A Companion to Assyria

by Eckart Frahm

  Regardless of the tensions between the powers, the international system remained in function until the early 12th century BCE, when the Sea People’s invasion (among other possible factors) brought about its collapse, especially in the west. The eastern partners managed to resist the ensuing fragmentation for another century (the century of Tiglath‐pileser I in Assyria, Nebuchadnezzar I in Babylonia, and Šilḫak‐Inšušinak in Elam), only to be eventually affected by the crisis as well. By the end of this process, Egypt had withdrawn into its traditional borders, Ḫatti had disappeared, Anatolia and the entire Levant were mostly deurbanized, Babylonia underwent a serious decline, Elam became segregated from the Near Eastern heartland, and Upper Mesopotamia was invaded by Aramaean tribes. Assyria itself experienced a serious crisis (1070–930 BCE), but it was the first to recover its energies and its willingness to expand, finding no serious rivals or resistance in Lower Mesopotamia or in the Levant. As the only major power left in a world slowly recovering but still split up into a plurality of city‐states and tribal leagues, Assyria could carry out her program of enlarging the central kingdom at the expense of the periphery relatively easily, eventually placing the entire oikoumene under the banner (or rather the yoke) of Assur.

  The Assyrian imperial conquest was not a continuous process, however, and it underwent various stages: (1) a period of “Reconquista” (930–860 BCE), regaining the territory that was already Assyrian in the 13th century; (2) the first expansion beyond the traditional borders (860–830 BCE), with Shalmaneser III achieving the submission (but not annexation) of most of the Levant; (3) a “feudal” period (830–745 BCE), with provincial governors challenging the central power and Assyrian expansion coming to a temporary halt; (4) a second expansion (745–705 BCE), with Tiglath‐pileser III and Sargon II conquering (and annexing) most of the surrounding territories and thus giving the empire its ‘classical’ structure; (5) a period of unchallenged hegemony (705–640 BCE), with the Assyrian kings even venturing to campaign against very distant regions (Arabia, Egypt, and Elam), although with mixed results; (6) and, finally, a civil war that culminated in a sudden collapse (640–610 BCE) (for details, see Chapter 8). In sum, Assyria’s imperial ideology was promoted for some seven centuries (c. 1300–600 BCE in round figures), but a truly universal (i.e. hegemonic in the known oikoumene) Assyrian empire lasted for a much shorter period of time, from the mid‐ninth to mid‐seventh centuries.

  Imperial Practice and Theory

  The establishment of “cosmic” order at the expense of chaos came about in various ways, both material and ideological. Conquests led, for instance, to a purely physical transformation of the landscape: roads were opened through previously impassable mountains, wells were dug to provide water for desert travelers, and uncultivated lands were transformed into productive fields – in the words of Sargon II, “to resettle abandoned regions, to break up fallow lands, to plant orchards, to raise crops on slopes so steep that no vegetation had ever flourished before, to set out plants in waste lands that had never known the plough under previous kings, to cut seed furrows, to let work songs resound, I let the springs of the plain flow, and abundant water rise high” (Fuchs 1993: 37 and 292).

  Although such physical, environmental efforts are repeatedly mentioned, Assyrian royal inscriptions devote more attention to law and order than to landscape. Enemies not yet defeated are characterized in two ways: they were either people (like the desert tribes or the mountaineers) who had never experienced a state administration, the presence of officials, taxation, and corvée work, or (in the case of more developed countries) they did have a king, a royal palace, a state structure, but not the “right” ones, because they did not originate from the unique source of legitimate power, the god Assur. The chaotic nature of the enemies was evident from their very plurality (dozens and dozens of Nairi kings, Aramaean tribes, Chaldean cities, and Elamite lands), which stood in contrast to the unitedness of Assyria under the Assyrian king. The enemies were foolish to trust in their mutual support, in their numbers, and in the hostile landscape, whereas the Assyrian king trusted only in Assur, which was enough to prevail over enemies who had no god, or merely lesser gods who ultimately abandoned them to their fates.

