Ancient Iraq

by Georges Roux

  Oppressed, impoverished and partly ‘denationalized’, such was Mesopotamia, it would appear, in the last decades of the fourth century B.C., when Alexander came to give her a new, though entirely different life.

  The Hellenistic Period

  The battle of Gaugamela,16 on 1 October 331 B.C., opened for Alexander the road to Babylonia and Persia, as the battle of Issus, two years before, had opened for him the road to Syria and Egypt. The Persian troops stationed in Babylon surrendered without fighting, and the Macedonian conqueror made a triumphal entry into the old Semitic metropolis. Realizing, like Cyrus, that he could never rule over ‘a hundred different nations’ unless he won their hearts, he made sacrifice to Marduk and ordered the rebuilding of the temples thought to have been destroyed by Xerxes – a gigantic task which was never to be completed.17 The Babylonians hailed him as their liberator and immediately acknowledged his kingship. After a month's stay in Babylon he proceeded to Susa and thereafter embarked upon the great armed expedition to the East which took him as far as the River Ganges. When he returned, nine years later, his mind was full of grandiose projects: Babylon and Alexandria in Egypt were to become the twin capital-cities of his empire; they would be linked by sea around the Arabian peninsula, shortly to be conquered; the coasts of the Indian Ocean would be explored; the Euphrates would be rendered navigable up to the Gulf; a great port would be built at Babylon and another at the mouth of the river. But most of these plans remained a dead letter: on 13 June 323 B.C. Alexander died in Babylon, probably of malaria, at the age of thirty-two.

  At that date Alexander's only son, the future Alexander IV, was not yet born, and it was his brother, Philip Arrhideus, who was proclaimed king in Macedonia. But the authority of this young and mentally retarded prince remained purely nominal. The real power lay in the hands of Alexander's generals – the diadochi – who, having divided the empire between themselves, struggled for forty-two years to prevent each other from reconstructing it. During this period – one of the most complex in the history of antiquity – Babylon changed hands several times. At first the seat of a military junta presided over by the regent Perdiccas, it was allotted to Seleucus, chief of the Macedonian cavalry, by his colleagues in 321 B.C., after they had murdered Perdiccas. In 316 B.C. Antigonus, the ambitious satrap of Phrygia, dislodged Seleucus from Babylon, forcing him to take refuge with Ptolemy in Egypt. But Seleucus came back in 312 B.C., recovered his satrapy, and for four years successfully protected it from repeated attacks launched by Antigonus and his son Demetrius. It was a fierce and bitter war which brought terrible suffering upon Babylon and its territory – ‘there was weeping and mourning in the land’ repeats as a leitmotif a Babylonian chronicle describing these events.18 Finally, Antigonus was defeated and killed at Ipsus in Phrygia (301 B.C.), and Seleucus added to Babylonia the satrapy of Syria and the eastern half of Asia Minor. The war, however, continued, this time in the west, between Seleucus, Ptolemy, Demetrius and the Macedonian ruler of Thrace, Lysimachus. In September 281 B.C.,19 a few months after he had defeated Lysimachus at Korupedion (near Sardis), Seleucus was stabbed to death by a son of Ptolemy. He had taken the title of king in 305 B.C., but for the Babylonians the ‘years of Silukku’, the Seleucid era, began on the first New Year's Day following his return from Egypt: 3 April 311 B.C. It was the first time that a continuous dating system was used in Mesopotamia.

  After Ipsus Seleucus ruled directly or indirectly over a huge territory extending from the borders of India to those of Egypt and from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf. But this empire lacked cohesion and started disintegrating almost as soon as it was formed. By 200 B.C. the descendants of Seleucus had lost practically all their provinces and protectorates beyond the Taurus and the Zagros, and after Babylonia had been conquered by the Parthians (126 B.C.), all that remained was a small state in northern Syria, torn apart by dynastic crises, which fell an easy prey to the Romans in 63 B.C. In actual fact, ever since Seleucus founded Antioch on the Orontes, in May 300 B.C., and made it his favourite residence, the Seleucid kingdom had always been essentially a Syrian kingdom. If we except an unsuccessful attempt made by Antiochus III (222 – 187 B.C.) to recover the Eastern districts, the diplomatic and military activities of its rulers were almost entirely absorbed in an endless conflict with the Ptolemies of Egypt for the possession of the Phoenician ports and hinterland. This meant peace for the Babylonians who must have been relieved to see the ravages of war removed from their own country to ‘(the country) across the river’ (ebir nâri), as they now called Syria, but it also meant that Babylon lost the privileged position it would have held had it remained the capital-city of the Macedonian dominion, as geography and history destined it to be. For many years to come, the world's political, cultural and economic centre had shifted from the banks of the Euphrates to the shores of the Mediterranean.

