0:13 JT
Hello and welcome to the Thin End of the Wedge, the podcast where experts from around the world share new and interesting stories about life in the ancient Middle East. My name is Jon. Each episode, I talk to friends and colleagues and get them to explain their work in a way we can all understand.
0:31 JT
This episode is another dedicated to the winners of the prizes offered each year by the International Association for Assyriology. We hear from three early career scholars whose research has been recognised for its excellence. We start with the history of the Isin II dynasty, a pivotal moment in Babylonian history, but a poorly documented one. Then we turn to astrology and horoscopes in the late Babylonian period, before ending with an attempted coup that could have taken the Assyrian Empire in a different direction.
1:04 JT
Congratulations to all three winners, and I hope you enjoy this special episode. So get yourself a cup of tea, make yourself comfortable, and let’s meet today’s guests.
1:24 JT
Hello and welcome to Thin End of the Wedge. Thank you for joining us.
1:28 WM
Oh, thanks so much, Dr Taylor.
1:29 JT
Could you tell us, please, who are you and what do you do?
1:34 WM
Yes, my name is William McGrath, and I’m a recent graduate from the University of Toronto studying assyriology, and I’m an early career assyriologist.
1:44 JT
Okay, we’re talking today because you won a prize earlier this summer, didn’t you? So could you tell us what the prize was, please, and what did you win it for?
1:53 WM
Yes, I won the prize for best dissertation from the International Assyriological Association, which they very generously selected my dissertation, which is entitled “Resurgent Babylon: A Cultural, Political and Intellectual History of the Second Dynasty of Isin”.
2:10 JT
Could you tell us a little bit more detail about your dissertation, then? What kinds of topics were you touching on?
2:15 WM
Sure. Well, to begin with, my dissertation is a study of the Isin II period of Babylonian history, a period of 132 years spanning from 1157 to 1026 BC. I have framed my study of the Isin II period as having two major foci: political history, typified by the work of Brinkman; and literary theological innovation, typified by the work of Lambert, which I aim to bring together in a single work, with the hope that these two focuses may prove mutually informative. So to start with, perhaps I could frame the intellectual background of this project–why it made a certain sense for a Toronto student to come to this topic, because, as it turns out, both Brinkman and Lambert had connections with Toronto-based astrology.
3:07 WM
Well, first of all, in 1962 Brinkman completed a PhD dissertation on the post-Kassite period for the University of Chicago. Over the next six years, he then developed a seminal version of this project, which was published in 1968 under the title A Political History of Post-Kassite Babylonia. This work, of course, was the first major treatment of the Isin II period, and remains indispensable today. It’s superbly reliable, cogently argued and with 2195 footnotes, it’s exhaustively documented. Brinkman’s updated work was again conducted at the University of Chicago, which is interesting because his access to the vast reference collections in the Oriental Institute’s files was likely a contributing factor to making his work as thorough as it is. His connections with Toronto were also significant at the time and provided him early access to Grayson’s editions of the chronicle texts, as well as an early involvement with Toronto’s Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia project.
4:12 WM
Secondly, although one would hardly go so far as to characterise Lambert as a Canadian scholar, it is notable that his first assyriological publication caught the eye of Toronto based Hebraist R. J. Williams, and that subsequently, Lambert accepted a position at the University of Toronto, which he maintained from 1955 until 1959. This period inaugurated Lambert’s full time academic career, and it was during his stay in Toronto that he produced his paper, “Ancestors, Authors and Canonicity”, and would have completed most of his work for his Babylonian wisdom literature project at this time. Of course, these, together with several of his later papers, proved foundational for the model of Babylonian religion that I maintain in my dissertation.
4:59 WM
To return to your question, “what was my dissertation about?”, it was envisioned from the start as a re-examination of the Isin II dynasty of Babylonian kings, albeit one that was sorely needed, since it had been 50 years since the last in-depth treatment. So I was able to draw from new textual sources that weren’t available to Brinkman for my look at the political history of the Isin II kings. And this is a corpus roughly 1/3 larger than that available in 1968 in fact, although many of these texts are laconic to a greater or lesser extent. Although my work treats the reigns of all 11 kings of the dynasty in question, it was inevitable that Nebuchadnezzar the First would be a major focus of my work, and this is because of the 54 kings of the post-kassite period, scholars have suggested that the only great king among them was Nebuchadnezzar the First. Further, of the over 100 Babylonian kings to have reigned in the various Babylonian dynasties, Nebuchadnezzar is held to be among the top four Babylonian kings in terms of the importance which subsequent tradition ascribed to him.
6:08 JT
This is quite exciting, then, isn’t it? You have a large number of new sources, and you’re presumably able to say something about one of the key figures in Babylonian history. Prior to publication, are you able to share what some of the conclusions are from your work?
