I. CHRONICLES
Beginnings—Cities—Race—The conquerors—Sennacherib and Esarhaddon—“Sardanapalus”
MEANWHILE, three hundred miles north of Babylon, another civilization had appeared. Forced to maintain a hard military life by the mountain tribes always threatening it on every side, it had in time overcome its assailants, had conquered its parent cities in Elam, Sumeria, Akkad and Babylonia, had mastered Phoenicia and Egypt, and had for two centuries dominated the Near East with brutal power. Sumeria was to Babylonia, and Babylonia to Assyria, what Crete was to Greece, and Greece to Rome: the first created a civilization, the second developed it to its height, the third inherited it, added little to it, protected it, and transmitted it as a dying gift to the encompassing and victorious barbarians. For barbarism is always around civilization, amid it and beneath it, ready to engulf it by arms, or mass migration, or unchecked fertility. Barbarism is like the jungle; it never admits its defeat; it waits patiently for centuries to recover the territory it has lost.
The new state grew about four cities fed by the waters or tributaries of the Tigris: Ashur, which is now Kala’at-Sherghat; Arbela, which is Irbil; Kalakh, which is Nimrud; and Nineveh, which is Kuyunjik—just across the river from oily Mosul. At Ashur prehistoric obsidian flakes and knives have been found, and black pottery with geometric patterns that suggest a central Asian origin;1 at Tepe Gawra, near the site of Nineveh, a recent expedition unearthed a town which its proud discoverers date back to 3700B.C., despite its many temples and tombs, its well-carved cylinder seals, its combs and jewelry, and the oldest dice known to history2—a thought for reformers. The god Ashur gave his name to a city (and finally to all Assyria); there the earliest of the nation’s kings had their residence, until its exposure to the heat of the desert and the attacks of the neighboring Babylonians led Ashur’s rulers to build a secondary capital in cooler Nineveh—named also after a god, Nina, the Ishtar of Assyria. Here, in the heyday of Ashurbanipal, 300,000 people lived, and all the western Orient came to pay tribute to the Universal King.
The population was a mixture of Semites from the civilized south (Babylonia and Akkadia) with non-Semitic tribes from the west (probably of Hittite or Mitannian affinity) and Kurdish mountaineers from the Caucasus.3 They took their common language and their arts from Sumeria, but modified them later into an almost undistinguishable similarity to the language and arts of Babylonia.4 Their circumstances, however, forbade them to indulge in the effeminate ease of Babylon; from beginning to end they were a race of warriors, mighty in muscle and courage, abounding in proud hair and beard, standing straight, stern and stolid on their monuments, and bestriding with tremendous feet the east-Mediterranean world. Their history is one of kings and slaves, wars and conquests, bloody victories and sudden defeat. The early kings—once mere patesis tributary to the south—took advantage of the Kassite domination of Babylonia to establish their independence; and soon enough one of them decked himself with that title which all the monarchs of Assyria were to display: “King of Universal Reign.” Out of the dull dynasties of these forgotten potentates certain figures emerge whose deeds illuminate the development of their country.*
While Babylonia was still in the darkness of the Kassite era, Shalmaneser I brought the little city-states of the north under one rule, and made Kalakh his capital. But the first great name in Assyrian history is Tiglath-Pileser I. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: if it is wise to believe monarchs, he slew 120 lions on foot, and 800 from his chariot.5 One of his inscriptions—written by a scribe more royalist than the King—tells how he hunted nations as well as animals: “In my fierce valor I marched against the people of Qummuh, conquered their cities, carried off their booty, their goods and their property without reckoning, and burned their cities with fire—destroyed and devastated them. . . . The people of Adansh left their mountains and embraced my feet. I imposed taxes upon them.”6 In every direction he led his armies, conquering the Hittites, the Armenians, and forty other nations, capturing Babylon, and frightening Egypt into sending him anxious gifts. (He was particularly mollified by a crocodile.) With the proceeds of his conquests he built temples to the Assyrian gods and goddesses, who, like anxious débutantes, asked no questions about the source of his wealth. Then Babylon revolted, defeated his armies, pillaged his temples, and carried his gods into Babylonian captivity. Tiglath-Pileser died of shame.7
His reign was a symbol and summary of all Assyrian history: death and taxes, first for Assyria’s neighbors, then for herself. Ashurnasirpal II conquered a dozen petty states, brought much booty home from the wars, cut out with his own hand the eyes of princely captives, enjoyed his harem, and passed respectably away.8 Shalmaneser III carried these conquests as far as Damascus; fought costly battles, killing 16,000 Syrians in one engagement; built temples, levied tribute, and was deposed by his son in a violent revolution.9 Sammuramat ruled as queen-mother for three years, and provided a frail historical basis (for this is all that we know of her) for the Greek legend of Semiramis—half goddess and half queen, great general, great engineer and great statesman—so attractively detailed by Diodorus the Sicilian.10 Tiglath-Pileser III gathered new armies, reconquered Armenia, overran Syria and Babylonia, made vassal cities of Damascus, Samaria and Babylon, extended the rule of Assyria from the Caucasus to Egypt, tired of war, became an excellent administrator, built many temples and palaces, held his empire together with an iron hand, and died peacefully in bed. Sargon II, an officer in the army, made himself king by a Napoleonic coup d’état; led his troops in person, and took in every engagement the most dangerous post;11 defeated Elam and Egypt, reconquered Babylonia, and received the homage of the Jews, the Philistines, even of the Cypriote Greeks; ruled his empire well, encouraged arts and letters, handicrafts and trade, and died in a victorious battle that definitely preserved Assyria from invasion by the wild Cimmerian hordes.
