Between 650 and 605 BC, Rome becomes Etruscan, and Babylon becomes queen of the world
ON THE TIBER RIVER, the two-hill settlement of Rome had grown. The mythological Sabine co-ruler Titus Tatius, killed in a riot, had not been replaced; Romulus ruled alone. The dual population of Latial tribesmen and Sabine immigrants was now dominated by the Latials.
Rome’s growth had not gone unnoticed by its neighbors. Not long after Titus Tatius’s death, the men of Fidenae, just above Rome on the Tiber, sacked Roman farms along the river. Then the city of Veii, on the river’s other side, started burning fields as well. Romulus fought off one threat and negotiated a peace with the other. But these attacks were signs of a bigger problem. “Veii,” Livy observes, “like Fidenae, was an Etruscan town.”1
The Etruscan towns stretched in a loose network of alliances up to the north. The Etruscans and Latials had once shared common customs, but the villagers north of the Tiber had been altered by newcomers. The Cimmerian sweep into Asia Minor had sent Phrygians and Lydians scrambling away into Thrace, across the narrow waters of the Bosphorus Strait and the Hellespont. This began a chain reaction of peoples shifting west; tribes driven into northern Italy filtered down into Villanovan land, where they mingled and traded and intermarried.2 They were joined by refugees directly from Asia Minor, fleeing from cities that had fallen to fire, siege, and invasion. Roman legend told of the Trojan hero Aeneas carrying his father on his back away from the shattered city of Troy, making his way as an exile through Thrace, and then sailing to Sicily and from there to the Italian coast, where he settled and took a wife, sired sons, and became a king in his own right: a mythical reflection of real immigration from the east.3 This meld of Villanovans and newcomers was an alchemy of native tradition and eastern skills that produced a new people: the Etruscans, strong builders and wealthy merchants who did not intend to let the Latial upstarts to the south expand without challenge.
57.1 Rome and Her Neighbors
Etruscan hostility was not the only cloud on Romulus’s horizon during his forty-year reign. “Great though Romulus was,” Livy remarks, “he was better loved by the commons than by the senate, and best of all by the army.”4 The early kings of Rome were no more able to rule autocratically than the Greek monarchs were; Livy’s use of the term “senate” is probably an anachronism, but some council of elders was keeping watch on the king’s power. Even the semidivine Romulus had to reckon with them, as the circumstances of his death make clear: Livy writes that he was reviewing his troops one day when
a storm burst, with violent thunder. A cloud enveloped him, so thick that it hid him from the eyes of everyone present; and from that moment he was never seen again upon earth…. The senators, who had been standing at the king’s side…now declared that he had been carried up on high by a whirl wind…. Every man hailed him as a god and son of a god, and prayed to him…. How ever, even on this great occasion there were, I believe, a few dissenters who secretly maintained that the king had been torn to pieces by the senators.5
Whether or not Romulus had been assassinated by the senators, they were not long in asserting their power. They took control of the throne themselves, and declared a rule by committee. But the Sabine population of the city objected loudly. No Sabine had held power since the death of Romulus’s co-regent, decades before, and they wanted a Sabine king.
The senators agreed to a Sabine king, as long as they could choose him. The Sabine they picked was Numa Pompilius. He was not a great general but a wise man, famous for his justice. “Rome had originally been founded by force of arms,” Livy concludes; “the new king now prepared to give the community a second beginning, this time on the solid basis of law and religious observance.”6 Like Romulus, Numa Pompilius is probably legend, but his rule stands for a transition: Rome was moving from its roots as a colony established by war, towards a settled and mature existence as a city. Under Numa Pompilius, the gates to the Temple of Janus, god of war, were shut for the first time, symbolizing that Rome was at peace with the outside.
But the city continued at odds with itself. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (a Greek historian who went to Rome in the reign of Augustus Caesar and spent twenty-two years writing a history of the city) tells us that the “Alban element, who together with Romulus had planted the colony, claimed the right [of]…enjoying the greatest honours…. The new settlers thought that they ought not…to stand in an inferior position to the others. This was felt particularly by those who were of the Sabine race.”7
None of the people who lived in Rome thought of themselves as Romans; they lived within the same walls, but that was their only point of agreement. This left “the affairs of State,” in Dionysius’s vivid phrase, “in a raging sea of confusion.”
