The Ancient East

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

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SECTION 1. THE NEW ASSYRIAN KINGDOM

For the last hundred and fifty years Assyrian history--a record of black
oppression abroad and blacker intrigue at home--has recalled the rapid
gathering and slower passing away of some great storm. A lull marks the
first half of the ninth century. Then almost without warning the full
fury of the cloud bursts and rages for nearly a hundred years. Then the
gloom brightens till all is over. The dynasty of Ashurnatsirpal and
Shalmaneser II slowly declined to its inevitable end. The capital itself
rose in revolt in the year 747, and having done with the lawful heirs,
chose a successful soldier, who may have been, for aught we know, of
royal blood, but certainly was not in the direct line. Tiglath
Pileser--for he took a name from earlier monarchs, possibly in
vindication of legitimacy--saw (or some wise counsellor told him) that
the militant empire which he had usurped must rely no longer on annual
levies of peasants from the Assyrian villages, which were fast becoming
exhausted; nor could it continue to live on uncertain blackmail
collected at uncertain intervals now beyond Euphrates, now in Armenia,
now again from eastern and southern neighbours. Such Bedawi ideas and
methods were outworn. The new Great King tried new methods to express
new ideas. A soldier by profession, indebted to the sword for his
throne, he would have a standing and paid force always at his hand, not
one which had to be called from the plough spring by spring. The lands,
which used to render blackmail to forces sent expressly all the way from
the Tigris, must henceforward be incorporated in the territorial empire
and pay their contributions to resident governors and garrisons.
Moreover, why should these same lands not bear a part for the empire in
both defence and attack by supplying levies of their own to the imperial
armies? Finally the capital, Calah, with its traditions of the dead
dynasty, the old regime and the recent rebellion, must be replaced by a
new capital, even as once on a time Asshur, with its Babylonian and
priestly spirit, had been replaced. Accordingly sites, a little higher
up the Tigris and more centrally situated in relation to both the
homeland and the main roads from west and east, must be promoted to be
capitals. But in the event it was not till after the reign of Sargon
closed that Nineveh was made the definitive seat of the last Assyrian
kings.

Organized and strengthened during Tiglath Pileser's reign of eighteen
years, this new imperial machine, with its standing professional army,
its myriad levies drawn from all fighting races within its territory,
its large and secure revenues and its bureaucracy keeping the provinces
in constant relation to the centre, became the most tremendous power of
offence which the world had seen. So soon as Assyria was made conscious
of her new vigour by the ease with which the Urartu raiders, who had
long been encroaching on Mesopotamia, and even on Syria, were driven
back across the Nairi lands and penned into their central fastnesses of
Van; by the ease, too, with which Babylonia was humbled and occupied
again, and the Phoenician ports and the city of Damascus, impregnable
theretofore, were taken and held to tribute--she began to dream of world
empire, the first society in history to conceive this unattainable
ideal. Certain influences and events, however, would defer awhile any
attempt to realize the dream. Changes of dynasty took place, thanks
partly to reactionary forces at home and more to the praetorian basis on
which the kingdom now reposed, and only one of his house succeeded
Tiglath Pileser. But the set-back was of brief duration. In the year 722
another victorious general thrust himself on to the throne and, under
the famous name of Sargon, set forth to extend the bounds of the empire
towards Media on the east, and over Cilicia into Tabal on the west,
until he came into collision with King Mita of the Mushki and held him
to tribute.

SECTION 2. THE EMPIRE OF SARGON

Though at least one large province had still to be added to the Assyrian
Empire, Sargon's reign may be considered the period of its greatest
strength. He handed on to Sennacherib no conquests which could not have
been made good, and the widest extent of territory which the central
power was adequate to hold. We may pause, then, just before Sargon's
death in 705, to see what the area of that territory actually was.

Its boundaries cannot be stated, of course, with any approach to the
precision of a modern political geographer. Occupied territories faded
imperceptibly into spheres of influence and these again into lands
habitually, or even only occasionally, raided. In some quarters,
especially from north-east round to north-west, our present
understanding of the terms of ancient geography, used by Semitic
scribes, is very imperfect, and, when an Assyrian king has told us
carefully what lands, towns, mountains and rivers his army visited, it
does not follow that we can identify them with any exactness. Nor should
the royal records be taken quite at their face value. Some discount has
to be allowed (but how much it is next to impossible to say) on reports,
which often ascribe all the actions of a campaign not shared in by the
King in person (as in certain instances can be proved) to his sole
prowess, and grandiloquently enumerate twoscore princedoms and kingdoms
which were traversed and subdued in the course of one summer campaign in
very difficult country. The illusion of immense achievement, which it
was intended thus to create, has often imposed itself on modern critics,
and Tiglath Pileser and Sargon are credited with having marched to the
neighbourhood of the Caspian, conquering or holding to ransom great
provinces, when their forces were probably doing no more than climbing
from valley to valley about the headwaters of the Tigris affluents, and
raiding chiefs of no greater territorial affluence than the Kurdish beys
of Hakkiari.

