Was Washukanni also biblical Calneh (Calno)?

Mitanni’s “Washukanni”

city of capital importance

 

Part Two:

Was Washukanni also biblical Calneh (Calno)?

 

 

 

“It is this author’s suggestion that the Calneh of the Bible is Washshukanni …

capital of the powerful Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni … that rose to power

some time around 1500 BC … according to the secular timeline …”.

 

Anne Habermehl

 

 

 

 

In Part One of this series:

https://www.academia.edu/35735015/Mitannis_Washukanni_city_of_capital_importance._Part_One_A_completely_new_perspective I (Damien Mackey) tentatively suggested, following a lead from Emmet Sweeney that, as I wrote, “the first great Mitannian king, Parratarna, may have been Shamsi-Adad I”, then logically (from that premise) proceeded to conclude that the Mitannian capital city, Washukanni, was Shamsi-Adad I’s elusive capital city of Shubat-Enlil (modern Tell Leilan). 

 

I added further on that: “Some have thought to identify Washukanni with the largely unexcavated Tell el Fakhariya, near Tell Halaf in Syria. But this site does not appear to be impressive enough for a capital city”.

 

 

Creationist Anne Habermehl, in a 2011 article: “Where in the World Is the Tower of Babel?”, who believes that there are in fact “persistent indications that Washshukanni could have been located at ancient Tell Fakhariya, near Ras al Ain …”, has looked to connect Washukanni with the biblical Calneh, or Calno: https://answersingenesis.org/tower-of-babel/where-in-the-world-is-the-tower-of-babel/

 

Calneh

 

Calneh is mentioned twice in the KJV Bible, in Genesis 10:10 and Amos 6:2; in addition, it would appear that Calno of Isaiah 10:9 is the same city as Calneh of the other two verses.16^a Also, Ezekiel 27: 23 mentions “Canneh”16^b in the same verse as Haran, Eden, Sheba, Asshur and Chilmad (a list of cities whose merchants did business with Tyre). As we shall show, there may be good reason to believe that “Canneh” is the same place as Calneh/Calno; indeed, a survey shows that many scholars believe this (for example, Jones 1856, p. 81; Smith 1948, pp. 102, 105). These slightly differing spellings could well be Semitic language variations coming into play, as discussed earlier.

 

This city in the Genesis triad has had to struggle for recognition of its very existence. In 1944, Albright published a paper in which he claimed to prove that the Hebrew word “Calneh” should be translated “all of them,” and that there actually was no such city in Shinar at all. According to him, Genesis 10:10 should read, “And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, all of them in the land of Shinar.” Many scholars have followed this (see for example, Thompson 1971; and van der Toorn and van der Horst 1990 who lists a number of other scholars and biblical translations in agreement with this thesis). Other scholars have refuted the Albright view on various linguistic grounds (Westermann 1984, p. 517; Yahuda 1946), but this idea lives on (Levin 2002). Interestingly, in Amos 6:2, where the KJV reads “Calneh,” the Brenton and NETS LXX both read “all of you” instead of the city’s name; the LXX translators appear to have made the same mistake as Albright, even though both LXX versions had included the actual city’s name in Genesis 10:10 and Isaiah 10:9. This author suggests that the “thence” in the next sentence of Amos 6:2 (Brenton LXX) and the “from there” (NETS LXX) do not make sense if there is no city name in the preceding sentence for these to relate back to, and the LXX translators should have noticed this.

 

In any case, the Brenton LXX leaves no doubt about the existence of Calneh with its rendering of Isaiah 10:9 (which is somewhat different than the KJV at this point): “Have I not taken the country above Babylon and Chalanes, where the tower was built? (Italics are the author’s.) And have I not taken Arabia,17 and Damascus, and Samaria?” (The NETS version is similar.) We can reasonably conclude that the “tower” of Isaiah 10:9 is the Tower of Babel, because we know that there was a Calneh very close to Babel from Genesis 10. The identifying clause about the tower was probably inserted to distinguish which city was meant, as there were possibly other cities at that time with similar names, as we shall see.

 

Calneh is also shown to exist in the KJV rendering of Isaiah 10:9: “Is not Calno as Carchemish? Is not Hamath as Arpad? Is not Samaria as Damascus?” Gelb (1935) points out that these three pairs of cities lie in geographical order as the conquerors went westward from their home in Assyria toward western Syria. This puts Calneh in the position of being the first in line of these six cities that the Assyrians had attacked and destroyed, giving us a clue as to its location.

 

What we know about this Calneh is that it must have been an important city some time before the time of the prophets Isaiah and Amos, because it is mentioned by them at the same time as other important cities—and both prophets mention Calneh first. A reading of the context of both passages, in Amos 6 and Isaiah 10, shows that what the prophets are alluding to is the destruction of all these cities, that had already taken place, and is using them as a warning that the king of Assyria would come and do the same to Israel. At the time of these two prophets, the destruction of these named cities would have been well known. In any case, one might wonder how all the scholars like Albright, who believed that Calneh should disappear in Genesis 10:10 as “all of them,” could ignore the later verses in Isaiah and Amos that only make sense by using the city’s name.

