Middle Elamite Kingdom

A language related to nothing

Drafted from Potts, Cambridge World Archaeology (2016)formation

Elamite is a language isolate. It has no established relatives — not Semitic, not Indo-European, not Hurro-Urartian, not Sumerian — and it was written for something over two thousand years, from the late fourth millennium down to the Achaemenid chancery, by people living on the plain of Khuzestan and in the mountains of Fars.

That is the first thing to say, because everything else about Elam has been read through Mesopotamia. Susa is ninety kilometres from the Tigris floodplain and has been in and out of Mesopotamian political orbit since Sargon of Akkad; the Elamites wrote in Mesopotamian cuneiform, borrowed Mesopotamian gods, fought Mesopotamian wars, and are described almost entirely in Mesopotamian sources. And the language underneath all of that belongs to nothing else in the ancient world.

Two capitals and one title

The Elamite royal style is king of Anshan and Susa, and the pairing is the state's structure in four words. Susa sits on the lowland plain, agriculturally rich, wide open to Mesopotamia, and has been dug since 1897. Anshan — modern Tal-e Malyan, in Fars, five hundred kilometres away and fifteen hundred metres up — is highland, pastoral, defensible, and was not securely identified until 1971.

A state that names both is claiming a lowland and a highland at once, and Potts's argument is that this is not a detail. Elam is not a Mesopotamian kingdom that happens to be in Iran. It is a persistent arrangement between a plain and a mountain range that kept reconstituting itself over two millennia in configurations that a Mesopotamian scribe could name and not understand.

Two Elams

The Middle Elamite period is conventionally dated from about 1500 BC, and its first century is names on bricks. The state proper begins around 1400 with the Igehalkid dynasty, where inscriptions, a sequence of kings and something describable as a state all start together, and it ends around 1110 when a Babylonian king wrecked it.

Then there is a gap of roughly three centuries with almost nothing in it, and on the far side of the gap there is another Elamite kingdom, fighting Assyria.

That pattern is everywhere in this region. There are two Babylons, a thousand years apart; two Assyrias; two Elams. In each case what returns after the interruption is the same ground, the same gods and the same tradition, under a different family, and in no case did anybody claim to be succeeding the earlier one. They were resuming a place, which is a different thing.

Three pairs is a pattern worth naming outright rather than treating each occurrence as a one-off: Neo-Elamite Elam, centuries later, resumes from this same kingdom in exactly that sense.

Three pairs is no longer an oddity. It is the organising fact about this region: a small number of places kept producing states, and the states are separated by dark ages rather than by successions.

Chogha Zanbil

Drafted from Potts, Cambridge World Archaeology (2016)expansion

Around 1250 BC Untash-Napirisha built a city from nothing on empty ground forty kilometres south-east of Susa, and called it Al-Untash-Napirisha, the town of Untash-Napirisha. Three concentric enclosure walls, the outermost about four kilometres round. Temples inside them to gods gathered from across the kingdom, highland and lowland both. Palaces, with a vaulted underground tomb complex. Water brought in by a canal from the Karkheh, fifty kilometres away.

At the centre, a ziggurat. It survives to about twenty-five metres, which makes it the best-preserved ziggurat in the world and the largest one still standing — better preserved than anything left at Babylon, Ur or Ashur, because after the city was abandoned nobody came back to quarry it.

The city was never finished. Thousands of unused bricks were found stacked where they had been left. After Untash-Napirisha's death the court seems to have returned to Susa, and the site was occupied thinly and then not at all.

Was it a capital?

Calling it one is a claim, and the claim is disputed.

For: the king built a royal city, moved his cult establishment into it, and brought the gods of the highland and the lowland together inside one wall. Every part of that is a statement about what the kingdom was: a state that had been an arrangement between two regions asserting itself as one thing, in brick, at enormous cost.

Against: no source calls it a capital, the administrative centre appears to have stayed at Susa, and there is a reading on which this was a sacred complex and a royal burial place rather than a seat of government at all. That reading may be right. What is not in dispute is that it was built, and what it cost.

What is not known

Almost nothing is known about how this state worked, and it is worth putting that directly beside the ziggurat. A state that could conceive, resource and very nearly complete a walled city with a twenty-five-metre monument at its centre must have had a way of raising labour, a way of feeding it, a fiscal apparatus and a rule about who inherited the throne. Not one of those can be described.

Mitanni is in the same condition and the reason there is that nobody has found its capital. Here the capital has been excavated since 1897 and the second city is standing. What is missing is not the buildings. It is the paperwork. Elamite royal texts are dedications, building inscriptions and curses on anyone who defaces them; they say what the king built and which god told him to and what will happen to you if you interfere. There is no Elamite equivalent of the Ur III delivery receipts, the Middle Assyrian provincial archives or the Babylonian temple accounts, and without one the institution fields are guesses.

A guess would be worse than the silence, because a guess repeated becomes a fact. So the honest description of Middle Elamite government is that there isn't one.

