by Eckart Frahm
Because the political situation in Iraq has significantly limited archaeological work in the Assyrian core area during the past decades, newly developed scientific methods such as paleobotanical and archaeometrical analysis have been applied only sparingly at the main Assyrian sites in the Tigris region. However, thanks to surveys in eastern Syria that were conducted before the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, and successful attempts in recent years to use satellite imagery, we now have a much improved understanding of settlement patterns, agricultural structures, and the distribution of roads and canals in the Assyrian heartland and its periphery (see Chapters 1 and 2).
Continuity and change in Assyrian history and culture
The aforementioned subdivision of Assyrian history into three periods, Old Assyrian, Middle Assyrian, and Neo‐Assyrian (followed by a long “post‐imperial” era, see Chapter 10), was devised by modern scholars and is primarily based on changes affecting the Assyrian language (see Chapter 17). Historically, it is somewhat problematic – the transitions between the periods were gradual and not marked by clearly identifiable historical events. Nonetheless, there are a number of characteristic political and cultural features that distinguish the three eras. They go hand in hand with some remarkable continuities that imbue the span of Assyrian history with a considerable degree of coherence.
With regard to Assyria’s territorial extent, we can trace, despite occasional setbacks, a steady development towards ever greater size. For most of the Old Assyrian period, Ashur was the center of a small city state. Even though the merchants of Ashur travelled wide and far, cities such as Nineveh were not under Ashur’s control yet. In the 18th century, the Amorite king Šamši‐Adad I brought Ashur for a short time into his large Upper Mesopotamian kingdom, but without making it his main residence. The situation changed in Middle Assyrian times, when Ashur grew into the political and religious capital of an influential territorial state reaching from the Khabur region in the west to the foothills of the Zagros in the east. Only now do we find references to the “land of Ashur” (māt Aššur) in the textual record and can speak of an “Assyria” in the strict sense of the word. Finally, in the Neo‐Assyrian period, Assyria expanded even further, morphing into an empire that dominated much of Western Asia.
Throughout all this territorial change, there was, however, also some continuity, especially with regard to the role played by the city of Ashur. It served as Assyria’s political capital until 879 BCE, when Aššurnaṣirpal II moved the royal court to Kalḫu. But Ashur remained a highly important cultural and religious center much longer. Up to the last decades of the Assyrian state, Assyrian kings would spend the winter months in Ashur to participate in various religious festivities. They also continued to be buried there, in vaults located under the floors of Ashur’s “Old Palace.”
Ashur’s status was closely linked to the god who shared his name with the city and had his temple there. Throughout the history of Ashur and Assyria, the god Assur served as the state’s foremost deity (see Chapter 18).3 As a consequence of the political transformations Assyria experienced over the course of this long period, Assur’s “character” changed as well – from numen loci into powerful divine king, with a family of his own. Yet he never ceased to define the religious identity of the Assyrian people and particularly their rulers. Even after the downfall of the Assyrian empire, Assur continued to be worshipped in his city, and some of the festivals held in honor of Assur and his wife Šerua were still celebrated in the second century AD (see Chapter 10).
While Assur served as Assyria’s divine protector, the Assyrian king embodied the earthly dimensions of the Assyrian state. But contrary to what one might expect, the autocratic type of rule that characterized Assyria’s political system during the imperial period came into being relatively late. During the Old Assyrian period, the Assyrian city state had a far more complex political structure, one that some have characterized, in reference to Aristotle, Polybius, and other classical political theorists, as a “mixed constitution” (Liverani 2011). There was a “democratic” component, provided by the city assembly, an aristocratic one, provided by the eponyms (līmum), who were probably chosen from among the landholding and mercantile elites, and a monarchical one, represented by a hereditary ruler. This ruler did not yet bear the traditional Mesopotamian title “king” (šarrum), which was instead associated with the god Assur. Rather, he was known as the “prince” (rubā’um), the “representative of the god Assur” (iššiak Aššur), and the “overseer” (waklum), a title referring to his legal functions.
