OS 41 - Shamshi-Adad and the Upper Mesopotamian Empire

These are the oldest stories online at oldeststories.net. Today we'll be looking at the second of the three great men of 1800 BCE. The first, the great man of Larsa in the south was Rimsim, the patient-campainer and great centralizing reformer who we've already covered. The third will be the famous Hammurabi of Babylon, who will soon be getting the attention he deserves on this podcast. But today we look at the conqueror of the north, founder of the Upper Mesopotamian Empire, Shamsia Dad. We left off last week at 1810, because Shamsia Dad will go from just another warlord to Empire builder in that year. But his story actually begins 25 years earlier, in 1836 BCE. His father, Ilah Qabqabu, was an amyright warlord like many that we've encountered up to this point, and in the chaos of the Syrian anarchy finds himself the king of one of the city's most famous for its fortifications up to this point, the city of Turkah on the Upper Rufreides. Now Turkah had long been part of the kingdom of Mari's domain, one of the key strategic points of defense for the capital, and it's a testament to just how far the kingdom of Mari has sunk at this point that an independent ruler can hold on to this city. Still, the Mariots were not simply allowing this, and as far as we can tell, Ilah Qabqabu spends his entire life at war with Mari, both sides being too weak to break through the impressive fortifications of the other's city. In the course of this conflict, Ilah Qabqabu manages in around 1836 to take the independent city-state of Suprem, only a day away from Mari, a battle Shamsia dad may have been involved in. At around this time, his father dies and passes the throne to Shamsia dad, who already shows great ambitions, but is not exactly off to a great start. In his third or fourth year, his lands are plagued with a group of bandits, not even an enemy army, just a group of criminals called the Lulam. But when he sends an army against them, his army is soundly beaten, and the bandits continue to raid through his countryside unopposed. He makes war against a number of the independent city-states around him, but is unable to expand his territory and wins about as much as he loses. In 1820, the king of Mari, Yagad-Lim, dies, and his son Yad-Dun-Lim agrees with Shamsia dad's proposal for a peace treaty. With his back secured, Shamsia dad was finally able to try and start consolidating power for a bit and form a rising empire. But again, his rise was about to be interrupted. This time, it's not fate conspiring against him, but people, specifically Yagad-Lim and the enigmatic Naram Sen, who could be one of two kings of the same name, or perhaps a single king that ruled both Asher and Isshnuna at the time, I discuss the confusion a bit last episode. Whoever Naram Sen was, a joint strike from Mari and Isshnuna caught Shamsia dad completely off guard, completely crushing his tiny empire, and driving him to flee. I discuss last episode how it isn't really clear what his empire contained. It may have contained the cities of Turk or Echalatum. It doesn't really matter because at this point, he loses it all. Shamsia dad was angered by this betrayal, and even decades later, you can feel his fury in an inscription he writes after finally managing to gain his vengeance on the traitor, Yagad-Lim. He writes, "Shamsia dad and Yagad-Lim took a grave oath between them by the God-Nurgle, and Shamsia dad never committed a sin against Yagad-Lim. It is Yagad-Lim who committed a sin against Shamsia dad. Nurgle went at the side of Shamsia dad and punished Yagad-Lim so that Shamsia dad's servants killed Yagad-Lim in battle." The inscription goes on to explain that because of this treachery, the God-Nurgle decided to give Shamsia dad divine right to Mari and the upper Euphrates, but this is all a bit later in the story. Only following his defeat, Shamsia dad was in no position to extract vengeance and was forced to flee over to Babylon, where the king Epil Sin may have been a distant relative of his. He and his surviving warriors were able to sign on as mercenaries for the Babylonian king for two or three years until finally Shamsia dad saw an opportunity or perhaps simply grew tired of serving another when he had ambitions of glory and revenge. The year 1812 saw a city called Echalatum fall vulnerable. Now, there's much that's obscure about this, especially since many later records recount Shamsia dad and sometimes his father as having originally been from this city rather than Turkum. However, since he would come to make this one of his capitals, it seems likely that later writers were simply projecting backwards and the city of Echalatum had no real significance prior to his arrival there. In this sense, Echalatum is a bit like old Akad or Babylon, a place chosen as a power base specifically because there wasn't much there and an ambitious ruler could impose his own culture, politics and desires on the city without dealing with a centuries old legacy that a larger city