The Ancient East

D >> D. G. Hogarth >> The Ancient East

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SECTION 8. PALESTINE

If the Phoenicians were feeling the thrust of Steppe peoples, their
southern neighbours, the Philistines, who had lived and grown rich on
the tolls and trade of the great north road from Egypt for at least a
century and a half, were feeling it too. During some centuries past
there had come raiding from the south-east deserts certain sturdy and
well-knit tribes, which long ago had displaced or assimilated the
Canaanites along the highlands west of Jordan, and were now tending to
settle down into a national unity, cemented by a common worship. They
had had long intermittent struggles, traditions of which fill the Hebrew
Book of Judges--struggles not only with the Canaanites, but also with
the Amorites of the upper Orontes valley, and later with the Aramaeans
of the north and east, and with fresh incursions of Arabs from the
south; and most lately of all they had had to give way for about half a
century before an expansive movement of the Philistines, which carried
the latter up to Galilee and secured to them the profits of all the
Palestinian stretch of the great North Road. But about a generation
before our date the northernmost of those bold "Habiri," under an
elective _sheikh_ Saul, had pushed the Philistines out of Bethshan and
other points of vantage in mid-Palestine, and had become once more free
of the hills which they had held in the days of Pharaoh Menephthah.
Though, at the death of Saul, the enemy regained most of what he had
lost, he was not to hold it long. A greater chief, David, who had risen
to power by Philistine help and now had the support of the southern
tribes, was welding both southern and northern Hebrews into a single
monarchical society and, having driven his old masters out of the north
once more, threatened the southern stretch of the great North Road from
a new capital, Jerusalem. Moreover, by harrying repeatedly the lands
east of Jordan up to the desert edge, David had stopped further
incursions from Arabia; and, though the Aramaean state of Damascus was
growing into a formidable danger, he had checked for the present its
tendency to spread southwards, and had strengthened himself by
agreements with another Aramaean prince, him of Hamath, who lay on the
north flank of Damascus, and with the chief of the nearest Phoenician
city, Tyre. The latter was not yet the rich place which it would grow to
be in the next century, but it was strong enough to control the coast
road north of the Galilean lowlands. Israel not only was never safer,
but would never again hold a position of such relative importance in
Syria, as was hers in a day of many small and infant states about 1000
B.C.: and in later times, under the shadow of Assyria and the menace of
Egypt, the Jews would look back to the reigns of David and his successor
with some reason as their golden age.

The traveller would not have ventured into Arabia; nor shall we. It was
then an unknown land lying wholly outside history. We have no record (if
that mysterious embassy of the "Queen of Sheba," who came to hear the
wisdom of Solomon, be ruled out) of any relations between a state of the
civilized East and an Arabian prince before the middle of the ninth
century. It may be that, as Glaser reckoned, Sabaean society in the
south-west of the peninsula had already reached the preliminary stage of
tribal settlement through which Israel passed under its Judges, and was
now moving towards monarchy; and that of this our traveller might have
learned something in Syria from the last arrived Aramaeans. But we, who
can learn nothing, have no choice but to go north with him again,
leaving to our right the Syrian desert roamed by Bedawis in much the
same social state as the Anazeh to-day, owing allegiance to no one. We
can cross Euphrates at Carchemish or at Til Barsip opposite the Sajur
mouth, or where Thapsacus looked across to the outfall of the Khabur.

SECTION 9. MESOPOTAMIA

No annals of Assyria have survived for nearly a century before 1000
B.C., and very few for the century after that date. Nor do Babylonian
records make good our deficiency. Though we cannot be certain, we are
probably safe in saying that during these two centuries Assyrian and
Babylonian princes had few or no achievements to record of the kind
which they held, almost alone, worthy to be immortalized on stone or
clay--that is to say, raids, conquests, sacking of cities, blackmailing
of princes. Since Tiglath Pileser's time no "Kings of the World" (by
which title was signified an overlord of Mesopotamia merely) had been
seated on either of the twin rivers. What exactly had happened in the
broad tract between the rivers and to the south of Taurus since the
departure of the Mushki hordes (if, indeed, they did all depart), we do
not know. The Mitanni, who may have been congeners of the latter, seem
still to have been holding the north-west; probably all the north-east
was Assyrian territory. No doubt the Kurds and Armenians of Urartu were
raiding the plains impartially from autumn to spring, as they always did
when Assyria was weak. We shall learn a good deal more about Mesopotamia
proper when the results of the German excavations at Tell Halaf, near
Ras el-Ain, are complete and published. The most primitive monuments
found there are perhaps relics of that power of Khani (Harran), which
was stretched even to include Nineveh before the Semitic _patesis_ of
Asshur grew to royal estate and moved northward to make imperial
Assyria. But there are later strata of remains as well which should
contain evidence of the course of events in mid-Mesopotamia during
subsequent periods both of Assyrian domination and of local
independence.

