Assyria

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The river marks it. Where the Tigris bends below the Zagros, on a rocky shelf of the west bank, a town grew up around a hill and a temple, and the town, the land around it, and the god of the temple all carried one name: Ashur. From that single point the whole of Assyria takes its name — the polity, the people, and the empire that would, at its height, hold the entire Near East under one hand. To speak of Assyria is to speak of a place that became a god and a god that became an empire, the three identities so tightly fused that the cuneiform sign for the town also wrote the country and the deity, leaving the reader to judge from context whether the wall, the territory, or the divine person was meant.

Assyria belongs to the northern half of Mesopotamia, the dry farmland and rolling steppe of the upper Tigris, as against the irrigated alluvium of the south where Sumer and later Babylonia lay. It is a successor-region: heir to the Sumerian and Akkadian civilization of the south, sharing its writing, its gods, its omen-science, and its long memory, but developing along its own line. The deepest stratum of that inheritance — the empire of Sargon of Akkad and the self-deified Naram-Sin in the late third millennium — belongs to the story of the Akkadian Empire; Assyria is the northern current that ran on after Akkad, carrying the city of Ashur from a small trading center to the master of the world and back down to ash.

Three phases of a single name

The standard chronology divides Assyria into three long periods, each named for its relation to the city on the Tigris.

The Old Assyrian period, in the earlier second millennium BCE, is the age of Ashur as a city-state — a compact, commercially minded community whose merchants ran a famous long-distance trade in tin and textiles up into central Anatolia, where their dealings are recorded in thousands of tablets from a trading colony at Kanesh. In this era Ashur is one town among many, and its god a local god. The ruler styled himself not king but steward or governor under the deity, a formula that would never wholly disappear: in Assyrian ideology the true king of the land was always Ashur himself, the human on the throne his viceroy.

The Middle Assyrian period, in the later second millennium, saw the city-state become a territorial kingdom. Taking advantage of the collapse of the older Near Eastern powers — the fall of the Mitanni state, the long contest with the Anatolian storm-god kingdom of the Hittites and with Kassite Babylon to the south — Assyrian kings such as Tukulti-Ninurta I and Tiglath-Pileser I extended their reach across the north. It was in this age that the theology of Ashur was deliberately enlarged, the city-god grafted onto the old Sumerian sky-and-air lord Enlil so that he inherited a rank, a household, and a claim to the headship of the gods.

The Neo-Assyrian period, conventionally dated 911 to 609 BCE, is the one the world remembers: the age in which Assyria became not merely a kingdom but the first true territorial empire of the Near East, a machine of conquest and administration that reached from the Persian highlands to the Mediterranean and, for a span, down the Nile. This is the Assyria of the palace reliefs and the great libraries, of mass deportation and the standing army, of kings whose names — Sargon, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, Ashurbanipal — became bywords for power.

The reforging under Tiglath-Pileser III

The Neo-Assyrian empire did not rise smoothly. After a strong ninth century under Ashurnasirpal II, who moved the royal seat from the old cult-city of Ashur to a new capital at Kalhu — the Nimrud of later excavation — and his son Shalmaneser III, Assyrian power sagged through the first half of the eighth century, hemmed in by the mountain kingdom of Urartu around Lake Van to the north and by restive vassals on every side.

The man who reforged it was Tiglath-Pileser III, who reigned from 745 to 727 BCE and is reckoned by most historians the true architect of the empire. His reforms were structural and they were ruthless. He broke the power of the over-mighty provincial magnates by carving their great governorships into smaller units answerable directly to the crown. He turned the seasonal levy into something closer to a professional standing army — paid, permanent, and specialized, with siege-engineers, cavalry, and a corps of chariots, the first such instrument of its scale in the ancient world. And he made deportation a deliberate instrument of statecraft: conquered populations were uprooted and resettled far from home, their elites scattered, their identities dissolved into the imperial mass, so that a defeated people could not easily cohere again into revolt. The policy was brutal and it was effective; it is the same policy that carried off the northern kingdom of Israel under his successors and lodged the name of Assyria, ever after, in the Hebrew memory as the rod of judgment.

