The world around the old.., p.19
The World around the Old Testament, page 19
The Old Babylonian tradition bequeathed many other cultural treasures. Scholars of the era assiduously collected older Sumerian compositions and often translated them into their Semitic tongue, Akkadian. A notable example was the Gilgamesh Epic, which originated in Sumerian but is known in Akkadian from important Old Babylonian manuscripts. The authoritative scholarly edition of this text is by Andrew George. Many copies of the Gilgamesh Epic are known, including one Middle Babylonian exemplar from Late Bronze Age Megiddo, in northern Israel, which seems, however, to have been brought to Megiddo from elsewhere in the Levant.21 The story, of course, revolves around the legendary hero, Gilgamesh, and his friendship with the strange figure of Enkidu. After adventures, great achievements, and terrible hardships, the two are eventually separated when Enkidu is killed. This prompts Gilgamesh to embark on a sublime effort to understand the limits of human mortality, to query gods and humans as he traverses the ends of the world in search of definitive answers to fundamental questions. Tablet 11 of the epic narrates Gilgamesh’s lengthy audience with Uta-napishti, survivor of the primeval flood, on whom the great gods conferred immortality after his tragic journey in a vessel built to carry him and “the seed of every living thing” across the great divide, which the flood represents in human experience. The epic was clearly venerated in antiquity and has rightly been regarded since its rediscovery as a landmark in the evolution of human culture.
2. The Kassite Period
Scholars identify the end of the Old Babylonian period with the Hittite sack of Babylon in the sixteenth century by Mursili I.
During the following, Middle Babylonian period, a non-Semitic population known as the Kassites, kaššū in Akkadian, dominated the regions of Sumer and Akkad, which they called Karduniash. The origins and early history of the Kassites remain obscure; they may have originated in the Zagros Mountains of Iran, but began to arrive in southern Mesopotamia already during the First Dynasty of Babylon. The Kassites began integrating into Babylonia during the Old Babylonian period and adopted many of its cultural features before founding a dynasty, one of the earliest rulers of which was Agum-Kakrime, in the early sixteenth century. This dynasty, the longest lived in Mesopotamia, lasted until about 1158. Limited textual, artistic, adminstrative, and archaeological data from this era have been published and only indirect evidence exists for the Kassite language.22 Yet the broad outlines of Babylonian history in this period suggest that the Kassites achieved substantial political consolidation within the region and installed a ramified bureaucracy to administer an exceptionally long-lived state.23 One distinctive type of cultural artifact that originated during this era is the so-called kudurru, or, better, “entitlement narû”—stone monuments that appear from the time of the Kassite Kurigalzu (probably Kurigalzu II, 1332–1308) onward (fig. 3.2). They describe royal benefactions, “the acquisition or affirmation of an entitlement to an ongoing source of income . . . that is hereditary.”24 These benefactions were evidently rewards for personal service to the crown. Early scholars thus saw in the Kassite administration a foreign, quasi-feudal system, but W. Sommerfeld challenged this view and argued that “granting lands is but an interesting manifestation in the conferral of royal favor, one that played a striking, but not decisive, role.”25 The “feudal” interpretation has therefore not won assent, and the extent of Kassite influence on native traditions remains under discussion. The inscriptions merge artistic, religious, and legal traditions in compact, three-dimensional form. The complex nexus between the gods, royal benefactions, and loyal service clearly served to reinforce the stability of regional political arrangements, to which these monuments eloquently attest.
