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Ramesses II › Who Was
Definition and Origins
Ramesses II (1279-1213 BCE, alternative spellings: Ramses, Rameses) was known to the Egyptians as Userma'atre'setepenre, which means 'Keeper of Harmony and Balance, Strong in Right, Elect of Ra'. He is also known also as Ozymandias and as Ramesses the Great. He was the third pharaoh of the 19th Dynasty (1292-1186 BCE) who claimed to have won a decisive victory over the Hittites at The Battle of Kadesh and used this event to enhance his reputation as a great warrior. In reality, the battle was more of a draw than a decisive victory for either side but resulted in the world's first known peace treaty in 1258 BCE. Although he is regularly associated with the pharaoh from the biblical Book of Exodus there is no historical or archaeological evidence for this whatsoever.
Ramesses lived to be ninety-six years old, had over 200 wives and concubines, ninety-six sons and sixty daughters, most of whom he outlived. So long was his reign that all of his subjects, when he died, had been born knowing Ramesses as pharaoh and there was widespread panic that the world would end with the death of their king. He had his name and accomplishments inscribed from one end of Egypt to the other and there is virtually no ancient site in Egypt which does not make mention of Ramesses the Great.
EARLY LIFE AND CAMPAIGNS
Ramesses was the son of Seti I and Queen Tuya and accompanied his father on military campaigns in Libya and Palestine at the age of 14. By the age of 22 Ramesses was leading his own campaigns in Nubia with his own sons, Khaemweset and Amunhirwenemef, and was named co-ruler with Seti. With his father, Ramesses set about vast restoration projects and built a new palace at Avaris. The Egyptians had long had an uneasy relationship with the kingdom of the Hittites (in modern-day Asia Minor ) who had grown in power to dominate the region. Under the Hittite king Suppiluliuma I (1344-1322 BCE), Egypt had lost many important trading centers in Syria and Canaan. Seti I recaptured the most coveted center, Kadesh in Syria, but it had been taken back by the Hittite king Muwatalli II (1295-1272 BCE). After the death of Seti I in 1290 BCE, Ramesses assumed the throne and at once began military campaigns to restore the borders of Egypt, ensure trade routes, and take back from the Hittites what he felt rightfully belonged to him.
In the second year of his reign, Ramesses defeated the Sea Peoples off the coast of the Nile Delta. According to his account, these were a people known as the Sherdan who were allies of the Hittites. Ramesses laid a trap for them by placing a small naval contingent at the mouth of the Nile to lure the Sherdan warships in. Once they had engaged the meager fleet, he launched his full attack from both sides, sinking their ships. Many of the Sherdan who survived the battle were then pressed into his army, some even serving as his elite bodyguard. The Sea Peoples' origin and ethnicity is unknown, although many theories have been suggested, but Ramesses describes them in his account as Hittite allies and this is important as it underscores the relationship between the Egyptians and Hittites at this time.
At some point, prior to the year 1275 BCE, he began construction of his great city Per-Ramesses ("House of Ramesses") in the Eastern Delta region near to the older city of Avaris. Per-Ramesses would be his capital (and remain an important urban centre throughout the Ramesside Period), a pleasure palace, and a military compound from which he would launch campaigns into neighboring regions. It was not only an armory, military stable, and training ground but was so beautifully constructed that it rivalled the magnificence of the ancient city of Thebes. It is possible, as some scholars suggest, that Per-Ramesses was actually founded - and construction begun - by Seti I because it was already a functioning military centre by the time Ramesses II launched his campaigns in 1275 BCE.
Ramesses marched his army into Canaan which had been a Hittite vassal state since the reign of the Hittite king Suppiluliuma I. This campaign was successful and Ramesses returned home with plunder and Canaanite (and probably Hittite) royalty as prisoners. The historian Susan Wise Bauer comments on this:
At twenty-five, the new pharaoh had already been living an adult life for at least ten years. He had married for the first time at fifteen or so, and had already fathered at least seven children. He had already fought in at least two of his father's campaigns up into the Western Semitic lands. He did not wait long before picking up the fight against the Hittite enemy. In 1275, only three years or so after taking the throne, he began to plan a campaign to get Kadesh back. The city had become more than a battle front; it was a symbolic foot-ball kicked back and forth between empires. Kadesh was too far north for easy control by the Egyptians, too far south for easy administration by the Hittites. Whichever empire claimed it could boast of superior strength (247).
