Ishuwa
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Ishuwa was an ancient kingdom in Anatolia, Turkey. The name is first attested in the second millennium BC, and is also spelled Išuwa. In the classical period the land was a part of Armenia.
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[edit] The land
The land of Ishuwa was situated in the upper Euphrates river region. The river valley was here surrounded by the Anti-Taurus Mountains. To the northeast of the river laid a vast plain stretched up to the Black Sea mountain range.
The plain had favourable climatic conditions due to the abundance of water from springs and rainfall. Irrigation of fields was possible without the need to build complex canals. The river valley was well suited for intensive agriculture, while livestock could be kept at the higher altitudes. The mountains possessed rich deposits of copper which were mined in antiquity.
[edit] The people
The name Ishuwa may be derived from an ancient Proto-Indo-European word for horse (*ek'wos, Proto-Indo-Iranian *ashwas), thus "Horse-land"[citation needed]. It is not clear which of the Anatolian peoples who inhabited the land of Ishuwa prior to the Armenians in the Roman period. The population may have been a mix of both Indo-Europeans related to the Hittites in the west, Hattians who spoke a Caucasian language, Hurrians from the south and the people of Urartu who lived east of Ishuwa in the first millennium BC.
[edit] History of Ishuwa
Ishuwa was one of the places were agriculture developed very early in the Neolithic. Urban centres emerged in the upper Euphrates river valley around 3000 BC. The first states may have followed in the third millennium BC. The name Ishuwa is not known until the literate period of the second millennium BC. Few literate sources from within Ishuwa have been discovered and the primary source material comes from Hittite texts.
[edit] The Hittite period
To the west of Ishuwa laid the kingdom of the Hittites and this nation was un untrustworthy neighbour. The Hittite king Hattusili I (c.1600 BC) is reported to have marched his army across the Euphrates river and destroyed the cities there. This corresponds well with burnt destruction layers discovered by archaeologists at town sites in Ishuwa of roughly the same date.
The Hittite king Suppiluliuma I records how in the time his father, maybe Tudhaliya III (c.1400 BC), the land of Ishuwa became hostile. The enmity was probably evoked by the Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni to the south. Mitanni tried to form a strong alliance against the power of the Hittites. From a fragmentary Hittite letter the king of Mitanni, Shaushtatar, seems to have vagued war against the Hittite king Arnuwanda I with support from Ishuwa. The hostilities lasted into Suppiluliuma's own reign when he c.1350 BC crossed the Euphrates and entered the land of Ishuwa with his troops. He claims to have made Ishuwa his subject.
Ishuwa continued to be ruled by kings who were vassals of the Hittites. Few kings of Ishuwa are known by names and documents. One Ehli-sharruma is mentioned as being king of Ishuwa in a Hittite letter from the thirteenth century BC. Another king of Ishuwa called Ari-sharruma is mentioned on a clay seal found at Korucutepe, an important site in Ishuwa.
[edit] The Neo-Hittite period
After the end of the Hittite empire in the early twelfth century BC a new state emerged in Ishuwa. The city of Malatya became the center of one of the so called Neo-Hittite kingdom. With the demise of the Hittites the Phrygians settled to the west of Ishuwa and to the east the kingdom of Urartu was founded. The most powerful neighbour of Ishuwa was Assyria to the south. The encounter with the Assyrian king of Tiglath-Pileser I (1115-1077 BC) resulted in the kingdom of Malatya being forced to pay tribute to Assyria. Malatya continued to prosper however until the Assyrian king Sargon II (722-705 BC) sacked the city in 712 BC. At the same time the Cimmerians and Scythians invaded Anatolia from the Caucausus to the northeast. The movement of these nomadic people may have weakened the kingdom of Malatya before the final Assyrian invasion. The decline of the settlements and culture in Ishuwa from the seventh century BC until the Roman period was probably caused by this movement of people. The Armenians later settled in the area since they were natives of the Armenian Plareteau and related to the earlier inhabitants of Ishuwa.
[edit] Archaeology of Ishuwa
The ancient land of Ishuwa has today virtually disappeared beneath the water from several dams in the Euphrates river. The Turkish Southeastern Anatolia Project which started in the 1960s resulted in the Keban, Karakaya and Atatürk Dam which entirely flooded the river valley when completed in the 1970s. A fourth dam, Bireçik, was completed further south in 2000 and flooded the remainder of the Euphrates river valley in Turkey.
[edit] Excavations
A great salvage campaign was undertaken in the upper Euphrates river valley at instigation of the president of the dam project Kemal Kurdaş. A Turkish, US and Dutch team of archaeologists headed by Maurits van Loon began the survey. Work then continued downstream where the Atatürk Dam was being constructed.
The excavations revealed settlements from the Paleolithic down into the Middle Ages. The sites of Ikizepe, Korucutepe, Norşuntepe and Pulur around the Murat (Arsanias) river, a tributary of the Euphrates to the east, revealed large Bronze Age settlements from the fourth to the second millennium BC. The center of the kingdom Ishuwa may have laid in this region which would equate well with the Hittite statements of crossing the Euphrates in reaching the kingdom.
The important site of Arslantepe near the modern city of Malatya luckily laid safe from the rising water. Today an Italian team of archaeologists led by Marcella Frangipane are working at the site and studying the surrounding area. The site of Arslantepe was settled from the fifth millennium BC until the Roman period. It was the capital of the Neo-Hittite kingdom of Malatya.
[edit] Culture
The earliest settlements in Ishuwa show culturual contacts with Tell Brak to the south, though not being the same culture. Agriculture began early due to favorable climatic conditions. Ishuwa was at the outer fringe of the early Mesopotamian Uruk period culture. The people of Ishuwa were also skilled in metallurgy and they reached the Bronze Age in the fourth millennium BC. Copper were first mixed with arsenic, later with tin. The Early Bronze Age culture were linked with Caucasus in the northeast. In the Hittite period the culture of Ishuwa show great parallells to the Central Anatolian and the Hurrian culture to the south. The monumental architecture was of Hittite influence. The Neo-Hittite state show influences both from the Phrygia, Assyria and the eastern kingdom of Urartu. After the Scythian people movement there appear some Scythian burials in the area.
[edit] See also
[edit] Bibliography
- Conti, Persiani : Between the Rivers and over the Mountains, La Sapienza Rome 1993.
- Erder, Cevat: Lessons in Archaeological and Monument Salvage: The Keban Experience, Princeton university 1973.
- Konyar, Erkan: Old Hittite presence in the East of the Euphrates in the light of stratigraphical data from Imikuşağı (Elazığ), lecture held at Hethiter-workshop Istanbul 2004.
- Loon, Maurits van: Korucutepe : final report on the excavations of the universities of Chicago, California (Los Angeles) and Amsterdam in the Keban reservoir, American Elsevier New York 1975-80 (3 vol.).
