What seems most remarkable about Assyria is its dynamism in the ninth century, at a time when almost every other region of the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean was still reeling from the economic and demographic depression which had accompanied the transition to the Iron Age around 1000 bce. The ability of the early NeoAssyrian kings to levy masses of native troops for their program of conquest, and to launch in addition a program of recolonization of the areas formerly lost to the Aramean invaders, probably means that the country experienced at that time a very strong demographic growth. Assyria’s ninth-century revival culminated with Assurnasirpal II (883-859 bce) and his son Shalmanezer III (858-824 bce), who transferred the royal residence from Assur to the more northern site of Kalhu (modern Nimrud) and created a provincial system that later became the backbone of the empire and the guarantee of its stability.
Assurnasirpal’s foundation of a new capital and royal palace at Kalhu was later emulated by Sargon II at Dur-Sharrukin and Sennacherib at Nineveh, while Tiglath-pileser III, Esarhaddon, and Assurbanipal built palaces in a previously existing administrative center. To build a new capital was a momentous decision for the future of the Assyrian monarchy. It increased the remoteness of the king, shut up in an immense palace and seemingly totally inaccessible to the majority of Assyrians, more and more resembling the cardboard image of the oriental despot dear to the European romantic imagination. Yet at the same time it favored the individualization of the expression of power. Every king with a dominant personality and sufficient resources would now try to put his own imprint on the ideological expression of the monarchy, especially the palace relief decorations, almost exclusively centered on the king as hero and embodiment of the Assyrian state. This focus on the king’s heroic and creative person is typically Assyrian and is also observed in the realm of historiography with the elaboration of the genre of annals (Tadmor 1997). These were records, organized chronologically, of the king’s conquests and other exploits, narrated in the first person.
The construction of Kalhu is also very significant because it provides the first important example of the systematic restructuring that became a dominant characteristic of the Assyrian state under Tiglath-pileser III and the Sargonids. In this case Assurnasirpal’s restructuring efforts focused more on the center than the periphery, which under his reign was still largely a territory to be raided rather than controlled permanently. But the riches amassed thanks to the relentless campaigns to the west enabled him to muster enough resources and manpower to turn Kalhu into an impressive capital, peopled significantly both with old-stock Assyrians and deportees from the newly conquered regions, surely a symptom of a new vision of power and the state.
With Shalmanezer III (858-824 bce) the policies of Assurnasirpal were largely carried on, with an increased effort to reduce the various Aramean and other states of the Levant to Assyrian clients. Shalmanezer III also consolidated and extended the provincial system in the regions east of the Euphrates, within Assyria’s traditional sphere of interest. This provincial system, which probably originated in the creation of a network of forts and supply centers for the annual campaigns of the army, was Assyria’s most original contribution to imperial governance. Already the Assyrian state was radically departing from the previous empires created by the Hittites of central Anatolia and the Hurrians of Mitanni in northern Syria, which were little more than feudal assemblages of vassal kingdoms and some directly administered territory under the loose control of the royal household. The new provincial system tended to blend and Assyrianize the conquered lands, and by making the imperial administration more efficient, it paved the way for increased interventionism. Also, in spite of the occasional co-optation of local elites in the Assyrian control system and the fact that provincial capitals were often the former seats of local dynasties, Assyrianization of a region was usually achieved by two different means: at the top by the removal of the former ruling groups and the appointment of Assyrians from the Assyrian heartland to administer the province, and at the bottom by deportation of population and relocation of production centers which destroyed local allegiances and often seriously altered the economic character of a region.
A good example of Assyrianization in the ninth century is Til Barsib (modern Tell Ahmar) on the Euphrates in Syria, the capital of the former Aramean kingdom of Bit-Adini, which was integrated into Assyrian territory by Shalmanezer not too long after his first campaigns in the West and renamed ‘‘Port Shalmanezer’’ (Sader 1987: 47-98). Shalmanezer eventually captured Ahunu, the leader of Bit-Adini, and claimed to have deported 22,000 of his people to Assyria. A large Assyrian palace was built on the acropolis of Til Barsib, and its painted wall decoration depicted scenes typical of Assyrian palaces of the first millennium, with no concessions to local taste and culture. This iconography demonstrated a will to export the Assyrian center and duplicate it in the provinces, a will to transform and to ‘‘make Assyrian.’’
