December 23, 2024 • 56 mins
Christopher discusses new ideas around the murder of King Sennacherib. Who really killed him and why? Was it a coup? Where was Esarhaddon and why wasn't he in Nineveh? [Much of this first section of the episode was published as part of Episode 71. 8:03-10:30 is not found there. And everything from 25:19 is also new] Next he addresses the question of how the kings of this dynasty ran their empire. What does social network analysis reveal about how they coped with information flow? Who was influential and why did that change?
2:09 prize winner
3:09 regicide
8:04 motives for murder
10:21 what's new?
15:21 who was involved?
19:13 a coup
22:24 propaganda
25:20 dissertation
27:54 how the empire functioned
32:30 new power structures
36:16 rise and fall of the scholars
38:38 why reform?
40:42 Ashurbanipal's relationship with scholars(hip)
46:10 where tablets were found
51:56 interpreting palace reliefs
Music by Ruba Hillawi
Website: http://wedgepod.org
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSM7ZlAAgOXv4fbTDRyrWgw
Email: wedgepod@gmail.com
Patreon: http://Patreon.com/WedgePod
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Jon Taylor (00:13):
Hello, and welcome to the Thin End of the Wedge,
the podcast where experts fromaround the world share new and
interesting stories about lifein the ancient Middle East. My
name is Jon. Each episode, Italk to friends and colleagues
and get them to explain theirwork in a way we can all
understand.
The archives found at Ninevehreveal how the Assyrians ruled
(00:35):
their empire in the seventhcentury BC.Thousands of these
texts have been edited,translated and studied in myriad
ways, but there's still plentyto learn from them. In this
episode, we explore two relatedtopics, a pivotal moment in
Assyrian history was the murderof Sennacherib by his sons. What
(00:57):
new light can be shed on thisevent, and how does recent study
of coups help us more broadly?
What can social network analysistell us about the different
strategies employed by each kingto manage the empire? Our guest
is a prize winning early careerassyriologist who shares with us
some of the insights from hisdoctoral research.
(01:20):
So get yourself a cup of tea,make yourself comfortable, and
let's meet today's guest.
Hello and welcome to Thin End ofthe Wedge. Thank you for joining
Christopher Jones (01:38):
Oh, thank you for having me.
us.
Jon Taylor (01:41):
Could you tell us please
you do?
Christopher Jones (01:44):
My name is Christopher Jones. I’m an
assistant professor in theDepartment of History at Union
University in Jackson,Tennessee. We’re a small school.
I teach quite broadly, but myspecialty in research and my
academic training is inassyriology. And I specialise in
the study of the Neo-AssyrianEmpire in the seventh century
(02:07):
BC.
Jon Taylor (02:08):
We’re talking today because you won a prize in the
summer, didn’t you? Could youtell us, what did you win? And
what did you win it for?
Christopher Jones (02:16):
It was an award from the International
Association of Assyriology forthe best first article. So it’s
a prize they award every year tosomeone who’s published their
first like real peer-reviewedjournal article in the field.
And my article was called … it’scalled “Failed Coup. The
(02:41):
Assassination of Sennacherib andEsarhaddon’s Struggle for the
Throne”. It’s taking a new lookat one of the most dramatic
events in Assyrian history, whenthe Assyrian king Sennacherib
was murdered by some of his ownsons. And there’s a brief civil
war that results, in which theson that Sennacherib actually
(03:03):
designated as his heir,Esarhaddon, defeats the others
and claims the throne.
Jon Taylor (03:08):
There are different interpretations of this event,
aren’t there? So sometimes it’sblamed on one of Esarhaddon’s
brothers. Sometimes Esarhaddonhimself is put in the frame.
Could you say something aboutthat, please? You know, who
dunnit?
Christopher Jones (03:21):
Yes. So for the longest time, the only
account that was extant of thisassassination was from the
Bible. And that was in the bookof Second Kings. It says that
the Sennacherib’s sons,Adrammelek and Sharezer, killed
Sennacherib with a sword, andthey escaped to the land of
(03:42):
Ararat. And you know, when westarted to decipher cuneiform,
one of the first sources relatedto this assassination that was
translated was a royalinscription of Esarhaddon called
“Nineveh A”. We actually havequite a few copies of Nineveh A
now. These were basically massproduced in 674 BC, in the
(04:08):
aftermath of Esarhaddon’s failedinvasion of Egypt. He’s
concerned that people mightbelieve his legitimacy is
somehow in question. That, youknow, losing this war means that
he’s been cursed by the gods.
Something of that nature.
So he writes this document as adefence of his legitimacy on the
throne. But he refers to theassassination in some weird
(04:32):
ways. He doesn’t refer to itdirectly. He just refers to his
brother’s alienated Sennacheribfrom him, and then he marched on
Nineveh and drove them out whilethey were, you know, angering
the gods. People were alwaysstruck that it seemed a little
strange that he’s notidentifying them as killing his
(04:56):
father, which would seem to be avery effective charge against
their legitimacy.
In 1926 Theo Bauer and BennoLandsberger published an article
where they suggested that maybeEsarhaddon had actually carried
out the assassination. Not himpersonally, but through an
accomplice or something, and heengineered this and then blamed
(05:21):
his brothers for it. Now thistheory was mostly put to bed in
1980 when Simo Parpola publisheda new edition of a tablet that
had not been well translatedbeforehand. And the tablet is a
(05:41):
… an investigation into theaftermath. And it describes a
son of Sennacherib namedUrad-Mullissu, which Parpola,
you know, convincingly linkswith the Adrammelek of Second
Kings 19 (05:56):
37. In this tablet, Urad-Mullissu is described as
plotting to kill the king, andsomebody finds out, and tries to
inform Sennacherib. ButUrad-Mullissu finds out that
this guy finds out, and there’sa dramatic scene where some of
Urad-Mullissu’s accomplicesbring the would be snitch into a
(06:20):
room blindfolded. And they tellhim that he’s standing before
Sennacherib and to tell themwhat he knows. And so he says,
you know, your son,Urad-Mullissu is plotting to
kill you. And then they take offthe blindfold, and instead of
Sennacherib standing before him,it’s Urad-Mullissu. That kind of
(06:43):
settled the debate again for awhile.
But more recently, there’s acouple of articles have
appeared, one by Matthijs deJong, couple by Andrew Knapp,
one by Stephanie Dalley and LuisSiddal that tried to revive this
theory. They made a couple ofnew arguments. In addition to
(07:05):
Nineveh A, they argued thatthere’s a Ashurbanipal prism
where he says he executedBabylonian prisoners on a site
where his grandfather had beenassassinated. There’s also
suggestions that Esarhaddonmoved on Nineveh too quickly;
(07:28):
that he wouldn’t have been ableto gather an army and move that
quickly, unless he had advancedknowledge that the assassination
would take place. And so Ididn’t set out to write this
article in this way, but, andyou know, many of these new
articles are relatively recent;they came out while I was still
working on it, so it kind ofreshaped the project. I’d wanted
(07:52):
to do, a project kind ofreassessing all the evidence
surrounding the assassination,and it ended up turning into
partly a scholarly refutation ofsome of these other positions.
Before we come to yourreconstruction, I wonder if we
could just touch quickly onmotives. So it's fairly clear
why Esarhaddon as the next inline might want to hasten
(08:13):
history. But why would hisbrother do it?
Sennacherib originally, hisoriginal plan for a successor
seems to have been his sonAshur-nadin-shumi. And he
appointed his son as king inBabylon. Now, previously, there
had been a local Babyloniannamed Bel-ibni, who Sennacherib
(08:36):
had appointed as king ofBabylon, and he was to be a
vassal of Assyria. But Babylonwas a very difficult province to
rule. It was deeply dividedsociety between the urban
population that tended to be,although not unanimously,
pro-Assyrian, and the ruralpopulation, which was very
(09:00):
anti-Assyrian. And it seems thathe wanted somebody who was going
to be both unquestioninglyloyal, but also more competent
to deal with Babylon. So hereplaced Bel-ibni with his son,
Ashur-nadin-shumi.
Ashur-nadin-shumi was probablyhis designated successor.
Babylon was like a practice runfor ruling the entire empire.
(09:25):
The problem is, though, thatAshur-nadin-shumi in 694 gets
kidnapped, handed over to theElamites during an Elamite
invasion, and he's never heardfrom again. Presumably, he was
executed in Elam. So with himout of the picture, he turns to
(09:45):
... a few months later, seems tohave appointed Urad-Mullissu as
a successor. And Urad-Mullissu,then is Crown Prince for over 10
years. Then he decides suddenly,and it's not at all clear why
from any of our sources, that
Unknown (10:04):
Okay, so it's all hotting up very nicely. So, what
he's going to change his mindand appoint his youngest son,
Esarhaddon instead.
Urad-Mullissu does not take hisdemotion well and plots to undo
this decision by his father.
(10:24):
is your reconstruction, then?
What did your article bring tothe discussion? And what’s the
latest, best idea of what reallyhappened?
Christopher Jones (10:32):
So I would say my article made a couple of
interventions. The first is, Ithink I’ve identified where
Esarhaddon was located at thetime of the assassination. So
it’s clear from Nineveh A thathe’s sent out of Nineveh long
before the assassination. Hesays he was taken to a secret
(10:56):
place. That’s all he says in theNineveh A inscription. And I
think this is really just astatement of thanks to the gods
that he wasn’t in Nineveh. He’ssaying the gods intervened to
protect him, because theydecided that he was destined for
kingship.
(11:16):
The clue that really broke itopen is there are two letters
sent to Esarhaddon after hebecame king from two different
people. One’s a provincialgovernment official, and one is
a scholar who interprets omensfor the royal court. Both of
them refer to Esarhaddon beinglocated in a place they call
(11:43):
“the tower”–isiti or ashiti,depending on which writer is
using it. It’s not clear … youknow, most people who’ve looked
at these letters before havejust thrown up their hands at
where the tower is, but the cityof Dur-Katlimmu on the Khabur
(12:04):
River in what’s now Syria, whichwas a early administrative
centre for the Assyrian rule inthat region. It’s referred to in
Aramaic documents a couple oftimes as Magdalu, which means
“the tower, the fortress” inAramaic. It’s also referred to
(12:29):
an Akkadian as “Birtu”, whichalso means “fortress” or
“tower”. So all of thesealternative names have the same
semantic range. I argue thatesiti is another name for
Dur-Katlimmu in the same waythat it’s called Magdalu in
(12:51):
Aramaic. And these namesprobably all refer to the
citadel towering over the riverand the surrounding countryside.
