Properly enthroned, Esarhaddon faced an empire whose edges had begun to fray. Official letters show that fifteen or sixteen major cities, centers of Assyrian provinces, had gotten well behind on their tribute, and Sennacherib had not bothered to follow up on the debts.3 Worse, as soon as the news of Sennacherib’s death spread down to the ruins of Babylon, a Chaldean rebellion began—led by none other than the son of old Merodach-baladan. His name was Nabu-zerketti-lisher, and he had been ruling over Bit-Yakin, down at the head of the Gulf, for some years. Now he collected his tribesmen and marched up to attack the city of Ur, the first stop on his way to claim the old Babylonian territory.4
Esarhaddon, who must have begun to feel that Merodach-baladan’s ghost was always going to torment the kings of Assyria, sent soldiers to clean up the mess; Nabu-zer-ketti-lisher fled to Elam and discovered, to his great surprise, that the newly crowned king of Elam had no intention of provoking the new Assyrian ruler. He was arrested and, still startled, put to death.5
Esarhaddon himself began, almost at once, to pour money and men into Babylon.
Sennacherib’s exasperated destruction of the city had not gone over well with much of the court, and many of his own people; Babylon’s gods were far too close to their own, and the removal of Marduk’s statue from Babylon struck many as an insult that simply begged for divine retaliation. Esarhaddon’s own records announce that he desired to rebuild Babylon out of affection for Marduk. This left him with a bit of a problem, though; if he spent too much time promising to amend the insult to Marduk, he was condemning his own father for impiety (and potentially destroying his own claim to be part of a divinely appointed family of kings).
He got around this by managing to describe the destruction of Babylon without ever mentioning his father. His account of Babylon’s flooding suggests that no human hand had any role in the devastation:
In the reign of an earlier king,
there were evil omens in Babylon.
There were crimes, injustices, lies,
The inhabitants mistreated the gods,
left off regular offerings and worship,
took the temple treasure to pay Elam,
took the treasure of Babylon for another.
Before my time, Marduk became angry with Babylon,
The Arahtu overflowed and turned the city into a ruin,
Babylon became a wasteland,
Reeds and poplars grew in the abandoned city,
its gods and goddesses left their shrines,
its inhabitants fled for refuge.6
This was dreadful history but brilliant propaganda: the repetition of “Before my time” which removed blame from Esarhaddon without pinning it on his father; the explanation that the gods deserted Babylon out of divine anger, as opposed to being hauled off in Assyrian wagons; the suggestion that the appeal to Elam had made Marduk particularly furious; the coy reference to “an earlier king” and above all, the plaintive “The Arahtu overflowed” (as opposed to the more truthful, “Assyrian soldiers dammed it with broken bits of Babylon’s own walls”).7
The statue of Marduk remained in Assyria, as a reminder to the citizens of Babylon that their god had taken up residence with the rightful king of Babylonia. But Esarhaddon, acting as the god’s agent, rebuilt temples and houses and relaid streets. He wrote his own praises into the very roads underfoot: scores of the bricks that paved the approach to the great temple complex of Esagila were stamped “For the god Marduk, Esarhaddon, king of the world, king of Assyria and king of Babylon, made the processional way of Esagila and Babylon shine with baked bricks from a ritually pure kiln.”8
The Chaldean tribe Bit-Dakkuri, brother-tribe to the Bit-Yakin of Merodach-baladan, now decided to make friends. They sent a letter up to Babylon offering loyalty, but Esarhaddon, who was in no mood to trust Chaldeans, wrote back tartly. “The word of the king to the non-Babylonians,” the letter begins, succinctly:
I am herewith sending back to you, with its seals intact, your completely pointless letter to me. Perhaps you will say, “Why did he return it to us?” When the citizens of Babylon, who are my servants and love me, wrote to me, I opened their letter and read it. But would it be good for me to accept and read a letter from the hand of criminals?9
The letter was followed by troops; Esarhaddon sent Assyrian soldiers to push the Chaldeans away from the southern lands of Babylonia, back into their marsh.
Meanwhile a new threat was coalescing to the northeast. Nomadic tribes who had long roamed around the shores of the Caspian Sea were gathering together above the tribes of the Medes and Persians. The Assyrians called the newcomers the Gimirrai; they were known to later historians as the Cimmerians.
