The Decline and Fall of Mitanni. A brief review of the final days of Mitanni. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- During the reign of Amenhotep II Egypt was the strongest power in the ANE, having pushed its borders up into Syria, thus confronting Mitanni, the major rival, a kingdom in upper Mesopotamia. (Hatti and Assyria were waiting in the wings.) Tuthmoses III had routed the Palestinian states at Megiddo and gone on to deal a crushing defeat on Mitanni. Amenhotep II followed up his father's vast gains at the expense of Mitanni with substantial campaigning in the Syrian area, with such success that the pharaoh says, "When the chief of Naharin (Mitanni), the chief of the Hittites and the chief of Babylon heard about the victory I had achieved, each one vied with his fellow in presenting all sorts of gifts from every foreign source..."[1] Assyria at the time of writing was not a player in the big game. It was then merely a vassal to Mitanni. Through the tensions between rivals Hatti and Mitanni, both having interests in northern Syria, the Hittites came to an accord with the Assyrians, thus placing Mitanni between two enemies. By the time of Amenhotep III the tensions between Hatti and Mitanni, heightened by Assyria's siding with Hatti, had led the Mitanni to seek a treaty with its old enemy Egypt to allow it to concentrate on the Hittite problem. The alliance was signified by the marriage of the daughter of king Artatama of Mitanni with Tuthmoses IV [2] (though it is not clear whether the Mitannian king who initiated the pact was Shaushtatar or Artatama). When a young Tushratta came to the throne of Mitanni (circa 1375 BCE), his advisers had let the alliance lapse. Tushratta was to defeat a Hittite force and send the pharaoh the booty from the victory in a measure to reassert the alliance. A sizable brief of letters was to be exchanged between Tushratta and Egypt over the following two generations. The el-Amarna letters Ashur-uballit I, the Assyrian king, wrote two letters to Egypt, known today from the el-Amarna archive, a collection of Egyptian diplomatic texts written in Akkadian discovered at Akhetaten. The first Assyrian letter was from a king making his realm's initial contacts with the mighty Egypt. It reads thus: To the king of Egypt, say: thus (says) Ashur-uballit king of Assyria. To you, to your house, to your land, to your chariots and to your troops, I salute you! I have sent my messenger to see you and see your land. Up to now my fathers have not written. Now I have written to you. I have sent you a fine chariot and two horses, and a date (fruit?) of natural lapis lazzuli. Don't detain the messenger I sent to see, that he sees and then comes away. He observes your behaviour and that of your land and then comes away. [3] When Burnaburiash king of Babylon (Karduniash, in the letters) found out about the Assyrian embassy to Egypt he wrote to Amenhotep IV (or perhaps Tutankhamen) saying, "Now the Assyrians, my vassals, I didn't send them to you: why have they come of their own initiative to your land? If you love me, then don't conclude any business with them and send them away empty-handed." (EA 9,40) The second letter was written with a very different tone. Its preamble says, "To Naphuriya, [great king,] king of Egypt, my brother, say: thus (speaks) Ashur-uballit, king of Assyria, great king, your brother." Ashur-uballit saw himself in a position that permitted him to call Amenhotep IV (Naphuriya = Nefer-kheferu-re) his brother. They were, in the eyes of the Assyrian on a par one to the other. In this letter it would seem that Ashur-uballit was signaling that he had regained a part of his realm that was held by Mitanni. He says, "[now I an equ]al to the king of Khanigalbat" (Mitanni in Akkadian texts). [4] As Mitanni was a big player, so had Ashur-uballit become, addressing the king of Egypt as his brother and calling himself a great king. The end With Mitanni weakened by Assyria, Shuppiluliuma I, the Hittite king, who, until this time, had been working through his vassals in Syria to destabilize the zone, took to open campaigning. He had managed to win the support of Nukhashshe from Mitanni, leading Tushratta to invade Nukhashshe and put a king on the throne who was favourable to Mitanni. This caused Shuppiluliuma to intervene, defeating Tushratta and driving him back as far as Washshukkanni, the Mitannian capital. [5] Now ex-vassals of Mitanni turned to Egypt with the hope of protection against Shuppiluliuma's clients in Syria and Mitanni's power was broken, never to be regained. It became a vassal to Hatti, later to become an Assyrian province under Shalmaneser I. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Donald B. Redford, "Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times", Princeton 1992, p. 163, citing Urk IV,1390: 13-20 [2] EA 29,16-18 [3] EA 15, text from "Le lettere di el-Amarna", edited by Mario Liverani, Paideia, Brescia 1999 (my translation from his Italian). [4] Liverani has filled out the lacuna from the clues of the context in the rest of the letter. [5] See Mario Liverani, "Storia di Ugarit", Roma 1962, p. 38 for the relevant bibliography. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- A synoptic table of king lists from the A.N.E. Text by Ian Hutchesson. Copyright 2000 http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/5210/endmitan.htm