Letters of the Great Kings of the Ancient Near East

The Royal Correspondence of the Late Bronze Age

Trevor Bryce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134575855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Offering fascinating insights into the people and politics of the ancient near Eastern kingdoms, Trevor Bryce uses the letters of the five Great Kings of Egypt, Babylon, Hatti, Mitanni and Assyria as the focus of a fresh look at this turbulent and volatile region in the late Bronze Age.

Numerous extracts from the letters are constantly interwoven into the fabric of narrative and discussion, and this lively approach allows us to witness history through the eyes of the people who lived it, revealing the personalities and reactions of kings, queens, princes, princesses and royal officials more than 3500 years ago to the current events of the day.

I

SETTING THE SCENE

In preference to the modern term ‘Babylonia’ commonly applied to the kingdom over which the city of Babylon held sway, I have used the city’s name for both capital and kingdom throughout this book. ‘Babylonia’ is also used, but primarily as a convenient geographical designation for the region encompassed by the kingdom.

1

THE MAIN PLAYERS

The five Great Kingdoms

The Late Bronze Age Near East presents us with a complex and ever-changing picture—one of constantly shifting balances of power amongst the major kingdoms, of expanding and contracting spheres of influence, of rapidly changing allegiances and alliances as the Great Kings vied with one another, and sometimes co-operated with one another, to secure their share of power in the region. In our survey of the correspondence of the age, we shall be moving constantly from vassal kingdom to royal capital, and from one royal court to another. That is a challenging enterprise. The complexity of the international scene in the Late Bronze Age may bewilder the reader who has little prior knowledge of the historical developments and political structures which underpinned it. Thus, before we move to the correspondence itself, we should give some attention to the historical and political settings in which the letters were written. This we shall do in our first two chapters, focusing our attention above all on the rise and fall of the five Great Kingdoms whose rulers shared supremacy over the Near Eastern world for periods ranging from 200 years to almost half a millennium. These were the kingdoms of Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Hatti and Mitanni.¹

The kingdom of Assyria²

The Assyrians figure prominently in the records of the early second millennium as enterprising merchants and traders who established a series of highly successful merchant colonies along the trade routes linking their capital Ashur with the towns and kingdoms of eastern and central Anatolia. We learn of their activities from some 15,000 tablets, the majority of which have come to light in the city of Kanesh (Nesa), where the Anatolian headquarters of the merchant enterprises was located. Kanesh lay on the southern bend of what the Hittites called the Marassantiya river, the Halys river of Classical times (mod. Kizil Irmak). By and large the Assyrian colony period was one of remarkable international co-operation between Assyrians and Anatolians, based on exchanges of commodities for which there were ready markets in the regions where they were traded. Tin and textiles were traded by Assyrian merchants in exchange for Anatolian gold and silver.

The many letters included in the records of the merchants’ activities are a testimony to the high level of efficiency and sophistication with which the Assyrians carried out their merchant operations, in spite of the inevitable tensions which they sometimes reflect. There were two main phases to these operations, the first extending from the last quarter of the twentieth century until about the middle of the nineteenth (from the reign of the Assyrian king Erishum I to that of Puzur-Ashur II), the second covering the period from the late nineteenth century until the first half of the eighteenth. Conflicts between and within the Anatolian kingdoms were almost certainly responsible for disrupting the merchant enterprises at the end of the first phase, and for terminating them altogether at the end of the second.³

This latter phase is associated with a man of Amorite stock who left his mark in Assyrian history as the greatest of his country’s early rulers, and for a time the most powerful figure in the Near Eastern world. The man in question was Shamshi-Adad (1813–1781).⁴ After occupying the city of Ekallatum on the Tigris river, Shamshi-Adad won control of the Assyrian capital Ashur, which lay close by on the opposite bank, and then carried his arms westwards. His first main objective was the strategically valuable kingdom of Mari, then ruled by Yahdun-Lim. Located on the west bank of the Euphrates, Mari had imperialist ambitions of its own, which seriously threatened the westward expansion of Assyrian power. Shamshi-Adad met the threat head on, attacking and inflicting a resounding defeat upon Yahdun-Lim’s forces. Shortly afterwards, Yahdun-Lim was assassinated. Shamshi-Adad promptly disposed of his successor and seized Mari for himself. With the chief obstacle to his imperialist ambitions now eliminated, he brought the whole of Upper Mesopotamia beneath his sway. Commercial considerations were almost certainly one of the major incentives for Shamshi-Adad’s campaigns of conquest, for by these he gained control over the major trade routes linking Ashur with Syria and eastern and central Anatolia.

