Successors of the Babylonians: Mitanni, Hurrians, Qatna and Kassites | Middle East And North Africa

Home | Category: Babylonians and Their Contemporaries

MESOPOTAMIA AFTER THE BABYLONIANS

Mitanni tablet

From about 2350 B.C. to the Persians took over in 450 B.C., Mesopotamia was largely ruled by Semitic-speaking dynasties with cultures derived from Sumer. They include the Akkadians, Eblaites and Assyrians. They fought and traded with the Hittites, Kassites and Mitanni, all possibly of Indo-European descent. All of these cultures incorporated many elements of Sumerian culture, including concepts of city life,, civic organization, law and monumental architecture. [Source: World Almanac]

Aaron Skaist wrote in Encyclopaedia Judaica: The map of the Near East presented a very different appearance in 1500 than it had 300 years earlier. In place of numerous small and medium-sized Amorite states, a few large non-Semitic royal houses now ruled the Fertile Crescent with the help of a nobility based on the ability to maintain horses, equipment, and retainers. [Source: Aaron Skaist, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2005, Encyclopedia.com]

The indigenous Semitic population was, at least for the time being, reduced either to the status of a semi-free peasantry or to that of roving mercenaries. A parallel may nonetheless be drawn with the earlier situation, for just as geography seemed to favor Shamshi-Adad i at the beginning of the 18th century, so now it served to favor a kingdom similarly centered in the triangle formed by the tributaries of the Khabur River in Upper Mesopotamia.

Websites on Mesopotamia: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Mesopotamia sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago isac.uchicago.edu ; University of Chicago Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations nelc.uchicago.edu ; University of Pennsylvania Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations (NELC) nelc.sas.upenn.edu; Penn Museum Near East Section penn.museum; Ancient History Encyclopedia ancient.eu.com/Mesopotamia ; British Museum britishmuseum.org ; Louvre louvre.fr/en/explore ; Metropolitan Museum of Art metmuseum.org/toah ; Ancient Near Eastern Art Metropolitan Museum of Art metmuseum.org; Iraq Museum theiraqmuseum ABZU etana.org/abzubib; Archaeology Websites Archaeology News Report archaeologynewsreport.blogspot.com ; Anthropology.net anthropology.net : archaeologica.org archaeologica.org ; Archaeology in Europe archeurope.com ; Archaeology magazine archaeology.org ; HeritageDaily heritagedaily.com; Live Science livescience.com/

Hittites

Around the second millennia B.C. the Indo Europeans tribes from north of India similar to the Aryans invaded Asia Minor. The Hittites, and later the Greeks, Romans, Celts and nearly all Europeans and North Americans descended from these tribes. They carried bronze daggers.

The Hittite Empire dominated Asia Minor and parts of the Middle East from 1750 B.C. to 1200 B.C. Once regarded as a magical people, the Hittites were known for their military skill, the of development of an advanced chariot, and as one of the first cultures to smelt iron and forge it weapons and tools. They fought with spears from chariots and did not possess more advanced composite bow.

The Hittites were an Indo-European people that served as a conduit and bridge for the cultures of Asia, the Middle East and Europe. They created a society with a government and laws, similar to those in Sumer. The Hittites fought against Kings of Babylonians and the Pharaohs of Egypt for possession what is now Israel, Lebanon and Syria. In the 12th century their empire fell to the Assyrians. The Hittites were charioteers who wrote manuals on horsemanship. Ninth century B.C. stone reliefs show Hittite warriors in chariots. "Charioteers were the first great aggressors in human history," writes historian Jack Keegan. They had an easy time conquering the nomads and farmers that inhabited the region. Donkeys were their fastest animal.

Around 2000 B.C. the Hittites were unified under a king named Labarna. A later king pushed their domain into Mesopotamia and Syria. The empire lasted into 1650 B.C. A more powerful kingdom rose in 1450 B.C. This kingdom possessed iron. The Battle of Kadesh in 1288 B.C. between the ancient Egyptians and the Hittites marked the beginning of a decline for the Hittites. After the fall of the empire a number of small Hittite states were created. By the 8th century they were absorbed by the Assyrians.