This will to make Assyrian was transmitted in the language of annals and royal inscriptions by a series of expressions which kept a very strong ideological distinction between the ‘‘land of Assur’’ and the outside world, composed first of client states bound to the Assyrian king by various types of agreements and treatises, and then of outlying states not yet reduced to vassal status. Modern historians often make a distinction between Assyria proper and the Assyrian empire, Assyria referring specifically to the small triangular region on the upper Tigris River which formed the original homeland of the Assyrians. Yet in the native political vocabulary no such distinction was made except in a rather allusive manner. When a conquered region, however distant from the center, was turned into a province, it became part of Assyria, the ‘‘land of Assur,’’ and the people were made into Assyrian subjects. The deportation of foreign populations, mostly Arameans, to the Assyrian core, and the exportation of Assyrian administrators, architecture, and culture to the provinces, made Assyrianization a reality by gradually eradicating differences between areas of the empire that were previously culturally distinct, to the extent that the northern Syrian city of Harran, well outside Assyria’s original area, could become the last Assyrian capital after the fall of Nineveh in 612 bce. That Syria itself probably owes its name to Assyria vividly testifies to the ancient perception that the two regions eventually fused into one country (Frye 1992). The process was also reciprocal, in that it was accompanied by a gradual aramaicization of the original Assyrian homeland with the influx of deportees from the west.
Assurnasirpal II and Shalmanezer III only initiated the process of homogenization, and Assyria was to undergo a serious crisis before territorial expansion and consolidation would resume. The crisis period, which lasted more than seventy-five years (827-745 bce), started with a rebellion in the Assyrian heartland which lasted several years and is usually interpreted as a reaction of the old nobility against the expansion of the provincial system which put forward a new class of royal favorites. And indeed, after the suppression of the rebellion, the influence of this new nobility of high officials increased dramatically, especially the influence of the commander-in-chief of the army, whose power often overshadowed the authority of the king. The northern state of Urartu posed a serious challenge to Assyrian hegemony, and together with its North Syrian allies it dominated the trading networks, creating serious economic problems for Assyria. The extent of actual royal authority was at times quite limited, while some provincial governors acted as nearly independent monarchs. If stronger factors of disintegration had been at work, Assyria might have disappeared altogether, or shrunk into complete insignificance as it had at the end of the Middle Assyrian period about 1076 bce, except that this time it might have happened for good. But once more the country resurrected, and Assyrian expansion started on a new footing.
Historians generally view Tiglath-pileser III (745-727 bce) as the real founder of the Assyrian empire, although it is obvious that in many respects he only systematized and expanded older administrative practices. One important step he took was to remodel the provincial system, first by splitting the very large provinces, thereby preventing leading high officials from becoming too powerful, and second by expanding the system for the first time west of the Euphrates, where a large number of provinces were created in the wake of the campaigns against the small kingdoms of Syria and the Levant. By abolishing the old border between the land of Assur and the client kingdoms of the west, Tiglath-pileser in fact inaugurated the true imperial phase of Assyria, and after him almost every new conquered land would automatically become a province, pushing the borders of Assyria far beyond the limits reached by any previous Near Eastern empire. Expansion did not focus exclusively on the west, however. Urartu was relentlessly attacked until it was finally neutralized at the end of the eighth century. Tiglath-pileser also invaded Babylonia and ascended the Babylonian throne under the name Pulu, inaugurating the principle of a double Mesopotamian monarchy. This final wave of expansion brought Assyria close to the borders of Egypt and Elam, which also fell prey to Assyrian territorial appetites during the reigns of Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal in the seventh century.
The rapid expansion of the imperial control system from 745 to the fall of Nineveh in 612 posed a number of logistical and ideological challenges which received various answers and attempted solutions. The dominant traits of this new phase were the intensification of the system of deportations and forced resettlements, a planned policy of economic rationalization affecting primarily the provinces, and finally the emergence of an imperial culture celebrating artistic and literary achievements and presenting Assyrian rule in a more grandiose, and sometimes even magnanimous light.