East of Assyria proper, the territorial empire of Sargon does not seem
to have extended quite up to the Zagros watershed; but his sphere of
influence included not only the heads of the Zab valleys, but also a
region on the other side of the mountains, reaching as far as Hamadan
and south-west Azerbaijan, although certainly not the eastern or
northern districts of the latter province, or Kaswan, or any part of the
Caspian littoral. On the north, the frontier of Assyrian territorial
empire could be passed in a very few days' march from Nineveh. The
shores of neither the Urmia nor the Van Lake were ever regularly
occupied by Assyria, and, though Sargon certainly brought into his
sphere of influence the kingdom of Urartu, which surrounded the latter
lake and controlled the tribes as far as the western shore of the
former, it is not proved that his armies ever went round the east and
north of the Urmia Lake, and it is fairly clear that they left the
northwestern region of mountains between Bitlis and the middle Euphrates
to its own tribesmen.

Westwards and southwards, however, Sargon's arm swept a wider circuit.
He held as his own all Mesopotamia up to Diarbekr, and beyond Syria not
only eastern and central Cilicia, but also some districts north of
Taurus, namely, the low plain of Milid or Malatia, and the southern part
of Tabal; but probably his hand reached no farther over the plateau than
to a line prolonged from the head of the Tokhma Su to the neighbourhood
of Tyana, and returning thence to the Cilician Gates. Beyond that line
began a sphere of influence which we cannot hope to define, but may
guess to have extended over Cappadocia, Lycaonia and the southern part
of Phrygia. Southward, all Syria was Sargon's, most of it by direct
occupation, and the rest in virtue of acknowledged overlordship and
payment of tribute. Even the seven princes of Cyprus made such
submission. One or two strong Syrian towns, Tyre and Jerusalem, for
example, withheld payment if no Assyrian army was at hand; but their
show of independence was maintained only on sufferance. The Philistine
cities, after Sargon's victory over their forces and Egyptian allies at
Raphia, in 720, no longer defended their walls, and the Great King's
sphere of influence stretched eastward right across the Hamad and
southward over north Arabia. Finally, Babylonia was all his own even to
the Persian Gulf, the rich merchants supporting him firmly in the
interests of their caravan trade, however the priests and the peasantry
might murmur. But Elam, whose king and people had carried serious
trouble into Assyria itself early in the reign, is hardly to be reckoned
to Sargon even as a sphere of influence. The marshes of its south-west,
the tropical plains of the centre and the mountains on the east, made it
a difficult land for the northern Semites to conquer and hold. Sargon
had been wise enough to let it be. Neither so prudent nor so fortunate
would be his son and successors.

SECTION 3. THE CONQUEST OF EGYPT

Such was the empire inherited by Sargon's son, Sennacherib. Not content,
he would go farther afield to make a conquest which has never remained
long in the hands of an Asiatic power. It was not only lust of loot,
however, which now urged Assyria towards Egypt. The Great Kings had long
found their influence counteracted in southern Syria by that of the
Pharaohs. Princes of both Hebrew states, of the Phoenician and the
Philistine cities and even of Damascus, had all relied at one time or
another on Egypt, and behind their combinations for defence and their
individual revolts Assyria had felt the power on the Nile. The latter
generally did no more in the event to save its friends than it had done
for Israel when Shalmaneser IV beleaguered, and Sargon took and
garrisoned, Samaria; but even ignorant hopes and empty promises of help
cause constant unrest. Therefore Sennacherib, after drastic chastisement
of the southern states in 701 (both Tyre and Jerusalem, however, kept
him outside their walls), and a long tussle with Chaldaean Babylon, was
impelled to set out in the last year, or last but one, of his reign for
Egypt. In southern Palestine he was as successful as before, but,
thereafter, some signal disaster befell him. Probably an epidemic
pestilence overtook his army when not far across the frontier, and he
returned to Assyria only to be murdered.

