I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword. I carried off prisoners, possessions, oxen and cattle from them. I burnt many captives from them. I captured many troops alive, I cut off some of their hands and arms; I cut off of others their noses, ears and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living and one of heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city. I burnt their adolescent boys and girls. I razed, destroyed, burnt and consumed the city.
(Quoted in J. Oates, Babylon.)
As this quotation, from the Royal Annals that survive from the years 910 to 649 bc, shows, a strategy of terror and annihilation was embedded in Assyrian military culture. Despite the turmoil of Near Eastern politics the Assyrians had survived as a kingdom and their royal family was still able to trace its lineage back to the sixteenth century. This gave the kingdom a bedrock of legitimacy that underlay periods of dynamic revival in the later centuries of the second millennium bc—the so-called Middle Assyrian period (C.1400-C.1050). The myth of an extensive Assyrian state persisted throughout Assyrian history so that, even when out conquering others, kings insisted that they were simply reasserting their right to their own territory. This was a militaristic society, continually finding ‘enemies, even when these were often nomadic tribes of little consequence.
A new phase of expansion for Assyria began in the ninth century when wars were launched by the kings, notably Adad-Nirari II, Ashurnasirpal II, and Shalmaneser III. The Assyrian state god, Assur, now proclaimed the right of the state under its king, his representative on earth, to expand its borders without limit. So there are campaigns to the west to Syria, the Levant, and southern Anatolia, and into the foothills of the Zagros mountains in the east. Ashurnasirpal reached the Mediterranean, which he called ‘the Great Sea, and in the flush of his victories he initiated an artistic revolution. In the great new palace he constructed for himself at Kalhu north of Assur (the modern Nimrud), he covered the walls with a mass of finely carved reliefs. Comparison of designs suggests that the inspiration came from the wealthy state of Carchemish that had offered him tribute. Subsequent Assyrian palaces at Khorsabad (the modern Dur-Sharrukin), and Nineveh follow the tradition. At Nineveh, Austen Layard, the nineteenth-century excavator of the palace, found over three kilometres of reliefs in the seventy-one halls of the palace. (After a somewhat unseemly struggle for control of the site with rival French
Excavators many of the reliefs were hurriedly shipped off to London, where they remain among the treasures of the British Museum. The French appropriated the reliefs from the palace at Khorsabad and most are now in the Louvre.) Many scenes show cities being stormed (the Assyrians were masters of siege warfare, their expertise not equalled until Hellenistic times) and then plundered without mercy, but the kings also show off their prowess as builders and hunters of lions. While the reliefs are blatant propaganda, they also provide an unrivalled picture of everyday life in town and country.
By 1000, iron was superseding bronze as the metal of war (it was much harder, see further p. 129), but the real strength of the Assyrians lay in their cavalry, made up of faster and heavier horses bred and pastured on the rich grazing lands of the plain. By the end of the ninth century, the whole of northern Mesopotamia was under Assyrian control and Babylon, whose independence had at first been respected, had been devastated. The Assyrians prospered from the weakness of their enemies. There were moments as in 853 when a coalition of forces under the control of the Syrians matched the Assyrian armies of king Shalmaneser and forced him back, but the coalition soon fell apart and Shalmaneser was able to regain the initiative for the Assyrians.
In the first half of the eighth century bc, however, the empire faltered and the state withdrew into its traditional territories. It took one of the great Assyrian kings, Tiglath-pilaser III (744-727), to reform the Assyrian army so that it was maintained as a standing professional force of foot soldiers backed by mounted forces, chariots, and cavalry. The old custom of waiting until the crops were in and the mountain passes clear of snow before campaigning began was abandoned. The new army had an immense advantage over its rivals whose troops were reassembled year by year and the result was a transition from a state that had successfully held its original territory to one that was self-consciously an empire ruling over subject peoples. At its height the empire extended north into southern Anatolia, west to the coasts of the Mediterranean, eastwards into modern Iran, and even raided south into Egypt (see below, p. 103). There were varying methods of control; those who submitted easily were left as vassal states, those who showed signs of continued resistance were incorporated as directly ruled provinces, often with their populations deported. Such was the fate of the Israelis of whom 27,290 were recorded as being sent off to north-eastern Syria in the reign of Sargon II (721-705). (The miserable lines of deportees, their possessions on carts and the women carrying their children, are recorded on the palace reliefs.) Other states, notably Babylon, proved harder to control and there were pragmatic attempts to find a way of bringing Babylonia under Assyrian influence without goading it into revolt. Even so Babylon was sacked on occasion.
The Assyrian declarations of war were presented within a standard formula that suggested that the kings had done everything to avoid battle but the intransigence of their opponents had roused the anger of the god Ashur. It was the sacred duty of the king to intervene to preserve the harmony of all. After the horror of suppression, a myth was promulgated that the gods of the conquered peoples had abandoned
Them because of their behaviour, even that these gods had called on the Assyrians to wreak their vengeance. So during a siege of Jerusalem (in 701), the Judaean court was told by the Assyrian commander that it was quite clear that they had offended Yahweh and that he had abandoned them to their fate. However, the Assyrians would return the gods (literally, it seems, in that cult statues would be removed from a city after its defeat and then returned) and natural harmony would be restored. Moreover the treaties between the Assyrian kings and subject rulers were upheld by oaths in which both the Assyrian and the local gods were evoked. If the treaty was broken it was treated as an act of madness—no sane person would risk the anger of the gods. Again it would be the duty of the king to restore their favour by destroying the rebels.
