Babylonians against Assyrians

Generally speaking, the grounds on which the Babylonians threw off the yoke of Assyria were geopolitical; the countries were different in regard to economy, language, religion, and customs, and, to a great extent, different in their relations with the bordering peoples. As a rule this is not a matter of xenophobically despising others. The main thing is the desire to maintain the cohesion of the country and the population, eager for autonomy and for freedom of action.

Several elements furthered the integration of the various ethnic groups living in Babylonia and probably in Assyria:

1.  Urban life tended over time to destroy the unity of an ethnic group,

2.  people dwelling in separate areas could avoid quarrels that went back to their countries of origin,

3.  common religious practices, the use of Sumerian in canonical texts, and national gods could create a sense of unity, and

4.  continuous and peaceful arrival of foreigners, men and women deported from defeated countries, made the most important distinction how long one had been in town, not where one came from.

For political and economic reasons Assyrians and Babylonians did not agree on several points and this often turned to war, but despite this hostility, there are few traces of nationalism to be found in the texts. Babylonians were true to the traditions and took a great deal of pride in the monuments of the past and in the ancient inscriptions of glorious kings. They restored and built temples. They dared to resist the Assyrian military expeditions for centuries, repelled the Elamites, and contained the chaldean tribes. They even built a short-lived empire for themselves. Reverence for ancient times, for religious beliefs and cultural traditions of the past are, as noted above, an important element of nationalism, but their leading political figures did not make plans for the future or have a political program; in other words, a political ideology that is characteristic of a national movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries CE was absent from Babylonia.