A Companion to Assyria

by Eckart Frahm

  Dalley, S. 1998. The Legacy of Mesopotamia, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

  Fales, F.M. 2010. Guerre et paix en Assyrie: Religion et impérialisme, Paris: Les Editions de Cerf.

  Frahm, E. 2006. “Images of Assyria in Nineteenth‐ and Twentieth‐Century Western Scholarship,” in: S. W. Holloway (ed.), Orientalism, Assyriology and the Bible, Hebrew Bible Monographs 10, Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 74–94.

  Frahm, E. 2015. “Mutilated Mnemotopes: Why ISIS Destroys Cultural Heritage Sites in Iraq and Syria,” European Union National Institutes of Culture Website, http://www.eunic‐online.eu/?q=content/mutilated‐mnemotopes‐0.

  Liverani, M. 2011. From City State to Empire: The Case of Assyria, in: J. P. Arnason and K. A. Raaflaub (eds.), The Roman Empire in Context: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, Oxford: Wiley‐Blackwell, 251–69.

  Mayer, W. 1995. Politik und Kriegskunst der Assyrer, ALASPM 9, Münster.

  Olmstead, A. T. 1923. History of Assyria, New York: Scribner’s Sons.

  Parpola, S. 1993. “The Assyrian Tree of Life: Tracing the Origins of Jewish Monotheism and Greek Philosophy,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 52, 161–208.

  Pongratz‐Leisten, B. 2015. Religion and Ideology in Assyria, Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records 6, Berlin: De Gruyter.

  Postgate, J.N. 2015. “The Bread of Aššur,” Iraq 77, 159–72.

  Radner, K. 2011. “The Assur–Nineveh–Arbela Triangle: Central Assyria in the Neo‐Assyrian Period,” in: P. A. Miglus and S. Mühl (eds.), Between the Cultures: The Central Tigris Region from the 3rd to 1st millennium BC, Heidelberg: Heidelberger Orientverlag, 321–29.

  Radner, K. 2015. Ancient Assyria: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Saggs, H.W.F. 1984. The Might that Was Assyria, London: Sidgwick and Jackson.

  West, M.L. 1997. The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

  Notes

  1 Pongratz‐Leisten 2015 is a recent attempt to analyze in detail Assyrian religion and political ideology in various historical periods. The book appeared too late to be considered by the contributors of this volume.

  2 For a few remarks on the problems of establishing an exact chronology for Assyrian history, see the “List of Assyrian Kings” at the end of this volume.

  3 In this volume, we use different orthographies to distinguish between the city, Ashur, and the god, Assur. It should be noted that this distinction is purely conventional and artificial. Both the city and the god had the same name, rendered Aššur in scholarly transliterations.

  4 The following paragraphs excerpt Frahm 2006, where bibliographical references can be found.

  5 The article appeared in The American Historical Review (for exact references, see Fales 2010, 45–6).

  6 Mayer 1995 is largely limited to an analysis of the history of Assyrian warfare, and almost exclusively based on the study of Assyrian royal inscription, with other sources receiving only sporadic attention. Saggs 1984 is a popular “cultural history” of Assyria.

  7 For detailed information on the destruction inflicted by ISIS, see the weekly reports posted online by ASOR’s Syrian Heritage Initiative at http://www.asor‐syrianheritage.org/weekly‐reports/(last accessed 11/15/2016). For some of the author’s thoughts on the crisis and its roots, see Frahm 2015.

  PART I

  Geography and History

  CHAPTER 1

  Physical and Cultural Landscapes of Assyria

  Jason Ur

  Introduction

  The history of the land of Assyria is, to a considerable extent, the story of a continuous attempt by individuals, communities, states, and empires to define their places in their landscapes. In basic economic terms, people had to feed their families, which meant adapting to the possibilities and limitations of climate and environment for agriculture and animal husbandry, and sometimes extending them. For the elite elements of society, the environment was a critical variable in how palace walls were decorated, how gardens and parks were created, and how tribute was collected. Climate and environment played important roles in determining the scheduling of royal campaigns and in which directions they went. The limitations and fluctuations of climate were a major concern in religious contexts as well, as priests and kings attempted to intercede with the gods for the favorable growing conditions that sustained cities, enabled trade, and revealed to the people the good relationship between the king and the gods.