Assyria, as has been said, was without doubt weak at this date, that is,
she was confined to the proper territory of her own agricultural
Semites. This state of things, whenever existent throughout her history,
seems to have implied priestly predominance, in which Babylonian
influence went for much. The Semitic tendency to super-Monotheism, which
has already been noticed, constantly showed itself among the eastern
Semites (when comparatively free from military tyranny) in a reversion
of their spiritual allegiance to one supreme god enthroned at Babylon,
the original seat of east Semitic theocracy. And even when this city had
little military strength the priests of Marduk appear often to have
succeeded in keeping a controlling hand on the affairs of stronger
Assyria. We shall see later how much prestige great Ninevite war-lords
could gain even among their own countrymen by Marduk's formal
acknowledgment of their sovereignty, and how much they lost by
disregarding him and doing injury to his local habitation. At their very
strongest the Assyrian kings were never credited with the natural right
to rule Semitic Asia which belonged to kings of Babylon. If they desired
the favour of Marduk they must needs claim it at the sword's point, and
when that point was lowered, his favour was always withdrawn. From first
to last they had perforce to remain military tyrants, who relied on no
acknowledged legitimacy but on the spears of conscript peasants, and at
the last of mercenaries. No dynasty lasted long in Assyria, where
popular generals, even while serving on distant campaigns, were often
elevated to the throne--in anticipation of the imperial history of Rome.

It appears then that our traveller would have found Babylonia, rather
than Assyria, the leading East Semitic power in 1000 B.C.; but at the
same time not a strong power, for she had no imperial dominion outside
lower Mesopotamia. Since a dynasty, whose history is obscure--the
so-called Pashe kings in whose time there was one strong man,
Nabu-Kudur-usur (Nebuchadnezzar) I--came to an inglorious end just about
1000 B.C., one may infer that Babylonia was passing at this epoch
through one of those recurrent political crises which usually occurred
when Sumerian cities of the southern "Sea-Land" conspired with some
foreign invader against the Semitic capital. The contumacious survivors
of the elder element in the population, however, even when successful,
seem not to have tried to set up new capitals or to reestablish the
pre-Semitic state of things. Babylon had so far distanced all the older
cities now that no other consummation of revolt was desired or believed
possible than the substitution of one dynasty for another on the throne
beloved of Marduk. Sumerian forces, however, had not been the only ones
which had contributed to overthrow the last king of the Pashe dynasty.
Nomads of the _Suti_ tribes had long been raiding from the western
deserts into Akkad; and the first king set up by the victorious peoples
of the Sea-Land had to expel them and to repair their ravages before he
could seat himself on a throne which was menaced by Elam on the east and
Assyria on the north, and must fall so soon as either of these found a
strong leader.

CHAPTER II

THE EAST IN 800 B.C.

Two centuries have passed over the East, and at first sight it looks as
if no radical change has taken place in its political or social
condition. No new power has entered it from without; only one new state
of importance, the Phrygian, has arisen within. The peoples, which were
of most account in 1000, are still of the most account in 800--the
Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Mushki of Cappadocia, the tribesmen of
Urartu, the Aramaeans of Damascus, the trading Phoenicians on the Syrian
coast and the trading Greeks on the Anatolian. Egypt has remained behind
her frontier except for one raid into Palestine about 925 B.C., from
which Sheshenk, the Libyan, brought back treasures of Solomon's temple
to enhance the splendour of Amen. Arabia has not begun to matter. There
has been, of course, development, but on old lines. The comparative
values of the states have altered: some have become more decisively the
superiors of others than they were two hundred years ago, but they are
those whose growth was foreseen. Wherein, then, lies the great
difference? For great difference there is. It scarcely needs a second
glance to detect the change, and any one who looks narrowly will see not
only certain consequent changes, but in more than one quarter signs and
warnings of a coming order of things not dreamt of in 1000 B.C.

