Assyria and Babylon- Competitors
Following Hammurabi’s reign, Southern Mesopotamia came to be known as Babylonia, and Babylon the city to be known as the political, cultural and religious center.
Soon, Babylonia would compete for power, against the Assyrians. From 885 to 860 BC, Assyrian king, Ashurnasirpal, was intensely focused on military, building it to be stronger. The emphasis of the administration was on military matters. The Campaign set a standard for warriors kings. Ruthless, determined empire builders. Reliefs carved into the palaces of these kings showed siege engines ripping apart the walls of enemy cities and warships with battering rams, chariots, cavalry, infantry digging tunnels underneath besieged cities. The empires were growing, becoming more ruthless. His policy on war prisoners and people fighting their taxation. He would flay people, behead them, showing this all to the people to make an example, using one city, he would terrify others into obeying them. The Assyrian kings had a lust to conquer Babylon. They believed it was them and Babylonia. If they didn’t have Babylon, they didn’t control the entire world in their mind’s. But Babylonia refused to buy into Assyria as an overlord, and broke away. They would put their own Babylonian King onto the throne. The Assyrians always held the civilization in high regard, despite being all powerful. They had a sense of cultural inferiority to the Babylonians. They also felt a strong bond with the Babylonians. Same gods, same languages, it was a sister culture, an older one whom they had respect for. In 704 BC, the reign of Sennacherib. His army marched several times to put down revolts in Babylonia. He set his own loved eldest son on the Babylonians throne. He thought it was a great favor to bless them with this, but in 688 BC his son, was killed by an invading army. Sennacherib blamed the Babylonians for failing to protect him. At that point he himself decided to besiege Babylonia, something previously unthinkable. He destroyed the city, brazing temples, toppling statues of gods, complete desecration and sacrilege, cursing them, “cursing it”, and saying nobody could rebuild it for seventy years. Assyrians then disliked him, his own family, killed by his own son, because he believed it would bring the Gods’ wrath. His son Esarhaddon, put on the throne, he immediately wanted to rebuild Babylon. But he would not outlive the seventy year curse recorded on a clay tablet. He showed the tablets to a priest, and made a startling discovery, they had been reading the tablet upside down, and it was only 11 years. He immediately ordered his spoils of conquests’ finances be used to rebuild all of Babylon. When he died, he left his eldest son Ashurbanipal a Kingdom stretching from Egypt to Persia. He was the most cultured ruler, and claimed a unique skill, that he could read and write. He wanted a collection of all literary works in his palace. King Ashurbanipal began sending agents to search Cuneiform tablets in Babylonian Temples, where the tablets were scribed and catalogued, over 2200 of them before they were housed in the world’s first library. The King Ashurbanipal especially valued 300 texts that he believed predicted the future. Ashurbanipal was a scholar, alongside being a military leader. The Assyrian empire came to control the entire near east, the greatest land area ever in Assyrian rule. To the Assyrians, that was everything. But after his death in 627 BC. New power brokers would deliver crushing blows. Following his death, people were forming a pincer attack on the Assyrian heartland. As soon as a king died, people tried to break away, assuming there would be chaos following the king's death. In 627 BC, a local leader named Nabopolassar began vying for the throne of the Assyrian Emperor. Claiming to be a man of the people he was determined to win independence of South Mesopotamia. Within 10 years he had solidified control over Babylonia, and began to threaten the Assyrian heartland. He began to push North into Assyria, by 615 he was operating with armies within Syria itself, joined there by people pushing in from Assyria's North. In 614 BC, the Medes sacked the city of Nimrud and brought down Assur. Babylonians and Medes then marched against Nineveh. It fell after 3 months, finishing the Syrian empire. It fell to it's own drive towards conquering. As soon as the power of Assyria waned, it toppled. Soon he died, succeeded by Nebuchadnezzar the Second. He became the equal of all the great conquerors from Sargon and onward, reigning for more than 40 years in the course of which he established Babylonian control in the territories in most of the Assyrian empire, including the Kingdom of Judah. The King of Judah, Jehoiakim, moved and attacked Jerusalem. In a 3 month battle, Nebuchadnezzar won, and ordered what is remembered as the Exile. Deportation to Babylon of thousands of Jewish people. His way of stabilizing the territory was taking the elite whom had not proved reliable, and replacing them with people whom had no ties there. He'd conquered an empire like Assyria. Like the other kings, he had devoted his wealth to make it the largest metropolis in the ancient world. During the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar, the arts, sciences and culture of Babylon positively flourished under him. |