The location fits very nicelywith the route that Esarhaddon
describes taking in Nineveh A.
He says he went through the landof Hanigalbat, which is an
(13:12):
archaic term for the the Jazirahplain. So that means he would
have travelled north fromDur-Katlimmu up the Khabur
River, and then turned andheaded east towards Nineveh.
This is not a very difficultjourney, so I would say he could
(13:34):
have made it in a couple ofdays. If he’s located in
Dur-Katlimmu arguments based onhim having a rapid reaction time
don’t really hold water, Ithink. And Dur-Katlimmu itself,
we have some evidence that thecity has some sort of special
(13:57):
link with the crown princes ofAssyria. There are officials who
serve the crown prince who arelisted on legal documents from
there. There are legal documentswith a strange formula that says
that the crown prince will bethe arbitrator of any dispute in
this contract. That’s a veryrare legal formula. And then
(14:21):
finally, there was a paper Iheard at ASOR last year by
Laurel Poolman, azoo-archaeologist. She said that
at Dur-Katlimmu there’s a lot ofremains of exotic, charismatic
megafauna, and suggested thatthere was some sort of elite
(14:43):
hunting going on there, whichwould certainly be consistent
with the city being linked tothe crown princes and them being
based out of it, you know, insome capacity. So I don’t think
that Esarhaddon was sent out ofNineveh in order to protect him,
or something like that; thatpeople were so angry at him that
(15:07):
they sent him away. I think hewas sent to Dur-Katlimmu just to
gain some experience ingovernment in preparation for
his taking the throne.
So another intervention in myarticle has to do with the
perpetrators. Obviously, youknow, Urad-Mullissu Adrammelek
(15:29):
has been pretty wellestablished. But the two
accomplices listed in the letterwhere they describe taking the
guy blindfolded beforeUrad-Mullissu. One of these
guys, Nabu-shumu-ishkun, I thinkcan be pretty clearly identified
with a chariot driver ofSennacherib, who disappears from
(15:50):
our sources after Sennacherib’sreign. The other one, the only
the first part of his name isstill extant on the tablet, and
it says, “Sil”. This has oftenbeen reconstructed “Sillaya”.
Simo Parpola did this in 1980and people have just followed it
since. I don’t think that iscorrect. Sillaya” is attested in
(16:17):
other texts as organizingagainst Esarhaddon within the
empire. But they’re from muchlater, and I suggest that the
reconstruction of this nameshould actually be Sil-Ashur,
who’s the governor of Ninevehduring the reign of Sennacherib.
(16:37):
But as I was looking into names,I got the idea that I should
record all the names of militarypersonnel in the legal documents
from Nineveh that appearedduring the time of Sennacherib.
And what I found was there are alot of legal documents of, you
(16:58):
know, charioteers, professionalsoldiers in the Assyrian army
that are stationed in thecapital from the reign of
Sennacherib. But then they alldisappear. There is nobody who
was a charioteer in Nineveh in681 BC, who appears in any legal
documents from the reign ofEsarhaddon. Now for charioteers
(17:22):
outside of Nineveh, that’s nottrue. For people who are
stationed out in the provinces,we have plenty of examples where
they’ve got a legal documentdating from Sennacherib, another
one from Esarhaddon. The othergroup that disappears like this
are officials who controlaccess, like locks and things
within the palaces. There’s a100% turnover there.
(17:46):
By comparison, you know, Iwanted to make sure that
Assyrian kings didn’t just, youknow, bring in new charioteers
whenever they took office, orsomething like a mass
retirement. I looked atcharioteers from the texts
dating from the reign ofEsarhaddon, and found that many
of them do have documents fromthe reign of Ashurbanipal as
(18:07):
well. So the people who wereprofessional soldiers when
Esarhaddon died continued intheir jobs under the next king.
So based on that, I started toget suspicious that the chariot
units stationed in Nineveh hadjoined Urad-Mullissu during or
(18:28):
after the assassination. We’renot just looking at an
assassination now; we’re lookingat a military coup. Then I found
there’s a smoking gun letter. Itwas sent during the reign of
Ashurbanipal, but it talks abouta charioteer. The writer informs
Ashurbanipal that this man hadfled the country during the
(18:51):
reign of your father. So itseems to me that you know, the
charioteer units that joined therebellion either were killed or
executed or fled, or at the veryleast, were cashiered from
service in the aftermath, whichleft Esarhaddon having to
rebuild the chariot corp.
(19:13):
And then my final interventionsare, one, this tablet that
Parpola published, there hadactually been a join made in the
early 2000s by Jeanette Fincke,but she never published it. And
when I was doing research for mydissertation at the British
Museum in 2018 I was able toexamine that and add some new
(19:36):
information from those joins;mostly the names of some of the
guys who tried to informSennacherib of a plot. They were
actually Babylonians. Probablythey were goldsmiths, probably
working in Urad-Mullissu’spalace household, when somehow
(19:58):
they learned about what wasbeing plotted. And the people
who wrote the letter wereinvestigating. I think they were
interviewing members ofUrad-Mullissu’s household, and
they’re pretty incredulous thatthe people that of his household
are not, well, it seems likethey’re saying they didn’t know
anything. And the investigatorsare sceptical that they didn’t
(20:20):
know anything, because threepeople were murdered in order to
cover up the plot before it evenhappened. And, you know, how did
nobody notice? So that added alittle bit.
And then, kind of the finalpiece of the puzzle was bringing
in some studies of modernmilitary coups. One guy,
Naunihal Singh, he did a studyof military coups in Ghana. He
(20:45):
went to Ghana and interviewedgenerals and people who had
tried to overthrow thegovernment and everything.
They’re all you know, retirednow. He was surprised that the
way that generals made decisionsduring a coup was pretty much
entirely based on whether theythought the plotters were going
(21:05):
to win. It wasn’t based on, “dowe agree with this guy
politically?” One general toldhim, “it would be very selfish
of me to throw away the lives ofmy men based on the political
ideology that I support”. Whatthey’re really doing is they’re
watching, and they’re trying tosee if the coup is going to
succeed. And if they think it’sgoing to succeed, they try to
(21:29):
get on its side, right, becausenobody wants to be on the losing
side. And if they think it’sgoing to fail, then they come
out and oppose it.
So coups, Singh argued, are whathe calls a coordination game,
where the plotters are trying togive the perception that their
victory is inevitable. Theiropponents are trying to give the
(21:50):
perception that failure isinevitable. And most people are
kind of sitting on the fencewaiting as long as they can
before they decide which sidethey’re going to support. And I
think we see that happening inthe days and weeks following the
assassination, we have a lot oftablets that record prophecies.
(22:11):
And these prophecies were issuedduring the brief civil war, in
the aftermath of theassassination on behalf of
Esarhaddon. They’re mostlylinked with the Temple of Ishtar
of Arbela.
There’s some evidence thatEsarhaddon’s mother Naqia, was
out helping to organize thispropaganda campaign. And having
(22:32):
prophets say Esarhaddon isdestined to the kingship. I,
Ishtar of Arbela, is going tohelp pull you through. These
things help create a perceptionthat Esarhaddon is going to win,
because he has the gods on hisside. And of course, he
immediately, as soon as he cangather whatever military forces
(22:52):
were at his disposal, startsmarching towards Nineveh. And in
the Jazirah plain somewhere, hemeets a force loyal to
Urad-Mullissu. And there’s onlya very slight battle, and most
of them switch sides and joinEsarhaddon. By the time he gets
to Nineveh, the support for hisbrothers has collapsed. There’s
(23:15):
some evidence that they’re also…Urad-Mullissu is one of the
plotters, but Esarhaddon says inNineveh A that they butted each
other like baby goats in themiddle of Nineveh for the right
to be king. So maybe they’re notas unified in their action.
We see this process play outelsewhere too. The governor of
(23:37):
Ashur has some real decisions tomake, because he’s got to bury
Sennacherib along with the otherkings of Assyria in Ashur. Can’t
sit on the fence on that one,right? You’re either gonna
pretend like he just droppeddead from a heart attack or
something, while his murdererpresides over the funeral or do
(24:00):
something else. There’s anunfortunately very fragmentary
letter that describes himdeploying armed soldiers in the
streets and trying to attacksomebody’s house and some
official in Nineveh and arresthim. And it’s not entirely clear
which side he ended up on, butclearly he had to do something,
(24:22):
and did something. It’s justunfortunately, the letter’s too
fragmentary to be certain aboutwhat.
In the aftermath, I, you know, Ifind this assassination so
important, one, it’s mentionedin the Bible. It’s mentioned in
Babylonian sources, where, inboth cases, it’s seen as kind of
divine vengeance on Sennacheribfor his invasion of Judah in 701
(24:48):
BC, or his destruction ofBabylon in 689. But it also sets
the tone for Esarhaddon’s timeon the throne. He’s full of
paranoia. He’s obsessed withuncovering plots against him. He
has lots of his officialsexecuted. It’s very dark, and I
(25:11):
think that the root is inthere’s a lot of fear on
Esarhaddon’s part that he’sgoing to end up like his father
did.
Jon Taylor (25:20):
Okay, so you touched there on your dissertation. I'd
like if we could to spend a fewminutes talking about that.
That's also on theNeo-Assyrians, isn't it, and
life at court. Could you explaina little bit what your
dissertation was about, please?
Christopher Jones (25:32):
Yeah. So my dissertation was really trying
to understand Assyria's internalpolitics. The kind of thing that
you won't find in royalinscriptions. I wanted to look
at the careers of the officialswho were doing, you know, the
running of the empire.
Fortunately, we have a ton ofsources on this, because we have
about 3800 letters which weresent to Assyrian kings. Mostly
(25:58):
from Nineveh. Mostly from thereigns of Sargon the second,
Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal,although there's a few from
other kings as well. And thetool I ended up settling on to
analyze this corpus was socialnetwork analysis, which is a way
to mathematically chartrelationships, essentially.
(26:25):
The reason this is importantwhen studying an organisation is
that organisations, even veryhierarchical ones, like the
Assyrian Empire, don'tnecessarily work the way you
would expect. Reading some ofthe literature on this, I found
that studies of moderncorporations and things like
(26:47):
that--hospitals--find thatpeople don't usually follow the
organisational chart. In lots ofthem, the organisation might
have a big rule book about howit's supposed to operate. Very
few people have actually readthat book. They just do their
jobs and they learn what partsof it they need to know as they
(27:07):
go. What this means is thatorganisations operate through
informal networks. I mean,anyone who's been in an
organisation knows that peopletalk to each other about what's
really going on and what youneed to know, right. And so on a
(27:29):
big picture, this means that aperson's formal position, like
the office they hold, their jobtitle within an organisation, is
not the same thing as theirstatus. Social network analysis
allows us to bypass the formalorganisational structure and
understand what's actuallygoingon, who the really influential
(27:52):
people are.
