Wars of Assurbanipal against Mannea and Gambulu

Turning now to Assurbanipal as king, twelve out of the sixteen queries from his reign pertain to political and/or military events known from other sources. Nos. 262-266 deal with the return of the statue of Marduk to Babylon, in early 668, and matters associated with it, like the appointment of a priest for the god.[[266]] Nos. 267-273 relate to warfare, the three first queries of this group to Assurbanipal's war against the Manneans,[[267]] a war which ended in the defeat and death of Ahšeri, the Mannean king, and the rest to military action against the Gambulu, one of the major Aramean tribes on the border of Elam.

The best preserved and therefore the most informative of the Gambulu texts is no. 271, dated 658. No. 272 is fragmentary, but does preserve the name of the eponym, Labasi, for the year 657, while no. 270 (no date preserved) parallels no. 271 and must have been approximately contemporary with it. All these queries accordingly date from about 658-657, but the beginnings of the conflict which they reflect were rooted in an earlier time, in 664 at the latest,[[268]] when Urtaku of Elam, evidently with the support of Bel-iqiša of Gambulu, invaded Babylonia, thus bringing to an end the peaceful relations he had established with Assyria ten years earlier.[[269]]

The subsequent deaths of these two rulers did not materially change the prevailing state of affairs. Urtaku's successor, Teumman, found an ally in Dunanu, the son of Bel-iqiša, and their anti-Assyrian activities must have continued for some time after 658/7, since the end of both apparently only came in 653, as a result of an Assyrian campaign culminating in the annexation of both Gambulu and Elam.[[270]] The military actions planned in nos. 270-272 are, accordingly, not directly related to the events described in the royal inscriptions.



266 No. 262, which inquires whether Assurbanipal's brother, Šamaš-šumu-ukin, should escort the statue of Marduk to Babylon, is dated 23-I-668. No. 263 refers to the return of the statue as an event to occur in the "coming year," and was hence written in 669. On the political aspects of the reorganization of the cult of Marduk (and other Babylonian gods) see B. Porter, Symbols of Power: Figurative Aspects of Esarhaddon's Babylonian Policy (Ph. Diss., University of Pennsyivania, 1987), p. 241ff.

267 To recover, according to no. 267, cities lost to the Manneans, presumably by Assurbanipal's predecessors. The exact date of this campaign is unknown, but it cannot have been undertaken before 664, since it is not included in the so-called HT recension of Assurbanipal's annals, composed in 664/3 B.C.; see Cogan and Tadmor, Or. 46 (1977) 81. Grayson, "The Chronology of the Reign of Ashurbanipal," ZA 70 (1980) 230 and 233, dates it to about 660 B.C.

268 Dietrich, AOAT 7 (1970), p. 75, dates it in 665. Grayson, ZA 70 (1980) 230, in 667. See, however, Brinkman, op. cit. 87 n. 423. See also Streck Asb p. cclxxxvif, and Ahmed, Southern Mesopotamia in the Reign of Assurbanipal (1968), 32f. ABL 269, a letter referring to the revolt of Bel-iqiša, is dated by Dietrich in 663, but the revolt most likely occured a year earlier, in 664.

269 Cf. no. 74 and see SAA 2 pp. XVIIf and XXIII. On Esarhaddon's policies towards the Elamites and Gambuleans, see Brinkman, op. cit. 78f.

270 See Streck Asb p.184:43ff, etc. The Assyrian campaign leading to the execution of Dunanu and Teumman can be fixed chronologically with the help of a lunar eclipse, see Mayr apud Piepkorn Asb p. 105ff; cf also Mattila, SAAB 1 (1987) 30.

Ivan Starr

Ivan Starr, 'Wars of Assurbanipal against Mannea and Gambulu', Queries to the Sungod: Divination and Politics in Sargonid Assyria, SAA 4. Original publication: Helsinki, Helsinki University Press, 1990; online contents: SAAo/SAA04 Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2020 [http://oracc.org/saao/saa04/chronologyandhistoricalbackground/warsofassurbanipal/]

 
Back to top ^^
 
SAAo/SAA04, 2014-. Since 2015, SAAo is based at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Historisches Seminar (LMU Munich, History Department) - Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East. Content released under a CC BY-SA 3.0 [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/] license, 2007-20.
Oracc uses cookies only to collect Google Analytics data. Read more here [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/about/cookies/index.html]; see the stats here [http://www.seethestats.com/site/oracc.museum.upenn.edu]; opt out here.
http://oracc.org/saao/saa04/chronologyandhistoricalbackground/warsofassurbanipal/