He took up residence in his newly built capital Shubat-Enlil, and to facilitate the administration of his newly won empire he appointed his sons Ishme-Dagan and Yasmah-Addu as ‘kings’, in effect viceroys, in Ekallatum and Mari, respectively, with the authority to deal with foreign rulers on equal terms and subject only to their father’s overlordship. It was essential to the security of Shamshi-Adad’s kingdom that these two cities on the kingdom’s most sensitive borders be firmly controlled.⁵ The extensive archives of this period which have come to light in Mari, including the correspondence between Shamshi-Adad and his younger son Yasmah-Addu, reveal much about the kingdom’s workings. They also reveal much about the relationship between father and son.⁶ The latter was subject to numerous paternal remonstrances for his alleged laziness, self-indulgence and failure to apply himself to his kingly duties. Yet both sons appear to have remained unswervingly loyal to their father, and almost certainly could not be held responsible for the kingdom’s rapid decline after his death.

As in the case of all other early Near Eastern empires, the task of maintaining control, for an extended period, over the large territories acquired initially by military force was beyond the capacity of the conquering power. Ultimately the resources required for the effective defence and administration of an empire imposed upon a large assortment of often unwilling subject peoples were more than the conqueror could command. The kingdom built by Shamshi-Adad was under constant threat and challenge from other contemporary powers, as well as from the subject populations within it. A well-known letter of slightly later date, written by an official at Mari, conveys a good impression of the kind of rivalry and power-play that was so marked a feature of the Near Eastern world in the early centuries of the second millennium:

There is no king who, just by himself, is truly powerful. Ten or fifteen kings follow Hammurabi, lord of Babylon, as many do RimSin, lord of Larsa, as many Ibalpiel, lord of Eshnunna, as many Amutpiel, lord of Qatna. Twenty kings follow Yarim-Lim, the lord of Yamhad (Aleppo).⁷

Shortly after Shamshi-Adad’s death his kingdom disintegrated, with the numerous small states over which he had imposed his authority regaining their independence. Around 1760, the final remnants of his empire succumbed to the Babylonian king Hammurabi. Some 170 years later Babylon fell to the Hittites, but its conquest provided little opportunity for an Assyrian resurgence, for the region where Shamshi-Adad had once held sway came to be dominated by the Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni. In what must have been one of the lowest points in Assyrian history, the former Great Kingdom’s traditional capital Ashur was sacked and looted by the Mitannian king Shaushtatar. Assyria now disappeared almost entirely from the Near Eastern scene. But only for the time being. Its power lay dormant. Even though it had lost its independence, core elements of the kingdom persisted, including the royal dynasty. The latter provided the essential foundation for Assyria’s resurgence, which followed closely upon the weakening and ultimate destruction of the Mitannian empire by the Hittites. A new Assyrian king, Ashur-uballit (1353–1318), appeared on the international scene. As Mitannian power yielded to the military might of Hatti, Ashur-uballit established his independence and began taking over parts of former Mitannian territory. He further sought to bolster his international standing by entering into correspondence with the pharaoh, as one Great King to another.

