Battle of Nihriya

Battle of Nairi
Date Approximately 1230 aC Location Nairi Result Assyrian victory
Belligerents
Hittites	Assyria
Commanders and leaders
Tudhaliya IV	Tukulti-Ninurta I

The Battle of Nihriya was the culminating point of the hostilities between Hittites and Assyrians by the control of which it had been the empire of Mitanni.

When Suppiluliuma I (13th century BCE) conquered Mitanni, he created two provinces (Aleppo and Carchemish), and distributed the large part of territories of this kingdom between his allies. The rest of what had been the empire of Mitanni retained its independence as a state that was vassal to the Hittites. This great expansion of Hittite power was the last cause of the war between Egyptian Hittites and which took advantage of Assyria to be occupying the vacuum progressively left by Mitanni; thus, in the days of their king Urhi-Teshub (principally during the 12th century BCE), the Hittites had to resign themselves to see their vassal state, Mitanni, conquered by the Assyrians.

The expansion of Assyria continued, until arriving at an attack, on a date not determined with exactitude, on the different kingdoms from Nihriya, under the command of king Tukulti-Ninurta I (although for some historians, the king at issue could have been Shalmaneser I or Ashur-nadin-Apli). The Hittites considered this attack on a frontier of their empire as intolerable, and, guided by Tudhaliya IV, they took their army to the zone.

The conflict between both powers took place in the neighborhoods of Nairi, and the Assyrians gained a decisive victory that allowed Assyria to annex the kingdoms of the zone, and placed the Hittites in a difficult situation, until the point of which one of the causes of documented coup d'etat against Tudhaliya IV not very well could have been the loss of prestige of this last one because of his defeat before Tukulti-Ninurta I.

Although the hostilities continued between both empires (Assyrian sources affirm that, after the battle, they captured 28,000 Hittite prisoners in diverse attacks), there were no greater consequences for Hittites in the long term, since Assyria fixed its attention on the conquest of Babylonia, a project in which it invested too many resources to permit expanding its western border. The Hittite empire could, therefore, peacefully live its last years, until its disappearance under the big wave of the "Peoples of the Sea" (approx. 1200 BCE).

References

• Singer, Itamar; 1985. “The battle of Nihriya and the end of the Hittite empire,” ZA 75: 100-123.