  The physical landscape of Assyria was far from immutable. Fluctuations in temperature, rainfall, and seasonality took place on yearly, decadal, and even millennial scales. Human communities were responsible for modifications that turned the physical environment into the cultural landscape. The nature of these cultural changes have much to tell us about past societies. At one end of the continuum, landscapes were modified by the aggregate actions of their inhabitants, whether they were farmers, shepherds, craftspeople, or traders. Individuals might have only limited effects on their surroundings within their lifetimes, but their collective actions can leave a tremendous, often unintended, footprint. The best example of such cumulative action is the tell, the classic form of archaeological site in the Near East, the largest of which grew to 40 m or higher. Tells formed over centuries or millennia as individual households built, repaired, tore down, and rebuilt stone and mudbrick structures on the same spot (Rosen 1986). The intention of the builders was simply to provide a physical space for their households, not to create a looming aggregate of decayed mud brick on the landscape; the cumulative result of many generations engaging in this simple domestic behavior, however, had just such an effect.

  On the other end of the continuum, landscapes could be modified according to royal will; kings and their planners imposed their particular political, economic, demographic, and cosmological visions upon the surrounding land. The resulting landscape elements were often monumental due to the royal household’s ability to mobilize vast amounts of labor toward its ends. These structures are more difficult to remove, and therefore disproportionately likely to survive to the present than lesser changes.

  This chapter reviews the physical environment and cultural landscapes, both emergent and imposed, in the regions of modern northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey and eastern Syria that encompass the central part of the ancient “Land of Assyria” (Figure 1.1). Although this geographic designation was only meaningful in the late second and early first millennia BCE, in the time of the Middle Assyrian and Neo‐Assyrian empires, it provides a convenient geographical framework within which to consider earlier landscapes, especially the Early Bronze Age (EBA) urban phase of the late third millennium BCE. Geographically, this region encompasses the middle stretch of the Tigris River between the Eski Mosul and the Fatha gorge, its tributary valleys and plains to the east, the Cizre plain in the north, and the Upper Khabur and Sinjar plains, as well as the Khabur river valley, to the west. These latter areas, while outside of the Tigris Valley “heartland,” were considered by the first millennium BCE Assyrian kings to be historically part of the “Land of Ashur,” and were administered as such (Postgate 1992, 1995; Radner 2006; Kühne 2012).

  Figure 1.1 Topography, hydrology, and major sites of Assyria (northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, and southeastern Turkey).

  A particularly useful framework for approaching Assyrian landscapes through time is the “signature landscape” concept developed by Tony Wilkinson (2003: 11–14). Signature landscapes describe certain combinations of landscape elements that recur across space and time. These landscapes tend to be products of either especially powerful state actors, or of particularly durable and widely shared activities that resulted in the deep etching of a suite of features into the landscape. In both cases, the features survive and sometimes even structure subsequent settlement and land use. Signature landscapes are generally associated with, but not dictated by, combinations of physical environment and social factors (most commonly economy, p
olitical structure, and cosmology). Here one might consider the lowland irrigation landscapes of southern Mesopotamia, the oasis‐based water catchment systems of the deserts, and the terracing and runoff agricultural systems of highland Yemen. The land of Assyria hosted two distinctive signature landscapes in the Early Bronze Age and Iron Ages under nearly identical environmental conditions, described below. It is thus an excellent case study in the variable connections between cultural landscapes and sociopolitical organization.