In late 1275 BCE, Ramesses prepared his army to march on Kadesh and waited only for the omens to be auspicious and word from his spies in Syria as to the enemy's strength and position. In 1274 BCE, when all seemed in his favor, he led some twenty thousand men out of Per-Ramesses into battle, the army divided into the four companies named after the gods: Amun, Ra, Ptah, and Set. Ramesses led the Amun division with the others following behind.
THE BATTLE OF KADESH
They marched for two months before reaching a place where he felt confident in arranging his army in battle formation for attack on the city and waited with his Amun division, along with his sons, for the others to catch up. At this time, two Hittite spies were captured who, under torture, gave up the location of the Hittite army which they said was nowhere near the city.Reassured, Ramesses abandoned his plans for an immediate strike and gave orders for his division to encamp and wait for the rest of the army to arrive. The Hittite army, however, was actually less than a mile away and the two spies had been purposefully sent. As Ramesses was pitching camp, the Hittites roared out from behind the walls of Kadesh and struck.
The battle is described in Ramesses accounts, Poem of Pentaur and The Bulletin, in which he relates how the Amun division was completely overrun by the Hittites and the lines were broken. The Hittite cavalry was cutting down the Egyptian infantry and survivors were scrambling for the safety of their camp. Recognizing his situation, Ramesses called upon his protector god, Amun, and fought back. According to historian Margaret Bunson:
Ramesses brought calm and purpose to his small units and began to slice his way through the enemy in order to reach his southern forces. With only his household troops, with a few officers and followers, and with the rabble of the defeated units standing by, he mounted his chariot and discovered the extent of the forces against him.He then charged the eastern wing of the assembled foe with such ferocity that they gave way, allowing the Egyptians to escape the net which Muwatalli had cast for them (131).
Ramesses had only just turned the tide of battle when the Ptah division arrived and he quickly ordered them to follow him in the attack. He drove the Hittites toward the Orontes River killing many of them while others drowned trying to escape. He had not considered the position his hasty charge might place him in, however, and was now caught between the Hittites and the river. All Muwatalli II needed to do to win at this point was to send his reserve troops into battle and Ramesses and his army would have been destroyed; yet, for some reason, the Hittite king did not do this. Ramesses rallied his forces and drove the Hittites from the field.
He then claimed a great victory for Egypt in that he had defeated his enemy in battle but the Battle of Kadesh nearly resulted in his defeat and death. According to his own reports, it was only owing to his own personal courage and calm in battle (and the goodwill of the gods) that he was able to turn the tide against the Hittites.
Ramesses II at The Battle of Kadesh
Rameses immortalized his feats at Kadesh in the Poem of Pentaur and The Bulletin in which he describes the battle as a dazzling victory for Egypt but Muwatalli II also claimed victory in that he had not lost the city to the Egyptians. The Battle of Kadesh led to the first peace treaty ever signed in the world between Ramesses II of Egypt and Muwatalli II's successor, Hattusili III (died 1237 BCE) of the Hittite Empire.
After the Battle of Kadesh, Ramesses devoted himself to improving Egypt's infrastructure, strengthening its borders, and commissioning vast building projects commemorating his victory of 1274 and his other accomplishments.
QUEEN NEFERTARI & LATER LIFE
The vast tomb complex known as the Ramesseum at Thebes, the temples at Abu Simbel, the hall at Karnak, the complex at Abydos and literally hundreds of other buildings, monuments, temples were all constructed by Ramesses. Many historians consider his reign the pinnacle of Egyptian art and culture and the famous Tomb of Nefertari with its wall paintings is cited as clear evidence of the truth of this claim. Nefertari was Ramesses' first wife and his favorite queen. Many depictions of Nefertari appear on temple walls and in statuary throughout his reign even though she seems to have died fairly early in their marriage (perhaps in child birth) and her tomb, even though discovered looted, was a work of art in construction and decoration.
Ramesses II Statue
After Nefertari, Ramesses elevated his secondary wife Isetnefret to the position of queen and, after her death, his daughters became his consorts. Even so, the memory of Nefertari seems to have always been close in his mind in that Ramesses had her likeness engraved on walls and statuary long after he had taken other wives. He always treated the children of these wives with equal regard and respect. Nefertari was the mother of his sons Rameses and Amunhirwenemef and Isetnefret the mother of Khaemwaset and yet all three were treated the same.