Mass deportations of the population of newly conquered regions were not new in Assyria, and were not even an Assyrian invention. However, the scale on which they were practiced by Tiglath-pileser III and his successors so much surpassed everything in previous recorded history that they must be reckoned as a new phenomenon, almost as a new means of government. The inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser III, Sargon II, and Sennacherib alone mention more than 1,000,000 deportees, which accounts for more than 80 percent of all the people displaced between 745 bce and the end of the empire (Oded 1979). Even keeping in mind that these numbers must be used with caution, they still convey a certain order of magnitude which reveals the scale of the new policy (De Odorico 1995: 170-6).
Deportations affected everyone, from kings to menial workers. While breaking local resistance and obliterating rival centers of power had been their primary aim before the eighth century, during the imperial period they seem to have also become a tool of economic rationalization. Deportees were resettled where manpower was needed, especially in Assyria proper, which appears to have suffered from a demographic slump in the late eighth and seventh centuries. This of course further increased the cosmopolitan character of the Assyria heartland, especially that of its bloated palatial capitals, and at the same time allowed non-Assyrians, especially Arameans, to gain access to positions of responsibility and eventually to develop some allegiance to the empire (Garelli 1982; Tadmor 1982). Under Tiglath-pileser III the Assyrian army began to include vassal contingents which turned the army from a purely Assyrian one, based on the royal military service, into an imperial one. The influx of foreigners must have created some unease among native Assyrians, whose attitude toward them probably wavered between acceptance and mistrust, but in this respect Assyria was not different from Rome where the process of Romanization of the conquered populations inevitably led to their influx into the center, even at the imperial level, generating similar attitudes of recognition and hostility.
Efforts at economic rationalization were particularly well documented in the Levant, the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. While entire areas like the kingdom of Israel underwent planned depopulation, others expanded demographic-ally and economically because they were targeted by the Assyrian administration to fulfill a specific role in the imperial structure. This was especially true of the Phoenician and Philistine ports which received favorable treatment because of their privileged role in bringing the empire into contact with the larger trading networks of the Mediterranean. A particularly interesting case is the inland Philistine city of Ekron, which vastly increased in size after 700 to become the largest known olive oil production center in antiquity (Gitin 1997). Such industrial concentration can only have happened from Assyrian impetus, and the reason for this concentration may have been to facilitate production and especially distribution of the products, the logistics of transportation favoring one large production center over a myriad of smaller ones. It also appears that some textile production was concentrated at Ekron to make maximal use of the facilities and manpower located there, since the olive oil production season lasted only four months.
At the cultural and ideological level several new traits emerged. One outstanding achievement was the library of cuneiform texts assembled by King Assurbanipal (668627 bce) in Nineveh, the largest collection of literary and scholarly texts ever found in Mesopotamia (Leichty 1988a; Potts 2000). In its comprehensiveness and organization it compares, though on a smaller scale, with the other great libraries of the ancient world such as those of Alexandria in Egypt and Pergamon in Turkey in the Hellenistic period. Assurbanipal himself claimed that he had been trained in the scribal art and could read difficult texts, ‘‘inscriptions from before the flood,’’ meaning from primordial time, and his personal involvement in the library is evident from the colophons, which contained detailed information on the texts and labeled them as his personal property (Hunger 1968: 97-108). In all respects, but especially in its ambition to gather in one single place the entire knowledge of a civilization, this library must be reckoned as a typical prestige achievement of a self-confident imperial culture at its zenith. A similar impression is gained from the stone reliefs commissioned by Assurbanipal for his palace. In their refinement, thematic breadth, and boldness of treatment they surpass everything produced before in this medium, ranking as one of the superlative artistic achievements of ancient Mesopotamia.
A new concept of space appeared in art and texts. We now find statements that Assyrian kings ruled from the horizon to the heights of heaven, claiming distant conquests located on the edge of the world where people never heard the name of the Assyrian king, or whose existence the Assyrians hardly suspected (Tadmor 1999).
Inscriptions showed an increasing interest in giving distances in miles to convey an idea of the size of the empire and the remoteness of its outlying regions. In art Sennacherib commissioned reliefs abandoning the former flat, one-dimensional, and strip-like display of imagery for a more complex iconography favoring expansive vistas and bird’s-eye perspective, a new spatial arrangement no doubt influenced by the widening and deepening horizon of the empire (Russell 1991: 191-222). Science and particularly cosmology were also impacted, with texts now measuring cosmic distances in hundreds of thousands of miles, thereby sharply departing from the tradition which viewed the cosmos as a rather small place, measurable and quantifiable on the same scale as the earth (Horowitz 1998: 177-86).
