Near East Kingdoms

Subartu (State) (Northern Mesopotamia)

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The city states of Sumer formed one of the first great civilisations in human history (see feature link). This Near Eastern civilisation emerged a little way ahead of that of Africa's ancient Egypt, and up to a millennium before that of the Indus Valley culture.

It developed out of the end of the Pottery Neolithic across the Fertile Crescent, a period which had seen Neolithic Farmer practices spread far and wide across the Near East and beyond. Southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and the western edge of Iran) was subjected to permanent settlement, initially in the form of pastoralists but soon as farmers too.

By the late fourth millennium BC, Sumer was divided into approximately a dozen independent city states which used local canals and boundary stones to mark their borders. Many of the smaller cities emerged in two broad waves, in the mid-third millennium BC and at the start of the second millennium BC. At the same time, northern Mesopotamia experienced its own burgeoning development processes, largely starting under the Hassuna culture.

These processes took longer here than they did in the south, in what is now northern Iraq, the western edge of Iran, the south-eastern corner of Turkey, and the eastern wedge of Syria. An urban lifestyle only really appeared in the third millennium BC, thanks in part to imposed influences from Sumerian empire-building periods.

There is mention in the mid-third millennium BC (and later) of a polity called Subartu (Šubarri in Assyrian or Subar in Sumerian). This is generally regarded as being an early Assyrian society, one which was situated around the upper Tigris (and perhaps more than one as the region seems to have been tribal rather than any form of unified state).

This would have been the vague and poorly-defined area in which could be found the 'Kings Who Live in Tents', semi-nomadic chieftains of pre-imperial Assyrian groups. Subartu was mentioned in the Egyptian Amarna letters as 'Subari' and by Ugarit as 'Šbr'.

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(Information by Peter Kessler, with additional information from Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City, Gwendolyn Leick (Penguin Books, 2001), from Encyclopaedia Britannica (Eleventh Edition, Cambridge (England), 1910), from Historical Atlas of the Ancient World, 4,000,000 to 500 BC, John Heywood (Barnes & Noble, 2000), from The Ancient Near East, c.3000-330 BC, Amélie Kuhrt (Routledge, 2000, Vol I & II), from Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East, Michael Road (Facts on File, 2000), from Mesopotamia: Assyrians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Enrico Ascalone (Dictionaries of Civilizations 1, University of California Press, 2007), from The Archaeology of Mesopotamia, S Lloyd (Revised Ed, London, 1984), from History of the Ancient Near East c.3000-323 BC, Marc van der Mieroop (Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 2007), and from External Links: Ancient Worlds, and Evolution of Sumerian kingship (Ancient World Magazine), and Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project (Published between 2003-2021, part of the Babylonian section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology), and the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, and Armenia, Subartu and Sumer, M Kavoukjian (Chapters 1-5 translated from Armenian by N Ouzounian, Montreal, 1987, and available via the Internet Archive).)

c.2013 BC

Having already appealed for help to Ibbi-Sin of Ur in regard to the encroaching forces of Ishbi-Erra of Isin and having seen that call for help refused, around this time Kazallu falls to Isin.

While southern Mesopotamia flourished during the third millennium BC, it took longer for the same effect to be felt in northern Mesopotamia, with the first larger cities and city states only really emerging towards the end of the millennium (click or tap on map to view full sized)

Eshnunna has maintained its own good relations with this new power in the north, and now it receives Isin's help in battle against Subartu, generally regarded to be the early Assyrians in north-western Mesopotamia.

c.1764 BC

A major invasion of Babylon by a coalition army of Elamites, Assyrians, Gutians, and Eshnunnians is defeated and crushed, and Hammurabi retaliates against Elam.

The year name for the following year (Hammurabi's thirtieth on the throne) is: 'Year Hammurabi the king, the mighty, the beloved of Marduk, drove away with the supreme power of the great gods the army of Elam who had gathered from the border of Marhashi, Subartu, Gutium, Tupliash (Eshnunna), and Malgium who had come up in multitudes, and having defeated them in one campaign, he (Hammurabi) secured the foundations of Sumer and Akkad'.

Babylon began life as a modest town which had been seized from Kazallu, but was quickly fortified by the building of a city wall in the nineteenth century BC

Possibly not coincidentally, this is the last genuine mention in history of the state of Marhashi. It is still named as a border of the territory of Kiddin-Khutran III of the Igehalkid dynasty in late thirteenth century BC Elam, but this is due to the Kassite use of outdated terminology which it copies from older Akkadian terms.