The Assyrians

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The road ran north out of the city, climbed through the Taurus passes, and came down into the Anatolian uplands, and along it for two centuries the donkeys went in their hundreds. Each carried tin in panniers and folded textiles on its back — woolens woven in the south, tin hauled from somewhere east of the Tigris — and at the far end, in the merchant quarter of a Cappadocian town, the loads were sold for silver and the silver carried home. The town was called Kanesh. The quarter where the foreigners lived and kept their accounts was a karum, a harbor without water, a trading-colony on dry land. And the men who kept it, who wrote their letters and their loan-contracts in a cramped Akkadian hand on small clay tablets, called themselves by the name of a single city on the upper river: the people of Ashur.

Ashur was three things at once, and the people never separated them. It was a town on a rock above the Tigris where the river bends below the Zagros. It was the land that town governed. And it was the god — the city’s own divine self, who had no myth of his own worth speaking of, no consort fixed in the old poems, only the city and the people who bore his name. To be an Assyrian was to belong to Ashur in all three senses at once: subject of the place, servant of the god, carrier of the name. From that knot of city, land, and deity a people went out, and in the end an empire.

The merchants of the silver road

The earliest Assyrians the documents show are not soldiers. They are traders. In the centuries around 2000 to 1750 BCE — the period scholars call Old Assyrian — the city of Ashur sat at the head of a long-distance commerce that reached deep into Anatolia. More than twenty thousand cuneiform tablets have come out of the ground at Kültepe, the mound that was Kanesh, and they are not royal annals or hymns but business: invoices, partnership agreements, complaints about debt, letters from wives to husbands away on the road for years. They are among the oldest archives of private commercial life anywhere.

The trade was tin and cloth for silver and gold. Tin was the indispensable metal — bronze cannot be made without it, and there was none in Anatolia — so the Assyrians, sitting astride the route from the eastern sources, carried it west at a markup. Textiles went the same way. The merchants pooled capital in a kind of joint venture the tablets call a naruqqum, a “money-bag,” funding caravans run by professional carriers on commission. A conservative estimate for the best-documented decades, around 1895 to 1865 BCE, puts the traffic at some fifteen hundred donkey-loads a year from Ashur into Anatolia — several tons of tin and many thousands of fabrics, moving up that one road, season after season. The wealth came home as silver, and the silver built the city.

This is the genealogy the later empire forgot to boast of. The war-state of the carved reliefs grew out of a counting-house. What the merchant colonies gave the people of Ashur was not territory but reach — a habit of operating far from home, a network of agents and obligations stretched across a thousand miles, an administrative literacy that treated the written tablet as the instrument of trust. The colonies faded as the political map of the Bronze Age shifted, and Ashur passed into a long middle period as a modest territorial kingdom, jostling among larger neighbors, sometimes subject to them. The Middle Assyrian state of the fourteenth to eleventh centuries BCE codified a body of law, fought its wars, and held its ground. But it was a kingdom among kingdoms. The thing that made the Assyrians the Assyrians of memory came later, and came fast.

The war-machine

From roughly 911 to 609 BCE the people of Ashur ran the Near East. Historians call it the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and at its height under Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal in the seventh century it reached from the Persian Gulf to the Nile — the first state ever to hold the whole of the region as one dominion. It was assembled by a line of kings whose names became, to their subjects and their enemies, a single word for terror: Ashurnasirpal II, who moved the capital to Kalhu and whose annals catalog his punishments without flinching; Tiglath-Pileser III, who reforged the state in the eighth century; Sargon II, who built a new capital from nothing and named it for himself, Dur-Sharrukin, the Fortress of Sargon; Sennacherib, who razed Babylon and rebuilt Nineveh as his “Palace Without Rival”; Esarhaddon, who took Egypt; Ashurbanipal, who held it and burned Thebes.

What made the reach possible was, first, the army. The Assyrians fielded what is often called the first true standing army of the ancient world — a professional, year-round force rather than a seasonal levy, equipped with iron weapons as iron displaced bronze, organized into units of cavalry, chariotry, archers, and the engineers of the siege. They were the masters of taking walled cities. The reliefs show the apparatus in patient detail: the siege-ramp built up against the wall, the battering-ram under its mobile shelter rolled to the gate, the sappers undermining the foundations, the archers giving covering fire while the towers burn. Against a city that resisted, the army was a machine for breaking it open.