  In both tribal and urbanized polities, the Assyrian mandate to create order was fulfilled by submitting the conquered people to the Assyrian “yoke”: nīr Aššur (or nīr bēlūti) emēdu (or kunnu), “to impose the yoke of Assur (or: the yoke of the (king’s) lordship)” is a metaphor hinting at taxation and forced labor. The same concept is more directly expressed by the idiom biltu maddattu kī ša aššurī emēdu, “to impose tax and tribute like on the Assyrians,” and the idiom itti nišē māt Aššur manû “to count with the people of Assyria” hints at the enrollment of the conquered people into the list of taxpayers as well. Without a concept of citizenship, the major (or, the only) requirement to “become Assyrian” was to fulfill one’s fiscal responsibilities.

  It is interesting to note that another prevailing idiom, pâ ištēn šakānu, literally, “to make (everyone) of one mouth” does not denote a unification of language but rather a unification under one command – the mouth being that of the conqueror, not of the conquered people. A passage of Sargon II, a true and proper manifesto of Assyrian imperialism, is rather explicit in this sense: “people of the four regions, of foreign tongue and untranslatable idioms, dwellers of mountains and lands … I had them submit to a unified command (pâ ištēn ušaškin) and settled them therein (= in the new capital city of Dur‐Šarrukin). Assyrians, competent in every craft, I sent to them as overseers and supervisors to teach them the (correct) behavior and the fear of god and king” (Fuchs 1993: 79–80 and 311). Since the passage starts with a reference to the diversity of languages, one expects that the Assyrian overseers would teach the deportees the one language, i.e. Assyrian; instead, the Assyrians teach them “to fear god and king” (palāḫ ili u šarri), i.e. obedience, and to understand the correct working procedures. Ironically, the linguistic landscape of the Assyrian empire would indeed become increasingly unified, but not because the conquered peoples would eventually learn Assyrian, but rather because the Assyrians themselves ended up speaking the language of most deportees, i.e. Aramaic.

  Destruction and Reconstruction

  The transformation of chaos into cosmos unfolds in two phases: first, the old disorder must be eliminated, and then (and only then) the new order created. The royal inscriptions are filled with descriptions of the first, destructive step, often expressed using the recurrent phrase appul aqqur ašrup “I razed, I destroyed, I burnt.” Every campaign report is a narrative of destruction, slaughters, and sadistic cruelty. Control over foreigners was based mainly on terror, as properly stated by Sargon II: “I established the power of Assur for all days to come; I left for the future a fear of him (= Assur), never to be forgotten” (Mayer 1983: 82–3 [152]). The most effective feature of terror is its long‐term ideological effect (you kill one to educate one thousand); but destruction could also cause permanent physical effects that added to the fearsome reputation of the Assyrians, as Esarhaddon states when describing the progress of his army: “before me cities, behind me tells (i.e. heaps of ruins)” (Leichty, RINAP 4: 184 [rev. 13]; cf. Frahm 2006: 93). As for the sadistic displays of cruelty (the descriptions and depictions of enemies being tortured, mutilated, impaled, flayed, and buried alive), it is commonly assumed that these were intended to terrify the enemies, which is partly true, but an additional aim was to encourage the pack mentality of the Assyrians themselves. In general, effective armies (be it in order to bring freedom or despotism) need to be reassured on two points in wartime: firstly, that the soldiers will not die, and, secondly, that it is not their fault if they have to kill other men. With regard to the first point, it is worth quoting from the “letters to Assur,” which describe the triumphal conclusion of a military campaign with the standard statement: “one charioteer, two horsemen, three foot‐soldiers died” (Mayer 1983: 112–13 [426]; Lei
chty, RINAP 4: 85 [iv 13’]) – thus reducing the number of casualties from the more realistic thousands to a mere handful. Regarding the second point, the royal inscriptions consistently describe the enemies as wicked and stubbornly resistant to accepting the beneficial lordship of Assur, madly running towards a punishment and a death that is no one’s fault but their own.

