He began to organize an expedition north, but was terrified by an eclipse which his court priests interpreted as a very bad omen indeed: “There will be an attack on your land,” they told their king, “and the land will be destroyed.”29 Fortunately for Ashurbanipal, not long after the sack of Sardis, Dugdamme grew sick with a revolting disease that combined the vomiting of blood and gangrene of the testicles.30 The illness carried him off, and a relieved Ashurbanipal was able to abandon the expedition north.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Medes and Persians
Between 653 and 625 BC,
Ashurbanipal makes a library and destroys Elam,
while the Medes and Persians become a nation
ASHURBANIPAL’S FAILURE TO STAMP ON Psammetichus was not his last loss of territory. During his rule, the borders of Assyria shifted, and caved slightly inwards. Ashurbanipal was a competent king, but no Sargon, to throw all of his energies into constant warfare so that his empire might be a little bit larger. He was preoccupied with a different sort of acquisition.
He was not the first Assyrian king to collect clay tablets, but he was the first to make their collection a priority all over his empire. He went about this in an organized fashion: he sent officers all over the kingdom to make an inventory of every library anywhere in the empire, and collected copies of every tablet he could find: spells, prophecies, medical remedies, astronomical observations, stories and tales (including a compilation of a thousand years’ worth of stories about the ancient hero Gilgamesh), all put together.1 Eventually the library at Nineveh had almost thirty thousand tablets in it As far as Ashurbanipal was concerned, his library was the abiding accomplishment of his reign:
I, Ashurbanipal, king of the universe,
on whom the gods have bestowed vast intelligence,
who has acquired penetrating acumen
for the most recondite details of scholarly erudition
(none of my predecessors having any comprehension of such matters),
I have placed these tablets for the future in the library at Nineveh
for my life and for the well-being of my soul,
to sustain the foundations of my royal throne.2
Esarhaddon might have managed to keep Egypt, but Ashurbanipal’s realm of the mind would last forever.
His earthly realm was more brittle. The Elamite king was preparing an invasion of Babylon, and to the north of Elam a new enemy was (again) coalescing into a threat.
In the same year as Psammetichus’s rebellion, the Elamite king Teumann and his army began to march towards Babylon. Presumably Teumann had been promised a warm welcome. Hostility had been growing between Ashurbanipal and his younger brother Shamash-shum-ukin, viceroy of Babylon, for some time. Early inscriptions of Shamash-shum-ukin name Ashurbanipal, politely, as “my favorite brother” and “king of the four quarters of the earth,” ask for blessings on Ashurbanipal’s health, and threaten his enemies with disaster.3
But an equal number of inscriptions left in Babylon by Ashurbanipal himself suggest that he had micromanaged the city’s affairs for years.4 An Elamite army could help Shamash-shum-ukin shake free from Ashurbanipal’s dominance.
When Ashurbanipal received news that the Elamites were on the march, he consulted his court prophets. They assured him that the omens were favorable, so he took the offensive: he crossed the Tigris and met the Elamites on their own land. His army drove them back to Susa, inflicting a great slaughter on them. “I dammed the river with the bodies of the people of Elam,” Ashurbanipal boasts, in the epigraphs carved on his reliefs at Nineveh, “and when Teumann, king of Elam, saw the defeat of his troops, he fled to save his life.”
Teumann, king of Elam, was wounded; his oldest son took him by the hand, and they fled towards a forest. But the frame of his royal chariot broke and fell on top of him [and trapped him]. Teumann, in desperation, said to his son, “Take up the bow [and defend us]!” But the wagon pole that had pierced Teumann, king of Elam, had also pierced his son. With the encouragement of Assur, I killed them; I cut off their heads in front of each other.5
The reliefs themselves give one more detail; Ashurbanipal apparently brought the heads back with him and hung them in his garden, where he and his wife then dined beneath the decorated trees. Meanwhile Shamash-shumukin remained on the throne. There was, apparently, no proof that he had ever corresponded with the dead Teumann.
Almost immediately, another army marched on Nineveh itself.
