The Ancient East

by D. G. Hogarth

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. [[1]]

[1.] 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.

SECTION 5. SYRIAN EXPANSION OF ASSYRIA

Such were the dangers which, as we now know, lurked on the horizon of the Northern Semites in 800 B.C. But they had not yet become patent to the world, in whose eyes Assyria seemed still an irresistible power pushing ever farther and farther afield. The west offered the most attractive field for her expansion. There lay the fragments of the Hatti Empire, enjoying the fruits of Hatti civilization; there were the wealthy Aramaean states, and still richer Phoenician ports. There urban life was well developed, each city standing for itself, sufficient in its territory, and living more or less on the caravan trade which perforce passed under or near its walls between Egypt on the one hand and Mesopotamia and Asia Minor on the other. Never was a fairer field for hostile enterprise, or one more easily harried without fear of reprisal, and well knowing this, Assyria set herself from Ashurnatsirpal's time forward systematically to bully and fleece Syria. It was almost the yearly practice of Shalmaneser II to march down to the Middle Euphrates, ferry his army across, and levy blackmail on Carchemish and the other north Syrian cities as far as Cilicia on the one hand and Damascus on the other. That done, he would send forward envoys to demand ransom of the Phoenician towns, who grudgingly paid it or rashly withheld it according to the measure of his compulsion. Since last we looked at the Aramaean states, Damascus has definitely asserted the supremacy which her natural advantages must always secure to her whenever Syria is not under foreign domination. Her fighting dynasty of Benhadads which had been founded, it seems, more than a century before Shalmaneser's time, had now spread her influence right across Syria from east to west and into the territories of Hamath on the north and of the Hebrews on the south. Ashurnatsirpal had never ventured to do more than summon at long range the lord of this large and wealthy state to contribute to his coffers; but this tributary obligation, if ever admitted, was continually disregarded, and Shalmaneser II found he must take bolder measures or be content to see his raiding-parties restricted to the already harried north. He chose the bold course, and struck at Hamath, the northernmost Damascene dependency, in his seventh summer. A notable victory, won at Karkar on the Middle Orontes over an army which included contingents from most of the south Semitic states--one came, for example, from Israel, where Ahab was now king,--opened a way towards the Aramaean capital; but it was not till twelve years later that the Great King actually attacked Damascus. But he failed to crown his successes with its capture, and reinvigorated by the accession of a new dynasty, which Hazael, a leader in war, founded in 842, Damascus continued to bar the Assyrians from full enjoyment of the southern lands for another century.

Nevertheless, though Shalmaneser and his dynastic successors down to Adadnirari III were unable to enter Palestine, the shadow of Assyrian Empire was beginning to creep over Israel. The internal dissensions of the latter, and its fear and jealousy of Damascus had already done much to make ultimate disaster certain. In the second generation after David the radical incompatibility between the northern and southern Hebrew tribes, which under his strong hand and that of his son had seemed one nation, reasserted its disintegrating influence. While it is not certain if the twelve tribes were ever all of one race, it is quite certain that the northern ones had come to be contaminated very largely with Aramaean blood and infected by mid-Syrian influences, which the relations established and maintained by David and Solomon with Hamath and Phoenicia no doubt had accentuated, especially in the territories of Asher and Dan. These tribes and some other northerners had never seen eye to eye with the southern tribes in a matter most vital to Semitic societies, religious ideal and practice. The anthropomorphic monotheism, which the southern tribes brought up from Arabia, had to contend in Galilee with theriomorphic polytheism, that is, the tendency to embody the qualities of divinity in animal forms. For such beliefs as these there is ample evidence in the Judaean tradition, even during the pre-Palestinian wanderings. Both reptile and bovine incarnations manifest themselves in the story of the Exodus, and despite the fervent missionary efforts of a series of Prophets, and the adhesion of many, even among the northern tribesmen, to the more spiritual creed, these cults gathered force in the congenial neighbourhood of Aramaeans and Phoenicians, till they led to political separation of the north from the south as soon as the long reign of Solomon was ended. Thereafter, until the catastrophe of the northern tribes, there would never more be a united Hebrew nation. The northern kingdom, harried by Damascus and forced to take unwilling part in her quarrels, looked about for foreign help. The dynasty of Omri, who, in order to secure control of the great North Road, had built himself a capital and a palace (lately discovered) on the hill of Samaria, relied chiefly on Tyre. The succeeding dynasty, that of Jehu, who had rebelled against Omri's son and his Phoenician queen, courted Assyria, and encouraged her to press ever harder on Damascus. It was a suicidal policy; for in the continued existence of a strong Aramaean state on her north lay Israel's one hope of long life. Jeroboam II and his Prophet Jonah ought to have seen that the day of reckoning would come quickly for Samaria when once Assyria had settled accounts with Damascus.