Figure 3.2. Shitti-Marduk kudurru image [Marie-Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons]
During the Kassite period, Babylonia played a significant role in the international politics of western Asia, when the lingua franca was Akkadian. The Kassite kings, notably Kadashman-Enlil I (d. 1360) and Burna-buriash II (1359–1333), developed extensive diplomatic ties, including royal marriages, with an array of powers that included Egypt, Mittani, and Hatti. This can be seen in the extensive correspondence of the fourteenth century discovered at el-Amarna, in Egypt, in which the kings of the great powers designate each other as “brother.”26 Amanda Podany has well surveyed and described the diplomatic achievements of the period and Babylon’s role in them.27 The small kingdoms of the southeastern Mediterranean littoral were also clearly influenced by the converging interests of the great powers, including Babylonia, as the Amarna correspondence shows. Not only did local scribes use their own variation of Babylonian Akkadian, but they also knew of sophisticated Babylonian literary traditions such as the Gilgamesh Epic28 and lexical word lists such as HUR.RA = ḫubullu, a fragment of which was discovered at the city of Ashkelon, on the southeastern Mediterannean coast.29 Whether these types of scholarly texts were carried west by Babylonian scribes, or whether the traditions were mediated by more proximate sources, such as scribal circles at Ugarit, is less clear. In any case, even during the Late Bronze Age, a period of extensive Egyptian control in Canaan, Babylonian linguistic and cultural influences penetrated the region and must have informed local traditions.30
The demise of the Kassite Dynasty in the mid-twelfth century was effected by Assyrian and Elamite pressure on Babylonia. For several decades under Meli-Shipak (ca. 1186–1172) and his son, Marduk-apla-iddina I (ca. 1171–1159), Babylonia seems to have been relatively stable. After the death of the latter, however, raids first by Assur-dan I (1178–1133) of Assyria and then Shutruk-Nahhunte of Elam brought the long period of Kassite rule to an effective end. The symbolic emphasis of this point was Shutruk-Nahhunte’s abduction of the statue of Marduk from his main temple, the Esagila of Babylon. The event would live in infamy, another example of the ancient principle that the angered deity could unleash his fury through the agency of an archetypal marauding foe.
3. The Late Middle and Early Neo-Babylonian Periods
The end of the thirteenth century and beginning of the twelfth witnessed an unparalleled collapse of previously robust polities throughout the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. From Mycenae in the Greek west, to the Hittite kingdom of Asia Minor, to the city-state of Ugarit on the Syrian coast, to New Kingdom Egypt, formerly impressive bureaucratic polities rapidly faded in the regions to the north and west of Babylonia. Historians have debated the reasons for this systemic collapse. Recently, a group of scholars has analyzed pollen retrieved from a core drilled in the Sea of Galilee to support the hypothesis that a lengthy dry period corresponded precisely with this period of geopolitical turmoil and collapse.31 Coupled with hints from textual and archaeological data, they suggest that “cold spells in the northern areas of the eastern Mediterranean and decrease in precipitation across the entire region had devastating effects on agriculture productivity and grazing.”32 In the wake of these “crisis years” and associated political collapses, new ethnic groups (e.g., the Sea Peoples) and a proliferation of minor polities emerged (including the territorial kingdoms of the Levant, like Israel). In Mesopotamia, Arameans from the west began to arrive in increasing numbers during the same period. The significance of these upheavals for the political and cultural trajectories of the first millennium can scarcely be overemphasized. Babylonia would retain its place as a cultural lodestar in the ancient Near East, but even more than in the Amorite era of the Old Babylonian period, developments in the West would shape Mesopotamian aspirations and cultural developments.
Thus, although the climatological effects may have been different in Mesopotamia, it was also during this period that Kassite control of Babylonia ended. In its wake, a less coherent constellation of local rulers, coupled with an apparent influx of migrants—among them West Semitic Arameans and Chaldeans—ushered in a tumultuous period. Between the late twelfth century and the period of Neo-Assyrian dominance over Babylonia in the eighth century, a series of unstable dynasties governed Babylonia. The Babylonian Chronicles and related texts indicate that frequent turmoil existed between Babylonia, tribal Arameans, Assyrians in the north, and Elamites in the east. The history of the entire period was sketched in its most authoritative formulation by J. A. Brinkman in his monumental A Political History of Post-Kassite Babylonia, 1158–722 B.C.33