6:23 WM
Certainly, yes. Listeners may be familiar with Nebuchadnezzar the First’s much-discussed victory over the Elamites, and this episode will naturally call to mind that Babylonia, at this time, was not at peace. Rather, it was a time of tension and conflict with neighbours. In fact, the Isin II dynasty begins, and continues for some time, in what has been called the Assyrian-Elamite phase. That is, a time characterised by conflict with both Assyria to the north and Elam to the east.
6:56 WM
One of the major findings I came to is a significant reworking of the timeline for these events, which occur in Nebuchadnezzar the First’s reign. Using newly available texts which provide new data about the timing of key events, I have produced a series of interlocking and mutually supportive arguments which result in the first definite timeline for Nebuchadnezzar’s Elamite campaign. Having established that I, was also able to reassess a series of prior events, such as the prior military action of the Elamite king in the region as being more direct and consequential in motivating Nebuchadnezzar’s ultimate response. I should add, however, that the work is not as much a re-examination of Nebuchadnezzar the First’s reign, as a treatment of the entire dynasty. Owing to the information from new sources and outside of the events of Nebuchadnezzar’s campaign just mentioned, my reconstruction of the dynasty differs from earlier works in several respects, or in numerous respects. This includes the positioning of Marduk-kabit-ahheshu’s ascension to the throne, Itti-Marduk-balatu’s military activity, the demise of Ninurta-nadin-shumi, although this is necessarily speculative, and Enlil-nadin-apli’s usurpation by his uncle, Marduk-nadin-ahhe.
8:19 WM
While it has been the traditional view that the Isin II kings were initially the aggressors against the Assyrian kings, my work establishes that this pattern was consistent from kings two, three, four and five, rather than just kings three and four. In addition, my reconstruction of Tiglath-pileser the First’s military actions against Babylonia contains updates and against previous accounts, I have argued that there was no Assyro-Babylonian clash in the reign of Adad-apla-iddina. In summary, my look at the political history of the dynasty has put forward a new formulation of the span of Babylonian history for consideration. I should add that I am indebted to several generations of archaeologists, curators, and philologists for making the contributions that I depended on.
9:10 JT
I’m very much looking forward to reading that. One of the benefits of the dissertation prize is the facility to help with the publication. So are you able to say what your plans are for this?
9:22 WM
Well, yes, I’m currently working to refine my dissertation and to selectively edit it down to a format which would be more applicable to a published book. I think because I was following a work that was particularly exhaustive, that is Brinkman’s 1968 treatment of this period, I sort of endeavoured to be as exhaustive as I could be as well. But this resulted in a very long dissertation with a lot of footnotes. So I see now that there is a lot of editing that I should do in order to make a more streamlined and readable work that would appeal more to publishers.
9:57 WM
In addition to that, after I finished my dissertation, several esteemed and authoritative scholars wrote to me and have generously provided critique and suggestions for revisions. In addition, they have provided me with information about numerous texts pertaining to the reigns of Nebuchadnezzar the First and Adad-apla-iddina that remain unpublished and that I had not been aware of at the time of my work. So of course, these are for the most part, administrative texts, which would probably just contain royal titles or statements of affiliation. But still, this counts as very appealing and important information for the study of a dynasty that is, in fact, poorly documented on as a whole. So I’m beyond grateful to these scholars for generously sharing, and I would want to work this information over thoroughly in the course of revising my dissertation for publication.
10:48 JT
Yeah, good luck. That sounds very interesting indeed. That must presumably take up rather a lot of your time. But if you have any time left over, and if you can envisage the period after the dissertation is published, is there anything else you’re working on or that you’d like to work on next?
11:05 WM
Oh, yes. Well, thanks for asking. Yeah. At the current moment, indeed, I am most focused on this material that would complement the revision of my dissertation, the good number of unpublished texts relating to the Isin II kings. Before getting there, I am thinking that I will produce a paper size study of this new material that could later be incorporated into the revised book edition. To that end, you know, curators at Yale have been very generous and forthcoming in providing photographs of a number of tablets, and I am very thankful for this. But I still have a good amount of legwork to do in reaching out to other collections elsewhere, and inquiring as to whether I might obtain permission to work with further Isin II period texts.
11:47 WM
Apart from this, I am developing a project that will examine a selection of Kassite administrative texts. This came about from considerations of the Middle Babylonian text publications, and the state of the publications that I observed in the course of my dissertation work. At which point, it became apparent to me that this area of the field remains somewhat underdeveloped. I’ve been in touch with Grant Frame and Jonathan Tenney, and they have kindly shared some insights with me. And as a result, I’m weighing my approach. There are, of course, many ways that one could come to a corpus as large and as significant as the Kassite administrative text from Nippur. I also note that there is a current upsurge in innovative and interesting Kassite period scholarship right now. And the amazing work being done at your Corpus of Seal Inscriptions of the Kassite period is a great example of that.
