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On the Origin of the Province of Kommagene
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2013
Extract
The object of this note is to examine the earlier history of this North Syrian province, and incidentally to suggest a cause for its political independence, of which we have striking evidence in the establishment of a kingdom of Kommagene when the power of the later Seleucidae had declined. In spite of lying in the more immediate neighbourhood of Antioch, the province had already won its independence in the time of Antiochus IV. Epiphanes; at the beginning of the first century King Mithridates Callinicus obtained recognition of his dynasty from the Seleucid house; and even after the kingdom had become a Roman province it reverted for a time to its independent status. Hitherto, the need for an inquiry into the cause of so decided a tendency to break away from its surroundings has not been apparent. The descent of the Seleucid province from a Persian satrapy of the same area has served as a bridge to Assyrian times; and the continual ‘revolts’ of ‘the land of Kummukh’ from the end of the twelfth century onwards have furnished sufficient analogies to its history during the later period.
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- Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1913
References
1 See the Journal of the Manchester Egyptian and Oriental Society, 1913, pp. 47 ff.
2 The other alternative, that the names Kummukh and Κομμαγηνή were of independent origin, need not be contemplated. Both are obviously transliterations of the same foreign place-name, and the Greek and Assyrian forms could hardly be closer. Later Assyrian variants of the name suggest a shifting of the accent from the first syllable, but with no consonantal nor vocalic change; the interchange of Κ and Ḳ at the beginning of the word can be disregarded, as before the vowel υ the distinction tended to be blurred in pronunciation.
3 These were engraved by Sennacherib on the Jûdî Dâgh, to the east of the Tigris, between the years 698 and 695 B.C.; cf. King, , P.S.B.A. xxxv. 66 ff.Google Scholar
4 When starting on his campaign of 881 B.C. Ashur-naṣir-pal entered the land of Kummukh immediately after crossing the Tigris; and another passage in his annals closely resembles Sennacherib's record, since it refers to Kummukh as contiguous to the cities at the foot of Mt. Nipur (the Jûdî Dâgh).
5 The city of Sherishe, into which the Kummukhians fled, was on the Tigris; and on their final defeat with their allies, the Kurkhê, the dead bodies of the slain were carried by the river Nâme into the Tigris, proving that the Assyrian army had not crossed the watershed. The Euphrates is not once mentioned.
6 It may be noted in passing that this conclusion is bound to contract our ideas of the extent of the ‘First Assyrian Empire.’ In a lecture before the Egypt Exploration Fund, to be published in the first number of the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Mr. Hogarth has emphasized the necessity, both for Egypt and Assyria, of distinguishing a spring raid for booty from an organized empire. The wisdom of this advice has lately been exemplified in the case of the alleged inclusion of Cyprus in the Old Babylonian empire of Sargon of Akkad. The evidence of a Neo-Babylonian chronicle, to the effect that it was not the Mediterranean but the Persian Gulf he crossed, has been confirmed by an early text from Nippur, which is being prepared for publication by Dr. Arno Poebel. Sargon is there recorded to have ‘washed his weapons’ in the Persian Gulf, which his successor crosses to capture the ‘silver holes’ (l.e the silver mines) of Elam. In the west he raids no further than ‘the cedar forest’ (Lebanon) and ‘the silver mountains’ (the foothills of Taurus).
