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.
0:32 JT
The archives found at Nineveh reveal how the Assyrians ruled their empire in the seventh century BC. Thousands of these texts have been edited, translated and studied in myriad ways, but there’s still plenty to learn from them. In this episode, we explore two related topics, a pivotal moment in Assyrian history was the murder of Sennacherib by his sons. What new light can be shed on this event, and how does recent study of coups help us more broadly? What can social network analysis tell us about the different strategies employed by each king to manage the empire? Our guest is a prize-winning early career assyriologist who shares with us some of the insights from his doctoral research.
1:20 JT
So get yourself a cup of tea, make yourself comfortable, and let’s meet today’s guest.
1:35 JT
Hello and welcome to Thin End of the Wedge. Thank you for joining us.
1:38 CJ
Oh, thank you for having me.
1:41 JT
Could you tell us please: who are you and what do you do?
1:44 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.
2:08 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?
2:16 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.
3:08 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?
3:21 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.
4:22 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.
5:03 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.
6:46 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.
8:04 JT
Before we come to your reconstruction, I wonder if we could just touch quickly on motives. So it’s fairly clear why Esarhaddon as the next in line might want to hasten history. But why would his brother do it?
8:16 CJ
Sennacherib originally, his original plan for a successor seems to have been his son Ashur-nadin-shumi. And he appointed his son as king in Babylon. Now, previously, there had been a local Babylonian named Bel-ibni, who Sennacherib had appointed as king of Babylon, and he was to be a vassal of Assyria. But Babylon was a very difficult province to rule. It was deeply divided society between the urban population that tended to be, although not unanimously, pro-Assyrian, and the rural population, which was very anti-Assyrian. And it seems that he wanted somebody who was going to be both unquestioningly loyal, but also more competent to deal with Babylon. So he replaced Bel-ibni with his son, Ashur-nadin-shumi. Ashur-nadin-shumi was probably his designated successor. Babylon was like a practice run for ruling the entire empire. The problem is, though, that Ashur-nadin-shumi in 694 gets kidnapped, handed over to the Elamites during an Elamite invasion, and he’s never heard from again. Presumably, he was executed in Elam. So with him out of the picture, he turns to … a few months later, seems to have 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 he’s going to change his mind and appoint his youngest son, Esarhaddon instead. Urad-Mullissu does not take his demotion well and plots to undo this decision by his father.
10:04 JT
Okay, so it’s all hotting up very nicely. So, what is your reconstruction, then? What did your article bring to the discussion? And what’s the latest, best idea of what really happened?
10:32 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.
11:16 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.
13:00 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.
15:21 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.
16:37 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.
17:46 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.
19:13 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.
20:32 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.
21:38 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.
22:24 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.
23:32 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.
24:29 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.
25:20 JT
Okay, so you touched there on your dissertation. I’d like if we could to spend a few minutes talking about that. That’s also on the Neo-Assyrians, isn’t it, and life at court. Could you explain a little bit what your dissertation was about, please?
25:32 CJ
Yeah. So my dissertation was really trying to understand Assyria’s internal politics. The kind of thing that you won’t find in royal inscriptions. I wanted to look at the careers of the officials who were doing, you know, the running of the empire. Fortunately, we have a ton of sources on this, because we have about 3800 letters which were sent to Assyrian kings. Mostly from Nineveh. Mostly from the reigns of Sargon the second, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, although there’s a few from other kings as well. And the tool I ended up settling on to analyze this corpus was social network analysis, which is a way to mathematically chart relationships, essentially.
26:25 CJ
The reason this is important when studying an organisation is that organisations, even very hierarchical ones, like the Assyrian Empire, don’t necessarily work the way you would expect. Reading some of the literature on this, I found that studies of modern corporations and things like that–hospitals–find that people don’t usually follow the organisational chart. In lots of them, the organisation might have a big rule book about how it’s supposed to operate. Very few people have actually read that book. They just do their jobs and they learn what parts of it they need to know as they go. What this means is that organisations operate through informal networks. I mean, anyone who’s been in an organisation knows that people talk to each other about what’s really going on and what you need to know, right. And so on a big picture, this means that a person’s formal position, like the office they hold, their job title within an organisation, is not the same thing as their status. Social network analysis allows us to bypass the formal organisational structure and understand what’s actually going on, who the really influential people are.
