The Greek poet Hesiod, from the region of Boeotia, was born sometime around the mid-eighth century. In his poem Works and Days, he describes his plight: when his father died, the farm should have been divided between himself and his older brother Perses, but apparently Perses thought that this would give him too little land to support himself and his family, and so bribed the judges who were appointed to settle disputes of this kind in order to get the whole thing.
Our inheritance was divided; but there is so much
you grabbed and carried away as a fat bribe
for gift-devouring kings, fools who want to be judges
in this trial.18
This was the secondary, but equally fraught, difficulty faced by the Greek cities; limited resources led to desperate acts, and corruption among the landholders and officials was at plague-level.19
Hesiod longs for a day when men will benefit from their own labor rather than seeing it stolen by the more powerful, when they will
know neither hunger or ruin,
but amid feasts enjoy the yield of their labors.
For them the earth brings forth a rich harvest; and for them
the top of an oak teems with acorns and the middle with bees.
Fleecy sheep are weighed down with wool,
and women bear children who resemble their fathers20
which suggests that the rich were appropriating more than just land.
Hesiod spends dozens of lines explaining that hard workers should get what they deserve, that farmers who plan their crops carefully should reap their own grain, that wages should be paid promptly, and that crooked judges should expect a visitation of divine justice. None of this happened. Nor was it likely to, given the inability of the cities to expand.
Colonization, not reform, was the only solution. Around 740 or so, the leaders of Greek cities began to send out all of those younger brothers to farm new land. The earliest colonists came from the same two cities which had built those initial trading posts in Italy; Chalcis and Eretria sent colonists to the Bay of Naples, where they began to build the new Greek city of Cumae. Around 733, the city of Corinth put its aristocrat Archias at the head of an expedition to Sicily, where he founded a colony called Syracuse; not to be outdone, Chalcis and Eretria built no fewer than four colonies (Naxus, Lentini, Catana, and Rhegium) over the next twenty years. By 700 BC, cities on the southern Italian coast were almost as likely to be Greek as native.
Chapter Fifty
Old Enemies
Between 783 and 727 BC,
the Assyrian empire declines,
until Tiglath-Pileser III restores it
IN 783, SHALMANESER IV came to the throne of Assyria and ruled for nine years. In a very un-Assyrian manner, he made few boasts of glory. The handful of subdued victory inscriptions that remain suggest that he spent most of his time trying to keep invaders out of Assyria. Damascus had grown to be the capital city of an Aramaean kingdom, called “Syria” in most ancient accounts, and the Syrians were strong enough to attack Assyria’s border, rather than the other way around.1 In one of his final battles against the Syrians, Shalmaneser IV was even forced to make an alliance with the king of Israel, Jeroboam II, in order to beat them off.2
He also faced a newly troublesome enemy to the north. In the mountains above Assyria, the Hurrians who had once belonged to the old Mitanni empire had built little tribal kingdoms. Since the fall of the Mitanni, Assyrian raiding parties had treated these backwoods Hurrians as a convenient source for metal, wood, and slaves. Shalmaneser I had boasted several centuries earlier of sacking fifty-one of their settlements, stealing their goods, and kidnapping their young men: “Their young men I selected and took for service,” he wrote, “heavy tribute for all time I imposed on them.”3
In the face of this constant invasion from beneath, the mountain peoples were forced to organize themselves into a coalition. They borrowed the Assyrian script for their inscriptions, and the Assyrian royal customs for their kings; the enemy’s empire gave them the model for their own.4 The Assyrians called them the Urartu, a name which is still preserved in the name of the high mountain in its ancient territory: Mount Ararat. Compared with Assyrian troops, the soldiers of Urartu were gnats swarming an elephant. But Assyrian attacks against the massive fortresses that guarded the Urartu mountain passes did not manage to breach their frontier.
50.1 Assyria and Its Challengers
Stalled on both his western and northern fronts, Shalmaneser IV suffered his terminal embarrassment when he lost hold of Babylon. The city had been increasingly fractious, under its Assyrian governor. A jostling crowd of Chaldean warlords now fought over its throne, and the Assyrian governor seems to have fled.
