The New Empire

By around 900 BCE, the Hittite Empire had disappeared. Mesopotamia and Syria were suffering under attacks from the Aramaean tribes, whose centers of power included southern Babylonia and the area surrounding Damascus. Assyria, which was increasingly on the defensive, had been forced back from the border formed by the Euphrates River in the west.

Around the beginning of the ninth century BCE, things began to change. Two kings—Adad-nirari II (ruled c. 911-891 BCE) and Tukulti-Ninurta II (ruled c. 890-884 BCE)—succeeded in winning back territory from the Aramaeans and regaining the banks of the Euphrates River. Their successes marked a turning point in Assyrian fortunes. Ashurnasirpal II, the son of Tukulti-Ninurta II, ruled from 883 to 859 BCE and continued his father’s policy of reconquest, isolating the Aramaean

LAYARD’S DISCOVERIES

Much of the existing knowledge about the Assyrians is the result of the work of British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard (1817-1894). Layard began excavating the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud in l845.At the time, he was unaware that he had uncovered the palace and capital of Ashurnasirpal II. However, as Layard and his team worked on, they discovered a number of magnificent artifacts that revealed much about the life of the Assyrian king who ruled in the ninth century BCE.

Among the treasures found at Nimrud was a statue of Ashurnasirpal himself, which had once stood in the temple of the goddess Ishtar. There were a number of huge stone sphinxes, which had guarded the palace. There were also relief sculptures depicting scenes from royal life. One object that contained a number of such reliefs was the Black Obelisk, a stele that stood nearly 7 feet (2.1 m) tall. The stele, which was crowned by three steps in the shape of a ziggurat, showed scenes of foreign kings paying tribute to Shalmaneser III, Ashurnasirpal’s son and successor. Assyrian kings often collected animals as trophies, and the illustrations on the obelisk show a number of exotic beasts, including an elephant and a rhinoceros, being brought to the king.

City-states one by one and destroying them. He was a brilliant and ruthless general, and his own accounts of his campaigns testify to their terrifying cruelty. It was his custom to impale his defeated enemies on stakes, flay them alive, or behead them. He also deported the local citizenry en masse, thereby robbing the conquered region of its indigenous people and creating a subjugated population throughout the empire.