Assyria
The Assyrians inhabited a narrow strip of rolling fertile land in northern Mesopotamia. Their heavily fortified city on the middle Tigris river was called Assur, after the god of war and their chief deity, so they named their land the Land of Assur, or Assyria. The city of Nineveh more than one hundred miles north of Assur served as a second major settlement.
By about 2300 BCE, the Assyrian homeland in northern Mesopotamia was ruled by Sargon and his Akkadian successors, and then by the monarchs of the Third Dynasty of Ur. When Ur's renowned dynasty collapsed about 2000 BCE, Assyria briefly emerged as independent and relatively influential. By the second millennium, Assyrian merchants had established flourishing colonies in eastern Anatolia, trading tin and textiles for copper, silver and gold. At about 1850 and for five centuries thereafter, Assyria fell under the control of outsiders, first becoming a dependency of Amorite Babylonia and then a client of Mitanni from about 1650 to 1360 BCE. The Assyrians, once farmers and shepherds, found their homeland in constant struggle between contending parties, and developed into fierce warriors, which is how history now remembers them.
The first truly powerful Assyrian state emerged after Egypt brought Miitanni to its knees in the middle of the fourteenth century BCE. King Assur-uballit, who reigned over Assyria from about 1365 to 1330, recovered Assyrian independence and began to expand. The Hittite empire fell and Egypt declined because of the arrival of the Sea Peoples, and Assyria soon supplanted Babylonia as the chief military power in Mesopotamia. King Tiglath-pileser, ruling between 1115 to 1077, even extended Assyrian rule briefly to the shores of the Mediterranean, but when he died, Assyria declined over the next century, as Arameans and other invaders pushed into the empire almost to the very gates of Assur.
By the early ninth century, Assyria was making a comeback and became once again the power of the ancient Near east. This new growth began during the reign of Adad-nirari II, 911-891 BCE. He pushed the frontiers east of the Tigris and down to the middle of the Euphrates, and took control of some valuable trade routes east of Assyria and drove the Arameans away. His grandson Assurnasirpal II, 883-859 BCE, extended Assyrian rule over man of the small kingdoms that stretched from Assyria westward to the Mediterranean. He and his successors dispersed conquered peoples around the empire on a massive scale, in order to ensure security and obtain forced labor, also bringing defeated Aramean tribes from Syria to Assyria to construct palaces and monuments. He transformed Kalhu, known today as Nimrud, into the chief administrative city in Assyria.
Assurnasirpal was succeeded by his son Shalmaneser III, 858 to 824, who campaigned west of the Euphrates and pushed deep into northern Syria and Palestine. Revolts at the end of his reign led to another period of gradual decline, with inept kings taking the throne and the central government weakening during the first half of the eighth century BCE, to be dominated by the new kingdom of Urartu in the northeast.
When the usurper Tiglath-pileser III, 745 to 727 BCE came to the throne, he ushered in the century of Assyria's greatest expansion. He reorganized the army and embarked on campaigns of conquest. The Kassite kings had been long expelled from Babylon. The Chaldeans had taken over the extreme southern part of that empire and called it Chaldea. Tiglath-pileser capture Babylon and took kingship over Babylonia. He was only partly successful against teh rival power of Urartu but pushed them out of northern Syria, and incorporated Aramean Damascus into his empire.
His son Shalmaneser V, 726 to 722, found himself facing a coalition between Egypt and Israel, where the latter refused to pay its tribute. Shalmaneser marched to the gates of Samaria, Israel's capital, and his successor Sargon II besieged the city for three years until it fell in 722. Assyria then abolished the kingdom of Israel, annexed its territory and deported many of its leading citizens to Assyria, providing the basis for the stories of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.
Sargon II was not in fact Shalmaneser's son, and may have been another usurper. But he and his descendant successors left astonishing monuments and extensive conquests, to be remembered as the finest of Assyria's kings. Sargon moved his capital from Kalhu to a new site nmortheast of Nineveh called Dur-Sharrukin, modern Khorsabad. His chief campaign was an invasion of Urartu in 714 BCE, ravishing the richest provinces and leaving it defenseless to the Cimerrians from teh north. Sargon prevented these invaders from marching into Assyria in 705 BCE, although he died in battle. They then pushed west into Anatolia and overthrew the kingdom of Phrygia, realm of the legendary king Midas, and attacked the wealthy new kingdom of Lydia. Eventually the Cimmerians were dominated by the Lydians and gradually absorbed into western Anatolia.