  But destruction was not the end goal of conquest, merely a necessary preliminary action. The final aim was reconstruction, in the image to the positive qualities of the center. After the noncompliant local leaders were eliminated, Assyrian governors were appointed, often eunuchs (šūt rēšīya bēl pīḫāti ana muḫḫīšunu aškun); after the palace of the local king was destroyed, an Assyrian palace was built in its place; and after the local population was deported, new people were settled in their place. In addition, local names were sometimes replaced with new, Assyrian ones. The basic idiom for this complex of actions is āla/māta ana eššūte ṣabātu “to renovate the (conquered) city (or: country),” and it is interesting to observe that, in the ninth century (under Aššurnaṣirpal II), the idiom refers to building activities, while in the eighth century (under Sargon II), it refers to incoming deportees – the conquered country is “renovated” after its population has been exchanged.

  As described above, emphasis was placed on fiscal assimilation especially: people “became Assyrian” when they became subject to taxation and forced labor. Since the theological principle was that the conquered peoples would have to accept the rule of the god Assur and his human representative, the Assyrian king, one could expect that they were forced to dismiss their own gods and accept the cult of Assur, but this was not so. True, the “weapon of Assur” (kakki dAššur) was erected within conquered cities, but only as a symbol for their oath of loyalty (Holloway 2001). In addition, an image of the king was occasionally erected. The cult images of the local gods were very rarely destroyed; they were more often “captured” and “deported” to Assyria (to signal the abandonment of their countries) and returned later, in some cases refurbished and with an Assyrian inscription added. Special attention was reserved for the Babylonian gods and their temples, but this was an exceptional case dictated by the cultural prestige of Babylon. Religion within the Assyrian Empire remained polytheistic, with foreign gods accepted and, in some cases, identified with Assyrian ones. Monotheism was the eventual result of a new moral conception of the divine, not of the elimination of the rival, lesser gods.

  The desired end result of the destruction and subsequent reconstruction of the conquered country was peace, even though proclaiming peace at the end of destruction and slaughter could occasionally seem rather paradoxical. Note, for instance, Sargon’s statement: “The city Qarqar I burnt, him (= the king) I flayed, inside the towns I killed the rebels, and (so) I established peace (sulummû)” (Fuchs 1993: 201 [Prunk. 35]). But in Assyrian passages of this kind there is no irony, intentional or otherwise. The elimination of the “rebels” was a necessary step toward a unified, homogeneous, and pacified world. We cannot avoid remembering Tacitus’s famous criticism (from the mouth of a Briton chief) of the official proclamations of the Roman Empire: “where they make a waste, they call it peace” (Agricola 30).

  The Advantages of Direct Rule

  In theory, the empire should have spread continuously and homogeneously in all directions, since each king was obligated to fulfill the divine mandate to “enlarge the country.” In practical terms, however, the growth of the empire was neither constant through time (as we have seen above) nor homogeneous in its political and administrative practices. The reasons for the existence of different political structures within the empire were essentially twofold: first, limitations of technology and second, the large variety of local patterns, dictated, to a fair extent, by environmental constraints.

  The limitations in transportation and communication technology generally prevented profitable exportation of basic resources (especially food) beyond a range of 20–25 kilometers. In ancient times, a “cantonal” structure was the standard module for polities and was rarely surpassed. The enlargement of a kingdom or empire was, therefore, achieved not by extending the central cell but rather by adding more and more modules to it; in other words, by establishing provinces that remained autonomous in the management of their resources and forwarded any surplus goods, either processed or converted into silver or other precious items, to the central capital city.