RAMESSES AS PHARAOH OF EXODUS
Although Ramesses has been popularly associated with the pharaoh of the biblical Book of Exodus, there is absolutely no evidence to support this claim. The association of the name `Ramesses' with the unnamed pharaoh of Egypt in the Biblebecame quite common after the success of Cecil B. DeMille's film The Ten Commandments in 1956. Film versions of the biblical story since, including the popular animated film Prince of Egypt (1998) and the more recent Exodus: Gods and Kings(2014) both followed the lead of DeMille's film but there is no historical support for this association.
Exodus 1:11 and 12:37 as well as Numbers 33:3 and 33:5 all mention Per-Ramesses as one of the cities the Israelite slaves labored on and also the city they departed Egypt from. There is no evidence of a mass exodus from the city - nor from any other city in the history of Egypt - and none to support the claim that Per-Ramesses was built by slave labor.
Extensive archaeological excavations at Giza and elsewhere throughout Egypt have unearthed ample evidence that the building projects completed under the reign of Ramesses II (and every other king of Egypt) used skilled and unskilled Egyptian laborers who were either paid for their time or who volunteered as part of their civic duty. The custom of Egyptian citizens volunteering their time to work on the king's building projects is well documented and it was even thought that, in the afterlife, souls would be called upon to work for Osiris, Lord of the Dead, on the building projects he would want. The practice of placing shabti dolls in the tombs and graves of the dead was precisely for this purpose: so the dolls would take the place of the deceased in work projects.
Further, Ramesses was famous for recording histories of his accomplishments and for embellishing the facts when they did not quite fit history as he wished it preserved. It seems highly unlikely that such a king would neglect to record (with or without a favorable slant) the plagues which allegedly fell upon Egypt or the flight of the Hebrew slaves. One need not rely solely on the inscriptions Ramesses himself ordered, however; the Egyptians, from the time they mastered writing c. 3200 BCE, kept very extensive records and none of them even hint at a large population of Hebrew slaves in Egypt much less their mass exodus.
Further, the literary works of the Egyptians from the Middle Kingdom through the Late Period provide numerous motifs, themes, and actual events which were made use of by the later scribes who wrote the biblical narratives. The association of Ramesses with the cruel, stubborn pharaoh of Exodus is unfortunate as it obscures the character of a man who was a great and noble ruler.
LEGACY
The reign of Ramesses II has become somewhat controversial over the last century with some scholars claiming he was more of a showman and a propagandist than and effective king and others arguing the opposite. The records of his reign, however - both the written and the physical evidence of the temples and monuments - argue for a very stable and prosperous reign. He was one of the few rulers to live and rule long enough to take part in two Heb Sed festivals which were held every thirty years to rejuvenate the pharaoh. He secured the country's borders, increased its wealth, and widened its scope of trade and, if he boasted of his accomplishments in his inscriptions and monuments, it is because he had good reason to be proud.
Ramesses the Great's mummy shows that he stood over six feet in height with a strong, jutting jaw, thin nose and thick lips. He suffered from dental problems, severe arthritis, and hardening of the arteries and, most likely, died from old age or heart failure. He was known to later Egyptians as the 'Great Ancestor' and many pharaohs would do him the honor of taking his name as their own. Some of them, such as Ramessess III, are considered better rulers than he was; none of them, however, would surpass the grand achievements and glory of Ramesses the Great in the minds and hearts of the ancient Egyptians.
Tukulti-Ninurta I › Who Was
Definition and Origins
Tukulti-Ninurta I (reigned 1244-1208 BCE) was a king of the Assyrian Empire during the period known as the Middle Empire.He was the son of Shalmaneser I (reigned 1274-1245 BCE) who had completed the work of his father, Adad Nirari I, in conquering and securing the lands that had once been the Kingdom of Mitanni. Tukulti- Ninurta I, therefore, inherited a vast empire that was largely secure. Not content with resting on the achievements of his father and grandfather, Tikulti-Ninurta I expanded Assyria ’s holdings further, toppled the kingdom of the Hittites, crushed the Nairi people of Anatolia, and enriched the palace treasury with loot from his conquests. An adept warrior and statesman, he was also a literate man who was the first Assyrian king to begin collecting tablets for a library in the capital city of Ashur. He is best known for the sack of Babylonand plundering the sacred temple of the city and has been identified as the king known as Nimrod from the biblical Book of Genesis 10:8-10, who was a great warrior, famous hunter, and Assyrian king. The historian Susan Wise Bauer comments on the Nimrod/Tukulti-Ninurta I identification, writing :
The chronology is difficult, but Tukulti Ninurta is probably the king called Nimrod in Genesis 10:10: a mighty hunter and warrior whose kingdom included Babylon, Erech [ Uruk ] Akkad, and Nineveh, the same expanse as that claimed by Tukulti-Ninurta for Assyria. Weirdly enough, this Hebrew version of the name of the Assyrian great king has become an English synonym for a foolish and ineffectual man (“What a nimrod!”). The only etymology I can find for this suggests that, thanks to some biblically literate scriptwriter, [the cartoon character] Bugs Bunny once called Elmer Fudd a “poor little Nimrod” in an ironic reference to the “mighty hunter”.Apparently the entire Saturday-morning audience, having no memory of Genesis genealogies, heard the irony as a general insult and applied it to anyone bumbling and Fudd-like. Thus a distorted echo of Tukulti-Ninurta's might in arms bounced down, through the agency of a rabbit, into the vocabulary of the twentieth century (270).