  Undoubtedly the most durable achievement of Alexander and his successors was the foundation in Egypt and Western Asia of numerous cities organized on the model of the Greek poleis and populated by Greco-Macedonian settlers as well as by Oriental subjects. Whether by so doing they merely wished to create a network of political and military strongholds, or aimed at promoting the Greek culture and way of life in the Orient is a much debated problem.20 But the results obtained are obvious: the Near East became ‘hellenized’ to various degrees, and the pattern of urban life in these regions was profoundly altered. We know of at least a dozen such cities in Mesopotamia21 alone, from Edessa-Antioch in the extreme north to Alexandria-Charax on or near the Gulf. They were, as a rule, built beside or on top of ancient towns and villages, though their layout and architectural characteristics were entirely new. Seleucia-on-the-Tigris (Tell ‘Umar, opposite Ctesiphon), founded by Antiochus I in 274 B.C., probably on the site of Semitic Upâ (Opis), was the largest city not only of Mesopotamia but of the whole Seleucid kingdom, with a population of about 600,000. Aerial photographs clearly show its ‘grid-plan’, the blocks of habitations being separated by straight avenues and streets crossing each other at right angles. Excavations conducted there before the war and since 1964 have uncovered a number of buildings and numerous objects (clay figurines, statues, coins, jewels, pottery) in the Seleucian city, the ruins of which were buried under an equally large and rich city of the Parthian period.22 A similar situation confronted archaeologists at Dura-Europus (Salahiyeh, on the Euphrates, fifty kilometres upstream of ancient Mari), and here again remains of Greek monuments – a fortress, a palace and at least one temple – could be traced underneath the Parthian buildings.23

  These Hellenistic cities were all situated on the great trade-routes which linked Central Asia with the Mediterranean, and thrived on transit operations. Seleucia, in particular, was the meeting-point of two land-routes coming from India (one through Bactria and the north of Iran, the other through Persepolis and Susa), of the important sea-route from India through the Gulf, and of several tracks crossing the Arabian peninsula. From Seleucia gold, ivory, spices, incense and precious stones, as well as the products of Mesopotamia itself – wheat, barley, dates, woollens and bitumen – were transported to Syria, either along the Euphrates via Dura-Europus, or along the Tigris and across Jazirah via Nisibin (Antioch in Mygdonia) and Edessa. Commercial intercourse between Europe, Asia and part of Africa was extremely active in Hellenistic times, and there is little doubt as to the prosperity of the Seleucid kingdom in general – at least during the third century B.C. Our information on Babylonia is regrettably scanty, but the few commercial texts published (mainly from Uruk) show that a fair amount of business was carried out even within the older towns, and that prices had fallen much below the levels they had reached in Achaemenian times.24

