[CHAPTER VII]
THE KASSITE DYNASTY AND ITS RELATIONS WITH EGYPT AND THE HITTITE EMPIRE
The Kassite conquest of Babylonia, though it met with immediate success in a great part of the country, was a gradual process in the south, being carried out by independent Kassite chieftains. The Sea-Country kings continued for a time their independent existence; and even after that dynasty was brought to an end, the struggle for the south went on. It was after a further period of conflict that the Kassite domination was completed, and the administration of the whole country centred once more in Babylon. It is fortunate for Babylonia that the new invaders did not appear in such numbers as to over-whelm the existing population. The probability has long been recognized that they were Aryan by race, and we may with some confidence regard them as akin to the later rulers of Mitanni, who imposed themselves upon the earlier non-Iranian population of Subartu, or Northern Mesopotamia. Like the Mitannian kings, the Kassites of Babylonia were a ruling caste or aristocracy, and, though they doubtless brought with them numbers of humbler followers, their domination did not affect the linguistic nor the racial character of the country in any marked degree. In some of its aspects we may compare their rule to that of Turkey in the Tigris and Euphrates valley. They give no evidence of having possessed a high degree of culture, and though they gradually adopted the civilization of Babylon, they tended for long to keep themselves aloof, retaining their native names along with their separate nationality. They were essentially a practical people and produced successful administrators. The chief gain they brought to Babylon was an improved method of time-reckoning. In place of the unwieldy system of date-formulæ, inherited by the Semites from the Sumerians, under which each year was known by an elaborate title taken from some great event or cult-observance, the Kassites introduced the simpler plan of dating by the years of the king's reign. And we shall see that it was directly owing to the political circumstances of their occupation that the old system of land tenure, already to a great extent undermined by the Western Semites, was still further modified.
But, on the material side, the greatest change they effected in the life of Babylonia was due to their introduction of the horse. There can be little doubt that they were a horse-keeping race,[1] and the success of their invasion may in large part be traced to their greater mobility. Hitherto asses and cattle had been employed for all purposes of draught and carriage, but, with the appearance of the Kassites, the horse suddenly becomes the beast of burden throughout Western Asia. Before their time "the ass of the mountain," as it was designated in Babylonia, was a great rarity, the earliest reference to it occurring in the age of Hammurabi.[2] In that period we have evidence that Kassite tribes were already forming settlements in the western districts of Elam, and when from time to time small parties of them made their way into the Babylonian plain to be employed as harvesters,[3] they doubtless carried their goods with them in the usual way. The usefulness of horses imported in this manner would have ensured their ready sale to the Babylonians, who probably retained the services of their owners to tend the strange animals. But the early Kassite immigrants must have been men of a simple and unprogressive type, for in all the contract-literature of the period we find no trace of their acquiring wealth, or engaging in the commercial activities of their adopted country. The only evidence of their employment in other than a menial capacity is supplied by a contract of Ammi-ditana's reign, which records a two-years' lease of an uncultivated field taken by a Kassite for farming.[4]
The Kassite raid into Babylonian territory in Samsu-iluna's reign[5] may have been followed by others of a like character, but it was only at the time of the later kings of the Sea-Country that the invaders succeeded in effecting a permanent foothold in Northern Babylonia. According to the Kings' List the founder of the Third Dynasty was Gandash, and we have obtained confirmation of the record in a Neo-Babylonian tablet purporting to contain a copy of one of his inscriptions.[6] The Babylonian king, whose text the copy reproduces, there bears the name Gaddash, evidently a contracted form of Gandash as written in the Kings' List; and the record contains an unmistakable reference to the Kassite conquest. From what is left of the inscription it may be inferred that it commemorated the restoration of the temple of Bêl, that is, of Marduk, which seems to have been damaged "in the conquest of Babylon." It is clear, therefore, that Babylon must have offered a strenuous opposition to the invaders, and that the city held out until captured by assault. It would seem, too, that this success was followed up by further conquests of Babylonian territory, for in his text, in addition to styling himself King of Babylon, Gaddash adopts the other time-honoured titles of King of the four quarters (of the world), and King of Sinner and Akkad. We may see evidence in this that the kingdom of the Sea-Country was now restricted within its original limits, though some attempts may have been made to stem the tide of invasion. Ea-gamil, at any rate, the last king of the Second Dynasty, was not content to defend his home-territory, for we know that he assumed the offensive and invaded Elam. But he appears to have met with no success, and after his death a Kassite chieftain, Ula-Burariash or Ulam-Buriash, conquered the Sea-Country and established his dominion there.[7]
