by Matt Waters
Through the second millennium, the center of Elamite civilization appears to have been in Fars, specifically the city of Anshan, approximately 30 miles west of the future Persian capital Persepolis. Yet the city of Susa, in Khuzistan, is the most visible city, thanks to over a century’s worth of archaeological work there that began in the late 1800s CE. Susa was on the eastern edge of the Babylonian flood plain, and as a consequence its history was intertwined with its Mesopotamian neighbors from its beginnings. Its importance persisted into the Persian period, when it became one of the Persian capitals.
Around 1000 BCE, Anshan was abandoned. In the roughly 150 years previous, the Elamite kings, who had styled themselves in their royal titles “King of Anshan and Susa,” were at the height of their territorial power and ambition. They even ruled Babylonia for a time in the mid-twelfth century. The written record falls silent shortly thereafter until the eighth century. A large part of the problem in studying Elamite history in Fars during the so-called Neo-Elamite period (c. 1000–550 BCE) is that large-scale settlement there cannot be traced again until the Achamenid period, four centuries later. The most likely reason for the gap in the archaeological record is that semisedentary pastoralism became the dominant way of life during this period. In addition, only a small part of Anshan has been explored. Our assessment of this and many other areas may change dramatically as archaeological excavation proceeds.
It is ironic that the period circa 750–650 BCE is the most well-known of Neo-Elamite history, because the vast majority of documentary evidence for Elamite political history is of Assyrian origin, Elam’s rival and nemesis. Assyrian kings left extensive narratives of their military achievements (the royal annals), many of which detail campaigns against Elam. Specialists are still working through these and related materials, many of which were found in the nineteenth-century excavations, and there is much work to be done. The record is much thinner from Elam itself: a smattering of royal inscriptions (most from Susa) that are poorly understood and lack the detail and flourish of the Assyrian annals. We are thus reliant upon the perspective of Elam’s enemy for assessment of Elam’s history. Beneath the political and economic rivalries (e.g., for control of the important trade routes through the Zagros Mountains), however, was a rich network of cultural ties – including close links between the Assyrian and Elamite royal families of the seventh century. It must be recalled that the histories of Elam and Mesopotamia (Assyria in the north, Babylonia in the south) had been intertwined for centuries; it was not until the rise of the Achaemenid Empire that all these regions were brought under one rule for more than a brief period. Indeed, the history of the seventh and sixth centuries is marked most frequently by Assyria’s problems with Elamites and Babylonians, the latter two often working in tandem to thwart Assyrian ambitions. Assyrian sources reveal that the Elamites had great influence, if not direct control, over many of the various Aramaean and Chaldean groups living in southern Mesopotamia.
One of the most powerful Neo-Elamite kings was Shutruk-Nahhunte II, who ruled from 717 to 699 and from whom we have the most Elamite inscriptions. He used the royal titles “King of Anshan and Susa” and “expander of the realm.” Shutruk-Nahhunte’s actual political reach, circumscribed by Assyrian power in the west, may not have approached that of his forebears in the second millennium, but his royal titles give insight into his aspirations. Shutruk-Nahhunte’s success against Assyria provided a severe check on the latter’s hold of southeastern Babylonia and the central Zagros in the late eighth century. Shutruk-Nahhunte’s successors through the first half of the seventh century continued to challenge Assyria. By this time, though, the most consistent fighting occurred along the Elamite-Babylonian frontier, and the Assyrians generally held the upper hand in the border zones of the central Zagros Mountains. Yet the necessity of frequent military activity against Elam in Babylonia and its southern reaches reveals that Assyria, even at the height of its power under the Sargonid kings (see discussion later in this chapter), never effectively quieted the region. This assessment is based on Assyrian sources; the Elamites would have had a different spin on this running conflict.