Jon Taylor (27:54):
Okay, and what does this tell us then about the
Assyrian court?
Christopher Jones (27:58):
it gave some really surprising results. One
of the the most surprising werethere the two officials who
wrote to Sargon thesecond--Tab-shar-Ashur and
Tab-sil-Eshara. Tab-shar-Ashurwas an official called the
Mashennu, areally high-rankingoffice, has a variety of duties.
(28:20):
And Tab-sil-Eshara was thegovernor of the city of Ashur,
which is, you know, the oldest,most prestigious city in in the
empire. They both wrote a verylarge number of letters to
Sargon. But when I graph them insocial network analysis, they
couldn't be more different,because sheer volume of letters
(28:40):
doesn't indicate influence,right? You know, an email every
day for the next year and youdidn't respond, that wouldn't
indicate that we had a veryclose relationship, right? It
would indicate the opposite.
{LAUGHS} And so Tab-shar-Ashuris a kind of guy that other
people see as influential,because they go to him with
(29:01):
their problems. He has a lot ofpeople writing to him. And then
when you plot this on a network,he's the one who's like central,
connecting them to the king.
Because people see him as havinginfluence when they got a
problem, they know they go tohim because he's somebody that
(29:23):
can help him out, because he'sgot the king's ear.
Tab-sil-Eshara, on the otherhand, hardly anyone connects
through him. He sends letters tothe king all the time. The king
even writes back sometimes. Butother people don't seem to see
him as somebody powerful andinfluential. And so they don't
connect through him to the king.
And then, you know, when youstart to look into the content
(29:47):
of the letters likeTab-shar-Ashur is having things
delegated to him, hugeresponsibilities. He's mediating
disputes. He's traveling allover the empire. Tab-sil-Eshara
is complaining other people arecoming into his province and
doing their jobs without evenasking his permission,
(30:07):
essentially. SometimesTab-shar-Ashur even shows up and
starts doing stuff. That's justa good example of how social
network analysis can revealsomething that wasn't
necessarily obvious, just fromtranslating and reading the
sources.
As far as the significance forthe big picture. You think,
(30:30):
well, this is just twoofficials. What does it have to
do with like understanding thecourse of history in the empire?
I've been able to identify, Ithink it's Sargon the second
that really undertakes a lot ofreforms. And many of these
reforms have been attributedbefore to Sargon father,
(30:51):
Tiglath-Pileser the third. And Isuggest in my dissertation that
the image of Tiglath-Pileser asa huge reformer is something of
a mirage. It seems that hecontinues the administrative
structures that were in placebefore his reign.
(31:11):
So Assyrian politics in theearly eighth century is
dominated by a small group ofvery influential people.
Sometimes they're called themagnates, in literature.
Sometimes they're called theRabiu, the big ones. That's
actually what they're called inAkkadian. And the Rabiu, you
know, there's maybe a half dozenof them at once. They accumulate
(31:36):
power by holding multipleoffices at the same time; being
governors of several provinces,things like that. They set up
monuments, sort of like a king,although they're very careful
not to claim that title. Theyset up palaces and things.
They're extremely powerful.
There's a lot of dispute in theliterature over whether they
were usurping the power of theking or not. I side with Luis
(31:58):
Siddal on this--book on thereign of Adad-narari the
third--that this is a deliberatestrategy of consolidating the
newly conquered empire on thepart of Assyrian kings. We see
evidence that during the reignof Tiglath-Pileser the third,
this system doesn't change. Whenhe conquers new territory, he
(32:20):
adds it to the Rabiu'sprovinces. There's Rabiu who
hold multiple offices during hisreign. They set up monuments.
It's only under Sargon thesecond that we see this start to
end. He takes their provincesand he breaks them up into
several smaller provinces. Youdon't see any evidence of
(32:43):
officials holding multipleoffices at the same time from
Sargon onwards. Assyrians kepttime by naming the years after
prominent officials, and theseare called limmu lists. The
officials in the eighth centuryhave a very strict order
precedents where it's first theking, then these top four rabiu,
(33:09):
then the governor of Ashur, andthen other provincial governors
in a set order. Sargon keeps theorder of the provincial
governors, but he kicks most ofthe top four guys off the list,
except for Tab-shar-Ashur.
So we're seeing him likedevaluing these offices. He's
(33:31):
moving, and I think quitedeliberately, to break up their
power. After that, one of theresults is, all of a sudden,
there's a lot more peoplereporting to the king than there
were before. Instead of a halfdozen guys or so, kings are now
having probably 90 provincialgovernors reporting to them.
(33:56):
Plus all the temple officialsand the palace officials and the
ambassadors and the vassal kingsand everything, right? And you
can only manage so many people.
There's no way you can treatpeople equally. So kings end up
playing favourites. But thesefavourites are no longer linked
to you know, this guy's myfavourite, so I made him the
(34:19):
Mashennu. It's this guy's myfavourite, so he's my favourite.
You could have any sort of jobtitle and be in that inner
circle of people that have aclose relationship to the king.
And what I think this does is itsupercharges elite competition.
(34:41):
Whereas, you know, only a smallhandful of people even had a
chance of becoming a Rabiu, noweverybody who writes to the king
directly thinks that maybe itcould be me. This creates what I
call an information problem forAssyrian kings. Everybody's
trying to put their bestpossible face forward in your
(35:04):
administration. Letter afterletter is basically, I'm the
best and most loyal. Anythingbad that happened isn't my
fault. Somebody else is probablydisloyal. Right? You can put
your best foot forward, takeyour competitors down a notch
(35:24):
and hope to profit. And theproblem is, how does the king
know who's lying and who isn't?
In my dissertation, I saidthere's a couple of strategies
Assyrian kings used for this.
One was intelligence officersinternal security called Sha
qurbutu. We often translate thatbodyguard, but a lot of them
(35:47):
aren't physically located nearthe king, and they're reporting
back to the king on whatprovincial governors are doing.
So you have somebody to watchthe watchmen, essentially. But
who's going to watch thewatchers of the watchmen becomes
the next problem, because we seefrom these letters that the Sha
(36:08):
qurbutus can get corrupted justas much as anybody else.
And then under Esarhaddon, Ithink he turns to scholars--like
guys who interpret omens. Theycan through extispicy, through
(36:29):
astronomy, they can determinewhat the gods have in store. You
don't need to deal with spiesand anonymous tipsters and
stuff. You can just ask the godShamash, and he will write the
answer on your sheep liver as towhether this guy is loyal or
not. And then Esarhaddon's othersolution is his succession
(36:53):
treaty. He decides he doesn'twant to end up like his father,
so he decides to kind of splitthe prize. And his younger son
Ashurbanipal will become king ofAssyria, while his older son
Shamash-shumu-ukin will becomeking of Babylon. He's hoping
(37:14):
that this is going to bringpeace.
It works for a little bit. Iteventually falls apart into a
civil war. He has the entireempire swear to respect this
succession. And the treaty has abunch of different clauses. Some
(37:34):
of them say things like, youwill not plot or even think
about plotting againstEsarhaddon, da-da-da-da-da. But
a lot of them contain a duty toinform. A duty to tell the king
if you have any rumour ofdisloyalty anywhere. And I argue
(37:57):
what this actually generated wasa bunch of bad quality
information. Either people aretrying to take down their
rivals, or, I don't know what.
We've got all sorts of reportsof plots after this point. This
is a point where the, you know,the purges and the executions
start that are recorded in theBabylonian Chronicles. I think
(38:19):
that this attempt to recruiteverybody in the empire as an
informant actually made theinformation problem much, much
worse, and probably contributedto, you know, political
instability and the collapse ofthe empire.
Jon Taylor (38:38):
Wow. Yeah. I was wondering, would this relate to
what you said earlier about theturnover in staff? So is it, do
you think, the case thatSargon's system failed
Sennacherib, and that the peoplewho should have been informing
and keeping control over thepowerful people who were either
part of the coup plot or failedto pick up the correct
intelligence or to pass on theintelligence. And so he turned,
(39:01):
out of necessity, to a differentsolution. Do you think that's
part of it, or is that justsomething else?
Christopher Jones (39:06):
That's a good question. I wish we had more
letters from the reign ofSennacherib to answer it. We
have a lot of letters from thereign of Sargon the second and a
lot from Esarhaddon, butactually very few from the reign
of Sennacherib to really get agood handle on the internal
politics of the empire and hisreign. There is one very
(39:30):
interesting letter that'sactually sent to Esarhaddon.
It's by the same scholar who waswith him in Dur-katlimmu at the
time of the assassination,Bel-ushezib. And he warns him
that during his father's reign,the extispicy experts and the
(39:51):
astrologers made a pact to notgive the king any bad news,
because, I guess they figured itwould be good for their
continued employment to give himgood omens. Now, the problem is,
you can't really hide omens thatare in the sky. So the agreement
was, if a bad omen appears inthe sky, we'll double check it
(40:16):
by extispicy, you know, byexamining a slaughtered sheep
liver. And the extinct experts,if it's a bad omen in the sky,
will conclude that it'sinconclusive. Because you can
fudge reading a liver a loteasier than you can fudge
movement of the planets and thestars. Bel-ushezib is basically
(40:38):
warning Esarhaddon, don't letthis happen to you.
Jon Taylor (40:42):
Gosh, that's really interesting. I'm not sure what
to make of the idea thatscholars are effectively
responsible for the collapse ofthe empire. That's ... {LAUGHS}
When we think about Assyrianscholarship, inevitably, minds
turn to Ashurbanipal, who seeshimself as a bit of a scholar.
How does this play into it? Isthere anything to say about
Ashurbanipal and how that worksat his court?
Christopher Jones (41:04):
I published an article recently as a social
network analysis of the courtscholars. And you know, for a
long time we had a lot ofletters from scholars to
Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, andvery few to any other king. For
example, we have about 1100Sargon letters, and two of them
(41:25):
are from scholars. It's a muchlower percentage. And the
question is, you know, have wejust not found them yet, or were
they never sent in the firstplace? And I think that there's
no real evidence that scholarsletters were separated off from
other letters. So with that inmind, I think, you know, we have
a pretty representative sampleof Sargon letters, at least for
(41:48):
the last for about 710, to 707.