SECTION 1. MIDDLE KINGDOM OF ASSYRIA

The obvious novelty is the presence of a predominant power. The mosaic
of small states is still there, but one holds lordship over most of
them, and that one is Assyria. Moreover, the foreign dominion which the
latter has now been enjoying for three-parts of a century is the first
of its kind established by an Asiatic power. Twice, as we have seen, had
Assyria conquered in earlier times an empire of the nomad Semitic type,
that is, a licence to raid unchecked over a wide tract of lands; but, so
far as we know, neither Shalmaneser I nor Tiglath Pileser I had so much
as conceived the idea of holding the raided provinces by a permanent
official organization. But in the ninth century, when Ashurnatsirpal and
his successor Shalmaneser, second of the name, marched out year by year,
they passed across wide territories held for them by governors and
garrisons, before they reached others upon which they hoped to impose
like fetters. We find Shalmaneser II, for example, in the third year of
his reign, fortifying, renaming, garrisoning and endowing with a royal
palace the town of Til Barsip on the Euphrates bank, the better to
secure for himself free passage at will across the river. He has finally
deprived Ahuni its local Aramaean chief, and holds the place as an
Assyrian fortress. Thus far had the Assyrian advanced his territorial
empire but not farther. Beyond Euphrates he would, indeed, push year by
year, even to Phoenicia and Damascus and Cilicia, but merely to raid,
levy blackmail and destroy, like the old emperors of Babylonia or his
own imperial predecessors of Assyria.

There was then much of the old destructive instinct in Shalmaneser's
conception of empire; but a constructive principle also was at work
modifying that conception. If the Great King was still something of a
Bedawi Emir, bound to go a-raiding summer by summer, he had conceived,
like Mohammed ibn Rashid, the Arabian prince of Jebel Shammar in our own
days, the idea of extending his territorial dominion, so that he might
safely and easily reach fresh fields for wider raids. If we may use
modern formulas about an ancient and imperfectly realized imperial
system, we should describe the dominion of Shalmaneser II as made up
(over and above its Assyrian core) of a wide circle of foreign
territorial possessions which included Babylonia on the south, all
Mesopotamia on the west and north, and everything up to Zagros on the
east; of a "sphere of exclusive influence" extending to Lake Van on the
north, while on the west it reached beyond the Euphrates into mid-Syria;
and, lastly, of a licence to raid as far as the frontiers of Egypt.
Shalmaneser's later expeditions all passed the frontiers of that sphere
of influence. Having already crossed the Amanus mountains seven times,
he was in Tarsus in his twenty-sixth summer; Damascus was attacked again
and again in the middle of his reign; and even Jehu of Samaria paid his
blackmail in the year 842.

Assyria in the ninth century must have seemed by far the strongest as
well as the most oppressive power that the East had known. The reigning
house was passing on its authority from father to son in an unbroken
dynastic succession, which had not always been, and would seldom
thereafter be, the rule. Its court was fixed securely in midmost
Assyria, away from priest-ridden Asshur, which seems to have been always
anti-imperial and pro-Babylonian; for Ashurnatsirpal had restored Calah
to the capital rank which it had held under Shalmaneser I but lost under
Tiglath Pileser, and there the kings of the Middle Empire kept their
throne. The Assyrian armies were as yet neither composed of soldiers of
fortune, nor, it appears, swelled by such heterogeneous provincial
levies as would follow the Great Kings of Asia in later days; but they
were still recruited from the sturdy peasantry of Assyria itself. The
monarch was an absolute autocrat directing a supreme military despotism.
Surely such a power could not but endure. Endure, indeed, it would for
more than two centuries. But it was not so strong as it appeared. Before
the century of Ashurnatsirpal and Shalmaneser II was at an end, certain
inherent germs of corporate decay had developed apace in its system.

