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 overwhelm 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-formulae, 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, 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. 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, 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.

The Kassite raid into Babylonian territory in Samsu-iluna's reign 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. 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 Bel, 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 Sumer 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. (The established genealogy of Agum-kakrime renders it impossible to identify the Agum of the chronicle, who was a son of Kashtiliash the Kassite, with either of the Kassite kings of Babylon who bore that name. He can only have raided or ruled in the Sea-Country, probably at the time his eldest brother Ushshi (or perhaps his other brother, Abi-rattash) was king in Babylon.).

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 latter's reign of twenty-two years Kashtiliash, a rival Kassite, had secured the throne. He evidently eame 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. 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 Dur-Enlil and to have destroyed E-malga-uruna, the local temple of Enlil. 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 Khani. 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, the modern Tell el-Amarna. Here he transferred the official records of his own government and those of his father, Amen-hetep 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. 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.

From these documents we have recovered a very full picture of international politics in Western Asia during two centuries, from the close of the fifteenth to the later years of the thirteenth century b.c. We can trace in some measure the dynastic relations established by Egypt with the other great Asiatic states, and the manner in which the balance of power was maintained, largely by diplomatic methods. During the earlier part of this period Egyptian power is dominant in Palestine and Syria, while the kingdom of Mitanni, under its Aryan dynasty, is a check upon Assyrian expansion. But Egypt was losing her hold upon her Asiatic provinces, and the rise of the Hittite empire coincided with her decline in power. Mitanni soon fell before the Hittites, to the material advantage of Assyria, which began to be a menace to her neighbours upon the west and south. After a change of dynasty, Egypt had meanwhile in part recovered her lost territory in Palestine, and once more took her place among the great nations of Western Asia. And it is only with the fall of the Hittite empire that the international situation is completely altered. Throughout Babylon stands, so far as she may, aloof, preoccupied with commerce rather than with conquest; but in the latter half of the period her eyes are always fixed upon her Assyrian frontier.

From the Tell el-Amarna correspondence we see how the kings of Mitanni, Assyria and Babylon gave their daughters to the Egyptian king in marriage and sought to secure his friendship and alliance. Apparently Egypt considered it beneath her dignity to bestow her princesses in return, for in one of his letters to Amenhetep III, Kadashman-Enlil remonstrates with the King of Egypt for refusing him one of his daughters and threatens to withhold his own daughter in retaliation. Another of the letters illustrates in a still more striking manner the intimate international intercourse of the period. At the height of its power the kingdom of Mitanni appears to have annexed the southern districts of Assyria, and for a time to have exercised control over Nineveh, as Hammurabi of Babylon had done in an earlier age. It was in his character of suzerain that Dushratta sent the holy statue of Ishtar of Nineveh to Egypt, as a mark of his esteem for Amen-hetep III. We have recovered the letter he sent with the goddess, in which he writes concerning her: " Indeed in the time of my father the lady Ishtar went into that land; and, just as she dwelt there formerly and they honoured her, so now may my brother honour her ten times more than before. May my brother honour her and may he allow her to return with joy." We thus gather that this was not the first time Ishtar had visited Egypt, and we may infer from such a custom the belief that a deity, when stopping in a foreign country with his or her own consent, would, if properly treated, confer favour and prosperity upon that land. We shall see later on that Rameses II sent his own god lvhonsu on a similar mission to Khatti, in order to cure the epileptic daughter of the Hittite king, who was believed to be possessed by a devil. We could not have more striking proofs of international intercourse. Not only did the rulers of the great states exchange their daughters but even their gods.

 

akhenatOn witH his queen and infant daughters on the balcony of their palace.

The king and his family are here represented throwing down collars and ornaments of gold to Ay, the Priest of Aten and Master of the Horse, who has called at the palace with his wife, attended by a large retinue. The Aten, or Solar Disk, the object of the royal worship, is caressing the king with its rays and giving him life. [After N. de G. Davies.]

But the letters also exhibit the jealousy which existed between the rival states of Asia. By skilful diplomacy, and, particularly in the reign of Akhenaten, by presents and heavy bribes, the Egyptian king and his advisers succeeded in playing off one power against the other, and in retaining some hold upon their troublesome provinces of Syria and Palestine. In paying liberal bounties and rewards to his own followers and party in Egypt itself, Akhenaten was only carrying out the traditional policy of the Egyptian crown; and he extended the principle still more in his dealings with foreign states. But peculation on the part of the ambassadors was only equalled by the greed of the monarchs to whom they were accredited, and whose appetite for Egyptian gold grew with their consumption of it. Much space in the letters is given up to the constant request for more presents, and to complaints that promised gifts have not arrived. In one letter, for example, Ashur-uballit of Assyria writes to Akhenaten that formerly the king of Khanirabbat had received a present of twenty manehs of gold from Egypt, and he proceeds to demand a like sum. Burna-Buriash of Babylon, his contemporary, writes in the same strain to Egypt, reminding Akhenaten that Amenophis III had been far more generous to his father. "Since the time my father and thine established friendly relations with one another, they sent rich presents to one another, and they did not refuse to one another any desired object. Now my brother has sent me as a present two manehs of gold. Send now much .gold, as much as thy father; and if it is less, send but half that of thy father. Why hast thou sent only two manehs of gold? For the work in the temple is great, and I have undertaken it and am carrying it out with vigour; therefore send much gold. And do thou send for whatsoever thou desirest in my land, that they may take it thee."