And so I argue that I don'tthink that we're missing
anything substantial.
I think that for whateverreason, scholars were not
heavily involved, not close tothe royal family under Sargon.
And under Esarhaddon, they were.
And I think it has to do withtrying to resolve this
(42:12):
information problem. So thenetwork data from Esarhaddon's
reign shows that half of thehighest centrality people, you
know, the ones that people areconnecting through to get to the
king, are the court scholars.
But under Ashurbanipal, theydecline precipitously. They're
(42:34):
still there, but their statusrelative to other people in the
network drops massively. And Ithink that Ashurbanipal did not
trust them. I don't think hedisbelieved in the basic
premises of divination, but I dothink that he didn't necessarily
(42:54):
trust that they were properlyapplying divination. Thought
maybe they were trying tocontrol him. Maybe they've been
trying to control his father.
So we actually have some letterswhere he's arguing pretty
strenuously. They tell him to dosomething, and he doesn't do it.
Some of them, there's this guy,Akullanu, he gives
Esarhaddon--this is in his firstyears on the throne, like a
(43:16):
really incredible tongue lashingfor someone to be addressing the
Assyrian king as about why he'snot performing a substitution
ritual to avert an evil omenfrom himself.
Now, later on, Akkulanu figuresout which way the winds are
blowing and changes his tune. Heactually has quite a long career
(43:38):
as a scholar, but he's one ofthe few who does change his
tune. There's another letterfrom the 650s where he says
there's an omen about a drought.
And Akkulanu explains toAshurbanipal that this is
actually good, because oursoldiers will fight harder so
that they can capture food andhave something to eat. At first,
(43:59):
he's like, this is an evil omen.
You got to do something. Whyaren't you doing something? Then
10 years later, he's saying,"Well, let's figure out some
creative interpretation for whythis bad omen is actually good".
And I do think thatAshurbanipal--and I'm very
(44:20):
curious where the Ashurbanipalcolophon project, if it's going
to come up with more data thataddresses this question--I do
think Ashurbanipal creates thislibrary and pursues scribal
training, partly so that he cancheck the scholar's work and
develop his own interpretationof these things?
Jon Taylor (44:41):
Yeah. I mean, I would tend to agree. We're not
entirely sure yet, but under theconstruction that I think makes
the most sense, there seems tobe a chronology to the different
colophon types. And I thinkthere's a transition between the
early phase, where it's allabout the assembly of scholars
and the later one where it justdoesn't talk about scholars
(45:02):
anymore, and everything comesthrough him. He's blessed by the
gods with great wisdom and etc,etc, and like that does fit.
Could I ask you something aboutthe publication of your
dissertation (45:12):
when and where and how are we able to read your
work?
Christopher Jones (45:17):
It's under contract right now with SBL
press for their ancient NearEast monograph series. The good
news is this it's an open accessseries, so you can buy the book,
and the series are notinordinately expensive, less
than $100. It's a bargain inacademic publishing, right?
Especially for dissertations.
But you can also download thebook as a PDF completely
(45:39):
legitimately from the publisher.
There's a couple of things I'mchanging up in the book. One is,
I'm adding a section where notjust competition between
individual officials, but achapter on competition between
different sectors of theAssyrian empire. There's a lot
of tension, I think, between thetemple administration, the
(46:02):
provincial government, and thepalace system. They're all
competing for resources andprestige.
Jon Taylor (46:10):
Wow. In fact, I look forward to that. Okay, with
dissertation done and you're atTennessee now. What are you
doing? And what do you plan towork on next?
Christopher Jones (46:20):
I'm going to the ASOR annual meeting. One of
the things I did in mydissertation was I went through
Julian Reade's Reallexikon derAssyriologie chapter on
"Nineveh", where he identifiedcertain catalogue numbers in the
Kuyunjik collection with certainfind spots. I use those to find
(46:42):
out what I could about whereletters were found. Now, the
paper I'm giving, I've got over4500 texts with find spots, or
some idea of a find spot. MaybeI should say, find areas.
{LAUGHS} And I'm trying to seewhat sort of patterns can be
(47:03):
found in this data.
So one thing I found is Sargonletters tend to come from kind
of the central areas of theSouthwest Palace, while
Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipalletters are found in the terrace
area around room 54 overlookingthe river. And I also found that
(47:24):
there are several either likeclear chains of correspondence,
where some of them were found inthe North palace and some of
them in the Southwest Palace. Oractually fragments, where it's
like half the letter was foundin the North palace and half in
the Southwest palace.
So I argue that the only thingthat really makes sense here:
(47:46):
it's not that, you know, whenLayard and the other
assyriologists dug down andfound an archive, you know, that
had been burned in the collapseand entombed there, in you know
the destruction of Nineveh in612 BC. But rather that these
letters had been discarded longbefore 612 into fill layers,
(48:09):
which were being used to raisefloor levels and such as part of
construction projects. This ishow most of the letters that
were found at Nimrud were found.
They were excavated much morecarefully and their
archeological context was thatthey were discarded and used to
raise the floor level of a room.
(48:30):
So I think that the Sargonletters were probably discarded
while Sennacherib was buildingthe Southwest palace. And then
the Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipalletters were discarded, either
late in Ashurbanipal's reign orduring the reign of
Sin-shar-ishkun. They did somerenovations along that room 54
(48:53):
terrace area.
And I think you know, the reasonwe don't have many letters after
Ashurbanipal is they didn'tthrow them out yet, right? They
weren't ...they were too currentto to clean out the files. And
the reason we don't have verymany Sennacherib letters is
because they were probablydisposed of in some other way,
(49:14):
right? If you need more shelfspace, and we're not building
stuff, then there's other waysto get rid of them. And then the
legal texts kind of supportthis. Because we have a lot of
synacth legal texts, but they'reoften found in areas where
Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipalletters predominate. So it's
like Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipalletters, Sennacherib legal
(49:37):
documents. I think what thismeans is legal texts were
retained for a longer period oftime. Most of the Sennacherib
legal texts were written in thelate 690s/680s, so they probably
wouldn't have been used as filllayer in the palaces, because
those palaces had already beenbuilt. But they could have been
(49:57):
thrown out when laterconstruction work led to
emptying the archives.
And then I've looked atscholarly texts as well. There's
kind of three areas wherescholarly texts predominate. And
there's not a ton of cleardifferences between them. I mean
(50:20):
some sites like the room 40/41that's often traditionally the
library of Ashurbanipal, hasmore lexical text than some
other places. But there's alittle bit like some places have
more lexical texts, some havemore prayers and incantations.
Things like that. But it's notdifferent enough that it's clear
we're dealing with differenttypes of archives. So then I
(50:43):
tried to look at colophons.
And I looked at a subset of theAshurbanipal colophons that I
could find, mostly going back toMaximilian Streck's 1916
publication. That's the one thathad the most accession numbers.
And I was able to find about 30that I could get a find area
(51:04):
for. And then I also, forcomparison's sake, I looked at
the colophons ofNabu-zuqup-kenu, who was the
chief scribe under Sargon. Thoseare just all over the place.
There's Ashurbanipal colophons,in, you know, different parts of
the Southwest Palace and theNabu temple and the North
Palace. So no clear patternsemerged there. But we'll see how
(51:28):
it's received at ASOR. If anyonehas any ideas as to what can
explain these patterns. Youknow, whether tablets were
already in a secondarydeposition in 612 or whether
they were, I think Andrew Georgehas an article suggesting that
the Babylonians went throughthem all, and, you know, were
looking for useful intelligence,and threw away all the scholarly
(51:52):
tablets. Something like that.
I also--totally different futureplan--I got a grant recently
from my university to do a studyof Assyrian seascape reliefs. So
I'm going to go to the Louvreand examine the Khorsabad timber
transport reliefs in person, andhopefully make my way to the
(52:16):
British Museum as well, if maybetake a look at some of the early
like Tiglath-Pileser reliefs.
I'm looking at Assyrian views ofthe Mediterranean. And I want to
argue that they deliberatelydepicted the Mediterranean as
quite strange. Some of thesethings have puzzled people for a
(52:38):
while. I mean, the most puzzlingone is the Tiglath-Pileser
relief from Nimrud with a ...
well, it looks like a giantchicken in the ocean. {LAUGHS} I
want to argue that they quitedeliberately depicted the
Mediterranean as an exoticlandscape, And doing so
emphasised the reach of theAssyrian empire going farther
(53:01):
than it's ever gone before.
Jon Taylor (53:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds brilliant. Well,
thank you very much indeed.
Christopher Jones (53:09):
Thank you for having me.
Jon Taylor (53:12):
I’d also like to thank our patrons
Jiménez, Jana Matuszak, NancyHighcock, Jay C, Rune
Rattenborg, Woodthrush, ElisaRossberger, Mark Weeden, Jordi
Mon Companys, Thomas Bolin, JoanPorter MacIver, John MacGinnis,
(53:32):
Andrew George, Yelena Rakic,Zach Rubin, Sabina Franke, Shai
Gordin, Aaron Macks, MaarjaSeire, Jaafar Jotheri, Morgan
Hite, Chikako Watanabe, MarkMcElwaine, Jonathan Blanchard
Smith, Kliment Ohr, ChristinaTsouparopoulou, TT, Melanie
(53:57):
Gross, Claire Weir, MarcVeldman, Bruno Biermann, Faimon
Roberts, Jason Moser, PavlaRosenstein, Müge
Durusu-Tanrıöver, Tate Paulette,Willis Monroe, Toby Wickenden,
Emmert Clevenstine, BarbaraPorter, Cheryl Morgan, Kevin Roy
(54:19):
Jackson, Susannah Paulus, EricWhitacre, Jakob Flygare, Jon
Ganuza, BonnieNilhamn-Kuosmanen, Ben, Michael
Gitlin, as well as those whoprefer to remain anonymous.
I really appreciate yoursupport. It makes a big
(54:39):
difference. Every penny receivedhas contributed towards
translations. Thanks of courseto the lovely people who have
worked on the translations on avoluntary basis or for well
below the market rate. ForArabic, thanks in particular to
Zainab Mizyidawi, as well asLina Meerchyad and May Al-Aseel.
(55:00):
For Turkish, thank you to PinarDurgun and Nesrin Akan. TEW is
still young, but I want to reacha sustainable level, where
translators are given propercompensation for their hard
work.