27:54 JT
Okay, and what does this tell us then about the Assyrian court?
27:58 CJ
it gave some really surprising results. One of the the most surprising were there the two officials who wrote to Sargon the second–Tab-shar-Ashur and Tab-sil-Eshara. Tab-shar-Ashur was an official called the Mashennu, a really high-ranking office, has a variety of duties. And Tab-sil-Eshara was the governor of the city of Ashur, which is, you know, the oldest, most prestigious city in in the empire. They both wrote a very large number of letters to Sargon. But when I graph them in social network analysis, they couldn’t be more different, because sheer volume of letters doesn’t indicate influence, right? You know, an email every day for the next year and you didn’t respond, that wouldn’t indicate that we had a very close relationship, right? It would indicate the opposite. {LAUGHS} And so Tab-shar-Ashur is a kind of guy that other people see as influential, because they go to him with their problems. He has a lot of people 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 having influence when they got a problem, they know they go to him because he’s somebody that can help him out, because he’s got the king’s ear.
29:27 CJ
Tab-sil-Eshara, on the other hand, hardly anyone connects through him. He sends letters to the king all the time. The king even writes back sometimes. But other people don’t seem to see him as somebody powerful and influential. And so they don’t connect through him to the king. And then, you know, when you start to look into the content of the letters like Tab-shar-Ashur is having things delegated to him, huge responsibilities. He’s mediating disputes. He’s traveling all over the empire. Tab-sil-Eshara is complaining other people are coming into his province and doing their jobs without even asking his permission, essentially. Sometimes Tab-shar-Ashur even shows up and starts doing stuff. That’s just a good example of how social network analysis can reveal something that wasn’t necessarily obvious, just from translating and reading the sources.
30:26 CJ
As far as the significance for the big picture. You think, well, this is just two officials. What does it have to do with like understanding the course of history in the empire? I’ve been able to identify, I think it’s Sargon the second that really undertakes a lot of reforms. And many of these reforms have been attributed before to Sargon father, Tiglath-Pileser the third. And I suggest in my dissertation that the image of Tiglath-Pileser as a huge reformer is something of a mirage. It seems that he continues the administrative structures that were in place before his reign.
31:11 CJ
So Assyrian politics in the early eighth century is dominated by a small group of very influential people. Sometimes they’re called the magnates, in literature. Sometimes they’re called the Rabiu, the big ones. That’s actually what they’re called in Akkadian. And the Rabiu, you know, there’s maybe a half dozen of them at once. They accumulate power by holding multiple offices 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. They set up palaces and things. They’re extremely powerful. There’s a lot of dispute in the literature over whether they were usurping the power of the king or not. I side with Luis Siddal on this–book on the reign of Adad-narari the third–that this is a deliberate strategy of consolidating the newly conquered empire on the part of Assyrian kings. We see evidence that during the reign of Tiglath-Pileser the third, this system doesn’t change. When he conquers new territory, he adds it to the Rabiu’s provinces. There’s Rabiu who hold multiple offices during his reign. They set up monuments.
32:30 CJ
It’s only under Sargon the second that we see this start to end. He takes their provinces and he breaks them up into several smaller provinces. You don’t see any evidence of officials holding multiple offices at the same time from Sargon onwards. Assyrians kept time by naming the years after prominent officials, and these are called limmu lists. The officials in the eighth century have a very strict order precedents where it’s first the king, then these top four rabiu, then the governor of Ashur, and then other provincial governors in a set order. Sargon keeps the order of the provincial governors, but he kicks most of the top four guys off the list, except for Tab-shar-Ashur.
33:26 CJ
So we’re seeing him like devaluing these offices. He’s moving, and I think quite deliberately, to break up their power. After that, one of the results is, all of a sudden, there’s a lot more people reporting to the king than there were before. Instead of a half dozen guys or so, kings are now having probably 90 provincial governors reporting to them. Plus all the temple officials and the palace officials and the ambassadors and the vassal kings and everything, right? And you can only manage so many people. There’s no way you can treat people equally. So kings end up playing favourites. But these favourites are no longer linked to you know, this guy’s my favourite, so I made him the Mashennu. It’s this guy’s my favourite, so he’s my favourite. You could have any sort of job title and be in that inner circle of people that have a close relationship to the king.
