A Companion to Assyria

by Eckart Frahm

  Siddall, L.R. 2007. “A Re‐examination of the Title ša reši in the Neo‐Assyrian Period,” in: J.J. Azize and N.K. Weeks (eds.), Gilgameš and the World of Assyria: Proceedings of the Conference Held at Mandelbaum House, the University of Sydney, 21–23 July, 2004, Leuven: Peeters, 225–40.

  Streck, M.P. 2007. “Die große Inschrift Tukultī‐Ninurtas I,” Welt des Orients 37, 145–65.

  Tenu, A. 2009. “Données archéologiques sur les frontiers de l’empire médioassyrien,” in: E. Cancik‐Kirschbaum and N. Ziegler (eds.), Entre les fleuves 1. Untersuchungen zur historischen Geographie Obermesopotamiens im 2. Jahrtausend v. Chr., Gladbeck: PeWe Verlag, 121–50.

  Wiggermann, F.A.M. 2000. “Agriculture in the Northern Balikh Valley. The Case of Middle Assyrian Tell Sabi Abyad,” in: R.M. Jas (ed.), Rainfall and Agriculture in Northern Mesopotamia. Proceedings of the 3rd MOS Symposium, Leiden May 21–22. 1999, Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 171–231.

  Further Reading

  Fundamental: Jakob 2003. For the Middle Assyrian political apparatus, see Postgate 2010, for land tenure, Postgate 1982, and for a general assessment of the Middle Assyrian and other contemporary bureaucracies in Western Asia, Postgate 2013. Saporetti 1979 deals with the status of women in Middle Assyrian times, and Saporetti 2008 with Middle Assyrian legal practices. Freydank 2009 addresses the conflict between royal power and high officials in a challenging environment, as well as the social impact of mass deportations.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Neo‐Assyrian Period (ca. 1000–609 BCE)

  Eckart Frahm

  Introduction

  This chapter provides a historical sketch of the Neo‐Assyrian period, the era that saw the slow rise of the Assyrian empire as well as its much faster eventual fall.1 When the curtain lifts, at the close of the “Dark Age” that lasted until the middle of the tenth century BCE, the Assyrian state still finds itself in the grip of the massive crisis in the course of which it suffered significant territorial losses. Step by step, however, a number of assertive and ruthless Assyrian kings of the late tenth and ninth centuries manage to reconquer the lost lands and reestablish Assyrian power, especially in the Khabur region. From the late ninth to the mid‐eighth century, Assyria experiences an era of internal fragmentation, with Assyrian kings and high officials, the so‐called “magnates,” competing for power. The accession of Tiglath‐pileser III in 745 BCE marks the end of this period and the beginning of Assyria’s imperial phase. The magnates lose much of their influence, and, during the empire’s heyday, Assyrian monarchs conquer and rule a territory of unprecedented size, including Babylonia, the Levant, and Egypt. The downfall comes within a few years: between 615 and 609 BCE, the allied forces of the Babylonians and Medes defeat and destroy all the major Assyrian cities, bringing Assyria’s political power, and the “Neo‐Assyrian period,” to an end. What follows is a long and shadowy coda to Assyrian history. There is no longer an Assyrian state, but in the ancient Assyrian heartland, especially in the city of Ashur, some of Assyria’s cultural and religious traditions survive for another 800 years.

  Politically and economically, the Neo‐Assyrian period is characterized by the enormous expansion the Assyrian state experienced during this time, and its transformation into what may well have been the first empire in world history. Pinpointing something like a Neo‐Assyrian “mentality” is difficult, not the least because of the large influx of foreigners who were integrated into Assyrian society between the tenth and the seventh century BCE. Some characteristics that seem to define the Neo‐Assyrian mindset do, however, stand out. To begin with, the Neo‐Assyrians apparently had a particularly strong sense of order, manifested in such diverse features as, on the one hand, the square and regular shape of the characters of their writing system and, on the other, the well organized administration of their provinces (Radner 2006–2008) – in some respects, the Neo‐Assyrians can be described as the “Prussians” of the ancient Near East.2 The idea of order, based on a well‐established hierarchy of superiors and subjects, was actively promoted by the Assyrian conquerors to justify their imperial mission. Sargon II, for instance, proudly proclaimed that he had defeated a number of Arab tribes that, previously, “had known no overseer or commander” (ša aklu šāpiru lā īdûma, Fuchs 1994: 110, line 121).