AN ADEPT WARRIOR AND STATESMAN, HE WAS ALSO A LITERATE MAN WHO WAS THE FIRST ASSYRIAN KING TO BEGIN COLLECTING TABLETS FOR A LIBRARY IN THE CAPITAL CITY OF ASHUR.
REIGN & EARLY CAMPAIGNS
The Kingdom of Mitanni had been conquered by the Hittites under their king Suppiluliuma I (1344-1322 BCE) prior to the rise of the Assyrians. Adad Nirari I and Shalmaneser I, as noted, had secured the region under Assyrian rule by the time Tukulti-Ninurta I took the throne. The Hittites, under their king Tudhaliya IV, were no longer considered the formidable power in the region that they had been in the days of Suppiluliuma I and his son Mursilli II. Tudhaliya IV, wishing to enhance his reputation as a ruler, focused on grand building projects, which included 26 new temples and renovations to his already luxurious palace.At the same time he was channeling funds into urban development. However, his country was suffering a famine which was so serious that he had to write to Egypt asking for grain to keep the people from starving. Further, the Hittite economy was failing and the army had not been paid. When the cities along the western border of his kingdom revolted, Tudhaliya marched out and subdued them, but the effort this took was noted by Tukulti-Ninurta I and, recognizing the weakness of the Hittites, he attacked.
Tudhaliya IV met him on the field of Erbila and, according to a letter which Tukulti-Ninurta I sent to one of his allies, tried to win the battle by trickery, since he feared he could not do so by strength of arms. Tukulti-Ninurta I's letter reads,
Tudhaliya wrote to me, saying, “You have captured merchants who were loyal to me. Come on, let's fight; I have set out against you for battle.”I prepared my army and my chariots. But before I could reach his city, Tudhaliya the king of the Hittites sent out a messenger who was holding two tablets with hostile words and one with friendly words. He showed me the two with a hostile challenge first. When my army heard about these words, they were anxious to fight, ready to set out at once. The messenger saw this. So then he gave me the third tablet, which said, “I am not hostile to the king of Assur [Ashur], my brother. Why should we brothers be at war with each other?”But I brought my army on. He was stationed with his soldiers in the city Nihrija, so I sent him a message saying, “I'll besiege the city. If you are truly friendly to me, leave the city at once.” But he did not reply to my message.So I withdrew my army a little way back from the city. Then a Hittite deserter fled from Tudhaliya's army and reached me. He said, “The king may be writing to you evasively, in friendship, but his troops are in battle order;he is ready to march.”So I called my troops out and marched against him; and I won a great victory (Bauer, 269).
Tukulti-Ninurta I claimed afterwards to have taken 28,800 Hittite prisoners of war and, while that may be an exaggeration, the historical record supports his claim of the great victory at the Battle of Nihriya in c. 1245 BCE. He could have then pursued Tudhaliya IV and destroyed the remnants of the Hittite army but chose instead to march back to his capital at Ashur with his prisoners and whatever loot there was to be had. While he had been engaged with the Hittites, the city of Babylon in the south moved against Assyrian territories on the border and claimed them. The question of the border states between Babylon and Assyria had been settled by treaty that the Babylonian king now chose to ignore. Regarding this, Bauer writes:
Babylon had had an ambiguous relationship with Assyria for years. Each city had, at various times, claimed the right to rule the other. Babylon and Assur were not only balanced in strength, but also twins in culture. They had once been part of the same empire, under Hammurabi, and the essentially Babylonian stamp on the whole area remained visible. Assyria and Babylon shared the same gods, albeit with occasionally different names; their gods had the same stories; and the Assyrians used Babylonian cuneiform in their inscriptions and annals. This likeness made Assyrian kings generally reluctant to sack and burn Babylon, even when they had the chance. But Tukulti-Ninurta was not much inclined to restraint. He boasted in his inscriptions of the fate of all those who defied him: “I filled the caves and ravines of the mountains with their corpses,” he announces, “I made heaps of their corpses, like grain piled beside their gates; their cities I ravaged, I turned them into ruinous hills” (270).
