Mesopotamian Politics

I. The Argument
The Narrative

Part V
Chapter 17

International Equilibrium

Marco De Pietri – April 2024

17.1 The New Ecumene: The World as a City

At the mid of the second millennium BC, the system of the three great ecumenes (cf. Section 8.2) collapsed along with the irradiation of the scribal culture and urban influence typical of the previous situation.

The new ecumene is a cosmopolis,^{Note 1}, characterized by four new geopolitical constructs (see Map 17), with sometimes profound differences:

to the north-west, the Hittite empire in Anatolia;
to the north-east, the kingdom of Mittani later replaced by Assyria;
to the south-east, the Kassite Babylon (Middle Babylonian kingdom);
to the south-west, the New Kingdom Egypt, in the southern regions of Syria (see Maps 18-20).

A deep integration in reciprocal and international relationships is the main feature of this new world made of macro-regional states reciprocally balanced with an alternation of conclict and diplomacy.

17.2 The End of Syro-Mesopotamia

Given this new international setup, Syro-Mesopotamia as it was perceived in the previous periods (like those of Sargon and Naram-Sin; cf. Section 9) disappeared, beign completely re-shaped (cf. Section 17.4).

A clue for this kind of internal collapse is the changing in the scribal culture, particularly in the western areas.

The Hittites, with kings Hattusili I and Mursili II (who sacked Babylon in 1595 BC; cf. Section 16.11), basically splitted the ancient Syro-Mesopotamia into a western and an eastern part.

Also the ethnic composition of the new ecumene changed, with the emerging of the Hittites (in Anatolia), the Hurrians (in Mittani), and the Kassites (in Babylon, know also known as Karduniash).

But in the end, the most relevant reason for this transformation resides in a structural redimensioning of the relationship between the people and the territory.

17.3 The Supra-Urban Dimension of the Territory

The new ecumene was at the same time:

profoundly variegated;
fully integrated as a political system.

In fact, “in this period […] new concepts of the state arose and were articulated in function of different ways of relating to the territory” (Buccellati, Origins, p. 207). In previous times, the territory was define by its urban center (the capital); now, the structural conditions of the territory preceded the capital.

The new political system is based on the macro-region (cf. Section 13.4), a cohesive territorial reality beyond the urban dimension, with new capital cities, representing a systemic innovation (an earlier example was that of Shamshi-Adad who founded Shubat-Enlil; cf. Section 14.4):

Washshukanni and Ta’idu (in Mittani);
Dur-Kurigalzu (in Kassite Babylon).

This phenonemon in unknown in Syria, which remained at the level of city-states acting as subsidiary elements, as vassal kingdoms, within the new cosmopolis.

17.4 The New Geo-Political Constructs

We can here briefly list the main ‘tiles’ of the new cosmopolitan ‘mosaic’:

the two great Mesopotamian powers:
- the Mittani kingdom (in the north);
- the Kassite Babylon (in the south);
the two great extra-Mesopotamian powers:
- Hatti (in Anatolia, with Hattusa/Boğazköy-Boğazkale and, later, Tarhuntassa as capitals);
- Egypt (Miṣri/a in Akkadian, with its cores in the capitals Thebes/Luqsor and, for a short period, Akhetaten/el-Amarna) with Thutmose III who reached the Euphrates after the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt (cf. 10, fn. 2);
the kingdom of the steppe, i.e. Amurru (structurally significant to our topic as a new model of territorial state, without a single central urban center (cf. Section 20.6);
the city-states in western Syria, following the model of the nuclear territorial state without the capability of merging into a multi-region (cf. Section 13.4). These cities were absorbed into the new macro-regional external entities, first Mittani (from the north-east) and Egypt (from the south), and later Hatti (from the north).

17.5 The Imperial Model of Limited Sovereignty

With this new international political situation, a systematic concept of vassalage (cf. Section 13.7) contributed to bring the process of territorial control beyond the central nucleus of the state.

The new macro-regions, in fact, as hegemonic entities, absorbed peripheral regions into a coherent administrative system.

Specifically for what concerns Syria, this area was subjected to an ‘imperial’ control on a different scale from the previous experience of the ‘empire’ of Akkad (cf. Section 12) and the later dominance of the Assyriam empire (cf. Section 22).

