The next great ruler of Assyria was Sargon II, who ruled between 722 and 705 BCE. It is not clear exactly who Sargon was, but he may have been a younger brother of Shalmaneser In taking the name Sargon, which means “legitimate king,” he may have been trying to bolster a weak claim to the throne. To curry favor with the priests and merchants, the first thing he did at the beginning of his reign was to restore some of the privileges they had lost under Tiglath-pileser, particularly the tax exemptions previously enjoyed by the temples and major cities.
Sargon continued the empire building of his predecessor and added further territories. He subjugated Urartu once again and took Carchemish. In 712 BCE, he defeated a coalition of the Syrian and Phoenician cities, annexing numerous states in Syria and southern Anatolia. He campaigned against the Medes on the eastern border and defeated the Aramaeans in the central Tigris Valley and the Chaldeans in the lower Euphrates Valley. In the subjugated regions, Sargon built mighty fortresses.
At the time of Sargon’s accession, the throne of Babylonia had been seized by a Chaldean, Merodach-baladan II. Not until 710 BCE did Sargon find the time to move on the usurper, who fled. Merodach-baladan had been so unpopular with the Babylonians that they welcomed Sargon with relief, and he became the first Assyrian to be crowned king of Babylon under his own name.
By this time, Sargon’s vast empire extended from the border of Egypt in the southwest to the Zagros Mountains in the east and fTom the Taurus Mountains in the northwest to the Persian Gulf in the southeast. Sargon divided this empire into some 70 provinces, each headed by a governor who was directly responsible to the king. In his capital of Nimrud, Sargon created a central administrative organization and delegated some of his own power to his son Sennacherib.
Toward the end of his reign, Sargon started on the
The foundations of the Assyrian city of Nimrud. The city was the capital of the great Assyrian king Shalmaneser III.
Construction of a new capital, the famous city of Khorsabad, 8 miles (12.9 km) north of Nineveh. This city was originally called Dur Sharrukin (meaning “Sargon’s Fortress”), and it was intended to be more elegant and refined than earlier Assyrian building complexes. However, following Sargon’s death in 705 BCE, work on the new capital ceased, and when archaeologists first discovered the site in 1840 CE, the city was just as it had been when it was abandoned 2,500 years earlier.
Under Sargon II, Assyria had reached the peak of its power. However, in 705 BCE, during a minor campaign in western Iran, Sargon was ambushed and slain. His body was left unburied to be eaten by vultures. This inglorious death made a great impression on the world, and his son Sennacherib (ruled 704-681 BCE) ordered his priests to find out what his father had done to incur the wrath of the gods. The priests’ answer was that the gods had been offended by the construction of the new capital.
World History
