The Art of The Middle East - Including
Persia, Mesopotamia and Palestine

Chapter One [cont.]

From 1200 to 606 B.C. the main part in Middle Eastern history was played by Assyria. Lying off the line of march of the Peoples of the Sea, itself therefore undisturbed and freed from Hittite rivalry, it could employ its military machine against any weaker powers that it chose; thus, about 1100 B.C., Tiglath-pileser I could extend his [p. 31] dominions northwards to the sources of the Tigris, could reduce to vassalage some of the Syro-Hittite states up to the Mediterranean coast, could overrun the western edges of the Iranian plateau and finally could obtain possession of Babylon. An Aramaean invasion brought the Old Assyrian Empire to an end, but after 900 B.C. the rulers of the Middle Kingdom recovered most of the lost territories, though Babylon retained its independence until captured in 722 B.C. by the Assyrian usurper Tiglath-pileser IV, who had already subdued Damascus and threatened Palestine; Samaria was captured by his successor Sargon. The following years were mainly taken up by wars against Elam, now in alliance with Babylon. In 689 B.C. Babylon fell and was completely destroyed, only to be rebuilt by the Assyrians as a bulwark against Elam, and in 670 B.C. Esarhaddon added Egypt to his dominions; f urther campaigns against Elam, [p. 32] which included a great battle in which Teumman, King of Elam, was killed by Assur-bani-pal's forces, brought on one more rebellion on the part of Babylon and the city's second destruction, and, in 645 B.C., the capture and sack of Susa. Assur-bani-pal had reached the summit of his ambition and now rested on his laurels. Such inertia encouraged the Medes, wild warriors living in the Iranian mountains north of Elam. They raided Assyria and were crushed; but their king Cyaxares, having profited by the defeat to reorganize his army on Assyrian lines, achieved better success, only to have victory snatched from his hands at the last moment by a Scythian invasion. Those raiders plundered much of Media, then the country districts of Assyria, swept westwards, plundering as they went, to the Mediterranean and into Anatolia, and for about a generation were in loose control of the lands they had overrun; then, their numbers depleted by constant warfare, they--that is, the remnant of them--were driven back across the Caucasus. Cyaxares meanwhile renewed his attack on Assyria, this time in alliance with Chaldaean Babylon, and this time with success. The victors divided between them the provinces of the fallen empire; Cyaxares held the north, and actually extended his power beyond the farthest limits ever reached by Assyria; as champion against the Scyths he secured the whole of eastern Anatolia, including Cappadocia and Armenia, and made the river Halys the boundary between himself and the Lydian kingdom. Not unnaturally, war followed, but after some six years of indecisive combat, in which Babylon intervened on behalf of the Medes, peace was made between the three powers, a peace embracing the whole of the Levant which lasted for fifty years.

The weakness and the downfall of Assyria had encouraged Egypt to try to regain her old position in Syria. Psammetichus began the adventure with the capture of Ashdod, and Necho followed; he defeated Josiah, king of Judah, advanced to and took Carchemish, and received the submission of Palestine, Idumea, Phoenicia and most of Syria. But in 604 B.C. he was defeated at Carchemish by Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon, who recovered the whole country as far as the borders of Egypt. When, soon afterwards, Egyptian intrigue persuaded Jehoiakim of Judah to rebel, a fresh expedition, supported by a Median contingent, put an end to the Jewish kingdom and the bulk of the Jewish population was transplanted to Babylonia. From the Levantine point of view this was a mere incident which only emphasized the general peace. [p. 33]

The successful revolt of Cyrus against Astyages the Mede and the substitution of the Persians for the Medes as the governing people upset the equilibrium of the Middle East. Lydia was the first victim; Croesus was defeated, Sardes captured [546 B.C.], and with the fall of the Greek cities the Persian empire extended to the Ionian coast. Unfortunately for himself, Nabonidus of Babylon had allied himself with Croesus and with Pharaoh against the Persians; that justified an attack and in due course Cyrus, who had long been busy with conquests in the far east, decided, in 539 B.C., to take vengeance. Babylon fell, and with Babylonia, Susiana, Syria and Palestine included in his dominions Cyrus became the sole master of the Middle East.

