The Ancient East

by D. G. Hogarth

[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.