He left his son, Shalmaneser V, with a well-protected border and the joint rule of Assyria and Babylon. But down at the head of the Gulf, the reluctant Chaldean vassal Merodach-baladan was quietly gathering followers around him.
Shalmaneser V’s reign suffers from an almost total lack of inscriptions, but he doesn’t seem to have noticed this rising Chaldean threat. He was concentrating on his western front. His campaigns show an obsessive desire to bring it under total control; certainly this would have been one up on his great father, who received tribute from the Phoenicians and Israelites, but treated them as vassal states rather than Assyrian provinces. According to Josephus, Shalmaneser V spent almost five years besieging the Phoenician city of Tyre, which had sent tribute to Tiglath-Pileser.1 Nor was this his only one-upon his father. Tiglath-Pileser had reduced Israel to a vassal state; Shalmaneser V wiped it out.
For this, he had some excuse. The current king of Israel, an ex-army officer named Hoshea, “no longer paid tribute to the king of Assyria, as he had done year by year.”2 Shalmaneser V’s spies also reported to him that Hoshea had sent envoys down “to So, king of Egypt.” Israel was planning a war against Assyria, and was searching for allies.
THE REENTRY OF EGYPT into the Western Semitic fray was only possible because the country had been temporarily reunified. In the century since the battle of Qarqar, Egypt had split again not only into north and south, but also into east and west kingdoms, yielding a dizzying array of pharaohs and three separate capitals: Thebes, Tanis, and the central Delta city of Leontopolis. For a brief time, there were also kings at Herakleopolis and Hermopolis, and at least fifteen other families claiming some sort of ruling title, from “king” and “lord” right down to the clan title of “chief.”3 Manetho attempts to reduce this mess into some sort of order by organizing the kings into the Twenty-Second, Twenty-Third, and Twenty-Fourth Dynasties, but all three “dynasties” were actually ruling simultaneously from different cities, and the local power of the Twenty-Second Dynasty lingered on into the dominance of the Twenty-Fifth.
51.1 Egypt and Assyria
During all of this messiness at the top, the southern lands on either side of the Nile—the African country of Nubia, its Egypt-governed section generally called “Kush” by the Egyptian overlords—had benefited from Egypt’s preoccupation with its own troubles. Technically, various Egyptian viceroys were supposed to be governing the area, but in fact no one was really paying attention. By the time of Egypt’s multiple dynasties, the Nubians, who were now a mixture of native African tribes and the Egyptians who had settled among them, were not actually governed by a viceroy, but rather by their own king. This kingdom, which its own people called Napata, was ruled from a Nubian palace at Jebel Barkal. It bore unmistakable traces of Egyptian occupation: its people worshipped the god Amun, and its Nubian rulers followed the ancient tradition of brother-sister marriages.4
In 727, the year just before Shalmaneser V inherited his father’s throne, the king of Napata was a Nubian native named Piankhe. He had already been on the throne twenty years when he learned that the kings of Sais, Tanis, Herakleopolis, Hermopolis, and Leontopolis, nervous about the growing size of Napata, had formed an alliance to push Egypt’s border back down into Nubian territory.
He fought back against the coalition, triumphed, and carved the details of his campaign into an elaborate relief: the god Amun bestows his blessing on Piankhe, true king of Egypt, while the warleader/kings approach him in humility.
Piankhe did not try to wipe out his enemies. Instead, he chose to see Egypt as a set of kingdoms, with himself as High King over them:
Amun of Napata has appointed me governor of this land
he wrote in another inscription,
as I might say to someone: “Be king,” and he is it,
or: “You will not be king,” and he is not.
Amun of Thebes has appointed me governor of Egypt….
Whoever is protected by me runs no risk of seeing his town conquered,
at least not if I can help it.5
This was the Egypt that Israel asked for alliance against the vast Assyrian threat.
The “So of Egypt” to whom the Israelite envoys appealed may not have been Piankhe himself; Egypt was now peppered with local “kings” serving as Piankhe’s viceroys. In all likelihood, the Israelites ended up in the court of a Delta king named Osorkon IV. Hoshea may not have known exactly who was in charge down in Egypt, which had a political scene so complicated that even the Egyptians were confused. And possibly Piankhe did not even know that Israelite ambassadors had arrived in his country.
