Adad-shuma-usur

Adad-šuma-uṣur, dated very tentatively ca. 1216—1187 BC (short chronology), was the thirty second king of the Third or Kassite dynasty of Babylon and the country contemporarily known as Karduniaš. His name was wholly Babylonian and not uncommon, as for example the later Assyrian King Esarhaddon (681 – 669 BC) had a personal exorcist, or ašipu, with the same name[1] who was unlikely to have been related. He is best known for his rude letter to Aššur-nirari III, the most complete part of which is quoted below, and was enthroned following a revolt in the south of Mesopotamia when the north was still occupied by the forces of Assyria and may not have been assumed authority throughout the country until around the twenty fifth year of his thirty year reign.

Contents

Biography

There is surprisingly little contemporary evidence for this king considering the alleged length of his reign, which was the longest recorded in the Kassite dynasty. The tablet known as King List A[2] shows him following Adad-šuma-iddina and his predecessor-but-one, Enlil-nadin-šumi, but in Chronicle P[3] he makes his appearance in the narrative before them. Brinkman argues that this is for stylistic purposes[4] but the Walker Chronicle[5] suggests a simpler explanation. Adad-šuma-uṣur was elevated to the position of king in the south of the country years before he conquered Babylon and made himself its king.[6] The early part of his reign was concurrent with that of the three kings preceding him on King List A, but he followed them in ascending the throne of the city of Babylon. It is a characteristic trait of this tablet that concurrent kings and dynasties are presented successively as if one followed another.[4] The brevity of his reign over Babylon proper, also explains the minimal contemporary inscriptions found. Only sixteen economic texts attest to his reign.[4]

Under Tukulti-Ninurta I’s reign

Tukulti-Ninurta I had conquered Babylon around 1225 BC and then ruled it through governors for seven years.[3] There is an economic text from Nippur dated to his accession year.[4] Then three vassal kings succeeded one another in short reigns totalling around nine years.[7] Around the time the last reign ended, Tukulti-Ninurta died at the hand of assassins in his eponymous city. Thereafter, it seems likely that his successors appointed governors over Babylon until they fled in the face of Adad-šuma-uṣur’s triumph over the Assyrian king Enlil-kudurri-usur[6] fifteen years or so later.[8]

Adad-šuma-uṣur had been “put on his father’s throne” by a rebellion against Tukulti-Ninurta among the Akkadian officers.[3] The identity of his father is never explicitly stated in the chronicle but it was assumed in antiquity to have been Kaštiliašu IV. A Luristan bronze dagger in the Foroughi Collection is inscribed with his filiation to this king,[4] and this claim may have helped reinforce his legitimacy.

Tukulti-Ninurta wrote a letter to the Hittite king, thought to be Suppiluliuma II, four fragments of which were discovered at the site of excavations of Ḫattuša in the 1930’s. It was dated to the limmu year of Ilī-padâ, in the latter part of Tukulti-Ninurta’s reign. In it, he recaps the genealogy of the recent Kassite dynasty, mentioning Kurigalzu II, Kadašman-Enlil II and Kudur-Enlil then apparently castigating Šagarakti-Šuriaš, the “non-son of Kudur-Enlil”, and his sons, one of whom, Kaštiliašu, had provoked the war by his dastardly pre-emptive strike against Assyria. In one place, the sons of Šagarakti-Šuriaš have been killed, almost certainly by none other than Tukulti-Ninurta himself. He then makes reference to a “servant of Suhi”, where Suhu is a region of northeast Syria, and Singer proposes this individual to be Adad-šuma-uṣur,[9] the implication being he was a foreigner, not of the royal stock and consequently unqualified for office.

A letter from an Elamite king, thought to be Shutruk-Nahhunte, to the Kassite elders demanding the right to the Babylonian throne through blood, describes Adad-šuma-uṣur as “son of Dunna-Sah, from the region by the bank of the Euphrates”, in his criticism of their choice of regent.[10] Unfortunately the Tukulti-Ninurta tablet is fragmentary and the text barely readable so a variety of restorations are possible. The letter ends with a plea for military aid and a moving, “If I am alive, [I will send(?)] a message of/about my life, but if I am dead, the messge of/about my death [will be sent to you(?)]”, “one hundred years, my brother[…” and “you have loved me with all your heart.”[9]

Letter to Aššur-nirari III

Tukulti-Ninurta’s successor was his son Aššur-nadin-apli, who “carried criminal designs against Babylon”[3] and whose brief reign was succeeded in turn by his son, Aššur-nirari III. He was the recipient of an extremely offensive letter from Adad-šuma-uṣur, which he addressed to “the Assyrian kings,” putting Aššur-nirari on an equal footing with his subordinate for added insult, a fragment of which has fortuitously survived:

[The god Ash]ur to Aššur-nirari and Ilī-ḫaddâ […through] slovenliness, drunkenness, and indecisiveness, things have taken a turn for the worse for you. Now there is neither sense nor reason in your heads. Since the great [gods] have driven you mad you speak […]. Your faces […..with] iniquitous and criminal counsel[11]
—Adad-šuma-uṣur, letter to Aššur-nirari and Ilī-ḫaddâ

