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Battle in the marshes; reign of Sennacherib (Nineveh, Southwest Palace, court LXIV, slab 5–7). Source Layard (1853b, pl. 27)
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The Assyrians ruled in the first half of the first millennium BCE over most part of the Ancient Near East. The Neo-Assyrian Empire was constructed on the base of a powerful, well organized and trained army, which defeated all enemies and seemed to be invincible. Babylonia was a special case, because of the complicated political situation and especi...
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Among the impressive cuneiform documentation found on the site of Mari (Tell Ḥarīrī, Syria) are many texts called “from practice” (letters and accounting documents) that informs on manufacturing gods and their artefacts during the Amorite period (2004-1595 BC). The Royal Archives of Mari show, over a short period of time throughout the history of t...
Citations
... From the perspective of Assyrian imperial ideology, Merodach-baladan had committed additional blasphemies by not sending tribute in violation of the vassal treaty that he had concluded with Assyria when he had been an ally in the war against Mukīn-zēri. Furthermore, the landscape in which he resided, while not the wild steppes inhabited by the Arameans, was a marsh shaped by the floods and the waters of the deep (Bagg 2020;Grayson & Novotny 2012: No. 1: 34, No. 16 iv 56-61, 34: 7-11 and passim). Reliefs from the Southwest Palace at Nineveh depicting the Babylonian terrain in which Sennacherib and his successors campaigned added to this impression, presenting the primordial strangeness of the marshes of the Sealand in contrast with the orderly bounty of urbanized Babylonia with its rows of fruit-bearing date palms (Seymour 2017: 134-139, 141-158). ...
From the ninth century until the last quarter of the seventh century BCE, the Assyrian Empire first extended its power over Babylonia and then engaged in a prolonged effort to retain control. The patchwork nature of Babylonian society—divided as it was between the traditional urban centers, territories controlled by five distinct Chaldean tribes, and regions inhabited by Aramaean tribes—presented opportunities and challenges for Assyria as it sought to assert its dominance. Assyrian interactions with the Chaldean tribes of Babylonia redefined the Chaldeans’ place within power relationships in southern Mesopotamia. Starting in 878, Assyria first perceived Chaldean territory as distinct from what they defined as Karduniaš, the land ruled by the king of Babylon. Shalmaneser III exploited and accentuated this division by recognizing the Chaldean leaders as kings and accepting their tribute even as he concluded a treaty with the Babylonian king, Marduk-zakir-shumi I. By decentralizing power in Babylonia, Assyria was able to assert indirect control over Babylonia. However, periods of Assyrian weakness created opportunities for several Chaldeans—drawing upon the economic and military power they could muster—to claim the title of king of Babylon with all the accompanying ideological power. These new developments prompted Assyria under the Sargonids to create counter-narratives that questioned the legitimacy of Chaldeans as kings of Babylon by presenting them as strange and inimical to the Assyrian order even as Assyrian interactions with the Chaldeans improved Assyrian familiarity with them.
... This date corresponds with a shift to a drier climate (Altaweel et al. 2019), which may have contributed to decreased river discharge and increased terrestrialisation along the palaeocoast. The name "Sealand" for the marsh region is attested since the mid 2 nd millennium BCE (Bagg 2020), which implies that around this time marsh formation had progressed to such extent that a separate landscape was recognisable. The Shadegan marshes in the Iranian part of southeastern Mesopotamia were formed not later than the 10 th century CE after the development of a new alluvial ridge had blocked the discharge of water (Walstra et al. 2011). ...
... Inherent to wetlands, animal live consists of numerous mollusc, fish, fowl, turtle, and small mammal species (Veldhuis 2004;Bagg 2020; Albadran 2021; Esmaeili 2021; Jawad 2021a; Salim et al. 2021). Wild (i.e., notdomesticated) large mammal species include grey wolf, long-fingered bat, smooth-coated otter, honey badger, striped hyena, jungle cat (also known as reed or swamp cat), wild boar, lion, goitered gazelle, crested porcupine, and roe deer, which all have been attested to thrive until recently (Bagg 2020; Jawad 2021a). ...
To understand the perception of wetlands by ancient Mesopotamians, it is crucial to have an understanding of the natural landscape "between the rivers". This paper provides an overview on the geomorphology of the region and the human-landscape interaction. In the course of time, starting in the early or mid-Holocene, the land “between the rivers” lost its natural character and was transformed into an increasingly cultural landscape with an intensive human impact. When and to what extent natural floodbasin marshes still existed is unknown, but they will have gradually decreased as a consequence of increasing population and expanding agriculture.
This article is concerned with interregional trade dynamics between Elam and Mesopotamia in the early to mid-first millennium BC. During the seventh century BC, two great famines in the Neo-Elamite kingdom, of which climatological changes were a major cause, were documented in the textual records. An era of megadrought made grain procurement from the neighboring regions essential to feed the Neo-Elamite lowland population. This article further explores the impact of the two Neo-Elamite famines and “drought of the century” on the commercial and political mechanisms in the Upper Persian Gulf region.