  The study of cultural landscapes is made challenging by the divergent histories of scholarship in the eastern (Iraqi) and western (Syrian and Turkish) halves of the Assyrian core. The Assyrian heartland along the Tigris River is one of the birthplaces of the modern discipline of archaeology, due to the efforts of Layard, Botta, and others in the great capital cities of the empire (Larsen 1996). These early excavations produced huge volumes of architectural, art historical, and epigraphic data that are still mined today for new insights. In terms of landscape and settlement studies, however, the hinterlands of the great capitals have been almost terra incognita until very recently. Early landscape observations were anecdotal and opportunistic, but remain unsurpassed forty or more years after they were made (see especially Bachmann 1927; Jacobsen and Lloyd 1935; Oates 1968; Reade 1978). The “golden age” of survey archaeology in southern Iraq in the 1950s and 1960s (e.g., Adams 1981, reviewed in Ur 2013) had almost no impact on research in Assyria, which was characterized by a “closing of perspectives” (Liverani 1988: 80). The western half of the Assyrian core, on the other hand, has witnessed an explosion of surveys and landscape studies since the 1970s (reviewed in Wilkinson and Barbanes 2000; Morandi Bonacossi 2000 and below). At the time of writing, this imbalance in archaeological survey is beginning to be corrected via new projects in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, in particular in the hinterlands of Nineveh, Erbil, and Kilizu (see, e.g., Ur et al. 2013; Ur and Osborne 2016; Morandi Bonacossi 2012–13; Morandi Bonacossi and Iamoni 2015; Kopanias and MacGinnis 2016).

  Despite these biases within the overall dataset, it is possible to describe general trends in the evolution of cultural landscapes, although some aspects will require ground confirmation in the future when new projects in Iraq and its Kurdistan Region begin to be published. After describing aspects of the physical environment, this chapter considers one of the most dramatic landscape shifts in the history of the ancient Near East: the transition from the emergent urban landscapes of the late Early Bronze Age (ca. 2600–2000 BCE) to the imposed landscape of imperial Assyria in the early first millennium BCE.

  Physical Environment of Assyria

  The geological framework of Assyria was born when the Arabian plate impacted the Eurasian plate in the Miocene Epoch, causing the formation of the Taurus and Zagros mountain ranges, as well as the elevation of the Tur Abdin and the Jebels Abd al‐Aziz and Sinjar regions (Lovelock 1984). Westerly air masses acquire moisture from the Mediterranean Sea and release it as precipitation across this area. The amount of precipitation is high in the mountains to the north but diminishes as one moves south into the steppes of Syria and Arabia. In the western part of this region, water flows through the Upper Khabur basin in two perennial streams and, ultimately, into the Euphrates River. The Tigris River receives water from several left bank tributaries, most notably from the Eastern Khabur, Upper Zab, and Lower Zab rivers. The region east of the Tigris River has several other small perennial streams and seasonally flowing drainages (wadis) as well.

  Geology, climate, and hydrology have combined to form a broad band of productive soils in both the river valleys and across the northern part of Assyria (Buringh 1960: 204–22; Weiss 1986; Courty 1994). To the north, in areas of higher rainfall, the reddish brown soils (Calcic xerosols) are especially fertile. Further south into the dry steppes, the soils have higher gypsum content and are less productive. It is likely that much of this region was originally a grassy parkland with oak and pistachio trees, but millennia of intensive grazing, cultivation, and fuel gathering dramatically impoverished its natural flora (Guest 1966; Deckers and Pessin 2010). The river valleys of the Tigris, Khabur, and their tributaries have particularly rich soils. In southern Mesopotamia, the Tigris and, especially, the Euphrates were easily exploited for broad irrigation because they formed levees. In the Assyrian core of northern Mesopotamia, however, the rivers are incised within narrow valleys, making irrigation challenging and largely restricting it to the adjacent river terraces.

  For much of the past four millennia, these conditions may have been similar to those of present‐day Iraq. At several points, however, shifts in climate may have had social impacts. Most notably, an abrupt environmental event has been proposed to explain the collapse of the late Early Bronze Age urban phase and the decomposition of several political dynasties in Mesopotamia and beyond (Staubwasser and Weiss 2006, reviewed most recently in Wossink 2009, Danti 2010). An extended dry phase has been implicated in the “dark age” at the end of the Late Bronze Age, a time when formerly cultivated landscapes fell under the control of Aramaean pastoral groups (Neumann and Parpola 1987). Even without such hypothesized events, climate and precipitation fluctuated annually. In some periods, these conditions placed limits on the nature and extent of the settlement landscape, but, in the two periods discussed below in particular, individuals, communities, and polities found ways to overcome them.