12:42 JT
Oh gosh, that’s very kind. Good luck with your work. Congratulations on your prize, and thank you very much for talking about it today.
12:48 WM
Sure. Well, thanks so much for having me. Like I said, I really enjoyed the opportunity to discuss this. And if I could, I would just quickly like to thank my supervisors, Professor Beaulieu and Professor Baker, as well as Professor Benjamin Foster for suggesting that I apply for the IAA award in the first place. In addition, I’d just like to quickly thank the IAA review panel for selecting my dissertation, of course. Finally, thank you very much again for having me on, Dr. Taylor.
13:12 JT
It’s been a pleasure. Thank you again.
13:14 JT
At this point, I must make a confession. I failed to record the question where I ask my next guest to introduce themself. My apologies to her and to you for that. So I’ll do that on her behalf now. We hear next from Alessia Pilloni, who is a PhD student at the Frei Universitaet Berlin.
13:45 JT
Hello and welcome to Thin End of the Wedge. Thank you for joining us.
13:49 AP
Hello, thank you so much for inviting me.
13:51 JT
We’ve invited you on because you won a prize this summer. Could you start please by telling us what the prize was that you won and what you won it for?
13:59 AP
Yes. So last summer, at the Rencontre, I won the runner-up prize for the best first article. The topic of my paper was the astrological schemes behind these two mysterious astrological terminology that are bit nisirtu and KI in the Babylonian horoscopes.
14:20 JT
And where did you publish that article?
14:22 AP
I published it in the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History, 2024.
14:27 JT
Well, first off, congratulations. Before we dig into your work in detail, perhaps you could set the scene for us and explain a little bit about what horoscopes are and the current state of research before your work, please?
14:41 AP
The starting point of my research is an edition that was already made in the ’90s by Francesca Rochberg. Actually, there was already an edition made by Abraham Sachs in the ’50s, but Francesca Rochberg added some more context, a nice introduction, and she clarified many of the things that were not clarified by Abraham Sachs before. So what is a horoscope? And why do we call these texts horoscopes? Well, we know that modern horoscopes are a very popular practice lately, and they actually derive from the Babylonian ones. We can say that the Babylonian horoscopes were the ancestors of our modern horoscopes.
15:21 AP
So what are these horoscopes? We can define them as horoscopes because they record mainly two informations. One is the child’s birth, the date of birth of the child, and the second one is the position of the planets at the time of that birth. So we can imagine sort of a map of the sky in a precise time. We might think that these positions were observed, but in fact, if we think about it, at any time, if we go out and look at the sky, we will never be able to see all the planets together. So either the sun is out, so it’s bright, and we cannot see the other planets. And even if it’s dark, even if the child was born at night, there is no way we can see all the planets together. So actually, the positions that we see in the horoscopes were all computed. In fact, we are already in the Late Babylonian period, so from the fourth century BC onwards, where the Babylonian scholars were already able to compute these positions. They already had a lot of algorithms and tools on how to compute the occurrences of planetary phenomena and also the exact position at any time that they wanted to. So that’s what they did for the horoscopes.
15:27 JT
There is a larger question, isn’t there, with omens and this kind of material. But if you’re calculating things and they’re predictable, why do they have meaning? And perhaps, in the case of astrology, that is what gives it the meaning?
16:53 AP
In the few cases where we have some prognostication written down in the tablet, they’re actually all positive. And they come after planetary position. So we have this horoscope from Uruk saying that a planet is in its KI, so in its place, and then some positive predictions follow. In this case, for example, I argue that the positive predictions are because the planet is in its triplicity. So the zodiacal position of this planet is part of the triplicity that belongs to that planet. So this gives an outcome. What I can say more about this is that how the prognostication is structured reminds us of the astral divination. So, for example, Enuma Anu Enlil.
17:45 JT
The horoscopes are quite late creations, aren’t they? But the names of … can we call these “signs” … are older?
17:51 AP
Yes. So the horoscopes are, in a way, an outcome of what astronomers and astrologers in Babylonia were already doing for many years. They started with astral divination, which is the old way of looking at the sky. So every event in the sky corresponded to something on Earth. But by the fourth century BC, they already had observed enough to be able to predict the occurrences of heavenly phenomena. And they already invented algorithms and other tools on how to predict these phenomena, like in the future, at any time. So I think that at some point they just combined the fact that you can associate events in the sky and on Earth with the fact that you could predict them.