Though a great part of the royal letters from Tell el-Amarna is taken up with such rather wearisome requests for gold, they also give valuable glimpses into the political movements of the time. We gather, for instance, that Egypt succeeds in preventing Babylon from giving support to the revolts in Canaan, but she does not hesitate to encourage Assyria, which is now beginning to display her power as Babylon's rival. Burna-Buriash makes this clear when he complains that Akhenaten has received an embassy from the Assyrians, whom he boastfully refers to as his subjects; and he contrasts Babylon's own reception of Canaanite proposals of alliance against Egypt in the time of his father Kurigalzu. "In the time of Kurigalzu, my father", he writes, "the Canaanites sent to him with one accord, saying, 'Let us go down against the border of the land and invade it, and let us form an alliance with thee.' But my father replied to them, saying, 'Desist from seeking to form an alliance with me. If ye are hostile to the king of Egypt, my brother, and ally yourselves with one another, shall I not come and plunder you? For with me is he allied.' My father for thy father's sake did not hearken to them." But Burna-Buriash does not trust entirely to the Egyptian's sense of gratitude for Babylon's support in the past. He reinforces his argument by a present of three manehs of lapis-lazuli, five yoke of horses and five wooden chariots. Lapis-lazuli and horses were the two most valuable exports from Babylon during the Kassite period, and they counterbalanced to some extent Egypt's almost inexhaustible supply of Nubian gold.

Babylon at this time had no territorial ambitions outside the limit of her own frontiers. She was never menaced by Mitanni, and it was only after the fall of the latter kingdom that she began to be uneasy at the increase of Assyrian power. Apart from the defence of her frontier, her chief preoccupation was to keep the trade-routes open, especially the Euphrates route to Syria and the north. Thus we find Burna-Buriash remonstrating with Egypt when the caravans of one of his messengers, named Salmu, had been plundered by two Canaanite chiefs, and demanding compensation. On another occasion he writes that Babylonian merchants had been robbed and slain at Khinnatuni in Canaan, and he again holds Akhenaten responsible. "Canaan is thy land," he says, "and its kings are thy servants"; and he demands that the losses should be made good and the murderers slain. But Egypt was at this period so busy with her own affairs that she had not the time, nor even the power, to protect the commercial interests of her neighbours. For in the majority of the Tell el- Amarna letters we see her Asiatic empire felling to pieces. From Northern Syria to Southern Palestine the Egyptian governors and vassal rulers vainly attempt to quell rebellion and to hold back invading tribes.

The source of a good deal of the trouble was the great Hittite power, away to the north in the mountains of Anatolia. The Hittite kings had formed a confederation of their own peoples north of the Taurus, and they were now pressing southwards into Phoenicia and the Lebanon. They coveted the fertile plains of Northern Syria, and Egypt was the power that blocked their path. They were not at first strong enough to challenge Egypt by direct invasion of her provinces, so they con­fined themselves to stirring up rebellion among the native princes of Canaan. These they encouraged to throw off the Egyptian yoke, and to attack those cities which refused to join them. The loyal chiefs and governors appealed for help to Egypt, and their letters show that they generally appealed in vain. For Akhenaten was a weak monarch, and was far more interested in his heretic worship of the Solar Disk than in retaining the foreign empire he had inherited. It was in his reign that the Anatolian Hittites began to take an active part in the politics of Western Asia.

 

Until the discovery of the documents at Boghaz Keui, it had only been possible to deduce the existence of the Hittites from the mark they had left in the records of Egypt and Assyria; and at that time it was not even certain whether we might regard as their work the hieroglyphic rock-inscriptions, which are scattered over a great part of Asia Minor. But it is now possible to supplement our material from native sources, and to trace the gradual extension of their power by both conquest and diplomacy. They were a virile race, and their strongly marked features may be still seen, not only on their own rock-sculptures, but also in Egyptian reliefs beside those of other Asiatics.

hittite foot-soldiers at the battle of kadesh

In facial type, too, they are quite distinct, for the nose, though prominent and slightly curved, is not very fleshy, mouth and chin are small, and the forehead recedes abruptly, with the hair drawn back from it and falling in one, or possibly in two plaits, or pig-tails, on the shoulders. It is still not certain to which of the great families of nations they belonged. The suggestion has been made that their language has certain Indo-European characteristics, but for the present it is safer to regard them as an indigenous race of Asia Minor. Their facial type in any case suggests comparison as little with Aryan as with Semitic stock. (The Mitannian people were probably akin to them, though in the fifteenth century they were dominated by a dynasty of Indo-European extraction, bearing Aryan names and worshipping the Aryan gods Mitra and Varuna, Indra and the Nasatya-twins).