And thank you for listening toThin End of the Wedge. If you
enjoy what we do, and you wouldlike to help make these podcasts
(55:21):
available in Middle Easternlanguages, please consider
joining our Patreon family. Youcan find us at
patreon.com/wedgepod. You canalso support us in other ways:
simply subscribe to the podcast;leave us a five star review on
Apple Music or your favouritepodcatcher; recommend us to your
(55:43):
friends. If you want the latestpodcast news, you can sign up
for our newsletter. You can findall the links in the show notes
and on our website atwedgepod.org. Thanks, and I hope
you’ll join us next time.
Hello, and welcome to the Thin End of the Wedge,
the podcast where experts fromaround the world share new and
interesting stories about lifein the ancient Middle East. My
name is Jon. Each episode, Italk to friends and colleagues
and get them to explain theirwork in a way we can all
understand.
The archives found at Ninevehreveal how the Assyrians ruled
(00:35):
their empire in the seventhcentury BC.Thousands of these
texts have been edited,translated and studied in myriad
ways, but there's still plentyto learn from them. In this
episode, we explore two relatedtopics, a pivotal moment in
Assyrian history was the murderof Sennacherib by his sons. What
(00:57):
new light can be shed on thisevent, and how does recent study
of coups help us more broadly?
What can social network analysistell us about the different
strategies employed by each kingto manage the empire? Our guest
is a prize winning early careerassyriologist who shares with us
some of the insights from hisdoctoral research.
(01:20):
So get yourself a cup of tea,make yourself comfortable, and
let's meet today's guest.
Hello and welcome to Thin End ofthe Wedge. Thank you for joining
Christopher Jones (01:38):
Oh, thank you for having me.
us.
Jon Taylor (01:41):
Could you tell us please
you do?
Christopher Jones (01:44):
My name is Christopher Jones. I’m an
assistant professor in theDepartment of History at Union
University in Jackson,Tennessee. We’re a small school.
I teach quite broadly, but myspecialty in research and my
academic training is inassyriology. And I specialise in
the study of the Neo-AssyrianEmpire in the seventh century
(02:07):
BC.
Jon Taylor (02:08):
We’re talking today because you won a prize in the
summer, didn’t you? Could youtell us, what did you win? And
what did you win it for?
Christopher Jones (02:16):
It was an award from the International
Association of Assyriology forthe best first article. So it’s
a prize they award every year tosomeone who’s published their
first like real peer-reviewedjournal article in the field.
And my article was called … it’scalled “Failed Coup. The
(02:41):
Assassination of Sennacherib andEsarhaddon’s Struggle for the
Throne”. It’s taking a new lookat one of the most dramatic
events in Assyrian history, whenthe Assyrian king Sennacherib
was murdered by some of his ownsons. And there’s a brief civil
war that results, in which theson that Sennacherib actually
(03:03):
designated as his heir,Esarhaddon, defeats the others
and claims the throne.
Jon Taylor (03:08):
There are different interpretations of this event,
aren’t there? So sometimes it’sblamed on one of Esarhaddon’s
brothers. Sometimes Esarhaddonhimself is put in the frame.
Could you say something aboutthat, please? You know, who
dunnit?
Christopher Jones (03:21):
Yes. So for the longest time, the only
account that was extant of thisassassination was from the
Bible. And that was in the bookof Second Kings. It says that
the Sennacherib’s sons,Adrammelek and Sharezer, killed
Sennacherib with a sword, andthey escaped to the land of
(03:42):
Ararat. And you know, when westarted to decipher cuneiform,
one of the first sources relatedto this assassination that was
translated was a royalinscription of Esarhaddon called
“Nineveh A”. We actually havequite a few copies of Nineveh A
now. These were basically massproduced in 674 BC, in the
(04:08):
aftermath of Esarhaddon’s failedinvasion of Egypt. He’s
concerned that people mightbelieve his legitimacy is
somehow in question. That, youknow, losing this war means that
he’s been cursed by the gods.
Something of that nature.
So he writes this document as adefence of his legitimacy on the
throne. But he refers to theassassination in some weird
(04:32):
ways. He doesn’t refer to itdirectly. He just refers to his
brother’s alienated Sennacheribfrom him, and then he marched on
Nineveh and drove them out whilethey were, you know, angering
the gods. People were alwaysstruck that it seemed a little
strange that he’s notidentifying them as killing his
(04:56):
father, which would seem to be avery effective charge against
their legitimacy.
In 1926 Theo Bauer and BennoLandsberger published an article
where they suggested that maybeEsarhaddon had actually carried
out the assassination. Not himpersonally, but through an
accomplice or something, and heengineered this and then blamed
(05:21):
his brothers for it. Now thistheory was mostly put to bed in
1980 when Simo Parpola publisheda new edition of a tablet that
had not been well translatedbeforehand. And the tablet is a
(05:41):
… an investigation into theaftermath. And it describes a
son of Sennacherib namedUrad-Mullissu, which Parpola,
you know, convincingly linkswith the Adrammelek of Second
Kings 19 (05:56):
37. In this tablet, Urad-Mullissu is described as
plotting to kill the king, andsomebody finds out, and tries to
inform Sennacherib. ButUrad-Mullissu finds out that
this guy finds out, and there’sa dramatic scene where some of
Urad-Mullissu’s accomplicesbring the would be snitch into a
(06:20):
room blindfolded. And they tellhim that he’s standing before
Sennacherib and to tell themwhat he knows. And so he says,
you know, your son,Urad-Mullissu is plotting to
kill you. And then they take offthe blindfold, and instead of
Sennacherib standing before him,it’s Urad-Mullissu. That kind of
(06:43):
settled the debate again for awhile.
But more recently, there’s acouple of articles have
appeared, one by Matthijs deJong, couple by Andrew Knapp,
one by Stephanie Dalley and LuisSiddal that tried to revive this
theory. They made a couple ofnew arguments. In addition to
(07:05):
Nineveh A, they argued thatthere’s a Ashurbanipal prism
where he says he executedBabylonian prisoners on a site
where his grandfather had beenassassinated. There’s also
suggestions that Esarhaddonmoved on Nineveh too quickly;
(07:28):
that he wouldn’t have been ableto gather an army and move that
quickly, unless he had advancedknowledge that the assassination
would take place. And so Ididn’t set out to write this
article in this way, but, andyou know, many of these new
articles are relatively recent;they came out while I was still
working on it, so it kind ofreshaped the project. I’d wanted
(07:52):
to do, a project kind ofreassessing all the evidence
surrounding the assassination,and it ended up turning into
partly a scholarly refutation ofsome of these other positions.
Before we come to yourreconstruction, I wonder if we
could just touch quickly onmotives. So it's fairly clear
why Esarhaddon as the next inline might want to hasten
(08:13):
history. But why would hisbrother do it?
Sennacherib originally, hisoriginal plan for a successor
seems to have been his sonAshur-nadin-shumi. And he
appointed his son as king inBabylon. Now, previously, there
had been a local Babyloniannamed Bel-ibni, who Sennacherib
(08:36):
had appointed as king ofBabylon, and he was to be a
vassal of Assyria. But Babylonwas a very difficult province to
rule. It was deeply dividedsociety between the urban
population that tended to be,although not unanimously,
pro-Assyrian, and the ruralpopulation, which was very
(09:00):
anti-Assyrian. And it seems thathe wanted somebody who was going
to be both unquestioninglyloyal, but also more competent
to deal with Babylon. So hereplaced Bel-ibni with his son,
Ashur-nadin-shumi.
Ashur-nadin-shumi was probablyhis designated successor.
Babylon was like a practice runfor ruling the entire empire.
(09:25):
The problem is, though, thatAshur-nadin-shumi in 694 gets
kidnapped, handed over to theElamites during an Elamite
invasion, and he's never heardfrom again. Presumably, he was
executed in Elam. So with himout of the picture, he turns to
(09:45):
... a few months later, seems tohave appointed Urad-Mullissu as
a successor. And Urad-Mullissu,then is Crown Prince for over 10
years. Then he decides suddenly,and it's not at all clear why
from any of our sources, that
Unknown (10:04):
Okay, so it's all hotting up very nicely. So, what
he's going to change his mindand appoint his youngest son,
Esarhaddon instead.
Urad-Mullissu does not take hisdemotion well and plots to undo
this decision by his father.
(10:24):
is your reconstruction, then?
What did your article bring tothe discussion? And what’s the
latest, best idea of what reallyhappened?
Christopher Jones (10:32):
So I would say my article made a couple of
interventions. The first is, Ithink I’ve identified where
Esarhaddon was located at thetime of the assassination. So
it’s clear from Nineveh A thathe’s sent out of Nineveh long
before the assassination. Hesays he was taken to a secret
(10:56):
place. That’s all he says in theNineveh A inscription. And I
think this is really just astatement of thanks to the gods
that he wasn’t in Nineveh. He’ssaying the gods intervened to
protect him, because theydecided that he was destined for
kingship.
(11:16):
The clue that really broke itopen is there are two letters
sent to Esarhaddon after hebecame king from two different
people. One’s a provincialgovernment official, and one is
a scholar who interprets omensfor the royal court. Both of
them refer to Esarhaddon beinglocated in a place they call
(11:43):
“the tower”–isiti or ashiti,depending on which writer is
using it. It’s not clear … youknow, most people who’ve looked
at these letters before havejust thrown up their hands at
where the tower is, but the cityof Dur-Katlimmu on the Khabur
(12:04):
River in what’s now Syria, whichwas a early administrative
centre for the Assyrian rule inthat region. It’s referred to in
Aramaic documents a couple oftimes as Magdalu, which means
“the tower, the fortress” inAramaic. It’s also referred to
(12:29):
an Akkadian as “Birtu”, whichalso means “fortress” or
“tower”. So all of thesealternative names have the same
semantic range. I argue thatesiti is another name for
Dur-Katlimmu in the same waythat it’s called Magdalu in
(12:51):
Aramaic. And these namesprobably all refer to the
citadel towering over the riverand the surrounding countryside.
The location fits very nicelywith the route that Esarhaddon
describes taking in Nineveh A.
He says he went through the landof Hanigalbat, which is an
(13:12):
archaic term for the the Jazirahplain. So that means he would
have travelled north fromDur-Katlimmu up the Khabur
River, and then turned andheaded east towards Nineveh.