Kassites

Kassarite divinity symbols

Aaron Skaist, Encyclopaedia Judaica: After the Hittite invasion Babylon fell securely in the hands of the Kassites, who had already controlled the Middle Euphrates for over a century (c. 1735–1595) before they seized Babylon, and who went on to rule Babylonia proper (which they gave the name of Kar-Duniash) for over four centuries thereafter (c. 1595–1157) — longer than any other dynasty. However, these were centuries of political stagnation for Babylonia. [Source: Aaron Skaist, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2005, Encyclopedia.com]

The Kassites were foreign invaders of uncertain ethnic affiliation who eagerly adopted, and adapted themselves to, the literary and artistic heritage of the ancient civilization to which they had fallen heir. They conquered the Sealand in the south about the beginning of the 15th century, thus probably recovering the surviving remnants of Sumerian learning (both scholars and texts) that had found refuge there at the time of the sack of Babylon.

In spite of the fact that some of them took Babylonian names, the Kassites retained their traditional clan and tribal structure, in contrast to the smaller family unit of the Babylonians. They were proud of their affiliation with their tribal houses, rather than their own fathers, and preserved their customs of fratriarchal property ownership and inheritance. The most notable Kassite artifacts are their Kudurru steles. Used for marking boundaries and making proclamations, they were also carved with a high degree of artistic skill. +/

Mitanni

Aaron Skaist wrote in Encyclopaedia Judaica: Somewhere in this Khabur Triangle, at a site still not rediscovered, lay the city of Washukkanni, capital of an empire which stretched clear across northern Mesopotamia from the Mediterranean in the west to beyond the Tigris in the east. The empire, called Mitanni, was headed by a small aristocratic ruling class whose names identify them as Indo-Aryans, i.e., as the western branch of a migration of Indo-Europeans that was at the same time overflowing India. They invoked "Indian" deities and perfected the raising of horses and horse racing, employing in part an Indo-Aryan terminology. However, the kingdom which they ruled was primarily a Hurrian state, for it was the Hurrian stratum of the population that made up the bulk of its chariot-nobility. [Source: Aaron Skaist, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2005, Encyclopedia.com]

Mitanni was a powerful Hurrian-speaking state in northern Syria and southeast Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), with Indo-European linguistic and political influences, that existed from around 1550 to 1260 B.C.. No histories, royal annals or chronicles have yet been found in its excavated sites, thus knowledge about Mitanni is limited compared to the other states in the region and is mainly based on what their neighbours said about them. They were called called abigalbat in old Babylonian texts, Hanigalbat or Hani-Rabbat in Assyrian records,[b] or Naharin in Egyptian texts, The Hurrians were in the region as of the late 3rd millennium B.C.. Later, Hurrians made up the main population of Mitanni. [Source: Wikipedia]

The Mitanni Empire was a strong regional power limited by the Hittites to the north, Egyptians to the west, Kassites to the south, and later by the Assyrians to the east. At its maximum extent Mitanni ranged as far west as Kizzuwatna by the Taurus Mountains, Tunip in the south, Arraphe in the east, and north to Lake Van. Their sphere of influence is shown in Hurrian place names, personal names and the spread through Syria and the Levant of a distinct pottery type, Nuzi ware.

Kingdom of Mitanni at its greatest extent under Barattarna 1490 BC

Mitanni Archaeology

According to Archaeology magazine: Tablets related to the Mitanni excavated at other sites show that while the empire’s rulers used a native language known as Hurrian, they might have been descended from people who spoke a version of Old Indic. Old Indic is the language of the Rigveda, the ancient Hindu text that was first written on the Indian subcontinent sometime before 1000 B.C. [Source: Eric A. Powell, Archaeology magazine, September-October 2019]

The Mitanni kings had Old Indic names and worshipped gods that are mentioned in the Rigveda. A tablet containing a manual on horse training even shows the Mitanni used Old Indic terms related to charioteering. This raises the possibility that the Mitanni aristocracy might have originally been Old Indic–speaking mercenaries who drove chariots and usurped a native Hurrian dynasty, but quickly adopted its language and customs.

In the late 2010s, the waters of the Tigris River in Iraqi Kurdistan receded and revealed the ruins of a 3,400-year-old palace. A team led by Hasan Ahmed Qasim of the Kurdish Archaeology Organization and researcher Ivana Puljiz of the University of Tubingen has now excavated the site and found that the palace’s six-foot-wide interior walls were painted in places with bright red and blue murals. They also uncovered a cuneiform tablet that suggests the site was the city of Zahiku, part of the Mitanni Empire, which occupied northern Syria and Mesopotamia from 1500 to 1350 B.C. That cuneiform tablet and nine others are still being translated. [Source: Eric A. Powell, Archaeology magazine, September-October 2019]