He bequeathed the venture to the son who, after defeating his parricide
brothers, secured his throne and reigned eleven years under a name which
it has been agreed to write Esarhaddon. So soon as movements in Urartu
and south-western Asia Minor had been suppressed, and, more important,
Babylon, which his father had dishonoured, was appeased, Esarhaddon took
up the incomplete conquest. Egypt, then in the hands of an alien dynasty
from the Upper Nile and divided against itself, gave him little trouble
at first. In his second expedition (670) he reached Memphis itself,
carried it by assault, and drove the Cushite Tirhakah past Thebes to the
Cataracts. The Assyrian proclaimed Egypt his territory and spread the
net of Ninevite bureaucracy over it as far south as the Thebaid; but
neither he nor his successors cared to assume the style and titles of
the Pharaohs, as Persians and Greeks, wiser in their generations, would
do later on. Presently trouble at home, excited by a son rebelling after
the immemorial practice of the east, recalled Esarhaddon to Assyria;
Tirhakah moved up again from the south; the Great King returned to meet
him and died on the march.

[Plate 4: ASSYRIAN EMPIRE AT ITS GREATEST EXTENT. EARLY YEARS OF
ASHURBANIPAL]

But Memphis was reoccupied by Esarhaddon's successor, and since the
latter took and ruined Thebes also, and, after Tirhakah's death, drove
the Cushites right out of Egypt, the doubtful credit of spreading the
territorial empire of Assyria to the widest limits it ever reached falls
to Ashurbanipal. Even Tyre succumbed at last, and he stretched his
sphere of influence over Asia Minor to Lydia. First of Assyrian kings he
could claim Elam with its capital Susa as his own (after 647), and in
the east he professed overlordship over all Media. Mesopotamian arts and
letters now reached the highest point at which they had stood since
Hammurabi's days, and the fame of the wealth and luxury of "Sardanapal"
went out even into the Greek lands. About 660 B.C. Assyria seemed in a
fair way to be mistress of the desirable earth.

SECTION 4. DECLINE AND FALL OF ASSYRIA

Strong as it seemed in the 7th century, the Assyrian Empire was,
however, rotten at the core. In ridding itself of some weaknesses it had
created others. The later Great Kings of Nineveh, raised to power and
maintained by the spears of paid praetorians, found less support even
than the old dynasty of Calah had found, in popular religious sentiment,
which (as usual in the East) was the ultimate basis of Assyrian
nationality; nor, under the circumstances, could they derive much
strength from tribal feeling, which sometimes survives the religious
basis. Throughout the history of the New Kingdom we can detect the
influence of a strong opposition centred at Asshur. There the last
monarch of the Middle Kingdom had fixed his dwelling under the wing of
the priests; there the new dynasty had dethroned him as the consummation
of an anti-sacerdotal rising of nobles and of peasant soldiery. Sargon
seems to have owed his elevation two generations later to revenge taken
for this victory by the city folk; but Sargon's son, Sennacherib, in his
turn, found priestly domination intolerable, and, in an effort to crush
it for ever, wrecked Babylon and terrorized the central home of Semitic
cult, the great sacerdotal establishment of Bel-Marduk. After his
father's murder, Esarhaddon veered back to the priests, and did so much
to court religious support, that the military party incited Ashurbanipal
to rebellion and compelled his father to associate the son in the royal
power before leaving Assyria for the last time to die (or be killed) on
the way to Egypt. Thus the whole record of dynastic succession in the
New Kingdom has been typically Oriental, anticipating, at every change
of monarch, the history of Islamic Empires. There is no trace of
unanimous national sentiment for the Great King. One occupant of the
throne after another gains power by grace of a party and holds it by
mercenary swords.

Another imperial weakness was even more fatal. So far as can be learned
from Assyria's own records and those of others, she lived on her
territorial empire without recognizing the least obligation to render
anything to her provinces for what they gave--not even to render what
Rome gave at her worst, namely, peace. She regarded them as existing
simply to endow her with money and men. When she desired to garrison or
to reduce to impotence any conquered district, the population of some
other conquered district would be deported thither, while the new
subjects took the vacant place. What happened when Sargon captured
Samaria happened often elsewhere (Ashurbanipal, for example, made Thebes
and Elam exchange inhabitants), for this was the only method of
assimilating alien populations ever conceived by Assyria. When she
attempted to use natives to govern natives the result was such disaster
as followed Ashurbanipal's appointment of Psammetichus, son of Necho, to
govern Memphis and the Western Delta.

