The Ancient East

by D. G. Hogarth

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.