The Cimmerians, like so many of the mountain nomads, were better at fighting than anything else.140 Their excursions along the northern Assyrian border had reached all the way over into Cilicia, at the edge of Asia Minor, and they had also made friends with the Urartian king, Rusas II (still, apparently, harboring the patricidal princes somewhere up in his mountains).10 This made Esarhaddon take notice: a Cimmerian/Urartian alliance could be dangerous.
In an attempt to strengthen his northern border, Esarhaddon made a tentative alliance with a second group of nomads who were filtering down from the Caucasus Mountains, north of the Black Sea. These Scythians would provide him with an extra arm to hold back the Cimmerians and Urartians, but he didn’t entirely trust them. Divination tablets from Esarhaddon’s rule, on which his formal inquiries to the sun-god Shamash were written so that they could be presented at the temple, record the king’s difficulties:
Shamash, great lord, will Rusas, king of the Urartu, come with his armies, and the Cimmerians (or any of his allies), and wage war, kill, plunder, and loot?
Shamash, great lord, if I give one of my daughters in marriage to the king of the Scythians, will he speak words of good faith to me, true and honest words of peace? Will he keep my treaty and do whatever is pleasing to me?
Shamash, great lord, will the troops of the Cimmerians, or of the Medes, or of any other enemy, attack? Will they try to capture cities by a tunnel, by scaling ladders, by ramps and battering rams, or by a treaty of peace—a ruse?11
There were no clear answers to any of these questions.
54.1 Esarhaddon’s World
ESARHADDON WAS FORCED into war in 676, when the Cimmerian nomads pushed so far west that they arrived at the borders of Phrygia.
The prosperous Phrygians were not helpless. Their villages—stone buildings on hilltops, their foundations still visible thousands of years later—were built for defense. Their most characteristic monuments, the “facade monuments,” still dot the landscape: slabs of stone jutting up into the air, one side carved into the likeness of a wall, with a sculpted door that can never be opened. The Midas Monument at Midas City faces the rising sun, as do almost all the other facade monuments. For a few moments at dawn, its gray surface turns bright and the false door glows.12
54.1. Midas Monument. The Midas Monument is carved to resemble the wall of a temple or tomb. Photo credit Chris Hellier/CORBIS
But the speed and savagery of the Cimmerian invasion took them by surprise. The Phrygian army was driven back towards the capital city of Gordium, as the people who lived in the countryside poured into the city, hoping to be protected by its walls. But the Cimmerians overran the walls and set the city on fire. Their king, Midas, grandson of the Midas who had ruled back in the years of Tiglath-Pileser, saw that defeat was inevitable. He killed himself in the citadel; the Roman geographer Strabo, writing six hundred years later, says that he committed suicide by drinking bull’s blood.13 It is an odd death, and a desperate one.
Esarhaddon marched his own army up to meet the threat. The two armies clashed in Cilicia, and Esharaddon claimed victory. He had killed the Cimmerian king Teushpa, he boasted in his inscriptions, with his own hands.14
Esarhaddon’s attack halted the Cimmerian invasion, and saved the west of Asia Minor from destruction. But Phrygia ha
d fallen. The shattered villages never did regather themselves, and the trade routes once dominated by Phrygian merchants now belonged to the villages farther west. These people were known as the Lydians, and with the plain to the east destroyed, their king Gyges became the strongest power in all of Asia Minor.
EGYPT HAD NOW been more or less united, under the Nubian pharaohs of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, for eighty years or so. Tirhakah, the prince who had fought Sennacherib to a draw years before, was now king. Esarhaddon was determined to finish the conquest that his father had begun: “Shamash, great lord,” his next query begins, “should I go to Egypt, and wage war against Tirkhakah, king of Kush, and his troops; and in this war, will my weapons and army prevail?”15 The answer must have been positive, because the Assyrian chronicles announce, “In the seventh year of Esarhaddon’s reign, the Assyrian army marched on Egypt.”16
Tirhakah had waited a long time for his throne, and he was not going to sit calmly in the Delta until Esarhaddon arrived. Egyptian forces marched up to meet the Assyrians at the Philistine town of Ashkelon, where the men of Ashkelon joined with them. Esarhaddon’s men arrived at Ashkelon to face this joint enemy already tired and weakened. On the long march south, they had been forced to fight off nomadic Arabian tribes who saw the long Assyrian column as a good source of food and weapons.