18:42 AP
The problem with these horoscopes is that we don’t have many mathematical astronomical sources for that, meaning that the main interest of mathematical astronomy is actually not calculating the exact position of the planet in every moment, but rather the future occurrences of the same phenomenon. That could be, I don’t know, the appearance of a planet in the eastern horizon. But we have some of these texts that calculate the exact position of the planet at given moments, and these were probably the sources for the horoscopes. But as I said before, we don’t really know what is the outcome of the horoscopes. It’s just a record of a date of birth of a child that sometimes has a name, sometimes it doesn’t. There are not a lot of interpretation of the events described in the tablets.
19:37 JT
That’s a shame, isn’t it, because I was going to ask, what do you do with these things? If there are very few prognostications, you don’t learn what the fate of your child is, I guess you can, you can explain it orally?
19:48 AP
Exactly, that’s my understanding. Probably they just serve as a scheme for the astrologer to actually explain the outcome, the prognostication, to the client. If we can talk about clients, because we don’t know that either.
20:03 JT
Would people have star signs, as we would think of it? So would someone say, “Oh, I’m a Capricorn”, and that would convey some kind of meaning. Would they consider themselves to be a type of person based on when they were born?
20:17 AP
Yeah, that’s very interesting. Probably the solar zodiacal sign, so where the sun was in the moment where we were born was not that important for them. They say that a planet is in a particular zodiacal sign. What does that mean? Because now we associate a zodiacal sign with being completely astrological. But actually the purpose of the zodiac was astronomy. So astronomical computation, mathematical astronomy. The zodiac, in fact, is ideal division of the path of the sun. The path of the sun sounds maybe a little bit awkward or weird to a modern audience, because we know that the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, but is the other way around. But for the Babylonians, that was not a given. They thought that the sun was moving around the Earth.
21:09 AP
We also know that a year for a Babylonian lasted about 360 days, and that’s how they divided the path of the sun, because the sun is moving little by little every day for 360 days, until returning to the same position. And that is exactly the zodiac. So the division of this path. Since 360 is a little bit of a big number, then they divide it into 12. That 12 are the zodiacal signs as well as the months of the year. And each zodiacal sign is divided into 30 degrees, as well as a month is divided into 30 days. So with this amazing tool, this amazing coordinate system, they were able to compute the planetary position, even if they couldn’t observe them.
21:57 AP
And apart from these two data, so the date of birth of the child and the position of the planets, we also have some other information, but we’re not diving into that. I can just say some of the horoscopes from Babylon record also the occurrences of eclipses, of equinoxes and solstices that happen close to the date of birth. And, for example, some of the horoscopes from Uruk record the position of the moon and the direction of the position of the moon at the time of birth. So whether it was going upward or downward. All these data were already clarified by Rochberg and also others.
22:37 AP
But we still have two mysterious elements in these horoscopes that consists of two terms. The bit nisirtu, which is the “house of secrecy”, literally, or the “house of protection”, according to some latest interpretations, that is only found in the horoscopes coming from Babylon, from the city of Babylon. And then we have another term that is the KI. It’s a Sumerian word, and in Akkadian it would be ashru, which means “place”, and nobody had an idea on what they meant, because this terminology appears in other texts. But in other texts, it has a clear context and a clear meaning, whereas in the horoscopes, we have no idea what it meant.
23:20 JT
What is the solution to these two terms?
23:23 AP
So bit nisirtu is this term that we only find in the horoscopes from Babylon. Not in all of them, but is exclusive of this corpus. So scholars are already well aware that bit nisirtu is actually connected to very well-known astrological concept that is well developed also in Greek astrology, that is that of the exaltation. In Greek it is called hypsoma. And is the position where a planet as the most powerful influence. This concept already existed, and it originated in Babylonia. The only problem is, it is not applicable to the horoscopes. So we said that a planet has a precise position where it has its most powerful influence. So, for example, we have Jupiter in the constellation of Cancer, and that’s where Jupiter has its most powerful influence. But then in the horoscope, whenever we find this terminology, like bit nisirtu of a certain planet, it’s never this exaltation. It’s never connected to the exaltation. It’s not the most powerful position of that planet. So that’s already a sign that for the horoscope, this meaning, this application of the exaltation, is not valid. So we need to find another one.
24:39 AP
And the same goes for KI. KI has such a broad range of meanings. It was suggested by Brown that it might refer to the ascendant. Maybe some of you that are familiar with modern astrology know what an ascendant is. It’s actually the zodiacal sign rising at the horizon at the time when we are born. But that’s probably, unfortunately, not the case. So even in this context, we need to find another meaning for this term. It’s not referred to the ascendant, nor to any other well-known concepts.
