Esarhaddon (died 669 BC) was King of Assyria from 681 BC to 669 BC, succeeding Sennacherib and preceding Ashurbanipal. He oversaw the rebuilding of Babylon, the crushing of a Phoenician rebellion in Sidon, and the start of the Assyrian conquest of Egypt, which would be completed under his son Ashurbanipal.
Biography[]
Esarhaddon was the youngest son of Sennacherib and Naqi'a, and he was surprisingly chosen by his father to succeed him as king. His brothers exiled him to what is now southeastern Turkey, having superficially damaged his reputation in the eyes of his father, who secretly continued to support his succession to the throne. Esarhaddon's brothers murdered their father in 681 BC after his failed siege of Jerusalem, and Esarhaddon returned to Nineveh and defeated his brothers after six weeks of civil war. His brothers fled to Ararat, and their followers and families were put to death. That same year, he began the rebuilding of Babylon, and he restored the statues of the Babylonian gods.
Esarhaddon's first campaigns were against the nomads of southern Mesopotamia, and he defeated a Cimmerian invasion under Teushpa at Hubushna in 679 BC, driving them back; the Cimmerians instead destroyed the kingdom of Phrygia in 676 BC. In 677 BC, Esarhaddon crushed a Phoenician rebellion in Sidon and had King Abdi-Milkutti beheaded, the city destroyed and rebuilt as Kar-Ashur-aha-iddina, and the population deported to Assyria. Esarhaddon also campaigned against the Medes in 676 BC and reached the border of the salt-desert near present-day Tehran, Iran. He build a number of fortresses to secure the empire's borders in the Zagros Mountains. In 674 BC, a preliminary expedition against Egypt failed, as he was away warring in Qatar. In 671 BC, he went to war with Pharaoh Taharqa, and part of his army remained in the Levant to deal with rebellions at Tyre and Ashkelon. In the summer, he took Memphis, and Taharqa fled to Upper Egypt; Esarhaddon then styled himself "King of Egypt, Patros, and Kush". Almost as soon as he triumphantly left the country, Egypt rose up in rebellion. In 669 BC, he died in Harran while preparing to crush the Egyptian uprising. He divided his realm between his sons Ashurbanipal and Shamash-shum-ukin, who would later go to war, with Ashurbanipal emerging as the next king of a united Assyria.