In other far-flung provinces of the Assyrian empire, the governors had begun to act as petty kings without consulting Caleh; the governor of Mari, in his own annals, even dates the events of his tenure by the years of his own rule, with no mention of the king at all.5 Under the reign of Shalmaneser IV’s son, more than one governor made an armed attempt at freedom, forcing Assyrian troops to march on their cities. And by the time of his grandson, the king of Urartu was boasting in inscriptions that he had “conquered the land…of Assyria.”6
Urartu had in fact managed to extend its rule not only south, into land once held by Assyria, but far to the west. In these new lands, they had built fortresses on the highest peaks they could find; they were mountain people, not happy unless they could stand on high ground and see around them. The Urartu borders now encompassed much of the ancient Hittite territory,127 and Sarduri I of Urartu sent east to make an alliance with the Mada and Parsua tribes against Assyria.
With these forces arrayed against him, it was all that Shalmaneser IV’s grandson, Ashur-nirari V, could do to keep the heartland secure. Even in this he failed. The inner walls of Assur, the city’s last line against invasion, had begun to disintegrate and collapse from neglect. No official or governor, nor the king, sent any order for their rebuilding; the people of Assur were gathering the fallen stones and building their own houses from them.7
Things must have been little better in Caleh, where the empire’s headquarters were located. Seven years into his reign, the governor of Caleh, a man named Pul, led an insurrection against the king.
Pul was probably a royal cousin of some kind, given that he had been awarded the responsibility of governing the royal city itself, but if Ashur-nirari V had hoped for blood loyalty, he had miscalculated. Pul took advantage of his relative’s weakness to round up his own supporters and murder not only Ashur-nirari V but also his family. He claimed the throne himself early in the month of May, 746. On his accession, he took a new name, one that recalled past Assyrian glories: Tiglath-Pileser, the third of that name.128
Almost simultaneously, a new and strong king had also taken the throne of Babylon.
Nabonassar was a Chaldean. However he managed to get control of Babylon, he then quelled the revolts and soothed the discontented. A historical tradition preserved by the Greeks insists that the strength of Babylon during his reign allowed the science of astronomy to flourish. (The Greeks, in fact, were so convinced of the Chaldean foundations of their own astronomical knowledge that they tended to use the words “Chaldean” and “astronomer” interchangeably, a usage which spread throughout the ancient world; it is for this reason that the book of Daniel explains that Nebuchadnezzar II, the king of Babylon two hundred years later, summoned his “Chaldeans” along with the other wise men of his kingdom when he needed advice.) During his years on the throne, Babylonian scribes first began to keep tables that correlate astronomical observations to daily records of the weather, the levels of the Tigris and Euphrates, and the price of grain and other important supplies: the sign not only of a city at peace, but a city with leisure to search for ways to make itself more prosperous.8
As soon as he had control of Assyria, Tiglath-Pileser III headed south towards Babylon and offered himself as Nabonassar’s ally. He had troubles on the north, e
ast, and west; he didn’t need an enemy to the south as well. Nabonassar accepted the alliance, and Tiglath-Pileser III sent Assyrian soldiers to help the new king of Babylon wipe out Chaldean and Aramaean resistance to his reign.
But the Chaldean and Aramaean chiefs ended up paying tribute to Tiglath-Pileser, not to Nabonassar. “The cities of Babylonia by the shore of the Lower Sea, I annexed,” Tiglath-Pileser boasted in his own annals, “I annexed them to Assyria, I placed my eunuch over them as governor.”9 To the north of Babylon, where Aramaeans had been squelched, Tiglath-Pileser built a new city called Kar Assur, or “Wall of Assur.” Ostensibly this city was to help protect Babylon against nomads trying to infiltrate Nabonassar’s land. In reality, it became an Assyrian outpost in Babylonia, staffed with Assyrian officials, guarded by Assyrian soldiers, and populated by Assyrian conquests: “I named it Kar Assur,” Tiglath-Pileser’s annals explain. “I settled therein people of foreign lands, conquered by me, I imposed upon them tribute, and I considered them as inhabitants of Assyria.”10 When Tiglath-Pileser went home he announced himself (as Shamshi-Adad V had done before him) to be “King of Sumer and Akkad.”
