2000 BCE, the south saw the struggle for supremacy between the various Babylonian
cities, which finally led to the rise of Babylon. At the same time, several cities in the
north regained their independence. One of them was the city of Ashur.
HISTORYBabylonia and Assyria were closely linked historically and culturally. The historical
relations between Assyria and Babylonia reached from campaigns, conquests and
destructions, to border agreements, diplomatic marriages and mutual assistance in
times of internal trouble. Unfortunately, the source material relating to the political
relations between Assyria and Babylonia is unevenly distributed, especially for the
earlier centuries of their history. The German excavations in Babylon seldom reached
the levels of the second millennium. Therefore, Babylonian written sources from this
period are scarce. We have to rely mostly on accounts written from an Assyrian point
of view, such as Assyrian royal inscriptions, administrative texts or letters (cf. Brinkman
1979 , 1984 and 1990 ). In addition we have three literary texts dealing with the
Assyro-Babylonian relations in the second millennium BCE:
- The ‘Synchronistic History’, an Assyrian historical text from the eighth century
which enumerates treaties, border agreements and their violations (Figure 37. 1 :
K 4401 a + Rm 854 ) (Grayson 1975 : 157 – 170 ). - The so called ‘Chronicle P’ is a larger fragment of a Late Babylonian tablet that
speaks more or less about the same events as the ‘Synchronistic History’. We do
not know where and when the original of this copy was written (Grayson 1975 :
170 – 177 ). - The Tukulti-Ninurta Epic, an Assyrian literary masterpiece from the thirteenth
century celebrating the conquest of Babylon by that king (Machinist 1976 and
1978 ).
Ashur was populated at least since the middle of the third millennium BCE. After
the fall of the Ur III kingdom, the city was ruled by a local dynasty which established
a network of trading connections with Anatolia, North Syria and the East during the
nineteenth century (Larsen 1976 ). (For the historical development of Assyria compare
Mayer 1995 and Cancik-Kirschbaum 2003 .) Later on it became part of the ‘Kingdom
of Upper Mesopotamia’ created by Samsi-Addu (c. 1748 – 1715 ), the Amorite ruler of
Ekallatum, a city near Ashur. He spent part of his early years in Babylon before he
conquered the cities of Ashur, Shechna and Mari, as well as most of Upper Mesopotamia.
The empire that Samsi-Addu created lasted for about thirty years, before it fell into
various small independent states. Some of them were incorporated in the Babylonian
state of Hammurabi. Ashur, it seems, remained independent for a while but was later
part of the kingdom of Mitanni that grew out of several Hurrian principalities in
the sixteenth century and soon became a leading power in Northern Syria. Finally,
in the fourteenth century, Assyria became independent of Mitanni rule. It tried to
establish its place among the leading states of that time: Egypt, Hatti, Mitanni and
Babylonia. Ashur-uballit I ( 1353 – 1318 ) sent two letters to the Egyptian pharaoh
Akhenaten in order to initiate regular diplomatic contacts. The Babylonian king
— Hannes D. Galter —