  Another means by which the Assyrians dealt with practical constraints hindering the expansion of their control was to leave vanquished kingdoms to native rulers, usually new, pro‐Assyrian ones who took the place of the wicked, rebellious rulers just eliminated. This practice of “indirect rule” was an often used alternative to provincial annexation or “direct rule.” In economic terms, indirect rule was not necessarily less profitable than direct rule: what worked better depended upon the amount of (external) tribute as compared to (internal) taxes. Indirect rule could even prove more convenient, because it was better suited to keep internal productivity high, avoiding the risks of low morale and depopulation brought about by flight and deportation. Yet, in the long run, the empire preferred direct rule wherever possible. The reasons were not economic but rather political: direct rule meant eliminating the local political elites (by either killing or deporting them) and diluting the local identity of the lower classes (through two‐way deportations), which discouraged attempts at rebellion and secession.

  When looking at the two types of rule from a diachronic perspective, we can distinguish two phases in the historical development of the Assyrian Empire. In the ninth century, the empire comprised a core area that was ruled directly and was more or less identical with the Middle Assyrian regional kingdom – it extended from the Zagros Mountains to the Middle Euphrates River region. Indirect rule, in contrast, was practiced throughout a periphery of tributary kingdoms that were reached by the Assyrian army during their seasonal campaigns, which could not go beyond one thousand kilometers. In the eighth and seventh centuries, direct rule was extended to the formerly tributary areas, and indirect rule was pushed increasingly farther outwards.

  But in the mountains, the steppe, and the desert, where no urban structure had ever developed and no redistributive agencies (such as palaces) were in operation, it proved impossible to apply direct rule. As a consequence, these regions could never be fully conquered. To cite just one example, when Assyria, under Sennacherib, dominated an enormously large territory, the king was, nonetheless, forced to go on a campaign a few miles up the Tigris River in order to punish the insubordinate mountaineers of the Judi Dagh (Frahm 1997: 150–1). In such marginal environments, tribes and chiefdoms that had never developed kingdoms of their own could not be transformed into provinces. Likewise, the provinces that Tiglath‐pileser III and Sargon II tried to establish in Media quickly reverted to chiefdoms with “city‐lords” installed in castles surrounded by the tents of the pastoralists. Assyrian rule in this region was based on personal relations between a patron and his clients (to use terminology of Roman origin), who provided gifts rather than tribute and supplied soldiers and bodyguards rather than a workforce.

  In this way, the periphery remained, of course, to some extent within the sphere of chaos, not of order, a dangerous situation that would prove fatal at the moment of the final collapse of the Assyrian Empire, when hordes of mountaineers descended from the Zagros Mountains to destroy the “despotic” state. Yet the translatio imperii would not bring the Median tribes to power but rather Babylon under Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II. Their “second” empire may have tried to learn a few things from the example of the fallen Assyrian state. The royal inscriptions of the Chaldean kings, for example, do not mention the destructive aspects of their imperial mission, describing building and cultic activities instead. The “third” empire, that of the Persians, even allowed some groups of deportees to return to their original homelands. The prototypical empire of Assyria, in contrast, represented an extreme and unabashed
form of despotism, not yet mollified by the insight that more sophisticated political practices and more subtle ideological messages might better serve the imperial mission.

  A final remark: problems in Assyria did not first arise in the periphery. At the very center of the empire, within the Assyrian royal palace itself, where peace and order should have existed, negative, chaotic events occurred with increasing frequency – murders of kings, plots and irregular successions, treachery by courtiers, and harem conspiracies (Liverani 2009). The last Assyrian kings seemed more concerned with surviving internal dangers than with running the affairs of the world, an additional reason why the rise of an empire is a long and difficult process, while its collapse can take place in a moment (Liverani 2008).

  References

  Albrektson, B. 1967. History and the Gods: An Essay on the Idea of Historical Events as Divine Manifestations in the Ancient Near East and in Israel, Lund: Gleerup.

  Ataç, M.‐A. 2010. The Mythology of Kingship in Neo‐Assyrian Art, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

  Bagg, A. 2011. Die Assyrer und das Westland: Studien zur historischen Geographie und Herrschaftspraxis in der Levante im 1. Jt. v.u.Z., OLA 216, Leuven: Peeters.