In religion important changes also took place under Sennacherib (704-681 bce), who in the wake of his campaigns of destruction in Babylonia imposed a number of religious reforms which aimed primarily at co-opting the Marduk theology created by the Babylonian intellectual elites in the previous centuries into an imperial theology exalting the god Assur (Machinist 1984/85). These reforms also gave primacy to the cities of Assur and Nineveh as cosmic centers, thereby stripping Babylon of that role. The pivotal status of Babylon had been propagated by an array of myths, rituals, and other religious texts which proclaimed its role as center of the universe. This dogma created serious ideological problems for the Assyrians because of their cultural dependence on Babylonian scholarship and literature. The ideological conflict worsened as the rulers of Assyria faced an increasing urge to resolve the contradiction of ruling a world empire from Kalhu, Dur-Sharrukin, or Nineveh, while fostering a literary tradition exalting the centrality of Babylon, a conflict further exacerbated by the staunch opposition of Babylonians to Assyrian rule. Among the various solutions, alternately violent and peaceful, but none satisfactory, Sennacherib’s destruction of Babylon was undoubtedly the most radical one.
Another important aspect of Sennacherib’s reforms was the identification of the god Assur with the primeval god Anshar, which gave the national god of Assyria a theological primacy and universal character in perfect harmony with the new Assyrian ambitions. Although the new Assur/Anshar theology gained lasting recognition, the anti-Babylonian aspects of his reform ultimately failed. Upon his accession his son Esarhaddon (680-669 bce) immediately reverted to a more traditional conciliatory attitude which was not basically to change under his successors, even after the suppression of the revolt of Samas-sum-ukin in 648 bce. The official Assyrian attitude toward Babylonia then became very similar to the Roman attitude toward the Greeks after their conquest of Greece and the Hellenized kingdoms, one of deference to cultural superiority mixed with a certain protective attitude stemming from the acknowledged role of the new imperial power as custodian of a shared civilization. However, the simmering ideological conflict found a clear resolution only with the collapse of Assyria and its swift replacement by an empire ruled from Babylon.
At the end of the seventh century it all came to a rather swift end. It has become almost a cliche of Assyriological writing to marvel, sometimes even to express regret at the sudden collapse of Assyria and to try to find some explanation for what is generally regarded as an unnatural event, a historical accident, something that should not have happened. However, a quick survey of world history, especially in the Near
East, will demonstrate that empires generally tend to disintegrate and fall rapidly. This is due to their very nature. Empires often suffer from overextension of resources and from an extreme centralization of decision-making which facilitates the collapse of the entire structure if the core is successfully attacked. Assyria certainly did not fall more swiftly than the succeeding Babylonian or Persian empires, which disappeared from the world scene even faster than they had arisen. Even the Western Roman Empire completely disintegrated in the space of two generations in the fifth century of our era.
Of course, every case is particular, and what were the specific weaknesses of Assyria that made it so vulnerable to attack remains open to speculation. Various factors have been invoked, such as the small size of the Assyrian heartland in relation to the empire, its demographic decline in the seventh century, the fact that richer parts of the Near East lay outside of Assyria while Assyria itself was only a conglomerate of small villages, with the exception of Assur and the large capitals which were largely financed by the spoils of conquest. In the final analysis, perhaps Assyria had been a typical case of a state which massively and successfully invested in one area, the military, and built an empire with the help of that powerful tool and the incentive of an irresistible will to power. One is reminded of Russia under Peter the Great, or Prussia in the eighteenth century, which launched ambitious programs of selective modernization and huge investments in military technology, while structurally they remained massively agrarian and economically backward compared with the emerging capitalist economies of Western Europe.
Assyria proper and its north Syrian extension seem to have lost all dynamism after the fall of Nineveh. The large imperial and provincial capitals where population and resources had been concentrated declined rapidly, leaving the former heart of the empire largely ruralized, a backwater in the political landscape of successor states. It took centuries before Assyria regained some economic and political importance under the Parthians, a fact which may reveal that some structural weakness plagued it during the last phase of the empire. In short, Assyria’s collapse was perhaps unavoidable. The powerful allegory of empires found in the Book of Daniel, with its motif of the statue with a head of gold and feet of clay, indicates that in ancient times it was perfectly well understood that empires had an inherent fragility concealed beneath their outward might.
World History
