Neo-Elamite Kingdom

The other side of the relief

Drafted from Potts, Cambridge World Archaeology (2016)formation

Almost everything known about the Neo-Elamite kingdom is known because an Assyrian king had it carved on a wall.

That is a common enough condition for a state of this period — Mitanni is in it, so are the Medes — and what makes it worth stating here is the completeness. The Neo-Elamite kingdom fought Assyria on and off for roughly a century, is named constantly in Assyrian royal inscriptions and in the Babylonian Chronicles, is the subject of some of the most elaborate narrative relief sculpture surviving from the ancient world, and has left, from its own side, building inscriptions and a modest number of administrative tablets from Susa that nobody has been able to build a state out of.

So almost nothing can be said about how the kingdom was governed — which is also true of Middle Elam three centuries earlier, for the opposite reason. That kingdom is under-described because Elamite royal texts do not describe administration. This one is over-described, by an enemy, in a genre that records who was defeated and never how the loser paid his troops.

What it was for

Strip the Assyrian framing and a shape emerges anyway, and it is a simple one. Babylon could not beat Assyria alone. Elam sat immediately east of Babylonia, behind the Zagros, out of easy Assyrian reach, with an army and a grievance, and for a hundred years it was the thing that made Babylonian resistance viable.

In 720 Humban-nikash I came west with Merodach-baladan of Babylon and met Sargon II at Der. Sargon's inscriptions claim the victory; the Babylonian Chronicle gives it to the Elamites; and the fact that decides between them is that Merodach-baladan then held Babylon for eleven years, which he could not have done if Sargon had won. Both sides' inscriptions survive and they cannot both be right.

In 691 an Elamite and Babylonian coalition met Sennacherib at Halule and both sides claimed it. Two years later Sennacherib sacked Babylon, demolished its temples and diverted a canal over the site — the act that poisoned Assyria's relations with Babylonia for good and, eventually, helped destroy it. He did it because Babylon kept revolting, and Babylon kept revolting because there was somewhere for it to get help.

That is the kingdom's structural role in the period, and it is invisible in any account of what Elam itself achieved. It has no measurable extent, almost no describable institutions, and it is load-bearing in the century that decided who would rule Mesopotamia.

Twelve years in Babylon

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

Elam's second life as a power did not begin with a conquest of its own. It began when an Elamite king answered a Chaldean's call for help, and the two of them held Babylon for twelve years against Assyria.

The account of it is Sargon II's, which is the only reason we have one.

The alliance

Merodach-baladan of Bit-Yakin, whose people lived on the Persian Gulf shore, had withheld his tribute — violated the oath and curse invoked in the name of the great gods, in Sargon's phrasing.

Then: Humbanigash, the Elamite, came to his aid.

Six words, and they are the whole hinge of the period. An Elamite king intervened in Babylonia on the Chaldean side, and the tribes of the marshes — Ru'a, Hindaru, Yatburu, Puqudu, the desert Sutu — came over with them. Merodach-baladan descended on Sumer and Akkad and took Babylon.

What Sargon then has to admit, in his own inscription, is the duration:

For twelve years, against the will of the gods, he held sway over Babylon, the city of the lord of the gods, and ruled it.

Twelve years is not a raid. It is a reign. The greatest city in Mesopotamia was governed for over a decade by a Chaldean chief with Elamite backing, while the Assyrian empire at its height could not dislodge him — and the Assyrian record has to explain that away theologically, as something Marduk permitted before choosing Sargon to reverse it.

The battle nobody will describe

The engagement that made it possible was fought at Der in 720, and the way Sargon handles it is instructive.

He does not narrate it. What he does instead is put it in his titulary and repeat it: who brought about the defeat of Humbanigash the Elamite — the same phrase, in the same list, alongside the smashing of Karalla and Shurda, the destruction of Kishesim and Harhar, the yoke laid on Ellipi, the devastation of Urartu, the spoil of Musasir.

