Neo-Assyrian Empire

A city and a god with the same name

Drafted from Frahm, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire (2023)formation

Ashur is a city on the Tigris, a god, and a country, and in Akkadian they are the same word. That identity is not a coincidence of naming and it is the starting point for everything else: the god is the city, the king is the god's appointed steward, and the state's business is extending the territory in which the god's order applies.

The city is old — a trading centre in the third millennium, a kingdom in the second, and the head of a substantial empire in the thirteenth century BC that finished off Mitanni.

Then three and a half centuries in which it was none of those things, which is why the empire everybody means by "Assyria" starts as late as it does. After about 1050 BC Assyria contracted to little more than its own heartland under pressure from Aramaean movements, and the Bronze Age system around it had already collapsed. What happened from 911 was a reconquest of territory Assyria considered its own, conducted by a succession of kings — Adad-nirari II, Ashurnasirpal II, Shalmaneser III — with a persistence that is the distinguishing Assyrian characteristic and is visible in the annals, which record the same campaigns against the same places year after year until they stopped needing to.

By the ninth century the reconquest had become an expansion, and by the seventh the empire ran from western Iran to Egypt.

The Assyrian version of divine sanction is worth distinguishing from its neighbours'. Naram-Sin of Akkad became a god. Egyptian kings were gods. The Assyrian king was emphatically not a god: he was the vice-regent of one, and the royal inscriptions are written as reports to Ashur explaining what has been done with his instructions. That is a more durable arrangement, and it is the version that reaches the later Near East.

A great king in all but name

Drafted from Frahm, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire (2023)formation

Adad-nirari III died in 783, and the four decades that followed his reign are the closest the reconquest that began in 911 came to reversing itself before it had finished.

Kings who left almost nothing

Three kings held the throne in succession — Shalmaneser IV, Ashur-dan III, Ashur-nirari V — and between them they left the empire's annals almost blank. No royal inscription of any length survives from any of the three describing a campaign in the king's own voice, which is not how an Assyrian reign is supposed to look. The eponym lists that record each year by the name of the official who held that year's chief magistracy are the main source for the period, and what they record is trouble: plague twice, in 765 and again in 759; a revolt in the Assyrian heartland itself in 763 and 762; further revolts at Arrapha and at Guzana in the years just after.

In the middle of it, on the fifteenth of June 763, the sky went dark at midday. The eponym list for that year records the eclipse directly, and modern astronomical calculation confirms the date precisely enough that this single line fixes the absolute chronology of the entire Assyrian eponym system against it. Nobody recorded what anyone thought it meant. They did not need to: a state already recording plague and revolt in the same years had an omen to match the mood without anyone having to invent one.

The man who did not need the throne

What filled the gap the kings left was a single official, Shamshi-ilu, who held the post of turtanu — commander-in-chief — for something close to forty years, under three kings in a row.

He commanded armies, negotiated a boundary settlement with a rival king in his own name rather than the king's, and had inscriptions cut at his own residence at Til Barsip in the same style a king used for his own conquests — crediting himself with victories, in his own titulary, with no royal name attached at all. No source accuses him of taking the throne outright. None needed to. A subordinate who commissions monuments in the register of kingship has already answered the question of where the empire's real authority was sitting, whatever the man on the throne was called.

What ended it

The crisis did not end with a reform proposed by any of the three kings it happened under. It ended with a coup.

In 746 a revolt broke out at Kalhu, the capital, and by the next year the throne had passed to a man named Pulu, who took the throne-name Tiglath-Pileser. Whether he was Ashur-nirari V's brother with a legitimate claim or a provincial governor who took the palace by force is argued about; the Assyrian King List calls him Ashur-nirari's son, his own inscriptions claim descent from Adad-nirari III instead, and he founds his own right to rule on the gods' choice rather than on the bloodline either version would require. What is not argued about is that the family occupying the throne changed, that it changed by violence at the capital rather than by succession, and that the man who came out of it had spent his career, on the likelier reading, as exactly the kind of provincial officeholder the preceding forty years had shown could outgrow the throne that nominally commanded him.

A man who may have owed his own crown to exactly the kind of independent regional power the old system had allowed spent the rest of his reign making sure nobody after him could repeat what he had just done.

The machinery of empire

Drafted from Frahm, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire (2023)expansion

Assyria is where a great deal of the apparatus later empires used was first assembled: a standing professional army rather than a seasonal levy, provinces under appointed governors rather than tributary kings, a road and messenger system, systematic record-keeping, and the mass deportation of conquered populations as a deliberate instrument for breaking regional identities.