34:35 CJ
And what I think this does is it supercharges elite competition. Whereas, you know, only a small handful of people even had a chance of becoming a Rabiu, now everybody who writes to the king directly thinks that maybe it could be me. This creates what I call an information problem for Assyrian kings. Everybody’s trying to put their best possible face forward in your administration. Letter after letter is basically, I’m the best and most loyal. Anything bad that happened isn’t my fault. Somebody else is probably disloyal. Right? You can put your best foot forward, take your competitors down a notch and hope to profit. And the problem is, how does the king know who’s lying and who isn’t?
35:32 CJ
In my dissertation, I said there’s a couple of strategies Assyrian kings used for this. One was intelligence officers internal security called Sha qurbutu. We often translate that bodyguard, but a lot of them aren’t physically located near the king, and they’re reporting back to the king on what provincial governors are doing. So you have somebody to watch the watchmen, essentially. But who’s going to watch the watchers of the watchmen becomes the next problem, because we see from these letters that the Sha qurbutus can get corrupted just as much as anybody else.
36:16 CJ
And then under Esarhaddon, I think he turns to scholars–like guys who interpret omens. They can through extispicy, through astronomy, they can determine what the gods have in store. You don’t need to deal with spies and anonymous tipsters and stuff. You can just ask the god Shamash, and he will write the answer on your sheep liver as to whether this guy is loyal or not. And then Esarhaddon’s other solution is his succession treaty. He decides he doesn’t want to end up like his father, so he decides to kind of split the prize. And his younger son Ashurbanipal will become king of Assyria, while his older son Shamash-shumu-ukin will become king of Babylon. He’s hoping that this is going to bring peace.
37:20 CJ
It works for a little bit. It eventually falls apart into a civil war. He has the entire empire swear to respect this succession. And the treaty has a bunch of different clauses. Some of them say things like, you will not plot or even think about plotting against Esarhaddon, da-da-da-da-da. But a lot of them contain a duty to inform. A duty to tell the king if you have any rumour of disloyalty anywhere. And I argue what this actually generated was a bunch of bad quality information. Either people are trying to take down their rivals, or, I don’t know what. We’ve got all sorts of reports of plots after this point. This is a point where the, you know, the purges and the executions start that are recorded in the Babylonian Chronicles. I think that this attempt to recruit everybody in the empire as an informant actually made the information problem much, much worse, and probably contributed to, you know, political instability and the collapse of the empire.
38:38 JT
Wow. Yeah. I was wondering, would this relate to what you said earlier about the turnover in staff? So is it, do you think, the case that Sargon’s system failed Sennacherib, and that the people who should have been informing and keeping control over the powerful people who were either part of the coup plot or failed to pick up the correct intelligence or to pass on the intelligence. And so he turned, out of necessity, to a different solution. Do you think that’s part of it, or is that just something else?
39:06 CJ
That’s a good question. I wish we had more letters from the reign of Sennacherib to answer it. We have a lot of letters from the reign of Sargon the second and a lot from Esarhaddon, but actually very few from the reign of Sennacherib to really get a good handle on the internal politics of the empire and his reign. There is one very interesting letter that’s actually sent to Esarhaddon. It’s by the same scholar who was with 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 astrologers made a pact to not give the king any bad news, because, I guess they figured it would be good for their continued employment to give him good omens. Now, the problem is, you can’t really hide omens that are in the sky. So the agreement was, if a bad omen appears in the sky, we’ll double check it by extispicy, you know, by examining a slaughtered sheep liver. And the extinct experts, if it’s a bad omen in the sky, will conclude that it’s inconclusive. Because you can fudge reading a liver a lot easier than you can fudge movement of the planets and the stars. Bel-ushezib is basically warning Esarhaddon, don’t let this happen to you.
40:42 JT
Gosh, that’s really interesting. I’m not sure what to make of the idea that scholars are effectively responsible for the collapse of the empire. That’s … {LAUGHS} When we think about Assyrian scholarship, inevitably, minds turn to Ashurbanipal, who sees himself as a bit of a scholar. How does this play into it? Is there anything to say about Ashurbanipal and how that works at his court?