The stele goes east

Drafted from Potts, Cambridge World Archaeology (2016)peak

In about 1158 Shutruk-Nahhunte invaded Babylonia. His son Kutir-Nahhunte finished the job three years later, ending the Kassite dynasty that had ruled Babylon for something over four centuries. What came home to Susa is why this kingdom matters to everybody else's history.

The statue of Marduk, taken from Esagila. The victory stele of Naram-Sin of Akkad — the one showing the king climbing a mountain over his enemies, wearing the horned crown of a god — carried off from wherever it had stood for a thousand years, and re-inscribed by Shutruk-Nahhunte, in Elamite, down the side, recording that he had taken it. And the diorite stele of Hammurabi's laws.

Two civilisations, in one city

Akkad is a state most of whose physical remains are gone and whose capital has never been located. What survives is the Naram-Sin stele and a handful of other objects — and the stele survives because an Elamite king took it to Susa, where a French expedition dug it out in the 1890s.

The First Dynasty of Babylon is known above all for a law code on a block of diorite, and that block was found at Susa too, for the same reason.

Both of Mesopotamia's most reproduced monuments are in the Louvre because an Elamite king put them on a boat.

The strange shape of that

Measured by influence, Middle Elam did nothing. It adapted its writing from Mesopotamia rather than exporting a script; it carried no religion outward; nobody afterwards claimed to continue it.

What it did instead was the opposite of transmission. It removed. It gathered the surviving monumental evidence of two other civilisations into one city, where it sat undisturbed until archaeologists arrived three thousand years later.

That is not influence in any ordinary sense and should not be dressed up as one. It is still true that a kingdom which spread nothing is a substantial part of the reason two much more famous kingdoms have anything left to look at.

Why it stopped

Nothing about the Shutrukid conquest was durable. Elam held parts of Babylonia for a few decades, and around 1110 Nebuchadnezzar I of Babylon — of the Second Dynasty of Isin, and not the far more famous Nebuchadnezzar of five centuries later — came the other way, beat the Elamites and took Marduk back. The recovery was a founding event for Babylonian religious literature; it is plausibly the occasion for which Marduk's promotion to head of the pantheon was composed.

For Elam it was the ending. The kingdom stops appearing in anybody's records, and the country goes quiet for three centuries.

The month of Tammuz

Drafted from King, Babylonian Boundary-Stones and Memorial-Tablets in the British Museum (1912)contraction

The Babylonian counter-attack that ended Elam's century of dominance is recorded, in the fullest surviving account, on a shaped block of limestone about two feet high — because a chariot officer wanted his villages exempted from tax, and the charter granting it had to explain what he had done to deserve that.

What the document is

Kudurrus are property deeds. This one, found near Sippar in 1882, is a charter issued by Nebuchadnezzar I to Ritti-Marduk, head of the House of Bit-Karziabku, and its business end is entirely administrative: his towns are freed from the jurisdiction of the neighbouring city of Namar, from all taxation and dues and confiscation by royal officers, from the corvée for public works, from arrest by imperial soldiers quartered there, and from having to billet those soldiers, whose maintenance is charged to Namar instead.

Thirteen high officials are then named as witnesses, and the gods whose emblems are carved above the text are invoked against anyone who alters it.

The historical narrative exists only because a grant has to be justified. To explain the exemptions, the charter first has to say what Ritti-Marduk did.

The march

Nebuchadnezzar is introduced as the despoiler of the Kassites, the appointer of kings, the prince beloved of Marduk, and the campaign is given a motive in four words: he raised his weapons to avenge Akkad — retaliation for Elamite raids into northern Babylonia, of the kind that had been carrying Mesopotamia's monuments to Susa for a century.

The army went from Der and marched thirty double-hours.

In the month of Tammuz he undertook the campaign.

Tammuz is high summer in Iraq, and the text does not pretend otherwise. What follows is one of the very few passages in ancient Near Eastern royal writing that describes a march as an ordeal rather than a procession:

The axe burned like fire, and the roads scorched like flame. There was no water in the wells, and the drinking supply was cut off. The splendour of the great horses failed, and the legs of the strong man turned aside.

The legs of the strong man turned aside. Men were falling out. The horses were finished. And this is in a document composed to praise the king.

The king is then praised anyway, in the same breath — he advances with the gods supporting him, he has no rival, he does not fear the difficult country — which is how these texts work: the hardship is admitted because it makes the perseverance larger.

Ritti-Marduk's first service was on that march. His station was at the king's right hand, and what the charter credits him with is keeping the chariots moving.

The Eulaeus

The battle was fought on the bank of the Eulaeus, the river of Susa.

The kings took their stand round about, and offered battle. In their midst fire was kindled, by their dust was the face of the sun darkened; the hurricane sweeps along, the storm rages. In the storm of their battle the warrior in the chariot perceives not the companion at his side.

Ritti-Marduk led the attack on the Elamite confederation, and for that — and for the march — he got his charter.