In addition, the peace with the outside was only temporary. The next two kings after Numa—the Latin Tullus Hostilius and the Sabine Ancus Marcius, both appointed by the Senate—led campaigns against the surrounding cities and tribes, doubling the size of Rome by force. If Rome ever did experience a time of tranquillity, it was brief; Rome had gone quickly back to its identity as an armed camp, threatening the peace of its neighbors.
The neighbors were not helpless, though. A native of the Etruscan city Tarquinii, on the northern coast above the Tiber, had set his sights on control of Rome.
This man, Lucumo, was mixed race by birth. His mother was Etruscan, but his father was a Greek from Corinth, a man named Demeter who had (according to Livy) been “forced by political troubles to leave his country.”8 Lucumo found himself facing the scorn of the “full-blooded” Etruscans around him, and with his wife decided to go to Rome, where race mattered less than opportunity: “There would be opportunities for an active and courageous man in a place where all advancement came swiftly and depended upon ability,” Livy writes. After all, more than one Sabine had risen to be king over the Latins; foreign blood was no bar to ability.
Settled in Rome, the Etruscan Lucumo worked energetically (and scattered money around) until he became the right-hand man of the king himself. Ancus Marcius even appointed Lucumo guardian of the royal princes. When the king died, the two princes were still young: “one still a child in years,” Dionysius records, “and the elder just growing a beard.”9 Lucumo sent the princes out of town (“on a hunting expedition,” Livy remarks) and began at once to canvass for votes. He was proclaimed king by an overwhelming majority and, in 616, ascended the throne of Rome. Later historians knew him as Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, or Tarquin the Elder.
After nearly forty years of reign, he was succeeded by his son-in-law, Servius Tullius, whose destiny as king had been revealed to the Roman people when, as a child, his head burst into flame. (He was sleeping at the time; a servant offered to throw water on his head, but when he woke up of his own accord, the fire went out. “From that time,” Livy explains, “the child was treated like a prince of the blood…he grew to be a man of truly royal nature,” and Tarquin the Elder betrothed his own daughter to him and made him heir.)
Servius Tullius, like his father-in-law, was an Etruscan. These two kings stand for a historical truth: the city of Rome, quarrelsome and pious by turns, constantly at war with its neighbors, throwing its walls around the nearby hills one by one, was itself swallowed by the greater, stronger, and older culture to its north. Etruscan cities had already spread up all the way up to the Bottomless River: the old name for the Po, across the Apennines. To the northwest, Etruscan cities controlled the copper, iron, and silver mines in the so-called Metal-Bearing Hills.10 This metal was traded to the Greek colonies along the Italian coast, and contact with the Greek trading cities brought the Etruscans face-to-face with the Greek writing system. The Etruscans began to use the Greek alphabet to label their own goods, using their own language written in Greek characters.148 Despite the recognizable letters, the language itself remains a puzzle: it appears almost entirely in brief inscriptions which have not been decoded.11
Rome did not become part of some entity called “Etruria.” There was no “Etrurian empire,” merely a set of Etruscan cities that shared a language and certain customs and were sometimes allies, sometimes enemies. The Etruscan move into Rome was the infiltration of a city already occupied by several different national groups by one more group—this one more influential than the rest.