His son Sennacherib put down revolts in the distant provinces adjoining the Persian Gulf, attacked Jerusalem and Egypt without success,* sacked eighty-nine cities and 820 villages, captured 7,200 horses, 11,000 asses, 80,000 oxen, 800,000 sheep, and 208,000 prisoners;13 the official historian, on his life, did not understate these figures. Then, irritated by the prejudice of Babylon in favor of freedom, he besieged it, took it, and burned it to the ground; nearly all the inhabitants, young and old, male and female, were put to death, so that mountains of corpses blocked the streets; the temples and palaces were pillaged to the last shekel, and the once omnipotent gods of Babylon were hacked to pieces or carried in bondage to Nineveh: Marduk the god became a menial to Ashur. Such Babylonians as survived did not conclude that Marduk had been overrated; they told themselves—as the captive Jews would tell themselves a century later in that same Babylon—that their god had condescended to be defeated in order to punish his people. With the spoils of his conquests and pillage Sennacherib rebuilt Nineveh, changed the courses of rivers to protect it, reclaimed waste lands with the vigor of countries suffering from an agricultural surplus, and was assassinated by his sons while piously mumbling his prayers.14
Another son, Esarhaddon, snatched the throne from his blood-stained brothers, invaded Egypt to punish her for supporting Syrian revolts, made her an Assyrian province, amazed western Asia with his long triumphal progress from Memphis to Nineveh, dragging endless booty in his train; established Assyria in unprecedented prosperity as master of the whole Near Eastern world; delighted Babylonia by freeing and honoring its captive gods, and rebuilding its shattered capital; conciliated Elam by feeding its famine-stricken people in an act of international beneficence almost without parallel in the ancient world; and died on the way to suppress a revolt in Egypt, after giving his empire the justest and kindliest rule in its half-barbarous history.
His successor, Ashurbanipal (the Sardanapalus of the Greeks), reaped the fruits of Esarhaddon’s sowing. During his long reign Assyria reached the climax of its wealth and prestige; after him his country, ruined by forty years of intermittent war, fell into exhaustion and decay, and ended its career hardly a decade after Ashurbanipal’s death. A scribe has preserved to us a yearly record of this reign;15 it is a dull and bloody mess of war after war, siege after siege, starved cities and flayed captives. The scribe represents Ashurbanipal himself as reporting his destruction of Elam:
For a distance of one month and twenty-five days’ march I devastated the districts of Elam. I spread salt and thorn-bush there (to injure the soil). Sons of the kings, sisters of the kings, members of Elam’s royal family young and old, prefects, governors, knights, artisans, as many as there were, inhabitants male and female, big and little, horses, mules, asses, flocks and herds more numerous than a swarm of locusts—I carried them off as booty to Assyria. The dust of Susa, of Madaktu, of Haltemash and of their other cities, I carried it off to Assyria. In a month of days I subdued Elam in its whole extent. The voice of man, the steps of flocks and herds, the happy shouts of mirth—I put an end to them in its fields, which I left for the asses, the gazelles, and all manner of wild beasts to people.16
The severed head of the Elamite king was brought to Ashurbanipal as he feasted with his queen in the palace garden; he had the head raised on a pole in the midst of his guests, and the royal revel went on; later the head was fixed over the gate of Nineveh, and slowly rotted away. The Elamite general, Dananu, was flayed alive, and then was bled like a lamb; his brother had his throat cut, and his body was divided into pieces, which were distributed over the country as souvenirs.17
It never occurred to Ashurbanipal that he and his men were brutal; these clean-cut penalties were surgical necessities in his attempt to remove rebellions and establish discipline among the heterogeneous and turbulent peoples, from Ethiopia to Armenia, and from Syria to Media, whom his predecessors had subjected to Assyrian rule; it was his obligation to maintain this legacy intact. He boasted of the peace that he had established in his empire, and of the good order that prevailed in its cities; and the boast was not without truth. That he was not merely a conqueror intoxicated with blood he proved by his munificence as a builder and as a patron of letters and the arts. Like some Roman ruler calling to the Greeks, he sent to all his dominions for sculptors and architects to design and adorn new temples and palaces; he commissioned innumerable scribes to secure and copy for him all the classics of Sumerian and Babylonian literature, and gathered these copies in his library at Nineveh, where modern scholarship found them almost intact after twenty-five centuries of time had flowed over them. Like another Frederick, he was as vain of his literary abilities as of his triumphs in war and the chase.18 Diodorus describes him as a dissolute and bisexual Nero,19 but in the wealth of documents that have come down to us from this period there is little corroboration for this view. From the composition of literary tablets Ashurbanipal passed with royal confidence—armed only with knife and javelin—to hand-to-hand encounters with lions; if we may credit the reports of his contemporaries he did not hesitate to lead the attack in person, and often dealt with his own hand the decisive blow.20 Little wonder that Byron was fascinated with him, and wove about him a drama half legend and half history, in which all the wealth and power of Assyria came to their height, and broke into universal ruin and royal despair.