41:04 CJ
I published an article recently as a social network analysis of the court scholars. And you know, for a long time we had a lot of letters from scholars to Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, and very few to any other king. For example, we have about 1100 Sargon letters, and two of them are from scholars. It’s a much lower percentage. And the question is, you know, have we just not found them yet, or were they never sent in the first place? And I think that there’s no real evidence that scholars letters were separated off from other letters. So with that in mind, I think, you know, we have a pretty representative sample of Sargon letters, at least for the last for about 710, to 707. And so I argue that I don’t think that we’re missing anything substantial.
41:59 CJ
I think that for whatever reason, scholars were not heavily involved, not close to the royal family under Sargon. And under Esarhaddon, they were. And I think it has to do with trying to resolve this information problem. So the network data from Esarhaddon’s reign shows that half of the highest centrality people, you know, the ones that people are connecting through to get to the king, are the court scholars. But under Ashurbanipal, they decline precipitously. They’re still there, but their status relative to other people in the network drops massively. And I think that Ashurbanipal did not trust them. I don’t think he disbelieved in the basic premises of divination, but I do think that he didn’t necessarily trust that they were properly applying divination. Thought maybe they were trying to control him. Maybe they’ve been trying to control his father.
43:02 CJ
So we actually have some letters where he’s arguing pretty strenuously. They tell him to do something, and he doesn’t do it. Some of them, there’s this guy, Akkullanu, he gives Esarhaddon–this is in his first years on the throne, like a really incredible tongue lashing for someone to be addressing the Assyrian king as about why he’s not performing a substitution ritual to avert an evil omen from himself.
43:30 CJ
Now, later on, Akkullanu figures out which way the winds are blowing and changes his tune. He actually has quite a long career as a scholar, but he’s one of the few who does change his tune. There’s another letter from the 650s where he says there’s an omen about a drought. And Akkullanu explains to Ashurbanipal that this is actually good, because our soldiers will fight harder so that they can capture food and have something to eat. At first, he’s like, this is an evil omen. You got to do something. Why aren’t you doing something? Then 10 years later, he’s saying, “Well, let’s figure out some creative interpretation for why this bad omen is actually good”. And I do think that Ashurbanipal–and I’m very curious where the Ashurbanipal colophon project, if it’s going to come up with more data that addresses this question–I do think Ashurbanipal creates this library and pursues scribal training, partly so that he can check the scholar’s work and develop his own interpretation of these things?
44:41 JT
Yeah. I mean, I would tend to agree. We’re not entirely sure yet, but under the construction that I think makes the most sense, there seems to be a chronology to the different colophon types. And I think there’s a transition between the early phase, where it’s all about the assembly of scholars and the later one where it just doesn’t talk about scholars anymore, and everything comes through him. He’s blessed by the gods with great wisdom and etc, etc, and like that does fit. Could I ask you something about the publication of your dissertation: when and where and how are we able to read your work?
45:17 CJ
It’s under contract right now with SBL press for their ancient Near East monograph series. The good news is this it’s an open access series, so you can buy the book, and the series are not inordinately expensive, less than $100. It’s a bargain in academic publishing, right? Especially for dissertations. But you can also download the book as a PDF completely legitimately from the publisher. There’s a couple of things I’m changing up in the book. One is, I’m adding a section where not just competition between individual officials, but a chapter on competition between different sectors of the Assyrian empire. There’s a lot of tension, I think, between the temple administration, the provincial government, and the palace system. They’re all competing for resources and prestige.
46:10 JT
Wow. In fact, I look forward to that. Okay, with dissertation done and you’re at Tennessee now. What are you doing? And what do you plan to work on next?
46:20 CJ
I’m going to the ASOR annual meeting. One of the things I did in my dissertation was I went through Julian Reade’s Reallexikon der Assyriologie chapter on “Nineveh”, where he identified certain catalogue numbers in the Kuyunjik collection with certain find spots. I use those to find out what I could about where letters were found. Now, the paper I’m giving, I’ve got over 4500 texts with find spots, or some idea of a find spot. Maybe I should say, find areas. {LAUGHS} And I’m trying to see what sort of patterns can be found in this data.