  A strongly developed “acquisitiveness” represents another defining feature of the Neo‐Assyrian mindset. One of its manifestations are the ambitious commercial enterprises in which Assyrians were involved. Even though they were no longer the predominant class they had been during the Old Assyrian period, Assyrian traders continued to play an important role in the Middle Assyrian and Neo‐Assyrian periods (Radner 1997). But over the centuries, the striving of the Assyrians for greater material prosperity took a new, more aggressive turn. Instead of focusing on peaceful commercial interactions with distant lands, the Assyrians resorted increasingly to the use of violent means to obtain foreign goods. Almost every year, during the summer months, Assyrian armies would now attack towns and cities outside the Assyrian heartland, rob them of their possessions, impose a regular tribute on their rulers, and eventually annex them (Fuchs 2005). Raw materials and finished products, as well as people, animals, and even trees and plants were brought to Assyria from far away places.

  The mercantile mentality that had originally motivated the Assyrians in their pursuit of material wealth can still be detected in the way Neo‐Assyrian royal inscriptions inventory, in the spirit of a diligent accountant’s bookkeeping, the numbers of killed, maimed, or deported enemies and the exact amount of booty and tribute delivered to the king; but the political and economic reality was now a very different one. Imperial exploitation, and a “tributary mode of production,” had to a significant extent (yet not entirely) replaced a commercial system in which merchants dealt with their trading partners in foreign lands on an equal footing.

  Another form of acquisitiveness lies behind Assyria’s attitude towards Babylonian traditions, which strongly influenced Neo‐Assyrian elite culture (see Chapters 15–21). Many literary and religious texts and virtually all learned treatises studied by Assyrian scholars were written in Babylonian language, often by Babylonian scribes (Fincke 2003/04). Like Greek civilization among the Romans, Babylonian culture enjoyed enormous prestige among the Assyrians, who often treated their southern “brothers” more leniently than any other people in their vast empire. Yet when the Babylonians, despite the privileges they enjoyed, continued to oppose Assyrian rule, the disappointed love of the Assyrians eventually turned into hatred. Twice during the seventh century BCE, Babylon suffered death and destruction at the hands of the Assyrians before eventually defeating her northern neighbor and taking bloody revenge by ringing the death knell on the Assyrian state.

  Chronology and Sources

  The basic chronology of the Neo‐Assyrian period is well established. The final sections of the famous Assyrian King List (Glassner 2004: 136‐45) and a few additional king lists, both from Assyria and Babylonia (Grayson 1980–83: 90–8, 101, 116–22, 124–5), provide concise yet comprehensive inventories of the Neo‐Assyrian monarchs and information on the lengths of their reigns. Their general reliability is confirmed by various Neo‐Assyrian eponym lists and eponym “chronicles” (Millard 1994; Glassner 2004: 164–77). The former include, in chronological order, the names and titles of the officials after whom the Assyrians named individual years (the so‐called eponyms); the latter add (beginning with 857 BCE) some basic information on events that happened during the years in question. A reference in two eponym chronicles to a solar eclipse, datable on astronomical grounds to 763 BCE (Millard 1994: 41; Hunger 2008), has helped to establish the absolute chronology of the Neo‐Assyrian period and continues to serve as an important chronological anchor for Mesopotamian history in general from the Late Bronze Age onwards. Unfortunately, there are so far no eponym lists or chronicles for the period after 649 BCE, which means that some uncertainty remains with regard to the ch
ronology of the last decades of the Neo‐Assyrian empire (Reade 1998).

  Slightly more detailed information on historical events is found in some additional chronicle‐type texts. The so‐called “Synchronistic History” (Grayson 1975: 157–70; Glassner 2004: 176–83) provides selective information, from an Assyrian viewpoint, on the relations between Assyria and Babylonia up to the reign of Adad‐nirari III (810‐783 BCE). Several Babylonian chronicles (Grayson 1975: 69–98; Glassner 2004: 193–224) cast light on the later phases of the interactions between the two states from a Babylonian perspective.

  Important though they are, the aforementioned sources do not allow us to reconstruct much more than a skeleton of Neo‐Assyrian history. The flesh and blood, so to speak, of that history is provided by a number of additional source types, unevenly distributed throughout the period from 1000 to 609 BCE. Most important, and available in abundant numbers from the middle of the 10th century onwards, are the “official” inscriptions written in the name of Assyrian kings (see, inter alia, the RIM and RINAP series, KAL 3, Fuchs 1994; Borger 1996; Frahm 1997). Assyrian royal inscriptions are found on tablets, prisms, and cylinders made of clay, on stone tablets and slabs, and on a number of other objects left by the kings in visible and invisible locations in palaces, temples, and fortification buildings in various Assyrian cities. Others were inscribed on stelae and rock reliefs in far away countries (Fales 1999–2001). The focus of these texts is on military campaigns and construction work. Some of the inscriptions are extremely long and detailed, comprising more than 1000 lines.

