Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 63 views

    Assyria The Rise and Fall of The Worlds

    Uploaded by

    jamiezferr
    This document provides an overview of the rise and fall of the ancient Assyrian Empire, from its origins as a small city-state called Ashur to its peak as the dominant power in Western Asia under King Esarhaddon in the late 8th century BCE, and then its dramatic collapse and fall less than a century later.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Assyria The Rise and Fall of The Worlds

    Uploaded by

    jamiezferr
    63 views8 pages
    This document provides an overview of the rise and fall of the ancient Assyrian Empire, from its origins as a small city-state called Ashur to its peak as the dominant power in Western Asia under King Esarhaddon in the late 8th century BCE, and then its dramatic collapse and fall less than a century later.

    Original Description:

    Assyria história

    Original Title

    Assyria_The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Worlds

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    This document provides an overview of the rise and fall of the ancient Assyrian Empire, from its origins as a small city-state called Ashur to its peak as the dominant power in Western Asia under King Esarhaddon in the late 8th century BCE, and then its dramatic collapse and fall less than a century later.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    63 views8 pages

    Assyria The Rise and Fall of The Worlds

    Uploaded by

    jamiezferr
    This document provides an overview of the rise and fall of the ancient Assyrian Empire, from its origins as a small city-state called Ashur to its peak as the dominant power in Western Asia under King Esarhaddon in the late 8th century BCE, and then its dramatic collapse and fall less than a century later.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    You are on page 1of 8

    ASSYRIA

    The Rise and Fall of the


    World’s First Empire

    Eckart Frahm

    New York

    Assyria_HCtextF1.indd iii 1/19/23 12:08:19 AM


    Contents

    List of Assyria’s Most Important Rulers vii


    A Note on Translations xi
    Maps xiii
    Introduction 1
    The Long Road to Glory
    1 A Small Town on the Tigris 31
    2 Birth of a Kingdom 57
    3 Disruption and Recovery 83
    4 The Crown in Crisis 107
    Empire
    5 The Great Expansion 125
    6 On the Edges of Empire 153
    7 A Ghost Story 177
    8 At the Gates of Jerusalem 191
    9 Sennacherib’s Babylonian Problem 213
    10 Mother Knows Best 235
    11 671 BCE 253
    12 Scholar, Sadist, Hunter, King 273

    Assyria_HCtextF1.indd v 1/19/23 12:08:19 AM


    ConTEnTs

    13 Everyday Life in the Empire 301


    14 Imperial Twilight 323
    Afterlife
    15 Assyria’s Legacy on the Ground 351
    16 A Model Empire 369
    17 Distorted Reflections 387
    18 The Second Destruction 409

    Epilogue 425

    Acknowledgments 429
    Abbreviations of Important Text Editions 431
    Notes 435
    Index 489

    vi

    Assyria_HCtextF1.indd vi 1/19/23 12:08:19 AM


    Introduction

    I n the summer of 671 BCE, an army dispatched by the Assyrian


    king Esarhaddon marched through Western Asia, crossed the Si-
    nai Peninsula, and entered the land of Egypt. Pharaoh Taharqa man-
    aged to flee, but his wife, his crown prince, and many of his harem
    women were captured. Along with enormous amounts of booty and
    with political hostages, craftsmen, exorcists, and magicians number-
    ing in the hundreds, they were brought to Nineveh, Esarhaddon’s
    mighty capital on the Tigris River in northeastern Iraq.
    It was an unprecedented triumph for Assyria. Two years earlier,
    King Esarhaddon had stated in one of his inscriptions that all his
    enemies “trembled like reeds in a storm,” that their “hearts were
    pounding,” and that “there was no rival whom my weapon could not
    face.” Now, in the wake of his great victory over Egypt, the Assyrian
    king could make good on his braggadocio. He dispatched letters
    requesting gifts and professions of respect from rulers of several far-
    away territories in the Mediterranean—from Cyprus to Greece to
    what is now modern Spain. When they complied, Esarhaddon had
    every reason to claim, “I achieved victory over the rulers of the four
    quarters of the world—and sprinkled the venom of death over all
    my enemies.”1