Natural law appears to decree that a family stock, whose individual
members have every opportunity and licence for sensual indulgence, shall
deteriorate both physically and mentally at an ever-increasing rate.
Therefore, _pari passu_, an Empire which is so absolutely autocratic
that the monarch is its one mainspring of government, grows weaker as it
descends from father to son. Its one chance of conserving some of its
pristine strength is to develop a bureaucracy which, if inspired by the
ideas and methods of earlier members of the dynasty, may continue to
realize them in a crystallized system of administration. This chance the
Middle Assyrian Kingdom never was at any pains to take. There is
evidence for delegation of military power by its Great Kings to a
headquarter staff, and for organization of military control in the
provinces, but none for such delegation of the civil power as might have
fostered a bureaucracy. Therefore that concentration of power in single
hands, which at first had been an element of strength, came to breed
increasing weakness as one member of the dynasty succeeded another.

Again, the irresistible Assyrian armies, which had been led abroad
summer by summer, were manned for some generations by sturdy peasants
drawn from the fields of the Middle Tigris basin, chiefly those on the
left bank. The annual razzia, however, is a Bedawi institution, proper
to a semi-nomadic society which cultivates little and that lightly, and
can leave such agricultural, and also such pastoral, work as must needs
be done in summer to its old men, its young folk and its women, without
serious loss. But a settled labouring population which has deep lands to
till, a summer crop to raise and an irrigation system to maintain is in
very different case. The Assyrian kings, by calling on their
agricultural peasantry, spring after spring, to resume the life of
militant nomads, not only exhausted the sources of their own wealth and
stability, but bred deep discontent. As the next two centuries pass more
and more will be heard of depletion and misery in the Assyrian lands.
Already before 800 we have the spectacle of the agricultural district of
Arbela rebelling against Shalmaneser's sons, and after being appeased
with difficulty, rising again against Adadnirari III in a revolt which
is still active when the century closes.

Lastly, this militant monarchy, whose life was war, was bound to make
implacable enemies both within and without. Among those within were
evidently the priests, whose influence was paramount at Asshur.
Remembering who it was that had given the first independent king to
Assyria they resented that their city, the chosen seat of the earlier
dynasties, which had been restored to primacy by the great Tiglath
Pileser, should fall permanently to the second rank. So we find Asshur
joining the men of Arbela in both the rebellions mentioned above, and it
appears always to have been ready to welcome attempts by the Babylonian
Semites to regain their old predominance over Southern Assyria.

SECTION 2. URARTU

As we should expect from geographical circumstances, Assyria's most
perilous and persistent foreign enemies were the fierce hillmen of the
north. In the east, storms were brewing behind the mountains, but they
were not yet ready to burst. South and west lay either settled districts
of old civilization not disposed to fight, or ranging grounds of nomads
too widely scattered and too ill organized to threaten serious danger.
But the north was in different case. The wild valleys, through which
descend the left bank affluents of the Upper Tigris, have always
sheltered fierce fighting clans, covetous of the winter pasturage and
softer climate of the northern Mesopotamian downs, and it has been the
anxious care of one Mesopotamian power after another, even to our own
day, to devise measures for penning them back. Since the chief weakness
of these tribes lies in a lack of unity which the subdivided nature of
their country encourages, it must have caused no small concern to the
Assyrians that, early in the ninth century, a Kingdom of Urartu or, as
its own people called it, Khaldia, should begin to gain power over the
communities about Lake Van and the heads of the valleys which run down
to Assyrian territory. Both Ashurnatsirpal and Shalmaneser led raid
after raid into the northern mountains in the hope of weakening the
tribes from whose adhesion that Vannic Kingdom might derive strength.
Both kings marched more than once up to the neighbourhood of the Urmia
Lake, and Shalmaneser struck at the heart of Urartu itself three or four
times; but with inconclusive success. The Vannic state continued to
flourish and its kings--whose names are more European in sound than
Asiatic--Lutipris, Sarduris, Menuas, Argistis, Rusas--built themselves
strong fortresses which stand to this day about Lake Van, and borrowed a
script from their southern foes to engrave rocks with records of
successful wars. One of these inscriptions occurs as far west as the
left bank of Euphrates over against Malatia. By 800 B.C., in spite of
efforts made by Shalmaneser's sons to continue their father's policy of
pushing the war into the enemy's country, the Vannic king had succeeded
in replacing Assyrian influence by the law of Khaldia in the uppermost
basin of the Tigris and in higher Mesopotamia--the "Nairi" lands of
Assyrian scribes; and his successors would raid farther and farther into
the plains during the coming age.

