Assyria

I

Introduction

Assyria (ancient Ashur, Ashshur, or Assur), ancient country of Asia. Extending south from about the northern border of present-day Iraq, it embraced the valley of the Tigris and one of its major tributaries, the Great Zab, covering an area roughly the shape of an inverted triangle. The western part of the country consisted of steppe suitable only for a nomadic population. The eastern part, however, was fit for agriculture, with wooded hills and fertile valleys watered by small rivers. To the east of Assyria lay the Zagros Mountains; to the north, terrace upon terrace led up to the Armenian Massif; the Mesopotamian plain stretched to the west. To the south was the country known first as Sumer, then as Sumer and Akkad, and still later as Babylonia. Mesopotamia is the name that the ancient Greeks gave to the general region in which all these countries, including Assyria, flourished. The most important cities of Assyria, all situated in the territory of present-day Iraq, were Ashur, now Sharqat; Nineveh, now the excavated mound Kuyunjik; Calah, now Nimrud; and Dur Sharrukin, now Khorsabad.

II

Early Settlements

From the beginning of the Late Stone Age, people had lived in the land that came to be known as Assyria, a fact confirmed by two adult Neanderthal skulls discovered in a cave on the north-eastern fringes of the region. Settled agricultural life did not begin there, however, until about 6500 bc. The ethnic composition of the earliest farming communities of Assyria is unknown; the inhabitants may have been a people known later on as Subarians, who spoke an agglutinative language rather than an inflected one (see Linguistics). Probably in the 3rd millennium bc, Semitic nomads conquered the region and made their inflected tongue, which was closely related to Babylonian, the prevailing language of the region (see Semitic Languages). The Assyrian script was a slightly modified version of the Babylonian cuneiform.

As early as the 7th millennium bc, the farmers of Assyria cultivated wheat and barley and owned cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. They built their houses, some of which contained as many as four rooms, of compact clay, used round ovens for baking with ground flour, and stored their grain in large, covered clay jars. These farming people wove textiles from thread spun with the help of spindle whorls; they made knives of obsidian and chert, a flint-like stone; and used celts, axe-shaped implements made of stone, as adzes and hoes. Their pottery was outstanding; much of it was made of skilfully fired clay and painted with attractive patterns. Obsidian and other hard stones were worked into vases, beads, amulets, and stamp seals. Female figurines, for ritual and religious purposes, were modelled in clay. The dead, often buried in a flexed position, with the knees drawn up to the chin, were interred among the houses, rather than in cemeteries.

III

Culture and Customs

Assyrian culture resembled that of Babylonia in most respects. Except for the royal annals, for example, Assyrian literature was practically identical with its Babylonian counterpart, and the more cultured Assyrian kings, notably Ashurbanipal, boasted of stocking their libraries with copies of Babylonian literary documents. Social or family life, marriage customs, and property laws all resembled those of Babylonia. The three Assyrian collections of court documents and legal records that have been found thus far share much with Sumerian and Babylonian law; the penalties provided for offenders under Assyrian law, however, were often more brutal and barbaric. Assyrian religious practices and beliefs were almost identical with those of Babylonia, except that the Assyrian national god, Ashur, was substituted for the Babylonian god Marduk. The major cultural contribution of the Assyrians lay in the field of art and architecture (see Mesopotamian Art and Architecture).

In the 3rd millennium bc, Assyria, like most of the Middle East, came under the influence of the Sumerian civilization to the south. A temple of this period, excavated in the city of Ashur, contained statues similar in style and appearance to those found in the temples of Sumer. Beginning about 2300 bc, Assyria formed part of the empire of Sumer and Akkad. Following the collapse of that empire about 2000 bc, the Amorites, a nomadic Semitic people from the Arabian Desert, infiltrated and conquered much of Mesopotamia, including Assyria. By 1850 bc Assyrian merchants had colonized parts of central Anatolia (Asia Minor), where they carried on a thriving trade in copper, silver, gold, tin, and textiles.

IV

Expansion and Dependency

About 1810 bc an Assyrian king, Shamshi-Adad I (reigned c. 1813-1780 bc), succeeded in extending the territory of Assyria from the Zagros Mountains to the Mediterranean Sea. Shamshi-Adad may have been the first ruler to establish a centrally organized empire in the ancient Middle East. He divided his kingdom into districts under specially appointed administrators and councils, instituted a system of couriers, and took a census of the population at regular intervals. This first Assyrian empire did not last long, however; Shamshi-Adad’s son, Ishme-Dagan I (reigned c. 1780-1760 bc), was defeated about 1760 bc by the Babylonian king Hammurabi, and Assyria became part of the Babylonian Empire.

The Babylonian Empire was also short-lived. The Kassites, a non-Semitic people, invaded Babylonia in the 16th century bc and seized political power. Another non-Semitic mountain people, the Hurrians, infiltrated most of northern Mesopotamia and even reached Palestine to the west. Close behind the Hurrians, and to some extent intermingling with them, came an Indo-European people whose name is unknown. As a result of these migrations and wanderings, the 16th century bc was one of turmoil in Mesopotamian history.

About 1500 bc Assyria became a dependency of Mitanni, a kingdom of imperial proportions that had extended its sway over all northern Mesopotamia. Assyria remained under its control until the early 14th century, when Mitanni suffered a serious defeat at the hands of the rising empire of the Hittites to the north. Taking advantage of the ensuing confusion, the Assyrian king Ashur-uballit I (reigned 1364-1328 bc) freed Assyria from the Mitanni yoke and even annexed some of its territory.

Ashur-uballit I was succeeded by a series of vigorous rulers, notably Adad-nirari I (reigned 1306-1274 bc), Shalmaneser I (reigned 1274-1244 bc), and Tukulti-Ninurta I (reigned 1244-1207 bc). They were successful in further extending Assyria’s borders and in keeping at bay their powerful neighbours, the Urartians, the Hittites, the Babylonians, and the Lullubi.