The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  We have no house, no home

  Because of the Xianyun;

  We cannot rest or bide

  Because of the Xianyun…

  The year is running out.

  But the king’s business never ends;

  We cannot rise or bide,

  Our hearts are very bitter.

  Eventually the Xianyun dropped back, in the face of Zhou resistance, and for a time disappeared from the historical record. But Hsuan’s victory over the barbarians did nothing to improve his authority with his own countrymen. Not long afterwards he was back to fighting his own feudal lords, and his fortunes grew bleaker and bleaker: “The many lords mostly rebelled against royal commands,” remarks one chronicle.14

  In the forty-sixth year of his reign, Hsuan died. His son Yu inherited, and the fall of the Zhou grew inexorably closer. An earthquake shook the capital almost as soon as Yu took power, and the resulting landslides apparently choked the river channels that supplied fresh water to the city: “When the source of the rivers is blocked,” laments one of the court advisors, “the state will surely perish.”

  If there is no way to imbue the soil and the people want for daily needs, then the state will perish all the sooner!…Now Zhou’s deeds are like those of [the Xia and the Shang] in their final years, and the rivers and their sources are…blocked…. Landslides and dried up rivers are the signs a state will perish. And when the rivers dry up, landslides will surely follow.15

  Sure enough, Sima Qian writes, “during that year, the three rivers dried up, and there were landslides.”

  The parallel between the action of Yu’s grandfather Li, who had blocked the mouths of his people as a river is blocked, and the earth which slides down into the mouths of the rivers and cuts the capital city off from water, is unmistakable. The evils of the Zhou have overflowed into the earth itself; and in return Heaven will remove its Mandate from the Zhou, so that they no longer give life to their people.

  Yu himself turned out to be a licentious, pleasure-seeking ruler. Having sired a son and heir on his senior wife, Yu then became infatuated with a harem woman and tried to depose the queen and crown prince on behalf of the concubine and her bastard son. His advisors resisted the suggestion, but Yu insisted; and finally the advisors stood aside. “The calamity has taken form,” the Grand Historian observed, in despair, “and there is nothing we can do about it.”16

  This concubine, now queen, had ripped apart the royal family; not surprisingly, her chief pleasures were destructive. She liked best to hear silk tearing, and so she ordered enormous pieces of the expensive fabric brought to the palace to be torn up in order to amuse her.17 Despite the wasteful occupation, she seldom smiled and never laughed.

  Yu cast around in his mind for some way to amuse her, and decided that he would light all the beacon fires, and beat the alarm drums. This was a signal reserved to warn of barbarian invasion; at the uproar, the nearby lords turned out their armies and charged to the walls of the city. On their arrival, they found no barbarians. Their startled faces were so comical that the concubine laughed out loud (perhaps for the first time).18

  But barbarian invaders did arrive, not too long later. They were known as the Quan Rong; their homeland was north and west of the Zhou lands. They poured over the borders and laid siege to the city. And they were joined in this by non-barbarians: relatives of King Yu’s first wife, angry that she had been set aside. The outside and inside threats had coalesced into one dynasty-shaking attack.

  King Yu ordered the beacon fires lit, but the feudal lords simply shrugged and went back to their own duties. They had no intention of being made fools of twice in order to entertain the emperor’s fancy piece. Yu himself, fighting against the invaders, was killed in battle. The barbarians looted the palace, kidnapped the concubine, and returned home.

  THE FALL OF the Zhou house, which took place in 771, was the end of the Western Zhou dominance. It was not, however, the end of the Zhou Dynasty. A few of the lords were still loyal to Yu’s oldest son P’ing, the heir who had been disinherited in favor of the concubine’s bastard son. Together, they declared him to be king.

  But the capital city of Hao was clearly no place for P’ing. The barbarians may have gone home, but the western border was insecure, and Hao was too close to it. King P’ing decided to withdraw to the east, to a safer location: to the city of Loyang, which had been established centuries before by the Duke of Zhou.