HITTITE CHIEFTAIN, A CAPTIVE OF RAMESES III A relief of the twelfth century, perhaps the finest representation of a Hittite on the Egyptian monuments; it is evidently a portrait sculpture, so far as the head is concerned. It illustrates, too, the manner in which the heavy plait of hair ends in a curled tail.

Their civilization was strongly influenced by that of Babylonia, perhaps through the medium of Assyrian trading settlements, which were already established in Cappadocia in the second half of the third millennium. From these early Semitic immigrants, or their successors, they borrowed the clay tablet and the cuneiform system of writing. But they continued to use their own picture-characters for monumental records; and even in the later period, when they came into direct contact with the Assyrian empire, their art never lost its individual character. Some of the most elaborate of their rock-sculptures still survive in the holy sanctuary at Yasili Kaya, not far from Boghaz Keui. Here on the rock-face, in a natural fissure of the mountain, are carved the figures of their deities, chief among them the great Mother-goddess of the Hittites. She and Teshub, the principal male deity, are here represented meeting, with their processions of deities and attendants. Whether it was from precisely this area that the Hittite tribes descended on their raid down the Euphrates, which hastened the fall of Babylon's First Dynasty and perhaps brought it to an end, we have as yet no means of judging. But during the subsequent centuries we may certainly picture a slow but uninterrupted expan­sion of the area under Hittite control; and it is probable that authority was divided among the various local kingdoms and chieftainships, which occupied the valleys and upland stretches to the north of the Taurus.

At the time of their empire, their capital and central fortress was Khatti, which lay to the east of the Halys, on the Anatolian plateau some three thousand feet above sea-level. It occupied a strong position near the crossing of the great lines of traffic through Asia Minor ; and expansion from this area must have begun to take place at an early period beyond the west bank of the river, where the country offered greater facilities for pasturage. Another line of advance was southward to the coast-plains beneath the Taurus, and it is certain that Cilicia was occupied by Hittite tribes before any attempt was made on Northern Syria. That at first the Hittites were scattered, without any central organi­zation, among a number of independent city-states, may be inferred from their later records. For when a land is referred to in their official documents, it is designated " the country of the city of so and so," suggesting that each important township had been the centre of an independent district to which it gave its name. Some of the Hittite states attained in time to a considerable degree of importance. Thus we find Tarkundaraba of Arzawa sufficiently eminent to marry a daughter of Amen-hetep III of Egypt. Another city was Kussar, one of whose kings, Khattusil I, was the father of Shubbiluliuma, under whom the Hittites were organized into a strong confederacy which endured for nearly two hundred years. It must have been owing to its strategic importance that Shubbiluliuma selected Khatti as his capital in place of his ancestral city.

Quite apart from its name, and from the traditions attaching to it, there can be no question but that from this time forward Khatti was the centre of Hittite power and civilization; for it is by far the most extensive Hittite site in existence. It covers the high ground, including the hill-top, above Boghaz Keui, which lies in the valley below; and it is fortunate that the greater part of the modern village was built clear of the outer boundaries of the ancient city, as the ruins have in consequence run far less risk of destruction. It was placed high for purely strategic purposes, commanding as it does the Royal Road from the west and the great trunk-road from the south as they approach the city-walls.

The citadel was formed by a flat-topped hill, which dominated the walled city to the north, west, and south of it. Its precipitous slopes descend on the north-east side to a mountain stream outside the walls; and a similar stream, fed by shallow gullies, flows north-westward through the city-area. From the point where they rise in the south, to their junction below the city, the ground falls no less than a thousand feet, and the uneven surface has been fully utilized for its defence. The wall which surrounded the southern and higher half of the city is still comparatively well preserved, and forms three sides of a rough hexagon, but the falling and broken ground to the north prevented a symmetrical completion of the circuit. A series of interior fortification-walls, following the slope of the ground, enclosed a number of irregular areas, subsidiary forts being constructed on four smaller hills along the most southerly cross-wall, which shut in the highest part of the city.

the royal gate of Hatti, the capital of the hittites, viewed from the outside.

The city's greatest length from north to south was about a mile and a quarter, and its greatest width some three-quarters of a mile, the whole circuit of the existing defences, including the lower-lying area, extending to some three and a half miles. This is a remarkable size for a mountain city, and although some portions of the area cannot have been occupied by buildings, the fortification of so extensive a site is an indication of the power of the Hittite empire and its capital. About fourteen feet in thickness, the wall is preserved in many places to a hight of more than twelve feet. It consists of an inner and an outer wall, filled in with a stone packing. The outer face was naturally the stronger of the two, and huge stones, sometimes five feet in length, have been employed in its construction. The wall was strengthened by towers, set at more or less regular intervals along it, their position being sometimes dictated by the contour of the ground. Round! a great part of the circuit there are traces of an outer defensive wall of lighter construction and with smaller towers, but this was not continuous, being omitted wherever the natural fall of the ground was a sufficient protection to the main wall.

