The Assyrian Empire was one of the major nations in Mesopotamian history. If the maximum splendor of the Assyrian State corresponds to the first half of the 1st millennium BC (Neo-Assyrian Empire), its origins date back to the end of the third millennium BC.
The original geographic core of the Assyrian people was made up of two areas. On the one hand, it included the so-called Assyrian triangle , between the upper Zab and the Tigris, with Nineveh as the main center. And on the other, further south, was the city of Assur, which gave its name to the Assyrians themselves. The Assyrian Triangle It was an open region, intensely populated, very rich from an agricultural point of view and with an important and ancient urbanism.
Stages of the Assyrian Empire
There were 3 stages in the Assyrian Empire, which were the Old Assyrian Empire, the Middle Assyrian Empire, and the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
The Old Assyrian Empire
The Assyrians have left us an important royal list that collects the names of the kings from the more or less legendary origins to the Neo-Assyrian period (8th century BC). According to this list, headed by the mythical Tudiya, who would have to go back to the end of the third millennium BC, the first 17 kings from Assyria lived in tents , which means that the Assyrian state would have had a tribal and nomadic origin. Of the following two sequences of kings, one includes the effective monarchs of Assur, while the other would be a legitimating list of the ascension to the throne of the usurper Shamshi-Adad I , first great king of the country. It seems, in fact, that all this first part of the list seeks to legitimize this rise, since the tribal origins go well with Shamshi-Adad himself, but have little to do with what the archaeological sources tell us about the beginnings of the Assyrian State. , which speak of a strongly urbanized region with an agricultural and commercial economy .
Shamshi-Adad I
Shamshi-Adad I (1812-1780 BC), a contemporary of Hammurabi of Babylon, first led the Assyrians beyond their home town. He managed to subdue all of upper Mesopotamia, annexing cities as significant as Mari, and signed a peace treaty with Babylon , that he recognized the dominions of him. Shamshi-Adad administratively, politically and militarily organized his new territories, building the first Assyrian territorial state; It is the time we know as the Ancient Assyrian Empire . On his death, however, the Empire fell apart; His sons were unable to preserve the integrity of the state they had inherited and were unable to stand up to pressure from the Hurrians. Assyria temporarily disappeared from history and its territory was under direct control of the Hurrians of the Mitanni Empire . Its kings were nothing more than shadows, of which the royal list tells us very little, which on more than one occasion echoes the dark origins of the monarchs and describes them as sons of no one . This situation lasted for 4 centuries.
The Middle Assyrian Empire
The Assyrian Middle Kingdom began with Assur-uballit I (1363-1328 BC), who managed to escape Mitannian tutelage, and, turning the situation around, momentarily imposed a Philo-Assyrian on the Mitannian throne. Mitanni, now in decline, ended up falling into the orbit of the Hittite Empire. Assur-uballit controlled Assyria as far as central Upper Mesopotamia and the easternmost territories of Mitanni. Aware of his renewed power, he called himself King of Totality , and established direct diplomatic relations with the Egypt of Amenhotep IV , provoking the angry protest of Burna-buriash of Babylon, who considered the Assyrians his vassals. Given the evidence of the new Assyrian power, however, Burna-buriash ended up recognizing the rank of Assur-uballit, and the reconciliation was sealed with a wedding:the son of the Babylonian married the daughter of the Assyrian. But the descendant of this marriage was assassinated by the anti-Assyrian faction of Babylon, so Assur-uballit intervened directly in the city, attacking it harshly, and imposed on his throne the little Kurigalzu, son of the assassinated prince. His actions did not serve Assyrian interests, and Assur-uballit's immediate successors had to fight him to push their southern frontier further south. away from Assur.
Successors of Assur-uballit I
Adad-nirari I (1305-1274 BC) resumed the expansion of Assyria through its natural outlet, which was Upper Mesopotamia, and managed to subdue the Mitannian king and make him a tributary of Assyria, passing this kingdom from the Hittite orbit to the Assyrian one. Adad-nirari was also titled King of the whole , but with greater legitimacy, since this title had always been related to the control of Upper Mesopotamia. Adad-nirari had to fight the populations of the Iranian plateau, and during his reign there were major incursions into Syria by the Sutetes and the Ajlamu, predecessors of the Arameans, destined in the future to completely transform the historical panorama of the Near East.
With Salmanassar I (1273-1244 BC), the winner of Shattuara II of Mitanni, the territory of this ancient power was definitively incorporated into the Assyrian Empire. The kingdom of Mitanni thus disappeared from history. A central Assyrian official ruled the region momentarily, until it was divided into several districts, each with its governor, who resided in a newly built palace. Population deportations were carried out, the new agricultural territories were colonized, and in the cities the local population was replaced by another Assyrian, in charge of directing social and economic life, and the western border of Assyria remained on the Euphrates, now the direct limit between the Assyrian and Hittite empires.
HeydayoftheMiddleAssyrianEmpire
War, as an economic activity of the first magnitude, with its spoils, taxation, colonization and deportation, which would soon end up becoming a distinctive feature of Assyrian power, was also widely practiced by Salmanassar's successor, Tukulti-Ninurta I (1243- 1207 BC), with whom the Middle Assyrian Empire reached its height.
Tukulti-Ninurta acted on three fronts. In the Zagros and the upper Tigris, just above the Assyrian countryside, it intervened for defensive and economic purposes (it was a region rich in wood, necessary for construction, and in copper and horses, the base of weapons and the army. In the west, the situation was one of forced balance, since neither the Hittites nor the Assyrians managed to unilaterally control the region located between the upper Euphrates and the upper Tigris, fearing each other, reciprocally, so that the contrasts were produced above all in the economic and commercial field. Finally, on the Babylonian front, the balance was clearly in favor of Tukulti-Ninurta. Indeed, in the face of a territorial advance by the Babylonian king Kashtiliash IV, violating a treaty signed in the time of Adad-nirari I, Tukulti-Ninurta intervened, defeated and captured the Babylonian king in battle, whom he took prisoner to Assur, and after conquering Babylon itself, demolished its walls and temples, and banished the god Marduk and his gods. part of the population, submitting all of Lower Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf.