  The new economic and demographic conditions prevalent in Seleucid Mesopotamia exerted a deep, though diverse influence upon the older cities. Thus Nimrud owed to its situation on the Tigris route its revival as a small but prosperous village. Similarly, Nineveh, Mari and Arslan-Tash were reoccupied after long years of aba
ndonment.25 Ur died slowly, probably killed by competition from Alexandria-Charax as much as by hydrographic changes in the region. Babylon was severely affected. It is true that sporadic efforts were made by the Macedonian rulers to revive and modernize the half-ruined city. In the last royal inscription in Akkadian that we possess Antiochus I (281 – 260 B.C.) calls himself ‘provider of Esagila and Ezida‘, like the Chaldaean kings, and declares that he ‘formed with his august hands’ and brought from ‘Hatti’ (Syria) the first bricks of these temples.26 A tablet dated in the reign of Seleucus III (225 – 223 B.C.) shows that regular offerings were still made to a number of Babylonian gods in their own shrines. Remains of Hellenistic architecture were discovered on the mound of Bâbil and on the site of Nebuchadrezzar's palace. Under Antiochus IV (175 – 164 B.C.) – the king who did most to propagate the Greek culture – Babylon received a gymnasium and a remarkable Greek theatre, later enlarged by the Parthians.27 Yet not only was Babylon no longer the seat of the royal government, but it was already partly deserted, a great number of its inhabitants having been transferred to Seleucia when the city was founded.28 We do not know what happened in Sippar, Kish and Nippur, but Uruk seems to have enjoyed considerable prosperity, judging from the impressive monuments erected during the Seleucid period. A huge terrace constructed around the E-Anna ziqqurat completely transformed the sacred area, while in other parts of the city were built two large temples: Irigal (or, better, Esh-gal), dedicated to Ishtar, and the so-called Bît rêsh, dedicated to Anu.29 Both had the conventional features of Babylonian temples, though a long inscription on glazed bricks which ran on the walls of the cult-room of Irigal was, significantly, in Aramaic script and language. Equally typical of the period are the Greek names conferred by the kings to the two city-magistrates who built these temples Anu-uballit Nicarachus and Anu-uballit Kephalon. A study of contracts on clay tablets and of bullae* bearing Greek or Aramaic inscriptions shows that Uruk (called by the Greek Orchoi) gave shelter to an important Greek community, but retained its ancient laws and customs and was exempted from certain royal taxes. Most of the business transactions were carried out by the temple organization in the activities of which ordinary citizens could be financially interested by means of a system not very different from our modern shareholding.30 The existence of semi-independent temple-states is well attested in Asia Minor in Hellenistic times, and it is probable that Uruk owed a similar status to the liberal policy of the Seleucids.

  It was in temples like those of Uruk, Sippar, Babylon and Barsippa that the Sumero-Akkadian culture was preserved. Throughout the Seleucid period temple astronomers and astrolo-gers continued to record on tablets the motions of celestial bodies, while temple scribes wrote down contemporary events in the form of chronicles and copied a number of very ancient myths, rituals, hymns and omens. It would seem a priori that the much-advanced Greek culture, which flourished in cities such as Seleucia, exerted a strong attraction on the less conservative members of the Babylonian intelligentsia; but if a long list of Greek authors native from Mesopotamia can be compiled,31 it is often difficult to distinguish between those who were of pure Greco-Macedonian descent and those who, born Babylonian, had adopted a Greek name. In fact, the evidence available seems to indicate a movement in the opposite direction: the Greeks became interested not so much in Mesopotamian history and literature as in the scientific and pseudo-scientific works of the ‘Chaldaeans’. In the second and third centuries B.C. the Babylonian Sudinês translated into Greek the writings of Kidinnu and other astronomers, and Berossus, priest of Marduk, wrote in Greek a strange mixture of astrology and historical narratives called Babyloniaca,32 which he dedicated to Antiochus I. Limited as they were, these cultural contacts saved for posterity some of the most remarkable achievements of Mesopotamian scientists, while the most objectionable end-product of the Mesopotamian belief in predestination, astrology, permeated and corrupted the religions of the West.

  The Parthian Period

  The Parthians – a branch of the Scythians – appear for the first time in history c. 250 B.C, when Arsaces led his nomadic tribesmen out of the steppes of Turkestan to settle in the north-eastern corner of Iran.33 By 200 B.C., the ‘Arsacids’ were firmly established between the Caspian Gate (Hecatompylos) and the region of Meshed (Nisaia). Between 160 and 140 B.C. Mithridates I conquered the Iranian plateau in its entirety and, reaching the Tigris, pitched his camp at Ctesiphon, opposite Seleucia. The Seleucid Demetrius II succeeded in recovering Babylonia and Media for a few years, but in 126 B.C. Artabanus II reasserted his authority over these regions, and from then on the Tigris-Euphrates valley remained in Parthian hands – save for two brief periods of Roman occupation under Trajan and Septimus Severus – until it fell under Sassanian domination with the rest of the Parthian kingdom in A.D. 227.

