For Assyria, this meant an opening to foreign recognition which would place it in
direct conflict with Babylon. Assur-uballit dispatched envoys to Egypt, and demanded
gifts from the Egyptian king with the result that the Babylonian king would demand
that Akhenaten send the Assyrian envoys out of his capital immediately and empty-
handed. The envoys may well have been overjoyed at the hope since Akhenaten had
made them stand out in the sun, worshipping for hours, but the situation reflected
a decisive turn in the history of Babylonian power. And the real victims of the political
situation were not the sun-burnt Assyrian envoys, but rather the sisters and daughters
of the Babylonian Kassite kings, as they were sent off as hostages of political interest
to the royal harems of Hatti, Elam and Egypt.
As it was generally the weaker party who sent the bride, these Babylonian beauties
were left as signposts of Babylonian frailty. The one case where the Babylonians were
able to acquire a bride, from Assyria, became a catastrophe for Babylon when Assur-
Uballit invaded after his grandson was murdered and replaced by a ‘nobody’. After
the Assyrian withdrawal, Kurigalzu II was able to sweep into Elam and take Susa.
In order to understand this reversal of fortune which allowed a brief interlude of
Babylonian greatness before Babylon was conquered by successive Assyrian and Elamite
kings, we must return to the stand-off in Syria. During the reigns of Thutmosis III
and Amenophis II (i.e., the period of c. 1445 , after the Euphrates campaign, until
1397 , the death of Amenophis II), the Egyptians had been struggling to maintain
their hold in the Orontes valley. However, during the reign of Thutmosis IV, Mitanni
had gradually come under Hittite pressure, and the princes of Syria began to align
themselves with Egypt, and Mitanni itself continued the overtures towards Egypt
begun near the end of the reign of Amenophis II. Thus, there was a change in the
balance of power in Syria which did not result from Egyptian advances but, rather,
from those of the Hittites.
The beneficiaries of this policy were not merely the Egyptians, but also the Assyrians
and the Babylonians. The great Hittite king, Shuppiluliuma I, who was destined to
destroy Mitanni during the reign of Akhenaten, benefited from the far-sighted
Babylonian policy of sacrificing their daughters, as he – like Amenophis III, and later
Ramesses II – had a Babylonian bride. Shuppiluliuma did not necessarily recognise
the etiquette as others did since he also sacrificed a daughter to his vassal Shattiwaza,
but it may be assumed that the Babylonians understood the rules better. The fact
that the Hittite king had a Babylonian Kassite wife reflected the growing threat from
the east and thus Shuppiluliuma’s wife would be completely unrelated to the power
relations between Hatti and Babylon. Instead, through Babylon, the Elamites exercised
a direct influence on Hatti. Thus Babylon was pursuing a diplomatic marriage policy
to the west and north while maintaining military pressure on Elam. Their opportunity,
which allowed the lunge into Elamite territory and the conquest of Susa, followed
from the Egyptian conflict with Hatti following the death of Tutankhamun.
Tutankhamun had died while Shuppiluliuma was besieging Carchemish, and his
widow had apparently sent a messenger asking Shuppiluliuma to send him one of
his sons to make him her husband and king of Egypt. Shuppiluliuma delayed, and
when he eventually established that the queen was telling the truth, he dispatched
his son – but too late, for the conspirators were able to assure that Shuppiluliuma’s
son died in Egypt and the widow was married to Aya. What happened to the queen
is unknown, for she disappears. However, Shuppiluliuma then attacked Egyptian
— Egypt and Mesopotamia —