Major Assyrian campaigns against Elam occurred with increasing frequency as the seventh century progressed from every few years to almost annually. In 653 BCE tensions between Elam and Assyria flared at the Battle of Til Tuba, along the Ulaya River in Khuzistan. The Assyrian victory was memorialized in an elaborate palace relief sequence at Nineveh and in numerous inscriptions.4 These reliefs are on display at the British Museum and acquaint the casual viewer – via depictions of humiliation, torture, and slaughter of enemies – with the cruelty for which the Assyrians were infamous. It may be countered, however, that the Assyrians were not much different than their predecessors and contemporaries in the ancient world. Their public relations were simply more compelling.
Much of the decade after the Til Tuba campaign was marked by more forceful and direct Assyrian involvement in Elamite affairs, to little positive effect. A rapid succession of kings reflected the resulting instability in Elam in the late 650s and early 640s. The political chaos did not reduce Elamite-Assyrian friction, so in 646 Ashurbanipal launched another campaign against Elam. This one resulted in the sack of Susa that, according to the Assyrian accounts, leveled the city. The devastation, while not atypical, is relayed in dramatic detail: treasuries were emptied, temples plundered and destroyed, previous kings’ graves exhumed and their corpses dishonored, and countless livestock and people removed to Assyria. It is difficult to assess the accuracy of this type of description. The victor certainly exaggerates, but beyond the hyperbole, we know that that was far from the end of the story for Susa. Scattered evidence reveals that several Elamite kingdoms in Khuzistan and Fars persisted into the sixth century. It is in this milieu that the earliest Persian kings, Cyrus the Great’s predecessors, must be located.
Assyria
The Assyrians were a Semitic-speaking people who dwelled in northern Mesopotamia, part of modern Iraq. Their history may be traced for centuries from the late third millennium BCE. The major cities of Nimrud (ancient Calah or Kalhu) and Nineveh were the two main Assyrian centers in the ninth through seventh centuries, and the nineteenth-century excavations at these places proved seminal in founding the modern discipline of Assyriology. Thousands of tablets, most famously from the Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, provide continuing insights into Assyrian history and civilization. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Epic of Creation (Enuma elish), and a variety of other famous myths and legends were uncovered there. In addition, once the cuneiform script was deciphered, a wealth of sources for the history of this period also became accessible: royal inscriptions and annals; correspondence between the king, his officials, and foreign dignitaries; cultic and omen texts detailing aspects of Mesopotamian religion and ritual; and administrative and legal texts revealing – in sometimes mind-numbing but massively useful detail – the bureaucratic workings of empire, temple, and even private commercial interests.
By the time of Tiglath-pileser III (ruled 744–727 BCE), the Assyrians were embarking on a new, imperial phase, one that would make them the largest empire to date and offer a model – ideological and organizational – for the much larger Achaemenid Empire to come later. Assyria reached the height of its power and territorial aspirations in the late eighth and seventh centuries under the Sargonid kings: Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Ashurbanipal. The Assyrian Empire controlled or held tributary large areas of south central and southeastern Turkey (Urartu), northwestern Iran (various Iranian groups), Babylonia, Syro-Palestine (Israel, Judah, Phoenicia, and other small kingdoms), Cyprus, and, briefly, Egypt (Map 2.1).
Map 2.1 Assyria and its neighbors. After Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. 3, Part 2, Second Edition, 1992, map 3.
Many of the Assyrian inscriptions (especially the royal annals) detail the king’s military campaigns, and they make manifest the king as the gods’ agent who was a moral force, both required and expected to punish ene
mies and, as a consequence, expand Assyrian territory. How much of this imperial narrative is meant to be taken literally is open to question. It is easy in our day to attribute too much cynicism to Assyrian or Achaemenid Persian claims of divine sanction for military activity and the horrific punishments meted out to defeated enemies. As far as we can tell, though, the Assyrians and other peoples of the ancient Near East took these depictions with utmost seriousness.
Babylonia
Babylonia is the geographic term for southern Mesopotamia. The Babylonians, like the Assyrians in the north, were a Semitic-speaking people, who used a slightly different dialect of Akkadian than the Assyrians, though by the eighth century BCE the Aramaic language was becoming the lingua franca of the ancient Near East. The Babylonians constituted various Chaldean and Aramaean tribes, some living in the old urban centers and others in the rural areas, all differing in their level of political organization. Throughout this region’s long history it was no small task to keep it under one rule.