It was not until the 14th century BCE, under Aššur‐uballiṭ I, that Assyrian rulers began to call themselves šarru(m). From this time onwards, the Assyrian kings accumulated more and more power. But even during Assyria’s imperial period in the eighth and seventh century BCE, they still used on occasion some of the traditional titles held by their Old Assyrian forebears, and tablets with loyalty oaths sworn by Assyrian vassals were sealed with the Old Assyrian seal of the “city hall.” The old idea that the true king of Assyria was the god Assur remained alive well into the seventh century BCE.
Assyrian dynastic continuity was nonetheless remarkably strong. With the probable exception of the short‐lived reign of the eunuch Sîn‐šumu‐lišir in 627, the rulers who governed Assyria from the 17th century onwards were apparently all members of one and the same family – they belonged to the so‐called Adasi dynasty. Even though there were phases when the power of the king was overshadowed by that of certain high officials, and despite the fact that on various occasions the royal family was plagued by infighting that led, in at least one case, to the killing of the monarch, the prerogative of the ruling house to provide the Assyrian king, enshrined in the Assyrian King List, remained unchallenged for a full millennium.
A long‐term analysis of the Assyrian economy reveals a strange mix of continuity and change as well. At first glance, the mercantile system of the Old Assyrian period seems to have little in common with the exploitatory “tributary mode of production” that characterized the economy of Assyria’s imperial phase. And yet, the transition may have had its own historical logic: it brings to mind what Marxist economists have written about imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. In fact, the Assyrian economy never entirely lost its commercial dimensions. Assyrian merchants continued to play an important economic role until the last decades of Assyrian history (see Chapter 9), and the detailed accounts Neo‐Assyrian scribes kept during military campaigns, not only to register plundered goods but also to document the numbers of killed, maimed, or deported enemies, appear like gory late manifestations of the mercantile spirit of Assyria’s early age.
Assyria’s material culture, amidst centuries of artistic and technical innovation, was characterized by certain continuities as well, continuities that helped create a specifically Assyrian identity. To mention a small but telling example, there were certain types of bread that were peculiar to Assyria from Middle Assyrian to Neo‐Assyrian times (Postgate 2015).
Assyrian civilization did not unfold in isolation. Throughout its history, it absorbed influences from other regions, which in turn adopted elements of Assyrian culture (see Chapters 11–16). The sculptures found in mid‐third millennium layers in Ashur, for example, were clearly inspired by southern Mesopotamian models.
From early on, Hurrian culture exerted a strong influence on Assyria. The main deity worshipped in Nineveh in the late third millennium was the Hurrian goddess Šauška, who was later identified by the Assyrians as Ištar of Nineveh. The bedchamber of that goddess was known well into the first millennium BCE under the semi‐Hurrian name bīt natḫi. Some Assyrian terms for (military) professions, for example turtānu (“Commander‐in‐Chief”), are Hurrian loanwords. Over time, however, the Assyrians replaced many Hurrian features, especially in the areas of religion, literature, and scholarship, with elements from the more prestigious culture of ancient Babylonia, where a language closely related to Assyrian was sp
oken. The importation of numerous Babylonian deities and the reshaping of the theology of Assur after the model of the god Enlil of Nippur are among the most prominent examples of this shift. Even Assyrian royal inscriptions were often written in Babylonian language, and Babylonian scholars and exorcists became key advisors to the Assyrian kings. Assyrian hostility towards the Hurrian state of Mittani in the mid‐second millennium probably accelerated this process.
In the first millennium BCE, Aramaean culture made a strong impact on Assyria. Aramaeans had begun to move into the Assyrian core area in the wake of the collapse of several major Late Bronze age civilizations around 1200 BCE and continued to arrive there in large numbers as a result of the mass deportations undertaken by various Neo‐Assyrian kings. Many Assyrians adopted the Aramaic language and alphabetic script. After the downfall of the Assyrian state in the late seventh century BCE, cuneiform writing in Assyria came to an end, but key elements of Assyrian culture and religion survived among the Aramaeans. Even today, there are groups of Aramaeans who call themselves Assyrians and consider themselves heirs of the Assyrians of the imperial age (see Chapter 32).