A king who names a victory five times in his formulaic epithets and never once tells you what happened in it is a king making a claim rather than reporting an event. Every other item in that list has a campaign narrative attached to it somewhere in his inscriptions. This one does not.

What is certain from Sargon's own text is the outcome, whatever the battle was: after Der, Elam and Chaldea held Babylon and Assyria did not.

What Elam had become

The kingdom in these decades is not the Elam of Chogha Zanbil, building its own monuments and carting other people's home.

It is something more modern and less grand: a state on the flank of a superpower, whose weight came from being able to decide which way Babylonia went. Elam did not need to take Babylon. It needed only to make Babylon expensive for Assyria — by lending troops to whoever in the marshes was currently in revolt, and by being close enough that Assyrian armies which went in after them had a second frontier to worry about.

That is a policy, and Elam ran it for a century. It also explains why the Assyrians eventually decided that the Elamite kingdom could not be left standing at all.

Halule

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

In 691 BC the king of Elam and the king of Babylon brought a coalition army to the bank of the Tigris and blocked Sennacherib's road. Sennacherib's account of the day is one of the longest battle narratives in Assyrian writing, and it is worth reading for what it concedes rather than what it claims.

The host

He lists who came, and the list is the achievement.

Umman-menanu of Elam had called to his side an enormous host of allies: the cities of Bit-Salatutu-akki and Lahiru, and the tribes of Puqudu, Gambulu, Halatu, Ru'a, Ubulu, Malahu, Rapiqu, Hindaru, Damunu. They took the road into Akkad, came up to Babylon, exchanged courtesies with Shuzubu the Chaldean king there, and halted.

Then, in Sennacherib's own image:

Like the onset of the locust swarms of the springtime they kept steadily coming on against me to offer battle. With the dust of their feet covering the wide heavens, like a mighty storm with its masses of dense clouds, they drew up in battle array before me by the city of Halule, on the bank of the Tigris. They blocked my passage and offered battle.

An Elamite king had assembled Babylon, Chaldea and every marsh tribe of southern Iraq into one army, marched it north, and chosen the ground. Nothing else in the Neo-Elamite record comes close to that.

What the victory looks like

Sennacherib describes his own preparation at length — the prayer, the coat of mail, the helmet, the great battle chariot mounted in the anger of his heart, the bow Ashur gave him, the voice raised rumbling like a storm, the roaring like Adad. Assyrian royal writing does not usually need this much throat-clearing.

Then the result, in the later summary version:

I went into their midst and accomplished the defeat of their armies... The chieftains of the king of Elam, together with Nabu-shum-ishkun, son of Merodach-baladan, king of Babylonia, my hands took alive in that battle. As for the king of Elam and the king of Babylonia, the dread of my terrible onslaught overcame them, they forsook their chariots, and they fled from their lands to save their lives. And they did not come back.

He took the officers and the Chaldean prince. Both kings escaped.

And then the sentence that gives the day away: Thereupon Sennacherib became violently angry. A victorious king, writing in the third person about himself, records that after the triumph he lost his temper and ordered the army turned toward Elam.

What he did instead

He did not conquer Elam. The Elamites, he says, left their land and took to the inaccessible mountains like eagles, and to the day of their death did not come out or make war.

So he went for Babylon, and what he did there in 689 is the most complete act of destruction in the Assyrian record: the city invested and mined, the squares filled with corpses, the king carried off alive with his household, the gods smashed by Assyrian hands, the temples and ziggurats tipped into the Arahtu canal, canals cut through the site and the ground flooded — I made its destruction more complete than that by a flood... I completely blotted it out with floods of water and made it like a meadow.

Babylon was destroyed because Elam could not be. The coalition Elam built at Halule was beaten in the field and not broken, and the empire took its rage out on the partner it could reach.

The high-water mark

Halule is the peak of this kingdom by any measure that matters. Elam never held more territory than it did in these decades and never needed to; what it had was the ability to make the strongest state in the world fight for its own southern provinces.