might have had. Indeed, Echalatum probably wasn't even the original name, since the word means the Palace, which would be an odd moniker for what was likely no more than a group of mudhuts on the Tigris, a bit downstream from Asher. And indeed, we know that Shamsia dad has a bit of a penchant for renaming cities. No, Echalatum was meant to be a new Akad and Shamsia dad wished to be a new Sargon, starting an empire from scratch with nothing but ambition and personal valor. In 1809, this empire building began in earnest with the seemingly easy conquest of Asher. Naram Sin, either the one who had kicked him out of Turkey or perhaps an unrelated man with the same name, had died a few years earlier of natural causes, and Eresham II would be the one to go down in history as the end of that dynasty. The city of Asher does not seem to have put up much of a fight, and as a result likely had a fairly gentle sack. Though Shamsia dad would not move his capital to Asher, the wealth that provided him would prove to be crucial for his later efforts. Indeed, though he conquered Asher, he seems to have left it almost completely alone, taking relatively few labor levies from the city and allowing the city assembly to continue meeting and legislating with apparently little oversight. The Kharams continued functioning, though a few like Kharam Kinesh from two episodes ago, had been destroyed in unrelated Anatolian internal conflicts, and the city itself had grown incredibly wealthy, especially considering that it was still likely smaller than 10,000 people. Shamsia dad decided that it wasn't worth involving himself in the complexities of democratic politics and that anyway there was no reason to meddle with the money machine of Asher. Instead, he patronized the city heavily, constructing a dual temple to Enlil, King of All the Gods, and Asher, the local supreme patron, and never claimed kingship proper over the city, instead adopting only the traditional titles of Steward of the God of Asher. Indeed, Shamsia dad allowed Asher so much freedom that in some contemporary records it's still considered an independent city, the one that shares a king with Echelatum, and we know from letters that its foreign policy was dictated by the king. With the tremendous wealth of Asher, and the backing of a number of Amorite tribes from Babylonia, which is fast becoming the geographic designation of the region ruled by Babylon, formally the general area of a cad, Shamsia dad's top priority was crushing his betrayer, the profiteous Yadun Lim. This was no small feat, since Yadun Lim had after taking Turkah, managed to completely rebuild the territory of Mari, banked to something close to its former glory, dominating towns up and down the Upper Euphrates and extending his control into both sides of the Syrian desert, with his allied and mercenary Amorite tribes. Despite Shamsia dad's incredible recovery, it seemed his hated enemy remained one step ahead of him even now. But this man had great aspirations, and he wasn't about to let Mari off the hook just because they remained stronger than him. The opportunity came shortly after Yadun Lim was weakened, following the victory over a large force from his western neighbor Yamhad, and Shamsia dad brought every man he could muster, including one of the very few conscriptions from Asher himself and marched in to marry a territory. They were met there by Yadun Lim himself. along with twelve allied kings and fought a huge pitched battle, likely featuring tens of thousands of men and the full strength of both kingdoms. As the Sun set, the Mariet force was crushed utterly, with many killed and the rest scattering. Yadun Lim fleeing back to his capital while Shamsia dad's men had free reign to overrun as many Mariet cities as they could, capturing and pillaging unopposed for months. Letters began to fly across every independent city-state and kingdom that bordered the growing upper Mesopotamian kingdom, and Yadun Lim was desperately trying to organize an international coalition to protect the world from what was clearly a greater threat than anyone had previously recognized. But the people of Mariet didn't see a man trying his best. They saw a man who had brought them failure, and his son, Prince Sumuyama, took the initiative to murder his own father and take control. Sumuyama made a great show of fortifying the city in preparation for the assault that everyone in the city knew was coming. Everyone knew by now of Shamsia dad's ambition and also of his unstoppable quest for vengeance against the traitor city. And so, when the forces of Upper Mesopotamia arrived outside the gates, the people of the city were anxious but ready. With the conqueror tri and starved the city out, or would he attempt to assault the walls? They had prepared for both, and so Shamsia dad paid a man inside the city to stab the patricidal king Sumuyama in the night. With their king dead and their city surrounded, Mari surrendered peacefully, and Shamsia dad became the ruler of a second major kingdom with surprisingly