakir to Ashurbanipal:

  On the 15th day of the month of Tebet, in the middle watch, there was an eclipse of the moon. It began on the east (side) and turned to the west. The evil disturbance which is in the land of Amurru and its territory is its own harm. The disturbance is the fault of the King of Amurru and his land for allowing the enemy of the king, my lord, to be in the land of Amurru. Let the king, my lord, do as he wishes. The hand of the king, my lord, shall capture him. The king shall accomplish his defeat…14

  It would be a mistake, however, to think that the home and foreign policy of Assyria was ruled by superstition, when all we know of her history bears the print of realism. Astrologers and diviners gave the king a general set of circumstances within which he felt free to ‘do as he wished’, and there were even cases when he asked for several omens in succession until he obtained one that fitted his plans.

  To run his vast empire the King of Assyria relied upon an administration which has been compared with that of the Ottoman empire (eunuchs included),15 but was probably much more efficient. Around him were high dignitaries, such as the turtânu (commander-in-chief), the rab shaqê (chief cup-bearer), the nâgir ekalli (palace herald), the abarakku (superintendent) and the sukallu dannu (great chancellor), not to mention lesser officials who looked after the palace, its stables and its stores. Those who bore these time-honoured titles were not ministers in the modern sense of the term. With the exception of the turtânu, they seem to have acted mainly as advisers and to have performed various duties as the occasion arose, including provincial government. The latter, however, was generally entrusted to other high officials whom we have already met under Tiglath-pileser III, and we find here well-defined functions (see above, page 306) and a more firmly structured organization, for under the province governors (bêl pihâti or shaknu) came the district chiefs (rab alâni, literally ‘chief of towns’) and under these the ‘mayors’ (hazannu) and the Councils of Elders of small towns and villages. The higher officials resided in comfortable houses in capital cities16 or in provincial palaces. They had their own courts and their own lands, employed hundreds of workers and slaves and could raise substantial armies if they so wished. Powerful and rich, they might have threatened the throne – as indeed they had done in the past – if the king had not kept them under control by a mixture of fear and rewards: fear of breaking the oath of obedience (adû) they had sworn and of being dismissed or even put to death (though there is no evidence that capital punishment was ever applied to them), and rewards in the form of grants of royal estates,17 carefully spread over several provinces, distributions of war booty and shares in the multiple taxes exacted in Assyria and vassal countries. For greater safety some posts were divided and there was, for instance, under Sennacherib a turtânu ‘of the right’ and a turtânu ‘of the left’.

  A similar control was exerted by the king over the great cities of the empire and their population of priests, diviners, scribes, physicians, artisans and artists which, like all intelligentsia, occasionally tended to be troublesome. They too had sworn the adû and could be severely punished if they revolted, but they were the object of royal attention and favours. It is to this urban ‘bourgeoisie’ that Sargon addressed his account of the great campaign in Kurdistan, and some cities, like Assur, enjoyed almost complete freedom whilst others, even in Babylonia, were exempted from taxes, tolls and corvées.

  Owing to the imprecision of terms and relative scarcity of documents, the economic conditions in the Assyrian empire remain imperfectly understood. The basis of the economy was, as always, agriculture, industry being reduced to artisan workshops around the cities. In theory, all the land belonged to the king, and indeed much of it did and was worked by peasants at his service or by people performing their ilku, but we learn from a census discovered at Harran and from land sale contracts18 that there were small private landowners and fairly large estates belonging to the royal family or the temples, or purchased by high officials. Of internal trade we know almost nothing, probably because from the eighth century onwards most business transactions were couched in Aramaic on parchment or papyrus and have therefore perished.

  Encouraged by the kings,19 foreign trade was flourishing, involving Egypt, the Gulf countries via Dilmun and the Aegean region visited by Phoenician ships. The goods most frequently exchanged were metals and rare items such as cotton, lint, dyes, precious stones and ivory.20 It must be noted that their territorial conquests had given the Assyrians free access to the iron mines of Lebanon and the silver mines of Anatolia. Silver was used for payment in all transactions. Taxes were levied on merchandise that transited through the empire.

