A Companion to Assyria

by Eckart Frahm

  At least in the eyes of the state, the new arrivals were not to be treated differently from those whose families had lived on their land for generations. The legal owner of landed property was whoever worked the land and paid the taxes (Radner 2007a: 221–3). The state authorities actively encouraged intermixing among the new neighbors: the ultimate goal of the Assyrian resettlement policy was to create a homogeneous population with a shared culture and a common identity, that of “Assyrians” (Oded 1979: 81–6; Machinist 1993).

  Indeed, the Bible supports the Assyrian sources by highlighting how enforced resettlement could be seen in a positive light. When the Assyrian army laid siege upon the city of Jerusalem in 701 BCE, the envoys of King Sennacherib (r. 704–681 BCE) are said to have communicated the following message to the people of Jerusalem after urging them not to support their ruler, who refused to submit. This is what the Assyrian king promised:

  “Make your peace with me and come out to me! Then every one of you will eat of his own vine, and every one of you will eat of his own fig tree, and every one of you will drink the water of his own cistern, until I come and take you away to a land like your own land, a land of grain and wine, a land of bread and vineyards, a land of olive trees and honey, that you may live, and not die!”

  (2 Kings 18)

  The chance to be resettled elsewhere in the Assyrian empire is presented here as a highly attractive privilege rather than as a punishment. People were, after all, not forced to leave on their own but rather with their families. They were not snatched away in the heat of battle or conquest, but chosen as the result of a deliberate selection process, often in the aftermath of a war that had, quite possibly, reduced their original home to ruins. When the Assyrian sources specify who precisely was to be relocated, they name the urban elites, the craftsmen, the specialists, and scholars (e.g. after the conquest of Memphis and Thebes in 671 BCE, see Radner 2009: 223–4). The decisions were made according to the needs of the state. While the goal was to create a carefully balanced population within the boundaries of Assyria, there is no reason to assume that such consideration was extended to any region that was not incorporated into the empire. Those who were taken away from these regions were not replaced, and the dire consequences for the economy and for communal life of places like Memphis in 671 BCE cannot be underestimated.

  The vast majority of people, and certainly the most valuable experts, were dispatched to the Assyrian heartland in order to generate wealth and knowledge. Hence, by the beginning of the seventh century BCE, the cities in central Assyria, among them Nineveh and Ashur, housed specialists from all over the known world. Without them, some of the most lasting achievements of the Assyrian kings, such as constructing and furnishing the magnificent palaces and temples or assembling the contents of the fabled library of Assurbanipal (r. 668–631 BCE), would have been impossible.

  The Heartland of Assyria

  The core region of Assyria was roughly the triangle formed by three ancient cities: Ashur in the south, Nineveh in the north, and Arba’il in the east. Most of the regions within this triangle were situated east of the Tigris River in a physical environment favorable for agriculture, with good soil conditions and sufficient rainfall, as well as a number of streams and seasonal rivers providing reliable irrigation. There was one main harvest season per year, in autumn, when the grain (barley and wheat) was brought in from the fields.

  The city of Ashur lies on the western riverbank and, thus, had access to and control over the important routes leading in the western direction to the Khabur Valley and to the Euphrates Valley. Situated at the fringes of the desert to the north of the artificially irrigated lands of Babylonia, Ashur was a natural contact point for the pastoralists that made use of this arid region. At the triangle’s northern tip, Nineveh controlled an important ford across the Tigris River, like Ashur, but it lay on the eastern riverbank. It was the natural terminus of the overland route running along the southern foothills of the Taurus Mountain range that led to the Mediterranean coast and into Anatolia. The triangle’s eastern tip, Arba’il, was located on the western fringes of the Zagros Mountain range and gave access to various routes across the mountains into Iran. The city was also located on the important route that led alongside the Zagros Mountains down to the Diyala River and into Babylonia, the key overland connection between central Assyria and the south. As the crow flies, the distance between Ashur and Arba’il is c. 105 kilometers, between Ashur and Nineveh c. 100 kilometers, and between Arba’il and Nineveh c. 80 kilometers.