little fuss. He now ruled a fairly substantial kingdom, but he wasn't satisfied simply with taking territory. His empire needed to be organized. He wasn't a barbarian, he saw himself as a new Sargon, and as such he spends the next few years consolidating his new kingdom. There were practical measures copied right out of Sargon's playbook, like the establishment of administrative centers in his new towns, and the appointment of military governors and garrisons in each city. But there were also innovations unique to him, such as the expansion of the Assyrian dating system to all the cities under his rule, in which each year was named by whoever held the office of Limu in Asher that year. Nice for standardization, but actually pretty unpleasant for later historians, spoiled by the very descriptive year names of the rest of Mesopotamia. Additionally, he took inspiration from the Sumerians and decided to write the first edition of the Assyrian King's List. The start of the list that has come down to us today, making sure to include himself, and some of his ancestors into that list as a way of establishing his own legitimacy through historical manipulation. But his most interesting reform was his decision, shortly after the conquest of Mari, to split his domain up into thirds. Assyria, the region along the Tigris, was to be ruled from Echelatum by his oldest son Ishmaedagon, and the former kingdom of Mari on the Euphrates was to be ruled by his younger son Yasma Adad from Mari itself. Shamsi Adad himself took the steplands in between the rivers dominated by his Amarite tribes and occupied the city of Shubat Enlul at the top of the Cabar River, where he micromanaged his sons and sent orders across the empire. All this new territory was also quite beneficial to the Assyrian merchant classes, giving them new places to trade and less competition within Syria. We aren't sure how long he spent resting and building, but at some point he decided that it was time to go back on the offensive. Gathering his army, he followed the traders of Asher, looking to take by force what they had grown wealthy, gaining through peaceful exchange, and made it all the way to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving a trail of plunder and destruction in his wake. Upon his return, he established a victory stellar in emulation of Sargon's similar monuments, but this was no conquest, merely a raid, and the kingdom of Yamhad, based in the city of Aleppo, would never forgive or forget the trail of destruction he laid through their territory. This campaign may well have been meant as a direct insult to Yamhad since they had taken in the last legitimate heir of Mari, a fellow named Zimri Lim, and may have drawn this campaign as a retribution. It fits Shamsia dad's character to be motivated by both Revenge and Imperial Ambition, though clearly the army of Yamhad was able to keep him from making serious territorial gains in the process. Shamsia dad is tenacious, however, and has no intention of letting a Yamhad that offered shelter to his despised foe off easily. Since he couldn't take Aleppo with his own troops, he forged a marriage alliance with Katna to the south, proposing that his son Yasma a dad in Mari marry the king of Katna's daughter. This alliance would, judging from the tone of the letters, prove to be fairly strong, and the wedding was said to be a quite happy one. The two kingdoms were able to bring in a pair of independent opportunistic cities from the north of Yamhad, and the four attacked as one, putting immense pressure on Aleppo itself. Even these four combined armies, however, were unable to push past the two walls of Aleppo, the inner of which still stands as part of a later medieval Islamic citadel, and were unable to claim an ultimate victory. Shamsia dad's allies seem to have grown tired of battle after a few years and simply gone home, leaving him holding the bag. The war continued in stalemate for an extensive period of time, and while Shamsia dad had to return to his central capital to manage the entire kingdom, his son and ruler of the west, Yasma a dad was left to run the day-to-day matters of war, a task which he seems to have mismanaged badly. We have a number of letters from Shamsia dad to his sons, but by far the most fun are the ones he sent to his younger son, presumably on his inability to manage the war. One letter reads, "How long do we have to guide you in every matter? Are you a child and not an adult? Don't you have a beard on your chin? When are you going to take charge of your house? Don't you see that your brother is leading vast armies? So you too take charge of your palace and your house, and in another letter throws the barb, while here your brother is victorious, down there you lie about among the women. And when Yasma a dad complained to his brother about his poor treatment from their father and the difficulties of the war, Ishmeh Dagan was at times concilatory, but even he loses his temper, exclaiming in one letter, "Why are you setting up a wail about