SECTION 3. THE MEDES

Menacing as this power of Urartu appeared at the end of the ninth
century to an enfeebled Assyrian dynasty, there were two other racial
groups, lately arrived on its horizon, which in the event would prove
more really dangerous. One of these lay along the north-eastern frontier
on the farther slopes of the Zagros mountains and on the plateau beyond.
It was apparently a composite people which had been going through a slow
process of formation and growth. One element in it seems to have been of
the same blood as a strong pastoral population which was then ranging
the steppes of southern Russia and west central Asia, and would come to
be known vaguely to the earliest Greeks as Cimmerians, and scarcely less
precisely to their descendants, as Scyths. Its name would be a household
word in the East before long. A trans-Caucasian offshoot of this had
settled in modern Azerbaijan, where for a long time past it had been
receiving gradual reinforcements of eastern migrants, belonging to what
is called the Iranian group of Aryans. Filtering through the passage
between the Caspian range and the salt desert, which Teheran now guards,
these Iranians spread out over north-west Persia and southwards into the
well-watered country on the western edge of the plateau, overlooking the
lowlands of the Tigris basin. Some part of them, under the name Parsua,
seems to have settled down as far north as the western shores of Lake
Urmia, on the edge of the Ararat kingdom; another part as far south as
the borders of Elam. Between these extreme points the immigrants appear
to have amalgamated with the settled Scyths, and in virtue of racial
superiority to have become predominant partners in the combination. At
some uncertain period--probably before 800 B.C.--there had arisen from
the Iranian element an individual, Zoroaster, who converted his people
from element-worship to a spiritual belief in personal divinity; and by
this reform of cult both raised its social status and gave it political
cohesion. The East began to know and fear the combination under the name
_Manda_, and from Shalmaneser II onwards the Assyrian kings had to
devote ever more attention to the Manda country, raiding it, sacking it,
exacting tribute from it, but all the while betraying their growing
consciousness that a grave peril lurked behind Zagros, the peril of the
Medes. [Footnote: I venture to adhere throughout to the old
identification of the _Manda_ power, which ultimately overthrew Assyria,
with the _Medes_, in spite of high authorities who nowadays assume that
the latter played no part in that overthrow, but have been introduced
into this chapter of history by an erroneous identification made by
Greeks. I cannot believe that both Greek and Hebrew authorities of very
little later date both fell into such an error.]

SECTION 4. THE CHALDAEANS

The other danger, the more imminent of the two, threatened Assyria from
the south. Once again a Semitic immigration, which we distinguish as
Chaldaean from earlier Semitic waves, Canaanite and Aramaean, had
breathed fresh vitality into the Babylonian people. It came, like
earlier waves, out of Arabia, which, for certain reasons, has been in
all ages a prime source of ethnic disturbance in West Asia. The great
southern peninsula is for the most part a highland steppe endowed with a
singularly pure air and an uncontaminated soil. It breeds, consequently,
a healthy population whose natality, compared to its death-rate, is
unusually high; but since the peculiar conditions of its surface and
climate preclude the development of its internal food-supply beyond a
point long ago reached, the surplus population which rapidly accumulates
within it is forced from time to time to seek its sustenance elsewhere.
The difficulties of the roads to the outer world being what they are
(not to speak of the certainty of opposition at the other end), the
intending emigrants rarely set out in small bodies, but move restlessly
within their own borders until they are grown to a horde, which famine
and hostility at home compel at last to leave Arabia. As hard to arrest
as their own blown sands, the moving Arabs fall on the nearest fertile
regions, there to plunder, fight, and eventually settle down. So in
comparatively modern times have the Shammar tribesmen moved into Syria
and Mesopotamia, and so in antiquity moved the Canaanites, the
Aramaeans, and the Chaldaeans. We find the latter already well
established by 900 B.C. not only in the "Sea Land" at the head of the
Persian Gulf, but also between the Rivers. The Kings of Babylon, who
opposed Ashurnatsirpal and Shalmaneser II, seem to have been of
Chaldaean extraction; and although their successors, down to 800 B.C.,
acknowledged the suzerainty of Assyria, they ever strove to repudiate
it, looking for help to Elam or the western desert tribes. The times,
however, were not quite ripe. The century closed with the reassertion of
Assyrian power in Babylon itself by Adadnirari.

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