  This was the core of the Assyrian empire not only geographically and geopolitically, but also culturally; the main temples of the three cities were dedicated to the most important Assyrian deities – Assur, as whose earthly representative the Assyrian king acted, Ištar of Nineveh, and Ištar of Arba’il who, too, were celebrated as patrons and protectors of Assyria. As a praise poem composed for Assurbanipal in the deities’ honor put it:

  Exalt and glorify the Lady of Nineveh, magnify and praise the Lady of Arba’il, who have no equal among the great gods! … Not [with] my [own strength], not with the strength of my bow, but with the power [… and] strength of my goddesses, I made the lands disobedient to me submit to the yoke of Assur … The Lady of Nineveh, the mother who bore me, endowed me with unparalleled kingship; the Lady of Arba’il, my creator, ordered everlasting life (for me). They decreed as my fate to exercise dominion over all inhabited regions, and made their kings bow down at my feet.

  (SAA 3 3: 1–3; rev. 4–6; rev. 14–18)

  No king could afford to ignore these gods, their shrines, or their festivals. The significance of their cults to Assyrian state ideology required the king to spend considerable amounts of time in these cities in order to take his place in their festivals, such as for the cult of Assur, which regularly required the king’s attention and presence.

  In 879 BCE, the city of Ashur was stripped of its ancient role as the seat of royal power and state administration when Aššurnaṣirpal II (r. 883–859 BCE) moved the court to a new location. His choice was the city of Kalḫu, which was transformed into the political and administrative center of Assyria during his reign and that of his son and successor Shalmaneser III (r. 858–824 BCE). Kalḫu was an old city and, crucially, an integral part of the regional traffic network. It was situated in a uniquely central position between Ashur, Nineveh, and Arba’il, since the most convenient routes that linked these cities all led through it (Altaweel 2008: 66–8, 116). Traveling to and from either of these cities, therefore, required a day or two at most, depending on the direction and the mode of travel, which was about half the time it took to cover the distance between any of the three cities. The ancient town of Kalḫu became a megacity with a surface area of 380 hectares contained within the city walls and regional canal systems that were constructed in order to provide additional water for its maintenance (Altaweel 2008: 86–8, 121). The creation of this new center influenced settlement patterns not only in the heartland but also, due to the necessity of procuring settlers, all over the empire.

  When Kalḫu was elevated to its new prominence, it was not only at the expense of Ashur but also at the expense of Nineveh and Arba’il. Given Ashur’s peripheral location within the Assyrian state, the latter two cities were effectively economic and political centers in their own right, of almost the same importance as Ashur. By choosing Kalḫu as the administrative center of the renewed Assyrian state, the influence of all three cities and their inhabitants within the state was substantially weakened – a strategy designed to strengthen the position of the king at the expense of the traditional urban elites. While these elites had previously played an important role in the political life of the Assyrian state, the highest administrative and military offices were now reserved for eunuchs of deliberately obscure origins who were undoubtedly loyal to the king. The residents of the new center of state, and especially the royal court, were handpicked from among the urban elites by one of these eunuchs, as the royal edict appointing
Nergal‐apil‐kumu’a to oversee the move to Kalḫu makes abundantly clear (SAA 12 83). We can safely assume that only those who had shown enthusiasm for the king and his plans for Assyria were chosen, thus creating in 879 BCE not only a new political center but also one that was exclusively populated by loyal supporters of the king.

  The Provinces

  Compared to the rest of the empire, the provinces in the Assyrian heartland were small in size (Figure 9.2). This reflects historical developments, since the provinces in the oldest part of the state had been established at a much earlier time and had survived from the Middle Assyrian Period (Radner 2006) in most cases unchanged, although they were sometimes merged with a neighboring province into a larger unit (e.g. Ashur and Libbi‐ali; Nineveh and Ḫalaḫḫu). Although the land controlled by these provinces was much more limited than that of the new provinces created in the ninth and, especially, in the eighth century BCE, it was intensely developed agricultural land with very little surface taken up by deserts or mountains, unlike elsewhere in the empire. That grain prices in Nineveh and Ḫalaḫḫu, probably as the result of the much higher demand in the densely populated heartland, were nevertheless considerably higher than in the western provinces (“the steppe”), where rain‐fed agriculture was supplemented with irrigation through long‐distance canal systems, is positively emphasized in a letter to Tiglath‐pileser III:

  The land of the king is well. The royal sustenance fields have been harvested. The market rate is extremely favorable in the land. One homer of barley (=100 liters) goes for one mina of copper in Nineveh (and is worth as much as) one homer and five seahs (=150 liters) in Ḫalaḫḫu and two homers (=200 liters) in the steppe. Forty minas of wool (go for) one mina of copper.

  (SAA 19 19)

  Figure 9.2 The Neo‐Assyrian provinces, with the position of Ashur, Nineveh, Arba’il, Kalḫu, and Dur‐Šarrukin marked by asterisks. The dashed lines indicate the provincial boundaries, but note that these are often hypothetical. For details see Radner 2006.

  Drawing by Cornelie Wolff after a sketch by the author.

  As far as we can see, all Assyrian governors were expected to provide the central administration with the same contributions in taxes and in labor, regardless of the size of their province; this emerges most clearly in the records of the construction of Dur‐Šarrukin (cf. Parpola 1995). This would seem to indicate that, at least in theory, all provinces were expected to have roughly the same economic potential. The exceptions were the border marches under the control of some of the highest military officials in empire: the commander‐in‐chief (turtānu), the treasurer (masennu), the cupbearer (rab šāqê), and the palace herald (nāgir ekalli). These were located in strategically sensitive border regions along the upper stretches of the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Lesser (Iraqi) Khabur, and the Great Zab Rivers (Radner 2006: 48–9). These heavily militarized zones were dedicated to the defense of the Assyrian state against its arch‐enemy to the north, Urartu, and its allies. Economic development was certainly considered secondary there as long as there was the danger of war. Some of the other provinces’ primary function was to generate trade with the neighboring regions (Radner 2004). This is clear in the case of the provinces of Sidon (established in 677 BCE; maritime trade across the entire Mediterranean Sea and surveillance of the trading activities of the vassals Tyre and Arwad) and Ashdod (established in 711 BCE; trade with Egypt and the Arabian peninsula) and the provinces in Median territory, which were collectively known as bēt kāri “House of trade” (established in 744 and 716 BCE; trade with the east along the Silk Route). After the conquest of Carchemish and the sacking of its state treasury in 717 BCE, the influx of vast quantities of silver caused a change from the copper standard, previously favored in the Assyrian empire, to a silver standard (Radner 1999: 131).

  In general, the Assyrian administration established in a newly annexed region would, at first, face considerable expenditures in order to secure Assyrian rule and to set up the necessary infrastructure: the construction of a provincial center, the reorganization of the local settlement structure (cf. Wilkinson and Barbanes 2000; Radner and Schachner 2004: 117–18), the linking up with the imperial information network (Radner 2014), and the enhancement of the agricultural potential of the land by introducing additional manpower and often also new agricultural techniques and, wherever possible, by means of irrigation projects (especially in the steppe regions of Syria).

  But once these infrastructural changes had been achieved, a large province could be divided into smaller units. For example, the holdings of the once enormous province of Raṣappa were split up into several provinces after its previously largely barren lands were cultivated (Radner 2006: 52–3). Similarly, Sargon II (r. 721–705 BCE) created the provinces of Til‐Barsip and Ḫarran out of the border march of the commander‐in‐chief, formed in 856 BCE and originally encompassing all lands west of the Khabur River as far as the Euphrates River (Radner 2006: 48).

  If our hypothesis is correct, then the economic power of the small, central Assyrian provinces equaled that of the much larger Syrian, Anatolian, or Iranian provinces. Given the importance of human labor, it stands to reason that the core provinces, therefore, had to be far more densely populated. This correlates with the fact that the Assyrian heartland was the destination for most of the deported populations (Oded 1979: 28, 116–35). In addition, the large‐scale irrigation projects reduced the insecurities of rain‐fed agriculture and, as Ur (2005: 343) argues, increased productivity substantially by allowing a more intensive production of winter grain and water‐intensive summer vegetable crops, and by reducing the need for biennial fallow.