That last is what it is best remembered for, largely through the Hebrew Bible, which was written in part by people on the receiving end. The reputation for calculated terror is not a distortion — Assyrian royal inscriptions describe flaying and impalement with evident satisfaction, as policy communicated on purpose.

Most of that apparatus dates from one reign. Tiglath-Pileser III converted conquered kingdoms into provinces under appointed officials instead of leaving them as tributaries, broke up the great provincial commands so that no governor held too much, enlarged and professionalised the standing army, and made deportation a system rather than an occasional punishment. The empire doubled inside forty years.

It fought with a standing professional core and conscripts behind it, and it lived, in a strict and unmetaphorical sense, on plunder. Assyria campaigned every year, the campaign brought back movable wealth and people, and the accounting of what it brought is a standard section of the royal inscriptions. The annual campaign was a fiscal institution before it was a strategic one.

The policy, examined

Drafted from Frahm, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire (2023)aside?What aside means

Assyria deported conquered populations on a scale nobody had attempted, and the practice is the single thing the empire is remembered for. It deserves a chapter that says what it actually was, because the popular version and the documentary version differ.

The scale is real. The royal inscriptions record numbers, and modern estimates of the total across three centuries run to something over four million people. The purpose is stated plainly in the sources and is administrative rather than punitive: a population moved away from its land, its shrines and its leaders cannot organise a revolt, and a province settled with people from three other provinces has no shared identity to revolt around. Deportees were resettled as farmers, as labour on royal building projects, and as soldiers.

They were also, generally, moved intact. Families travelled together, with their possessions and often with their livestock; the reliefs show ox-carts, women and children, and guards escorting rather than driving. Skilled workers were assigned to work matching their skills. This was not extermination and Assyria had no interest in reducing its own tax base; it was the compulsory redistribution of an empire's population for the convenience of governing it, carried out with the administrative care that implies and the human consequences that follow anyway.

The reputation for calculated terror is separately earned and is not a distortion. Assyrian royal inscriptions describe flaying, impalement and the piling of heads with evident satisfaction, and they were meant to be read that way: the point of describing what happened to a city that resisted was that the next city should not. Plenty of later states did the same things and did not write them down.

Two consequences ran the other way from what was intended.

The Hebrew Bible is the first. Israel was deported in 722, Judah was besieged in 701 and deported by Babylon in 587, and a substantial part of the Hebrew scriptures is literature written by people processing conquest and exile — which is why an empire that left tens of thousands of its own cuneiform documents is known to most of the world through the account of one small deported kingdom.

The second is Aramaic. Moving populations around the Near East for three centuries, with Aramaean deportees among the largest groups, produced a common spoken language across the whole empire, written in an alphabet on parchment rather than in cuneiform on clay. The Assyrian state adopted it as a second administrative language, and it went on to be the language of the Achaemenid chancery, of the Talmud, and of the Church of the East's missions to China. An empire trying to eliminate local identities created the first Near Eastern lingua franca, and it outlasted the empire by two thousand years.

Ashurbanipal's library

Drafted from Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC (2015)aside?What aside means

Ashurbanipal assembled at Nineveh a collection of some thousands of cuneiform tablets, gathered by systematic requisition from temples and private collections across Babylonia: omen texts, medical and astronomical compendia, lexical lists, rituals, and literature including the fullest surviving version of the epic of Gilgamesh.

It burned when Nineveh fell in 612, and the fire is why it survives. Clay tablets are baked hard by burning; papyrus and parchment libraries of the same period are gone entirely. The single largest body of Mesopotamian written culture we possess exists because the empire that collected it was destroyed violently enough to fire the archive.

The collection also tells you what the state thought knowledge was for. It is heavily weighted toward divination — reading the future in livers, in the sky, in irregular births — because an empire that campaigned annually needed to know whether to campaign, and the king's decisions were validated by specialists reading signs. This is administrative literature, not antiquarianism.

No measure of an empire registers any of it. Assyria can be given a size, a duration and a body count, and the library appears in none of those, although it is the single reason most of Mesopotamian literature exists to be read.

The widest it ever was

Drafted from Frahm, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire (2023)peak

Sennacherib moved the capital to Nineveh in 705 and built there on a scale that had no precedent: a palace he called the Palace Without Rival, with reliefs running for kilometres of wall, and an engineered water supply bringing water from the hills through canals and an aqueduct at Jerwan built of two million dressed stones. The gardens he describes at Nineveh — irrigated by that system, planted with trees from everywhere the army had been — are the strongest current candidate for the Hanging Gardens the Greek tradition attributed to Babylon.