The Madua tribes had managed to organize themselves into a Median kingdom a few years early. Sometime before Ashurbanipal’s accession, a village judge named Deioces had gained a reputation for fairness and integrity that spread throughout all the Median tribes until they proclaimed him leader of them all. “Once power was in his hands,” Herodotus writes, “Deioces insisted that the Medes build a single city and maintain this one place.”6 The central city was Ecbatana, and when the tribes converged on it Ecbatana became the center of an emerging nation.
55.1 The Medes and the Persians
Ecbatana: one of the most startling cities of ancient times, built on the eastern slopes of Mount Orontes. Ecbatana was surrounded by seven circular walls, the outermost lying downhill from the next and so on, so that the top of each wall could be seen rising up beyond.7 The city’s bastions—the defensive positions on the walls, built out from the wall itself in a fortified wedge so that archers could stand on them—were painted with bright colors; the bastions of the outer wall white, the next black, then red, blue, and orange; the bastions of the penultimate circle were gilded with silver, and the final circle, within which lay the royal palace itself, gilded with gold. Ecbatana was one of the great sights of the ancient world: six thousand feet above sea level, shining on its hilltop like an enormous and threatening child’s toy.
In 675, Deioces’s son Phraortes had inherited his father’s role as leader. From Ecbatana, Phraortes attacked the nearby Parsua: the Persians, who were a looser confederation led by their overlord Achamenes. They were conquered and made a subject state. And from there, Herodotus remarks, Phraortes, “with two strong countries under his command,” set his eye on conquering Asia, “tribe by tribe.” He had become a king.
By 653, Phraortes had also managed to make an alliance with the wild Cimmerians. Together, the Medes and Persians and Cimmerians decided to take advantage of Ashurbanipal’s troubles in Assyria to march on the capital itself.
This was a miscalculation. The Scythians, allied to Assyria by marriage (Ashurbanipal’s sister had married the Scythian king), came down and fought on the side of the Assyrian defenders. Not only were the forces of the Cimmerians, Medes, and Persians driven back from Nineveh’s walls, but Phraortes was killed; and the Scythian warrior chief Madius claimed his place as Madius the Scythian, King of the Medes and the Persians.
THE YEAR AFTER, Shamash-shum-ukin’s resentment of his brother burst into the open. He led Babylonian soldiers against Cuthah, an Assyrian outpost just north of Babylon, in an open attempt to drive his brother’s forces out. Ashurbanipal rounded up his own armies for a return fight; his concerns are reflected in the queries to the sun-god Shamash that survive from this time. “Shamash, great lord,” one of the earlier ones reads, “will the Elamites join the war?” (The answer was an affirmative, and indeed Elamite soldiers had soon arrived to reinforce Shamash-shum-ukin’s rebellion. After Teumann’s death, no one in particular had managed to claim the Elamite throne, and the army was apparently running itself. )
Shamash-shum-ukin dug himself in behind Babylon’s walls to fight it out. “Will the army of Shamash-shum-ukin leave Babylon?” Ashurbanipal asks his god, not long after, and then, showing a certain lack of confidence, “Will the Assyrian army prevail over Shamash-shum-ukin?”8
The army did prevail, but not until after a three-year siege that ended in starvation and horror (“They ate the flesh of their sons and daughters because of starvation”). When the city finally fell, Ashurbanipal’s soldiers showed no mercy on
the rebels who had defended it. Ashurbanipal’s own account justifies, obliquely, his grandfather Sennacherib’s destruction of the city in the first place: Babylon was nothing but trouble. “The rest of those living, I destroyed in the place where my grandfather Sennacherib was killed,” he wrote, “and their carved-up bodies I fed to dogs, to pigs, to wolves, to eagles, to birds of the heavens, to fishes of the deep.”9
Shamash-shum-ukin himself died, not by any man’s hand, but in a fire in his own palace. He had immolated himself to avoid his brother’s vengeance.