25:16 AP
So here comes my suggestion: looking at other texts and other compendia from Mesopotamia, even from earlier astral science texts, I suggested these two terms are connected to the triplicities. So this is quite hard to imagine, but let’s give it a try. Let’s imagine that we have a circle, and this circle is divided into 12 equal parts. I told you before that the Zodiac is the division of the path of the sun into 12 equal parts. Each of the parts correspond to one zodiacal sign, or one month, because they are the same, they are associated. And Babylonians were really aware of this. So we can imagine that the first month, nisannu, corresponds to the first zodiacal sign, which is Ares, and the second month to the second sign and so on. In the triplicity scheme, months, or zodiacal signs, are arranged in four groups of three, so that their distance is always four months or signs. That’s quite complicated, but if we want to put it in a easy way, we can say that they form triangles in a circle. And each of these triplicities is assigned to a different planet. And this is probably what these terminologies are referred to. But there are different applications of this scheme. In one case, the bit nisirtu of a certain planet is associated to the month where the solstice or equinox that happens closest to the date of birth is happening.
26:51 JT
Was this just an article you wrote as a single piece of work, or does this belong to a larger piece of research for you?
26:58 AP
Yes, yes, it belongs to my research interest, but I have to say it was not expected. I’m still doing my PhD. I’m halfway through it, and I’m investigating the differences between the astral science texts from Uruk and Babylon. Why these two cities? Because this is where we have all the text pertaining astral science in the Late Babylonian period. So we also have mathematical astronomy, other forms of astrology, some calendrical texts, observation and such.
27:33 AP
One year ago, I was looking at the horoscopes as a genre of astrology in the Late Babylonian period. And I was looking only at the differences between the texts from Uruk and Babylon and see if I can detect how astral knowledge was transmitted between these two cities and how they implemented each other. And then I got into the terminology. And as I said at the beginning, they differ between the two cities. We have bit nisirtu only in Babylon and KI only in Uruk. So I was mainly interested in why they were using two different terminology. And then I looked at some other sources, and I found out that actually I could find a possible solution. Or, as far as we know, we don’t know, if we find other horoscopes, we might change our view, but that’s … that’s what I was able to detect so far. So yeah, it is part of my project on astral knowledge transfer in Late Babylonia. And also part of another bigger project with this, which is Zodiac: Ancient Astral Science in Transformation, led by Matthieu Ossendrijver, which is also my supervisor. Where we, as the title, says, investigate transformation in astral sciences in Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
28:50 JT
Well, congratulations again. This is fascinating stuff. I look forward to the results of your PhD. Good luck with that. And thank you for explaining about your work.
29:00 AP
Thanks a lot.
29:10 JT
Hello and welcome to Thin End of the Wedge. Thank you for joining us.
29:14 CJ
Thank you for having me.
29:16 JT
Could you tell us please, who are you and what do you do?
29:20 CJ
My name is Christopher Jones. I’m an assistant professor in the Department of History at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. We’re a small school. I teach quite broadly, but my specialty in research and my academic training is in assyriology. And I specialise in the study of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the seventh century BC.
29:44 JT
We’re talking today because you won a prize in the summer, didn’t you? Could you tell us, what did you win? And what did you win it for?
29:52 CJ
It was an award from the International Association of Assyriology for the best first article. So it’s a prize they award every year to someone who’s published their first like real peer-reviewed journal article in the field. And my article was called … it’s called “Failed Coup. The Assassination of Sennacherib and Esarhaddon’s Struggle for the Throne”. It’s taking a new look at one of the most dramatic events in Assyrian history, when the Assyrian king Sennacherib was murdered by some of his own sons. And there’s a brief civil war that results, in which the son that Sennacherib actually designated as his heir, Esarhaddon, defeats the others and claims the throne.
30:45 JT
There are different interpretations of this event, aren’t there? So sometimes it’s blamed on one of Esarhaddon’s brothers. Sometimes Esarhaddon himself is put in the frame. Could you say something about that, please? You know, who dunnit?
30:57 CJ
Yes. So for the longest time, the only account that was extant of this assassination was from the Bible. And that was in the book of Second Kings. It says that the Sennacherib’s sons, Adrammelek and Sharezer, killed Sennacherib with a sword, and they escaped to the land of Ararat. And you know, when we started to decipher cuneiform, one of the first sources related to this assassination that was translated was a royal inscription of Esarhaddon called “Nineveh A”. We actually have quite a few copies of Nineveh A now. These were basically mass produced in 674 BC, in the aftermath of Esarhaddon’s failed invasion of Egypt. He’s concerned that people might believe his legitimacy is somehow in question. That, you know, losing this war means that he’s been cursed by the gods. Something of that nature.