  So that he could march safely towards his new capital, the chief of the Ch’in—a minor state whose lord had not been officially recognized by the throne—sent soldiers to escort P’ing. In gratitude, according to the Shu ching, P’ing made the chief a lord, the Duke of Ch’in, and “also gave him sufficient land to sustain his new position, the chief city of which was the old capital which had just been abandoned.”19 The Zhou homeland was now in the hands of lesser lords; from his new eastern capital, leaning on the support of the dukes who would be loyal as long as it was in their best interest, King P’ing ruled over a newly shrunken kingdom.20 The era of the Western Zhou had ended; the time of the Eastern Zhou had begun.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  The Assyrian Renaissance

  Between 934 and 841 BC,

  Assyria makes itself a new empire,

  and the Western Semites begin to lose their independence

  THE ARAMAEANS, the tribes whose wandering invasion of Mesopotamia had disrupted business-as-usual in Assyria and Babylonia, had now settled down in a patchwork of tiny independent states. The strongest of these was centered at the city of Damascus, in the middle of the plain that lay across the Euphrates from Assyria. King David had managed to bring the Aramaeans of Damascus at least partly under his control: his chronicler boasts that the Israelite army under David “struck down twenty-two thousand of them,” and afterwards received regular tribute from them.1

  During the same years, the Assyrians called the entire area west of the Euphrates “Aram,” a blanket term for the cities governed by Aramaean chiefs, and were almost helpless against them. Not until the reign of David’s grandson Rehoboam and the fracture of Israel into two states did an Assyrian ruler manage to rally his troops and push back against Aramaean encroachment. His name was Ashur-dan II, and he was the first of the great Assyrian kings who would bring Assyria back out of its dark age, into its new and final renaissance.

  Ashur-dan’s inscriptions boast that he took vengeance on the wandering peoples who “committed destruction and murder” by burning the Aramaean cities which had been built on land that had once been Assyrian. In fact he came nowhere near re-establishing the boundaries of the old Assyrian empire. He did manage to ring the Assyrian heartland around with his troops, and make it secure; he brought back from the mountains the Assyrian villagers who had been driven from their towns by “want, hunger and famine,” resettling them in their own land.2 But he did not push any farther to the north or the east, where the Aramaeans still held the most power.

  47.1 The New Assyrian Empire

  And to the south, the ragged remnant of the Babylonian empire kept its independence, such as it was. The Babylonian throne had been claimed by family after family, its royal capital shifting from city to city, and Aramaeans had infiltrated the old Babylonian territory to such an extent that their language, a Western Semitic dialect known as Aramaic, was beginning to replace the ancient Akkadian which had once served Babylonians as a common tongue.3

  Not until three generations later did the next great king of Assyria stake his claim to the title. Ashur-dan’s great-grandson Ashurnasirpal II finally made Assyria into an empire again.114 He fought up to the northwest of Nineveh, and made the city his northern base.4 He crossed to the eastern bank of the Tigris and built himself a new capital city on the site of the old village of Caleh: “I have taken it anew as a dwelling,” he announced. “The former city of Caleh, which Shalmaneser, king of Assyria, a prince who preceded me, had built, that city had fallen into decay and lay in ruins, it was turned into a mound
and ruin heap. That city I built anew.…I laid out orchards round about it, fruit and wine I offered unto Assur, my lord…. I dug down to the water level…. I built the wall thereof; from its foundation unto its top I built and completed it.”5

  Caleh, from now on, would be the center of his government; Assur itself became a purely ceremonial city. In Caleh he built not only office buildings, but a palace decorated with reliefs of the warriors and kings who had surrendered to him; at the doorways to the hall where he received tribute, he set up guardian statues, enormous winged bulls with human heads, their faces an idealized portrait of Ashurnasirpal himself.6 When the palace was finished, Ashurnasirpal threw a huge banquet to celebrate it: his celebratory inscription explains that his guests were fed a thousand oxen, a thousand domestic cattle and sheep, fourteen thousand imported and fattened sheep, a thousand lambs, five hundred game birds, five hundred gazelles, ten thousand fish, ten thousand eggs, ten thousand loaves of bread, ten thousand measures of beer, ten thousand containers of wine, and more. By Ashurnasirpal’s count, there were 69,574 guests at the tables, all celebrating his greatness. At the feast, he publicly claimed the titles “great king, king of the world, the valiant hero who goes forth with the help of Assur; he who has no rival in all four quarters of the world, the exalted shepherd, the powerful torrent that none can withstand…he who has over come all of mankind…whose hand has conquered all lands and taken all mountain ranges.”7