The Kassite king of Babylon, Kashtiliash IV, took the border regions between Babylon and Assyria and fortified them. He seems to have felt that Tukulti-Ninurta I would be dealing with the Hittites for an extended period and would not concern himself with Babylon or the disputed territories. Bauer comments on this writing, “We know almost nothing about this king, Kashtiliash IV, except that he was a poor judge of men; Tukulti-Ninurta marched down and plundered Babylon's temples” (270). The Assyrian army sacked Babylon and Tikulti-Ninurta I wrote that he faced down the Babylonian king personally in battle and “trod on his royal neck with my feet like a footstool.” With Babylon in ruins, he then took the treasures of the gods, including the statue of the great god Marduk, back to the city of Ashur. He also took with him a large portion of the population as slaves, including the king, who he marched “naked and in chains” to Ashur and then placed an Assyrian official in charge of re-building and governing Babylon. The Assyrian Empire now extended further than it ever had previously under any king, and historians have long claimed that Tukulti-Ninurta I now built his city Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta to celebrate his great victory by creating a new capital city distinct from Ashur.
KAR-TUKULTI-NINURTA
The city of Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta (Harbor of Tukulti-Ninurta) was the king's personal project and has long been held to have been initiated after the sack of Babylon. The historian Marc Van De Mieroop writes, “The greatest project was the construction of a new capital city by Tikulti-Ninurta, named Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta, opposite Ashur on the Tigris River. It was built after he had defeated Babylon, and the spoils of that campaign may have helped provide the means” (183). Bauer also cites the same version of events, claiming the city was built following the sack of Babylon. This view of the history of the city, though long held, has been questioned in recent years by scholars who claim the city was among the king's first projects and was only renovated, not initiated, after the fall of Babylon. The historian Alesandra Gilibert writes:
The site was excavated by a German team led by Walter Bachman from October 1913 to March 1914. Fieldwork then resumed in 1986 and again in 1987…Drawing on the results of these excavations and on textual evidence, [we should call] into question two theses that, though rarely properly discussed, have become the communis opinio in scholarly literature. They concern the first decades of the history of the city and can be summarized as follows: 1. Kar Tukulti Ninurta was founded and completed in a relatively short period of time following the military conquest of Babylon, 2. Kar Tukulti Ninurta was conceived as a counterpart to Assur…both theses are based on misinterpretations and false assumptions and hence should be revised (179).
Based on archaeological evidence and the inscriptions found at the site and elsewhere, the city does seem to have been initiated much earlier than the traditional date assigned. The accepted story of the city rising after the fall of Babylon comes from inscriptions found on buildings in the ruins of Kar Tukulti Ninurta, in the king's royal inscriptions, and on the supposition that, after the sack of Babylon, the king wanted to separate himself from those in Ashur who did not approve of his campaign and so built a new capital. The inscriptions in the city, however, are all found on buildings which were renovated, not built, after the fall of Babylon, and the older part of the city pre-dates Babylon's fall in c. 1225 BCE. It seems more likely that the new city, whose palace Tukulti-Ninurta I referred to as “my royal dwelling”, was built early in his reign not to replace Ashur as the capital but simply to complement it. Records indicate that the same officials who worked in the administrative offices in Ashur also worked across the river in the offices at Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta, and so the claim that the new city was built to replace the old capital is untenable. The inscriptions of the king claiming it was built quickly after the fall of Babylon seem more like political propaganda than historical truth and most likely actually refer to the renovations to the city and not to its founding. These inscriptions make clear how complete Tukulti-Ninurta I's victory was over the Kassites of Babylon and how this victory should be remembered by those visiting the city. These writings correspond to another work commissioned by the king, the Tukulti Ninurta Epic, which justifies his campaign against Babylon and the looting of the temples.