31:57 CJ
So he writes this document as a defence of his legitimacy on the throne. But he refers to the assassination in some weird ways. He doesn’t refer to it directly. He just refers to his brother’s alienated Sennacherib from him, and then he marched on Nineveh and drove them out while they were, you know, angering the gods. People were always struck that it seemed a little strange that he’s not identifying them as killing his father, which would seem to be a very effective charge against their legitimacy.
32:38 CJ
In 1926 Theo Bauer and Benno Landsberger published an article where they suggested that maybe Esarhaddon had actually carried out the assassination. Not him personally, but through an accomplice or something, and he engineered this and then blamed his brothers for it. Now this theory was mostly put to bed in 1980 when Simo Parpola published a new edition of a tablet that had not been well translated beforehand. And the tablet is a … an investigation into the aftermath. And it describes a son of Sennacherib named Urad-Mullissu, which Parpola, you know, convincingly links with the Adrammelek of Second Kings 19:37. In this tablet, Urad-Mullissu is described as plotting to kill the king, and somebody finds out, and tries to inform Sennacherib. But Urad-Mullissu finds out that this guy finds out, and there’s a dramatic scene where some of Urad-Mullissu’s accomplices bring the would be snitch into a room blindfolded. And they tell him that he’s standing before Sennacherib and to tell them what he knows. And so he says, you know, your son, Urad-Mullissu is plotting to kill you. And then they take off the blindfold, and instead of Sennacherib standing before him, it’s Urad-Mullissu. That kind of settled the debate again for a while.
34:22 CJ
But more recently, there’s a couple of articles have appeared, one by Matthijs de Jong, couple by Andrew Knapp, one by Stephanie Dalley and Luis Siddal that tried to revive this theory. They made a couple of new arguments. In addition to Nineveh A, they argued that there’s a Ashurbanipal prism where he says he executed Babylonian prisoners on a site where his grandfather had been assassinated. There’s also suggestions that Esarhaddon moved on Nineveh too quickly; that he wouldn’t have been able to gather an army and move that quickly, unless he had advanced knowledge that the assassination would take place. And so I didn’t set out to write this article in this way, but, and you know, many of these new articles are relatively recent; they came out while I was still working on it, so it kind of reshaped the project. I’d wanted to do, a project kind of reassessing all the evidence surrounding the assassination, and it ended up turning into partly a scholarly refutation of some of these other positions.
35:40 JT
What is your reconstruction, then? What did your article bring to the discussion? And what’s the latest, best idea of what really happened?
35:48 CJ
So I would say my article made a couple of interventions. The first is, I think I’ve identified where Esarhaddon was located at the time of the assassination. So it’s clear from Nineveh A that he’s sent out of Nineveh long before the assassination. He says he was taken to a secret place. That’s all he says in the Nineveh A inscription. And I think this is really just a statement of thanks to the gods that he wasn’t in Nineveh. He’s saying the gods intervened to protect him, because they decided that he was destined for kingship.
36:32 CJ
The clue that really broke it open is there are two letters sent to Esarhaddon after he became king from two different people. One’s a provincial government official, and one is a scholar who interprets omens for the royal court. Both of them refer to Esarhaddon being located in a place they call “the tower”–isiti or ashiti, depending on which writer is using it. It’s not clear … you know, most people who’ve looked at these letters before have just thrown up their hands at where the tower is, but the city of Dur-Katlimmu on the Khabur River in what’s now Syria, which was a early administrative centre for the Assyrian rule in that region. It’s referred to in Aramaic documents a couple of times as Magdalu, which means “the tower, the fortress” in Aramaic. It’s also referred to an Akkadian as “Birtu”, which also means “fortress” or “tower”. So all of these alternative names have the same semantic range. I argue that esiti is another name for Dur-Katlimmu in the same way that it’s called Magdalu in Aramaic. And these names probably all refer to the citadel towering over the river and the surrounding countryside.
38:16 CJ
The location fits very nicely with the route that Esarhaddon describes taking in Nineveh A. He says he went through the land of Hanigalbat, which is an archaic term for the the Jazirah plain. So that means he would have travelled north from Dur-Katlimmu up the Khabur River, and then turned and headed east towards Nineveh. This is not a very difficult journey, so I would say he could have made it in a couple of days. If he’s located in Dur-Katlimmu arguments based on him having a rapid reaction time don’t really hold water, I think. And Dur-Katlimmu itself, we have some evidence that the city has some sort of special link with the crown princes of Assyria. There are officials who serve the crown prince who are listed on legal documents from there. There are legal documents with a strange formula that says that the crown prince will be the arbitrator of any dispute in this contract. That’s a very rare legal formula. And then finally, there was a paper I heard at ASOR last year by Laurel Poolman, a zoo-archaeologist. She said that at Dur-Katlimmu there’s a lot of remains of exotic, charismatic megafauna, and suggested that there was some sort of elite hunting going on there, which would certainly be consistent with the city being linked to the crown princes and them being based out of it, you know, in some capacity. So I don’t think that Esarhaddon was sent out of Nineveh in order to protect him, or something like that; that people were so angry at him that they sent him away. I think he was sent to Dur-Katlimmu just to gain some experience in government in preparation for his taking the throne.