  Grandiloquent rhetoric aside, Ashurnasirpal did do one thing his ancestors had not accomplished. He fought his way to the Euphrates and then crossed it. “I crossed the Euphrates at its flood in ships made of skins,” he records. “I marched along the side of Mount Lebanon, and…in the Great Sea I washed my weapons.”8 It was exactly the same gesture of victory that Sargon had made, in the Persian Gulf, so many years before.

  This brought him right across the top of the northern border of Israel, which was under the rule of a king named Omri. Omri doesn’t get much play in the biblical account, which is more concerned about his disregard for the laws of God: all we learn from the book of 1 Kings is that Omri seized the throne of the north from another claimant and that he was more evil than any king who came before him.9 But in political terms, Omri was a great warrior and builder (he built Samaria to be the new capital of the north), and the first Israelite king to be mentioned with awe in the inscriptions of another country; the Mesha Inscription, a stone found across the Jordan river in the territory of the tribe known as the Moabites, mourns that Omri “humbled Moab for many years.”10 He was a ruler of enough strength that Ashurnasirpal, who subdued pretty much all of the little states all the way to the coast and even demanded tribute from the Phoenician kings of Tyre and of Sidon, did not venture to attack him.

  By now Ashurnasirpal’s territory stretched across to the Euphrates, from there in a narrow band to the Mediterranean coast and down it as far as the port city of Arvad. He never actually claimed rule over either Tyre or Sidon, whose kings were friendly to Israel; nor did he attack Babylonia itself. He did march south down the Euphrates as far as the then-accepted borderline between Assyria and Babylonia, and there he sacked a town on the line in order to terrify the Babylonians (although he did not push farther).

  His reputation undoubtedly preceded him. In Ashurnasirpal there appeared, full-blown, the delight in cruelty which tagged at the heels of almost every Assyrian king who followed. “I put up a pillar at the city gate,” Ashurnasirpal explains, recording his dealings with a city which had revolted and killed its Assyrian-appointed governor, “and I skinned the chiefs who revolted against me, and covered the pillar with their skins. I walled up others in the middle of the pillar itself, and some of them I impaled on stakes and arranged them around the pillar. Inside the city, I skinned many more and covered the walls with their skins. As for the royal officials, I cut off their members.”11 He varied this, at other times, by making heaps of cut-off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, and tying heads to vines throughout the gardens of conquered cities like obscene and decaying fruit. “I made one pillar of the living,” he remarks, a particularly nasty Assyrian invention where living prisoners were laid one on top of another and covered with plaster to make a column. “I cut off their ears and their fingers, of many I put out the eyes…. their young men and maidens I burned in the fire.”12

  AFTER A TWENTY-FIVE-YEAR REIGN of terror, Ashurnasirpal II died and left the throne to his son Shalmaneser, the third of this name. Shalmaneser III continued the campaign against the Western Semitic lands west of the Euphrates. Like his father, Shalmaneser crossed the Euphrates “at flood” (this seems to have become a point of pride), and advanced “to the shore of the sea of the setting sun,” where “I washed my weapons in the sea.”13 Unlike his father, however, he did not shy away from the northern kingdom of Israel.

  Israel, paradoxically, seemed stronger than ever. Omri’s son Ahab had inherited his father’s throne, and—watching the spreading Assyrian threat to his east and north—had negotiated a strategic marriage with the daughter of the Phoenician king of Sidon. This princess, Jezebel, became not just a wife, but his principal queen, which greatly strengthened the Phoenician-Israelite alliance against the Assyrian army.

  For all this political savvy, Ahab made several very stupid moves. He showed a shrewd willingness to worship gods other than the God of Israel, including Baal, the chief god of the Phoenicians, and a number of other Western Semitic tribes and cities; this should have won him the friendship not only of Tyre and Byblos, but also the cities that lay between Israel and the advancing Assyrian front. But rather than pacifying his own people by keeping the worship of Yahweh alive as well, he allowed his Phoenician wife to round up and slaughter all the prophets of the God of Abraham. At least a hundred escaped and hid in the mountainous land to the east; from this refuge they became a voice calling the Israelites to rebel against their evil king.

