Ancient Assyria: A Very Short Introduction by Karen Radner

Author:Karen Radner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198715900
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2015-01-13T05:00:00+00:00

Pharaoh Thutmose III (15th century bc; 18th Dynasty) greatly expanded Egyptian power by leading military campaigns deep into Syria and even reached the Euphrates, to him ‘that inverted water which goes downstream in going upstream’. He established a border with Mittani and on three occasions accepted gifts from the rulers under its authority, including the unnamed leader of Aššur. This was most likely Aššur-nadin-ahhe I who, if we can believe one of his successors, had at one point received twenty talents of gold from Egypt. The actual sum may have substantially increased in Assyrian memory in the intervening century or else Aššur-uballit I, who quoted this figure, may have deliberately inflated the amount in order to shame his correspondent Pharaoh Akhenaten into sending a similarly generous gift; after all, his former overlord, the king of Mittani (Hanigalbat to the Assyrians), also had received twenty talents. But however that may be, Egypt’s gold certainly captured the Assyrian ruler’s imagination and emerges from the sources as a key incentive for diplomatic contact with the far-away kingdom on the Nile.

Aššur-uballit I was the first Assyrian ruler to adopt the titles of a king and, during his rule of over three decades, he proved extremely successful in establishing his brand-new kingdom as a powerful state. Towards the end of his reign, he even marched on Babylon in order to install a king acceptable to him (see Chapter 5). The two letters found among the state correspondence of the pharaohs of the later 18th Dynasty of Egypt, dubbed the ‘Amarna Letters’ after their findspot, date from earlier in his reign. He appears to have not yet fully undergone the metamorphosis from local ruler to international statesman. The first of his letters was composed in Assyrian and is quite short, especially if one considers that it had to be transported over a vast distance to reach its recipient. From Aššur, the envoy carrying the letter had to cross all of Syria, and then travel down the Mediterranean Coast. Skirting the Sinai Peninsula along the coastal route, he would then have reached the Delta of the Nile and continued upstream to the capital of Akhetaten, modern Amarna. In total, this is a distance of 1,450 kilometres, as the crow flies, but overland of at least 1,800 kilometres.

Aššur-uballit’s envoy brought with him a greeting gift, which would have been officially presented once he secured an audience with the pharaoh. In his first diplomatic overture, the Assyrian king sent a chariot and two horses as well as a lump of lapis lazuli, a highly prized precious stone of dark blue colour from faraway Afghanistan. Apart from initiating contact, the first letter of Aššur-uballit was mostly concerned with making sure that his envoy would return promptly:

Do not delay the envoy whom I sent to you for a visit. He should visit and then leave for here. He should see what you are like and what your country is like, and then leave for here.

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