40:37 CJ
So another intervention in my article has to do with the perpetrators. Obviously, you know, Urad-Mullissu Adrammelek has been pretty well established. But the two accomplices listed in the letter where they describe taking the guy blindfolded before Urad-Mullissu. One of these guys, Nabu-shumu-ishkun, I think can be pretty clearly identified with a chariot driver of Sennacherib, who disappears from our sources after Sennacherib’s reign. The other one, the only the first part of his name is still extant on the tablet, and it says, “Sil”. This has often been reconstructed “Sillaya”. Simo Parpola did this in 1980 and people have just followed it since. I don’t think that is correct. Sillaya” is attested in other texts as organizing against Esarhaddon within the empire. But they’re from much later, and I suggest that the reconstruction of this name should actually be Sil-Ashur, who’s the governor of Nineveh during the reign of Sennacherib.
41:54 CJ
But as I was looking into names, I got the idea that I should record all the names of military personnel in the legal documents from Nineveh that appeared during the time of Sennacherib. And what I found was there are a lot of legal documents of, you know, charioteers, professional soldiers in the Assyrian army that are stationed in the capital from the reign of Sennacherib. But then they all disappear. There is nobody who was a charioteer in Nineveh in 681 BC, who appears in any legal documents from the reign of Esarhaddon. Now for charioteers outside of Nineveh, that’s not true. For people who are stationed out in the provinces, we have plenty of examples where they’ve got a legal document dating from Sennacherib, another one from Esarhaddon. The other group that disappears like this are officials who control access, like locks and things within the palaces. There’s a 100% turnover there.
43:02 CJ
By comparison, you know, I wanted to make sure that Assyrian kings didn’t just, you know, bring in new charioteers whenever they took office, or something like a mass retirement. I looked at charioteers from the texts dating from the reign of Esarhaddon, and found that many of them do have documents from the reign of Ashurbanipal as well. So the people who were professional soldiers when Esarhaddon died continued in their jobs under the next king. So based on that, I started to get suspicious that the chariot units stationed in Nineveh had joined Urad-Mullissu during or after the assassination. We’re not just looking at an assassination now; we’re looking at a military coup. Then I found there’s a smoking gun letter. It was sent during the reign of Ashurbanipal, but it talks about a charioteer. The writer informs Ashurbanipal that this man had fled the country during the reign of your father. So it seems to me that you know, the charioteer units that joined the rebellion either were killed or executed or fled, or at the very least, were cashiered from service in the aftermath, which left Esarhaddon having to rebuild the chariot corp.
44:29 CJ
And then my final interventions are, one, this tablet that Parpola published, there had actually been a join made in the early 2000s by Jeanette Fincke, but she never published it. And when I was doing research for my dissertation at the British Museum in 2018 I was able to examine that and add some new information from those joins; mostly the names of some of the guys who tried to inform Sennacherib of a plot. They were actually Babylonians. Probably they were goldsmiths, probably working in Urad-Mullissu’s palace household, when somehow they learned about what was being plotted. And the people who wrote the letter were investigating. I think they were interviewing members of Urad-Mullissu’s household, and they’re pretty incredulous that the people that of his household are not, well, it seems like they’re saying they didn’t know anything. And the investigators are sceptical that they didn’t know anything, because three people were murdered in order to cover up the plot before it even happened. And, you know, how did nobody notice? So that added a little bit.
45:48 CJ
And then, kind of the final piece of the puzzle was bringing in some studies of modern military coups. One guy, Naunihal Singh, he did a study of military coups in Ghana. He went to Ghana and interviewed generals and people who had tried to overthrow the government and everything. They’re all you know, retired now. He was surprised that the way that generals made decisions during a coup was pretty much entirely based on whether they thought the plotters were going to win. It wasn’t based on, “do we agree with this guy politically?” One general told him, “it would be very selfish of me to throw away the lives of my men based on the political ideology that I support”. What they’re really doing is they’re watching, and they’re trying to see if the coup is going to succeed. And if they think it’s going to succeed, they try to get on its side, right, because nobody wants to be on the losing side. And if they think it’s going to fail, then they come out and oppose it.