  Chief among the prophetic opponents of Ahab was the prophet Elijah, a wild man in animal skins who escaped Jezebel’s attempts to assassinate him and did his best to upset the wicked monarch. In fact he anointed a young Israelite officer named Jehu to be God’s choice as the next king and gave him divine permission to assassinate Ahab, Jezebel, and the entire royal house.

  Given this level of hatred among Israelites themselves for their own king (and, even more virulently, for his foreign wife), it isn’t surprising that the Aramaean king of Damascus chose to use this internal unrest as an opportunity to launch his own attack against Israel. He rounded up thirty-two Aramaean warlords, and with this enormous combined force set out to meet the relatively tiny Israelite force: “The Israelites camped opposite them,” the writer of 1 Kings tells us, “like two little flocks of goats, while the Aramaeans covered the countryside.”

  Despite the overwhelming odds, the Israelite army, led by Ahab—who, despite his failings in devotion, appears to have been a perfectly competent commander—managed to fight the Aramaeans to a draw. The king of Damascus made a treaty with Ahab, a treaty which kept peace between Aramaeans and Israelites for two kings for three years.

  In the third year, Shalmaneser marched against the Israelite border.

  Israel was prepared. Ahab led into battle his own Israelite soldiers (including significant cavalry), Phoenician troops from his allies on the coast, and men sent by the king of Damascus, who did not wish to be the next victim of Assyrian expansion. They were joined by Egypt; the fifth pharaoh of the Twenty-Second Dynasty, Osorkon II, apparently feared that Assyria, once it plowed its way through the Western Semitic lands, might march down the Mediterranean into Egypt.

  The troops broke against each other at the city of Qarqar in the year 853.

  It is difficult to know exactly what happened next. Shalmaneser III claimed to be victorious: “I made the blood of my enemies flow down into the valley and scattered their corpses,” he boasted, on an inscription known as the Monolith Inscription.14 But the Assyrian reliefs depicting the battle show a highly uncommon sight: en
emy soldiers charging forwards over the bodies of Assyrian dead.15 Given the usual Assyrian depictions of dead enemies and live warriors, this hints at a much different outcome.

  And despite Shalmaneser’s claim, he advanced no farther into the Western Semitic lands during the remaining thirty years of his rule. The Phoenician cities, the Israelite lands, and Damascus all remained free of Assyria’s grasp.

  Most likely the battle was a draw, but devastating enough to Assyria that Shalmaneser decided to withdraw. The Western Semitic kings returned to their cities, and the Egyptian soldiers marched back down to their homeland, which promptly fell apart again into civil war; Egypt, preoccupied with internal troubles, disappeared for a few years from the international stage.

  Ahab did not stay put, though. Perhaps exalted beyond reason by his successful defense of his country, Ahab decided, just after the battle of Qarqar, that this was an opportune moment to turn against his ally, the king of Damascus. He sent south to Jehoshaphat, the king of Judah, and asked him to travel north and join with him in an attack against the border city of Ramoth-Gilead, which lay just over the Israelite border, in Aramaean land protected by the treaty.

  Jehoshaphat, the great-great-grandson of Solomon, ruled a territory which consisted of the large tribe of Judah along with the minute tribe of Benjamin, a land known collectively as “Judah.” He had no enormous military might, but since Ramoth-Gilead lay almost exactly on the north-south border, Jehoshaphat’s alliance would have allowed Ahab to perform a pincer move on the city.

  Jehoshaphat agreed to visit Ahab to discuss the matter, but once in Ahab’s court—which, thanks to Jezebel’s imported prophets and court attendants from Tyre, seemed more like a Phoenician than an Israelite court—he grew nervous. The Phoenician advisors, who were also soothsayers and omen-readers, were predicting certain victory against the Aramaeans, but Jehoshaphat asked whether Ahab had considered asking a Hebrew prophet what Yahweh thought about this plan.