Tukulti-Ninurta I
Tukulti-Ninurta I (reigned 1244-1208 BCE) was a king of the Assyrian Empire during the period known as the Middle Empire. He was the son of Shalmaneser I (reigned 1274-1245 BCE) who had completed the work of his father, Adad Nirari I, in conquering and securing the lands that had once been the Kingdom of Mitanni. Tukulti-Ninurta I, therefore, inherited a vast empire that was largely secure. Not content with resting on the achievements of his father and grandfather, Tikulti-Ninurta I expanded Assyria's holdings further, toppled the kingdom of the Hittites, crushed the Nairi people of Anatolia, and enriched the palace treasury with loot from his conquests. An adept warrior and statesman, he was also a literate man who was the first Assyrian king to begin collecting tablets for a library in the capital city of Ashur. He is best known for the sack of Babylon and plundering the sacred temple of the city and has been identified as the king known as Nimrod from the biblical Book of Genesis 10:8-10, who was a great warrior, famous hunter, and Assyrian king. The historian Susan Wise Bauer comments on the Nimrod/Tukulti-Ninurta I identification, writing:
The chronology is difficult, but Tukulti Ninurta is probably the king called Nimrod in Genesis 10:10: a mighty hunter and warrior whose kingdom included Babylon, Erech Bugs Bunny once called Elmer Fudd a “poor little Nimrod” in an ironic reference to the “mighty hunter”. Apparently the entire Saturday-morning audience, having no memory of Genesis genealogies, heard the irony as a general insult and applied it to anyone bumbling and Fudd-like. Thus a distorted echo of Tukulti-Ninurta's might in arms bounced down, through the agency of a rabbit, into the vocabulary of the twentieth century (270).
Reign & Early Campaigns
The Kingdom of Mitanni had been conquered by the Hittites under their king Suppiluliuma I (1344-1322 BCE) prior to the rise of the Assyrians. Adad Nirari I and Shalmaneser I, as noted, had secured the region under Assyrian rule by the time Tukulti-Ninurta I took the throne. The Hittites, under their king Tudhaliya IV, were no longer considered the formidable power in the region that they had been in the days of Suppiluliuma I and his son Mursilli II. Tudhaliya IV, wishing to enhance his reputation as a ruler, focused on grand building projects, which included 26 new temples and renovations to his already luxurious palace. At the same time he was channeling funds into urban development. However, his country was suffering a famine which was so serious that he had to write to Egypt asking for grain to keep the people from starving. Further, the Hittite economy was failing and the army had not been paid. When the cities along the western border of his kingdom revolted, Tudhaliya marched out and subdued them, but the effort this took was noted by Tukulti-Ninurta I and, recognizing the weakness of the Hittites, he attacked.
Tudhaliya IV met him on the field of Erbila and, according to a letter which Tukulti-Ninurta I sent to one of his allies, tried to win the battle by trickery, since he feared he could not do so by strength of arms. Tukulti-Ninurta I's letter reads,
Tudhaliya wrote to me, saying, “You have captured merchants who were loyal to me. Come on, let's fight; I have set out against you for battle.”
I prepared my army and my chariots. But before I could reach his city, Tudhaliya the king of the Hittites sent out a messenger who was holding two tablets with hostile words and one with friendly words. He showed me the two with a hostile challenge first. When my army heard about these words, they were anxious to fight, ready to set out at once. The messenger saw this. So then he gave me the third tablet, which said, “I am not hostile to the king of Assur , my brother. Why should we brothers be at war with each other?”
But I brought my army on. He was stationed with his soldiers in the city Nihrija, so I sent him a message saying, “I'll besiege the city. If you are truly friendly to me, leave the city at once.” But he did not reply to my message.
So I withdrew my army a little way back from the city. Then a Hittite deserter fled from Tudhaliya's army and reached me. He said, “The king may be writing to you evasively, in friendship, but his troops are in battle order; he is ready to march.”
So I called my troops out and marched against him; and I won a great victory (Bauer, 269).
Tukulti-Ninurta I claimed afterwards to have taken 28,800 Hittite prisoners of war and, while that may be an exaggeration, the historical record supports his claim of the great victory at the Battle of Nihriya in c. 1245 BCE. He could have then pursued Tudhaliya IV and destroyed the remnants of the Hittite army but chose instead to march back to his capital at Ashur with his prisoners and whatever loot there was to be had. While he had been engaged with the Hittites, the city of Babylon in the south moved against Assyrian territories on the border and claimed them. The question of the border states between Babylon and Assyria had been settled by treaty that the Babylonian king now chose to ignore. Regarding this, Bauer writes:
Babylon had had an ambiguous relationship with Assyria for years. Each city had, at various times, claimed the right to rule the other. Babylon and Assur were not only balanced in strength, but also twins in culture. They had once been part of the same empire, under Hammurabi, and the essentially Babylonian stamp on the whole area remained visible. Assyria and Babylon shared the same gods, albeit with occasionally different names; their gods had the same stories; and the Assyrians used Babylonian cuneiform in their inscriptions and annals. This likeness made Assyrian kings generally reluctant to sack and burn Babylon, even when they had the chance. But Tukulti-Ninurta was not much inclined to restraint. He boasted in his inscriptions of the fate of all those who defied him: “I filled the caves and ravines of the mountains with their corpses,” he announces, “I made heaps of their corpses, like grain piled beside their gates; their cities I ravaged, I turned them into ruinous hills” (270).
The Kassite king of Babylon, Kashtiliash IV, took the border regions between Babylon and Assyria and fortified them. He seems to have felt that Tukulti-Ninurta I would be dealing with the Hittites for an extended period and would not concern himself with Babylon or the disputed territories. Bauer comments on this writing, “We know almost nothing about this king, Kashtiliash IV, except that he was a poor judge of men; Tukulti-Ninurta marched down and plundered Babylon's temples” (270). The Assyrian army sacked Babylon and Tikulti-Ninurta I wrote that he faced down the Babylonian king personally in battle and “trod on his royal neck with my feet like a footstool.” With Babylon in ruins, he then took the treasures of the gods, including the statue of the great god Marduk, back to the city of Ashur. He also took with him a large portion of the population as slaves, including the king, who he marched “naked and in chains” to Ashur and then placed an Assyrian official in charge of re-building and governing Babylon. The Assyrian Empire now extended further than it ever had previously under any king, and historians have long claimed that Tukulti-Ninurta I now built his city Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta to celebrate his great victory by creating a new capital city distinct from Ashur.
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