this thing? This is not great conduct." Yasma dad surely deserves some sympathy for being up against the strongest kingdom of the age with only a third of his father's empire, being responsible for bringing a victory in a war his father had now twice failed to win, but he also seems to have not been of a particularly martial disposition and was appreciated by his brother for his ability to collect knowledge and wise men, particularly noting a skilled doctor that Ishmeh Dagan writes a letter thanking his brother for. The stalemate would come to an end in the year 1780, with the king of Yamhad's death in one of these endless battles. His successor, Yarem Lim, would solve the problem of warfare with diplomacy, forging alliances among a number of tribes in the Zagros mountains, as well as with Eshnoona and Babylon, Shamsia dad's neighbors to the south and east. Provoking a war on the eastern front, finally convinced Shamsia dad to abandon his long war with Yamhad and focus on threats to the east. And when Shamsia dad became deeply engaged with these new enemies, Yarem Lim would win favor with the Babylonians by resuming his attacks, striking into Shamsia dad's rear and forcing him to abandon an eastern campaign to protect his holdings on the Euphrates River. On the other side of this divided empire, Shamsia dad's far more diligent son is making steady, though difficult, progress against the various enemies of the east. The first task his father assigns for him is to venture into the Zagros mountains, subdue the various tribal groups there, and expand the area in which a Syrian merchants can safely extract more of the mineral wealth of the Iranian Highlands. This region has been a continuous challenge from Eshpitanian kings since all the way back to Enmercar of Eurak in episode 1, and it proves no less difficult for Ishmael Dagan, compounded by the fact that Elon is at a high level. of its power. Still, over the slow and grueling course of years, he manages to make solid inroads into the mountains and capture the barbarian city of Cabra and the Hurrian city of Arrapah. The territory never really pacifies, though, and throughout his reign, first as prince and later as king, the mountain tribes will remain a threat. The tribe of Ya'i Al-Anum, in particular, seems to have been particularly tenacious, and near the end of Shamsia dad's life, he would issue an order to slaughter the entire tribe. With Ishma Dagon, later reporting to his brother that following this order, Mar-Adu and all the sons of the tribe of Ya'i Al-Anum are killed. With Ishma Dagon, later reporting to his brother that in following this order, Mar-Adu and all the sons of the tribe of Ya'i Al-Anum had been killed, and all its servants and soldiers were killed, and not one of the enemy escaped. Rejoice. The severed head of Mar-Adu, the tribe's leader, would be brought back as a trophy. In the south, for his first decades as prince of Assyria, Ishma Dagon would be one player among many, as the newly energized Elamites, Eshununa, Babylon and Larsa, all continuously shifted allegiances to build power blocks in the region aimed at taking down one or another of their foes. But in 1780, as already mentioned, the newly ascended Yaram Lim of Yamhad would outplay him at this game, uniting Eshununa, Babylon and the mountain tribes together in a five-way attack that would paralyze the Upper Mesopotamian Empire. This particular war was short-lived, but so too it would turn out was Shamsia Dad, dying shortly after, and leaving the throne to his diligent older son Ishma Dagon in 1776. We could see from his records of letters that Ishma Dagon's succession was no accident. He had been manipulating the court and his brother to ensure that he would take the throne on their father's death. Given his father's disdain for the younger son, this was likely unnecessary. But by the time of their father's death, Ishma Dagon had convinced their younger brother to pass all correspondence directed towards his father through him, and the older brother promised to intercede on Yasma Dad's behalf. This means that he was effectively monitoring two-thirds of the empire even before taking the throne, and when his father dies, he smoothly transitions into that seat. However, while it may have been smooth internally, the death of the man who had built the Upper Mesopotamian Empire was seen as an opportunity by everyone outside the empire and most of the cities and tribes inside the empire who wished they were not so. Diligent or not, Ishma Dagon proved not to be the equal of his father, and in less than a year, the western third of the empire had been lost. Mari restored to the limb dynasty with the help of Yamhad, and his younger brother either killed in the fighting or exiled and simply undesired within the now much-reduced kingdom. His father's empire will be reduced to nothing but the city of Asher and a small zone along the Tigris River within a decade, and his dynasty will fall into obscurity soon enough. This isn't the end of a Syria though. There are