the royal gate of Hatti, the Hittites Sphinxs

Projecting towers also flanked the main gateways, which exhibit a characteristic feature of Hittite architecture. This is the peculiar form of the gateway, consisting of a pointed arch with gently sloping sides, the latter formed by huge monoliths bonded into the structure of the wall. It would seem that brick was probably employed for the upper structure of both wall and towers; and in other buildings of the city, such as the great temple to the north-west of the citadel, brick was used for the upper structure of the walls upon a stone foundation. Whenever the use of brick was adopted in one of the northern lands of Mesopotamia, where stone is plentiful, the latter was always used in the foundations. It is not improbable, therefore, that the stepped battlements of Assyria and Babylon were also borrowed, as that was the most convenient and decorative way of finishing off the upper courses of a fortification-wall built of that material.

In the earlier years of Shubbiluliuma the city was doubtless very much smaller than it subsequently became. But he used it effectively as a base, and, as much by diplomatic means as by actual conquest, he succeeded in making the power of the Hittites felt beyond their own borders. The Syrian revolts in the reign of Amen-hetep III, by which the authority of Egypt was weakened in her Asiatic provinces, undoubtedly received Hittite encouragement. Shubbiluliuma also crossed the Euphrates and ravaged the northern territory of Mitanni, the principal rival of the Hittites up to that time. Later he invaded Syria in force and returned to his mountain fastness of Khatti, laden with spoil and leading two Mitannian princes as captives in his train. On the accession of Akhenaten, Shubbiluliuma wrote him a letter of congratulation; but, when the Syrian prince Aziru acknowledged the suzerainty of Egypt, Shubbiluliuma defeated him and laid the whole of Northern Syria under tribute, subse­quently confirming his possession of the country by treaty with Egypt. The state of Mitanni, too, sub­mitted to Shubbiluliuma's dictation, for, on the murder of its powerful king Dushratta, he espoused the cause of Mattiuaza, whom he restored to his father's throne after marrying him to his daughter. We have recovered the text of his treaty with Mitanni, and it reflects the despotic power of the Hittite king at this time. Referring to himself in the third person he says, "The great king, for the sake of his daughter, gave the country of Mitanni a new life."

It was not until the reign of Mursil, a younger son of Shubbiluliuma, that the Hittite empire came into armed conflict with Egypt. A change of dynasty in the latter country, and the restoration of her old religion, had strengthened the government, and now led to renewed attempts on her part at recovering her lost territory. On the first occasion the Hittites were defeated by Seti I in the north of Syria, and Egypt reoccupied Phoenicia and Canaan. Later on, probably in the reign of Mutallu, Mursil's son, Rameses II attempted to recover Northern Syria. At the battle of Kadesh, on the Orontes, he succeeded in defeating the Hittite army, though both sides lost heavily and at an early stage of the fight Rameses himself was in imminent danger of capture. Episodes in the battle may still be seen pictured in relief on the temple-walls at Luxor, Karnak and Abydos.

The Egyptian war was continued with varying success, though it is certain that the Hittites were eventually successful in the north. But in the reign of Khattusil, the brother of Mutallu, both sides were weary of the conflict, and an elaborate treaty of peace and alliance was drawn up. This, when engraved upon a silver tablet, was carried to Egypt by an ambassador and presented to Rameses. The contents of the treaty have long been known from the Egyptian text, engraved on the walls of the temple at Karnak; and among the tablets found at Boghaz Keui was a broken copy of the original Hittite version, drawn up in cuneiform characters and in Babylonian, the language of diplomacy at the period. Khattusil also maintained friendly relations with the Babylonian court, and he informed the king of Babylon of his treaty with the king of Egypt. It is clear from a copy of the letter, recovered at Boghaz Keui, that the Babylonian king had heard about the treaty and had written to enquire concerning it. Khattusil replies that the king of Egypt and he had formed a friendship and had concluded an alliance: "We are brothers, and against a foe will we fight together, and with a friend will we together maintain friendship". And his next remark enables us to identify his Kassite correspondent; for he adds, "and when the king of Egypt [formerly] attacked [Khatti], then did I write to inform thy father Kadash­man-turgu". Khattusil was thus the contemporary of two Kassite kings, Kadashman-turgu and Kadashman-Enlil II, the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth rulers of the dynasty.

Another section of this letter is of considerable interest, as it shows that an attempt by Khattusil to intervene in Babylonian politics had been resented, and had led to a temporary estrangement between the two countries. Khattusil is at pains to reassure Kadashman-Enlil as to the unselfishness of his motives, explaining that the action he had taken had been dictated entirely by the Kassite king's own interests. The episode had occurred on the death of Kadashman-turgu, and, according to Khattusil's account, he had at once written to Babylon to say that, unless the succes­sion of Kadashman-Enlil, who was then a boy, was recognized, he would break off the alliance he had concluded with the late king, Kadasman-Enlil's father. The Babylonian chief minister, Itti-Marduk-balatu, had taken offence at the tone of the letter, and had replied that the Hittite king had not written in the tone of brotherhood, but had issued his commands as though the Babylonians were his vassals. As a result, diplomatic negotiations had been broken off during the young king's minority; but he had now attained his majority, and had taken the direction of affairs from his minister's hands into his own. The long communication from Khattusil must have been written shortly after the resumption of diplomatic intercourse.