7 The phrase reads ‘the Euphrates, the boundary of Kummukh,’ and has hitherto been taken as referring to the eastern boundary of the district. Meyer attempts to reconcile the various passages by placing Kummukh on both sides of the upper Euphrates, (Geschichte des Altertums, I. ii. p. 601)Google Scholar; others have placed it mainly to the west of that river with an extension on the left bank (cf. Schrader, , Keilins. Bibl. i. 218Google Scholar, ii. 294, and Keilinschriften und Geschichtsforschung, 127 ff.; Winckler, in Helmolt's History, iii. 54, 86Google Scholar; Maspero, , Histoire ancienne, iii. 195, etc.)Google Scholar; others again, disregarding the earlier references, confine the term, like Kommagene, to Syrian territory (cf. Encycl. Bibl. i. 352 f.; Garstang, , Land of the Hittites, 342, 368Google Scholar; Hall, , Anc. Hist. of the Near East, 504Google Scholar). But if the Tigris formed the eastern boundary of Kummukh in 881 B.C. and also in the years 698–695 B.C., it is hardly probable that in the interval between these two dates it could have been regarded as extending as far east only as the Euphrates. Moreover the passage in question records the defeat of the Vannic king Sarduris III., and is written from the standpoint of Urarṭu (Armenia): it mentions the Euphrates as the most distant boundary of Kummukh from that direction.
8 In all the inscriptions which refer to these two princes the name occurs in its gentilic, not under its geographical form; and the distinction is obviously intended.
9 The terminal i in Kundašpi and Kuštašpi is the Assyrian genitive case-ending; while for the transition of the initial vi to gu (Assyt.-ku) we may compare the Middle-Persian forms Gondopherres, Gondopharos, Guštâsp, etc.; cf. Justi, , Iranisches Namenbuch, 372 f.Google Scholar; Geiger, and Kuhn, , Grundriss der iran. Philol. ii. 506 f.Google Scholar; Scheftelowitz, , Zeitschrift f. vergl. Sprachf. xxxviii. 276Google Scholar; and Meyer, ibid. xlii. 16 f.
10 Meyer, , Geschichte des Altertums, I. ii. 601 f.Google Scholar
11 Mitteil. d. Vorderen. Ges., 1897, 216.
12 Cf. Winckler, , O.L.Z., 15th Dec. 1906Google Scholar, and M.D.O.G., No. 35 (Dec. 1907); and Meyer, , Sitzber. kgl. preuss. Akad. 1908Google Scholar, i. Winckler at first refused, but afterwards accepted, the equation Ḫarrî = Aryans.
13 This is clear from the non-Iranian character of the Mitannian speech, as represented in one of Tushratta's letters from Tell Amarna. In spite of Scheftelowitz, 's attempt to prove it Aryan (Z. f. vergl. Sprachf., xxxviii. 260 ff.)Google Scholar, it has been shown by Bloomfield, to be totally non-Indo-European (Amer. Journ. of Philol., xxv. 4 ff.)Google Scholar; cf. also Meyer, , Z. f. vergl. Sprachf., xlii. 21Google Scholar; Hall, (Anc. Hist, of the Near East, p. 201Google Scholar) suggests that the ruling caste in Mitanni were ‘barons’ of the usual Iranian type. The success of the Aryan invaders may in large part be traced to their greater mobility. That they were a ‘Reitervolk’ is clear from the numerous Iranian proper names which include asva (aspa), ‘horse,’ as a component (cf. Justi, , Iran. Namenbuch, p. 486Google Scholar; Meyer, , Geschichte, I. ii. 579Google Scholar). With their appearance the horse suddenly becomes the beast of burden throughout Western Asia; before that time ‘the ass of the mountain» was a great rarity, the earliest reference to it occurring in the age of Hammurabi at the beginning of the second millennium (cf. Ungnad, , O.L.Z., 1907, 638 f.Google Scholar).
14 The Eastern Kummukhians and their allies, the Kurkhê, who were defeated by Tiglathpileser I. (see above n. 5), were under princes of Hittite extraction; this is clear from the proper names ‘Shadi-Teshub, the son of Khattushar,’ and ‘Kili-Teshub, the son of KaliTeshub’ (cf. Hommel, , Grundriss der Geogr. und Gesch. des alt. Orients, I. 43Google Scholar). The occurrence of the name of the Hittite-Mitannian weather-god (Teshub) cannot be regarded as a Mitannian survival in view of the purely Hittite name Khattushar (cf. Khattusil, Eg. Khetasar, the contemporary of Rameses II.).