  The population of Assyria was divided into three categories: free men (whatever their social status and including nomads), people who depended on the State or on rich landowners (the word mushkênu is used in some texts) and ‘slaves’ recruited among endebted families and prisoners of war; but slaves benefited from legal rights and could rise to important posts in the administration. To designate the inhabitants of their country the Assyrian officials only used vague terms such as nishê (‘the people’), napshâti (‘human beings’) and ardâni (‘servants’) without distinction of rank, function or profession.21 This suggests that in the eyes of bureaucrats the whole population of the empire was regarded as a human mass entirely at the king's service (dullu sharri), a service which included not only corvées for public works but also participation in what has been called ‘the national industry of Assyria’: war.

  The Assyrian Army

  Called up almost every year during three centuries, driven from the snow-capped mountains of Armenia and Iran to the swamps of the Sea-Land and the burning sands of Egypt, indefatigable and nearly always victorious, the army was the unrivalled instrument of Assyrian might.22 Like the Macedonian phalanx and the Roman legion, the secret of its success lay in the quality of its troops, the superiority of its weapons and, as we may well imagine, the rigidity of its discipline.

  Originally, the Assyrian Army was recruited among the peasants of northern Iraq, a mixed race of born warriors who combined the boldness of the bedouin with the tenacity of the farmer and the toughness of the highlander.

  Since the reign of Tiglathpileser III, however, there were three categories of soldiers who may be called professional soldiers, conscripts and reserves.23 Professional soldiers, selected, recruited and stationed in the main cities of Assyria and in all provinces of the empire, formed the bulk of the standing army (kisir sharruti). Some of them were Assyrian by birth but the majority came from formerly independent countries such as Babylonia or the Syrian kingdoms. Aramaeans were predominant, and among them the Itusi' and Guraya tribes provided numerous and much appreciated shock-troops. There were also auxiliary troops from among the Medes, Cimmerians, Arabs and even Elamites. Some units of the standing army formed the royal guard. The conscripts in turn may be divided into two groups: the king's soldiers and the reserves. The king's soldiers (sabê sharri) were generally young men who were temporarily mobilized in fulfilment of their ilku duty. They too were recruited throughout the empire and from all classes of society; they received a daily ration and waited, at home or in camps, to be called up, if needed, for the duration of a campaign. The reserves (sha kutalli, literally ‘those behind’) were men destined to be mobilized whenever necessary, to replace losses, for instance. Finally, all males of a population could be levied, together with the above listed categories of troops, in case of exceptionally long or dangerous conflict. In some wars, as in the Egyptian expedition, the King of Assyria asked his vassals to put their armed forces at his disposal.

  This complex recruitment system had enormous advantages. For one thing, there were troops in every part of the empire, ready to quell a local rebellion or to repel a sudden attack on the Assyrian border. Secondly, the existence of a standing army made it possible to rapidly organize the forces that were required for a major military operation and to fight prolonged wars, whereas with the old system s
ome campaigns had to be cut short so that the men could resume their agricultural activities.24 We must add that the Assyrian army had other major assets, notably a well-organized system of communications by fast couriers or sometimes fire signals, and a state security and espionage system that would compare favourably with that of modern nations.25