It is also the beginning of the reckoning. An empire that has flooded Babylon to erase it has decided that this problem is to be solved permanently. Forty-five years after Halule, an Assyrian army went into Susa and did to Elam what Sennacherib had done to Babylon.

Til-Tuba

Drafted from Potts, Cambridge World Archaeology (2016)contraction

In 653 BC Ashurbanipal destroyed the Elamite army on the Ulai river near Susa, and the king Te-Umman was killed in the rout. The battle is carved on the walls of the North Palace at Nineveh in continuous narrative relief — one of the earliest sustained attempts anywhere to tell a story in a single unbroken visual field, with the river at the bottom full of bodies and horses, chariots overturning, and the sequence of Te-Umman's death told in stages across the panel: the chariot wrecked, the king wounded, the king seized, the king beheaded.

The head then travels. It is shown being carried, and it appears again in the most reproduced Assyrian image of all: the garden scene, in which Ashurbanipal reclines on a couch under a vine with his queen sitting opposite, food and musicians around them, and Te-Umman's head hanging from a branch of the tree beside them.

Whose battle it is

Til-Tuba decided something: Elam never put an army in the field against Assyria again, and Susa was sacked within seven years.

But the documentation is worth naming, because it is about as one-sided as evidence gets. The reason anyone can describe the battle in detail is that the winner commissioned a picture of it for the wall of his own dining room. There is no Elamite account of the battle, no Elamite figure for the army, no Elamite name for the site. Everything that can be said about the worst defeat in Elamite history is what the man who inflicted it wanted his guests to look at over dinner.

Interference from the inside

Te-Umman was not fighting only Assyria. He had taken the throne from a line whose princes had fled to Nineveh, and Ashurbanipal was sheltering them; the campaign of 653 was launched, in the Assyrian telling, to restore them. After Til-Tuba the Assyrians installed one of these exiles as king in Susa and another in a second Elamite centre, splitting the country in two.

The Neo-Elamite succession in this period is a sequence of rival claimants, depositions and restorations, with Assyria backing one party and Babylon sometimes another, and the sources for it are the courts doing the backing. Whether there was a rule underneath all that cannot be established: what survives is a list of outcomes recorded by foreigners with an interest in each one.

Mesopotamia offers every possible combination of that. Babylon under the Neo-Babylonian kings had a documented rule and three coups in five transitions. Ur III and Old Babylon had flawless successions for generations and never wrote a rule down. Middle Assyria had a clear rule and a king murdered by his son. Here there is neither the rule nor a reliable account of the outcomes — only what the neighbours chose to record about whom they had installed.

646

Drafted from Potts, Cambridge World Archaeology (2016)end

Ashurbanipal took Susa in 646 and left an account of what he did to it. The ziggurat was pulled down and its horns of shining bronze stripped. The gods and goddesses of Elam, with their ornaments and their goods and their priests, were carried off to Assyria. The royal tombs of Elam's kings, ancient and recent, were opened and the bones taken to Assyria, so that their spirits would be denied offerings and libations. The groves were cut down. Salt and thorny plants were strewn on the ground. For a distance of a month and twenty-five days' journey the fields were laid waste, and the noise of people, the tread of cattle and sheep and the shouts of harvest song were banished.

Humban-haltash III, the last Elamite king anybody can name, was hunted down in the mountains, handed over, and taken to Nineveh, where he is shown pulling Ashurbanipal's ceremonial chariot.

How much of it to believe

Assyrian royal inscriptions are not neutral about their own thoroughness, and the passage above is a literary set piece as much as a report — the banishing of the sound of cattle and the harvest song is a formula. Excavation at Susa does not show a site reduced to nothing; occupation continues, and Elamite kings are attested afterwards.

What is not in doubt is the political result. Elam stopped being a state. The country broke into small principalities whose sequence nobody has been able to reconstruct. There are local rulers afterwards and no way to date them, which is a different thing from a kingdom.

What moved into the space

Within a century the region east of the Zagros was Persian, and the way that happened is worth following.