Ashurbanipal ordered his body buried with proper ceremony, put his own agent, a man named Kandalu, on the throne, and ruled Babylon through this puppet. Kandalu served this role for more than twenty years, but his lack of authority is indicated by the absence of any royal inscriptions in Babylon that bear his name.10
And then Ashurbanipal fought the one war of his reign that would move Assyria’s border outwards. To his east, civil war had broken out over the succession to the Elamite throne; Ashurbanipal went over the Tigris twice more with his army, each time acting with increasing ferocity as he brought the whole area directly under Assyrian rule. Elamite cities burned. The temples and palaces of Susa were robbed. For no better reason than vengeance, Ashurbanipal ordered the royal tombs opened and the bones of the kings bundled off into captivity:
I took away their bones to Assyria,
I made their ghosts restless,
I deprived them of their food and drink offerings.11
He took anyone who could lay a future claim to the throne of Elam back to Nineveh in chains, and deported huge groups of Elamite citizens far away from their homeland; a slew of them were settled in the old territory of Israel, north of the small, resistant country of Judah.
This did not destroy their national identity quite as much as he could have hoped. Two hundred years later, the governor of the area wrote to his king naming the various groups under his supervision: among them, he mentions “the Elamites of Susa, and the other people whom the great and honorable Ashurbanipal deported and settled in the city of Samaria and elsewhere in Trans-Euphrates.”12 Even in exile, the descendants of Ashurbanipal’s captives remembered both their names and their city of origin.
But after almost two thousand years of existence, the country of Elam had been obliterated. Ashurbanipal had two settings, in his dealings with trouble spots in his empire: full devastation or complete neglect. Egypt had been far enough away to benefit from the second setting; Elam, too close for neglect, received the first.
It was an unwise move. Ashurbanipal did not rebuild after the wrecking of the country. He installed no governors, he resettled none of the devastated cities, he made no attempt to make this new province of Assyria anything more than a wasteland; Elam lay open and undefended.
The first invasion was a cautious one: the Persian overlord Teispes moved gingerly into the old Elamite territory of Anshan and claimed it for his own. Ashurbanipal did nothing to stop him. Neither did Teispes’s superior, Madius the Scythian, currently occupying the role of high king over both Medes and Persians. Even when Teispes began to style himself “King of Anshan,” there was no retaliation. Presumably the title “king” was accompanied by a properly submissive attitude and the payment of tribute, even as Persian tribes began to spread across the land of the Elamites. It was this land, not the lands they had occupied in their earlier days, that became known by their name: Persia. It was here that they adopted the Elamite dress, the long ceremonial robes, that later on was identified as distinctively Persian.13
Just three or four years later, in 640, Teispes died and left the job of Persian overlord to his son Cyrus. Like his father, Cyrus exercised leadership of the Persian tribes under the umbrella of Madius the Scythian, and like his father, he called himself the King of Anshan. Madius the Scythian continued to exercise his own rule from Ecbatana, with Anshan as a subsidiary city.
THE LAST YEARS of Ashurbanipal’s reign were marked by increasing chaos; the inscriptions are fragmentary, the chronicles incomplete. But if his behavior towards Elam is anything to judge by, the king had grown increasingly careless in the administration of his provinces. He may have been ill, or growing senile; from 630 until his death in 627, his son Ashur-etillu-ilani governed the empire in his name, and on his behalf.
Certainly the nearby states were doing what they pleased without fear of Assyrian interference. The Medes and Scythians had begun to make armed excursions into Urartu, closing down one pass after another, blocking one fortress and then the next; the walls of Urartian citadels, excavated two millennia later, had Scythian arrowheads dug into them like a spray of musket balls.14 Up on the northern border of Urartu, the collapsed wooden roofs of the city of Teishabani (now Karmir Blur) were discovered, studded with charred Scythian arrowheads. Burning arrows, fired into the town, had set it ablaze.15
Over in the lands of the Western Semites, King Josiah of Jerusalem was making excursions up into the Assyrian province that had once been Israel, breaking down shrines and defiling the altars of the people settled there in Assyrian deportations by scattering human bones on them.16 Meanwhile Scythian troops marched past Judah and down towards Egypt, threatening an invasion until Psammetichus came out and made a bargain with them: “With a combination of bribery and entreaty, he persuaded them to come no further,” Herodotus writes.17 And down at the head of the Persian Gulf, the curse of Merodach-baladan was still active; the Chaldean chief Nabopolassar, great-nephew of the old rebel, was inching his own men closer to the walls of Babylon.141
To all of this, Nineveh made no answer.