THE TUKULTI-NINURTA EPIC
The historian Stephen Bertman writes, “In literature, Tukulti-Ninurta's victory over Kashtiliash was celebrated in an epic, the so-called Tikulti-Ninurta Epic, the only Assyrian one we possess” (108). In this poem, the king claims that he had no choice but to sack Babylon because the Kassite king had broken the laws ordained by the gods. Commenting on this, the historian Christoph O. Schroeder writes:
The Assyrian Tukulti-Ninurta Epic's purpose is to give a theological legitimation for the destruction of Babylon by the Assyrian king…It intends to justify the city's destruction as the outcome of a just war. To achieve this, it portrays Kashtiliash IV, the Babylonian king, as a breaker of oaths and the violator of the parity-treaty that had been the basis of the relations between Assyria and Babylon since the time of the king's fathers (147).
The poem begins with Tikulti-Ninurta I addressing the sun god Shamash saying, “I respected your oath, I feared your greatness” and then going on to explain how the king of Babylon had not done so - “He had no fear of your oath, he transgressed your command, he schemed an act of malice” - and so Tikulti-Ninurta I had only been doing the will of the gods when he sacked the city and took the treasures of the temple back to Ashur. Even though it was true that Kashtiliash IV had initiated hostilities, the people of the land, both Babylonians and Assyrians, felt the king's treatment of the city was too harsh for the transgression of claiming the border territories and breaking the treaty. Bauer writes:
Babylon itself had been shocked by the plunder of the temples: “He put Babylonians to the sword,” the Babylonian Chronicle says, “the treasure of Babylon he profanely brought out, and he took the great lord Marduk off to Assyria.” Nor had the destruction gone over well with the devout in his own land. The Assyrian epic that Tukulti-Ninurta commissioned to celebrate the victory over Babylon has an unmistakably defensive tone; it goes to great lengths to explain that Tukulti-Ninurta really wanted to have peace with Babylon and tried his best to be friends with Kashtiliash, only the Babylonian king insisted on coming into Assyrian territory to thieve and burn, which is why the gods of Babylon deserted the city and left it for punishment to the Assyrians. Clearly the great king was under pressure to explain not only why he sacked Babylon, but why he took its sacred images back to his own capital. The explanation didn't convince, and Tukulti-Ninurta's sacrilege brought about his end (271).
Centuries later, the Assyrian king Sennacherib would sack Babylon and his son Esarhaddon would explain the city's fate using this same theological justification. Esarhaddon, however, had been a young prince at the time of his father's conquest of Babylon and clearly had had nothing to do with it. His explanation that the gods had destroyed Babylon because of the sins of the people, which left out any mention of the role his father played in the destruction of the city, seemed to make sense in that he was re-building Babylon following its fall and had played no part in its destruction. Tukulti-Ninurta I's inscription was not accepted because the people knew what he had done and how he had personally profited from the wealth stolen from the gods. Whether Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta was built earlier or later in his reign, it was lavishly renovated with wealth from the sack of Babylon, and the king retreated to his royal dwelling and left the politics of Ashur to his court administrators. It has long been surmised that he did so because the tide of popular opinion had turned against him because of his treatment of Babylon.
DEATH & LEGACY
The Babylonian Chronicles report that, “As for Tukulti-Ninurta, who had brought evil upon Babylon, his son and the nobles of Assyria revolted and they cast him from his throne and imprisoned him in his own palace complex and then killed him with a sword.” His death plunged the country into a chaos of civil war from which his son Ashur-Nadin-Apli, generally understood as his assassin or at least a primary conspirator, took the throne and restored order. Still, the country fell into a kind of stasis in which it neither declined nor evolved. The entire region c. 1200 BCE suffered significantly in the so-called Bronze Age Collapse but Assyria would remain relatively intact; even so, the empire suffered after the death of Tukulti-Ninurta I and no king would rise to lead the country forward until the reign of Tiglath Pileser I (1115-1076 BCE).
Although he had ruled successfully for 37 years, Tukulti-Ninurta I's decision to sack Babylon, and his subsequent assassination, were what he was known for afterwards, thanks to the work of the Babylonian scribes who wrote the chronicles.His legacy, however, could be greater than they imagined when they wrote of him centuries ago. Van De Mieroop notes that, “Babylon's culture had an impact on the entire Near Eastern world…Tukulti Ninurta I, for example, after sacking Babylon, took home literary tablets as booty. He may thus have laid the foundation of a royal library in Assyria filled with Babylonian manuscripts. These influenced local authors” (179). These Assyrian authors would transcribe works such as the myth of Adapa, the inscriptions of Sargon the Great, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the myths of the gods of Babylon specifically and Sumer in general, and, in doing so, passed on these stories to other generations in Assyria. As the Assyrian Empire grew larger and conquered other territories, the literature of Babylon spread throughout their territories, influencing the cultures and literary traditions of the ancient world.
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