This is not a very difficultjourney, so I would say he could
(13:34):
have made it in a couple ofdays. If he’s located in
Dur-Katlimmu arguments based onhim having a rapid reaction time
don’t really hold water, Ithink. And Dur-Katlimmu itself,
we have some evidence that thecity has some sort of special
(13:57):
link with the crown princes ofAssyria. There are officials who
serve the crown prince who arelisted on legal documents from
there. There are legal documentswith a strange formula that says
that the crown prince will bethe arbitrator of any dispute in
this contract. That’s a veryrare legal formula. And then
(14:21):
finally, there was a paper Iheard at ASOR last year by
Laurel Poolman, azoo-archaeologist. She said that
at Dur-Katlimmu there’s a lot ofremains of exotic, charismatic
megafauna, and suggested thatthere was some sort of elite
(14:43):
hunting going on there, whichwould certainly be consistent
with the city being linked tothe crown princes and them being
based out of it, you know, insome capacity. So I don’t think
that Esarhaddon was sent out ofNineveh in order to protect him,
or something like that; thatpeople were so angry at him that
(15:07):
they sent him away. I think hewas sent to Dur-Katlimmu just to
gain some experience ingovernment in preparation for
his taking the throne.
So another intervention in myarticle has to do with the
perpetrators. Obviously, youknow, Urad-Mullissu Adrammelek
(15:29):
has been pretty wellestablished. But the two
accomplices listed in the letterwhere they describe taking the
guy blindfolded beforeUrad-Mullissu. One of these
guys, Nabu-shumu-ishkun, I thinkcan be pretty clearly identified
with a chariot driver ofSennacherib, who disappears from
(15:50):
our sources after Sennacherib’sreign. The other one, the only
the first part of his name isstill extant on the tablet, and
it says, “Sil”. This has oftenbeen reconstructed “Sillaya”.
Simo Parpola did this in 1980and people have just followed it
since. I don’t think that iscorrect. Sillaya” is attested in
(16:17):
other texts as organizingagainst Esarhaddon within the
empire. But they’re from muchlater, and I suggest that the
reconstruction of this nameshould actually be Sil-Ashur,
who’s the governor of Ninevehduring the reign of Sennacherib.
(16:37):
But as I was looking into names,I got the idea that I should
record all the names of militarypersonnel in the legal documents
from Nineveh that appearedduring the time of Sennacherib.
And what I found was there are alot of legal documents of, you
(16:58):
know, charioteers, professionalsoldiers in the Assyrian army
that are stationed in thecapital from the reign of
Sennacherib. But then they alldisappear. There is nobody who
was a charioteer in Nineveh in681 BC, who appears in any legal
documents from the reign ofEsarhaddon. Now for charioteers
(17:22):
outside of Nineveh, that’s nottrue. For people who are
stationed out in the provinces,we have plenty of examples where
they’ve got a legal documentdating from Sennacherib, another
one from Esarhaddon. The othergroup that disappears like this
are officials who controlaccess, like locks and things
within the palaces. There’s a100% turnover there.
(17:46):
By comparison, you know, Iwanted to make sure that
Assyrian kings didn’t just, youknow, bring in new charioteers
whenever they took office, orsomething like a mass
retirement. I looked atcharioteers from the texts
dating from the reign ofEsarhaddon, and found that many
of them do have documents fromthe reign of Ashurbanipal as
(18:07):
well. So the people who wereprofessional soldiers when
Esarhaddon died continued intheir jobs under the next king.
So based on that, I started toget suspicious that the chariot
units stationed in Nineveh hadjoined Urad-Mullissu during or
(18:28):
after the assassination. We’renot just looking at an
assassination now; we’re lookingat a military coup. Then I found
there’s a smoking gun letter. Itwas sent during the reign of
Ashurbanipal, but it talks abouta charioteer. The writer informs
Ashurbanipal that this man hadfled the country during the
(18:51):
reign of your father. So itseems to me that you know, the
charioteer units that joined therebellion either were killed or
executed or fled, or at the veryleast, were cashiered from
service in the aftermath, whichleft Esarhaddon having to
rebuild the chariot corp.
(19:13):
And then my final interventionsare, one, this tablet that
Parpola published, there hadactually been a join made in the
early 2000s by Jeanette Fincke,but she never published it. And
when I was doing research for mydissertation at the British
Museum in 2018 I was able toexamine that and add some new
(19:36):
information from those joins;mostly the names of some of the
guys who tried to informSennacherib of a plot. They were
actually Babylonians. Probablythey were goldsmiths, probably
working in Urad-Mullissu’spalace household, when somehow
(19:58):
they learned about what wasbeing plotted. And the people
who wrote the letter wereinvestigating. I think they were
interviewing members ofUrad-Mullissu’s household, and
they’re pretty incredulous thatthe people that of his household
are not, well, it seems likethey’re saying they didn’t know
anything. And the investigatorsare sceptical that they didn’t
(20:20):
know anything, because threepeople were murdered in order to
cover up the plot before it evenhappened. And, you know, how did
nobody notice? So that added alittle bit.
And then, kind of the finalpiece of the puzzle was bringing
in some studies of modernmilitary coups. One guy,
Naunihal Singh, he did a studyof military coups in Ghana. He
(20:45):
went to Ghana and interviewedgenerals and people who had
tried to overthrow thegovernment and everything.
They’re all you know, retirednow. He was surprised that the
way that generals made decisionsduring a coup was pretty much
entirely based on whether theythought the plotters were going
(21:05):
to win. It wasn’t based on, “dowe agree with this guy
politically?” One general toldhim, “it would be very selfish
of me to throw away the lives ofmy men based on the political
ideology that I support”. Whatthey’re really doing is they’re
watching, and they’re trying tosee if the coup is going to
succeed. And if they think it’sgoing to succeed, they try to
(21:29):
get on its side, right, becausenobody wants to be on the losing
side. And if they think it’sgoing to fail, then they come
out and oppose it.
So coups, Singh argued, are whathe calls a coordination game,
where the plotters are trying togive the perception that their
victory is inevitable. Theiropponents are trying to give the
(21:50):
perception that failure isinevitable. And most people are
kind of sitting on the fencewaiting as long as they can
before they decide which sidethey’re going to support. And I
think we see that happening inthe days and weeks following the
assassination, we have a lot oftablets that record prophecies.
(22:11):
And these prophecies were issuedduring the brief civil war, in
the aftermath of theassassination on behalf of
Esarhaddon. They’re mostlylinked with the Temple of Ishtar
of Arbela.
There’s some evidence thatEsarhaddon’s mother Naqia, was
out helping to organize thispropaganda campaign. And having
(22:32):
prophets say Esarhaddon isdestined to the kingship. I,
Ishtar of Arbela, is going tohelp pull you through. These
things help create a perceptionthat Esarhaddon is going to win,
because he has the gods on hisside. And of course, he
immediately, as soon as he cangather whatever military forces
(22:52):
were at his disposal, startsmarching towards Nineveh. And in
the Jazirah plain somewhere, hemeets a force loyal to
Urad-Mullissu. And there’s onlya very slight battle, and most
of them switch sides and joinEsarhaddon. By the time he gets
to Nineveh, the support for hisbrothers has collapsed. There’s
(23:15):
some evidence that they’re also…Urad-Mullissu is one of the
plotters, but Esarhaddon says inNineveh A that they butted each
other like baby goats in themiddle of Nineveh for the right
to be king. So maybe they’re notas unified in their action.
We see this process play outelsewhere too. The governor of
(23:37):
Ashur has some real decisions tomake, because he’s got to bury
Sennacherib along with the otherkings of Assyria in Ashur. Can’t
sit on the fence on that one,right? You’re either gonna
pretend like he just droppeddead from a heart attack or
something, while his murdererpresides over the funeral or do
(24:00):
something else. There’s anunfortunately very fragmentary
letter that describes himdeploying armed soldiers in the
streets and trying to attacksomebody’s house and some
official in Nineveh and arresthim. And it’s not entirely clear
which side he ended up on, butclearly he had to do something,
(24:22):
and did something. It’s justunfortunately, the letter’s too
fragmentary to be certain aboutwhat.
In the aftermath, I, you know, Ifind this assassination so
important, one, it’s mentionedin the Bible. It’s mentioned in
Babylonian sources, where, inboth cases, it’s seen as kind of
divine vengeance on Sennacheribfor his invasion of Judah in 701
(24:48):
BC, or his destruction ofBabylon in 689. But it also sets
the tone for Esarhaddon’s timeon the throne. He’s full of
paranoia. He’s obsessed withuncovering plots against him. He
has lots of his officialsexecuted. It’s very dark, and I
(25:11):
think that the root is inthere’s a lot of fear on
Esarhaddon’s part that he’sgoing to end up like his father
did.
Jon Taylor (25:20):
Okay, so you touched there on your dissertation. I'd
like if we could to spend a fewminutes talking about that.
That's also on theNeo-Assyrians, isn't it, and
life at court. Could you explaina little bit what your
dissertation was about, please?
Christopher Jones (25:32):
Yeah. So my dissertation was really trying
to understand Assyria's internalpolitics. The kind of thing that
you won't find in royalinscriptions. I wanted to look
at the careers of the officialswho were doing, you know, the
running of the empire.
Fortunately, we have a ton ofsources on this, because we have
about 3800 letters which weresent to Assyrian kings. Mostly
(25:58):
from Nineveh. Mostly from thereigns of Sargon the second,
Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal,although there's a few from
other kings as well. And thetool I ended up settling on to
analyze this corpus was socialnetwork analysis, which is a way
to mathematically chartrelationships, essentially.
(26:25):
The reason this is importantwhen studying an organisation is
that organisations, even veryhierarchical ones, like the
Assyrian Empire, don'tnecessarily work the way you
would expect. Reading some ofthe literature on this, I found
that studies of moderncorporations and things like
(26:47):
that--hospitals--find thatpeople don't usually follow the
organisational chart. In lots ofthem, the organisation might
have a big rule book about howit's supposed to operate. Very
few people have actually readthat book. They just do their
jobs and they learn what partsof it they need to know as they
(27:07):
go. What this means is thatorganisations operate through
informal networks. I mean,anyone who's been in an
organisation knows that peopletalk to each other about what's
really going on and what youneed to know, right. And so on a
(27:29):
big picture, this means that aperson's formal position, like
the office they hold, their jobtitle within an organisation, is
not the same thing as theirstatus. Social network analysis
allows us to bypass the formalorganisational structure and
understand what's actuallygoingon, who the really influential
(27:52):
people are.
Jon Taylor (27:54):
Okay, and what does this tell us then about the
Assyrian court?