Even so, the empire would not have survived as long as it did if suppression had been its only strategy. The kings portrayed themselves as fathers of their people who cared for the well-being of all and it is known that they would listen to appeals. Plunder was brought back to the Assyrian heartland and distributed freely. A letter to the king Ashurbanipal (668-627), the last of the great Assyrian rulers, describes the prosperity that was the result. ‘The old men dance, the young men sing, the women and girls are happy; women are married, adorned with earrings, boys and girls are brought forth, the births thrive. . . Those who were sick for many years have got well, the hungry have been sated, the parched have been anointed with oil, the needy have been covered with garments.’ The Assyrians had a deliberate policy of agricultural expansion, the bringing into cultivation of new areas, and a state-sponsored distribution of iron ploughs to the peasantry. This was enforced, however, by the deliberate policy of settling deportees in depopulated parts of the empire. In their new homes the deportees were often described as Assyrians as if their original nationality had been erased. The empire also seems to have been given coherence by the shared values of its ruling elite in the same way as is found in the Roman empire a few centuries later. Favoured courtiers are found holding land throughout the empire, a guarantee of shared involvement in its security.
In the final century of the empire a new capital was created at Nineveh (the modern Mosul), hitherto a fairly minor religious centre. The king responsible was Sennacherib (705-681), who was determined that the city would not only be impressive (it was to hold ‘a palace without rival, an ambitious enterprise in a region known for its magnificent royal buildings) but would also enjoy the latest technology. Its hydraulic engineering works were so sophisticated that some of its tunnels and dams are still in use today. They watered orchards and parks and then extended out to the arable land around. (It may be that the famous hanging gardens of Babylon were in fact at Nineveh, as convincingly argued by Stephanie Dalley, The Mystery of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Oxford, 2013.) Meanwhile a mass of deported workmen laboured on the palace and the squares and avenues of the city. While Sennacherib could be as brutal as his predecessors—he diverted his considerable technical skills to work out a means of flooding Babylon after he had sacked
It—he was clearly something more than this. The reliefs at Nineveh show his informed interest in the vast territories he controlled.
His successor but one, Ashurbanipal, went further in proclaiming himself as a scholar. ‘I can solve the most complicated divisions and multiplications,’ he boasted. ‘I have read intricate tablets inscribed with obscure Sumerian and Akkadian, difficult to unravel, and examined sealed and obscure inscriptions on stone from before the flood.’ He is remembered as the founder of one of the first libraries in a form recognizable today, a systematically arranged set of books available for consultation. (See Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World, New Haven and London, 2002.) The tablets in Ashurbanipal’s library recorded their provenance, often as ‘Palace of Ashurbanipal, King of the World, King of Assyria. Many of the tablets were accumulated as trophies of war from defeated cities, a precedent to be followed by the Romans after they defeated Greek states and took off their libraries as plunder. The collection seems to have been personal to the king but texts warning against theft suggest it was also open to other readers. There may have been some 1,500 titles in all, omens and religious texts, scholarly works, even dictionaries for translating Sumerian into Akkadian, and classics of literature such as the ubiquitous Epic of Gilgamesh. Omens predominate, warnings that, if a set procedure is not followed or particular events occur, then there might be specific consequences if the gods are not persuaded to change the result. There is particular care taken to ensure correct copying of texts, probably because many contained ritual formulas that had to be accurate to be effective. The perennial problems of librarians are recorded in other tablets from the period in which readers are warned against breaking tablets, placing them in water, or rubbing out the text, and the most time-honoured problem of all, not returning them! (It was the decipherment of one of the tablets from this library by George Smith in 1872 that opened up a new era of biblical scholarship when Smith unravelled an account of the Great Flood.)
In a few short years at the end of the seventh century (640-610) the Assyrian empire succumbed to the combined forces of the Medes and Babylonians and as an empire disappeared suddenly and completely from the historical record. Ashur was sacked in 614, Nineveh fell in 612. Why the Assyrian collapse was so sudden is not clear. As with Egypt in the reigns of Pepy and Rameses II, there had been a long-lived king (Ashurbanipal, 668-627) whose vitality may have eroded with time. On Ashurbanipal’s death there were power struggles between rival claimants and these may have caused some weakening of the state in the 620s. Babylon asserted its independence in this decade and then, under its king Nabopolassar, went on the offensive, but relationships between the two had always been unsettled and this is hardly enough to explain the defeat of an empire which had developed such sophisticated survival skills. What seems to have tipped the balance against Assyria is the intervention of the Medes. It is possible that Assyria’s weakening grip on eastern trade routes threatened to undermine the prosperity of the Medes who took retaliatory action. The combination of two enemies proved too much. The records suggest the shock waves of the collapse were felt throughout the Near East. The Greek historian Herodotus (see below, p. 207) records the fall of Nineveh in his history of
The Persian wars (as part of the rise of the Medes) and it became part of the founding myth of the Persian empire itself.
World History
