Ancient History - Part 20: A Legacy of War

Soon after the Great Assyrian Temple of Ashur (E-Kharsag-kurkura) was fully restored, the kingship of Assyria passed down to Shalmaneser I's son, Tukulti-Ninurta (1256-1233). As his father before him, his reign proved to be quite a success, and once seated upon the throne, renewed his predecessor's wars with the northwest:

1. First, king Tukulti-Ninurta invaded Na'iri, a land mass divided and ruled by its many kings, swollen with Hittite population. It was here that a series of engagements took place on the battlefield, where his armies fought to victory over all forty-three regional kings.
2. Hittite and Semitic town, village, and city alike surrendered or fell to Assyria, in a march that conquered the budding Commagene tribes land on the borderlands stretching to the Syrian city of Mari, the latter of which held long ties to Babylonia.
3. Any territory that was lost within Hanigalbat following the days after his father's return to Ashur, was subsequently recaptured and the "land of the Shubari" (speculated geographically to be a mixture of former Mitanni, Hittite, and nomadic tribes land) were absorbed into the growing Middle Kingdom of Assyria.

The direct result of these victories displaced nearly 30,000 Hittites from the east of Euphrates back into their northwestern homelands of Hatti. 

A recovered text gives an account of a man who fled with his family from Hanigalbat (during this Assyrian invasion), decided against relocating to the Hittite lands, and instead migrated into Babylonia, where he resumed his leather-working trade. Interestingly enough, through the sands of time, this piece of tablet was recovered in Iran of all places. Nonetheless, it remains highly suggestive that Babylonia was now viewed by the smallfolk of the Near East as a more suitable safe haven than the once powerful Hatti.

While certain details of this war and the effects it had on these cultural populations are omitted due to lack of evidence, what historians today do have in their possession undoubtedly proves that king Tukulti-Ninurta's war was heavily pressed upon Hanigalbat and changed the lives of its people for the generations that followed:

Hanigalbat then officially became an Assyrian province.

[MARI TODAY]