Whoever heard the appeal didn’t respond, though; Hoshea was turned down. The trip down to Egypt turned out to be a major blunder. Shalmaneser V, already annoyed by the long siege of recalcitrant Tyre, was in no mood to put up with any resistance from the cities his father had reduced to obedience. “The king of Assyria invaded the entire land,” reads II Kings 17:5, “marched against [Israel’s capital] Samaria and laid siege to it for three years.”
At this point the Assyrian accounts blink. When they reopen, Shalmaneser V—only five years on the throne and carrying on two sieges simultaneously—is dead. A new king has taken the throne under the royal name Sargon II.
If Shalmaneser V had died in battle, the writer of Kings would likely have said so. Most likely his successor Sargon II was a younger son of Tiglath-Pileser, taking advantage of his brother’s weakness to seize power; those long and apparently fruitless sieges cannot have been popular with the army, and Shalmaneser V had also made himself unpopular back home by trying to introduce an obligation of forced labor to the people of Assur. This had not gone over well.6
Sargon II promised the citizens of Assur tax exemptions, by way of convincing them to forget about his brother’s sudden death: “Shalmaneser did not fear the king of the universe,” he told them, in his official annals. “He raised his hand to do evil against that city; he imposed on its people feudal dues and services, harshly, and counted them as his camp followers, whereupon the lord of the gods, in the anger of his heart, overthrew his rule. Me, Sargon, my head he raised on high…. Assur’s freedom from dues I restored…. from the ‘call to arms’ of the land, the summons of the taskmaster, from tax, toll, and dues to all the temples of Assyria, I freed them.”7
He also broke the stalemated sieges. In the first year of his annals, 721, he conquered Samaria, bringing to an end in short order an assault which had dragged on far too long. And then, with a ruthlessness that none of his predecessors had shown, Sargon II wiped the political state of Israel from the map. He took Hoshea captive, put him in jail, and then set to work deporting the Israelites, which was the typical Assyrian response to a vassal state that clung stubbornly to independence. Deportation was a kind of genocide, murder not of persons, but of a nation’s sense of itself. Sargon’s own inscriptions note that he removed 27,290 Israelites from their homeland, and settled them from Asia Minor all the way over to the territory of the Medes.8 These Israelites became known as the “lost ten tribes,” not because the people themselves were lost, but because their identity as descendants of Abraham and worshippers of Yahweh was dissipated into the new wild areas where they were now forced to make their homes.131
The scattered Israelites who still lived in the northern kingdom now found themselves invaded by exiles from elsewhere. “People of the lands my hand had conquered, I settled within,” Sargon II notes.9 This mishmash of Israelites and others eventually developed their own culture; it was a mix of different religions and bloodlines that the Jews of the first century BC called “Samaritans,” and despised as half-breeds.
THIS WAS NOT the end of it. When the Aramaeans of Syria and Hamath joined to defy the Assyrian king, Sargon II met them at the city of Qarqar. This time, a hundred years after the first great clash of powers at Qarqar, there was no ambiguity over the outcome. The king of Hamath was dragged off in chains to Assur, the Syrian leader “ran off alone like a shepherd whose sheep have
been carried off,” and Sargon sacked and burned Qarqar.10
Fully in control of the west, he crossed the Mediterranean as far as the island of Cyprus—occupied by a mix of Ionian Greeks and Phoenician settlers from the coast—and forced it to pay tribute to him. He also built himself a new capital, Dur-Sharrukin (“Sargon City”), northeast of Nineveh, just beyond the foothills of the Taurus Mountains where the Urartu still hovered as a threat.
