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CHAPTER 5
THE ART OF THE ICASSITE DYNASTY

<CIRCA l600-II00 B.C.)>

The accession to power of the ICassites, a foreign dynasty, represents the culmination of
two centuries of disturbances. Even before Hammurabi had succeeded to the throne of
Babylon (1792 b.c.) hordes of immigrants, irrupting, as so often, out of Central Asia,
had appeared on the fringes of the civilized world. Asia Minor had been invaded, and
ultimately subjugated, by people of an Indo-European tongue, the Hittites. Farther to
the south, in Syria and Palestine, mixed forces advanced into, and eventually overran,
Lower Egypt, where their rule is known as that of the Hyksos or Shepherd kings. From
the Kurdish mountains warriors of uncertain lineage — the Kassites — descended into the
plain. They attacked Babylon and, although Hammurabi’s successor repelled them (1742
B.c.), they established themselves in the north.1 They extended their power after 1595
b.c., when a king of the Hittites, Mursilis I, made a sortie from Anatolia and sacked
Babylon. After this raid he returned to his highlands, and in the vacuum which he left
the Kassites assumed power.
In both northern and southern Mesopotamia the authority of the Kassites was chal­
lenged. In the marshes at the mouth of Tigris and Euphrates a ‘Sea-land Dynasty’ ruled
independently; and in the north, in Syria, a band of Indo-European-speaking people -
Aryans in the strictest sense, who worshipped Mitra, Varuna, and other Indian gods -
created an independent kingdom, centred on the Khabur river but reaching, in the west,
almost to the Mediterranean, and in the east as far as Kirkuk. These people - the Mitan-
nians - thus included in their domain that northern portion of Mesopotamia which was
later to gain its independence as the realm of the god Assur, Assyria.
During the ethnic upheavals of the eighteenth century b.c. Assyria, too, received
immigrants. They were the Hurrians - people who had moved westwards and south­
wards, in the wake of, or intermingled with, Hittites, Hyksos, and Kassites, and spread
over northern Mesopotamia into Syria and Palestine. They lacked political talents and
appear everywhere under foreign leadership, but they formed an important element
among the subjects of the Mitannians.
In the history of art these new-comers remain indistinguishable. One cannot speak of
a Hurrian, Hyksos, or Kassite style. One chiefly notes their power of destruction, a dis­
ruption of the established forms of Egyptian and Mesopotamian art, followed, after a
while, by a new combination of the scattered elements. In Mesopotamia the traditional
themes were enriched by foreign admixture, of Syrian, Aegean, or even Egyptian origin.
The presence of these derivations is easily explained. The migration had broken dawn
frontiers and carried foreign influences through the lands which were overrun. ie
Assyrians in particular became well acquainted with the art of the West, while they were

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