  However, by the reign of Sargon II, the governorship over a central Assyrian province was no longer the pinnacle of a successful career in the state administration that it had once been. It was far more prestigious to govern one of the new provinces, whereas the governorship over a central Assyrian province represented an earlier, more junior stage in an official’s career. This is clear from the career paths of some of Sargon’s officials: Šep‐Aššur, for instance, was first governor of Dur‐Šarrukin and was then promoted to govern Ṣimirra on the Phoenician Coast (SAA 1 124), whereas Nabû‐belu‐ka”in (Postgate and Mattila 2004: 251–2 with n. 50) was first governor of Arrapḫa (modern Kirkuk) and then of the Median province of Kar‐Šarrukin before he was promoted to vizier (sukallu), one of the most senior state offices. That the more experienced governors now ruled over the newly annexed and distant provinces is also reflected by changes in the sequence of year eponyms (Millard 1994). From at least the reign of Aššurnaṣirpal II onwards, there was a specific sequence in place, according to which the king, the most senior state officials, and some provincial governors, including those of the core provinces, took on this prestigious role. But, under Sargon, we find that it was the governors of the newly annexed provinces, rather than those ruling the core provinces, who were made eponym, and this trend continued under Sargon’s successors.

  It made good political sense to dispatch only the officials who had already proven their worth and their loyalty to the king to postings far away from the court and the central administration, and, therefore, far away from the Assyrian core region. There was a general shift of the attention of the king and his administration away from the heartland, the almost unavoidable result of the rapid extension of the provincial system during the second half of the eighth century BCE.

  The Nineveh Region

  This regional power shift away from the heartland is also reflected by the move of the political and administrative center of the empire away from Kalḫu to the Nineveh region (first to Dur‐Šarrukin under Sargon II and then to Nineveh itself under Sennacherib), the starting point for the principal route to the increasingly more important western half of the empire. The successive annexation of the lands on the Mediterranean Sea coast and north of the Taurus Mountains under Tiglath‐pileser III, Shalmaneser V (r. 726–722 BCE), and Sargon II had turned the route along the s
outhern Taurus foothills into the empire’s most important overland connection; and all goods, people, and information travelling on it passed through Nineveh, which controlled the principal ford over the Tigris River in this region. The expansion made Nineveh the hub of the Assyrian empire.

  However, since Sargon’s new foundation, Dur‐Šarrukin, principally used resources previously under the control of Nineveh – most importantly agricultural lands, personnel, and water – the move curtailed Nineveh’s economic potential. Sargon’s relocation of the royal court and the central state administration can be seen as a reaction to the geopolitical changes brought about by the growth of the empire in the previous decades and the resulting increase in Nineveh’s nationwide importance. Yet it is obvious that this ruler, whose early reign was severely threatened by rebellions, including many in the heartland, did not want to forego the political opportunities offered by founding a new and “disembedded” power base. The creation of an entirely new city went hand in hand with the establishment of a corresponding province at the expense of nearby Nineveh (and perhaps also Kalḫu), a strategy designed to counter and lessen Nineveh’s, and also Kalḫu’s, regional political and economic importance. The court moved to Dur‐Šarrukin in 706 BCE but, when Sargon died on the battlefield in the following year, his son and successor Sennacherib (r. 704–681 BCE) chose to abandon the city and move his court and the central administration to Nineveh, which was greatly expanded for this purpose. Since the geopolitical advantages of a move from Dur‐Šarrukin to Nineveh are obvious, we must at least ask the question of whether Sennacherib would still have moved to Nineveh if his father had not died in a way that tainted his new city (Frahm 1999; Fuchs 2009, 59–60). I believe this is a distinct possibility. Sennacherib was, unlike Sargon, uncontested in his claim to the throne and, thus, the old urban elites of central Assyria would have appeared to be less of a danger to his royal power than they would have seemed to his father.