plenty of ups and downs left for the merchant kingdom, but it is the last that will be focusing on it for now. To the west, Yamhad had established itself as the leading power in Syria. The king Yaram Lim had essentially raised young Zimri Lim through his formative years, and when he was finally able to conquer the strategic fortress city of Tuttle on the Euphrates while Shamsia dad had been occupied in the east, he gave Zimri Lim the city, the Marriot Crown, and his daughter in marriage, cementing him as a beneficiary and son-in-law of Yamhad. From here, with the death of Shamsia dad in the following year, the conquest of Marri itself is relatively painless, and in short order, the old Marriot kingdom is restored, though this time as a fast ally of Yamhad. Cottonuts of the south wisely goes quiet at this time, seeing both its northern neighbors strong and unified, while the wealthy Hurrian city of Eugarrit at the northern extreme of Phoenicia is brought under Aleppo's dominion, along with many other smaller towns in a general expansion of territory and power. But we must stop the tales of Yamhad, Assyria, and Marri here, because we have an all three cases creeped well into the reign of Hammarabi. That's okay, since looking at these events from multiple angles reveals different stories, but starting next week, we will finally be moving on to the man you've all been waiting for, Hammarabi of Babylon and his rise to power. Shamsia dad's empire was not to endure after his death, but that doesn't mean he left no mark on history. Most notably, his dynasty will persist a few generations following his death, and when Assyria gets back on its feet again, it will come to remember the military successes of this king that they will claim as their own far more brightly than the more enduring and prosperous period of mercantile wealth that preceded it. The later Assyrian empires, and especially the Neo-Assyrian empire, will become famous principally through acts of violence. And it is Shamsia dad that brought this into a culture that had been shockingly Republican, mercantile, and passive up to this point. We can see it in this sense as something of a negative legacy. As this is the closest Mesopotamia ever gets to a mercantile trade republic, like those that will dot the Mediterranean in the classical era, but definitely the Assyrians themselves would see it as an injection of masculinity into their traditions. More interestingly, he shows us that civilization in general is developing decisively away from city states into larger territorial kingdoms. It's noted by contemporaries that when he sees his control of Assyria, there are no longer any notable independent cities left, and that the entire world comes to be divided among eight powers of approximately equal strength. What's more, these states are all as far as we can tell, beginning to experiment with centralization and new ways of organizing territory. The extensive archives of government letters in the city of Mari shows us that there's quite a lot going on, below the gross summaries usually provided by history of this period. But there's no reason to think that any of the other kingdoms were sending any fewer letters to their underlings, those letters just haven't been fortunate enough to survive. Which means that as we move to Hammarabi and his governmental reforms, he will certainly deserve a certain amount of credit, but many of the things he adopts were in the air anyway. And the more we learn about the state's surrounding old Babylon, the more we realize that it wasn't particularly special. As long as one of the eight contenders had managed to emerge from the anarchy of the Amorite Age, we likely would have seen a similar golden age coming into being. And the final reason to remember Shamsia Dan is that he's another story of a man who started with nothing, or at least was reduced to very little for a period of time, who had come to exert control over a major kingdom and came within striking distance of establishing himself as the next great empire. The Bronze Age was a smaller time, and a great city had only perhaps 20,000 people in it in these days, with maybe fewer than one or two million people in the entire region, and ambition and competence were enough for a man to throw in his hat for world domination. In many ways, it's a time more like a fantasy novel than we usually give it credit for. One far more alien to modern times than we like to think, despite the literacy and urbanization that characterizes so much of Sumer. But there will be plenty of more examples of how ancient Mesopotamia was both similar to and different from modern life, as we move the story forward, now properly into the story of Great and Mighty Babylon, under its first Great King, Hammurabi. So join us next week, as we go over the political situation one more time as Sinmubalit brings Babylon into a regional power, and then as Hammurabi takes the reign and raises it to the first unifying empire the region has seen in 300 years. Thank you for listening.