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(IOWP) Arabs in Late First Millennium BC Babylonia

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(IOWP) Arabs in Late First Millennium BC Babylonia Imperium and Officium Working Papers (IOWP) Arabs in late first millennium BC Babylonia Version 00 April 2014 Reinhard Pirngruber (University of Vienna, Department of Oriental Studies) Abstract: This brief article discusses and aims to contextualize the references to Arabs in the corpus of the Astronomical Diaries. © Reinhard Pirngruber 2014 [email protected] Reinhard Pirngruber 1 Arabs in late first millennium BC Babylonia1 Introduction Throughout the first millennium BC, the large entities reigning over Mesopotamia – the native Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires as well as the subsequent foreign, Iranian and Graeco-Macedonian respectively, rulers of the Achaemenid, Seleucid and Parthian dynasties – were in frequent contact with a people called “Arabs”, designated in the Akkadian language by means of the nisbah lúArbāya. The earliest attestation of this ethnonym in the cuneiform sources dates to the year 853 BC, when the so-called Kurkh-monolith, a victory stela of the Neo-Assyrian king Shalmaneser III commemorating his success in the battle at Qarqar on the Orontes river, mentions the “1,000 camels of the Gindibu’ the Arab” reinforcing a coalition of several local rulers headed by Ahab of Israel and Hadad-ezer of Damascus. The following two centuries of the Neo-Assyrian Empire until its demise early in the second half of the 7th century BC are then the most abundantly documented era in Ancient Near Eastern History as regards Arabs. Arab tribal leaders often occur in royal inscriptions as victims of the expansionist ambitions of the Neo-Assyrian kings, bearing tribute and swearing oaths of loyalty, whereas epistolographic sources document the efforts of Assyrian administrators in Syria of coming to terms with nomadic Arab tribal elements within the empire. The tribute borne by the defeated Arab sheiks (nāsiku) usually consisted of valuable exotic goods connected with long-distance overland trade such as gold, spices and especially camels, and they furthermore served as guides for the Assyrian army crossing the desert during Esarhaddon’s (680–669 BC) campaigns into Egypt.2 It comes thus hardly as a surprise that, although there are clear indications of permanent Arab settlements above all in western Babylonia especially from the reign of Sennacherib (705–681 BC) onwards, the term “Arab” had clear connotations with a mobile lifestyle in the cuneiform documentation and was accordingly defined by Ran Zadok (1981, 44) as “primarily a social concept which designated a nomad (bedouin)” rather than “Arabians in the ethno-linguistic sense”. With the onset of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, information on Arabs becomes increasingly sparse. The main exception here is the ten year sojourn of the last king of the Neo-Babylonian dynasty, 1 This contribution was written within the framework of the research network “Imperium” amd “Officium” – Comparative Studies in Ancient Bureaucracy and Officialdom, funded by the FWF – Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (Vienna). R. Pirngruber is post-doctoral researcher in the sub-project “The Language of Power I: Official Epistolography in Babylonia in the First Millennium BC”. 2 Indispensable starting point for any investigation of the topic is Ephʻal 1982, providing both an overview of the sources and a historical analysis; the letters of Neo-Assyrian administrators mentioning Arabs have also been discussed by Fales 2002. Ephʻal 1974 summarizes the evidence on Arab presence in Babylonia. For their role in long-distance trade see Elat 1998 and Graslin-Thomé 2009, 299-308. Zadok 1981 and 1990 mainly deal with onomastic evidence. Imperium & Officium: Comparative Studies in Ancient Bureaucracy and Officialdom Arabs in late first millennium BC Babylonia 2 Nabonidus (556–539 BC), in the northern Arabian oasis of Tayma, possibly motivated by the desire to exercise a firmer control over the trade routes of the peninsula.3 However, this silence of the sources does not necessarily reflect historical realities in an adequate manner, and it in general should be remembered that wealth of legal and administrative cuneiform records characterizing the Neo-Babylonian period (626–539 BC) as well as the first decades of Achaemenid reign over Babylonia suffers a significant break after the suppression of the revolts in northern Babylonia during the second year of Xerxes (484 BC).4 Nevertheless, also the later, comparatively sparse documentation does provide is with interesting bits of evidence, attesting for example to the presence of tenants of agricultural land collectively identified as Arabs in Babylonia as late as the reign of Darius II (423–405 BC): According to PBS 2/1 48, a text from the Murašû archive from the city of Nippur, these Arabs were organized in a hadru and thus were firmly integrated into the extensive