 

If Calneh was so important, we can reasonably expect that it should appear in ancient history somewhere. Not surprisingly, various biblical writers have been more than willing to supply some ideas on this. For instance, some have equated Calneh with Niffar (ancient Nippur) in South Mesopotamia (Burgess 1857, pp. 374–375; Spiers 1910, pp. 374–375).

 

Others believed that Calneh (or Canneh) was ancient Ctesiphon, located on the Tigris River opposite Seleucia (Barnes 1855, p. 222; Jones 1856), although a history of the names of this city does not indicate any resembling Canneh (Ctesiphon 2010). It is claimed that a fairly unimportant city with a name similar to Calneh is located near Aleppo in northwest Syria, south of ancient Carchemish. Usually called Zarilab or Zirlaba, scholars tell us that spelling variations of a form of this city’s name could arguably be the same city name as Calneh; these spellings include Kulnia, Kullani, Kullanhu, Kalana, Kulunu, and Kulluna (Gelb 1935; Hastings 2004, p. 185; Pinches 1893, p. 487; Pinches 1908, p. 344). Another Calneh is reported by travelers of the nineteenth century, this one located near the junction of the Khabur and Euphrates rivers (Chesney 1868, p. 250; Vaux 1855, p. 11; Watson and Ainsworth 1894, p. 290). Toffteen (1907, p. 118) believed that Kalneh was Kharsag-kalama, east of Nippur in South Mesopotamia (he considered that the change of “n” to “m” was not uncommon, and offered Shumir = Shinar as an example of this). Clearly, there has not been a shortage of ideas where Calneh could have been located, and we can see why the prophet Isaiah might have wanted to distinguish “where the tower was built.”

 

It is this author’s suggestion that the Calneh of the Bible is Washshukanni (there are many spelling variations), capital of the powerful Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni (also called Hanigalbat), that rose to power some time around 1500 BC (Oates 1979, p. 207), according to the secular timeline (although the offered dates vary somewhat). Mitanni controlled a large area of north Syria and Assyria at its peak (Oppenheim 1964, pp. 399–400). The city of Washshukanni is generally believed to be somewhere in the Khabur triangle area, but most sources claim that this city has never been found. However, there are persistent indications that Washshukanni could have been located at ancient Tell Fakhariya, near Ras al Ain, west of Amuda/Urakka (see figs. 3 and 4). Moore (1978, pp. 183–184) concludes that Tell Fakhariyah goes back to earliest times (seventh millennium BC in the secular timeline). A city named Sikan(i) is believed to be Tell Fakhariya because of a statue with a bilingual inscription that was found there (Greenfield and Shaffer 2001, p. 217; Huehnergard 1986; Millard 2000, p. 115). There has been discussion among scholars as to whether the Assyrian “Sikani” could be a derivative of the Hurrian “Washshukanni” (for example, Millard 2000, pp. 114–115).

Astour (1992, p. 7f) points out an itinerary that would have placed Washshukanni near Ras al Ain and Tell Fakhariya. We note also that Sikani is placed in this location at the headwaters of the Khabur river on the Assyrian Empire map (Parpola 1987).

 

We now return to the earlier discussion of the various forms of “Calneh” that appear in the Bible, one of which is “Canneh.” The “kanni” at the end of “Washshukanni” could well be Canneh or Calneh of the Hebrew Scriptures. Geographically, a march westward across this northern territory would first bring the Assyrians to Washshukanni/Sikan/Tell Fakhariya (that is, Calneh) and then to Carchemish as per Isaiah 10:9, “Is not Calno as Carchemish?” We know that the Assyrians had conquered Carchemish in 717 BC (Miller 1996, pp. 173–176). Washshukanni was finally destroyed by the Assyrians around 1250 BC in the standard timeline (McIntosh 2005, p. 93). This would appear to make the destruction of Calneh hundreds of years before the time of the prophets; if this was true, Calneh’s destruction would hardly have been fresh in anyone’s memory in Isaiah’s time.

 

The matter of determining an accurate timeline now becomes especially pressing. A study of ancient Middle East history shows that, over a couple of thousand years, cities rose and fell constantly, and a city that was very powerful at one time was in total ruins at another. If we are looking for a city that had been powerful, but then was completely destroyed before the era of the prophets, we need to be sure that we have the chronology right. One of the recurring timeline themes is that the accepted secular history of the ancient Middle East has to be reduced by at least 500 years; this is an idea that was first put forth by the much-maligned Velikovsky (1952), and has been a matter of discussion by various authors since (for example, Courville 1971; Henry 2003).18 Subtracting approximately 500 years from the final destruction of Calneh/Washshukanni puts this event in the eighth century BC, bringing it fairly close to the period of Amos and Isaiah (Ussher 1658). This author suggests that this would be about right for the time period that we would expect for Calneh’s destruction. ….