by Eckart Frahm
For the year 763, the Eponym Chronicles record not only the occurrence of a solar eclipse (see above, “Chronology and Sources”), but also the beginnings of a massive rebellion that broke out in various Assyrian cities, apparently including Ashur (but see Fuchs 2008: 86), Arrapḫa, and Guzana in the west. The uprising was most likely directed against Šamši‐ilu, whose de facto rule many must have considered illegitimate. When Šamši‐ilu, in 758, finally defeated his opponents, Assyria, weakened by years of civil war, was in dire straights – the Eponym Chronicles mention that there had been a widespread plague or famine in 759 and that the Assyrian army did not undertake any military actions in 757 and 756.
In 755, a new king, Aššur‐nirari V, yet another son of Adad‐nirari III, came to the Assyrian throne.11 Initially, Aššur‐nirari’s accession seems to have led to a certain stabilization of Assyria’s political situation. The Chief Cupbearer, the Palace Herald, and the masennu served again as eponyms, and the Assyrian army undertook a successful campaign against Arpad in northwestern Syria in 754. Mati’ilu, Arpad’s king, was forced to sign a treaty with Aššur‐nirari, in which he acknowledged his vassalage (SAA 2: no. 2). But soon after Assyria’s military fortunes took another turn for the worse. The Urartian king Sarduri II won an important battle against the Assyrians, celebrated in one of his inscriptions, and the Eponym Chronicles report that the Assyrian army had to stay home between 753 and 750 and again in 747. To what extent paralysis had seized the Assyrian state can be gauged from the fact that not a single royal inscription survives from the reign of Aššur‐nirari (for a royal decree from this period, see RIMA 3: 246–7). What we have instead from the middle of the eighth century is a group of inscriptions written in the name of various “governors” of Suḫi and Mari on the Middle Euphrates (RIMB 2: 275–331). They suggest that these men were essentially independent and able to direct their affairs without any serious interference from Assyria.
At some point between 752 and 745, Šamši‐ilu seems to have died. We do not know whether he played any role in the events of 746, when another major revolt broke out in Kalḫu. Besides a short reference in the Eponym Chronicles, we have hardly any information on how this revolt unfolded – but it is clear that it changed the political playing field completely. King Aššur‐nirari was probably killed, and on Ayyaru 13, 745, yet another son of Adad‐nirari III ascended the Assyrian throne: a certain Pulu, who might previously have served as governor of Kalḫu.12 He assumed the throne name Tiglath‐pileser (Assyrian: Tukulti‐apil‐Ešarra) (III) and ushered in an entirely new era.
Genesis of an Empire: Assyria from Tiglath‐pileser III to Sargon II (744–705)
With the reign of Tiglath‐pileser III, our sources begin to flow more abundantly again. Tiglath‐pileser left a significant number of royal inscriptions, collected in RINAP 1 (see also Tadmor 1994). They include the king’s (unfortunately badly preserved) “annals,” written on sculpted stone slabs decorating his palace in Kalḫu and describing in great detail the king’s military exploits between 745 and 729, as well as various stelae, statues, rock reliefs, and clay tablets. Tiglath‐pileser is, moreover, the earliest Neo‐Assyrian king from whose reign we have significant numbers of administrative texts and letters sent to the court by state officials, spies, and other correspondents (for the letters, see SAA 19: 1–151). He is also the first Assyrian ruler to be mentioned in the Babylonian Chronicle series and the Hebrew Bible (see Chapters 28–9), texts that provide us with outside perspectives of the history of his reign.13
Tiglath‐pileser would not have been able to ascend the Assyrian throne without the help of a number of important military leaders and high officials, including Bel‐Ḫarran‐belu‐uṣur, whom the new king reappointed as Palace Herald (Fuchs 2008: 95). But, once in power, Tiglath‐pileser took important steps to reduce the influence of the magnates. The large territories previously controlled by them were divided into smaller units that were placed under the authority of provincial governors loyal to the crown. From now on, Assyrian high officials and military officers, as a rule, no longer had the right to commission inscriptions written in their own names (for a possible exception, see Balcioğlu and Mayer 2006), and it is noteworthy that the latest stelae from Ashur that commemorate the names of eponyms date to the mid‐eighth century (Millard 1994: 12). The powerful magnate Šamši‐ilu was subjected to damnatio memoriae – his name and titles seem to have been deliberately erased from his lion inscriptions from Til‐Barsip.