The battle that followed was brief, and Tirhakah’s army was victorious. Esarhaddon retreated from the Delta. Tirhakah went back to Egypt, where he splashed building projects (including an enormous sprawling Temple of Amun down in Nubia) all across the country, in the manner of a pharaoh secure in his own greatness.17
But Esarhaddon had not gone away. He had simply withdrawn to regather his forces. Two years later, in 671, he arrived with a rested army and drove through the outer defenses of Egypt, down through the Delta and all the way to Memphis, where Tirhakah and his army made a last stand. When it became clear that the Assyrian army would triumph, Tirhakah escaped the battlefield and fled down south towards his ancestral lands. Esarhaddon captured his son and wife, most of his family, and a slew of courtiers, and took the whole group back to Nineveh as captives. Along with Tirhakah’s family, he had rounded up the sons of various noblemen—including the son of the king of Sais, a western Delta city—and hauled them back to Nineveh to educate them into Assyrians.
He left Egypt under the control of governors who had sworn allegiance to Assyria.18 Their allegiance barely lasted until Esarhaddon was back in Nineveh. The governor of Sais, a man named Necho, remained loyal (his son, after all, was a hostage in Nineveh), but the vassals of other cities ceased following Assyrian orders almost as soon as the tail end of the procession was out of sight.
Esarhaddon reached Nineveh, turned around, and started back down to Egypt. He never reached it; he died on the march south.
ESARHADDON LEFT his Assyrian throne to Ashurbanipal, his chosen and favorite son; but he appointed a younger prince, Shamash-shum-ukin, crown prince of Babylon, a sovereign ruler under his older brother’s supervision. The year after Ashurbanipal’s coronation, Shamash-shum-ukin was formally crowned in Babylon. His entrance into the city was accompanied by the image of the god Marduk, who was finally coming back home. “During my reign,” Ashurbanipal announced in an inscription in Babylon,
the great lord, the god Marduk
entered Babylon amidst rejoicing and took up his residence
and I re-established the privileged status of Babylon
and I appointed Shamash-shum-ukin, my favorite brother,
to the kingship of Babylon.19
Then he picked up his father’s sword against Egypt. Tirhakah had crept back north and was trying to regain his throne; Ashurbanipal stormed through Egypt as far south as Thebes, killing every king who had forgotten his Assyrian allegiance, but sparing the pro-Assyrian Necho of Sais. In the place of the dead vassal kings, Ashurbanipal appointed those Assyrian-trained Egyptian sons that his father had taken to Nineveh. Necho’s son, a young man named Psammetichus, was brought back from Assyria and installed in the eastern city of Athribis, across from his father’s city. Together the father and son were given the joint overlordship of all the other cities.20
Tirhakah was still alive, though. This time he had been driven all the way south into Upper Nubia and was in Napata, almost at the Fourth Cataract. He had announced that his cousin would be his heir; apparently his own son had been executed, up in Nineveh. When he died, his cousin Tantamani inherited an empty title, the kingship of a land firmly under Assyrian control.
But then Tatanami had a dream:
In Year 1 of his coronation as king…His Majesty saw a dream by night: two serpents, one upon his right, the other on his left. Then His Majesty awoke, and did not find them. His Majesty said, “Why have I seen this?” The answer came to him: “The Southland is yours; take the Northland also for yourself. The Two Goddesses shine upon your brow, the land is given to you in all of its length and breadth. No other divides it with you.”21
He rose from his bed with the divine command echoing in his ears: take Egypt back from the Assyrians and their vassal kings.
His early victories were easy; the Assyrians had left, again, and the natives were not happy under their Assyrian governors. Tatanami progressed north along the Nile, welcomed by the towns he passed and collecting allies behind him. At Memphis, he came up against the first real obstacle: Necho of Sais, who had hurried south with an Assyrian-reinforced army to stop the Nubian conqueror.