Urartian soldiers could easily come down from their high places, attack, and then retreat back into the passes over which their fortresses loomed; marching into the mountains after them was a much more difficult proposition. And the Urartu had developed into a sophisticated and well-guarded kingdom. Sargon’s own accounts speak, admiringly, of the Urartian king Rusas and the network of canals and wells which he built; of the herds of well-bred and guarded horses, raised in protected valleys until they were needed for war; of the splendid efficiency of Urartian communication, with watchtowers built high on mountain peaks, guarding heaps of fuel that could be lit at a moment’s notice. One beacon, lit, flared up on its mountaintop into an enormous bonfire that appeared as a spark to the next distant post, where the next bonfire could then be lit. They shone like “stars on mountaintops,” in Sargon’s own words, and spread news of invasion faster than a messenger could ride.11
By 714, Sargon was ready to invade the mountains, in a dangerous and risky campaign which he chose to lead himself. Rather than marching straight north up into Urartian territory, which would have brought his army against the strongest of the Urartian fortresses, he led the army east towards the Zagros, intending to reach the relatively flat land on the other side and march up towards the weaker eastern border of the Urartu.
Sargon himself wrote an account of this campaign, in the form of an official royal letter to the god Assur and his divine companions, informing them all of the battles fought on their behalf (undoubtedly a letter to be read out loud to the gods in hearing of most of Assur’s citizens). The army set off in early summer, forded the Upper and Lower Zab, and came soon to the Zagros Mountains.12 Here the lowlanders came to looming and unfamiliar slopes, covered with thick forests where unknown enemies waited:
[We came then to] high mountains, where trees of all kinds grew entwined; the midst of the mountains chaos, their passes stirring fear; over all stretched shade, like a forest of cedars; where he who treads their paths sees no rays of the sun.13
The cedar forests on the mountain slopes, like those into which Gilgamesh had ventured so many years ago, sheltered an enemy which was more terrifying because it was unseen.
Sargon set his men to chopping their way through the forest with copper tools, until the army had reached the flatlands on the east. Here the Medes, bound by treaty (and fear) to feed the Assyrian horde, offered water and grain.
With the army resupplied, Sargon led them up north to meet the Urartian army on the mountain slopes just south of the modern city of Tabriz.132 He had chosen the battlefield well; it was far away from the imposing line of fortresses that guarded the southern frontier. But to reach it, the Assyrian army had marched over three hundred miles, in summer, through stifling woods and steep rock roads, low on water and lower on food. They were exhausted to the point of revolt:
The harassed troops of Assur, who had come a long way, very weary and slow to respond, who had crossed and re-crossed sheer mountains innumerable, of great trouble for ascent and descent, their morale turned mutinous. I could give no ease to their weariness, no water to quench their thirst.14
Sargon was caught: he had reached his objective, and found himself powerless. Meanwhile the Urartian army, under the command of Rusas himself, had assembled to meet him.
His army refusing to follow, he gathered his own personal bodyguard around them and led them in a frantic and suicidal attack on the nearest wing of Rusas’s force. The wing gave ground in the face of his desperate savagery; and according to his own account, Sargon’s army, seeing him fling himself into the line, took courage and followed him in. The Urartian army wavered, broke, and began to retreat.
The retreat turned into a rout. The Assyrian army chased the disintegrating enemy westwards, past Lake Urmia and into their own territory. Rusas abandoned any attempt to hold his own capital city, Turushpa, and fled into the mountains.
At this point, Sargon’s account announces, very abruptly, that the Assyrian army turned for home. He may have suspected that the Assyrian army would mutiny for good if he insisted on chasing the king farther into the unknown, tree-covered depths of the Urartu kingdom.
Instead, the army turned back south and, on its way, plundered and sacked the city of Mushashir, where the main temple of the Urartian chief god stood.15 When this news reached Rusas in his distant retreat, he despaired. “The splendor of Assur overwhelmed him,” Sargon’s inscriptions read, “and with his own iron dagger he stabbed himself through the heart, like a pig, and ended his life.”16
The troublesome kingdom to the north had been brought to heel, and Sargon marched home in victory. It was now November, and he could not have pursued the remnants of the Urartian forces any farther into the mountains without risking being trapped by winter weather, which might choke the mountain passes with ice and snow. The conquest of Urartu had taken place in less than six months.17
Now he was almost at the top of his world. He received ambassadors from Egypt and Ethiopia; gifts and envoys came even from the “king of Dilmun,” who, according to Sargon’s own inscriptions, “lives like a fish.”18 By this he probably meant the Sabean tribes of Arabia, whose queen had visited Solomon two centuries before. He was the admitted overlord of almost the entire world, except for the land directly to the south.