Livy credits the Etruscan Tarquin the Elder with the planning of the Circus Maximus, the great Roman stadium that lay between the Palatine and Aventine hills, and the laying of the foundations for the Temple of Jupiter, on the Capitol; Dionysius adds that he squared off the walls and began the digging of sewers to drain the city’s waste (a less dramatic but infinitely more useful accomplishment). The Etruscan Servius Tullius is praised for claiming the Quirinal and Viminal hills, and building trenches and earthworks to reinforce Rome’s walls. These real structures were indeed built by Etruscans. Romans had little talent for building, but in Etruria, religious rituals governed the founding of towns, the laying out of walls, and the placement of gates.12 Etruscan cities, excavated, show planned streets, laid out in a grid (something which the Romans had not yet considered). Like the long-ago cities of the Harappan Indians, Etruscan streets had standardized widths for main streets, the secondary roads that crossed them, and the minor roads that lay between. In Rome itself, excavation shows that sometime around 650, the huts in which most Romans lived (made of branches woven together, with walls of mud packed into the interstices) began to be knocked down in favor of stone houses. The huts on the western side of town were cleared away, and the open space was packed down hard, to serve as a city gathering place: later, this square became known as the Roman Forum.13
The very material of Rome was gaining an Etruscan stamp. So was its monarchy. Dionysius writes that Tarquin the Elder introduced to Rome the Etruscan symbols of kingship: “a crown of gold and an embroidered purple robe…[he] sat on a throne of ivory holding an ivory sceptre in his hand.” He was attended, when he went out, by twelve bodyguards (known as lictors), each of whom carried an axe bound into the middle of a bunch of rods: the fasces, which represented the power of the king both to discipline wrongdoers and execute serious criminals.14
57.2 The City of Rome
Under Servius Tullius, “the size of the city was greatly increased,” and he reigned forty-four years as king, Etruscan monarch over a mixed population of Etruscans, Latins, and Sabines. And Rome went on fighting: the city’s soldiers fought with Sabine cities and Latin cities, and warded off assaults from other Etruscan kings who resented Roman control of the important ford at the Tiber river. Dionysius and Livy both tell the story of war after war, between Rome and Collatia, Rome and Fidenae, Rome and a five-city coalition of Etruscans, Rome and Eretum: unending war.
WHILE ROME struggled for its beginnings, an old empire was crashing to the ground to the east.
The three-way fighting in Assyria had continued. Ashurbanipal’s heir at Nineveh, Ashur-etillu-ilani, had mobilized the Assyrian army against his brother Sin-shum-ishkun, now in command of a mixed Assyrian and Babylonian force headquartered at Babylon. The Chaldean king Nabopolassar, meanwhile, was driving his way up against the Babylonian forces from the south, taking away one ancient Sumerian city after another.
After years of fighting (how many is completely unclear, since the various Babylonian king lists differ), Sin-shum-ishkun was forced to give up the defense of Babylon, and Nabopolassar marched into the city. But the confused accounts of the outcome suggest that Sin-shum-ishkun may have surrendered the south, only to go north and seize his brother’s throne; Ashur-etillu-ilani disappears from the accounts from this point on. The heartland was in disarray, and now a Chaldean sat on the throne of Babylon.
Once established, Nabopolassar took up the fighting again—against the Assyrian empire itself. He had already planned his strategy: to fight his way first all the way up the Euphrates river, “liberating” one province after another, and then to turn and fight his way towards the Tigris to the east, towards Nineveh itself.
In this, he had help. Cyarxes, the Median king of the Medes and the Persians, knew an opportunity when he saw one. He offered his friendship to Nabopolassar, who accepted. They agreed to divide the Assyrian provinces, once Assyria had fallen; and Nabopolassar married off his son, the Babylonian crown prince (and his father’s most trusted general) Nebuchadnezzar, to the Median princess Amytis, the daughter of Cyarxes.15
Together, the Medes and Persians fought with the Babylonians against the elderly empire that had dominated the world for so long. Babylonian chronicles record Assyria’s slow fall: “In the tenth year,” it begins, “Nabopolassar, in the month of Aiaru, mobilized the Babylonian army and marched up the bank of the Euphrates. The people…did not attack him, but laid their tribute before him.”16
The tenth year—ten years after Nabopolassar had crowned himself king of the Chaldeans, in the wake of Esarhaddon’s death—would have been 616/615 BC. The month of Aiaru was springtime, late April to early May; and the peoples along the Euphrates could see the writing on the wall.
After another year of fighting, Nabopolassar had reached Assur and laid siege to it. He had to retreat, after a mere month, and was forced to hole up in a nearby fortress for the summer. The Medes had apparently returned to their own land, but now they came back to aid their Babylonian ally. Rather than joining up with Nabopolassar, they made straight for the Assyrian heartland. Cyarxes crossed the Tigris and laid siege to Assur himself, and succeeded where Nabopolassar had failed. He captured the city and raided it for captives and goods; afterwards, he permitted the Median troops to massacre everyone left inside. Nabopolassar arrived, with his own army, after the city was thoroughly destroyed.17
The two kings planned, together, the final assault on Nineveh. Some months were spent in preparation; the Median army made a visit home to refurbish itself, and Nabopolassar took a few months to terrify various rebellious cities along the Euphrates into submission. But by 612, the assault troops were ready. “In the fourteenth year,” the Babylonian Chronicle says, “the king of Babylon mobilized his army, and the king of the Medes came to where the Babylonians were encamped. They went along the banks of the Tigris to Nineveh. From the month of May to the month of July they made an assault on the city. And at the beginning of August, the city was taken.”
