Iraqi History · Chronicle IV of XII
Ancient Mesopotamia
Kassite Babylonia, the first Assyrian empire, and the Bronze Age collapse.
Kassite DynastyPolitical
Kassite kings from the Zagros seize the leaderless city and found the longest dynasty Babylon would ever know.
The Kassites, a people of uncertain origin, adopted Babylonian gods, language, and customs and ruled for over four hundred years — longer than any native line. They renamed the land Karduniash, restored its temples, and gave southern Mesopotamia a rare age of stability and unity, ruling from a new capital at Dur-Kurigalzu.
Kassite DynastyPolitical
The Amarna letters show Kassite kings writing to the pharaohs of Egypt as brothers, trading gold for lapis and marriage alliances.
In the diplomatic archive found at Egyptian Amarna, the kings of Babylon, Assyria, Mitanni, Hatti, and Egypt address one another as equals in a 'club of great powers.' Kassite Babylon exchanged princesses and precious goods with the pharaohs, complaining when the gold sent was less pure than promised — the ordinary business of Bronze Age diplomacy.
Middle Assyrian KingdomPolitical
Ashur-uballit I throws off the overlordship of Mitanni and makes Assyria an independent great power.
As the kingdom of Mitanni crumbled, Ashur-uballit seized its eastern lands and wrote to Egypt as a king in his own right — to the annoyance of Babylon, which considered Assyria a vassal. From this base grew the Middle Assyrian kingdom, the first version of the militarized state that would one day dominate the whole Near East.
Middle Assyrian KingdomMilitary
The Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta I storms Babylon, captures its king, and carries the statue of Marduk north.
For the first time an Assyrian king ruled Babylon directly — a shocking reversal, since Babylon was the revered cultural mother of Assyria. Tukulti-Ninurta founded a grand new capital and celebrated his triumph in epic verse, but his hubris cost him: he was murdered by his own son, and Babylon soon slipped free.
End of the KassitesMilitary
Elamite armies sack Babylon, end four centuries of Kassite rule, and carry the Code of Hammurabi off to Susa.
The Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte swept into Babylonia and hauled its greatest monuments — the Code of Hammurabi, the victory stele of Naram-Sin — back to his capital at Susa, where archaeologists would find them three thousand years later. The Kassite line was extinguished, and Babylon lay open to new masters.
Second Dynasty of IsinReligious
Nebuchadnezzar I of Isin invades Elam and brings the statue of Marduk home in triumph.
In a daring summer campaign across the mountains, Nebuchadnezzar I crushed Elam and recovered the god Marduk, whose long exile had, Babylonians felt, left them defenceless. His victory was celebrated for centuries, and it was in this age that Marduk finally rose to supreme king of the gods in the great creation epic, the Enuma Elish.
Middle Assyrian KingdomMilitary
The warrior-king Tiglath-Pileser I campaigns from the mountains to the Mediterranean, extending Assyria's reach.
Tiglath-Pileser I fought the Aramaeans on the Euphrates, hunted wild bulls in the Lebanon, and sailed the Mediterranean, leaving detailed annals of his conquests. He also compiled laws and a great library at Assur. Yet the tide he rode against was rising: waves of Aramaean nomads were pressing on the settled land from every side.
Aramaean AgeEvent
Drought and Aramaean migrations shatter the old order; Assyria shrinks to its heartland and Babylon falls into disorder.
The whole eastern Mediterranean world collapsed around 1200-1050 BCE, and Mesopotamia was not spared. Semitic Aramaean tribes settled across Syria and the Assyrian frontier, while Chaldean tribes moved into the Babylonian south. For over a century written records thin to almost nothing — a genuine dark age between two ages of empire.
Aramaean AgeCultural
The Aramaic language and its simple alphabet begin to spread, destined to become the common tongue of the whole Near East.
The Aramaeans brought no empire, but they brought a language written with an easy alphabet on parchment and papyrus rather than clay. Over the coming centuries Aramaic would displace Akkadian as the everyday speech of Mesopotamia, become the administrative language of empires, and remain the tongue of the region into the Islamic age.
Assyrian RecoveryPolitical
Ashur-dan II begins to reconquer the lost frontier, opening the recovery that will explode into the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
Ashur-dan II and his successors resettled abandoned lands, rebuilt granaries, and drove the Aramaeans back year by year. Their patient, brutal campaigns of reconquest laid the foundations of the most powerful state the ancient Near East had ever produced — the war-machine of the Neo-Assyrian kings.
2 more entries, to 934 BC