Rotten within, hated and coveted by vigorous and warlike races on the
east, the north and the south, Assyria was moving steadily towards her
catastrophe amid all the glory of "Sardanapal." The pace quickened when
he was gone. A danger, which had lain long below the eastern horizon,
was now come up into the Assyrian field of vision. Since Sargon's
triumphant raids, the Great King's writ had run gradually less and less
far into Media; and by his retaliatory invasions of Elam, which
Sennacherib had provoked, Ashurbanipal not only exhausted his military
resources, but weakened a power which had served to check more dangerous
foes.

We have seen that the "Mede" was probably a blend of Scythian and
Iranian, the latter element supplying the ruling and priestly classes.
The Scythian element, it seems, had been receiving considerable
reinforcement. Some obscure cause, disturbing the northern steppes,
forced its warlike shepherds to move southward in the mass. A large
body, under the name Gimirrai or Cimmerians, descended on Asia Minor in
the seventh century and swept it to the western edge of the plateau and
beyond; others pressed into central and eastern Armenia, and, by
weakening the Vannic king, enabled Ashurbanipal to announce the
humiliation of Urartu; others again ranged behind Zagros and began to
break through to the Assyrian valleys. Even while Ashurbanipal was still
on the throne some of these last had ventured very far into his realm;
for in the year of his death a band of Scythians appeared in Syria and
raided southwards even to the frontier of Egypt. It was this raid which
virtually ended the Assyrian control of Syria and enabled Josiah of
Jerusalem and others to reassert independence.

The death of Ashurbanipal coincided also with the end of direct Assyrian
rule over Babylon. After the death of a rebellious brother and viceroy
in 648, the Great King himself assumed the Babylonian crown and ruled
the sacred city under a Babylonian name. But there had long been
Chaldaean principalities in existence, very imperfectly incorporated in
the Assyrian Empire, and these, inspiring revolts from time to time, had
already succeeded in placing more than one dynast on the throne of
Babylon. As soon as "Sardanapal" was no more and the Scythians began to
overrun Assyria, one of these principalities (it is not known which)
came to the front and secured the southern crown for its prince
Nabu-aplu-utsur, or, as the Greeks wrote the name, Nabopolassar. This
Chaldaean hastened to strengthen himself by marrying his son,
Nebuchadnezzar, to a Median princess, and threw off the last pretence of
submission to Assyrian suzerainty. He had made himself master of
southern Mesopotamia and the Euphrates Valley trade-route by the year
609.

At the opening of the last decade of the century, therefore, we have
this state of things. Scythians and Medes are holding most of eastern
and central Assyria; Chaldaeans hold south Mesopotamia; while Syria,
isolated from the old centre of empire, is anyone's to take and keep. A
claimant appears immediately in the person of the Egyptian Necho, sprung
from the loins of that Psammetichus who had won the Nile country back
from Assyria. Pharaoh entered Syria probably in 609, broke easily
through the barrier which Josiah of Jerusalem, greatly daring in this
day of Assyrian weakness, threw across his path at Megiddo, went on to
the north and proceeded to deal as he willed with the west of the
Assyrian empire for four or five years. The destiny of Nineveh was all
but fulfilled. With almost everything lost outside her walls, she held
out against the Scythian assaults till 606, and then fell to the Mede
Uvakhshatra, known to the Greeks as Kyaxares. The fallen capital of West
Asia was devastated by the conquerors to such effect that it never
recovered, and its life passed away for ever across the Tigris, to the
site on which Mosul stands at the present day.

SECTION 5. THE BABYLONIANS AND THE MEDES

Six years later,--in 600 B.C.--this was the position of that part of the
East which had been the Assyrian Empire. Nebuchadnezzar, the Chaldaean
king of Babylon, who had succeeded his father about 605, held the
greater share of it to obedience and tribute, but not, apparently, by
means of any such centralized bureaucratic organization as the Assyrians
had established. Just before his father's death he had beaten the
Egyptians in a pitched battle under the walls of Carchemish, and
subsequently had pursued them south through Syria, and perhaps across
the frontier, before being recalled to take up his succession. He had
now, therefore, no rival or active competitor in Syria, and this part of
the lost empire of Assyria seems to have enjoyed a rare interval of
peace under native client princes who ruled more or less on Assyrian
lines. The only fenced places which made any show of defiance were Tyre
and Jerusalem, which both relied on Egypt. The first would outlast an
intermittent siege of thirteen years; but the other, with far less
resources, was soon to pay full price for having leaned too long on the
"staff of a broken reed."

