'IRAQ AND THE PERSIAN GULF' [‎154r] (312/862)

SUMERIAN AND BABYLONIAN PERIOD
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In Anatolia Peninsula that forms most of modern-day Turkey. the power of the Hittites or Khatti (known also as
Goyyim to the Semites) had been increasing. This people, native
to the land and neither Indo-European nor akin to the Semitic
speaking population of Mesopotamia, had its own civilization, though
this was not so finely developed as that of Egypt and Babylon. Their
capital, Boghaz Koi (Bogazkoy) in Cappadocia, became the centre
of a powerful state under Shubbilu Liuma {c. 1385-1345 B.c.).
Earlier raids had led to the establishment of some Hittite princi
palities in northern Syria, one of which, Carchemish, controlled an
important crossing of the Euphrates on the routes through Mitanni
to Babylonia or Assyria. Shubbilu Liuma exploited the weakness of
Amenhetep IV to establish his power throughout north and central
Syria, while leaving Palestine to Egypt. Meanwhile the strong king
Dushratta of Mitanni died, anarchy prevailed, and Shubbilu Liuma
took possession of the country, maintaining on the throne a Mitanni
prince married to his daughter. Tn order that the land of Mitanni,
the great land, may not disappear, hath the great king Shubbilu
Liuma summoned it to life for the sake of his daughter’, so he wrote in
his chronicle, found at Boghaz Koi with many other documents. His
successors, however, ruled Mitanni and Syrian Naharin directly, with
Carchemish as their central fortress and base. The Hittite kings of
the fourteenth century did not attempt to interfere with the growing
power of the Assyrians except to exclude them from Mitanni, which
Ashur-Uballit had attempted to seize on the death of Dushratta.
Rise of Assyria
By the third millennium the kernel of the future Assyria existed
in the small city-state of Ashur and its territory, the plains around
Qala Sharqat, cut off from Babylonia by the Little Zab and the Jabal
Hamrin. Its population was at this period little more than a colony
of Amurru in a region of fair-headed Subareans, who peopled the
Jazira and most of the plains and foothills east of the Tigris and
north of the Jabal Hamrin. The wealth of Ashur was based mainly
on agriculture which, with a more favourable climate than Babylonia,
was far less dependent on irrigation, but Ashur was also the centre
for the vital trade in copper which came from the mining regions
of the Taurus. Part of Ashur’s importance derives from the fact
that it is the Mesopotamian terminal of the route from the Medi
terranean by the Jazira. The civilization of Ashur was already
Sumerian, with remarkable and distinct native elements in law and