The Babylonians placed great store in being the cultural heirs of the Sumerians: the originators of civilization centered in the ancient cities of Ur, Uruk, and Nippur. Babylon itself was younger than these cities but had risen to prominence in the second millennium and retained its august position through the Achaemenid period. Sources for the study of Neo-Babylonian history are similar to those for the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Babylonian royal inscriptions focus on the building and cultic activities of the kings more than on their military deeds. Temple and private archives are in such abundance, however, that the minutiae of some temple households may be tracked at an amazingly detailed level. Records kept in these sanctuaries, from Babylon itself and other majorcities, show a level of continuity in the administration and functioning of these organizations even into the Achaemenid period and beyond.
The Neo-Babylonian Empire’s relations with Syro-Palestine and Egypt may be sketched with some confidence, but the situation on its eastern front remains opaque. What of the Medes, who, with the Babylonians, brought about the downfall of Assyria? What of the Elamites, frequent close partners with Babylonia against Assyria at its height? For that matter, what of the Persians themselves during this period, only a generation or two before Cyrus the Great? Answers to these questions remain frustratingly elusive. From Assyria’s overthrow (610s BCE) until the reign of the Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus (556–539 BCE), there is minimal evidence for the political situation in western Iran. The first half of the sixth century remains almost blank.
A Babylonian priest of Marduk, whose name in Greek was Berossos, wrote a history of Babylonia in Greek during the reign of the Seleucid king Antiochus I, within a generation of the Achaemenid Empire’s overthrow by Alexander the Great of Macedon in the late 330s. Berossos (Fragment 8b) recorded a tradition that the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar married a Median princess, Amytis, the daughter of Astyages. This marriage would have occurred in the late 610s, as Babylonian and Median pressure on Assyria intensified. Presumably, however, Berossos meant Cyaxeres not Astyages, because Cyaxeres was king of the Medes at that time. Astyages was the last Median king, defeated by Cyrus. The word “presumably” is used, because Berossos’ confusion makes the tradition suspect, and some scholars reject it as fiction. A lone reference, written three centuries after the fact, does not often inspire confidence, but the study of ancient history is filled with similar examples. What if Berossos’ account is true, or contains an element of truth? This might explain the lack of references in the Babylonian tradition to any Babylonian-Median strife, because, in light of a marriage alliance that had done its job, there may have been none. On the other hand, a lack of evidence for conflict does not mean that conflict did not exist. This story reminds us that we have much to learn; discoveries from one site or even of one text may radically change our understanding.
Another piece of Greek evidence also gives pause. The Athenian Xenophon, writing in the early fourth century (roughly one hundred years before Berossos), chronicled his adventures with a Greek mercenary army aiding Cyrus the Younger’s revolt against his brother Artaxerxes II. Xenophon makes a passing reference (Anabasis 2.4.12) to a “Median Wall,” a line of fortifications purportedly built by Nebuchadnezzar that stretched between Sippar and Babylon. Xenophon provides no information about its purpose, but the label itself has been taken to imply a Median threat. Some of Nabonidus’ inscriptions about the Medes, whom he labeled with the pejorative Akkadian term umman-manda (translated as “horde” or the like), suggest a potential threat in the 550s. But, as Nabonidus’ inscriptions further relate, that potential threat was neutralized by Cyrus and the Persians’ defeat of the Medes.
Anatolian Kingdoms
Phrygia
After the fall of the Hittite kingdom in the twelfth century BCE, little is known of Anatolian history until well into the first millennium. The most important kingdoms for our purposes were Phrygia (north central and northwestern Anatolia), Urartu (east and southeastern Anatolia), and Lydia (central western Anatolia). The first of these two kingdoms are mentioned with some frequency in Assyrian sources of the eighth and seventh centuries. Phrygia is sometimes confused with Lydia in modern literature, but they were distinct kingdoms. Little is known of Phrygia’s origins in the “dark age” after the Hittite kingdom’s collapse, but by the eighth century Phrygia, from its main center Gordion, had encompassed the old Hittite capital of Hattusha (modern Boghazkoy). The Assyrians called this kingdom Mushki, of which a vague echo is preserved in the Greek myth King Midas of the Golden Touch.