The most noteworthy Babylonian ruler from early in this period was undoubtedly Nebuchadnezzar I (1125–1104), the fourth ruler of the so-called Second Dynasty of Isin (1157–1026), the textual record for whom is fairly substantial.34 A text labeled by scholars as the Synchronistic History indicates that Nebuchadnezzar fought on multiple occasions against the Assyrians along the northern border of Babylonia, apparently without much success.35 On the other hand, Nebuchadnezzar campaigned successfully against the Elamites in the east. Several of his texts, including a lengthy bilingual (Sumerian-Akkadian) inscription, offer commentary on the vicissitudes of Babylonian history during the period; the bilingual text focuses especially on the behavior of the patron deity of Babylon, Marduk. The first part of the inscription narrates how Marduk had earlier become angered with his land and how this prompted him to permit Elamite depredations against it: “(Marduk) became angry and (full of) wrath. He commanded and the land was abandoned by its gods.” Thereupon, “the wicked Elamite . . . laid waste the settlements (and) turned (the land) into a desert. He carried off the gods (and) turned the sanctuaries into ruins.”36 As noted above, the Elamites had even captured the cult statue of Marduk. Nebuchadnezzar I’s entreaties to the god, however, proved effective according to the text: “In his generous heart [Marduk] had pity and turned back unto the holy city.”37 Nebuchadnezzar was able to humble the Elamites, and he made it possible for Marduk to journey home and take up residence in his shrine, to much rejoicing. Several of the king’s inscriptions commemorate this dramatic event, yet another example of how the ancient religious principle of divine abandonment and return informed both political and theological speculation.38
W. Lambert argued that Nebuchadnezzar’s repatriation of Marduk’s cult statue to Babylon also provided the context in which the great literary composition known as Enuma Elish (sometimes dubbed the Babylonian Epic of Creation) was composed.39 The text focuses in particular on Marduk’s primordial defeat of the divine forces of chaos embodied by the goddess Tiamat, after which the other gods hail Marduk as king and he takes up residence in his temple, Esagila, in Babylon.40 Indeed, Lambert and W. Sommerfeld have argued that it was during the Second Dynasty of Isin that Marduk was recognized in Babylon as the chief god of the Babylonian pantheon, a religious innovation that would shape first-millennium cultic history in Babylonia but also far beyond.41 Lambert also argued that the text of Enuma Elish became, effectively, the libretto for the Babylonian version of the Akītu festival, an archaic ritual that celebrated the autumnal and vernal equinoxes. The seven-day-long Babylonian Akītu festival entailed reciting Enuma Elish on the evening of the fourth day, and thus celebrated Marduk’s defeat of Tiamat and his reenthronement in his temple in Babylon at the midpoint of the festival.42 The dramatic confirmation of Babylon’s cultic supremacy and Marduk’s primacy among the gods would remain durable elements of the Babylonian intellectual world for the next five hundred years. In its particular configuration, Enuma Elish has often been understood to have influenced Israelite conceptions of God’s creation of the world and the celebration of his defeat of the forces of chaos. These events, in the influential reconstruction of Sigmund Mowinckel, were seen to have influenced Israel’s cultus, including the Psalms, many of which, he argued, commemorate the annual ritual enthronement of God at an autumn New Year festival in Israel.43
Nebuchadnezzar I’s reign also yielded several remarkable “entitlement narû” inscriptions (formerly called kudurrus), which detail benefactions to important courtiers.44 One remarkable literary exemplar celebrates a local ruler called Shitti-Marduk and provides a heroic depiction of a Babylonian battle against the Elamites, detailing Shitti-Marduk’s bravery and enumerating royal benefactions due him and his territory, particularly tax exemption.45 The so-called Hinke Kudurru details land grants to the leader of Nippur.46 The early Neo-Babylonian period likewise saw the composition or compilation of a number of other important texts, including Tintir, the great repository of topographical information about Babylon, and the sapiential text Ludlul bel nemeqi, or I Will Praise the Lord of Wisdom (also known as The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer).47 The latter ostensibly contains the reflections of an individual beset by the gods—Marduk in particular—for reasons that escape him, since he has always been a faithful devotee. In a sense, this poem applies the historiographical principle of divine anger and abandonment, followed by reconciliation and well-being, to consideration of an individual’s biography. It counts as one of the more influential psychological ruminations among Babylonian compositions, and was regarded by William Moran as having been composed after the individual in question recovered from a serious malady.48 Its introspective component has intrigued scholars since its republication.