Between May and August there was a bit of drama that the Babylonian Chronicle doesn’t record, but which is preserved by Herodotus. Cyarxes, according to the Histories, was all set to destroy Nineveh, when his siege was disrupted by “a huge Scythian army, led by their king Madius.”18 (This was probably the grandson of the original Madius the Scythian, who had dominated the Medes fifty years or so earlier.) The Scythians chose the moment for attack well—but the Median and Persian troops, trained and organized by Cyarxes, turned from the siege and wiped them up.19
Then the soldiers turned back to Nineveh. A tributary of the Tigris ran through the city beneath the walls, providing it with water and making it difficult to besiege. But it seems likely that the attackers built a dam to divert more of the Tigris into the city, carrying away the foundations of the walls and breaking them away. Diodorus of Sicily, a Greek historian writing six hundred years later, says that the Ninevites put their confidence in a “divine oracle given to their fathers, that Nineveh the city would never be taken or surrender until the stream that ran through the city became its enemy; the king supposed that this would never come to pass.” It is an after-the-fact prophecy that probably reflects an actual event.20
With the walls crumbling, the Babylonians stormed the city and sacked it. “A great slaughter was made of the people,” the Chronicle tells us, “and the nobles, and Sin-shum-ishkun, king of Assyria, fled…. They turned the city into a mound and ruin heap.”21 The Jewish prophet Nahum, celebrating the destruction of the empire that had laid waste to the northern part of his country, offers a glimpse of the horror:
The river gates are thrown open,
the palace collapses.
It is decreed: the city will be exiled, carried away….
Nineveh is like a pool,
and its water is draining away….
She is pillaged, plundered, stripped,
Hearts melt, knees give way,
bodies tremble, every face grows pale….
Many casualties, piles of dead,
bodies without number,
people stumbling over the corpses….
Nothing can heal your wound;
your injury is fatal.
Everyone who hears the news about you
claps his hands at your fall,
for who has not felt your endless cruelty?22
The Assyrians had flooded Babylon a hundred years earlier; now the Babylonians were returning the favor.
The Assyrian king fled towards the city of Haran.149 The victorious Medes claimed the eastern territory, including the land which had once belonged to the Scythians; Babylon took over the old western provinces. And somewhere between Nineveh and Haran, Sin-shum-ishkun died or was killed. Assur-uballit, an army officer and royal cousin, took his title.
With a new king and a new capital, the depleted Assyrian army made one more attempt to gather itself. But Nabopolassar did not leave Haran long in peace. After putting down various Assyrian cities which had tried to take advantage of the chaos by declaring their independence from both Assyria and Babylon, Nabopolassar marched back towards Haran in 610, meeting up with Cyarxes and leading the joint force towards the city. When Assur-uballit got wind of this new front, he and his men deserted the city before the Median-Babylonian force had even shown up on the Orion. “Fear of the enemy fell upon them,” the Babylonian Chronicle says, “and they forsook the city.” Nabopolassar arrived at the defenseless city, looted it, and went back home.
But Assur-uballit was not quite done. He sent a message down south, to ask the pharaoh of Egypt for help.
The Assyrian-trained Psammetichus I of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty had died at a ripe old age, after a reign of more than fifty years. Now his son, Necho II, had assumed the throne.150 Despite his father’s fight against the Assyrians decades before, Necho II was not averse to helping out the Assyrians now. He had plans to make Egypt more important in world affairs (he was already hiring Greek mercenary sailors to strengthen his army, and one of his pet projects was the digging of a canal that would connect the Nile river to the Red Sea, improving Egyptian trade with the east by water),23 and if Egypt was going to once again throw its net outside its own borders, the logical place for expansion was the Western Semitic lands along the Mediterranean. The rise of a strong Babylonian empire would not allow for Egyptian takeover of those Mediterranean territories. Anyway, if the Assyrians fell, one more barrier against the Scythians (who had already shown up at Egypt’s borders once during Necho II’s childhood) would be gone.