Urartu
The kingdom of Urartu was a rival of the Assyrians from the eighth century until the end of the Assyrian Empire. Urartian royal inscriptions are similar to those from Babylonia and Elam, that is, they focus on the king’s building activities and his piety to the gods. We rely mainly on Assyrian accounts for reconstruction of much of Urartu’s political history, what little there is known of it. Migrating Cimmerians and Scythians in the early seventh century wreaked havoc in Urartu, as Assyrian sources attest these groups did in many areas throughout the ancient Near East. A broken reference in a Babylonian source suggests that Urartu persisted as an independent entity until the time of Cyrus, when it was incorporated into the Persian Empire.
Lydia
The kingdom of Lydia is known to us mainly through the Greek historian Herodotus’ account in Book I of his history. Herodotus starts with Lydia because of its rule of the Ionian Greeks, both Lydia and Ionia later subsumed by the rising Persian Empire. Herodotus’ history of Lydia, like that of the Medes, contains much of interest to the historian, but it must be considered more legendary than factual. That does not mean, however, that it is entirely fabricated. There is some external corroboration for the Lydian royal house. According to Herodotus, a Lydian courtier by the name of Gyges deposed the king Candaules, married Candaules’ wife, and founded a new dynasty. Herodotus’ Gyges has been identified with a king of Lydia, Gugu, in one of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal’s inscriptions.5 Gugu’s messenger was dispatched to Nineveh to seek assistance against the continuing Cimmerian incursions of the mid-seventh century. Ashurbanipal’s inscription emphasizes the wonder that accompanied Gugu’s messenger: the distance from which he came (Sardis, in western Anatolia) and the fact that no one at the Assyrian court could understand a word he said. By the time of the Achaemenid Empire, the world had grown smaller; Lydia and other Anatolian territories were administered by Persian satraps, and Sardis was the western edge of the so-called Royal Road. Ashurbanipal’s wonder at Gugu’s message underlines the great distances and diversity between various regions that were later unified under Achaemenid power.
Classical sources indicate that Lydian power was at least in part based on gold panned from the Pactolus River that ran through Lydia. Many of the Greek city-states of western Anatolia (Ionia) were brought under Lydian rule, and Lydian kings’ donations to Greek sanctuaries – especially those of the last king, Croesus, to Delphi – also were the stuff of legend. Croe
sus sponsored not only Delphi but several other sanctuaries as well, including the famous Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. That temple was destroyed in a fire in the late fourth century but rebuilt; the new Temple of Artemis was designated one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Archaeological finds at Ephesus and elsewhere in Ionia confirm the intensive mingling of Greek and Lydian styles that remained typical throughout the Achaemenid period.6
Expanding Lydian influence brought Lydia into conflict with the Medes, a struggle that culminated in a standoff at the so-called Battle of the Solar Eclipse in the year 585. Here is another instance where it is difficult to separate fact from fiction in Greek accounts of this period. Herodotus set the stage for this conflict with his tale of Scythian guests at the Median court of Cyaxeres. The Scythians ran afoul of their benefactor, and, stung by Cyaxeres’ insults, they slaughtered and served as dinner (unbeknownst to Cyaxeres) a Median boy, after which they fled to Alyattes, Gyges’ great-grandson, in Lydia.7 Alyattes’ refusal to hand over the fugitives led to war. The culminating battle took its name from the solar eclipse that occurred during it, an event so momentous – and one considered of such ill omen – that the combatants ceased the war and negotiated a peace. According to Herodotus, though the names and geography appear confused, the kings of Cilicia and Babylonia (the former perhaps subject to the latter) served as witnesses and the treaty was sealed by a dynastic marriage: Alyattes’ daughter Aryenis was married to Cyaxeres’ son Astyages.