The siege of Lachish in Judah, 701 BCE: Sennacherib’s army at the walls, and below, the captured inhabitants led out into deportation. Gypsum relief from the South-West Palace at Nineveh, British Museum. Photograph by Mike Peel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The second instrument was subtler and, in its way, more total. The Assyrians made deportation a policy. When a province rebelled or a kingdom was annexed, the empire did not merely garrison it — it could empty it, marching whole populations off to be resettled hundreds of miles away, and moving other deportees in to take their place. The point was to break the bond between a people and its land, the soil and the local gods and the memory of independence in which revolt took root. The records are explicit about the numbers: tens of thousands moved in a single campaign, by one royal accounting more than a hundred and fifty thousand persons shifted in a year. The most famous instance is the one the Hebrew scriptures remember — the carrying-off of the northern kingdom of Israel after the fall of Samaria, the population scattered through the empire and replaced with settlers from elsewhere, the ten tribes lost to history in the churn.

It was not, in the Assyrian frame, simple cruelty for its own sake. The deportees were not enslaved; they traveled under guard but were fed and kept, and at their destination they became subjects of the king with the same standing as the Assyrians among whom they were settled, set to work where the empire needed hands. Deportation was the empire’s engine of homogenization: it dissolved conquered peoples into a single Assyrianized mass, bound to the king and stripped of the local loyalties that might rise against him. Over generations the policy helped make the imperial core speak one language — not Akkadian, in the end, but Aramaic, the western tongue the deportations spread until it became the common speech of the Near East.

What the stone remembers

The kings did not leave their deeds to memory. They carved them. Along the lower walls of the palace state-rooms at Kalhu, at Dur-Sharrukin, at Nineveh, ran register upon register of gypsum relief — the most sustained record of imperial self-presentation the ancient world produced. The reliefs are official art, propaganda in stone, and they are also unflinching documentary: the army on the march, the cities falling, the tribute brought in, the prisoners impaled on stakes outside the wall they failed to hold, the captives flayed. The Assyrians did not hide the punishments. They displayed them. The terror was the message, and the wall in the throne-room was where the message was kept.

Guarding the great doorways stood the lamassu — colossal human-headed winged bulls, carved with five legs so that they seemed to stand still from the front and stride forward from the side, set in pairs at the gates to ward what was hostile and overawe what entered. They are the single most recognizable image the Assyrians left, and they were apotropaic before they were decorative: a threshold made into a guardian.

A lamassu — human-headed winged bull — from the palace of Sargon II at Dur-Sharrukin (Khorsabad), c. 713–706 BCE, Louvre. Photograph by Marie-Lan Nguyen, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

And set among the conquests, the other great theme: the hunt. The North Palace at Nineveh held the lion-hunt reliefs of Ashurbanipal, in which the king rides down lions released into an arena and kills them with bow and spear and sword — the royal performance of mastery over the wild, the same hand that breaks cities breaking beasts. They are carved with a tenderness toward the dying animals that sits strangely beside the impalings on the war-panels: a lioness dragging her paralyzed hindquarters, an arrow through her spine, rendered with such attention that she has outlived every king who ever hunted her. In the Assyrian mind the two scenes belonged together. To hunt the lion and to crush the rebel were one office — the king as the order of the world made flesh, putting down the chaos that pressed against the wall.

The royal lion hunt of Ashurbanipal, gypsum relief from the North Palace at Nineveh, c. 645–635 BCE, British Museum. Photograph by Carole Raddato, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The watch of the sky

Against the war-state stood a thing harder to reconcile with it: a scholarship of extraordinary depth, kept by the same kings who burned the cities. The empire that flayed its rebels also gathered, at Nineveh, the largest library the ancient world had assembled.

Ashurbanipal built it, and he was unusual among kings in that he could read what he collected. Most rulers left the tablets to their scribes; this one had been trained in the scribal craft as crown prince, and he said so. In his own inscriptions he claims to have mastered “the lore of the wise sage Adapa, the hidden secret, the whole of the scribal craft,” and to have read “cunningly written text in Sumerian, obscure Akkadian, the interpretation of which is difficult” — even, he says, “stone inscriptions from before the flood.” The boast styles him a disciple of Adapa, the first of the seven antediluvian sages, the apkallu who in the Mesopotamian frame had brought the arts of civilization out of the deep before the waters came. A king who could read the oldest tongues set out to gather everything written in them.

His agents combed the temples and private collections of Babylonia for texts to copy or seize. What they brought to Nineveh became a deliberate encyclopedia of the cuneiform mind — over thirty thousand tablets and fragments, possibly the remnant of a far larger whole. It held the fullest surviving version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the creation poem the Enuma Elish, the omen-series, the medical and incantation corpora, the dictionaries and god-lists. Much of what is known today about Mesopotamian literature is known because Ashurbanipal’s library preserved it.

Around the king worked a college of scholars, and a remarkable body of their correspondence survives — hundreds of letters and reports from the experts to the throne. They came in several disciplines. The baru read the future in the entrails of sacrificed sheep, the liver above all, that organ mapped into a chart of the gods’ intentions. The ashipu was the exorcist, the master of the ritual that turned away evil. The asu was the physician; the kalu, the lamentation-singer. And the tupsar Enuma Anu Enlil — the scribe of the great celestial-omen series — watched the sky.