The Hittite king Suppiluliuma viewed with some alarm this outcome of his destruction of Mitanni, and sought to prevent or at least limit the growth of Assyrian power east of the Euphrates by establishing Shattiwaza, the son of his arch-enemy Tushratta, as puppet ruler of a rump Mitannian kingdom. Kassite Babylon no doubt viewed the Assyrian resurgence with even greater alarm. There had been a long tradition of hostility between the neighbouring kingdoms. For some time Hurrian dominance of northern Mesopotamia had relieved Babylon of any serious threat from Assyria. But that dominance was now gone, and the Assyrian menace had re-emerged. The Babylonian king Burnaburiash II (1359–1333) expressed his concerns about this new development in a letter to the pharaoh.⁸ However, tensions between the two kingdoms eased temporarily when a marriage alliance was agreed upon and Ashur-uballit wedded his daughter Muballitat-Sherua to Burnaburiash’s son Karaindash. Unfortunately this did not meet with the approval of the Babylonian king’s troops, who were far from overjoyed at the prospect of being ruled by a king with Assyrian blood in his veins. And when Karahardash, the son of the couple, assumed the throne he was assassinated by the Kassite militia and replaced by a full-blooded Kassite nonentity called Nazibugash. Furious at this turn of events, Ashur-uballit invaded the Babylonian kingdom and executed the pretender.

Tensions between Assyria and Babylon may again have abated, for a time, when an apparently amicable agreement was reached between the Assyrian king Adad-nirari I (1295–1264) and his Babylonian counterpart over the boundaries separating the two kingdoms. In this same period, the Assyrians had substantial success in consolidating their hold upon the former territories of the Mitannian kingdom east of the Euphrates. Their takeover of territory allied with Hatti was clearly an embarrassment to the Hittites, but it appears to have met with little opposition from them. A much more devastating blow to Hittite military prestige was delivered by Adad-nirari’s successor but one, Tukulti-Ninurta I (1233–1197), who decisively defeated a large Hittite army at the battle of Nihriya (which probably lay in the region north or north-east of modern Diyabakir). The prospects for a successful Assyrian invasion of the Hittite subject territories in Syria must now have seemed extremely good. There is little doubt that the Assyrians had long entertained aspirations of gaining direct control of the regions lying between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean coast. They were now in a position where this appeared to be well within their grasp.

Instead, and much to the Hittites’ great relief, Tukulti-Ninurta turned his attention southwards—against Babylon. His decision to do so may well have been provoked by an attack on his own territory by the Babylonian king Kashtiliash IV, apparently in breach of the earlier agreement reached during Adad-nirari’s reign. Tukulti-Ninurta very likely took the view, with some justification, that he should secure his southern boundaries before risking a major commitment of his military resources against the Hittite territories in Syria. At all events, his campaign against Babylon was resoundingly successful. He made himself overlord of the kingdom and hauled his opponent Kashtiliash back to Ashur in chains.

But Assyrian rule over Babylon was not to last. The extensive commitment of resources needed to maintain control over the vanquished southern kingdom diverted substantial resources away from protecting other Assyrian territories. A major campaign across the Euphrates into Hittite territory was now clearly out of the question. Tukulti-Ninurta’s forces suffered several military defeats, and the king eventually fell victim to assassination. It was some fifteen years after his death that a Babylonian king called Adad-shumu-usur (1216–1187), who had come to power in the south of the kingdom, liberated the whole of his country from Assyrian rule, in the process capturing the Assyrian king Enlil-kudurri-usur (1187–1183). In Assyria conflicts broke out over the succession, and several kings followed one another in short succession.

Yet Assyria was to prove one of the most resilient of the Bronze Age Great Kingdoms. Decades after the Anatolian kingdom of Hatti had disappeared, when Egypt had forever lost its status as a major international power, when Babylon was being ruled by a succession of insignificant dynasties, when Mitanni was but a fleeting memory, Assyria remained a formidable power in the Near East. In the reign of its king Tiglath-Pileser I (1114–1076) it still retained control over a substantial part of northern Mesopotamia. Henceforth it would go from strength to strength, becoming for a time, in the period we call the Assyrian New Kingdom, the most powerful and the most ruthless empire the Near Eastern world had ever seen.

The kingdom of Babylon

When the kings of Sumer held sway over southern Mesopotamia in the third millennium, few could have foreseen that the small township on the east bank of the Euphrates would one day become the centre of one of the most illustrious and influential civilizations of the Near Eastern world. At times it would be devastated by its enemies, at times it would be little more than a weak and obscure appendage of its powerful neighbours. But in a region which saw the dramatic rise and fall of many civilizations, the emergence and disappearance of many Great Kingdoms, Babylon endured. When Nebuchadnezzar ascended his country’s throne in 605 BCE, he did so in a city which could boast a pedigree at least 2,000 years old, the longest lifespan of any city outside Egypt in the entire Near East.