    Assyria_HCtextF1.indd 1 1/19/23 12:08:19 AM


    AssYRIA

    The Assyrian conquest of Egypt represented the culmination of a


    long historical journey. When that journey began, in the second half
    of the third millennium BCE, there were few signs that the country
    would one day achieve hegemony over almost all of Western Asia
    and some adjoining territories. In fact, Assyria was barely a coun-
    try at all—in the beginning there was only the city of Ashur (see
    Plate 1). Located some 100 kilometers (62 miles) south of Nineveh,
    Ashur was home to a number of important temples—including that
    of a god likewise named Ashur—but it was not a major political
    player.
    Around 2000 BCE, after spending several centuries under the
    heel of the powerful kingdoms of southern Mesopotamia, Ashur
    became politically independent. For the following three hundred
    years—the so-called Old Assyrian period—it was jointly ruled by
    a popular assembly and a dynasty of hereditary leaders. The city’s
    role as a hub in the international trade in tin and textiles permitted
    Ashur to accumulate considerable wealth during this time.
    A period of decline starting around 1700 BCE brought the Old
    Assyrian city-state and many of its institutions to an end, but the
    journey was not over. When Ashur got back on its feet in the four-
    teenth century BCE, it assumed a very different role: serving as cap-
    ital of a territorial state eager to expand its borders through military
    means. This birth of Assyria in the proper sense of the term—its
    emergence as a land that included great cities such as Nineveh,
    Calah, and Arbela, and soon others much farther away—marked
    the beginning of a new era: the Middle Assyrian period. Now a
    full-fledged monarchy, Assyrians started to see their land as a peer
    of the most powerful states of the time, from Babylonia in the south
    to Egypt in the west.
    During the eleventh century BCE, the Assyrian kingdom ex-
    perienced a new crisis, this one caused by climate change, migra-
    tions, and internal tensions. It lost most of its provinces, especially
    in the west. But when the dust settled, it managed to rise from the

    Assyria_HCtextF1.indd 2 1/19/23 12:08:19 AM


    InTRoduCTIon

    ashes faster than any of the other states in the region. A number of
    energetic and ruthless Assyrian rulers of the Neo-Assyrian period
    (ca. 934– 612 BCE) took advantage of the weakness of their political
    rivals, embarking on a systematic campaign of subjugation, destruc-
    tion, and annexation. Their efforts, initially aimed at the reconquest
    of areas that had been under Assyrian rule before and then moving
    farther afield, were carried out with unsparing and often violent de-
    termination, cruelly epitomized in an aphoristic statement found in
    another of Esarhaddon’s inscriptions: “Before me, cities, behind me,
    ruins.”2
    Again, there were setbacks. On several occasions— even in the
    otherwise glorious year of 671—internal and external revolts threat-
    ened Assyria’s hegemony. In Israel and Judah, resistance to Assyria’s
    military interventions resulted in the emergence of new, anti-imperial
    forms of religion, with long-term consequences unforeseen at the
    time. But by the late eighth century, the Assyrians had managed to
    create a state that transcended all its predecessors in power, size, and
    organizational complexity.
    During the last years of Esarhaddon’s reign, Assyria ruled over
    a territory that reached from northeastern Africa and the Eastern
    Mediterranean to Western Iran, and from Anatolia in the north to
    the Persian Gulf in the south. Parks with exotic plants lined As-
    syrian palaces, newly created universal libraries were the pride of
    Assyrian kings, and an ethnically diverse mix of people from dozens
    of foreign lands moved about the streets of Assyrian cities such as
    Nineveh and Calah. Yet it was not to last. Only half a century after
    Esarhaddon’s reign, the Assyrian state suffered a dramatic collapse,
    culminating in the conquest and destruction of Nineveh in 612 BCE.
    Assyria’s fall occurred long before some better-known empires
    of the ancient world were founded: the Persian Empire, established
    in 539 BCE by Cyrus II; Alexander the Great’s fourth-century BCE
    Greco-Asian Empire and its successor states; the third-century BCE
    empires created by the Indian ruler Ashoka and the Chinese emperor

    Assyria_HCtextF1.indd 3 1/19/23 12:08:19 AM


    AssYRIA

    Qin Shi Huang; and the most prominent and influential of these,
    the Roman Empire, whose beginnings lay in the first century BCE.
    The Assyrian kingdom may not have the same name recognition.
    But for more than one hundred years, from about 730 to 620 BCE, it
    had been a political body so large and so powerful that it can rightly
    be called the world’s first empire.
    And so Assyria matters. “World history” does not begin with
    the Greeks or the Romans—it begins with Assyria. “World religion”
    took off in Assyria’s imperial periphery. Assyria’s fall was the result
    of a first “world war.” And the bureaucracies, communication net-
    works, and modes of domination created by the Assyrian elites more
    than 2,700 years ago served as blueprints for many of the political
    institutions of subsequent great powers, first directly and then in-
    directly, up until the present day. This book tells the story of the
    slow rise and glory days of this remarkable ancient civilization, of its
    dramatic fall, and its intriguing afterlife.

    T wo centuries ago, for a moder ately educated citizen of


    the West, Assyria was both much better known and much more
    poorly understood than it is today. Nineveh was then a household
    name for most people. They were familiar with it from the Hebrew
    Bible, which portrayed it as the capital of the state that had sounded
    the death knell on the Kingdom of Israel. The Book of Jonah, pop-
    ular and widely read, claimed that Nineveh was so large that it took
    three days to walk across from one end to the other— and that God
    had forgiven the Ninevites their sins when they repented. The Book
    of Nahum painted a much darker picture, comparing Nineveh to
    a debased prostitute and describing the city’s impending destruc-
    tion, brought about by God to punish Assyria’s imperial hubris.
    In a variety of Greek and Latin texts from classical antiquity, As-
    syria appeared as the first in a long succession of empires, founded
    by King Ninus and his colorful wife Semiramis and destroyed by

    Assyria_HCtextF1.indd 4 1/19/23 12:08:19 AM

    You might also like