6.2 The near east: 1500 to 1000 b.c.  (Page 2/3)

Iraq and syria

Babylonia (mesopotamia)

Babylonia, on the lower two-thirds of the Tigris and Euphrates, remained throughout these five hundred years chiefly under Kassite rule and there was little progress in civilization except during the reign of the Kassite king, Kurigalzu II, who was a great builder. He constructed innumerable monuments, not only in Ur, but in other southern cities. No one knows the reason for this sudden spurt of industry, but the growing signs of strength in neighboring Assyria and Mitanni and in the area of the Hittites may have been a factor. Unfortunately none of the Kassite monuments were particularly artistic. As mentioned in the last chapter, these people were probably a mixed body of warriors with at least two linguistic elements, an original Caucasian and an Indo-European. The Kassites were overthrown by raiding Elamites in 1,157 B.C. and the previously great city of Ur then sank into obscurity for at least three or four centuries. (Ref. 238 )

Assyria

To the north and west of Babylonia, proper, the Assyrians were accumulating in an increasing number of city-states, at first just in the area immediately around Nineveh, Memrud, Arbil and Asher. In 1,244 B.C., however, Tukulti-Ninurta took over a great deal of old Babylon and apparently contested with the Kassites for most of Mesopotamia, so that the latter were squeezed between these invaders and the raiding Elamites from the east. By 1,115 B.C. the Assyrian Tiglath-Pileser I had lost some territory on the lower Tigris but had gained a precarious corridor to the Mediterranean north of Damascus, between Arwad and Sidon.

NOTE: Insert Illustration - Map Reference 97

Up to 1,380 B.C. various Mitannian lords had been dominant in that area, but after Shalmaneser I united the Assyrian states under one central rule, the Mitannians were kept in a small kingdom just to the west of Assyria. The Assyrians were a mixture of warrior Semites from the south, non-Semitic tribes of Hittite and/or Mittanian origin from the west and Kurds from the Caucasus. They used a common language taken from Sumer, but modified it to practical similarity with Babylonian. Multiple languages persisted, however, making work difficult for the scribes, so that those of Ugarit

Prior to 1,250 B.C. there had been a great struggle for control of the Assyrian lands, which was the same area that has been known with variations in its borders, throughout history chiefly as Syria, including the cities of Byblos and Damascus. The struggle for control by Egypt, the Hittites, the Ugarits, Babylonians and Mitannis, all using essentially the Babylonian language and chariotry, occurred because Syria was the junction for all trade routes between the East, Asia Minor, the Aegean and Egypt. From 1,500 to 1,400