47:05 CJ
So one thing I found is Sargon letters tend to come from kind of the central areas of the Southwest Palace, while Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal letters are found in the terrace area around room 54 overlooking the river. And I also found that there are several either like clear chains of correspondence, where some of them were found in the North palace and some of them in the Southwest Palace. Or actually fragments, where it’s like half the letter was found in the North palace and half in the Southwest palace.
47:41 CJ
So I argue that the only thing that really makes sense here: it’s not that, you know, when Layard and the other assyriologists dug down and found an archive, you know, that had been burned in the collapse and entombed there, in you know the destruction of Nineveh in 612 BC. But rather that these letters had been discarded long before 612 into fill layers, which were being used to raise floor levels and such as part of construction projects. This is how most of the letters that were found at Nimrud were found. They were excavated much more carefully and their archaeological context was that they were discarded and used to raise the floor level of a room. So I think that the Sargon letters were probably discarded while Sennacherib was building the Southwest palace. And then the Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal letters were discarded, either late in Ashurbanipal’s reign or during the reign of Sin-shar-ishkun. They did some renovations along that room 54 terrace area.
48:54 CJ
And I think you know, the reason we don’t have many letters after Ashurbanipal is they didn’t throw them out yet, right? They weren’t …they were too current to clean out the files. And the reason we don’t have very many Sennacherib letters is because they were probably disposed of in some other way, right? If you need more shelf space, and we’re not building stuff, then there’s other ways to get rid of them. And then the legal texts kind of support this. Because we have a lot of Sennacherib legal texts, but they’re often found in areas where Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal letters predominate. So it’s like Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal letters, Sennacherib legal documents. I think what this means is legal texts were retained for a longer period of time. Most of the Sennacherib legal texts were written in the late 690s/680s, so they probably wouldn’t have been used as fill layer in the palaces, because those palaces had already been built. But they could have been thrown out when later construction work led to emptying the archives.
50:03 CJ
And then I’ve looked at scholarly texts as well. There’s kind of three areas where scholarly texts predominate. And there’s not a ton of clear differences between them. I mean some sites like the room 40/41 that’s often traditionally the library of Ashurbanipal, has more lexical text than some other places. But there’s a little bit like some places have more lexical texts, some have more prayers and incantations. Things like that. But it’s not different enough that it’s clear we’re dealing with different types of archives. So then I tried to look at colophons.
50:45 CJ
And I looked at a subset of the Ashurbanipal colophons that I could find, mostly going back to Maximilian Streck’s 1916 publication. That’s the one that had the most accession numbers. And I was able to find about 30 that I could get a find area for. And then I also, for comparison’s sake, I looked at the colophons of Nabu-zuqup-kenu, who was the chief scribe under Sargon. Those are just all over the place. There’s Ashurbanipal colophons, in, you know, different parts of the Southwest Palace and the Nabu temple and the North Palace. So no clear patterns emerged there. But we’ll see how it’s received at ASOR. If anyone has any ideas as to what can explain these patterns. You know, whether tablets were already in a secondary deposition in 612 or whether they were, I think Andrew George has an article suggesting that the Babylonians went through them all, and, you know, were looking for useful intelligence, and threw away all the scholarly tablets. Something like that.
51:56 CJ
I also–totally different future plan–I got a grant recently from my university to do a study of Assyrian seascape reliefs. So I’m going to go to the Louvre and examine the Khorsabad timber transport reliefs in person, and hopefully make my way to the British Museum as well, if maybe take a look at some of the early like Tiglath-Pileser reliefs.
52:24 CJ
I’m looking at Assyrian views of the Mediterranean. And I want to argue that they deliberately depicted the Mediterranean as quite strange. Some of these things have puzzled people for a while. I mean, the most puzzling one is the Tiglath-Pileser relief from Nimrud with a … well, it looks like a giant chicken in the ocean. {LAUGHS} I want to argue that they quite deliberately depicted the Mediterranean as an exotic landscape, And doing so emphasised the reach of the Assyrian empire going farther than it’s ever gone before.
53:05 JT
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds brilliant. Well, thank you very much indeed.
53:09 CJ
Thank you for having me.
53:12 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.
54:37 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.
55:15 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.