  Cultural Landscapes: Past Research and Methods

  What is known of the landscape of Assyria stems from a century and a half of archaeological observation. In the nineteenth century, early excavators rendered anecdotal impressions of sites and landscape features. These initial observations have several elements in common. For instance, the archaeologists concentrated on monumental finds, particularly rock‐cut reliefs. Although the reports often included detailed and valuable recordings, the interpretations were often flawed or incorrect. Layard, for example, interpreted the aqueduct at Jerwan as a bridge (1853: 215–16) and failed to notice the canalhead structure at Khinis, which was the raison d’etre of the massive rock relief that received his attention. In addition, these observations were made in the course of opportunistic travel, when the focus of excavation was on the elite palaces in the great capitals. The excavation reports appear almost exclusively in travel narrative form. The great exception is Felix Jones’s “Vestiges of Assyria” map series (Jones 1855), which captured many elements of the immediate hinterlands of the great capitals that have long since disappeared.

  The quality of observations and the accuracy of interpretation improved in the twentieth century, especially the recording of rock reliefs (Bachmann 1927) and of the remains of monumental irrigation systems (Jacobsen and Lloyd 1935; Safar 1947; Oates 1968; Reade 1978). These pioneering studies explored the relationships between these features, the imperial capitals, and other monumental aspects of the landscape. For example, David Oates (1968) used the physical traces of canals around Nineveh and Nimrud to evaluate population estimates. Julian Reade (1978) perceived a recurring connection between rock reliefs and state sponsored irrigation features, and proposed that Sennacherib’s system was primarily an ideological device rather than a functional system.

  Although invaluable, these monument‐focused studies still cannot be related to patterns of settlement. No systematic settlement surveys have examined the hinterlands of the great capitals or the plains east of the Tigris River (although see now Ur and Osborne 2016; Morandi Bonacossi 2012–13), but several reconnaissances have investigated the western banks on the plain south of the Jebel Sinjar (Lloyd 1938; Reade 1968) and the Wadi Tharthar (Ibrahim 1986).

  The situation has dramatically improved, however, in the western half of this region, mostly within the modern states of Turkey and Syria. Starting in the late 1970s, a series of reconnaissances and intensive surveys identified and recorded thousands of archaeological sites on the Cizre plain, the Wadi al‐Murr, the upper Khabur basin, and the lower Khabur river valley (see reviews in Morandi Bonacossi 2000; Wilkin
son 2000; Wilkinson and Barbanes 2000). Several of these projects have also considered the “off‐site” landscape, including features such as canals, field systems, roads, and tracks (Wilkinson 2003: 44–70). The archaeological landscape of western Assyria often must be used to make generalizations for the eastern heartland that have only recently been subjected to fieldwork‐based confirmation in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

  The most recent research has capitalized on the widespread availability of remote‐sensing datasets. In the decades prior to the first Gulf War, the Iraqi government placed strong restrictions on the use of aerial photographs by foreign researchers. Two recent trends have democratized the research process, however. Imagery from declassified American intelligence satellite programs such as CORONA and HEXAGON is now globally available and inexpensive, and has been used to document ancient communication (Ur 2003, 2010b; Altaweel 2008) and irrigation systems (Ur 2005; Altaweel 2008; Ur and Reade 2015). More recent multispectral satellite imagery and topographic data can also detect sites and landscape features (Altaweel 2005; Menze et al. 2006; Menze and Ur 2012); these images are free or available at low cost to academic researchers. In some cases, it is possible to interpret these images with reference to the ground observations of earlier archaeologists, but much of the remotely sensed work will still require field confirmation in the future.

  Over the past 150 years, these methods have produced a broad dataset concerning settlement and landscape in the land of Assyria. At two periods in particular, the inhabitants of these lands created vivid but very different cultural landscapes: the later Early Bronze Age (ca. 2600–2000 BCE) and the Iron Age (ca. 1000–600 BCE).