  It seems that Assyrian royal inscriptions do not “invent” royal campaigns or building projects, which enhances their value as historical sources. Nonetheless, using them for a reconstruction of Neo‐Assyrian history requires some caution. Often enough, the inscriptions provide no exact information on the date of the events they describe, or, worse, list these events in an order not based on actual chronology. Sometimes, they amalgamate in one narrative events that happened at different times (for an example, see Liverani 1981). Moreover, Assyrian royal inscriptions, as a rule, tend to focus their attention on successful endeavors, all ascribed to the king alone. Failures the Assyrian king experienced usually remain unrecorded, while royal enterprises that yielded mixed results are often presented in a more positive light than warranted. Fortunately, the modern researcher is not entirely without tools when evaluating the historicity of the events described in the royal inscriptions. Of particular significance is the critical study of the semantic “codes” applied by the scribes who composed them (Fales 1981). Thus, the statement that Assyrian troops had trapped an enemy king “like a bird in a cage” in his city suggests that they had actually failed to conquer the city and capture its ruler (Tadmor 1994: 79).

  Particularly when studying “Late Assyrian” history, i.e., the period from the middle of the eighth to the last decades of the seventh century BCE, the modern historian has access to several additional groups of sources. Most revealing, and an important corrective to the biased “in dubio pro rege” approach of the Assyrian royal inscriptions, are the thousands of letters from the Assyrian “state archives” in Kalḫu (Calah) and Nineveh that have survived from this time. Most of them have been published in the State Archives of Assyria (SAA) series, in volumes 1, 5, 8, 10, 13, 15, and 16–19. Many of the letters in question deal with what went wrong in Assyria and the territories under her rule – turmoil in the provinces, failed campaigns, natural disasters, and political opposition both at home and abroad – thus providing us with a more realistic – and more dramatic – view of Neo‐Assyrian politics than the royal inscriptions (Frahm 2015b). The available letters seem to cluster around limited periods of time (Parpola 1981), illuminating, like lightning in the night, brief moments of Late Assyrian history only; but what they reveal about the power dynamics within the Assyrian state, the role of military and civilian officials, spies, priests, and scholars, most likely applies, mutatis mutandis, to all of it.

  Royal grants and decrees (see SAA 12 and KAL 3: 124–7) provide important historical information as well, and so do international treaties and tablets inscribed with loyalty oaths to be sworn to the crown by Assyrians and vassals alike (see SAA 2; KAL 3: 129–36; Lauinger 2012). Like the letters, most of these texts date to the Late Assyrian period, but some cast light on earlier times. Administrative documents, primarily from palace archives in Kalḫu and Nineveh (CTN 1–3 and SAA 7 and 11), offer information on the organization of Assyria’s civil service and army, while tablets with oracle queries addressed by the king to the sun god (SAA 4) cast light on the planning of military campaigns and the appointment of high officials. Legal and economic documents from private archives illuminate, at least to some extent, the social and economic situation in Late Assyrian cities, especially Nineveh and Ashur, while thousands of religious, scholarly, and literary texts from libraries in Ashur, Kalḫu, Nineveh, Sultantepe, and a few other places give us insights into Assyria’s intellectual history (for overviews, see Parpola 1983; Frahm 1999a; Brown 2000; Fincke 2003/04; Frame and George 2005; Maul 2010; and the contributions by Fincke and Heeßel in the present volume). The famous library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh remains the most important repository of such texts ever excavated in Mesopotamia.

  We know that Neo‐Assyrian scribes used not only clay tablets, but also other media for their daily communications. They wrote in cuneiform on wooden boards with a surface covered with wax, and in Aramaic on papyrus and leather. Besides a few badly preserved examples of the former, however, no texts thus recorded have survived. The vast majority of the Aramaic documentation from the Neo‐Assyrian period is irretrievably lost. Our only window into the use of Aramaic by scribes who were active within the Neo‐Assyrian state is provided by a limited number of clay tablets that were either inscribed entirely in Aramaic (Lemaire 2010; Lipiński 2010) or supplied with Aramaic “epigraphs” (Röllig 2005). There is also an Aramaic ostracon from Ashur that includes important historical information (Fales 2010b).