Hurrians

Aaron Skaist wrote in Encyclopaedia Judaica: The Hurrians had begun to settle, and even rule, on the northern and eastern frontiers of Mesopotamia even before the end of the Akkadian empire (to whose fall they may have contributed). They began to enter Mesopotamia proper in increasing numbers in the neo-Sumerian and Old Babylonian periods. They ruled minor localities like Shushara (Shashrum) under Shamshi-Adad i and left their mark at Mari in the form of Hurrian incantations. However, it was only now, with the creation of the Mitanni state, that they took advantage of their strategic location to assume a commanding position. [Source: Aaron Skaist, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2005, Encyclopedia.com]

The center of their power in the Khabur region was known as Hanigalbat. To the east they claimed sovereignty over the client kingdoms of Assyria and Arrapha, to the west over those of Mukish and Yam ad. Most of the documentation comes from these client states rather than from the center of the empire. In particular the archives of Nuzi and Alalakh have yielded vast numbers of texts from the realms of family law and public administration respectively. Together they throw valuable light on the newly emerging institutions of a society thought (by some scholars) to have had a direct impact on the institutions of pre-monarchical Israel. The cultural unity of the extensive Mitanni domain is also attested archaeologically: an elegant pottery style designated variously as Khabur, Mitanni, or Nuzi ware characterizes the ceramic remains of sites of this period throughout the area.

A separate Hurrian state grew up at the same time northwest of Mitanni: in the fertile plain later known as Cilicia, the kingdom of Kizzuwatna united the areas lying between Mitanni and the Hittite lands of Anatolia. It served both as a buffer between them in political and military terms and as a bridge in cultural terms. It was, at least in part, by this road that Hurrian literary and religious influences reached Asia Minor, where they were soon to play a major role. The Hurrians, however, were important beyond that as transmitters and transmuters of the older traditions of Babylonia, many of which, according to one theory, reached the West — that is, Hittites and Phoenicians, and via these ultimately also Greeks and Hebrews, respectively — in Hurrian guise.

20120207-Standard_of_Ur_-_peace_side d.jpg

Mesopotamian feast

Amorites

The Amorites were an ancient Semitic-speaking people that dominated the history of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine from about 2000 to about 1600 B.C. In the oldest cuneiform sources (c. 2400–c. 2000 B.C.), the Amorites were equated with the West, though their true place of origin was most likely Arabia, not Syria. They were troublesome nomads and were believed to be one of the causes of the downfall of the 3rd dynasty of Ur (c. 2112–c. 2004 bc). [Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica]

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica: “During the 2nd millennium B.C., the Akkadian term Amurru referred not only to an ethnic group but also to a language and to a geographic and political unit in Syria and Palestine. At the beginning of the millennium, a large-scale migration of great tribal federations from Arabia resulted in the occupation of Babylonia proper, the mid-Euphrates region, and Syria-Palestine. They set up a mosaic of small kingdoms and rapidly assimilated the Sumero-Akkadian culture. It is possible that this group was connected with the Amorites mentioned in earlier sources; some scholars, however, prefer to call this second group Eastern Canaanites, or Canaanites.

“Almost all of the local kings in Babylonia (such as Hammurabi of Babylon) belonged to this stock. One capital was at Mari (modern Tall al- arīrī, Syria). Farther west, the political centre was alab (Aleppo); in that area, as well as in Palestine, the newcomers were thoroughly mixed with the Hurrians. The region then called Amurru was northern Palestine, with its centre at Hazor, and the neighbouring Syrian desert. In the dark age between about 1600 and about 1100 bc, the language of the Amorites disappeared from Babylonia and the mid-Euphrates; in Syria and Palestine, however, it became dominant. In Assyrian inscriptions from about 1100 bc, the term Amurru designated part of Syria and all of Phoenicia and Palestine but no longer referred to any specific kingdom, language, or population.”

Hyksos and Activity in the Western Near East

Aaron Skaist wrote in the Encyclopaedia Judaica: In the West, meantime, military and political hegemony was also passing out of the hands of Semitic-speaking peoples. A new dynasty of Theban rulers, the 18th, had succeeded by the middle of the 16th century in driving the Hyksos (largely consisting of Amorite elements) from Egypt and reuniting the country. Thutmose III (1490–1436) carried Egyptian arms as far as the Euphrates and reduced all the intervening city-states to vassalage. His greatest victory was won on the very first campaign, when he defeated the armies of the Asiatics, combined, if not exactly united, under the prince of Kadesh (better; Kedesh), at the great battle of Megiddo, the first "Armageddon" (the graecized form of Har Megiddo, "hill of Megiddo"). [Source: Aaron Skaist, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2005, Encyclopedia.com]

With Retenu, as the Egyptians called Palestine and Southern Syria, firmly in his grasp, Thutmose III even challenged the armies of Mitanni and eventually extracted a treaty that recognized a common frontier running between Hama and Qatna (c. 1448). His successors continued to maintain the Asiatic empire by repeated incursions into Palestine and Syria to receive the submission of loyal vassal princes and secure that of the recalcitrant ones. Sporadic finds of cuneiform tablets from Palestine (Taanach, Gezer) seem to include royal exhortations to this effect.