  Despite the wealth of war-records that have survived, we know surprisingly little about the size, organization and tactical methods of the Army. The number of soldiers engaged in action is very rarely given – Ashurnasirpal once speaks of 50,000 men; at the battle of Qarqar, Shalmaneser III fielded 120,000 men to the enemy's 70,000 troops – and if the enemy losses are grossly inflated, the casualties suffered by the Assyrians are practically never mentioned. If an overall figure were requested, we would venture to guess that in the seventh century B.C. the King of Assyria was in a position to mobilize an army of 400,000 to 500,000 men, reserves excluded. There are several gaps in our knowledge of the military hierarchy: from the turtânu and the rab shaqê (who often acted as his lieutenant) we pass almost immediately to the ‘captains of seventy’ and the ‘captains of fifty’. We learn, however, that there were various grades among the cavalry officers, for instance, and that the king's bodyguard, the ‘dagger-men’, and other units had their own ‘colonels’. The battles are invariably described in vague, though colourful terms, so that we are left in the dark as to the tactics applied, and only on rare occasions do we find references to ambushes and surprise attacks. All considered, our main source of information remains the innumerable scenes of war sculptured on slabs in the palaces of Nimrud, Khorsabad and Nineveh or carved in ‘repoussé’ on the bronze gates of Balawat.26 The infantrymen depicted fall into two categories: light infantry (bowmen and slingers) and heavy infantry (lancers). The light infantrymen were clad in a short tunic and had no defensive weapon, whereas the lancers were protected by a coat-of-mail and by a round or oblong shield, sometimes taller than themselves. Slingers were, as a rule, bare-headed, but archers and lancers wore a tall conical helmet or, more rarely, a crested helmet resembling the Greek one. Besides their distinctive weapons,27 most infantrymen carried a short sword, a dagger or a mace. All of them, at least since Tiglathpileser III, had half-boots laced in front. Cavalrymen wore a similar ‘uniform’ and were armed with a small bow or a long spear. They rode without a saddle or stirrups, but in late Sargonid times horses were protected by armour, so that both riders and mounts strangely resemble our medieval knights. A third category of soldiers fought on light, two-wheeled chariots drawn by two or three horses, each chariot carrying three to four men: a driver, one or two bowmen and two shield-bearers. Male and female servants, as well as wagons loaded with supplies and baggage followed the Army in campaign. Rivers were crossed either in ordinary boats or in reed-boats sealed with bitumen (the qûfa of the Arabs, still in use on the Upper Tigris), or on inflated goatskins.

  One of the major assets of the Assyrian Army was its equipment in efficient siege-weapons. Many towns, particularly in Armenia and Syria, were strongly fortified, and to capture them was no mean task. But the Army included an important corps of engineers who filled in the moats, threw earthworks against the ramparts and dug tunnels, while the assailants shot arrows from fixed or mobile towers, battered weak points, doors or walls with enormous rams and progressed under cover of large shields. The besieged enemy tried to resist by hurling oil fire and torches on the war engines or by entwining the rams with chains. The final assault was made through breaches or from ladders. Once the town had been taken and looted and its inhabitants massacred or captured, it was either set on fire, dismantled and razed, or fortified anew, depending on its strategic interest.

  War being an object of immense pride to the Assyrian monarchs, the official sculptors have depicted it in all its multiple aspects and with a profusion of detail. Scores of reliefs, obviously intended to illustrate the written descriptions that ran endlessly on orthostats, on steles, on monoliths, on mountain rocks and around statues, represent soldiers parading, fighting, killing, plundering, pulling down city-walls and escorting prisoners. In this series of pictorial war-records without equivalent in any country, among this almost monotonous display of horrors must be set apart some reliefs which have no parallel in the inscriptions and show soldiers at rest in their camps and under their tents, grooming horses, slaughtering cattle, cooking food, eating, drinking, playing games and dancing. These little scenes teeming with life give the tragedy of war a refreshing human touch. Through the ruthless killer of yore emerges a familiar and congenial figure: the humble, simple, light-hearted, ‘rank-and-file’ of all armies, past, present and future.

  Assyrian Arts

  The Assyrian Army has vanished long ago, routed and destroyed in the great disaster of the years 614 – 609 B.C., but the monuments of Assyrian art have mercifully survived, no less impressive by their quality than by their number.

  Ever since the colossi of stone ‘whose icy eyes had contemplated Nineveh’ reached Europe for the first time, over a hundred years ago, the words ‘Assyrian arts’ have been suggestive of sculpture and particularly of reliefs. Sculpture in the round is poorly represented on the banks of the Tigris during the first millennium B.C. For some unknown reason, the capital cities of Assyria have yielded very few statues, and the best ones – such as the statue of Ashurnasirpal in the British Museum – are conventional, lifeless and inferior in many respects to the works of the great Neo-Sumerian masters. Reliefs, on the contrary, are always interesting, often attain to real beauty and undoubtedly represent ‘the greatest and most original achievement of the Assyrians’.28