Christopher Jones (27:58):
it gave some really surprising results. One
of the the most surprising werethere the two officials who
wrote to Sargon thesecond--Tab-shar-Ashur and
Tab-sil-Eshara. Tab-shar-Ashurwas an official called the
Mashennu, areally high-rankingoffice, has a variety of duties.
(28:20):
And Tab-sil-Eshara was thegovernor of the city of Ashur,
which is, you know, the oldest,most prestigious city in in the
empire. They both wrote a verylarge number of letters to
Sargon. But when I graph them insocial network analysis, they
couldn't be more different,because sheer volume of letters
(28:40):
doesn't indicate influence,right? You know, an email every
day for the next year and youdidn't respond, that wouldn't
indicate that we had a veryclose relationship, right? It
would indicate the opposite.
{LAUGHS} And so Tab-shar-Ashuris a kind of guy that other
people see as influential,because they go to him with
(29:01):
their problems. He has a lot ofpeople writing to him. And then
when you plot this on a network,he's the one who's like central,
connecting them to the king.
Because people see him as havinginfluence when they got a
problem, they know they go tohim because he's somebody that
(29:23):
can help him out, because he'sgot the king's ear.
Tab-sil-Eshara, on the otherhand, hardly anyone connects
through him. He sends letters tothe king all the time. The king
even writes back sometimes. Butother people don't seem to see
him as somebody powerful andinfluential. And so they don't
connect through him to the king.
And then, you know, when youstart to look into the content
(29:47):
of the letters likeTab-shar-Ashur is having things
delegated to him, hugeresponsibilities. He's mediating
disputes. He's traveling allover the empire. Tab-sil-Eshara
is complaining other people arecoming into his province and
doing their jobs without evenasking his permission,
(30:07):
essentially. SometimesTab-shar-Ashur even shows up and
starts doing stuff. That's justa good example of how social
network analysis can revealsomething that wasn't
necessarily obvious, just fromtranslating and reading the
sources.
As far as the significance forthe big picture. You think,
(30:30):
well, this is just twoofficials. What does it have to
do with like understanding thecourse of history in the empire?
I've been able to identify, Ithink it's Sargon the second
that really undertakes a lot ofreforms. And many of these
reforms have been attributedbefore to Sargon father,
(30:51):
Tiglath-Pileser the third. And Isuggest in my dissertation that
the image of Tiglath-Pileser asa huge reformer is something of
a mirage. It seems that hecontinues the administrative
structures that were in placebefore his reign.
(31:11):
So Assyrian politics in theearly eighth century is
dominated by a small group ofvery influential people.
Sometimes they're called themagnates, in literature.
Sometimes they're called theRabiu, the big ones. That's
actually what they're called inAkkadian. And the Rabiu, you
know, there's maybe a half dozenof them at once. They accumulate
(31:36):
power by holding multipleoffices at the same time; being
governors of several provinces,things like that. They set up
monuments, sort of like a king,although they're very careful
not to claim that title. Theyset up palaces and things.
They're extremely powerful.
There's a lot of dispute in theliterature over whether they
were usurping the power of theking or not. I side with Luis
(31:58):
Siddal on this--book on thereign of Adad-narari the
third--that this is a deliberatestrategy of consolidating the
newly conquered empire on thepart of Assyrian kings. We see
evidence that during the reignof Tiglath-Pileser the third,
this system doesn't change. Whenhe conquers new territory, he
(32:20):
adds it to the Rabiu'sprovinces. There's Rabiu who
hold multiple offices during hisreign. They set up monuments.
It's only under Sargon thesecond that we see this start to
end. He takes their provincesand he breaks them up into
several smaller provinces. Youdon't see any evidence of
(32:43):
officials holding multipleoffices at the same time from
Sargon onwards. Assyrians kepttime by naming the years after
prominent officials, and theseare called limmu lists. The
officials in the eighth centuryhave a very strict order
precedents where it's first theking, then these top four rabiu,
(33:09):
then the governor of Ashur, andthen other provincial governors
in a set order. Sargon keeps theorder of the provincial
governors, but he kicks most ofthe top four guys off the list,
except for Tab-shar-Ashur.
So we're seeing him likedevaluing these offices. He's
(33:31):
moving, and I think quitedeliberately, to break up their
power. After that, one of theresults is, all of a sudden,
there's a lot more peoplereporting to the king than there
were before. Instead of a halfdozen guys or so, kings are now
having probably 90 provincialgovernors reporting to them.
(33:56):
Plus all the temple officialsand the palace officials and the
ambassadors and the vassal kingsand everything, right? And you
can only manage so many people.
There's no way you can treatpeople equally. So kings end up
playing favourites. But thesefavourites are no longer linked
to you know, this guy's myfavourite, so I made him the
(34:19):
Mashennu. It's this guy's myfavourite, so he's my favourite.
You could have any sort of jobtitle and be in that inner
circle of people that have aclose relationship to the king.
And what I think this does is itsupercharges elite competition.
(34:41):
Whereas, you know, only a smallhandful of people even had a
chance of becoming a Rabiu, noweverybody who writes to the king
directly thinks that maybe itcould be me. This creates what I
call an information problem forAssyrian kings. Everybody's
trying to put their bestpossible face forward in your
(35:04):
administration. Letter afterletter is basically, I'm the
best and most loyal. Anythingbad that happened isn't my
fault. Somebody else is probablydisloyal. Right? You can put
your best foot forward, takeyour competitors down a notch
(35:24):
and hope to profit. And theproblem is, how does the king
know who's lying and who isn't?
In my dissertation, I saidthere's a couple of strategies
Assyrian kings used for this.
One was intelligence officersinternal security called Sha
qurbutu. We often translate thatbodyguard, but a lot of them
(35:47):
aren't physically located nearthe king, and they're reporting
back to the king on whatprovincial governors are doing.
So you have somebody to watchthe watchmen, essentially. But
who's going to watch thewatchers of the watchmen becomes
the next problem, because we seefrom these letters that the Sha
(36:08):
qurbutus can get corrupted justas much as anybody else.
And then under Esarhaddon, Ithink he turns to scholars--like
guys who interpret omens. Theycan through extispicy, through
(36:29):
astronomy, they can determinewhat the gods have in store. You
don't need to deal with spiesand anonymous tipsters and
stuff. You can just ask the godShamash, and he will write the
answer on your sheep liver as towhether this guy is loyal or
not. And then Esarhaddon's othersolution is his succession
(36:53):
treaty. He decides he doesn'twant to end up like his father,
so he decides to kind of splitthe prize. And his younger son
Ashurbanipal will become king ofAssyria, while his older son
Shamash-shumu-ukin will becomeking of Babylon. He's hoping
(37:14):
that this is going to bringpeace.
It works for a little bit. Iteventually falls apart into a
civil war. He has the entireempire swear to respect this
succession. And the treaty has abunch of different clauses. Some
(37:34):
of them say things like, youwill not plot or even think
about plotting againstEsarhaddon, da-da-da-da-da. But
a lot of them contain a duty toinform. A duty to tell the king
if you have any rumour ofdisloyalty anywhere. And I argue
(37:57):
what this actually generated wasa bunch of bad quality
information. Either people aretrying to take down their
rivals, or, I don't know what.
We've got all sorts of reportsof plots after this point. This
is a point where the, you know,the purges and the executions
start that are recorded in theBabylonian Chronicles. I think
(38:19):
that this attempt to recruiteverybody in the empire as an
informant actually made theinformation problem much, much
worse, and probably contributedto, you know, political
instability and the collapse ofthe empire.
Jon Taylor (38:38):
Wow. Yeah. I was wondering, would this relate to
what you said earlier about theturnover in staff? So is it, do
you think, the case thatSargon's system failed
Sennacherib, and that the peoplewho should have been informing
and keeping control over thepowerful people who were either
part of the coup plot or failedto pick up the correct
intelligence or to pass on theintelligence. And so he turned,
(39:01):
out of necessity, to a differentsolution. Do you think that's
part of it, or is that justsomething else?
Christopher Jones (39:06):
That's a good question. I wish we had more
letters from the reign ofSennacherib to answer it. We
have a lot of letters from thereign of Sargon the second and a
lot from Esarhaddon, butactually very few from the reign
of Sennacherib to really get agood handle on the internal
politics of the empire and hisreign. There is one very
(39:30):
interesting letter that'sactually sent to Esarhaddon.
It's by the same scholar who waswith him in Dur-katlimmu at the
time of the assassination,Bel-ushezib. And he warns him
that during his father's reign,the extispicy experts and the
(39:51):
astrologers made a pact to notgive the king any bad news,
because, I guess they figured itwould be good for their
continued employment to give himgood omens. Now, the problem is,
you can't really hide omens thatare in the sky. So the agreement
was, if a bad omen appears inthe sky, we'll double check it
(40:16):
by extispicy, you know, byexamining a slaughtered sheep
liver. And the extinct experts,if it's a bad omen in the sky,
will conclude that it'sinconclusive. Because you can
fudge reading a liver a loteasier than you can fudge
movement of the planets and thestars. Bel-ushezib is basically
(40:38):
warning Esarhaddon, don't letthis happen to you.
Jon Taylor (40:42):
Gosh, that's really interesting. I'm not sure what
to make of the idea thatscholars are effectively
responsible for the collapse ofthe empire. That's ... {LAUGHS}
When we think about Assyrianscholarship, inevitably, minds
turn to Ashurbanipal, who seeshimself as a bit of a scholar.
How does this play into it? Isthere anything to say about
Ashurbanipal and how that worksat his court?
Christopher Jones (41:04):
I published an article recently as a social
network analysis of the courtscholars. And you know, for a
long time we had a lot ofletters from scholars to
Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, andvery few to any other king. For
example, we have about 1100Sargon letters, and two of them
(41:25):
are from scholars. It's a muchlower percentage. And the
question is, you know, have wejust not found them yet, or were
they never sent in the firstplace? And I think that there's
no real evidence that scholarsletters were separated off from
other letters. So with that inmind, I think, you know, we have
a pretty representative sampleof Sargon letters, at least for
(41:48):
the last for about 710, to 707.
And so I argue that I don'tthink that we're missing
anything substantial.
I think that for whateverreason, scholars were not
heavily involved, not close tothe royal family under Sargon.
And under Esarhaddon, they were.
And I think it has to do withtrying to resolve this
(42:12):
information problem. So thenetwork data from Esarhaddon's
reign shows that half of thehighest centrality people, you
know, the ones that people areconnecting through to get to the
king, are the court scholars.