What it cost Elam

The Elamite kingdom that had taken Babylon, ended the Kassite dynasty and carried off Marduk himself was beaten in its own country, at its own river, by an army that had nearly destroyed itself getting there.

Nothing in the Elamite record answers this. After it there is a silence of about three centuries in Elam's own inscriptions, and the kingdom that emerges at the far end is a different sort of state.

There is a symmetry worth naming. Elam's greatest achievement is known from the objects it stole, read at Susa where French excavators dug them out. Elam's defeat is known from a Babylonian tax exemption. In both cases the kingdom is visible only in somebody else's paperwork — and in this one, the paperwork survives because a man wanted his villages left alone.

1110

Drafted from Potts, Cambridge World Archaeology (2016)end

There is no account of how this kingdom ended. There is a Babylonian king's campaign, a recovered statue, and then almost nothing Elamite for something like three hundred years — no royal inscriptions that can be securely dated into the gap, no sequence of kings, no dated levels at Susa that fill it convincingly.

It is a different kind of ending from the others in this region, and the difference is worth stating. The Middle Assyrian kingdom shrank onto its core and stopped writing. Hatti ends in a burned capital that nobody claims to have burned. Here there is a named enemy, a dated campaign and a defeat — and then the same silence anyway.

The three-century problem

What was happening in Elam between about 1100 and about 800 is one of the larger blanks in Near Eastern history, and it is a blank of the awkward kind — not a region nobody has excavated, but a well-dug region whose material in this period is hard to date and impossible to attach to a political narrative.

The next Elamite kingdom is visible from about 770, with a king list that can be secured and a war against Assyria. What connects it to this one is the language, the gods, the royal titulature and the ground. What connects them politically is nothing anybody can trace.

The third Elam

There is an older one still, and it is worth naming because it is the one that took Ur.

When the Third Dynasty of Ur fell in 2004 BC, the coalition that took the city and carried its last king off to Anshan was Elamite — but it belongs to neither of the kingdoms described here. It is the Elam of Awan and Shimashki and then of the sukkalmah, six hundred years with a federal structure of its own and a succession in which a brother followed a brother and then a sister's son followed him, which is one of the genuinely unusual constitutional arrangements of the ancient world.

So there are at least three Elams, separated by long silences, sharing a language, a pantheon and a pair of cities. That is what a tradition looks like when it produces states, dissolves, and produces them again over two and a half thousand years — and it is the same shape as the two Babylons and the two Assyrias next door.

No foe other than myself

Drafted from Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, Volume II (1927)afterlife

Five centuries after the Elamite kings emptied Babylonia into Susa, an Assyrian king came and emptied Susa.

Ashurbanipal took the city in 646 BC and wrote an account of what he did there. It is unusually specific, because the point of the inscription is the completeness of the thing.

The treasuries

He entered the palaces, he says, and dwelt there amidst rejoicing, and opened the treasure-houses in which the silver and gold and property of the kings of Elam had been heaped up — into which no foe other than myself had ever brought his hand.

Then the list of what came out, and the list is the point. Along with Elam's own wealth he recovered the silver and gold of Sumer and Akkad and the whole of Babylonia, which the former kings of Elam had carried off in some seven raids and brought to Elam.

That is the plunder of Mesopotamia, going home. The steles and the statues and the temple treasure that Shutruk-Nahhunte and his son had shipped east in the twelfth century were still sitting in Susa when the Assyrians arrived, and Ashurbanipal took what he found back.

The obliteration

Then the part that is not about property.

He destroyed the ziggurat of enamelled brick and broke down its bronze pinnacles. He carried off Inshushinak, the oracle god who dwells in seclusion, the work of whose divinity no one has ever seen, and then twelve more gods and goddesses by name, with their priests and their furniture. Thirty-two royal statues in gold, silver, bronze and marble went to Assyria, along with the guardian colossi from the temple gates.

His soldiers entered the sacred groves that no stranger had ever penetrated, saw what was in them, and set them on fire. The tombs of the earlier and later kings of Elam were opened, devastated and exposed to the sun; the bones were carried off to Assyria, so that their shades might be denied rest and cut off from food offerings and libations of water.

Over twenty-five days' journey of Elamite country he scattered salt and thorn. The noise of people and the tread of cattle he banished from the fields, and left wild asses and gazelles to lie down there as if at home.

What was still in the ground

The claim is total and the claim is not quite true, which is the last thing worth saying about it.

The victory stele of Naram-Sin of Akkad and the diorite stele of Hammurabi's laws had been in Susa for five hundred years when Ashurbanipal arrived, and they were still in Susa two and a half thousand years later, when a French expedition dug them out in the 1890s and 1901.

An Assyrian king who told the world he had taken everything back, and a modern excavation that found the two most famous objects in Mesopotamian history exactly where the Elamites had left them. Somebody's account is incomplete, and the plunder outlasted both the people who took it and the people who came to take it home.