Down in Babylon, a drama had in the meantime been playing itself out. Merodach-baladan, the Chaldean chief of Bit-Yakin, had been collecting his own loyal following in the city of Ur. Almost directly after Shalmaneser V’s death, Merodach-baladan uncrossed his fingers, marched on Babylon, drove off his rivals, and became king.133 He had seen three changes in Assyrian kingship in less than a decade, and was sure that he could outlast Sargon II as well. To make this more likely, he sent envoys to the east, with a good chunk of his not inconsiderable personal wealth to buy Elamite support against Assyria.19
He needed an outside ally; Merodach-baladan’s new country was not entirely behind him. Especially in the north, Babylonians tended towards pro-Assyrian feeling and disliked Chaldeans. Merodach-baladan attempted to get around this with a strategy that Napoleon would adopt a couple of millennia later; he announced that he was the country’s liberator, the restorer of an ancient Babylonian tradition long trampled under the foot of northern invaders. If Assyrians had immediately arrived outside the city walls, this might not have worked. But Sargon was busy with the west, the Mediterranean, his Egyptian and Arabian tributaries, and his Urartian enemies. He did not have much time for Merodach-baladan at first, and for almost a decade, the Chaldean king was able to work (and threaten) his way into total control of Babylon and much of the remaining land.
But by 710, Sargon found himself at leisure to turn south. And over in Elam, the experienced king-general who had agreed to be Merodach-baladan’s ally had just died; his young and unseasoned nephew Shutruk-Nahhunte was now on the throne. So Sargon II attacked Babylon by first marching east into Elam.
Shutruk-Nahhunte fled almost at once into the sheltering mountains; Sargon, having cut off any possibility of Elamite aid coming to Merodach-baladan’s rescue, then marched south and approached Babylon from the southeast. This canny strategy had the double effect of cutting Merodach-baladan off from his Elamite allies and also making it very dangerous for him to retreat to his homeland at the head of the Gulf, since Sargon’s soldiers were actually nearer to the homeland of Bit-Yakin than they were to Babylon. Nor could he go north; the northern cities of Babylon welcomed Sargon with relief, opening their gates to him “with great rejoicing.”20
Sargon’s annals record that Merodach-baladan, c
learly seeing that the battle was lost before it even began, considered fleeing into Elam with a small party, trusting to speed and the cover of darkness in order to get past the Assyrian camp:
When Merodach-baladan…heard in Babylon of the victories of Assur…fear for his own safety befell him in the midst of his palace. He, with the warriors who supported him, left by night and headed for…Elam. Toask a favor from Shutruk-Nahhunte, the Elamite, he sent as presents his own royal furniture: a silver bed, throne, table, the royal ablution-pitcher, his own necklace. The Elamite scoundrel accepted his bribe but feared my military power; so he blocked Merodach-baladan’s way and forbade him to go into Elam.21
Shutruk-Nahhunte may have been a scoundrel, but he made out well in this encounter, ending up with most of Merodach-baladan’s treasure while still avoiding chastisement by the Assyrian king.
Deprived of refuge, Merodach-baladan had to turn around and make his dangerous way back down to Bit-Yakin. Here he suffered exactly the fate he had feared: he was besieged in his own native city. He did his best to resist; Sargon’s account says that he “raised higher” the walls, fortifying them, and “cut a ditch…and flooded the city around with the mighty waves of the sea.”22
But the jury-rigged moat did not protect the city for long. The Assyrian army splashed through it and broke through the defenses. “I burned it with fire,” Sargon II boasts, “and even its foundations were torn up.”23
Sargon II then played the Napoleon card himself, going through the festival in honor of Marduk and “taking the hand” of the god as true king of Babylon. He was restoring the city to its roots, so he claimed; he was their liberator, conqueror of the Chaldean invader who knew nothing of the shared heritage of the two cities. The Babylonians, who had probably lost sight of exactly who was actually restoring their heritage at this point, submitted.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 38