Nabonassar, down to the south, held his tongue. As long as the Assyrian king left him alone to rule his own country, he doesn’t seem to have worried overmuch about what titles the other man boasted.11 Tiglath-Pileser, in his turn, was content to leave the day-to-day running of Babylon to Nabonassar. He had business elsewhere.129 He intended to replace the rebellious governors of the distant provinces with newly appointed officials, who were required to send him regular reports; he set up for this purpose an ancient sort of Pony Express so that relay riders could get reports to the palace in decent time.
Then, with his own house in order, he turned his attention to the north, where the Urartu were strutting across the provinces which had once belonged to Assyria. They had conquered their way as far down to the southwest as Carchemish. Even the city of Arvad farther south, technically bound to Assyria by treaty, had now joined the Urartu as an ally.12
Tiglath-Pileser besieged the city. It was a drawn-out attack, bloody on both sides. Two years later, Arvad finally fell.
Tiglath-Pileser’s records say that he spent the year 740 “in Arvad” the king had taken up residence temporarily in the conquered city, using it as a military headquarters to continue his battles into Urartu. He took both Que and Carchemish away from Urartian control. By 735, the Assyrians had marched into the center of Urartu, and the Urartian king Sarduri I and his soldiers had been forced northwards towards their own capital city. “The gorges and precipices of the mountains I filled with [their bodies],” Tiglath-Pileser III boasted, in the language which had now become as familiar as any governmental jargon. He adds, though, a distinct note: Sarduri “to save his life, escaped at night and was seen no more…up to the bridge across the Euphrates, the boundary of his land, I pursued him.”13
There he stopped. Sarduri regathered and ruled over a smaller, although independent Urartu, in the area which had once been the northern part of his kingdom. The south remained in Assyrian hands.
Tiglath-Pileser III’s redrawing of the map had the effect of creating a new country. His new province had swallowed the eastern tribes of the Phrygians, in central Asia Minor. Now the western tribes regathered themselves into a coalition, drawing together, in the face of the eastern enemy, into a Phrygian kingdom. Tiglath-Pileser III had accidentally created a new nation whose first real king exists in legend: King Midas.
Whoever Midas was, the story of his accession had entered into myth by the time of Alexander the Great, four hundred years later. Arriving in Phrygia, Alexander found himself faced with an ancient wagon, with the yoke attached to the wagon’s pole by a huge knot. This, he was told, was the wagon of the first king of Phrygia. The Phrygian people, leaderless, had asked an oracle who should become their king; the oracle had answered that the first man who drove up in a wagon was the divine choice, whereupon a farmer named Midas came into sight, riding this very wagon.130 He was at once crowned king, and in gratitude dedicated the wagon to Zeus.14
Midas, according to Herodotus, sent an offering to the oracle of Delphi, of his own throne, one of the few non-Greeks to do so.15 According to other legends, Midas also married a Greek woman from Cyme. Both of these stories reveal that the Phrygians, now organized under a king and with a capital city named after him (Midas City; “Midas” became a traditional royal name), did a great deal of trade with the Ionian cities on the Asia Minor coast.
This trade made Phrygia immensely rich. The old Greek tale of Midas, in which he is given the magical ability to turn whatever he touches to gold, preserves the awe of Ionian merchants over the wealth of Phrygia’s kings; the dreadful outcome, in which Midas’s golden touch turns out to be curse as much as blessing, reflects their jealousy over all this prosperity.
WHILE PHRYGIA GREW, Tiglath-Pileser campaigned against all the usual enemies. He marched east and reconquered the rebellious Parsua and Mada. Once victorious he took up the cause against the troublesome west. When the king of Israel, a nobody named Menahem, saw the Assyrian forces on the horizon, he sent forty tons of silver to buy the enemy off.16 Judah was even more cooperative; the current Davidic king, Ahaz, first raided Solomon’s temple and sent all the sacred items to Tiglath-Pileser as a gesture of submission, and then offered to become Assyria’s ally against Israel.