Tiglath‐pileser’ reign is characterized by a series of major military campaigns in all directions, beginning in his accession year with assaults on Babylonian territories on the east side of the Tigris. One year later, the Assyrians created two new provinces in the Zagros region, Parsua and Bit‐Ḫamban. Between 743 and 739, Assyrian campaigns focused on Urartu and the unruly city‐states of northern Syria. The greatest triumphs of this period were the defeat, in 743, of the Urartian king Sarduri II, who had to flee on a mare to save his life, and the conquest and annexation, in 740, of the strategically important city of Arpad, which had been under siege for three years.
In the following years, Tiglath‐pileser began to penetrate regions further southwest, beyond the Euphrates, that had never been fully controlled by Assyria before. In 738, Assyrian armies defeated and annexed Unqi (Pattin) in northern Syria, as well as Ṣimirra and Ḫatarikka in the region between Hamath and the Mediterranean. In 732, they occupied Damascus, Galilee, and Transjordan. These latter conquests severely reduced the size of the kingdom of Israel, vindicating predictions of impending doom made a little earlier by the Biblical prophet Amos. Already two years before, in 734, an Assyrian army had reached the Egyptian border, forcing numerous states in the Levant, including Judah, Ammon, Moab, and Edom, to become Assyrian vassals and pay a heavy tribute (Bagg 2011: 213–6; Dubovský 2006b).
At some point during these years, Tiglath‐pileser made a woman with the apparently West Semitic name of Yabâ (“the beautiful one”) his principal wife. Her lavish tomb was discovered in 1989 by Iraqi archaeologists under the pavement of a room of the Northwest Palace at Nimrud/Kalḫu (Curtis 2008). S. Dalley (2008) has surmised that Yabâ was a Judean princess, but this remains highly uncertain (see Frahm 2014: 182–8, with further literature).
A salient feature of Tiglath‐pileser’s military policies were the mass deportations he undertook in territories occupied by his armies (Oded 1979, esp. 20). Even though the numbers the king provides in his inscriptions may often be exaggerated (De Odorico 1995: esp. 100–3, 170–1, 198), there is little doubt that he exiled tens and perhaps even hundreds of thousands of people, often replacing them with ethnic groups from other regions under Assyrian control. The practice of mass deportation, which was continued under later Assyrian kings, had two main goals: to destroy the identity of the colonized polities and thus reduce the potential for armed resistance; and to enable the Assyrian king to send large numbers of laborers wherever they were most needed, whether in underdeveloped provinces to do agricultural work, or in the Assyrian capital cities to participate in large construction projects. The deportations of the Late Assyrian period changed the ethnolinguistic composition of Western Asia forever, diluting the region’s cultural diversity and enhancing the rise of Aramaic as lingua franca. There is little doubt that the deportations were often devastating for the affected populations, but it is important to keep in mind that, unlike certain mass deportations in modern times, they were not aimed at killing large numbers of civilians.
During the last years of his reign, Tiglath‐pileser shifted his attention towards Babylonia, where conflicts between traditionally minded urban elites, Chaldaean strong men, and Aramaean tribes had led to a highly volatile situation (Berlejung and Streck 2013). Some twenty letters from Kalḫu sent to Tiglath‐pileser by his agents in Babylonia (see SAA 19: XXVIII–XXXIII), and a cache of contemporary Neo‐Babylonian letters from Nippur (Cole 1996: esp. nos. 6, 16–18, 21–2, 97), cast light on the events in the south. In 73
1, Mukin‐zeri, a leader of the Chaldaean Bit‐Amukani “tribe,” had seized the Babylonian throne. Tiglath‐pileser considered this an assault on Assyrian interests. In 729, he attacked and defeated Mukin‐zeri and assumed the title “king of Babylon.” Well aware of the fact that Babylon, despite all its political troubles, had remained an extremely important religious and cultural center that was now on the verge of a slow but steady economic recovery, and eager to win the hearts and minds of the citizens of Babylon, Tiglath‐pileser twice participated in the Akitu festival that was celebrated in the city at the beginning of the new year in honor of the Babylonian god Marduk. Campaigns against Chaldaean strongholds in the south consolidated Assyria’s rule over Babylonia.