He is also the king who destroyed Babylon. After years of failing to hold Babylon through client kings and after the Babylonians handed his own son to the Elamites, he took the city in 689, demolished its temples, and diverted a canal over the ruins. It was an act against the most prestigious city in Mesopotamia and against the gods Assyria itself worshipped, his own son reversed it and rebuilt, and it poisoned the relationship that eventually destroyed the empire.

Esarhaddon, that son, took Egypt in 671 — the first time any Mesopotamian power had done it — and Ashurbanipal held it, sacked Thebes in 663, and then destroyed Elam in a war of extermination in the 640s that the reliefs record in detail including the famous scene of the king dining in a garden with an Elamite king's head hanging in a tree.

That is the widest extent: the Nile to western Iran, everything in between, the largest state the world had yet seen.

Two things about that peak are worth stating. The first is that Egypt was not held: Assyria installed clients, the clients revolted, and by about 655 it was gone — the ordinary fate of a rich province at the far end of a long line.

The second is the royal women, whose absence from older narratives Frahm's book sets out to correct. Sammu-ramat, regent for her son in the ninth century, appears on monuments in ways no earlier Assyrian queen does and is the origin of the Greek legend of Semiramis. Naqia, Sennacherib's wife and Esarhaddon's mother, was a substantial political actor in her own right and had her own inscriptions and her own succession oath imposed on the empire's subjects.

Any account that asks only who held the throne will miss both of them, which is how they came to be missed for a century of modern scholarship.

My hostile brother

Drafted from Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, Volume II (1927)contraction

Esarhaddon left the empire divided between two sons on purpose. Ashurbanipal took Assyria; Shamash-shum-ukin took Babylon. It held for sixteen years and then the brother in Babylon raised the whole south against the brother in Nineveh.

The account of what followed is Ashurbanipal's own, and he is not defensive about any of it.

The siege

The war was decided by starvation, and the annals say so directly.

At this time, the people of Akkad, who had cast in their lot with Shamash-shum-ukin, and plotted evil — famine laid hold upon them. They ate the flesh of their sons and daughters to stay their hunger, they gnawed leather thongs.

Then the gods — Ashur, Sin, Shamash, Adad, Bel, Nabu, Ishtar of Nineveh, the queen of Kidmuri, Ishtar of Arbela, Urta, Nergal and Nusku, listed in full, who march before me slaying my foes — cast Shamash-shum-ukin into the burning flames of a conflagration and destroyed him.

Ashurbanipal's comment on the men who had organised the revolt is that they were afraid of death and valued their lives highly, and therefore did not throw themselves into the fire alongside their lord. He regards this as discreditable.

Afterwards

The reprisals are itemised with the same care as the tribute lists.

Those who had spoken against Ashur had their mouths slit. The remaining prisoners were taken to the place between the colossi where Sennacherib — the father of the father who begot me — had been cut down forty years earlier, and were killed there as an offering to his shade; their dismembered bodies were given to dogs, swine, wolves, eagles, the birds of heaven and the fish of the deep.

And then, in the next breath and with no change of tone, the corpses of those who had died of plague and famine — what was left of the feast of the dogs and swine, the annals say, the limbs that blocked the streets and filled the squares — were ordered cleared out of Babylon, Kutha and Sippar and heaped up outside.

Then the shrines were purified by priestly rite and the filthy streets cleansed. The angry gods and wrathful goddesses of Babylon were appeased with penitential prayer and psalm. The temple revenues, which had fallen off, were restored in full as in the days of old. And on the survivors of the slaughter and the famine the king took pity and ordered their lives to be spared, and settled them in Babylon.

That sequence — the mass execution, the street-clearing, the liturgy, the restored endowments, the mercy — is one continuous passage, and it is the clearest statement in Assyrian writing of what the empire thought it was doing. Babylon was not an enemy city. It was Assyria's own holy place in revolt, and it had to be punished, cleaned, reconsecrated and refinanced, in that order, by the same king.

What it cost

Chaldea, Aram and the Sea-land, which Shamash-shum-ukin had brought to one mouth, were trodden under foot and given governors and prefects who were, in the phrase, creatures of my hand. Yearly tribute was imposed without ceasing.

The empire won. Ashurbanipal went on to break Elam so thoroughly that it stopped being a power, and Assyria in his last decades looks on the map like the largest state the world had yet seen.