In the battle that followed, Israel lost most of its northern parts to Assyria. Now Tiglath-Pileser ruled Syria and controlled both Israel and Judah; the west was troublesome no more.
So far, Tiglath-Pileser had paid little attention to Babylon, but now Nabonassar died and the city fell into a frenzy of civil war. Tiglath-Pileser, who had just finished the conquest of Damascus, took notice of the mess and decided that it was now time to make Babylon part of his kingdom in fact as well as in name.
As Tiglath-Pileser crossed Babylon’s northern border and marched towards the capital along the Tigris river, the country divided into two. Babylonian cities argued among themselves, as he approached, as to whether they should throw their lot in with the Assyrian monarch, or mount a (probably pointless) fight for independence. The Babylonian cities in the north tended to be pro-Assyrian; it was prudent to be pro-Assyrian if you lived just south of the Assyrian border, but their willingness to throw their lot in with Tiglath-Pileser suggests that they had more sympathy with Assyrian customs and gods than with the ways of the Semitic Chaldeans who were fighting over the throne.
Knowing this, Tiglath-Pileser sent officials down to Babylon ahead of him, with instructions to ask the citizens of Babylon for loyalty. They sent their report back to Tiglath-Pileser, behind them on the campaign trail, in a letter discovered at Caleh in 1952:
To the king my lord, from his servants Samas-bunaia and Nabuieter. We came to Babylon on the twenty-eighth and took our stand before the Marduk Gate. We spoke to the Babylonians and said, “Why are you acting against us, for the sake of Chaldeans? Their place is down with their own Chaldean tribesmen. Babylon, showing favor to Chaldeans! Our king recognizes your rights as citizens of Babylon.” To us, the citizens said, “We do not believe the king will come,” but that they would submit, should the king arrive.17
Samas-bunaia and Nabuieter had played the race card, and Babylon preferred Assyria to the Chaldeans.
The Chaldean chief who currently occupied Babylon’s throne fled, and Tiglath-Pileser swept past the city and down to the south, to the city where he had holed up: Sapea, a city with three walls, the shortest a good fifteen feet high and the other two ascending progressively higher. An Assyrian relief records the siege and the spoil of the city. Archers, shooting down from the walls, fall before the Assyrian assault and their bodies are piled in the stream that circles the city. Weeping women and children are carried off into exile.18
Tiglath-Pileser then marched to Babylon and entered the city in triumph. He declared himself king and swore allegiance to the great Babylonian god Marduk during the New Year’s
festival of 728. The Chaldeans, having been thoroughly terrified by the fall of Sapea, hurried to Babylon to honor their new king.
Among them was a local warlord named Merodach-baladan. He was, Tiglath-Pileser makes special note, a “king of the sealand who had not submitted to any of the kings, my fathers, and had not kissed their feet.” But now he swore allegiance, and brought lovely presents as tribute: gold necklaces, precious stones, logs of valuable wood, dyed garments, and livestock.19
Merodach-baladan swore loyalty to Assyria with his fingers crossed behind his back, but Tiglath-Pileser III did not yet know this.20 He was filled with exaltation, king of Babylon and Assyria together, and to demonstrate his power he sacrificed to the gods of Babylon in every major city: “In Sippar, Nippur, Babylon, Borsippa, Kutha, Kish, Dilbat, and Erech,” he writes, “I offered pure sacrifices to…the great gods…and they accepted my priesthood. The wide land of [Babylonia] I brought under my sway, and exercised sovereignty over it.”21 He was the first Assyrian monarch to appear in Babylon’s own king lists, the first to be recognized by the people of Babylon as their own king. All of the acclaim managed to paper neatly over the fact that he had no right to either throne.
Chapter Fifty-One
Kings of Assyria and Babylon
Between 726 and 705 BC,
Egypt is reunited and Israel scattered,
as Sargon II conquers nearly the whole world
IN 726, TWO YEARS AFTER “taking the hand of Marduk,” Tiglath-Pileser III died after almost twenty years on the Assyrian throne.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 37
