Chronology of Babylonia and Assyria/1911
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- Below is the complete unedited text of the 1911 article, upon which part of the Chronology of the Ancient Near East article is based.
The later chronology of Assyria has long been fixed, thanks to the lists of limmi, or archons, who gave their names in succession to their years of office. Several copies of these lists from the library of Nineveh are in existence, the earliest of which goes back to 911 BC, while the latest comes down to the middle of the reign of Assur-bani-pal. The beginning of a king's reign is noted in the lists, and in some of them the chief events of the year are added to the name of its archon, Assyrian chronology is, therefore, certain from 911 BC to 643 BC, and an eclipse of the sun which is stated to have been visible in the month Sivan, 763 BC, is one that has been calculated to have taken place on the 15 June that year. The system of reckoning time by limmi was of Assyrian. origin, and archeological discoveries have made it clear that it went back to the first days of the monarchy. Even in the distant colony at Kara Euyuk near Kaisariyeh (Caesarea) in Cappadocia cuneiform tablets show that the Assyrian settlers used it in the 15th century BC. In Babylonia a different system was adopted. Here the years were dated by the chief events that distinguished them, as was also the case in Egypt in the epoch of the Old Empire. What the event should be was determined by the government and notified to all its officials; one of these notices, sent to the Babylonian officials in Canaan in the reign of Samsu-Iluna, the son of Khammurabi, has been found in the Lebanon. A careful register of the dates was kept, divided into reigns, from which dynastic lists were afterwards compiled, giving the duration of each king's reign as well as that of the several dynasties. Two of these dynastic compilations have been discovered, unfortunately in an imperfect state.
In addition to the chronological tables, works of a more ambitious and literary character were also attempted of the nature of chronicles. One of these is the so-called "Synchronous History of Assyria and Babylonia," consisting of brief notices, written by an Assyrian, of the occasions on which the kings of the two countries had entered into relation, hostile or otherwise, with one another; a second is the Babylonian Chronicle discovered by Dr Th. G. Pinches, which gave a synopsis of Babylonian history from a Babylonian point of view, and was compiled in the reign of Darius. Its author says of the battle of Khalule, which we know from the Assyrian inscriptions to have taken place in 691 or 690 BC, that he does "not know the year" when it was fought: the records of Assyria had been already lost, even in Babylonia. The early existence of an accurate system of dating is not surprising; it was necessitated by the fact that Babylonia was a great trading community, in which it was not only needful that commercial and legal documents should be dated, but also that it should be possible to refer easily to the dates of former business transactions.
The Babylonian and Assyrian kings had consequently no difficulty in determining the age of their predecessors or of past events. Nabonidus (Nabunaid), who was more of an antiquarian than a politician, and spent his time in excavating the older temples of his country and ascertaining the names of their builders, tells us that Naram-Sin, the son (or grandson?) of Sargon of Akkad, lived 3200 years before himself (i.e. 3750 BC), and Sagarakti-suryas 800 years; and we learn from Sennacherib that Shalmaneser I reigned 600 years earlier, and that Tiglath-Pileser I fought with Merodach-nadin-akhi (Marduk-nadin-akh~) of Babylon 418 years before the campaign of 689 BC; while, according to Tiglath-Pileser I, the high-priest Samas-Hadad, son of IsmeDagon, built the temple of Anu and Hadad at Assur 701 years before his own time. Shalmaneser I in his turn states that the high-priest Samas-Hadad, the son of Bel-kabi, governed Assur 580 years previously, and that 159 years before this the high priest Erisum was reigning there. The raid of the Elamite king Kutur-Nakhkhuntë is placed by Assur-bani-pal 1635 years before his own conquest of Susa, and Khammurabi is said by Nabonidus to have preceded Burna-buryas by 700 years.
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