This last was the keeping of the heavens. The Assyrian and Babylonian astrologers maintained a continuous watch on the moon, the planets, the fixed stars, and the weather, because in their frame the sky was a script in which the gods wrote what was coming, and the king’s safety depended on reading it in time. An eclipse foretold the death of a ruler; the conjunction of a planet with a star bore on war and harvest and plague. The scholars wrote to the king almost daily — this omen seen, this one not, this danger to be averted by ritual. To watch the planets was to watch the gods themselves move, for the bright wanderers were the gods: the moon was Sin, Venus was Ishtar, Jupiter was Marduk. Out of this royal watch — a thing done not for curiosity but for the king’s protection — grew the long, patient record of celestial position that is the deep root of astrology and, with it, of mathematical astronomy. The Babylonians would carry the science on after the empire fell, and the Greeks would take it from them, and the wandering stars would keep the names of Mesopotamian gods in Latin translation down to the present catalog of the planets.

The fall, and the silence

It ended without warning and almost without trace. In the last quarter of the seventh century BCE the empire that had held the Near East for three hundred years came apart in a single decade. A coalition formed against it — the Medes from the Iranian highlands under Cyaxares, and the Babylonians under Nabopolassar, the southern subjects in revolt. The old cult-city of Ashur fell to the Medes in 614. Two years later, in 612, the great capital itself was besieged and taken: Nineveh fell after some three months, the king Sin-shar-ishkun apparently dying in the wreck of it, the city given to fire. A last Assyrian king held on at Harran in the west with Egyptian help; the recapture failed; by 609 the empire of Ashur had ceased to exist. For a power so total, the suddenness is astonishing. The terror of the whole region was simply gone.

And the cities went quiet under the earth. The great mounds were so thoroughly emptied and buried that within two centuries no one passing knew what they were. When the Greek soldier Xenophon led the Ten Thousand back up the Tigris around 401 BCE — his march recorded in the Anabasis — he passed two enormous ruined cities along the river and recorded them as the work of the Medes, calling one Larissa and the other Mespila. They were Kalhu and Nineveh, the capitals of the empire that had ruled the world he was walking through, and the names of the Assyrians had fallen so far out of memory that a literate Athenian could march past their walls and not know whose they had been. The recovery had to wait for the nineteenth century, when European excavators dug into the mounds and pulled the lamassu and the reliefs and the library out of the ground, and the cuneiform was deciphered, and a vanished empire was read back into history out of its own buried archives.

In the meantime the Assyrians lived on in the one place their enemies had kept them: the Hebrew prophets. To the writers of scripture, Assyria was the great threat from the north, the empire that destroyed the northern kingdom and besieged Jerusalem — and yet the prophets cast it, terribly, as an instrument in a larger hand. O Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, runs Isaiah’s oracle, and the staff in their hand is mine indignation — the empire imagined as a tool taken up by God to chasten his own people, and then, its work done, broken in turn. The city’s fall became a set-piece of prophetic vengeance: the book of Nahum is a single sustained song over the ruin of Nineveh. The Assyrians entered the Western imagination as the type of the cruel conqueror brought low, the bloody city whose end the righteous celebrate.

There is a last thread, and it is contested. In the same lands today live the Assyrians — Aramaic-speaking Christians of several churches, the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean Catholic and the Syriac communions, who carry the ancient name into the present and claim descent from the people of Ashur. How much continuity the name actually marks is a genuine scholarly dispute: critics argue that the modern Assyrian identity, in its self-conscious appeal to the ancient empire, is substantially a construction of the nineteenth century, shaped by Western scholarship and missionary contact; others trace a thread of local self-designation running back far earlier, and note that Aramaic — the very language the empire’s deportations spread — has been spoken continuously in that country for some three thousand years. What is not in dispute is the cost of the inheritance. In 2015 the militants of the Islamic State, holding the plain of Nineveh, bulldozed the excavated ruins of Kalhu and shattered the museum sculptures of Mosul, declaring the lamassu and the reliefs un-Islamic idols — and drove the modern Assyrian Christians, the people who still bear the name, from the towns their families had held for centuries. The empire of Ashur was buried once by its enemies and dug up by strangers. The name went on, into a people who would have to defend it again, in sight of the same mounds.

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

→ Related: The Sumerians · The Elamites · Nineveh · Chaldeans · Sin · Astrology · Assyria · Babylon · Ishtar · Marduk · Nabu · Shamash · Nergal · Anu · Gilgamesh · The Apkallu · Berossus · Oannes · Harran