The Assyrians interacted also with other people, among them Hittites, Luwians, Urartians, and Elamites, and adopted elements of their cultures. All in all, they were remarkably open to foreign influences. Neo‐Assyrian kings built monumental palace complexes incorporating zoos and gardens as formal showcases for collections of foreign animals, trees, and plants, kept princes from foreign states as hostages in their residences, and embraced with great enthusiasm the artwork and architecture of their neighbors, from delicately carved ivories to monumental art forms and palatial architectural elements such as porticos known among the Neo‐Hittite and Aramaean inhabitants of northern Syria as bīt ḫilāni. At the same time, Assyrian culture had an impact on other civilizations, especially during the first millennium BCE. The Urartians, for example, adopted Assyrian cuneiform writing and remodeled their national god Ḫaldi after the Assyrian god Assur. The olive oil industry in Ekron was, in all likelihood, boosted by the new markets that emerged as a result of the Assyrian domination of the Levant. And some of the new religious ideas articulated in the Biblical book of Deuteronomy can be seen as a response to the political theology underlying the loyalty oaths that Assyrians kings imposed on their subjects and vassals. Unlike other empires, however, Assyria made no attempt to actively promote its language, religion, and literature outside its core area. The cultural changes effected by Assyrian rule in conquered regions were, as a rule, incidental rather than symptoms of deliberate cultural domination.
Trends in Research on Ancient Assyria and their Ideological Background
As mentioned above, the foundations for the modern study of ancient Assyria were laid in the 1840s and 1850s, when French and British explorers rediscovered the great Assyrian cities Kalḫu, Dur‐Šarrukin, and Nineveh, and the Irish clergyman Edward Hincks and other scholars deciphered the cuneiform writing system (see Chapter 31). Since then, the scholarly analysis of ancient Assyria has gone through various phases.4 Initially, texts and images found at Assyrian sites were first and foremost scrutinized with the goal to assess their bearing on the “sacred history” outlined in the Hebrew Bible, whose reliability as a historical source was partly corroborated and partly invalidated by the new finds. Assyrian references to a number of Israelite and Judean kings known from the Bible confirmed the historical existence of these rulers, but other information retrieved from the Assyrian inscriptions undermined established patterns of Biblical history and chronology (see Chapter 29).
When, from the 1870s onwards, tablets from Assurbanipal’s Ninevite library were successively translated, additional connections with the Biblical record came to light, including those between the Assyro‐Babylonian and Biblical flood stories. In early twentieth‐century Germany, these and other discoveries led to the politically charged “Babel–Bibel” dispute, in which the German emperor Wilhelm II intervened in person to condemn claims by some Assyriologists that the apparently derivative character of the Bible challenged the holy book’s status as a source of unquestionable truths.
While nineteenth and early twentieth‐century scholars often read Assyrian texts with an eye to their relevance to the Bible, the yardstick for judging Neo‐Assyrian art was the sculpture from ancient Greece and Rome. By displaying Neo‐Assyrian monuments along with Greek masterpieces like the Parthenon friezes in the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris, the cultural elites of the nineteenth‐century European imperial powers implicitly endorsed Assyrian civilization – not the least, perhaps, because their own political mission was to some extent comparable to Assyria’s imperial politics (Bohrer 2003). But there were also some critical voices. The famous nineteenth‐century cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt, in his Reflections on History, derided “the utterly uncouth royal fortresses of Nineveh, [t]he meanness of their ground‐plan and the slavishness of their sculptures.” The tension between an attitude that admired the political and cultural achievements associated with Assyria’s empire‐building and one that detested the brutality and oppression associated with this endeavor has never entirely ceased to inform the debate about the Neo‐Assyrian period (Fales 2010: 27–55).