After giving these explanations of his present relations with Egypt, and of his former discontinuance of negotiations with Babylon, Khattusil passes on to matters which doubtless had furnished the occasion for his letter. Certain Babylonian merchants, when journeying by caravan to Amurru and Ugarit, a town in Northern Phoenicia, had been murdered; and, as the responsibility lay on the Hittite empire in its character of suzerain, Kudashman-Enlil had apparently addressed to Khattusil the demand that the guilty parties should be handed over to the relatives of the murdered men. The reference is of interest, as it gives further proof of Babylon's commercial activities in the West, and shows how, after Egypt had lost her control of Northern Syria, the Kassite rulers addressed themselves to its new suzerain to secure protection for their caravans.

JOURNEYED INTO CAPPADOCIA TO CAST OUT A DEVIL FROM A HITTITE PRINCESS

We have evidence that such diplomatic action was thoroughly effective, for not only had Babylon's language and system of writing penetrated Western Asia, but her respect for law and her legislative methods had accompanied them, at any rate within the Hittite area. The point is well illustrated by one of the last sections in this remarkable letter, which deals with a complaint by the Babylonian king concerning some action of the Amorite prince, Banti-shinni. The Amorite, when accused by Khattusil of having "troubled the land" of kadashman-Enlil, had replied by advancing a counterclaim for thirty talents of silver against the inhabitants of Akkad. After stating this fact, Khattusil continues in his letter: "Now, since Banti-Shinni has become my vassal, let my brother prosecute the claim against him; and, concerning the troubling of my brother's land, he shall make his defence before the god¹ in the presence of thy ambassador, Adad-shar-ilani. And if my brother will not conduct the action (himself), then shall thy servant come who has heard that Banti-Shinni harassed my brother's land, and he shall conduct the action. Then will I summon Banti-Shinni to answer the charge. He is (my) vassal. If he harasses my brother, does he not then harass me?" It may be that Hittite diplomacy is here making use of the Babylonian respect for law, to find a way out of a difficult situation; but the mere proposal of such a trial as that suggested proves that the usual method of settling international disputes of a minor character was modelled on Babylon's internal legislative system. It is clear that the Hittite was anxious to prevent strained relations with Babylon, for he goes on to urge Kadashman-Enlil to attack a common enemy, whom he does not name. This must have been Assyria, whose growing power had become a menace to both states, and had caused them to draw together for mutual support.

Rameses ii offering incense to one of the boats of khOnsu before he started on his journey.

The account that has been given of this lengthy document will have indicated the character of the royal correspondence discovered at Boghaz Keui. In some respects it closely resembles that from Tell el-Amarna, but it exhibits a pleasing contrast by the complete absence of those whining petitions for gold and presents, which bulk so largely in the earlier documents. The Egyptian policy of doles and bribery had brought out the worst side of the Oriental character.

The Hittite did not believe in doles, and in any case he had not them to give; as a consequence, his correspondence confines itself in great measure to matters of state and high policy, and exhibits far greater dignity and self-respect. And this applies equally, so far as Ave can see, to the communications with Egypt, who had recovered from her temporary decadence. There can be little doubt that the royal Hittite letters, when published, will enable us to follow the political movements of the period in even greater detail.

One other act of Khattusil may be referred to, as it illustrates in the religious sphere the breaking down of international barriers which took place. A few years after the completion of his great treaty, Khattusil brought his daughter to Egypt, where she was married to Rameses with great pomp and circumstance. An intimate friendship continued to exist between the two royal families, and when Bentresh, his sister-in-law, fell ill in Khatti and was believed to be incurably possessed by a devil, Rameses hastened to send his physician to cure her. But his efforts proving fruitless, the Pharaoh despatched the holy image of Khonsu, the Egyptian Moon-god, to Cappadocia, in order to cure her. The god duly arrived at the distant capital, and, while he wrought with the evil spirit, it is said that the Hittite king "stood with his soldiers and feared very greatly." But Khonsu was victorious, and the spirit having departed in peace to the place whence he came, there was great rejoicing. The episode forms an interesting parallel to Ishtar's journey into Egypt in the reign of Amenhetep III.