The Ilī-ḫaddâ mentioned is none other than Ilī-padā, the viceroy of Hanigalbat, Ashur-nirari’s distant relative (sharing a common ancestor in Eriba-Adad I) and the official for whose limmu year Tukulti-Ninurta’s letter to the Hittite king had been dated. The letter was carefully copied and preserved in the library at Nineveh. Grayson speculates it was kept to “goad” the Assyrians to vengeance.[11]

The cities of Nippur, Dur, Isin and Marad had been sacked by the marauding Elamites under their king, Kidin-Hutran III, and two of these, Nippur and Isin were the subjects of construction work by Adad-šuma-uṣur. Bricks from Isin were excavated in 1975/76 with a Sumerian inscription recording his work on the Egalmaḫ and also earlier from Nippur recording work on the Ekur.[4] He had been credited with rebuilding the walls of Nippur in the Walker Chronicle.[6]

Battle with Enlil-kudurri-uṣur

Ashur-nirari’s rule proved to be fairly transitory and he was succeeded by Enlil-kudurri-usur, another son of Tukulti-Ninurta. Adad-šuma-uṣur “muster]ed [his army] and attacked and defeated him” and then

[…The officers of Assyria] seized [Enlil-kudu]r-usur their lord and gave (him) to Adad-šuma-uṣur. …the peop]le of Karduniash who had fled to Assyria …they gave [to Adad-šu]ma-uṣur.[6]
—Walker Chronicle (ABC 25), tablet BM 27796, obverse, lines 5 to 7, in the British Museum.

Following this famous victory, a “son of a nobody, whose name is not mentioned” exploited the chance to enthrone himself in Babylon, so a revolt was propagated and Adad-šuma-uṣur took the city and his place in the Kassite dynastic list.[6] The events were captured for posterity in the Adad-šuma-uṣur Epic, a late Babylonian historical literary work where a rebellion of officers and nobles is caused by the neglect of Marduk and Babylon. The penitent king confesses his sins to the god and restores his temple, Esagila.[12]

The end of Enlil-kudurri-usur’s reign is dated 1193 or 1183 depending on uncertainty about the duration of his successor’s, Ninurta-apal-Ekur’s, rule, three or thirteen years.[13] As a son of Ilī-padā, Ninurta-apal-Ekur had taken advantage of Enlil-kudurri-usur’s demise to seize power in Aššur.[14] He had “(come) up from Karduniaš”,[15] where he may conceivably have been the last Assyrian governor of Babylon, as his brother, Mardukija, was governor of Katmuḫi.[16] The length of his reign does rather crucially determine the likely date range for the beginning of Adad-šuma-uṣur’s thirty year reign, because there is no datable event that takes place at the beginning, such as the passing of a preceding monarch. The interregnum between Babylon’s fall to Tukulti-Ninurta and its conquering by Adad-šuma-uṣur had been at least twenty two years and perhaps even more than thirty years.

He was succeeded by his son, Meli-Šipak, who was curiously reluctant to mention his filiation to Adad-šuma-uṣur in his own inscriptions.[4]

References

  1. ^ Gwendolyn Leick (2001). Who's Who in the Ancient Near East. Routledge. p. 5. 
  2. ^ King List A, BM 33332, column 2, lines 8-11.
  3. ^ a b c d Chronicle P, (ABC 22), BM 92701, column 4, lines 8 and 9.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g J. A. Brinkman (1976). Materials for the Study of Kassite History, Vol. I (MSKH I). Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. pp. 19–20, 427, 315, 89–94, 443 and 445. 
  5. ^ Walker Chronicle, ABC 25, BM 27796, lines 2-4.
  6. ^ a b c d e C.B.F. Walker (May 1982). "Babylonian Chronicle 25: A Chronicle of the Kassite and Isin II Dynasties". In G. van Driel. Assyriological Studies presented to F. R. Kraus on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Netherlands Institute for the Near East. pp. 398–406. 
  7. ^ I. E. S. Edwards, ed (1975). Cambridge Ancient History, Volume 2, Part 2, History of the Middle East and the Aegean Region, c. 1380-1000 BC. Cambridge University Press. pp. 288–289. 
  8. ^ Trevor Bryce (2003). Letters of the great kings of the ancient Near East: the royal. Routledge. p. 11. 
  9. ^ a b Itamar Singer (2006). "KBo 28.61-64, and the struggle over the throne of Babylon". Ḫattuša-Boğazköy. Gernot Wilhelm. pp. 223–245. 
  10. ^ Daniel T. Potts (1999). The archaeology of Elam: formation and transformation of an ancient Iranian State. Cambridge University Press. p. 208. 
  11. ^ a b A. K. Grayson (1972). Assyrian Royal Inscriptions, Volume 1. Otto Harrassowitz. pp. 137–138. 
  12. ^ Jonathan Z. Smith (1988). Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. University Of Chicago Press. p. 92. 
  13. ^ Donald John Wiseman (1965). Assyria and Babylonia c. 1200-1000 B. C., Volume 2, Part 31. Cambridge University Press. p. 11. 
  14. ^ Synchronistic History, ABC 21, tablet B, lines 5 to 8.
  15. ^ According to the Assyrian King List, 82nd king listed entry.
  16. ^ J. A. Brinkman (1999). Erich Ebeling, Bruno Meissner. ed. Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie. Walter De Gruyter Inc. pp. 50–51.