The city-states in Syria, in fact, besides keeping their economic value intact, lost their political independence, having a limited sovereignity. This new situation was different to that of the Old Babylonian period, when the political relationship was perceived as an asymmetrical alliance; now, instead, the relationship is that of the vassalage, where the vassals are part of a system of taxes and obligations, even if the subjected city-states retained a certain degree of autonomy on a local level (cf. Section 20.7).

What is now structurally different concerns the sense of solidarity which is set in series of hierarchical nodes binding the city-states to the macro-region they ‘belong’ to.

About the system of control of the macro-regions, two details deserve a specific focus:

Egypt had its own garrisons in Syria with Egyptian functionaries and troops, but without local governors; these garrisons served to maintain contacts between the ‘small’ Syrian kings and the ‘great’ pharaoh
Hatti, on the contrary, established a Hittite prince (Shuppiluliuma I’s son Piyassili/Sharri-kushukh) in Karkemish/Jarablus^{Note 2} as a sort of viceroy in Syria and, later another similar figure in Amurru (cf. Section 20.6).^{Note 3}

17.6 Internationalism as a System

While in the previous periods international relationships had a bilateral character, in the ‘international period’ a very well-codified system of relations accepted by all the macro-regions has been established.

In this new situation, territories were distant from one another: even if a kind of ‘international’ trade had been already experienced between Assur and Anatolia in the centuries of the second millennium BC with the so-called Assyrian ‘colonies’ (cf. Section 14.8) without any political opposition, commercial and political relationships now can be even troublesome, because of the confrontation of equal state, like, e.g., Hatti and Egypt.

Particularly, the Syrian area, because of its strategic location, at the same time was a channel for unity but also an element of separation: for sure, the respective Egyptian and Hittite population knew very little of the other state entity.

To coordinate this new systematized system of international relationships a new important tool was developed, i.e. that of treaties)^{Note 4} (the most important is that between Hatti and Egypt, signed around 1259 BC)^{Note 5} which had a strong political valence, since they regulated and prevented possible contentions, recognizing the reciprocal authority of the parties, whose relationships were shaped according to a standardized protocol.

17.7 The Integrative Dynamic

Three other phenomena contributed to the establishment of this new inter-regional situation, helping in shorten territorial distances in a context of bilateral relationships characterized by a sense of hierarchy manifested in a standardized diplomatic etiquette:

inter-dynastic marriages: usually, they were royal princesses to be given in marriage to other, foreign same-rank kings^{Note 6}; two examples can be taken to better identify this situation:
1. the son of the Kassite king Kurigalzu asked the pharaoh for one of his daughters; but the pharaoh, as it was custom, firmly refused;^{Note 7}
2. is a similar way, the king of Mittani Tushratta wrote to the pharaoh Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten, recalling how the former’s father had to write to the Egyptian king many times about an inter-dynastic marriages;^{Note 8}
diplomatic correspondence, which represented a stron instrument for integration: the most important example of this is the corpus of the so-called el-Amarna letters (14^th century BC, a period designated also also ‘the period of Amarna’) written, in Babylonian (cf. Section 20.6), under the reigns of Amenhotep III, Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, and found at Akhetaten/Amarna; the archive contained many letters (some hundreds) exchanged between Egypt and its Syrian vassals (the ‘small kings’ letters, according to Mario Liverani’s definition)^{Note 9} or between the pharaoh and other ‘great kings’ (hence, the ‘great king’ corpus of Liverani), i.e. basically, Babylon, Hatti, Arzawa, and Mittani);^{Note 10}
long-distance trade: the first factor of integration, which basically replicated formats of the past, even if enlarging the geographical scope and deepening the complexity of the common legal system; a system which also implied fixed taxes and commercial forms of control defining pre-determinated schemes of communication.

17.8 New Means of Exploitation of Natural Resources

Around the middle of the second millennium BC, three new technological innovations occurred (comparable to those already presented in Section 3):

the introduction, in Mittani, of a new military technique based on the use of horses and carriages which are now produced with a new technique and differently driven;
the production, again in Mittani, of glass;
the ‘invention’ of a new writing system, i.e. the (pseudo-)alphabets:
- the Proto-Sinaitic (derived from the Egyptian hieroglyphic system);
- the Ugaritic (based on the cuneiform script).

These innovations are characterized by a theoretical insight, leading to the writing of treatises attesting to a scribal interest of an encyclopedic character and abstraction, as it is evident, e.g., in the first abecedaries from Ugarit.