land-for-service pattern of land tenure so characteristic for Late Achaemenid Babylonia.5 Activities of Arabs in Babylonia according to the Astronomical Diaries Since the 1980s, a new corpus of sources has been published containing the latest known references to Arabs in cuneiform literature. The so-called ‘Astronomical Diaries’ are a set cuneiform tablets recording a variety of observed astronomical and celestial but also terrestrial – historical, economic and ecological – observations.6 They consist of hundreds of tablets dating to the half millennium between ca. 650 and 60 BC and comprise one of the largest collections known from the Ancient World. These Diaries constitute the single most important source for the history of Babylonia from the Late Achaemenid to the Parthian period. Among the historical accounts, the quite extensive report of the battle of Gaugamela and Alexander the Great’s subsequent entry into the city of Babylon (Van der Spek 2003, 297-299, also Kuhrt 1990) has attracted particular attention, as has the description of preparatory measures preceding the First Syrian War between the Ptolemaic and the Seleucid Empires in 274/3 BC (Van der Spek 2000, 305-307). The Diaries also contain a not negligible number references to Arabs, and except for brief remarks in a recent contribution by P.-A. Beaulieu (2013, 39-40) pointing out a period of about a quarter of a century of continuous 3 On this episode see in the first place Beaulieu 1989, 149-185; also Ephʻal 1982, 179-188. Recent finds from the joint Saudi–German excavations including a votive inscription of Nabonidus are introduced by Eichmann et al. 2006. 4 This phenomenon of the ‘end of archives’ has first been described by Waerzeggers 2003/04. 5 On the hadru- system see Stolper 1985, especially 70-83. 6 The editio princeps of the Astronomical Diaries is ADART, relevant here is especially volume III. The historical sections of the Diaries from the Hellenistic and Parthian periods have been edited with a brief comment by Del Monte 1997. Imperium & Officium: Comparative Studies in Ancient Bureaucracy and Officialdom Reinhard Pirngruber 3 raids by Arabs during the last quarter of the 2nd century BC, they have not yet been fully appreciated. In total, there are twenty references to Arabs found in the Astronomical Diaries, 18 of which date to the years between ca. 130 and 105 BC, with a particularly densely documented peak of 16 attestations in the period between 126 and 118 BC. These sections usually report incursions by marauding bands of Arabs, who in those years were perceived to be a constant threat – the expression kīma panu, “like before” occurs frequently in these attestations – and in general, the interpretation of the designation Arbāya by R. Zadok given above seems to be also valid for this corpus. A fitting illustration is provided by line 21 of the Diary AD -124B: “That month, the Arabs plundered as before; fear of Arabs, just a before, was strong in the country.” Whereas also the two latest attestations of Arabs in this corpus in 112 and 106 BC have this same general context, the two earlier instances are more difficult to contextualize. The first mention of Arabs in the Astronomical Diaries dates to the reign of Alexander the Great and unfortunately, there is no context left as the tablet is severely damaged and the remainder of the line is in a lacuna. A connection to the exploratory campaigns into Arabia launched by Alexander is in any case unlikely when considering the chronology, as these expeditions date to the short period between his return to Babylon from India and his unexpected death in June 323 BC,7 whereas the diary fragment dates to 330 BC already. The second early mention dates to the late Seleucid period, to the first reign of Demetrius II (145– 139/8 and again 129–125 BC) and does not refer to a people but rather to the “Arabian road”. A possible identification would be the road leading from Tayma via Dumah (Adummatu in cuneiform sources) to Babylon, a stretch of ca. 1,530 kilometres.8 Also the political circumstances of the time are of interest here, as Alexander I Balas had been ousted from the Seleucid throne by Demetrius II in 145 BC, but had given his minor son into the custody of a Syro-Arabian sheikh named Iamblichus before. In spring 144 BC and hence the year to which this diary dates, the Seleucid general Diodotus Tryphon defected from central authority, by unknown means got his hands on Alexander I Balas’ son and declared the child king under the name Antiochus VI.9 However, in the end any connection of this affair to the Astronomical Diary must remain pure speculation due to both the fragmentary state of the Diary and the overall scarcity of sources for the later Seleucid kings. But that there were 7 These campaigns are discussed e.g. by MacDonald 2009, 10-17. 8 See Eph’al 1982, 12-17 for a concise description of the network of roads, the tentative identification of the ‘Arabian road’ proposed here corresponds to his route 2a.
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