In this way, the Assyrian sovereign was able to proclaim himself King of the country of Assur, King of the universe, King of the four regions, King of kings, King of the country of Karduniash (Babylon) and King of Sumer and Akkad . After his Babylonian victory, Tukulti-Ninurta devoted himself essentially to building activity. He restored temples and palaces in Assur and, above all, built in Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta the first artificial capital of Assyrian history, located near Assur, on the other bank of the Tigris. Perhaps this fact is due to conflicts between the king and the noble families of Assur, dissatisfied with the authoritarian and personalistic mood of the former. The internal tensions, the pressure from foreign peoples such as the Elamites, the economic and labor effort involved in the construction of the new capital and the Babylonian reaction, which was not long in coming, provoked an uprising against the king that ended his life. . Babylon became independent, and the successors of Tukulli-Ninurta, mediocre kings, managed to keep the rest of the Empire for the time being thanks, more than to their personal abilities, to the serious crisis that hung over the Middle East in general.
Crisis and Recovery, Tiglat-Pileser I
The vacuum of power that opened in Assyria when Tukulti-Ninurta died was taken advantage of by the Sutetes and the pre-Aramaic Ajlamu to penetrate and settle in large areas of upper Mesopotamia, and by the Elamites to advance along the strip located at the foot of Mesopotamia. the Zagros. The situation straightened out somewhat with Assur-resh-ishi (1132-1115 BC), who reinforced strategic cities such as Arbela , on the Zagros front, and Apku, on the Upper Mesopotamian front; stopped the suteos and the ajlamu, and subjected the former to taxation; he repulsed the Elamites and disputed the middle valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates from the Babylonians of Nebuchadnezzar I, who was forced to reconsider his territorial ambitions. He also took advantage of his campaigns against Elam, which was definitively defeated. Assur-resh-ishi was titled Avenger of the Country of Assur, and dedicated himself to restoring temples and palaces in various cities of his kingdom.
His successor was Tiglath-pileser I (1114-1076 BC), in whose reign Assyria reached one of its moments of maximum splendor . At the advent of Tiglath-pileser, the international scene had changed substantially. The Hittite Empire had ceased to exist, swept away by the invasions of the Peoples of the Sea, and in its place had been small kingdoms, the result of its disintegration:the neo-Hittite kingdoms . The Assyrian king fought against some of these, such as Mushki or Phrygia, and against other small northwestern states, such as the Armenian country of Nairi, to which he imposed an annual tribute in bronze cauldrons and horses.
He also faced the people that the annals call ajlamu of the land of Armaya , that is to say to the people who from then on would be known as Aramaic , from the name of their land of origin, and that they were destined to cause one of the most profound transformations in the history of the Near East. Assyrian sources call them, enemies of the god Assur , and they claim that Tiglath-pileser repulsed them 28 times in 14 years, which shows their unstoppable ability to infiltrate despite being defeated in battle.
The purpose of the Assyrian king was to ensure communications between Assyria and the Euphrates region. When these were guaranteed. Tiglath-pileser I, took the strategic and symbolic step of crossing the Euphrates, the natural border of his Empire, and of entering foreign territory for the first time , former Hittite territory. He concluded a peaceful trade agreement with the Neo-Hittite kingdom of Karkemish and imposed an annual taxation on other Neo-Hittite kingdoms and major Phoenician cities. To the west, his direct sphere of influence now extended to the Mediterranean itself.
By the southeast. Tiglath-pileser I intervened directly in Babylon, which had been losing strength and positions since the time of Nebuchadnezzar, and took the northernmost Babylonian cities (Dur-Kurigalzu, Opis and Sippar), as well as the capital itself. But it was more an act of prestige and a show of force than a true conquest, and the king returned to Assyria without annexing Babylon to his Empire , content with the political significance of the campaign.
Tiglath-pileser continued the building work of his predecessors, restoring and expanding temples and palaces. The same annals of him are but the inscription founding the temple of Anu and Adad in Assur . One of the purposes of his military expeditions to the mountains of the northeast was. same as in the past, get wood for those constructions. In the legislative field, Tiglath-pileser's reign produced an important code of laws and a compilation of the royal edicts promulgated from Assur-uballit to Tiglath-pileser itself. And in the literary field, at this time the first Assyrian library was created at this time. , with the material obtained by the conquering Middle Assyrian kings throughout their bells.
Fall of the Middle Assyrian Empire
After the death of Tiglath-pileser, Assyria entered a period of crisis even more serious than the previous one (1076-934 BC). In fact, he lost direct control of all the regions that the kings of the Middle Kingdom had been conquering, barely maintaining, and more nominally than anything else, the dominion over Upper Mesopotamia. The epigones of Tiglath-pileser, again characters of mediocre performance, could not contain the increasingly determined advance of the Arameans, and ended up retreating into the original Assyrian territory.
In Babylon, also plunged into a crisis, various Chaldean tribes, relatives of the Arameans, and soon more powerful than the Babylonian kings, managed to penetrate and settle. The fountains, which are almost completely silent at this time, accentuate the sensation of darkness and decadence. The recovery of Assyria would not come until the end of the 1st century BC, when a renewed royalty gave rise to the Neo-Assyrian Empire, destined to reach the highest levels of power and splendor.