17.9 The Role of War

Also war changed in the cosmopolitan period, becaming ‘international’, particurly on two aspects:

there were two unusual episodes: the Hittite military campaign (with Mursili II, around 1595 BC, a watershed date) that reached Babylon, and the Egyptian campaign (under Thutmose I and Thutmose III) that reached the Euphrates; besides that, they later returned to their respective homelands, without affecting the local political structure but also marking the beginning of the equilibrium that characterizes this whole period, involving a movement of the northern center or gravity towards the east (cf. Section 18.4) and of the southern Mesopotamian fulcrum towards the south (cf. Section 18.6);
the development of chariots of war, connected to the training of horses, starting in Mittani and later ‘exported’ to Hatti and Egypt.

17.10 The Collapse of the Cosmopolis

Around 1200 BC, also because of the arrival of the ‘Sea People’ in Syria, the cosmopolitan system collapsed in a quite short timespan, even if in a ‘coherent’ process of interelated and networked causes.^{Note 11} Many kingdoms, as Hatti, disappeared an others, like Egypt and Mesopotamia retreated into their original countries.

And it was specifically in Syria where new great transformation started:

the settlements of the Philistines in the south;
a profound division between west and east developed, because of the costal nature of these new Philistine settlements;
a fracture between costal cities and the steppe became more substancial, being re-entangled just later (in the first half of the first millennium BC), with the Aramaeans and the Phoenicians (with the Neo-Hittite/Aramaeans states between south-eastern Anatolia and northern Syria).

In the end, the cosmopolis was over and Syria, a place for encounters and even struggles between many cultures, lost its historical and geo-political role.

«But the sense of correlation had become fully en-trenched, and would re-emerge in a more consolidated form with the final assertion of state evolution, the empire (Chapter 21)» (Buccellati, Origins, p. 206).

Notes

Note 1: on the definition of cosmopolis, see Buccellati, Origins, p. 206 fn. 11: “I adopt the term ‘cosmopolis’ in the sense of the ‘world as a city,’ deriving it from the common sense use of the adjective ‘cosmopolitan’ meaning ‘citizen of the world’”. _{Back to text}
Note 2: on Karkemish (Jarablus), see the dedicated website, with also the possibility of a 3D virtual tour of the ancient site. _{Back to text}
Note 3: at the same time, another son of Shuppiluliuma I, Telipinu, was appointed as viceroy in Aleppo. _{Back to text}
Note 4: treaties are usually divided into two: 1) paritetical treaties (between equal rank states) and 2) subordination treaties (when they were issued by a macro-region and one of its vassal states). An edition of many ancient Near Eastern treaties can be found in Kitchen & Lawrence 2012 Treaty. _{Back to text}
Note 5: editio princeps with transliteration of both the Egyptian and Hittite version, German translation and commentary in Edel 1997 Vertrag; for another transliteration and English translation, see Kitchen & Lawrence 2012 Treaty, Vol. 1, pp. 573-594 (texts 71A-B). _{Back to text}
Note 6: a notable exception is that of the so-called daḫamunzu (literally, the cuneiform rendering of the Egyptian term t3 ḥm.t nsw, i.e. ‘the wife of the king’); according to the most reliable historicalreconstruction of Egyptologists and Hittitologists, the widowed wife of Tutankhamun, the queen Ankhesenamun, wrote a letter (or better, two, in fact) to the Hittite king Shuppiluliuma I while he was sieging the city of Karkemish, asking to send her a son of him to be installed as new pharaoh in Egypt; after many doubts, the Hittite king sent his son Zannanza (which, very likely, is just a calque of the Egyptian s3 n nsw, ‘the son of the king’) who, unfortunately never reached Egypt, being killed on the way; even if this narrative could be very fictitional, it is, nevertheless, a clear exemplification of the international relationships of that time. _{Back to text}
Note 7: See e.g. the recent edition in Schniedewind & Cochavi- Rainey 2015 Amarna. _{Back to text}
Note 8: See Liverani 1999 Amarna. _{Back to text}
Note 9: See Liverani 1998 Amarna. _{Back to text}
Note 10: See, e.g. Liverani 1994 Guerra. _{Back to text}
Note 10: See, on this topic mostly Cline 2021 Year; cf. also Drews 1993 End. On the aftermath of the ‘collapse’, see recently Cline 2024 Year. _{Back to text}