This apparent cultural boom came despite the fact that Babylon’s regional power remained limited. The latter part of Nebuchadnezzar I’s reign, moreover, coincided with a renewal of Assyrian power under Tiglath-pileser I (1114–1076), who was able to extend Assyrian influence relatively far to the west and also curtail Babylonian ambitions. When Nebuchadnezzar’s younger brother, Marduk-nādin-ahhē, eventually came to the throne (1099–1082), he raided the Assyrian city of Ekallate and captured several Assyrian deities’ statues. In retaliation, Tiglath-pileser I campaigned extensively through Babylonia, capturing important cities and devastating palaces in Babylon.49 A Babylonian Chronicle entry for the reign of Marduk-shāpik-zēri (1081–1069), son of Marduk-nādin-ahhē, suggests that prosperity prevailed during his reign. Yet Assyrian pressure and then successive waves of Aramean migrations disrupted the internal stability of the Babylonian heartland. Few royal inscriptions from this period are known, and the Babylonian Chronicle texts emphasize that Aramean and Sutean tribal groups wreaked havoc. In the mid-eleventh century, under Adad-apla-iddina (1068–1047), the Babylonian Chronicle reads: “The Arameans and a usurper rebelled against Adad-apla-iddina . . . and [prof]aned the holy cities. . . . They destroyed Dēr, Nippur, Si[ppar, and Dūr]-Kurigalzu. The Suteans took the offensive and carried the booty of Sumer and Akkad into their country.”50
It may also have been during this tumultuous era that another important text of the Babylonian literary tradition originated, although it is best known from an eighth-century version: the epic concerning Erra and Ishum (the Poem of Erra). The text, as Benjamin Foster writes, “is a portrayal of violence: its onset, course, and consequences. . . . Violence can eliminate even the order ordained by the gods and sweep away in its frenzy all the hopes and accomplishments of civilization.”51 The destructive god Erra threatens to rage against Babylonia, while the remote, apparently ineffective Marduk remains powerless to resist him. Only Erra’s companion, Ishum, is able to dissuade Erra from his catastrophic course. The text seems to ruminate on Babylon’s tumultuous recent past, and in its literary inventiveness and daring seems to question age-old pieties. Its influence on biblical thought, including the prophet Ezekiel, has been variously assessed,52 but its novel formulations suggest the emergence of an iconoclastic intellectual tradition. Literary trends in the period, therefore, indicate that scribes sought self-consciously to move beyond preservation of, expansion of, and commentary on known genres and pushed the literary boundaries with somewhat more daring.
Figure 3.3. Sun-God Tablet [Prioryman/Wikimedia Commons]
The end of the Second Dynasty of Isin is a little-known period in Babylonia, and the relative political weakness of the successive kings of the region in subsequent centuries makes the period rather unremarkable. Meanwhile, the Assyrian monarchs in the north solidified their political and military capacities. As a result, few Babylonian kings emerge into sharp focus, and their dynastic affiliations remain mostly unknown. The achievements of one king, Nabû-apla-iddina, who reigned for thirty-three years in the ninth century (roughly 887–855), do warrant attention, since he seems to have had some success stemming the tide of Sutean maurauders, and it is from his reign that we have one of the most remarkable documents ever recovered in ancient Babylonia, the so-called Sun-God Tablet (fig. 3.3).53 The stone inscription, discovered at Sippar, was classified early on with other so-called kudurru texts of the late Kassite and early Neo-Babylonian eras.54 The principal purpose of both the text and the elaborate image accompanying it—it is one of the most recognizable pieces of art from ancient Babylonia—was to celebrate the reestablishment of the cult of Shamash, the sun god, in the Ebabbar temple of Sippar, thanks to the solicitation of Nabû-apla-iddina, who authorized a priestly sinecure in the temple. “What is remarkable about this tablet, however, is the impressive marshalling of visual and literary devices in terms of archaic iconography and poetic, historical narrative to establish not only the great antiquity of the cult, but, more to the point, its ancient claim to these prerogatives and revenues.”55 The resuscitation of the Shamash cult in the ninth century rested in a remarkable antiquarian concern for re-creating and installing an image of the sun god, for which a model had miraculously been recovered. This intellectual interest would in turn become a kind of hallmark of the later Neo-Babylonian kings, in particular Nabonidus, who, some three hundred years later, may well have taken steps to preserve the famed tablet of Nabû-apla-iddina when the Ebabbar temple of Sippar was restored, if the reconstruction of Christopher Woods is correct.56 This first-millennium Babylonian penchant for investigating the past and modeling present cultic realities on it has rightly been identified as an intellectual orientation of considerable influence.
