Drawn by Boudier, from a drawing by Père Durand.
It was thickly strewn with walled towns and villages; the latter, perched upon the precipitous mountain summits, and surrounded by deep ravines, owed their security solely to their position, and, indeed, needed no fortification. The country abounded in woods and pastures, interspersed with cornlands; access to it was gained by one or two passes on the eastern side, which thus permitted caravans or armies to reach the districts lying between the Erythræan and Caspian Seas. The tribes who inhabited it had been brought early under Chaldæan civilization, and had adopted the cuneiform script; such of their monuments as are still extant resemble the bas-reliefs and inscriptions of Assyria.* It is not always easy to determine the precise locality occupied by these various peoples; the Guti were situated near the upper courses of the Turnât and the Badanu, in the vicinity of the Kashshu;** the Lulumê had settled in the neighbourhood of the Batîr, to the north of the defiles of Zohab;*** the Namar separated the Lulumê from Elam, and were situated half in the plain and half in the mountain, while the Arapkha occupied, both banks of the Great Zab.
* Pinches has published an inscription of a king of Khani,
named Tukultimir, son of Ilushaba, written in
Chaldeo-Assyrian, and found in the temple of Shamash at
Sippara, where the personage himself had dedicated it.
Winckler gives another inscription of a king of the Guti,
which is also in Semitic and in cuneiform character.
** The name is written sometimes Quti, at others Guti, which
induced Pognon to believe that they were two different
peoples: the territory occupied by this nation must have
been originally to the east of the Lesser Zab, in the upper
basins of the Adhem and the Diyaleh. Oppert proposes to
recognise in these Guti “the ancestors of the Goths, who,
fifteen hundred years ago, pushed forward to the Russia of
the present day: we find,” (he adds), “in this passage and in
others, some of which go back to the third millennium before
the Christian era, the earliest mention of the Germanic
races.”
*** The people of Lulumô-Lullubi have been pointed out as
living to the east of the Lesser Zab by Schrader; their
exact position, together with that of Mount Padîr-Batîr in
whose neighbourhood they were, has been determined by Père
Scheil.
Budîlu carried his arms against these tribes, and obtained successes over the Turuki and the Nigimkhi, the princes of the Guti and the Shuti, as well as over the Akhlamî and the Iauri.*
* The Shutu or Shuti, who are always found in connection
with the Guti, appear to have been the inhabitants of the
lower mountain slopes which separate the basin of the Tigris
with the regions of Elam, to the south of Turnât. The
Akhlamê were neighbours of the Shuti and the Guti; they were
settled partly in the Mesopotamian plain and partly in the
neighbourhood of Turnât. The territory of the Iauri is not
known; the Turuki and the Nigimkhi were probably situated
somewhere to the east of the Great Zab: in the same way that
Oppert connects the Goths with the Guti, so Hommel sees in
the Turuki the Turks of a very early date.
The chiefs of the Lulumê had long resisted the attacks of their neighbours, and one of them, Anu-banini, had engraved on the rocks overhanging the road not far from the village of Seripul, a bas-relief celebrating his own victories. He figures on it in full armour, wearing a turban on his head, and treading underfoot a fallen foe, while Ishtar of Arbeles leads towards him a long file of naked captives, bound ready for sacrifice. The resistance of the Lulumê was, however, finally overcome by Rammân-nirâri, the son of Budilû; he strengthened the suzerainty gained by his predecessor over the Guti, the Cossæans, and the Shubarti, and he employed the spoil taken from them in beautifying the temple of Assur. He had occasion to spend some time in the regions of the Upper Tigris, warring against the Shubari, and a fine bronze sabre belonging to him has been found near Diarbekîr, among the ruins of the ancient Amidi, where, no doubt, he had left it as an offering in one of the temples. He was succeeded by Shalmânuâsharîd,* better known to us as Shalmaneser I., one of the most powerful sovereigns of this heroic age of Assyrian history.
Drawn by
Faucher-Gudin,
from the
sketch
published
in the
Transactionsof the Bibl.
Arch. Soc.
His reign seems to have been one continuous war against the various races then in a state of ferment on the frontiers of his kingdom. He appears in the main to have met with success, and in a few years had doubled the extent of his dominions.* His most formidable attacks were directed against the Aramaeans** of Mount Masios, whose numerous tribes had advanced on one side till they had crossed the Tigris, while on the other they had pushed beyond the river Balîkh, and had probably reached the Euphrates.***