What Tiglath-Pileser built, the kings called Sargonid completed. Sargon II (reigned 722–705 BCE), who took a throne-name pointedly recalling Sargon of Akkad, built himself an entirely new capital, Dur-Sharrukin — “Fortress of Sargon” — and it was his theologians who performed the most audacious act of the imperial cult: the rewriting of Babylon’s creation epic so that the creator-hero was no longer Marduk but Ashur, identified with the primordial Anshar named in the poem’s opening lines, made thereby into Marduk’s own ancestor. Sennacherib (705–681 BCE) abandoned his father’s new city and made Nineveh, on the east bank of the Tigris opposite old Ashur, into the greatest capital of the age, ringing it with walls and gardens and a palace the inscriptions call without a rival. Esarhaddon (681–669 BCE) carried Assyrian arms into Egypt; and Ashurbanipal, who came to the throne in 669/668 BCE, ruled the empire at its fullest extent and gave it the monument by which it is best known.

Babylon, the favored enemy

No relationship governed Assyrian history more than the one with the south. The city of Babylon and the region of Babylonia were at once Assyria’s cultural parent and its most stubborn problem. The Assyrians shared Babylon’s gods, learned from its scribes, copied its literature, and revered its antiquity — Babylon was the ancient seat of Marduk, of the akītu New Year festival, of the scholarship the Assyrian court most wanted to possess. Yet Babylon would not be ruled. Again and again the Assyrian kings tried to hold the south: by conquest, by installing a brother or a son as client-king, by claiming the Babylonian throne in their own person. Again and again the south rose.

The contradiction tore at the dynasty. Sennacherib, exhausted by Babylonian revolt, did the unthinkable in 689 BCE and razed the holy city itself, diverting canals over its ruins — an act the Babylonians never forgave and the Assyrians themselves seem to have read, in hindsight, as sacrilege; Sennacherib’s murder by his own sons was understood by some as the god’s reply. His successor Esarhaddon reversed the policy entirely and rebuilt Babylon stone by stone, restoring its temples and its god. Ashurbanipal fought a long and bitter civil war against his own brother Shamash-shum-ukin, whom Esarhaddon had set on the Babylonian throne, and won — but the strain of holding both crowns at once was part of what would finally bring the empire down. When Assyria fell, it fell to a coalition led by a resurgent Babylon.

To the east lay the other great rival, Elam, the kingdom of the southwestern Iranian lowlands centered on Susa, perennial backer of Babylonian resistance and perennial target of Assyrian campaigns. Ashurbanipal’s armies sacked Susa and broke Elamite power, carrying off its gods and its treasures — and in doing so removed the last counterweight that had kept the Iranian highlands divided, helping clear the ground for the Medes who would, a generation later, ride down on Assyria itself.

The carved walls and the king at the hunt

The Neo-Assyrian palaces have given the modern world its most vivid image of the empire. Their lower walls were lined with carved stone slabs — orthostats — covered in low relief and originally painted: registers of campaign and siege, of tribute-bearers and deported captives, of the king enthroned, of the great lion hunts in which the sovereign, drawing his bow from a chariot, kills the beasts loosed before him. Above the royal figure, in scene after scene, hovers a winged disc, sometimes enclosing a bearded archer drawing his own bow in time with the king: the sign most often read as Ashur present above his servant, sanctioning the hunt and the war as a single sacred act. The reliefs are propaganda of the highest order, but they are also among the supreme achievements of ancient art, and the lion-hunt slabs from Nineveh in particular — the dying lioness dragging her paralyzed hindquarters, the spear going home — have a naturalism and a pathos unmatched in the surviving art of the ancient Near East.

The hunt was not sport but office. To master the lion was to enact the king’s function as the one who holds chaos at the border of the ordered land, the guarantor on earth of the cosmic order the gods had won; the same logic that sent the army out each year under Ashur’s standards sent the king into the hunting park to kill. War, hunt, and cult were facets of one duty, and the walls declared it to anyone who walked the palace corridors.

The library, and the science of the sky

Ashurbanipal’s monument was not a building but a collection. At Nineveh he gathered, by purchase, copying, and seizure, the largest assemblage of cuneiform learning the ancient world had produced — the royal library whose remains, excavated from the mound of Kuyunjik in the mid-nineteenth century, amount to some thirty thousand tablets and fragments and form the single greatest source for the literature, religion, and science of Mesopotamia. The king, unusually, could read; his inscriptions boast of mastering the scribal art and the secret lore of the diviners. He sent agents through the cities of Babylonia to acquire texts, and what they brought back was copied into a standardized palace archive organized by series and subject.