The late chronicler, who records these events, tells us that Ulam-Buriash was the brother of Kashtiliash, the Kassite, whom we may probably identify with the third ruler of the Kassite Dynasty of Babylon. There Gandash, the founder of the dynasty, had been succeeded by his son Agum, but after the hitter's reign of twenty-two years Kashtiliash, a rival Kassite, had secured the throne.[8] He evidently came of a powerful Kassite tribe, for it was his brother, Ulam-Buriash, who conquered the Country of the Sea. We have recovered a memorial of the latter's reign in a knob or mace-head of diorite. which was found during the excavations at Babylon.[9] On it he terms himself King of the Sea-Country, and we learn from it, too, that he and his brother were the sons of Burna-Burariash, or Burna-Buriash, who may have remained behind as a local Kassite chieftain in Elam, while his sons between them secured the control of Babylonia. After a certain interval the Sea-Country must have revolted from Ulam-Buriash, for its reconquest was undertaken by Agum, a younger son of Kashtiliash, who is recorded to have captured the city of Dûr-Enlil and to have destroyed E-malga-uruna, the local temple of Enlil.[10] The eldest son of Kashtiliash had meanwhile succeeded his father on the throne of Babylon, and, if Agum established his rule in the Sea-Country, we again have the spectacle of two brothers, in the next generation of this Kassite family, dividing the control of Babylonia between them. But as the chronicler does not record that Agum, like his uncle Ulam-Buriash, exercised dominion over the Sea-Country as a whole, he may have secured little more than a local success. The throne of Babylon then passed to the second son of Kashtiliash, Abi-rattash, and it was possibly by him, or by one of his successors, that the whole country was once more united under Babylon's rule.
We know of two more members of the family of Kashtiliash, who carried on his line at Babylon. For Abi-rattash was succeeded by his son and grandson, Tashshi-gurumash and Agum-kakrime, of whom the latter has left us the record already referred to, commemorating his recovery of the statues of Marduk and Sarpanitum from the land of Khanî.[11] And then there occurs a great break in our knowledge of the history of Babylon. For a period extending over some thirteen reigns, from about the middle of the seventeenth to the close of the fifteenth century b.c., our native evidence is confined to a couple of brief records, dating from the latter half of the interval, and to one or two historical references in later texts. By their help we have recovered the names of a few of the missing kings, though their relative order, and in one or two cases even their existence, are still matters of controversy. In fact, were we dependent solely upon Babylonian sources, our knowledge of the country's history, even when we can again establish the succession, would have been practically a blank. But, thanks in great part to the commercial relations established with Syria since the age of the West-Semitic kings, the influence of Babylonian culture had travelled far afield. Her method of writing on the convenient and imperishable clay tablet had been adopted by other nations of Western Asia, and her language had become the lingua franca of the ancient world. After her conquest of Canaan, Egypt had become an Asiatic power, and had adopted the current method of international intercourse for communication with other great states and with her own provinces in Canaan. And thus it has come about that some of our most striking information on the period has come to us, not from Babylon itself, but from Egypt.
The mounds known as Tell el-Amarna in Upper Egypt mark the site of a city which had a brief but brilliant existence under Amen-hetep IV., or Akhenaten, one of the later kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty. He was the famous "heretic" king, who attempted to suppress the established religion of Egypt and to substitute for it a pantheistic monotheism associated with the worship of the solar disk. In pursuance of his religious ideas he deserted Thebes, the ancient capital of the country, and built a new capital further to the north, which he called Akhetaten,[12] the modern Tell el-Amarna. Here he transferred the official records of his own government and those of his father, Amenhetep III., including the despatches from Egypt's Asiatic provinces and the diplomatic correspondence with kings of Mesopotamia, Assyria and Babylon. Some twenty-seven years ago a large number of these were discovered in the ruins of the royal palace, and they form one of the most valuable sources of information on the early relations of Egypt and Western Asia.[13] More recently they have been supplemented by a still larger find of similar documents at Boghaz Keui in Cappadocia, a village built beside the site of Khatti, the ancient capital of the Hittite empire. The royal and official archives had been stored for safety on the ancient citadel, and the few extracts that have as yet been published, from the many thousands of documents recovered on the site, have furnished further information of the greatest value from the Hittite standpoint.[14]