But the reserves had gone into a war against itself. The southern provinces had been governed by an Assyrian prince and had still risen; Egypt, taken a generation earlier, was already slipping; and the settlement in Babylonia now rested on garrisons and appointees rather than on a brother of the king. Within about twenty years of Ashurbanipal's death, Babylon and the Medes together took Nineveh, and the state that had eaten its own second capital to hold it did not survive the sequel by long.

Seventeen years

Drafted from Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC (2015)end

Ashurbanipal died around 631. Nineveh fell in 612. The Assyrian state was gone by 609.

That is about as fast as a great power has ever collapsed, and no single cause explains it. What can be listed is what was going on.

There was the civil war between the two brothers a generation earlier, fought under the most elaborate loyalty oath the ancient world produced and won only by starving out Assyria's own second capital. The most carefully documented succession instrument in the ancient world had failed at exactly the thing it was designed to prevent, and the empire that emerged from winning had spent reserves a war against itself does not give back.

There was an exhausted army and an overextended frontier. Egypt had been taken and lost; Elam had been destroyed, which removed a rival and also removed the buffer between Assyria and the peoples of the Iranian plateau; and the annual plundering campaign had been running for three centuries.

There was Babylon, which had been sacked in 689 and rebuilt and revolted repeatedly and finally, under Nabopolassar from 626, permanently.

And there were the Medes, about whom the honest position is that nobody knows what they were. Something out of western Iran joined the Babylonians and helped take Ashur in 614 and Nineveh in 612.

What is striking is how completely it went. Assyria did not become a rump or a client kingdom; the great cities were destroyed and not reoccupied, the language of the court stopped being written, and within two centuries Greek writers passing through the region were recording legends about the ruins. Xenophon marched an army past Nimrud in 401 and was told it had been a Median city.

Two powers took Nineveh, and both claims are true. The Babylonians under Nabopolassar had been at war with Assyria since 626 and led the coalition; the Medes came down out of western Iran and joined them. Neither could have done it alone, and the empire that inherited the Assyrian position was the Babylonian one, which went on to take Jerusalem and was itself taken by Cyrus within seventy years.

A Median city

Drafted from Layard, Nineveh and its Remains (1849)afterlife

Two hundred years after Nineveh fell, Xenophon marched ten thousand Greeks up the Tigris past the ruins of the Assyrian capitals, and did not know what they were.

He describes a deserted city with a great pyramid beside it, and gives its name as Larissa, which is a Greek word and not a local one. He was told it had been a Median city, abandoned when the Persians took the empire. Nothing in his account mentions Assyria at all.

The place was Kalhu — Nimrud — which had been the capital of the largest empire the world had yet seen, and whose kings had left palaces there covered in inscriptions describing what they had done to everybody between the Zagros and the Nile.

What Layard found

When Austen Henry Layard rode through the region in 1840 he stood on a mound at night and looked across the plain at exactly what Xenophon had seen: a line of lofty mounds, one of pyramidal form rising above the rest. He recognised it immediately from the Greek text — this was the pyramid which Xenophon had described, and near which the ten thousand had encamped: the ruins around it were those which the Greek general saw twenty-two centuries before, and which were even then the remains of an ancient city.

Local tradition attributed the mounds to Nimrod, which is where the modern name comes from and which is a biblical figure rather than an Assyrian one.

Fifty miles down the Tigris he explored another vast ruin, Qalat Sherqat. It was, he wrote, a shapeless mass covered with grass, showing scarcely any trace of human work except where the winter rains had cut ravines down its almost perpendicular sides and laid its contents open. He and his companion searched it for the best part of a day, on the strength of an Arab report of strange figures carved in black stone, and found a few potsherds and inscribed bricks. Then they rode on. Their escort, alarmed at the emptiness of the country, turned back alone and was killed by horsemen on the way.

That mound was Ashur: the city that gave the empire, the god and the country their single name.

How complete the erasure was

Between 612 BC and 1845 the following was the sum of what anybody knew about Assyria: some hostile chapters in the Hebrew prophets, a few pages of Greek legend about Sardanapalus and Semiramis, and a set of grass-covered mounds attributed to Nimrod or to the Medes.

The palaces were forty feet down with their reliefs standing. Ashurbanipal's library, buried in the same rubble that had preserved it, had been sitting unread for two and a half thousand years.

Layard began digging in 1845. Within six years he had shipped enough sculpture to London to fill a wing of the British Museum, and within thirty the tablets were being read.

An empire that deported entire populations to make itself remembered, and left inscriptions on every wall it could reach, was forgotten so thoroughly that its own capital was pointed out to a Greek general as somebody else's.