About the east and north a different story would certainly have to be
told, if we could tell it in full. But though Greek traditions come to
our aid, they have much less to say about these remote regions than the
inscribed annals of that empire, which had just come to its end, have
had hitherto: and unfortunately the Median inheritors of Assyria have
left no epigraphic records of their own--at least none have been found.
If, as seems probable, the main element of Kyaxares' war strength was
Scythian, we can hardly expect to find records either of his conquest or
the subsequent career of the Medes, even though Ecbatana should be laid
bare below the site of modern Hamadan; for the predatory Scyth, like the
mediaeval Mongol, halted too short a time to desire to carve stones, and
probably lacked skill to inscribe them. To complete our discomfiture,
the only other possible source of light, the Babylonian annals, sheds
none henceforward on the north country and very little on any country.
Nebuchadnezzar--so far as his records have been found and read--did not
adopt the Assyrian custom of enumerating first and foremost his
expeditions and his battles; and were it not for the Hebrew Scriptures,
we should hardly know that his armies ever left Babylonia, the
rebuilding and redecoration of whose cities and shrines appear to have
constituted his chief concern. True, that in such silence about warlike
operations, he follows the precedent of previous Babylonian kings; but
probably that precedent arose from the fact that for a long time past
Babylon had been more or less continuously a client state.

We must, therefore, proceed by inference. There are two or three
recorded events earlier and later than our date, which are of service.
First, we learn from Babylonian annals that Kyaxares, besides
overrunning all Assyria and the northern part of Babylonia after the
fall of Nineveh, took and pillaged Harran and its temple in north-west
Mesopotamia. Now, from other records of Nabonidus, fourth in succession
to Nebuchadnezzar, we shall learn further that this temple did not come
into Babylonian hands till the middle of the following century. The
reasonable inference is that it had remained since 606 B.C. in the power
of the Medes, and that northern Mesopotamia, as well as Assyria, formed
part of a loose-knit Median "Empire" for a full half century before 552
B.C.

Secondly, Herodotus bears witness to a certain event which occurred
about the year 585, in a region near enough to his own country for the
fact to be sufficiently well known to him. He states that, after an
expedition into Cappadocia and a war with Lydia, the Medes obtained,
under a treaty with the latter which the king of Babylon and the prince
of Cilicia promoted, the Halys river as a "scientific frontier" on the
north-west. This statement leaves us in no doubt that previously the
power of Ecbatana had been spread through Armenia into the old Hatti
country of Cappadocia, as well as over all the north of Mesopotamia, in
the widest sense of this vague term.

Something more, perhaps, may be inferred legitimately from this same
passage of Herodotus. The mediation of the two kings, so unexpectedly
coupled, must surely mean that each stood to one of the two belligerents
as friend and ally. If so (since a Babylonian king can hardly have held
such a relation to distant Lydia, while the other prince might well have
been its friend), Cilicia was probably outside the Median "sphere of
influence," while Babylon fell within it; and Nebuchadnezzar--for he it
must have been, when the date is considered, though Herodotus calls him
by a name, Labynetus, otherwise unknown--was not a wholly independent
ruler, though ruler doubtless of the first and greatest of the client
states of Media. Perhaps that is why he has told us so little of
expeditions and battles, and confined his records so narrowly to
domestic events. If his armies marched only to do the bidding of an
alien kinsman-in-law, he can have felt but a tepid pride in their
achievements.

In 600 B.C., then, we must picture a Median "Empire," probably of the
raiding type, centred in the west of modern Persia and stretching
westward over all Armenia (where the Vannic kingdom had ceased to be),
and southward to an ill-defined point in Mesopotamia. Beyond this point
south and west extended a Median sphere of influence which included
Babylonia and all that obeyed Nebuchadnezzar even to the border of Elam
on the one hand and the border of Egypt on the other. Since the heart of
this "Empire" lay in the north, its main activities took place there
too, and probably the discretion of the Babylonian king was seldom
interfered with by his Median suzerain. In expanding their power
westward to Asia Minor, the Medes followed routes north of Taurus, not
the old Assyrian war-road through Cilicia. Of so much we can be fairly
sure. Much else that we are told of Media by Herodotus--his marvellous
account of Ecbatana and scarcely less wonderful account of the reigning
house--must be passed by till some confirmation of it comes to light;
and that, perhaps, will never be.

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