There is no doubt that the son and grandson of Khattusil, Dudkhalia and Arnuanta, carried on their father's policy of friendliness towards Babylon, who had no reason politically to resent the intrusion of Egyptian influence at Khatti. But Arnuanta is the last king of Khatti whose name has been recovered, and it is certain that in the following century the invasion of Anatolia by the Phrygians and the Muski put an end to Hittite power in Cappadocia. The Hittites were pressed southward through the passes, and they continued to wield a diminished political influence in Northern Syria. Meanwhile Assyria profited by their downfall and disappearance in the north. She had already expanded at the expense of Mitanni, and now that this second check upon her was removed, the balance of power ceased to be maintained in Western Asia. Babylon's history from this time forward is in great part moulded by her relations with the northern kingdom. Even at the time of the later Hittite kings she failed to maintain her frontier from Assyrian encroachment, and the capital itself was soon to fall. We are able to follow the course of these events in some detail, as, with the reign of Kara-indash I, the earliest of Amen-hetep III's correspondents, our sources of information are increased by the so-called "Synchronistic History" of Assyria and Babylonia, which furnishes a series of brief notices concerning the relations maintained between the two countries.

In the long period between Agum-kakrime and Kara-indash, the names of three Kassite rulers only have recovered. From a kudurru, or legal document, of the reign of Kadashman-Enlil I we learn of two earlier Kassite kings, Kadashman-Kharbe and his son Kuri- galzu, and it is possible that a son of the latter, Meli-Shipak, succeeded his father on the throne. We know nothing of Babylon's relations to Assyria at this time, and our first glimpse of their long struggle for supremacy is in the reign of Kara-indash, who is recorded to have made a friendly agreement with Ashur-rim-nisheshu with regard to their common boundary. That such an agreement should have been drawn up is in itself evidence of friction, and it is not surprising that a generation or so later Burna-Buriash, the correspondent of Amen-hetep III, should have found it necessary to conclude a similar treaty with Puzur-Ashur, the contemporary Assyrian king. We may regard these agreements as marking the beginning of the first phase in Babylon's subsequent dealings with Assyria, which closes with friendly agreements of a like character at the time of the Fourth Babylonian dynasty. During the intervening period of some three centuries friendly relations were constantly interrupted by armed conflicts, which generally resulted in a rectification of the frontier to Babylon's disadvantage. On only one occasion was she victorious in battle, and twice during the period the capital itself was taken. But Assyria was not yet strong enough to dominate the southern kingdom for any length of time, and at the close of the period Babylon may still be regarded as in occupation of a great part of her former territory, but with sorely diminished prestige.

To appreciate the motives which impelled Assyria from time to time to intervene in Babylonian politics, and to attempt spasmodically a southward expansion, it would be necessary to trace out her own history, and note the manner in which her ambition in other quarters reacted upon her policy in the south. As that would be out of place in the present volume, it will suffice here to summarize events so far as Babylon was affected. The friendly attitude of Puzur-Ashur to Burna-Buriash was maintained by the more powerful Assyrian king Ashur-uballit, who cemented an alliance between the two countries by giving Burna-Buriash his daughter Muballitat-Sherua in marriage. On the death of Burna-Buriash, his son Kara-indash II, who was Ashur-uballit's grandson, ascended the throne, and it was probably due to his Assyrian sympathies that the Kassite party in Babylon revolted, slew him and set Nazi-bugash in his place. Ashur-uballit invaded Babylonia, and having taken vengeance on Nazi-bugash, put Kurigalzu III, another son of Burna-Buriash, upon the throne. But the young Kurigalzu did not fulfil the expectations of his Assyrian relatives, for after Ashur-uballit's death he took the initiative against Assyria, and was defeated at Sugagi on the Zabzallat by Enlil-nirari, to whom he was obliged to cede territory. A further extension of Assyrian territory was secured by Adad-nirari I, when he defeated Kurigalzu's son and successor, Nazi-marut- tash, at Kar-Ishtar in the frontier district of Akarsallu. We have already seen from the Boghaz Keui correspondence how the Hittite Empire and Babylon were drawn together at this time by dread of their common foe, doubtless in consequence of the aggressive policy of Shalmaneser I. We do not know whether Kadash­man-Enlil II followed the promptings of Khattusil, and it is not until the reign of Kashtiliash II that we have record of fresh conflicts. Then it was that Babylon suffered her first serious disaster at Assyrian hands. Up to this time we have seen that two Assyrian kings had defeated Babylonian armies, and had exacted cessions of territory as the result of their victories. Tukulti-Ninib I was only following in their steps when he in turn defeated Kashtiliash. But his achievement differed from theirs in degree, for he succeeded in capturing Babylon itself, deported the Babylonian king, and, instead of merely acquiring a fresh strip of territory, he subdued Karduniash and administered it as a province of his kingdom till his death. The revolts which closed Tukulti-Ninib's reign and life were soon followed by Babylon's only successful campaign against Assyria.