  The technique of relief is almost as old as Mesopotamia itself, but it was for a long time confined to steles set up in temples. It found its first expression in the ‘hunting stele’ of Warka (Uruk or Jemdat Nasr period) and was carried on through such masterpieces as the ‘Stele of the Vultures’ of Eannatum and the ‘Stele of Victory’ of Narâm-Sin down to the Kassite and Middle Babylonian kudurrus. The Assyrians followed the tradition with a few religious subjects (e.g., the god Ashur as vegetation-god in the Berlin Museum),29 but soon broke away from it to concentrate on representations of the king. The imperial steles, usually erected in conquered countries to commemorate Assyrian victories, are at best honest works of art, more remarkable perhaps for their historical value than for the quality of their execution. Reliefs carved on slabs, on the other hand, are probably of foreign origin. The idea of applying sculpture to the decoration of architectural elements seems to have originated in Anatolia among the Hittites, who, as early as the second millennium B.C., adorned the walls of their palaces with ‘orthostats’. In the hills of their own country the Assyrians found in abundance a calcareous rock, rather porous and brittle but sufficient for most purposes, or they imported better materials from abroad. They had unlimited labour to quarry and transport the blocks, excellent artists to draw the subjects, skilful artisans to handle the chisel. They adopted the Hittite invention and raised it to an extraordinary degree of perfection. The colossal, yet lively winged bull-men and lion-men who guarded the gates of their palaces and seemed to emerge from them are treated with a harmonious sobriety in their masses and a wealth of precision in their detail which are probably unique. The slabs carved in low relief, which lined rooms and corridors and were made to be looked at more closely, are striking for the perfect balance of their composition, the sharpness of observation they reveal – especially where animals are concerned – and the sense of movement which pervades them. This is really ‘grand art’, superior to all that the world had already produced in this domain and second only to the sculpture of classical Greece.

  While it is impossible for us to give here even a brief analysis of Assyrian reliefs, we would like to underline a peculiarity of this form of art which sets it apart from similar productions of the ancient Near East. All the monuments of Mesopotamia had hitherto possessed a religious significance and revolved, in one way or other, around the gods. In Assyrian
sculpture, however, the central subject is usually the king – not a king supernatural in heroism and in size as the god-king of Egyptian reliefs, but a human, albeit dominating and exceedingly valorous, monarch. Moreover, while the king is portrayed parading, hunting, resting, receiving homage or tribute, or leading his armies in war, he is practically never shown performing his priestly functions. Genii, demi-gods, heroes are also represented, but the gods are conspicuously absent – except on rock sculptures – or reduced to their symbols: a spear stuck in an altar or a winged disc in the sky. Since kingship in Assyria was just as immersed in religion as in Sumer and Babylonia, there is only one possible explanation: the sculptured slabs which adorned the royal palaces were a form of political propaganda; narrative as much as decorative, they were intended not to please or placate the gods, but to inspire respect, admiration and fear in the human race. From a general point of view, the work of the Assyrian sculptors appears as one of the first attempts ever made to ‘humanize’ the arts and to deprive them of magical or religious meaning inherited from prehistoric ages.

  It had been known for a long time that some statues and reliefs were painted. On the other hand, brightly coloured glazed bricks bearing ornamental or pictorial motifs were used in temples and palaces forming, as it were, a transition between reliefs and frescoes.30 On the basis of recent excavations we may now assume that mural paintings adorned the walls of most, if not all, official buildings and of many private residences. Because the paint was laid on fragile plaster, it has generally disappeared, but at Khorsabad, Nimrud and Tell Ahmar (Til-Barsip) large fragments have been copied in situ or removed to museums. Mural paintings, like reliefs, had deep roots in the country and, at least in Assyria, favoured profane subjects. These varied according to the size and function of the room. They ranged from simple friezes of geometrical designs to elaborate panels covering the greater part of the walls and combining floral motifs, animals, scenes of war and hunting scenes and royal effigies, arranged in horizontal bands. From the examples recovered Assyrian painting appears as being by no means inferior to Assyrian sculpture, and the frescoes of Tell Ahmar,31 display a great freedom of expression as well as high qualities of craftsmanship.