And so he agreed. Assur-uballit suggested that the city of Carchemish would be a good place to meet up and organize the joint force for an attack, and Necho II set out to march north.
He did not pass by Jerusalem unnoticed. “While Josiah was king,” the writer of 2 Kings says, “Pharaoh Necho king of Egypt went up the Euphrates to help the king of Assyria.”24
Josiah of Judah had taken advantage of the Assyrian disintegration to reassert his own independence; he had led a religious revival, getting rid of all traces of Assyrian shrines and cults; and he did not want to see Assyria resurrected. Nor did he want to find Necho II replacing Assyria as lord and master of Jerusalem. So instead of letting Necho go by, he marched out to attack the Egyptians when they drew close to Megiddo.
Necho, in a hurry, hadn’t intended to take on the armies of Jerusalem quite so soon. He sent messengers to Josiah, offering a truce: “What quarrel is there between you and me? It is not you that I am attacking at this time, but the house with which I am at war.”25 Josiah ignored this. “King Josiah marched out to meet him in battle,” says 2 Kings, “but Necho faced him and killed him at Megiddo.” 2 Chron. 35 adds the detail that Josiah, in disguise, was struck by archers. His bodyguard took the wounded king away from the battlefield, but he died in his chariot on the way back to the capital city. He was thirty-nine years old.
Necho II did not pause to follow up on his victory. With the Judeans in retreat, he continued on up to meet the Assyrians under the command of Assur-uballit. Together, the joint armies tried to retake the Assyrian headquarters at Haran, which was now occupied by a Babylonian detachment. “They defeated the garrison which Nabopolassar had stationed there,” the Babylonian Chronicle says, “but they were not able to take the city.”26
Both armies retreated. Nabopolassar was not inclined to try again; his health was poor, he was no longer a young man, and Assur-uballit was not that much of a threat. Necho II decided to go down and finish his business at Jerusalem. He sent his soldiers again against Jerusalem, and took Josiah’s son and heir Jehoahaz captive with ease. Necho II ordered Jehoahaz marched off to Egypt, where he died sometime later in exile. Then Necho picked one of Josiah’s younger sons, Eliakim, to be his puppet. He changed Eliakim’s name to Jehoiakim—a traditional act of dominance and ownership—and demanded a heavy payment of gold and silver tribute (which Jehoiakim raised by collecting a new tax, by force, from the people).27
In 605, Nabopolassar turned his attention back to the resistance. The Egyptians and Assyrians had set up camp at Carchemish, but Nabopolassar was old and increasingly wretched with sickness. Instead he sent his son Nebuchadnezzar south to Carchemish at the head of his troops, to get rid of the Assyrian remnant.28
The two armies met outside the city. In heavy fighting, the Egyptian line broke. Necho II began the retreat back down towards the Delta, deserting the Western Semitic lands—a defeat celebrated by the Judean court prophet Jeremiah:
This is the message against the army of Necho, king of Egypt
defeated at Carchemish on the Euphrates by Nebuchadnezzar….
What do I see?
They are terrified, they are retreating, their warriors are defeated.29
There is no mention of Assyrian fugitives in any ancient records of this battle; apparently the Assyrian forces were wiped out with no survivors. Assur-uballit fell, somewhere on the field, but must have been trampled into an unrecognizable corpse.
Nebuchadnezzar himself followed the trail of the retreating Necho II, apparently intending to catch and kill the pharaoh. But his pursuing army was caught by faster messengers who carried news: Nabopolassar had died while Nebuchadnezzar fought at Carchemish. At this, Nebuchadnezzar immediately gave up the chase and and turned back towards Babylon. The throne of Babylon was a ball that needed to be caught at once before someone else snatched it away.
Meanwhile, Necho II subsided back down south. He made no further attempt to assert Egyptian power over the Mediterranean coast. Instead, he concentrated his efforts on fortifying himself against further attacks from any claimants to the old Twenty-fifth Dynasty crown.30
And so two of the greatest ancient empires ceased to be world powers. Egypt was caged, and Assyria no longer existed. The Babylonian crown had become the most powerful in the world.