Adad-shum-usur, who owed his throne to a revolt of the Kassite nobles against the Assyrian domination, restored the fortunes of his country for a time. He defeated and slew Enlil-kudur-usur in battle, and, when the Assyrians retreated, he followed them up and fought a battle before Ashur. This successful reassertion of Babylon's initiative was maintained by his direct descendants Meli-Shipak II and Marduk-aplu-iddina, or Merodach-baladan I; and the kudurru-records of their reigns, which have been recovered, have thrown an interesting light on the internal conditions of the country during the later Kassite period. But Assyria once again asserted herself under Ashur-dan I, who defeated Zamama-shum-iddin and succeeded in recovering her lost frontier provinces. The Kassite dynasty did not long survive this defeat, although it received its death-blow from another quarter. Shutruk-Nakhkhunte, the Elamite king, invaded Babylonia, defeated and slew Zamama-shum-iddin, and, aided by son Kutir-Nakhkhunte, he sacked Sippar and carried away much spoil to Elam. The name of the last Kassite ruler, who reigned for only three years, is broken in the Kings' List, but it is possible that we may restore it as Bel- nadin-akhi, whom Nebuchadnezzar I mentions after referring to the invasion which cost Zamama-shum-iddin his life. Whether we accept the identification or not, we may certainly connect the fall of the Kassite Dynasty with aggression on the part of Elam, such as so often before had changed the course of Babylonian politics.

Apart from the tablets of the Kassite period discovered at Nippur, our principal source of information on economic conditions in Babylonia at this time is to be found in the kudurru-inscriptions, or boundary-stones, to which reference has already been made. The word kudurru may be rendered accurately enough as "boundary-stone," for the texts are engraved on conical blocks or boulders of stone; and there is little doubt that many of the earlier stones must have been set up on landed estates, whose limits and ownership they were intended to define and commemorate. Even at a time when the stone itself had ceased to be employed to mark the boundary and was preserved in the owner's house, or in the temple of his god, as a charter or title-deed to which he could appeal in case of need, the text preserved its old formulae setting out the limits and orientation of the plot of land to which it referred.

The importance of these records is considerable, not only in their legal and religious aspects, but also from a historical point of view. Apart from the references to Babylonian kings and to historical events, which they contain, they form in many cases the only documents of their period which have come down to us. They thus serve to bridge the gap in our knowledge of Euphratean civilization between the Kassite epoch and that of the Neo-Babylonian kings; and, while they illustrate the development which gradually took place in Babylonian law and custom, they prove the con­tinuity of culture during times of great political change.

The kudurru or boundary-stone had its origin under the Kassite kings, and, while at first recording, or confirming, a royal grant of land to an important official or servant of the king, its aim was undoubtedly to place the newly acquired rights of the owner under the protection of the gods. A series of curses, regularly appended to the legal record, was directed against any interference with the owner's rights, which were also placed under the protection of a number of deities whose symbols were engraved upon the blank spaces of the stone. It has been suggested that the idea of placing property under divine protection was not entirely an innovation of the Kassites. It is true that the foundation-cones of the early Sumerian patesi Entemena may well have ended with elaborate curses intended to preserve a frontier-ditch from violation. But the cones themselves, and the stele from which they were copied, were intended to protect a national frontier, not the boundaries of private property. Gate-sockets, too, have been treated as closely related to boundary-stones, on the ground that the threshold of a temple might be regarded as its boundary. But the main object of the gate-socket was to support the temple-gate, and its prominent position and the durable nature of its material no doubt suggested its employment as a suitable place for a commemorative inscription. The peculiarity of the boundary-stone is that, by both curse and sculptured emblem, it invokes divine protection upon private property and the rights of private individuals.

In the age of Hammurabi we have no evidence of such a practice, and the Obelisk of Manishtusu, the far earlier Semitic king of Akkad, which records his ex­tensive purchases of land in Northern Babylonia, is without the protection of imprecatory clauses or symbols of the gods. The suggestion is thus extremely probable that the custom of protecting private property in this way arose at a time when the authority of the law was not sufficiently powerful to guarantee respect for the property of private individuals. This would specially apply to grants of land to favoured officials settled among a hostile population, especially if no adequate payment for the property had been made by the Kassite king. The disorder and confusion which followed the fall of the First Dynasty must have been renewed during the Kassite conquest of the country, and the absence of any feeling of public security would account for the general adoption of such a practice as placing land in private possession under the protection of the gods.

The use of stone stelae for this purpose may well have been suggested by a Kassite custom; for in the mountains of Western Persia, the recent home of the Kassite tribes before their conquest of the river-plain, stones had probably been used to mark the limits of their fields, and these may well have borne short inscriptions giving the owner's name and title. The employment of curses to secure divine protection was undoubtedly of Babylonian, and ultimately of Sumerian origin, but the idea of placing symbols of the gods upon the stone was probably Kassite. Moreover, the kudurru was not the original title-deed recording the acquisition of the land to which it refers. As in the earlier Babylonian periods, clay tablets continued to be employed for this purpose, and they received the impression of the royal seal as evidence of the king's sanction and authority. The text of the tablet, generally with the list of witnesses, was later on recopied by the engraver upon the stone, and the curses and symbols were added.