45:48 CJ
So coups, Singh argued, are what he calls a coordination game, where the plotters are trying to give the perception that their victory is inevitable. Their opponents are trying to give the perception that failure is inevitable. And most people are kind of sitting on the fence waiting as long as they can before they decide which side they’re going to support. And I think we see that happening in the days and weeks following the assassination, we have a lot of tablets that record prophecies. And these prophecies were issued during the brief civil war, in the aftermath of the assassination on behalf of Esarhaddon. They’re mostly linked with the Temple of Ishtar of Arbela.
47:39 CJ
There’s some evidence that Esarhaddon’s mother Naqia, was out helping to organize this propaganda campaign. And having prophets say Esarhaddon is destined to the kingship. I, Ishtar of Arbela, is going to help pull you through. These things help create a perception that Esarhaddon is going to win, because he has the gods on his side. And of course, he immediately, as soon as he can gather whatever military forces were at his disposal, starts marching towards Nineveh. And in the Jazirah plain somewhere, he meets a force loyal to Urad-Mullissu. And there’s only a very slight battle, and most of them switch sides and join Esarhaddon. By the time he gets to Nineveh, the support for his brothers has collapsed. There’s some evidence that they’re also …Urad-Mullissu is one of the plotters, but Esarhaddon says in Nineveh A that they butted each other like baby goats in the middle of Nineveh for the right to be king. So maybe they’re not as unified in their action.
48:48 CJ
We see this process play out elsewhere too. The governor of Ashur has some real decisions to make, because he’s got to bury Sennacherib along with the other kings of Assyria in Ashur. Can’t sit on the fence on that one, right? You’re either gonna pretend like he just dropped dead from a heart attack or something, while his murderer presides over the funeral or do something else. There’s an unfortunately very fragmentary letter that describes him deploying armed soldiers in the streets and trying to attack somebody’s house and some official in Nineveh and arrest him. And it’s not entirely clear which side he ended up on, but clearly he had to do something, and did something. It’s just unfortunately, the letter’s too fragmentary to be certain about what.
49:45 CJ
In the aftermath, I, you know, I find this assassination so important, one, it’s mentioned in the Bible. It’s mentioned in Babylonian sources, where, in both cases, it’s seen as kind of divine vengeance on Sennacherib for his invasion of Judah in 701 BC, or his destruction of Babylon in 689. But it also sets the tone for Esarhaddon’s time on the throne. He’s full of paranoia. He’s obsessed with uncovering plots against him. He has lots of his officials executed. It’s very dark, and I think that the root is in there’s a lot of fear on Esarhaddon’s part that he’s going to end up like his father did.
50:36 JT
Yeah, thank you. That’s super interesting. And congratulations on the prize.
50:41 CJ
Thank you.
50:42 JT
I’d also like to thank our patrons: Enrique Jiménez, Jana Matuszak, Nancy Highcock, Jay C, Rune Rattenborg, Woodthrush, Elisa Rossberger, Mark Weeden, Jordi Mon Companys, Thomas Bolin, Joan Porter MacIver, John MacGinnis, Andrew George, Yelena Rakic, Zach Rubin, Sabina Franke, Shai Gordin, Aaron Macks, Maarja Seire, Jaafar Jotheri, Morgan Hite, Chikako Watanabe, Mark McElwaine, Jonathan Blanchard Smith, Kliment Ohr, Christina Tsouparopoulou, TT, Melanie Gross, Claire Weir, Marc Veldman, Bruno Biermann, Faimon Roberts, Jason Moser, Pavla Rosenstein, Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver, Tate Paulette, Willis Monroe, Toby Wickenden, Emmert Clevenstine, Barbara Porter, Cheryl Morgan, Kevin Roy Jackson, Susannah Paulus, Eric Whitacre, Jakob Flygare, Jon Ganuza, Bonnie Nilhamn-Kuosmanen, Ben, Michael Gitlin, as well as those who prefer to remain anonymous.
52:07 JT
I really appreciate your support. It makes a big difference. Every penny received has contributed towards translations. Thanks of course to the lovely people who have worked on the translations on a voluntary basis or for well below the market rate. For Arabic, thanks in particular to Zainab Mizyidawi, as well as Lina Meerchyad and May Al-Aseel. For Turkish, thank you to Pinar Durgun and Nesrin Akan. TEW is still young, but I want to reach a sustainable level, where translators are given proper compensation for their hard work.
52:46 JT
And thank you for listening to Thin End of the Wedge. If you enjoy what we do, and you would like to help make these podcasts available in Middle Eastern languages, please consider joining our Patreon family. You can find us at patreon.com/wedgepod. You can also support us in other ways: simply subscribe to the podcast; leave us a five star review on Apple Music or your favourite podcatcher; recommend us to your friends. If you want the latest podcast news, you can sign up for our newsletter. You can find all the links in the show notes and on our website at wedgepod.org. Thanks, and I hope you’ll join us next time.