In the wake of the trauma of World War I, the “critics” of ancient Assyria gained for quite some time the upper hand. A 1918 article by Albert T. Olmstead, an influential American historian of the ancient Near East, compared the atrocities described in Assyrian royal inscriptions to the horrors of the recent war.5 But Olmstead was also a representative of a more “historicist” approach to Assyria. Tellingly, his History of Assyria from 1923 begins with the statement: “Assyrians deserve to be studied by and for themselves.” Olmstead’s book is, incidentally, both the first and, somewhat astoundingly, the last serious attempt by a modern scholar to produce a comprehensive history of ancient Assyria.6
In the half‐century that followed World War II, scholars focused on preparing new editions of Assyrian texts and other forms of “positivist” research. Where we find value judgments regarding Assyria in their works, these are largely negative. The Danish‐American Assyriologist Thorkild Jacobsen, for example, claimed, in his 1976 book The Treasures of Darkness, that the first millennium BCE, the period of Assyria’s greatest expansion, “contributed no major new insights, rather, it brought in many ways decline and brutalization.”
The past two or three decades have seen Assyriologists continue their traditional editorial work, but also, in the wake of the “cultural turn” of the 1970s, become more interested in Assyria’s religious, intellectual, and socio‐economic history. Inspired by the new insights thus gained, several scholars, among them Martin West (1997), Stephanie Dalley (1998), and especially Simo Parpola (e.g., 1993), have sought to reestablish a more positive image of ancient Assyria. Possibly influenced by the experience of the vastly amplified global flow of ideas and goods brought about by new technologies and the downfall of communism in the late 1980s, they have stressed that later civilizations were in many ways indebted to Assyrian models, not only politically, but also in religion, literature, and the arts. Even though this “neo‐diffusionist” approach has led to a number of contestable claims (for a critique, see, e.g., Cooper 2000), it has served as an important corrective to the largely negative appreciation of Neo‐Assyrian civilization that dominated the preceding decades, and it has opened up Assyrian studies to the “global history” approach that has gained traction in recent years (see, for example, Liverani 2011).
The Assyrian Cultural Heritage Crisis
This Introduction cannot end without a word on the current political situation in the region in which Assyrian civilization once thrived. For quite some time now, conditions there have been deplorable, especially in Iraq, where war, unrest, and humanitarian crisis have been steady phenomena since 1980. But at no point in recent history has the state of affairs been worse than at this very juncture. At the time of writing this Introduction, much of the an
cient Assyrian heartland is under control of the so‐called “Islamic State,” a group that, after taking the city of Mosul in June 2014, began to accompany its atrocities against civilians with a well‐publicized campaign of cultural cleansing targeting museums and archaeological sites such as Nineveh and Kalḫu and threatening to destroy significant parts of Assyria’s cultural heritage. Important archaeological complexes such as the throne room suite of Aššurnaṣirpal’s palace in Nimrud and the Nabû temple at the same site, as well as central parts of Sennacherib’s famous Southwest Palace at Nineveh, have been entirely demolished between March 2015 and June 2016.7 For everyone interested in ancient Assyria, this is a deeply depressing moment. But it is perhaps also a moment in which the appearance of a Companion to Assyria is particularly timely. May the book help to counter the powerful forces that seek, at this very moment, to obliterate Assyria’s rich history and culture.
References
Bohrer, F.N. 2003. Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth Century Europe, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Cancik‐Kirschbaum, E. 2008. Die Assyrer: Geschichte, Gesellschaft, Kultur (2nd edition), Munich: C. H. Beck.
Cooper, J.S. 2000. “Assyrian Prophecies, the Assyrian Tree of Life, and the Mesopotamian Origins of Jewish Monotheism, Greek Philosophy, Christian Theology, Gnosticism, and Much More,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 120, 430–44.