The Assyrian Empire

Introduction

The Assyrian Empire stands as one of the most formidable, innovative, and enduring civilizations of the ancient world, exercising dominion over vast stretches of the ancient Near East for more than a millennium and leaving behind a legacy that encompasses everything from the world's first professional standing army and systematic administrative bureaucracy to the greatest library of the ancient world and some of the most magnificent palace art ever produced by human hands. For students of ancient Near Eastern history, the rise and fall of the Assyrian Empire presents a narrative of extraordinary complexity: a story of military genius and savage brutality, of cultural ambition and systematic destruction, of imperial expansion and sudden catastrophic collapse. The Neo-Assyrian Empire at its height in the seventh century BCE controlled a territory stretching from Egypt in the west to the borders of Persia in the east, from the mountains of Armenia in the north to the shores of the Persian Gulf in the south, making it the largest empire the world had yet seen.

The history of Assyrian civilization encompasses three distinct phases separated by periods of reduced power, each of which made its own contributions to the broader story of ancient Near Eastern civilization. The Old Assyrian period, flourishing from approximately 2000 to 1800 BCE, saw Assyrian merchants establish an extraordinary network of commercial colonies across Anatolia whose archives have produced the largest collection of ancient business records ever discovered, providing modern historians with an unparalleled window into the commercial life of the early second millennium BCE. The Middle Assyrian period, spanning roughly the fourteenth through the eleventh centuries BCE, saw Assyria emerge as a major military and political power in competition with the Hittite and Egyptian empires. And the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which is the primary subject of this article, achieved the military domination, administrative sophistication, and artistic magnificence that make Assyria one of the most studied and discussed civilizations of the ancient world.

The story of the Assyrian Empire also includes some of the most famous and dramatic episodes in the history of the ancient Middle East: the siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib and its mysterious failure, the total destruction of Babylon as punishment for rebellion, the compilation of the greatest library of the ancient world by the last great Assyrian king, and the sudden and comprehensive collapse of the empire at the hands of a Babylonian-Median coalition in 612 BCE, so complete that the city of Nineveh was lost for more than two thousand years until archaeologists discovered its ruins in the nineteenth century. The Assyrian legacy reaches forward to the present day through the Assyrian Christian communities of Iraq, Syria, Iran, and the diaspora who claim descent from the ancient Assyrians and who have themselves been the victims of persecution, displacement, and cultural destruction in the modern era.

Geography and Origins: the Land of Ashur

The heartland of Assyrian civilization lay in northern Mesopotamia, in the upper valley of the Tigris River in what is now northern Iraq. The name Assyria derives from the city of Ashur (also spelled Assur or Aššur), which was both the sacred city of the Assyrian people and the name of their national deity. The city of Ashur occupied a naturally defensible position on a rocky promontory at the confluence of the Tigris River and the Wadi Tharthar, and its location gave it several strategic advantages: it commanded important river crossings and trade routes, it was relatively easy to defend due to the natural terrain, and it had access to the agricultural lands of the surrounding river valleys. The ruins of Ashur, located near the modern Iraqi town of Qal'at Shirqat, were excavated by a German expedition under Walter Andrae in the early twentieth century and remain among the most important archaeological sites for understanding early Assyrian history. The site was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003.

The physical geography of Assyria differed significantly from that of Babylonia to the south, and these geographical differences help explain several distinctive features of Assyrian civilization. Northern Mesopotamia receives more rainfall than the southern alluvial plain, and the Assyrian heartland was capable of supporting rain-fed agriculture without the elaborate irrigation systems that were essential to Babylonian farming. The landscape was more varied, including the foothills and mountains at the edges of the Zagros and Taurus ranges, and this terrain gave Assyrian builders access to stone for construction that was largely unavailable in the flat alluvial plain of Babylonia, where mud brick was the primary building material. The northern location also placed Assyria at the crossroads of trade routes connecting Mesopotamia with Anatolia, Syria, the Levant, and Iran, making it a natural hub of commercial activity.