In the battle that followed, Necho fell. His son Psammetichus took up his task, but found himself at once terribly unpopular with the other noblemen of the Delta, who preferred Nubian to Assyrian rule; Herodotus says that at one point Psammetichus was driven to hide in the marshes from eleven other Delta rulers, out for his blood. He was pushed steadily backwards into Sais, where he fenced himself in behind the Assyrian garrison stationed there.22
Meanwhile, the Delta was celebrating, and Tantamani was carving victory prayers to Amun (“He who is guided by Amun cannot go astray!”) on memorial steles.23
But then Ashurbanipal returned, this time with more troops. In 663, he joined his forces with those of the struggling Psammetichus, and together, the two armies laid waste to the Delta. Tantamani ran down south for the second time; and Thebes was sacked and burned for the first time in its history. The Temple of Amun was crushed. Its treasure was stolen, its walls levelled, and the two silver obelisks that stood at its doors were hauled back up to Nineveh.24 The destruction of Thebes was so shattering that it became a byword in the ancient Near East, proof of what could happen to those who defied Assyrian might. Decades later, the Jewish prophet Nahum could still describe it with violent detail:
Thebes, on the river Nile, with water around her,
defended by the river, the water her walls,
Kush her strength, her ally—
But she was taken captive, taken into exile,
Her infants were dashed to pieces at the head of every street,
Lots were cast for her noblemen,
and all her great men were put into chains.25
Then Ashurbanipal got rid of every vassal king and appointed Psammetichus the sole pharaoh of Egypt. Egypt was just too far away for the Assyrians to keep a huge garrison there. If Ashurbanipal was to keep the country under his thumb, he needed an indestructibly loyal vassal king.
Despite his Assyrian indoctrination, Psammetichus was not that king. His willingness to fight on the side of Ashurbanipal’s army had been craft, the strategy of a man who had spent his entire adolescence surrounded by enemies, powerless and homeless with his life hanging by a thread. As soon as he had the throne, he began to veer slowly away from the Assyrian straight and narrow. He began to negotiate with the various governors of Egypt, promising them power in a new regime. Not too long later, an Assyrian officer posted in Syria sent a message of complaint to Ashurbanipal, in Nineveh, about Psammetichus’s increasingly independent behavior; the Assyrian viceroy was slowly but surely cleansing
his cities of Assyrian soldiers stationed there. Ashurbanipal acknowledged the letter, but sent no cleanup crew. His men were busy elsewhere.26
By 658, Psammetichus was sending secret messengers to Gyges, king of Lydia, now the only powerful sovereign in Asia Minor. Sympathetic to the Egyptian cause (anything that reduced the looming power of Assyria made him happier), Gyges sent additional soldiers down to join Psammetichus in Egypt. They left their tracks; while waiting in boredom for the fighting to start, they scribbled graffiti which can still be read on the walls of the temple at Wadi Alfa.27
By 653, Psammetichus was ready to stake his future on the success of a rebellion. He turned on the Assyrian soldiers stationed in the Delta and drove them all the way out of his country, up into the Western Semitic territories. He then made Sais his royal capital; and by marrying his daughter to the most powerful nobleman at Thebes, he spread his authority down almost as far as the First Cataract.
Farther south, Nubia remained under a shifting patchwork of local rulers, progressively more independent of Egyptian influence. But north of the First Cataract, Egypt was once more under a real pharaoh (if an Assyrian-trained one), who claimed the ancient title Uniter of the Two Lands and the blessing of Egypt’s chief god.28 For the first time in many years, maat—divine order—had returned to Egypt. The Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, or Saite Dynasty, centered in Psammetichus’s birth-city of Sais, had begun.
THE REVOLT IN EGYPT didn’t work out nearly as well for Gyges. The Cimmerians, who had regathered themselves, were again on the march west. This time, the Assyrians refused to interfere; Ashurbanipal held a grudge against Gyges, thanks to those Lydian soldiers down in Egypt. The Cimmerians, under their king Dugdamme, attacked the Lydian army, drove it back, killed Gyges, and sacked Sardis. Dugdamme then moved southwards, which brought him a little too close to Assyrian territory; Ashurbanipal was willing to let the Cimmerians teach another nation a lesson, but he didn’t want them on his own land.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 41