Cyrus introduces himself, on the cylinder deposited in the wall of Babylon in 539, as king of Anshan, son of Cambyses king of Anshan, grandson of Cyrus king of Anshan, descendant of Teispes king of Anshan. Four generations, and every one of them styled with an Elamite royal title, in a document written in Akkadian for a Mesopotamian audience — and no Persian title anywhere in the sequence.

Anshan is Tal-e Malyan in Fars. It had been one of the two halves of the Elamite royal style, king of Anshan and Susa, for the better part of two thousand years. What the cylinder records is that the family which produced the largest empire the world had yet seen began as kings of an Elamite city, holding an Elamite title, at a moment when Elam had just been destroyed by Assyria and the title was available.

It is as clear a case as exists of a new power dressing itself in the titles of one that had just been destroyed, in front of everybody, because they were available.

What else went west

The claim is the countable part and it is not the largest part.

The Achaemenid empire ran its administration in Elamite. The Persepolis Fortification archive — tens of thousands of tablets recording the movement of grain, wine, livestock and workers across the imperial heartland — is in Elamite, written by scribes in an Elamite tradition, for a Persian king. Elamite is one of the three languages of the Behistun inscription. Susa became one of the Achaemenid capitals.

None of that is a conquest, a religion spread or a script invented, and none of it would show up in any tally of what a state exported. It is still the most durable thing Elam ever did: a kingdom that Assyria set out to erase supplied the next empire with its administrative language, its scribes and one of its capitals.

Nana goes home

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

Ashurbanipal's account of what he did to Elam in 646 is the most detailed description of a deliberate erasure written by the person who ordered it, and it ends on an oddly tender note.

The erasure

He lists it methodically. The treasure-houses opened and counted as spoil. The ziggurat of enamelled brick destroyed and its bronze pinnacles broken off. Inshushinak, the oracle god who dwells in seclusion, the work of whose divinity no one has ever seen, carried off, along with twelve more named gods and goddesses, their priests, their furniture and their vessels. Thirty-two royal statues in gold, silver, bronze and marble. The guardian colossi lifted out of the temple gates.

The sacred groves that no stranger had ever entered were entered by his soldiers, who saw their mysteries and burned them. The tombs of the kings of Elam, earlier and later, were opened and devastated and exposed to the sun, their bones carried to Assyria — so that, he says, their shades would be denied rest and cut off from food offerings and libations of water.

For twenty-five days' journey he scattered salt and thorn across the provinces. The noise of people and the tread of cattle and the glad shouts of harvest he banished from the fields, and left wild asses and gazelles to lie down there as if at home.

The goddess

Then, at the end of the same inscription, the reason for all of it.

The goddess Nana, he writes, had been angry for one thousand six hundred and thirty-five years, and had gone away to dwell in Elam, a place not suitable for her. Now, in these days, she had entrusted to him the return of her divinity.

An Elamite king had taken her statue from Uruk sixteen centuries earlier. The whole campaign is presented, in its closing lines, as a restitution — a goddess brought home from an exile older than any state involved in the fighting.

Ashurbanipal's Assyria would itself be destroyed within forty years.

What was not erased

The claim to have obliterated Elam is total and it was not true.

Within a century the country east of the Zagros was Persian, and the Persians did not replace what the Elamites had built — they used it. Susa became one of the capitals of the largest empire the world had yet seen. The Achaemenid administration ran in Elamite, written by Elamite scribes; the archives of Persepolis are in that language. When Darius wanted his account of his own accession carved on a cliff for everybody to read, Elamite was one of the three languages he had it written in.

The founder of that empire introduced himself, on a clay cylinder buried in the wall of Babylon, as king of Anshan — an Elamite city, and an Elamite title, taken up at the moment when Elam had been destroyed and the title was going spare.

A kingdom whose fields were sown with salt supplied the next empire with its scribes, its bureaucratic language and one of its capitals. The salt was literal; the erasure was not.