Between the ninth and the fourth century bce the Near East was ruled by a succession of states which fully deserve the label of ‘‘empire.’’ The first one was Assyria, which after a period of growth and crisis between about 930 and 745 bce achieved the true status of centralized empire under Tiglath-pileser III (745-727 bce), eventually enabling the Sargonid dynasty (721-610 bce) to exercise its hegemony over the entire region. The second one, Babylonia (610-539 bce), immediately emerged from the ruins of the Assyrian empire and fell heir to most of its territory. The third one, the Persian or Achaemenid empire (539-331 bce), replaced the Babylonian empire almost overnight in the autumn of 539 bce and grew to rule vast territories from Afghanistan in the east to Thracia in Europe and Nubia in northeastern Africa for a period of two centuries. Finally, after his conquest of the Persian empire Alexander the Great laid the foundations for an even larger Greco-Macedonian empire which quickly disintegrated after his death, but by the end of the fourth century the royal house founded by his general Seleucus had firmly established its rule over the core of Alexander’s empire.
The first question that arises concerns the very concept of ‘‘world hegemony,’’ especially how such hegemony was understood in the native political vocabulary of the Ancient Near East. The second issue is whether we can assert that the period extending between 900 and 300 bce was characterized by a new phase of world hegemony which differed substantially from what had preceded, both in our view and in the ancient perception. There certainly was a view current in antiquity that during the first millennium bce the known world had experienced a succession of hegemonies on a scale not seen before, which had succeeded each other without any intervening period of political fragmentation. Such views were circulated at least as early as the Hellenistic period, and they found a literary and spiritual expression in the Book of Daniel, which envisioned in the metaphorical dream and vision of chapters 2 and 7 a succession of four hegemonies: the Babylonians, the Medes, the Persians, and finally the Greco-Macedonians, each kingdom inferior to the preceding, the disintegration of the last one leading to an eschatological climax (Hartman and Di Lella 1978: 29-42).
The geopolitical vision of the period is exemplified by the Babylonian map of the world, in which Babylon stands only slightly away from the center of a roughly circular world, while the text as a whole exhibits a remarkably limited geographic horizon (Horowitz 1998: 20-42). The map can roughly be dated to the eighth or early seventh century, and the vision it presents accommodated both Babylonian and Assyrian pretensions to hegemony, as Mesopotamia and its immediate surroundings were portrayed as coextensive with the civilized world.
Two traits stand out that made the first millennium empires radically different from what preceded. First, there was a departure from the previous imperial models in the level of structural transformation which first millennium empires imposed on both the imperial core and the conquered periphery in the course of their expansion. Second, whereas the previous empires had been rather ephemeral, Assyria in the first millennium eventually grew into something not seen before, not only in scale, but also in a distinctively new imperial structure, its ideological expression, and especially its lasting success.
Like Rome, the history of Assyria was not only the history of the growth of an empire, but also the history of the growth of an imperial idea. Although the Assyrian empire eventually collapsed under the combined assault of the Medes and the rebellious Babylonians, the structure it had created ultimately survived because there was no serious attempt at returning to the previous state of political fragmentation. Assyria’s enduring contribution was to create the irreversible fact of empire and to inculcate it so deeply in the political culture of the Near East that no alternative model could successfully challenge it, in fact almost up to the modern era. Therein lies the radical departure from the early forms of Near Eastern imperialism.
World History