A boundary-stone was sometimes employed to commemorate a confirmation of title, and, like many modern legal documents, it recited the previous history of the property during a long period extending over several reigns. But the majority of the stones recovered commemorate original grants of land made by the king to a relative, or to one of his adherents in return for some special service. Perhaps the finest of this class of charters is that in which Meli-Shipak makes a grant of certain property in Bit-Pir-Shadu-rabu, near the old city of Akkad or Agade and the Kassite town Dur-Kurigalzu, to his son Merodach-baladan I, who afterwards suc­ceeded him upon the throne. After giving the size and situation of the estates, and the names of the high officials who had been entrusted with the duty of drawing up the survey, the text defines the privileges granted to Merodach-baladan along with the land. As some of these throw considerable light on the system of land tenure during the Kassite period, they may be briefly summarized.

Kudurru-of-Melishipak

The king, in conferring the ownership of the land upon his son, freed it from all taxes and tithes, and forbade the displacement of its ditches, limits, and boundaries. He freed it also from the corvée, and enacted that none of the people of the estate were to be requisitioned among the gangs levied in its district for public works, for the prevention of flood, or for the repair of the royal canal, a section of which was maintained in working order by the neighbouring villages of Bit-Sikkamidu and Damik-Adad. They were not liable to forced labour on the canal-sluices, nor for building dams, nor for digging out the canal-bed. No cultivator on the property, whether hired or belonging to the estate, was to be requisitioned by the local governor even under royal authority. No levy was to be made on wood, grass, straw, corn, or any sort of crop, on the carts and yokes, on asses or man-servants. No one was to use his son's irrigation-ditch, and no levy was to be made on his water-supply even during times of drought. No one was to mow his grass-land without his permission, and no beasts belonging to the king or governor, which might be assigned to the district, were to be driven over or pastured on the estate. And, finally, he was freed from all liability to build a road or a bridge for the public convenience, even though the king or the governor should give the order.

From these regulations it will be seen that the owner of land in Babylonia under the later Kassite kings, unless granted special exemption, was liable to furnish forced labour for public works both to the state and to his local district; he had to supply grazing and pasture for the flocks and herds of the king and the governor, and to pay various taxes and tithes on land, irrigation-water, and crops. We have already noted the prevalence of similar customs under the First Dynasty, and it is clear that the successive conquests to which the country had been subjected, and its domination by a foreign race, had not to any appreciable extent affected the life and customs of the people nor even the general character of the administrative system.

On one subject the boundary-stones throw additional light, which is lacking at the period of the First Dynasty, and that is the old Babylonian system of land tenure. They suggest that the lands, which formed the subject of royal grants during the Kassite period, were generally the property of the local bitu, or tribe. In certain cases the king actually purchased the land from the bitu in whose district it was situated, and, when no consideration was given, we need merely assume that it was requisitioned by royal authority. The primitive system of tribal or collective proprietorship, which is attested by the Obelisk of Manishtusu, undoubtedly survived into the Kassite period, when it co-existed with the system of private ownership, as it had doubtless done at the time of the West-Semitic kings. The bitu must often have occupied an extensive area, split up into separate districts or groups of villages. It had its own head, the bel biti, and its own body of local functionaries, who were quite distinct from the official and military servants of the state. In fact, agricultural life in Babylonia during the earlier periods must have presented many points of analogy to such examples of collective proprietorship as may be seen in the village communities of India at the present day. As the latter system has survived the political changes and revolutions of many centuries, so it is probable that the tribal proprietorship in Babylonia was slow to decay.

The principal factor in its disintegration was undoubtedly the policy, pursued by the West-Semitic and Kassite conquerors, of settling their own officers and more powerful adherents on estates throughout the country. Both these periods thus represent a time of transition, during which the older system of land tenure gradually gave way in face of the policy of private ownership, which for purely political reasons was so strongly encouraged by the crown. There can be no doubt that under the West-Semitic kings, at any rate from the time of Hammurabi onwards, the policy of confiscation was rarely resorted to. And even the earlier rulers of that dynasty, since they were of the same racial stock as a large proportion of their new subjects, would have been the more inclined to respect tribal institutions which may have found a parallel in their land of origin. The Kassites, on the other hand, had no such racial associations to restrain them, and it is significant that the kudurrus were now for the first time introduced, with their threatening emblems of divinity and their imprecatory clauses. At first employed to guard the rights of private ownership, often based on high-handed requisition by the king, they were afterwards retained for transfers of landed property by purchase. In the Neo-Babylonian period, when the boundary-stones recorded long series of purchases by means of which the larger landed estates were built up, the imprecations and symbols had become to a great extent conventional survivals.

But that period was still far distant, and the vicissitudes the country was to pass through were not conducive to security of tenure, whether the property were held under private or collective ownership. We have seen that Assyria, as early as the thirteenth century, had succeeded in capturing and sacking Babylon, and, according to one tradition, had ruled the city for seven years. She was shortly to renew her attempts to subjugate the southern kingdom; but it was Elam, Babylon's still older foe, that brought the long and undistinguished Kassite Dynasty to an end.

 

CHAPTER VIII

THE LATER DYNASTIES AND THE ASSYRIAN DOMINATION