It is from this library that the modern world recovered the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh in its fullest form — the twelve-tablet redaction whose eleventh tablet, carrying the story of the Flood, the British scholar George Smith read aloud to a stunned learned society in 1872, opening the cuneiform record to the public imagination. It is from this library that the creation epic Enūma Eliš, the tale of the sage Adapa, the hymns and laments and king-lists of the cuneiform tradition, come down to us. And it is here, above all, that the empire’s vast scientific apparatus was kept: the great canonical series of omens by which the scholars of the court read the will of the gods in the world.

The flagship of that apparatus was Enūma Anu Enlil, “When the gods Anu and Enlil,” a canonical series of some seventy tablets gathering thousands of celestial omens in the conditional form that governed all Mesopotamian divination — if a given sign appears in the heavens, then a given consequence follows for the king and the land. The sky was read as a written surface, a divine script legible to the trained: eclipses of the moon and sun, the haloes and risings and stations of the planets, the appearances of fixed stars, each a sign set there by the gods for those who could decipher it. The astral powers were themselves great deities — the sun-god Shamash, lord of justice and of the diviner’s craft; the goddess Ishtar of war and of the planet Venus; the scribe-god Nabu, keeper of the tablet of destinies; the underworld lord Nergal glittering as Mars; the remote sky-father Anu at the height of the old pantheon — so that to watch the planets was to watch the gods themselves move. This is the celestial-omen science that, centuries later and transformed through Greek hands, would feed the long tradition of astrology, and the “Chaldean” reputation that clung ever after to the wisdom of the two rivers.

The scholars of the court

The reading of the signs was a profession, and a remarkably documented one. The letters and reports preserved in the Nineveh archives let us watch the divination specialists at work, reporting phenomena to the king and recommending the rites that would turn aside an evil portent. Several distinct expertises made up the learned circle around the throne.

The bārû was the diviner proper, master above all of extispicy — the inspection of the entrails, and especially the liver, of a sacrificed sheep, in which the markings and malformations of the organ were read as a message written by the gods in answer to a posed question. His was the inductive art, the querying of the divine will through a sacrifice offered for the purpose, and a whole compendium, the Bārûtu or “art of the diviner,” codified the signs.

The ṭupšar Enūma Anu Enlil, the “scribe of Enūma Anu Enlil,” was the celestial diviner — the watcher of the sky who matched what he observed against the canonical omen series and told the king what it meant. From this learning, late in the Babylonian tradition, would grow the casting of horoscopes for individuals; in the Assyrian court its concern was still overwhelmingly the king and the kingdom.

The āšipu was the exorcist and incantation-priest, the specialist in the apotropaic — in the ritual undoing of evil, the lifting of curses, the warding of demons, the healing of the sick whose illness was read as the touch of a ghost or a god. His was the corpus of exorcism and protective ritual that ran alongside the diviners’ work: where the bārû and the celestial scribe told the king what was coming, the āšipu could be called on to turn it aside. Beside them stood the physician and the lamentation-chanter, the whole forming the body of scholars on whom the king depended to keep his rule aligned with the order of heaven. Mesopotamian religion, in its Assyrian and Babylonian forms alike, was less a matter of personal salvation than of reading and maintaining that order; the scholar-priest was its indispensable technician.

Empire and its subjects

At its height under Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal the empire stretched from western Iran to the Levantine coast and into Egypt, a span no earlier Near Eastern power had held. Its reach drew the older peoples of the region into its orbit not as absorbed provinces of one kind but as a graded order of subjects, clients, and enemies. The Anatolian world that the Hittites had once dominated had broken into smaller Neo-Hittite and Aramean states that Assyria swallowed one by one. The Levantine maritime cities of Phoenicia — Tyre, Sidon, Byblos — were pressed into tribute and used as the empire’s window onto the sea and its long-distance trade, their fleets and their silver flowing toward Nineveh while their colonies spread west across the Mediterranean. Babylon to the south, Elam to the east, Urartu to the north: each stood in its own relation to the imperial center, and the annals of the kings are in large part the record of how each was fought, courted, broken, or held.

The instrument that bound it together was a road-and-message system of relays that carried the king’s word and the scholars’ reports across the provinces at speed, an administrative reach as much as a military one. And the language of empire was shifting beneath the cuneiform: alongside the old script and tongue, a West Semitic vernacular written in an alphabet — far easier to learn than the hundreds of cuneiform signs — spread through the bureaucracy and the conquered populations until it became the common speech of the whole Near East, an inheritance of empire that would outlast every throne.