That vast empire, to which Egypt and later the Punjab were added, was not seriously disturbed either by palace conspiracies such as caused the death of Cambyses and by the subsequent local mutinies or by what must have seemed the minor accidents of the war with Athens. Well organized, and run with due regard to the temper of diverse races, the ponderous machine functioned smoothly enough until it was smashed by the hammer-bows of Alexander the Great. The Hellenistic period meant a break with tradition such as the Levant had never known. Under the Diadochi the Middle East was once more split up into distinct and often warring states, but on all alike the Greek imprint was indelible and the old national characteristics survived merely as different interpretations of the Greek or as new motives for Greek treatment. So vast were the territories conquered by Alexander that so far as the Middle East was concerned interference from outside was almost impossible; alone, an incursion by Gauls into Anatolia, eventually subdued by Attalus of Pergamon, introduced a non-Greek element into a world uniformly Hellenistic. The advent of the Romans meant a political but not a cultural change; it rather emphasized the classical formula that had been imposed on the Orient. It is significant that when the Nabataeans, grown rich by desert traffic and living outside the limits of Roman control, set up a kingdom and built a capital of their own, they expressed themselves in terms of Hellenistic architecture; so too did the Palmyrenes, in similar circumstances, though, as if to insist upon their independence of their great neighbour, they infused Hellenistic art with an exotic taste that was peculiarly their own.

After the constant wars carried on between the rival monarchs of the Hellenistic world the Pax Romana ushered in a period of unexampled prosperity for the Middle East. Actually the wars had been [p. 34] less destructive than might have been expected; they had been dynastic struggles in which the people were little concerned, and it was to the interest of neither ruler to destroy what he hoped to acquire. But guaranteed tranquillity meant wealth and progress. Of course there were breaches of the peace, but they were few and were dealth with rigorously. The siege and destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. was but a local incident; the defeat of Zenobia and the fall of Palmyra in 272 A.D. was a minor event that had no repercussions in Syria generally; the real danger, that of the Parthians, was too far away to disturb men's hearts.

It was none the less real. The wars between the Seleucids and Ptolemy Euergetes had given the Parthians their first chance to proclaim their independence and they gradually extended their power into Media; although defeated in 209 B . C. by Antiochus the Great they finally concluded an alliance with him and, profiting by Antiochus' unsuccessful war with Rome, added Hyrcania to Parthia proper, and, in 144 B.C., Babylon as well. In 12 9 B.C. the last of the Seleucids drove the Parthians out of Babylon and Media but was then defeated and killed by Phraates, the Parthian king, at Ecbatana, and all Syria lay at Phraates' mercy, when suddenly Parthia itself was invaded by the Yue-chi nomads and reduced to anarchy. Mithridates II [124-88 B.C.] restored the kingdom of his forefathers, but in the meanwhile conditions had changed. Rome had entered Asia Minor, as inheritor of the kingdom of Attalus of Pergamon [129 B.C.], and had left in power, as an ally of Rome, Mithridates VI of the petty kingdom of Pontus. Mithridates however started to enlarge his kingdom at the eastern end of the Black Sea, and made an advantageous alliance with Tigranes of Armenia, whose country had long been in the Parthian sphere of influence. When Rome was obliged to put a stop to the agrandisement of Pontus and Sulla marched through Asia to the banks of the Euphrates the Parthians also intervened, proposing an alliance with Rome; it was not accepted. But after the long wars with Pontus and the final defeat of Mithridates and of Tigranes of Armenia, who had supported him, the victorious Roman general Pompey, who had on his own initiative concluded an alliance with Parthia against Armenia, refused to honour his agreement; Parthian enmity against Rome was thus assured at the very moment when the two powers marched together with no recognized frontier between them. In 53 B.C. Crassus in added Parthia and was utterly defeated. Spasmodic invasions of Syria followed, and thereafter the [p. 35] campaigns of Mark Antony, with varying fortune; but with the accession of Augustus peace was made and was kept for a hundred years. When war did break out, over the ever-vexed question of Armenia, neither side was obviously victorious, and Nero was glad to make peace, even at the cost of setting an Arsacid on the Armenian throne; Trajan's attack [A.D. 116], again due to quarrels over Armenia, did gain Adiabene and Mesopotamia as new provinces of the empire, but in A.D. 122 Hadrian abandoned these and made peace with the Parthian king. From 161 to 217 A.D. there was intermittent warfare, each side invading the territories of the other, at the end of which Parthia seemed to have won a signal victory but was in truth exhausted ; in 226 A.D. a revolt by Ardeshir, the vassal king of Persia, put an end to the Arsacid dynasty and to the Parthian empire and substituted for it the empire of the Sassanians.

The first major clash with Rome resulted in the capture of the Emperor Valerian [260 A.D.]; Rome had her revenge when Galerius defeated Narses in 297 A.D. and advanced the Roman frontier to the Tigris. But with the accession of Shapur II [309 A. D.] Parthia was again successful, and Julian's disastrous invasion in 363 A.D. resulted in the surrender of the five disputed provinces and of Nisibis to Shapur. The Sassanian dynasty was now well established and was to endure until the Moslem conquest. [p. 36]

[Woolley, Leonard. The Art of The Middle East, including Persia, Mesopotamia and Palestine. New York: Crown Publishers. 1961.]