Thus the subjection of the indigenous Amorites was completed before the end of the 15th century throughout the Near East. There was, however, one exception to this rule. Since the emergence of the Amorites, cuneiform texts from very diverse regions had begun to make mention of a group of people called abiru with ever increasing frequency until, by the 15th century, they appear in texts from all over the Near East. On philological grounds, these abiru can be conclusively equated with the ʿApiru of the Egyptian texts and less likely, with the Hebrews of the Bible. Their name was explained, tellingly if not scientifically, as meaning "robbers," "dusty ones," or "migrants," respectively. These abiru were thus not an ethnic but a social entity: though largely of Amorite stock, they constituted that portion of the population unwilling to submit to Amorite rule or, subsequently and more particularly, to that of their nonsemitic conquerors. Instead they chose to serve as roving mercenaries under successive masters, or, alternatively, to band together in order to impose their own rule in areas beyond the reach of the various imperial armies. The latter was particularly true of the wooded hill country of Syria and Palestine. There they maintained a tenacious and much maligned independence even while the great powers were dividing up the cleared lowlands.

Qatna People

Qatna was a trading center near present-day Mishrifeh in western Syria that prospered from the late 18th century B.C. until it was destroyed in the 1300 B.C. after being invaded perhaps by the Hittites at a time when Hittites, Egyptians and Hurrians from the kingdom of Mitanni were all fighting for control of Syria. [Source: Karen Lange, National Geographic, February 2005]

Qatna was powerful enough to have its own king. As was true with other Mesopotamian cultures, the people of Qatna wrote using cuneiform tablets and seals that could be rolled on clay. Located between ancient Egypt, the Hittite kingdom and Assyria, it thrived as long as did through a shrewd system of alliances with its more powerful neighbors. The people spoke Hurrian.

Qatna is being excavated by a team led by Peter Pfalzner of the University of Tubingen in Germany. In the 1980s, the 12,000 people who lived in Mishrifeh were resettled so that archaeologists could excavate the site.

Qatna Cult Feast of the Dead

An excavation of a tomb in Qatna revealed a bizarre ritual in which the living sat down and shared a meal with the dead. From what can be gleaned from the tomb and ancient text, the king of Qanat would descend into the tomb once a month during a new moon with family members and priests. In the tomb the king sat down for a ritual feast with his ancestors in which the dead were honored and fed and the king proclaimed himself the legitimate successor to the throne while he presented food and drink offering to the dead and feasted on lamb, beef, milk, cereals, butter and beer under torchlight

The memorial feast was called a “ kispum". The central act was when the when the king priest gave some food to his ancestors and exclaimed something like: “Come! Eat this! Drink this! And bleed the King of Qatna.” The dead were placed on wooden platforms in an ossuary. In one sarcophagus archeologists found three skeletons but no skulls. Most of the remains were in the form of loose bones scattered around, which suggests the bones themselves may have been used in rituals.

The tomb itself was like an underground palace. A subterranean corridor and steep shaft led to the rooms where the dead were buried, three stories below the ground. The entrance was guarded by a basalt statue of royal statues with eyes inlaid with limestone. Food and drink was offered to the dead in the throne room which had benches for feast participants to sit on. Among the artifacts found in the tomb were delicate-cast golden duck heads and jugs, jars and bowls with evidence of food and drink still in them.

The finding revealed the first direct evidence of a cult of the dead. Before such activities were only known from ancient texts. The ritual is thought to have been an exercise in placating the king’s ancestors to prevent them from bringing bad things like disease and poverty and make sure they brought good things like peace and bountiful harvests.

Qatna

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons except Mashkan, Minnesota State University

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Mesopotamia sourcebooks.fordham.edu , National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, especially Merle Severy, National Geographic, May 1991 and Marion Steinmann, Smithsonian, December 1988, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Discover magazine, Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, BBC, Encyclopædia Britannica, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Time, Newsweek, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated June 2024