609 BCE

The end came with a speed that still astonishes. Ashurbanipal’s long reign had masked deep strains — the exhausting Babylonian war, the overreach into Egypt, the sheer cost of holding so much — and within a generation of his death the structure came apart. In the south, a Chaldean ruler named Nabopolassar seized Babylon and threw off Assyrian control, founding the dynasty that would become the Neo-Babylonian empire. In the east, the Medes under Cyaxares welded the Iranian highland peoples — the very ground Ashurbanipal’s destruction of Elam had helped clear — into a single striking power. The two made common cause against the empire that had oppressed them both.

The cult-city of Ashur, the ancient heart of the land, fell to the Medes in 614 BCE. Two years later, in 612 BCE, the combined armies of Medes and Babylonians laid siege to Nineveh and, after some three months, took and sacked the greatest city of the age; the king Sin-shar-ishkun perished in the fall. A remnant of the royal line held on in the west, at Harran, under a last king styled Ashur-uballit II and propped up by Egyptian troops sent north to keep Assyria alive as a buffer. It was not enough. Harran fell, an attempt to retake it in 609 BCE failed, and with it the Assyrian state simply ceased — no rump kingdom, no successor dynasty in the old land, the king’s line gone out like a snuffed lamp.

Within a few generations Greek travelers passing the grass-grown mounds of the Tigris could no longer say with certainty what cities had stood there. But the clay did not burn. The fired and baked tablets of Ashurbanipal’s library lay under the ash of Nineveh for twenty-five centuries, and when they were dug out again they gave back, more completely than any other ancient archive, the literature and the sciences of a civilization that had spoken to its gods through the liver of a sheep and the motion of the planets — the flood-story and the hero’s quest, the omen-series and the incantations, the king’s prayers and the scholars’ letters, all the recorded mind of a people who had made a god of a city and an empire of a god, kept safe by the very fire that destroyed them.

Sources and scholarship

The textual record of Assyria is among the richest of the ancient world, and the modern apparatus for reading it is correspondingly deep. For the gods and the imagery — the cult of Ashur, the winged disc, the iconography of the reliefs — the standard handbook is Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia (British Museum Press, 1992). For the celestial sciences and the omen tradition that defined the scholarly life of the court, the indispensable modern synthesis is Francesca Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2004), which reads Mesopotamian celestial divination as a coherent intellectual tradition rather than a primitive forerunner of Greek astronomy. The long history of the land and its southern neighbor is set out in Paul-Alain Beaulieu, A History of Babylon, 2200 BC – AD 75 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018).

The working life of the Assyrian scholars is documented above all in their own correspondence, edited in Simo Parpola’s Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars, volume 10 of the State Archives of Assyria series (Helsinki, 1993), the foundation of the nineteen-volume project that has put the Neo-Assyrian archives on a modern footing. The distinct expertises of the court — the bārû diviner, the ṭupšar Enūma Anu Enlil celestial scribe, the āšipu exorcist, the physician, and the lamentation-chanter — are set out clearly in the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, whose Nimrud project describes the scholarly professions at ancient Kalhu. For the empire as a political and military structure — the reforms of Tiglath-Pileser III, the Sargonid dynasty, and the sequence of the fall — the overview at Neo-Assyrian Empire gathers the chronology, and the final collapse at the western capital is treated in detail at Fall of Harran.

The library itself, the empire’s most consequential bequest, is described in the British Museum’s account of the Library of Ashurbanipal, whose thirty thousand tablets remain the great quarry of cuneiform literature. The creation epic at the center of the Assyrian theological program survives in W. G. Lambert’s critical edition, Babylonian Creation Myths (Eisenbrauns, 2013), in copyright and cited rather than reproduced; the first full modern edition and translation, L. W. King’s The Seven Tablets of Creation (Luzac, 1902), is in the public domain and freely available through the sacred-texts archive. The Babylonian priest Berossus, writing in Greek for a Seleucid king long after Nineveh had fallen, carried the king-lists and cosmogony of the cuneiform world to Mediterranean readers; the surviving fragments of his work, collected in I. P. Cory’s Ancient Fragments, are among the channels through which the wisdom of the two rivers entered the later pseudo-Babylonian and Nabataean Hermetic substrate of the Western occult imagination.

→ In the library: Cory — Ancient Fragments (1832; incl. Berossus on Babylonia and Assyria)

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