Towards the end of his reign, Tiglath‐pileser could claim that he had more than doubled the territories dominated by Assyria. Particularly in the west, Tiglath‐pileser had created a significant number of new provinces, often by dividing previously independent states into two units (Radner 2006–08: 56–63; Bagg 2012: 213–26). The king’s preference for direct rule, which replaced indirect control through vassal kings in many cases, led to some important changes in the way the Assyrian state accumulated wealth. Booty (ḫubtu/šallutu) seized from enemies and tribute (biltu/maddattu) received from vassals still played a role, as did “presents” (nāmurtu/tāmartu) sent by political allies; but with the establishment of so many additional provinces, Assyria’s central government became more and more dependent on taxes, which were levied on people, cattle, agricultural produce, and trade, and collected by provincial governors (Radner 2007). The new system reduced the need for military intervention, but increased administrative costs.
The enormous size the Assyrian state had reached by 729 and its even larger sphere of influence (see Figure 8.2), the complex mechanisms of political and economical control established throughout the realm, the state’s multi‐ethnic and multi‐lingual character, and the osmotic imbalance between center and periphery – all these features justify calling Assyria, from the time of Tiglath‐pileser onwards, an empire stricto sensu, possibly the first empire in world history (Bagg 2011: 271–308; Radner 2014), even though defining empire is, of course, a notoriously problematic affair (Howe 2002: 9–34; Morris and Scheidel 2009) and despite the fact that other scholars consider not Assyria but Akkad, the state founded by king Sargon in ca. 2300 BCE, “the first world empire” (Liverani 1993) or locate the birth of empire in 18th Dynasty Egypt (ca. 1550–1390 BCE) (e.g., Van De Mieroop 2011: 151–83).
Figure 8.2 Map illustrating the various stages of the expansion of the Neo‐Assyrian state.
Source: Wiley.
The Assyrian “empire” served, directly or indirectly, as a model for the succeeding imperial states of Western Asia, from the Babylonian and Persian empires of antiquity to the Abbasid and Ottoman states of the Islamic period (see Chapter 27). This invests Late Assyrian history with a world‐historical dimension, and it is hence quite fitting, and probably not by chance, that both the Hebrew Bible (see Chapter 29) and classical sources (see Chapter 30) preserved a memory of Assyria, while essentially ignoring earlier Mesopotamian history.
In some respects, Assyrian imperialism was different from later forms of imperial rule. Most importantly, the Assyrian kings did not actively promote their religion and culture. The Assyrian state god Assur (Lambert 1983; Holloway 2002; Berlejung 2007; von der Osten‐Sacken 2010) had no regular cult outside Assyria, and the Neo‐Assyrian language (Hämeen‐Anttila 2000), which was spoken in Assyria’s core areas, served as an “official language” among provincial administrators, but was not imposed on the populations of the newly conquered territories. Even within Assyria itself, Neo‐Assyrian was, in fact, increasingly replaced by a new vernacular, Aramaic, a language that owed its growing importance initially to the eastward migration of Aramaean population groups and then to the mass deportations undertaken by several Neo‐Assyrian kings (Oded 1979; Lipiński 2000; Beaulieu 2006: 191–6).
One of the greatest problems the Assyrian empire faced from the time of Tiglath‐pileser onwards was its relationship with Babylonia (see Chapter 15). The Late Assyrian kings, aware that many features of their culture and religion were based on Babylonian models, were willing to grant Babylonia a special status, but expected in return from their southern neighbor a basic acceptance of their political domination. When the Babylonians, in the decades following Tiglath‐pileser’s reign, sought repeatedly to shake off the Assyrian yoke, relations with the south became increasingly sour.
The problems with Babylonia, however, did not start right away. During the short reign of Tiglath‐pileser’s son and successor Ululayu, who ruled from 727 to 722 and assumed the throne name Shalmaneser (V), the situation in the south remained largely stable.14
Before his accession, Ululayu had served as Tiglath‐pileser’s crown prince, as indicated by a number of letters written by him to his father during this period (Radner 2003/04), and his rise to power was apparently smooth. The new king focused his attention on Syria and the Levant, like the earlier kings Shalmaneser I and III, whose name Ululayu may have chosen for that very reason. Towards the end of his reign, he seems to have conquered Samaria, the capital of the kingdom of Israel. He may also have annexed Sam’al in northern Syria and Que in Cilicia, even though this remains debated (Becking 1992: 21–60, Fuchs 1998: 84–5, Bagg 2011: 227–32). Unfortunately, our information on all these events comes exclusively from later sources and non‐Assyrian texts such as the Babylonian Chronicle and the Hebrew Bible. We have no royal inscriptions of any significance written in Shalmaneser’s name (see RINAP 1: 171–88), and the Assyrian Eponym Chronicles are only fragmentarily preserved for his reign.