When Ashurbanipal finally died, in 627, disorder swallowed almost every part of the empire. Ashur-etillu-ilani became king of Assyria, but his brother immediately went down to Babylon and took it for himself. Meanwhile Nabopolassar was marching up from the south to make his own run at the Babylonian throne. For the next six years, three-way fighting went on between the Assyrians at Nineveh, the Assyrians in Babylon, and Nabopolassar, who was unable to take Babylon itself at first, but laid siege to the nearby cities one at a time.
In the middle of this mess, the Medians struck back against their Scythian overlords, who had now ruled over them for twenty-eight years. The Scythians, who were warriors and not administrators, had made themselves increasingly unpopular: “It was not just that they used to exact taxes from their subjects,” Herodotus remarks, “but that, if the tax was not enough, they used to ride around and plunder people’s belongings.”18
The Medes, chafing under this treatment, used the Scythian greed to good account. The son of the dead Phraortes, Cyarxes, still lived on his father’s estate (it had apparently not occurred to the Scythians that it might be a good plan to eliminate him). According to Herodotus, Cyarxes invited his Scythian ruler and his bodyguard to a banquet in their honor, got them thoroughly drunk, and killed them: “So the Medes regained their empire,” Herodotus concludes, “and took control again of the same peoples as before.” Cyarxes became high king over the Medes and Persians. At once he reorganized the army to make it stronger. He divided it into squads by specialty (foot soldiers with spears, cavalry, and archers) and began to drill them into perfection.
To the west lay nothing but chaos; to the north, disorganized and nomadic warrior tribes and a dying Urartian kingdom. The Medes and the Persians were poised to take it all over.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Conquest and Tyranny
In Greece, between 687 and 622 BC,
Sparta and Athens try to eliminate sin
BY THE YEAR OF ASHURBANIPAL’S DEATH, Greek colonists had gone out to found scores of cities along a widely scattered southwest-to-northeast axis. Greek settlers rebuilt a new city on the Asian coast, on top of Troy’s four-hundred-year-old ruins. The Greek cities of Chalcis and Eretria, which had already sent out colonists to found no fewer than nine cities on the Italian peninsula, dispatched more settlers up to the northern Aegean; Chalcis, in fact, sent so many that an entire area of the
northern Aegean became known as Chalcidice.1 The Aegean shore was ringed with Greek cities; the Greeks had become, in Plato’s vivid simile, “like frogs around a marsh.”2
The settlers who ventured out to these new Greek cities were forced to give up their citizenship in their home city, the metropolis or “mother city” from which they came.3 Their entire identity as Greeks lay in their ability to establish a Greek enclosure in the new land. They took with them baskets of Greek grain to plant in foreign fields, and firepots with Greek brands to light the foreign hearthfires. Sustained by Greek food and warmed by Greek fire, they built Greek temples, told Greek tales, and sent their delegations to the Greek games, weaving a Greek net which stretched out from the peninsula itself to cover distant parts of the world.
The scarcity of land on the Greek peninsula had forced each metropolis to send out colonists well before the home city itself had reached maturity. Colonies, surrounded by other peoples, and mother cities grew together. From the very beginning, to be Greek was also to have elements of Asian, Italian, Phoenician, and African culture as well. Greek settlers populated Thrace, the land just north of the passage towards the Black Sea, where the Phrygians had long ago moved across the water into Asia Minor.142 Greek adventurers moved through the Bosphorus Strait to the Black Sea itself, where men and women from Miletus—an Ionian city, which had itself been settled by Mycenaean colonists more than a century before—planted as many as seventy colonies around the Black Sea and even up to its north. Colonists sent out from the city of Megara (just west of Athens, on the bridge of land that connected the Peloponnese with the more northern parts of the Greek peninsula), seized two prime sites on either side of the Bosphorus Strait, and built twinned Megaran colonies on the shores: Byzantium on the western shore, Chalcedon on the east.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 42