  To govern their empire the Arsacids could only rely upon a small, if valorous, Parthian aristocracy, but they had the intelligence to utilize the social organizations created by the Seleucids, or those which had grown upon the ruins of the Seleucid kingdom. They encouraged the development of Hellenistic cities and tolerated the formation of independent vassal kingdoms, such as Osrhoene (around Edessa-Urfa), Adiabene (corresponding to ancient Assyria) and Characene (near the Arabo-Persian Gulf).31 Towards the beginning of the Christian era Hatra, an old caravan city on the Wadi Thartar, 58 kilometres west of Assur, acquired its autonomy and became the centre of a small but prosperous state known as Araba.34 The Arsacids and their vassals were rich, since they controlled practically all the trade-routes between Asia and the Greco-Roman world, with the result that the second and first centuries B.C. were marked in Mesopotamia by intensive building activities resulting from governmental or regional initiative. Not only were Seleucia, Dura-Europus and, presumably, other prosperous market-places provided with a large number of new monuments, but towns and villages which had been lying in ruins for hundreds of years were reoccupied. In southern Iraq traces of Parthian occupation were found on almost every site excavated, in particular Babylon, Kish, Nippur, Uruk and even forgotten Girsu. In the north Assyria was literally resurrected: Nuzi, Kakzu, Shibanniba were inhabited again, and Assur, rebuilt anew, became at least as large a city as it had been in the heyday of the Assyrian empire.35 But it must be emphasized that the revived settlements had very little in common with their Assyrian or Babylonian precursors. Several of them, if not all, had straight streets, often lined with columns, a citadel, usually built on top of the old ziqqurat, and an agora wherever possible. Walls of stone or ashlar-masonry replaced the traditional walls of mud bricks, while the buildings themselves, with their lofty vaulted chambers wide open on one side (iwan), their elegant peristyle and their decoration of moulded stucco, differed from the buildings erected by Mesopotamian architects as markedly as the Greco-Iranian statues of the rulers of Hatra differed from those of Gudea or Ashurnasirpal.

  These archaeological data, combined with textual evidence, point to a massive influx of foreign population. The Greek and

  Macedonian settlers, probably not very numerous at the beginning, had lived side by side with the Babylonians with relatively few social contacts; they had preserved their nationality, their institutions, their art, their language, their ‘Greekhood’ in a word, and were still keeping it under the protection of enlightened monarchs who called themselves ‘philhellen’. But the newcomers – mostly Aramaeans, Arabs and Iranians – settled in Mesopotamia in very large numbers, and mixed with the native population more easily since they were of Oriental, often Semitic stock and spoke the same language. Each city, old or new, gave shelter to several foreign gods. At Dura-Europus, for instance, were brought to light two Greek temples, an Aramaean sanctuary, a Christian chapel, a synagogue and a Mith-reum, let alone the shrines of local deities and of the gods of Palmyra. Similarly, the Sumero-Akkadian god Nergal, the Greek god Hermes, the Aramaean goddess Atar'at and the Arabian deities Allat and Shamiya had their temples in Hatra, around the majestic sanctuary of Shamash, the sun-god commo
n to all Semites. Even at Uruk, the ancestral home of Anu and Ishtar, can still be seen a charming little temple, more Roman than Greek in style, dedicated to the Iranian god Gareus, and the remains of an extraordinary apsidal building believed to be a temple of Mithra.36 Jews were numerous in Mesopotamia, and from about A.D. 30 to 60 or even more, a local family converted to Judaism ruled over Adiabene from its capital city Arbela (Erbil).37 According to the Oriental tradition, during the same period Christianity began to penetrate into northern Mesopotamia coming from Antioch and Edessa.

  This flood of people and ideas submerged what was left of the Sumero-Akkadian civilization. A handful of contracts, about two hundred astronomical or astrological texts and two or three very fragmentary chronicles and Babylonian – Greek vocabularies constitute all the cuneiform literature in our possession for that period.38 The last cuneiform text known so far – an astronomical ‘almanac’ – was written in A.D. 74 – 5.39 It is quite possible that the Babylonian priests and astronomers continued for several generations to write in Aramaic on papyrus or parchment, but no work of this kind is likely to be found. We know that some of the ancient temples were restored, that Ashur was worshipped in his home town and that a cult was rendered to Nabû in Barsippa until, perhaps, the fourth century A.D. But there is no evidence that Esagila, the temple of the former national god Marduk, was kept in repair. Indeed, Babylon probably suffered more damage in the repression which followed the revolt of a certain Hymeros in 127 B.C., or in the civil war between Mithridates II and Orodes in 52 B.C., than in the hands of Xerxes. When Trajan, in A.D. 115, entered the once opulent city, it was not to ‘take the hand of Bêl’, but to sacrifice to the manes of Alexander. Eighty-four years later, Septimus Severus found it completely deserted.40