In 722, Shalmaneser V was succeeded on the Assyrian throne by a man named Sargon (Assyrian: Šarru‐ukin) (II), whose reign has produced a particularly rich set of sources, including numerous royal inscriptions and diplomatic letters.15 Even though he was apparently a son of Tiglath‐pileser III like his predecessor Shalmaneser, Sargon was most probably a usurper. The exact circumstances of his rise to power remain unclear, but there is evidence for massive internal trouble at the beginning of his reign, most prominently in the form of a statement in one of Sargon’s inscriptions that the new king deported 6300 “guilty Assyrians,” presumably political opponents, to Hamath. Sargon alleged, moreover, that Shalmaneser V had wickedly abolished certain privileges rightfully claimed by the city of Ashur, another indication that he loathed his predecessor and probably deposed him in a coup (for a different view, see Vera Chamaza 1992).
Sargon eventually managed to defeat his domestic opponents and consolidate his position as king, but not before several regions on the edges of the Assyrian empire had begun to use the temporary instability in the center to reclaim their independence. One such rebellion broke out early in 721 in Babylon, where Marduk‐aplu‐iddina II, the leader of the Chaldaean state of Bit‐Yakin, seized the throne and established an alliance with the Elamites in the east, initiating the long series of anti‐Assyrian uprisings that occurred in Babylonia during the Late Assyrian period. Sargon reacted by attacking Aramaean tribes supportive of Marduk‐aplu‐iddina and, in 720, by leading his troops to the city of Der to fight the Elamite king Ḫuban‐nikaš I. Yet even though Sargon claims to have prevailed in the battle, he failed to reach his most important objective, the removal of Marduk‐aplu‐iddina from power. In fact, the Babylonian Chronicle suggests that the Assyrians suffered a defeat at Der.
More success was in store for Sargon in the west, where an uprising initiated by Yau‐bi’di of Hamath and supported by Arpad, Ṣimirra, Damascus, and Samaria threatened to undo the provincial structures established by Tiglath‐pileser III and Shalmaneser V. The situation seemed initially grim: going on a killing spree reminiscent of the “Sicilian Vespers” of AD 1282, the insurgents tried to finish off every Assyrian who happened to fall into their hands. But in 720, while Sargon himself campaigned in the east, his generals were able to quell the rebellion (Bagg
2011: 233–6; Frahm 2013). As correctly reported in the Bible (2 Kings 17:6), one of the results of the events was that numerous people from Samaria were deported to Guzana in the Khabur triangle, Ḫalaḫḫu in central Assyria, and Media in the east. Together with the Israelites exiled by Tiglath‐pileser III in 732, they form the “ten lost tribes” of Israel, whose alleged identity with later people of the east has led to much uninformed speculation throughout the centuries. A few years later, Sargon resettled foreigners from other parts of the empire in Samaria, among them significant numbers of Arabs (Becking 1992: 61–104).
In the two years following his victory over the western alliance, Sargon conducted successful military campaigns against Mannaya in western Iran and Šinuḫtu in Anatolia. In 717, he conquered Carchemish on the Euphrates and took so much silver from the city’s treasury that, in the years after, silver began to replace copper as Assyria’s main currency (Müller 1997: 120).
The large influx of silver may also have played a role in Sargon’s decision, made in the year of the Carchemish campaign, to start construction work on an enormous new capital: a city named Dur‐Šarrukin (“Fort Sargon”) – today known as Khorsabad – that was built from scratch at the site of the small village of Magganubba some 18 kilometers northeast of Nineveh. A main reason why Sargon wished to move the royal court to a new city might have been that he no longer felt entirely safe in the old capital Kalḫu after the insurgency that had accompanied his rise to the throne (Radner 2011: 325–7). Since the king did not need to take into account any previous buildings, he was free to conceive Dur‐Šarrukin as an “ideal city,” based on geometric harmony, with a city wall that formed an almost perfect square (Battini 2000). It took Sargon’s construction crews, comprising deportees and corvée workers, some ten years to finish their work (Parpola 1995). In the end, Dur‐Šarrukin covered a surface of some 315 hectares.