But under Ashurbanipal, theydecline precipitously. They're
(42:34):
still there, but their statusrelative to other people in the
network drops massively. And Ithink that Ashurbanipal did not
trust them. I don't think hedisbelieved in the basic
premises of divination, but I dothink that he didn't necessarily
(42:54):
trust that they were properlyapplying divination. Thought
maybe they were trying tocontrol him. Maybe they've been
trying to control his father.
So we actually have some letterswhere he's arguing pretty
strenuously. They tell him to dosomething, and he doesn't do it.
Some of them, there's this guy,Akullanu, he gives
Esarhaddon--this is in his firstyears on the throne, like a
(43:16):
really incredible tongue lashingfor someone to be addressing the
Assyrian king as about why he'snot performing a substitution
ritual to avert an evil omenfrom himself.
Now, later on, Akkulanu figuresout which way the winds are
blowing and changes his tune. Heactually has quite a long career
(43:38):
as a scholar, but he's one ofthe few who does change his
tune. There's another letterfrom the 650s where he says
there's an omen about a drought.
And Akkulanu explains toAshurbanipal that this is
actually good, because oursoldiers will fight harder so
that they can capture food andhave something to eat. At first,
(43:59):
he's like, this is an evil omen.
You got to do something. Whyaren't you doing something? Then
10 years later, he's saying,"Well, let's figure out some
creative interpretation for whythis bad omen is actually good".
And I do think thatAshurbanipal--and I'm very
(44:20):
curious where the Ashurbanipalcolophon project, if it's going
to come up with more data thataddresses this question--I do
think Ashurbanipal creates thislibrary and pursues scribal
training, partly so that he cancheck the scholar's work and
develop his own interpretationof these things?
Jon Taylor (44:41):
Yeah. I mean, I would tend to agree. We're not
entirely sure yet, but under theconstruction that I think makes
the most sense, there seems tobe a chronology to the different
colophon types. And I thinkthere's a transition between the
early phase, where it's allabout the assembly of scholars
and the later one where it justdoesn't talk about scholars
(45:02):
anymore, and everything comesthrough him. He's blessed by the
gods with great wisdom and etc,etc, and like that does fit.
Could I ask you something aboutthe publication of your
dissertation (45:12):
when and where and how are we able to read your
work?
Christopher Jones (45:17):
It's under contract right now with SBL
press for their ancient NearEast monograph series. The good
news is this it's an open accessseries, so you can buy the book,
and the series are notinordinately expensive, less
than $100. It's a bargain inacademic publishing, right?
Especially for dissertations.
But you can also download thebook as a PDF completely
(45:39):
legitimately from the publisher.
There's a couple of things I'mchanging up in the book. One is,
I'm adding a section where notjust competition between
individual officials, but achapter on competition between
different sectors of theAssyrian empire. There's a lot
of tension, I think, between thetemple administration, the
(46:02):
provincial government, and thepalace system. They're all
competing for resources andprestige.
Jon Taylor (46:10):
Wow. In fact, I look forward to that. Okay, with
dissertation done and you're atTennessee now. What are you
doing? And what do you plan towork on next?
Christopher Jones (46:20):
I'm going to the ASOR annual meeting. One of
the things I did in mydissertation was I went through
Julian Reade's Reallexikon derAssyriologie chapter on
"Nineveh", where he identifiedcertain catalogue numbers in the
Kuyunjik collection with certainfind spots. I use those to find
(46:42):
out what I could about whereletters were found. Now, the
paper I'm giving, I've got over4500 texts with find spots, or
some idea of a find spot. MaybeI should say, find areas.
{LAUGHS} And I'm trying to seewhat sort of patterns can be
(47:03):
found in this data.
So one thing I found is Sargonletters tend to come from kind
of the central areas of theSouthwest Palace, while
Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipalletters are found in the terrace
area around room 54 overlookingthe river. And I also found that
(47:24):
there are several either likeclear chains of correspondence,
where some of them were found inthe North palace and some of
them in the Southwest Palace. Oractually fragments, where it's
like half the letter was foundin the North palace and half in
the Southwest palace.
So I argue that the only thingthat really makes sense here:
(47:46):
it's not that, you know, whenLayard and the other
assyriologists dug down andfound an archive, you know, that
had been burned in the collapseand entombed there, in you know
the destruction of Nineveh in612 BC. But rather that these
letters had been discarded longbefore 612 into fill layers,
(48:09):
which were being used to raisefloor levels and such as part of
construction projects. This ishow most of the letters that
were found at Nimrud were found.
They were excavated much morecarefully and their
archeological context was thatthey were discarded and used to
raise the floor level of a room.
(48:30):
So I think that the Sargonletters were probably discarded
while Sennacherib was buildingthe Southwest palace. And then
the Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipalletters were discarded, either
late in Ashurbanipal's reign orduring the reign of
Sin-shar-ishkun. They did somerenovations along that room 54
(48:53):
terrace area.
And I think you know, the reasonwe don't have many letters after
Ashurbanipal is they didn'tthrow them out yet, right? They
weren't ...they were too currentto to clean out the files. And
the reason we don't have verymany Sennacherib letters is
because they were probablydisposed of in some other way,
(49:14):
right? If you need more shelfspace, and we're not building
stuff, then there's other waysto get rid of them. And then the
legal texts kind of supportthis. Because we have a lot of
synacth legal texts, but they'reoften found in areas where
Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipalletters predominate. So it's
like Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipalletters, Sennacherib legal
(49:37):
documents. I think what thismeans is legal texts were
retained for a longer period oftime. Most of the Sennacherib
legal texts were written in thelate 690s/680s, so they probably
wouldn't have been used as filllayer in the palaces, because
those palaces had already beenbuilt. But they could have been
(49:57):
thrown out when laterconstruction work led to
emptying the archives.
And then I've looked atscholarly texts as well. There's
kind of three areas wherescholarly texts predominate. And
there's not a ton of cleardifferences between them. I mean
(50:20):
some sites like the room 40/41that's often traditionally the
library of Ashurbanipal, hasmore lexical text than some
other places. But there's alittle bit like some places have
more lexical texts, some havemore prayers and incantations.
Things like that. But it's notdifferent enough that it's clear
we're dealing with differenttypes of archives. So then I
(50:43):
tried to look at colophons.
And I looked at a subset of theAshurbanipal colophons that I
could find, mostly going back toMaximilian Streck's 1916
publication. That's the one thathad the most accession numbers.
And I was able to find about 30that I could get a find area
(51:04):
for. And then I also, forcomparison's sake, I looked at
the colophons ofNabu-zuqup-kenu, who was the
chief scribe under Sargon. Thoseare just all over the place.
There's Ashurbanipal colophons,in, you know, different parts of
the Southwest Palace and theNabu temple and the North
Palace. So no clear patternsemerged there. But we'll see how
(51:28):
it's received at ASOR. If anyonehas any ideas as to what can
explain these patterns. Youknow, whether tablets were
already in a secondarydeposition in 612 or whether
they were, I think Andrew Georgehas an article suggesting that
the Babylonians went throughthem all, and, you know, were
looking for useful intelligence,and threw away all the scholarly
(51:52):
tablets. Something like that.
I also--totally different futureplan--I got a grant recently
from my university to do a studyof Assyrian seascape reliefs. So
I'm going to go to the Louvreand examine the Khorsabad timber
transport reliefs in person, andhopefully make my way to the
(52:16):
British Museum as well, if maybetake a look at some of the early
like Tiglath-Pileser reliefs.
I'm looking at Assyrian views ofthe Mediterranean. And I want to
argue that they deliberatelydepicted the Mediterranean as
quite strange. Some of thesethings have puzzled people for a
(52:38):
while. I mean, the most puzzlingone is the Tiglath-Pileser
relief from Nimrud with a ...
well, it looks like a giantchicken in the ocean. {LAUGHS} I
want to argue that they quitedeliberately depicted the
Mediterranean as an exoticlandscape, And doing so
emphasised the reach of theAssyrian empire going farther
(53:01):
than it's ever gone before.
Jon Taylor (53:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds brilliant. Well,
thank you very much indeed.
Christopher Jones (53:09):
Thank you for having me.
Jon Taylor (53:12):
I’d also like to thank our patrons
Jiménez, Jana Matuszak, NancyHighcock, Jay C, Rune
Rattenborg, Woodthrush, ElisaRossberger, Mark Weeden, Jordi
Mon Companys, Thomas Bolin, JoanPorter MacIver, John MacGinnis,
(53:32):
Andrew George, Yelena Rakic,Zach Rubin, Sabina Franke, Shai
Gordin, Aaron Macks, MaarjaSeire, Jaafar Jotheri, Morgan
Hite, Chikako Watanabe, MarkMcElwaine, Jonathan Blanchard
Smith, Kliment Ohr, ChristinaTsouparopoulou, TT, Melanie
(53:57):
Gross, Claire Weir, MarcVeldman, Bruno Biermann, Faimon
Roberts, Jason Moser, PavlaRosenstein, Müge
Durusu-Tanrıöver, Tate Paulette,Willis Monroe, Toby Wickenden,
Emmert Clevenstine, BarbaraPorter, Cheryl Morgan, Kevin Roy
(54:19):
Jackson, Susannah Paulus, EricWhitacre, Jakob Flygare, Jon
Ganuza, BonnieNilhamn-Kuosmanen, Ben, Michael
Gitlin, as well as those whoprefer to remain anonymous.
I really appreciate yoursupport. It makes a big
(54:39):
difference. Every penny receivedhas contributed towards
translations. Thanks of courseto the lovely people who have
worked on the translations on avoluntary basis or for well
below the market rate. ForArabic, thanks in particular to
Zainab Mizyidawi, as well asLina Meerchyad and May Al-Aseel.
(55:00):
For Turkish, thank you to PinarDurgun and Nesrin Akan. TEW is
still young, but I want to reacha sustainable level, where
translators are given propercompensation for their hard
work.
And thank you for listening toThin End of the Wedge. If you
enjoy what we do, and you wouldlike to help make these podcasts
(55:21):
available in Middle Easternlanguages, please consider
joining our Patreon family. Youcan find us at
patreon.com/wedgepod. You canalso support us in other ways:
simply subscribe to the podcast;leave us a five star review on
Apple Music or your favouritepodcatcher; recommend us to your
(55:43):
friends. If you want the latestpodcast news, you can sign up
for our newsletter. You can findall the links in the show notes
and on our website atwedgepod.org. Thanks, and I hope
you’ll join us next time.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.