  A certain number of texts written by non‐Assyrians contribute to a better understanding of Neo‐Assyrian history as well, by providing outside perspectives. The chronicles and king lists from Babylonia have already been mentioned; some Babylonian royal inscriptions can be added to them (RIMB 2; Schaudig 2001; and the texts listed in Da Riva 2008; see also Chapter 28). Texts produced during the Neo‐Assyrian period by non‐Mesopotamian rulers, whether in Aramaic language and script, Luwian hieroglyphs, or the Urartian and Elamite versions of cuneiform writing, provide limited information on Assyrian activities in northern Syria, Anatolia, and western and southwestern Iran (Tropper 1993; Hawkins 2000; Salvini 2008; König 1965). The portions of the Hebrew Bible that deal with the western expansion of Assyria, found in 2 Kings, Isaiah, and various other prophetic books, are in many respects intriguing, but ought to be used with caution since their final redaction usually postdates the Neo‐Assyrian period by centuries (see Chapter 29). The Aramaic Ahiqar legend, known from a papyrus from the ancient Egyptian site of Elephantine as well as later translations and adaptations, and a few additional Aramaic papyrus fragments from Egypt tell stories about the Assyrian kings Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Assurbanipal (Dalley 2001; Ryholt 2004). Though likewise much later than the events they describe, and in many respects quite fantastic, they represent interesting examples of what seems to have been the popular vision of Late Assyrian history in ancient Western Asia. The accounts of Assyrian history provided by classical authors such as Ctesias (Lenfant 2004) and others (see Rollinger 2011) are often based on such popular lore as well (see Chapter 30).

  In addition to textual sources, modern historians of the Neo‐Assyrian period have access to various types of pictorial remains, from miniature seal impressions showing royal, mythological, and other scenes (Herbordt 1992; Winter 2000) to the hundreds of large wall slabs with depictions of military campaigns lining the walls of Assyrian palaces (Winter 1997; Russell 1999; see also Chapter 24). They can study Assyria
n material culture by examining Assyrian grave goods, whether found in tombs in private houses of the urban middle class or in the burial chambers of the Assyrian kings and queens in the Old Palace in Ashur and the Northwest Palace in Kalḫu (Mofidi‐Nasrabadi 1999; Curtis 2008; Lundström 2009; Hauser 2012). And finally, they can analyze the architecture and spatial organization of capital cities such as Ashur, Kalḫu, and Nineveh (see Chapter 23), and of provincial towns such as Ḫuzirina or Guzana, as well as the complex networks of roads and canals that crossed the Assyrian heartland and adjoining territories – to the extent they can be reconstructed from finds on the ground and modern satellite imagery (Bagg 2000; Altaweel 2003; Ur 2005). Taking into account these manifold physical manifestations of Assyrian civilization can help amend the historical information gleaned from the textual evidence in important ways.

  The Crisis Years (ca. 1050–935)

  The demarcation of historical periods is often difficult, and the problem of establishing when exactly the transition from the Middle Assyrian to the so‐called Neo‐Assyrian period took place is no exception. The beginnings of the latter are often associated (for example by A. K. Grayson in RIMA 2: 131) with Aššur‐dan II (934–912). The main reason for considering the reign of this king a new beginning is that it terminates a poorly documented period during which Assyria seems to have experienced a major crisis. With Aššur‐dan II, who left several royal inscriptions describing military campaigns in the periphery of the Assyrian core area, we appear to enter an era that saw a resurgence of Assyrian power.

  This traditional chronological division is, admittedly, not quite as clear‐cut as it may seem at first glance. We do have a number of Assyrian royal inscriptions from the 120 year long alleged “dark age” that preceded Aššur‐dan’s II reign, especially from the reign of Aššurnaṣirpal I (1049–1031) (RIMA 2: 113–30, 254–6; KAL 3: 117–23). The gap apparently separating the end of the well documented reign of Aššur‐bel‐kala (1073–1056) and the beginning of that of Aššur‐dan II is, hence, less wide than is often assumed. Moreover, there are a number of features usually associated with the Neo‐Assyrian era that can be traced back to late Middle Assyrian times. The royal inscriptions of Tiglath‐pileser I (1114–1076), for instance, bear some conspicuous similarities with those of later Neo‐Assyrian kings, among them their “annalistic” structure and their use of Babylonian month names, as well as the fact that some of them were inscribed on clay prisms. Similarly, the recently published documents from Giricano (Dunnu‐ša‐Uzibi near Tušḫan in the Upper Tigris region), which date to the reign of Aššur‐bel‐kala, are written in a language that includes features commonly regarded as Neo‐Assyrian (Radner 2004).