Sargon's son Sennacherib further enlarged Assyria's empire. He rebuilt Nineveh, sitting opposite from modern Mosul across the Tigris, to serve as its capital. In 701 BCE, angered by Hezekiah of Judah becoming allied with Egypt, and the Phoenicians and Philistines rising against Assyria, Sennacherib swept through Palestine. He captured Phoenician and Philistine towns and surrounded Jerusalem, receiving an enormous tribute from a now chastened King Hezekiah who remained a loyal vassal to Assyria. Sennacherib gained control over northern Babylonia by placing one of his younger sons on Babylon's throne, but this new king was betrayed to the neighboring Elamites, one of Babylonia's allies, and presumably slain. Sennacherib decided to end Babylonian opposition by marching into the city in 689 BCE and massacring its inhabitants, ordering its destruction thereafter.
In 681, Sennacherib was murdered by two of his own sons, while praying in temple, seen throughout the land as divine punishment, since his brutality against Babylon had been resented even among the Assyrian people. He had designated his youngest son Esarhaddon as his rightful successor, and the upsurge in sibling jealousies quite possibly was the primary cause of his assassination. Esarhaddon hastened to Nineveh to face his brothers, but they fled after many of their own soldiers deserted to Esarhaddon. He then rebuilt Babylon. His chief campaign was against Egypt, for the Nubian rulers of Egypt during that period had repeatedly intrigued with several vassal rulers of Assyria. Esarhaddon invaded Egypt in 671 BCE, vanquishing its army and proclaiming himself its king. Upon his departure from Egypt however, the Nubian king Taharqa returned to Egypt, fomented a rebellion, and expelled the Assyrian occupiers. Esarhaddon turned around, intending to retake Egypt, but died on the way after falling ill.
His son Assurbanipal was the last great king of Assyria. He carried out the attack against Egypt that his father had planned, and captured the city of Memphis and the entire Delta. Yet he had to fight constantly to retain his throne. He even had to fight in Babylonia against his own brother Shamash-shum-ukin, who had been proclaimed by Esarhaddon as the crown prince of Babylon, with Assurbanipal as the legitimate heir to the Assyrian throne. Shamash became involved in plots hatched by the Chaldeans, the Elamites, the Egyptians and others. He attacked the Assyrian garrisons in Babylonia with the aid of the Elamites in 652 BCE, yet the Elamites soon returned to their own lands. The Assyrians took advantage of cleared southern Babylonia of Chaldean forces and marched against Shamash, besieging Babylon for three years, finally capturing the city in 648.
Assurbanipal hunted down the surviving rebels and proceeded to crush the Elamites. But his horrible vengeance left the buffer state in shambles and opened his eastern borders to attacks by the hostile Medes, northeast of Assyria. The Medes refused to pay tribute to Assyria. Meanwhile the new Saite dynasty in Egypt had also asserted its own independence and expelled the occupying Assyrian garrisons. Yet when Assurbanipal died in 627 BCE, the Assyrian empire remained essentially intact, except for Egypt. Lydia was now a tributary ally, Nineveh was still the largest and most magnificent city in the world, its library containing some 20,000 cuneiform tablets.
In 626 BCE the Chaldean leader Naboplassar, acting as Assyrian governor of southern Babylonia, seized the kingship of Babylonia and formed an alliance with the Median king in order to conquer and divide Assyria. The Assyrians made a new alliance with Egypt, who itself was alarmed by Scythians and other northern nomads were moving south into the Assyrian empire and threatening Syria. But with the former buffer state of Elam now destroyed, the Medes stormed and destroyed the city of Assur in 614 BCE, next assaulting Nineveh itself in 612. They burned the proud city. The remaining Assyrian forces, with their ally King Nectanebo II of Egypt tried to march against the Medes, but were defeated at teh battle of Carchemish in 605 BCE.