For some centuries after its foundation Babylon remained a relatively insignificant settlement, though it achieved the status of a regional administrative centre of the Ur III dynasty (2112–2104). Its insignificance probably meant that it was little affected by the upheavals and invasions which brought this dynasty to an end, or by the ensuing military contests between the kingdoms of Isin and Larsa for supremacy over southern Mesopotamia. However, during this so-called Isin-Larsa period (2017–1763), we see an important development in the city’s history with the establishment there of a dynasty of Amorite kings (circa 1894). The Amorites, called the Martu in texts of the third millennium, were originally Semitic nomads, who may initially have entered the Mesopotamian plain in search of suitable pasture-land for their flocks. But as their numbers increased, they adopted a more settled existence, posing an ever-increasing threat to the security of the kingdoms and city-states of the region. Indeed, shortly before the fall of the Ur III kingdom an Amorite chieftain had set himself up as ruler of the city-state of Larsa, just 40 kilometres to the north of Ur.

Under the first five rulers of the Amorite dynasty in Babylon, whose reigns covered a period of approximately 100 years, Babylon was but one of a number of petty kingdoms over which some sort of supremacy was exercised by the rival states of Isin and Larsa. But in 1792 there was a dramatic upswing in the little kingdom’s fortunes. This came with the accession of the sixth king of the dynasty, a man called Hammurabi (1792–1749). To begin with, Hammurabi made little impact on the world beyond his kingdom’s frontiers. In fact he appears to have devoted the first twenty-eight years of his reign to the kingdom’s internal administration, including a programme of legal and social reform.

But in his twenty-ninth regnal year he adopted an aggressive new militaristic policy. It was a policy which, he claimed, was sparked off by a coalition of enemy forces, including the Elamites, Gutians, Assyrians and the people of Eshnunna (mod. Tell Asmar), who were threatening the security of Babylon. He may well have been right. The more successful Hammurabi was in organizing his kingdom into an efficient and prosperous political unit, the more likely he was to attract the unwelcome attentions of his neighbours. He proceeded against his proclaimed enemies, one after the other, conquering in succession Larsa (1763)⁹ and Eshnunna (1761). These conquests placed southern and central Mesopotamia under Babylonian control. Next, Hammurabi attacked and captured Mari (1761), which after regaining its independence from Assyrian rule under its energetic ruler Zimri-Lim (1776–1761) had become one of the Near East’s most powerful kingdoms. Finally, in Hammurabi’s thirty-sixth year on the throne, the final remnants of what had once been the empire of the great Assyrian king Shamshi-Adad fell beneath his sway.

This in effect led to the unification of the whole of Mesopotamia under Babylon’s overlordship—half a century or more before the Hittite kingdom was established in central Anatolia. But by the time Babylon had achieved this status Hammurabi was an old man. He died within a few years of establishing his empire, after a reign lasting more than four decades. Under the reign of his son Samsu-iluna (1749–1712), the empire began to contract. This was in part due to the emergence of a new rival dynasty called the ‘Sealand’, which arose in the marshlands of southern Mesopotamia and won control over Babylonia as far north as the city of Nippur.¹⁰ Yet in spite of the shrinking of the realm over which they held sway, Hammurabi’s successors managed to maintain their power in Babylon for some 150 years after his death. Finally, in the reign of the man fated to be the last of these successors, Samsu-ditana, the dynasty—along with what was left of the empire was brought dramatically to an end, with the conquest and sack of Babylon by the Hittite king Mursili I (1595).

We have little information about the aftermath of this conquest. Once he had plundered the city, Mursili had no further interest in it, and immediately began his long trek homewards. However, the ultimate beneficiaries were a group called the Kassites. These were immigrants into southern Mesopotamia, perhaps from a homeland in the Zagros mountains (in the region of Elam),¹¹ making their first recorded appearance in history during Hammurab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of abbreviations
• Comparative chronology of the Great Kings
• Introduction
• Part I Setting the scene
• Part II The letters and their themes
• Part III Historical episodes
• Appendix: the Amarna letters
• Bibliography
• Index