"20 Adad-Nirari II, Neo-Assyrian Empire, Ashurnasirpal II"

As a child growing up in England, one of the most exciting things I can remember was going to London for the day. I was terrified of riding the underground trains, but everything else seemed magical. One of my most vivid memories is of visiting the British Museum, and especially the giant winged lion statues at the entrance to the Assyrian galleries. This was long before I decided to spend my career studying ancient Mesopotamia. I was just a schoolgirl. But the majesty of those sculpted lions was almost overwhelming. They were immense, up to 14 feet tall. From the front, each one looked like a bearded man. But his head was set on the body and legs of a giant cat, and he wore a horned crown. From the side, each stone figure appeared to be striding forwards, with wings that spread right across the top of his back, as though he were about to take off in flight. I'd never seen anything so impressive, or otherworldly. Later, during graduate school, I went back to visit these giant lion men, and they still took my breath away. The Assyrian kings who created them might never have guessed that they would still stand guard over a doorway thousands of years later. But now they were in a London museum, rather than in the Assyrian capital. The Assyrian kings might have been pleased, though, to know that these sculptures still have the power to make us gasp. The empire of the Assyrians was centered on the Tigris River in northern Mesopotamia. And through all the thousands of years of history that separate us from them, their legend lived on. The Sumerians and Akkadians of southern Mesopotamia would be forgotten for thousands of years. They had to be rediscovered in the 19th century. But the Assyrians were immortalized by the Bible and by Greek and Roman authors. They were never forgotten. And so, when archaeologists first started digging in Iraq during the mid-19th century, it was evidence of the Assyrian empire that they were looking for. They found it. And it was just as impressive as they had imagined. It turns out that Assyria existed long before the time of the Bible. Until the 14th century BCE, it was just one state among many in Mesopotamia. In fact, through much of the 15th and 14th centuries BCE, Assyria was subject to the kingdom of Mitanni, the great power that dominated northern Mesopotamia. But western Mitanni was subsumed into the Hittite empire around the 1330s BCE, and Assyria regained its independence. For the next 700 years, until the end of the 7th century BCE, Assyria played a huge role in Mesopotamian history. It was led by one of the most stable dynasties anywhere in all of history, with the throne passing from father to son over and over again. Eventually, the Assyrians created an empire on a huge scale, much bigger than anything that had come before. And it set the basic model for how an empire should be run. All later empires in the Near East and the Mediterranean regions – the empires of the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans – they all learned from the Assyrians. Before I start discussing the details of the Assyrian phenomenon, I should be clear about some terms. First is the term Assyria. That's not what the Assyrians called their country. They called it Ashur. Their capital city was also known as Ashur. And the god of the city and the land of Ashur was also named Ashur. The god Ashur wasn't a cosmic god. He wasn't a planet or a star or a force of nature. He was physically present in the city of Ashur as the rock formation on top of which his temple was built, towering above the river. So they had a god, a city and a country, all with the same name. Imagine today if we had a country called God with a capital city also called God. You might assume that the people there would be pretty religious, pretty devoted to God. And that does seem to have been true in Ashur. They absolutely believed in the power and the supremacy of their god. It's not that they didn't believe in other gods as well, or that they were monotheists. They still worshipped the whole pantheon of Mesopotamian gods. But in their minds it was Ashur, not Enlil, who was the most powerful, the king of the gods. In any event, to make things a little less confusing, we now refer to their country as Assyria rather than Ashur. The heartland of Assyria, that is the area that always remained subject to this long dynasty of kings, was mostly located along the Tigris River. Its southern edge lies in the area around the city of Ashur, which remained the religious capital of Assyria even after the political capital was moved further north up the Tigris River, first to the city of Kalhu and ultimately to Nineveh. Nineveh was next to present-day Mosul, and north of Ashur by about 60 miles. It marked the northern edge of the heartland. And in the east, closer to the Zagros Mountains, was the city of Arbella, about 60 miles northeast from Ashur and about 50 miles east of Nineveh. If you lived anywhere in this triangle, at any time through the 7th century BCE, you lived in the land of Assyria. The lands beyond the triangle were sometimes under the control of other kingdoms, but there was no obvious boundary to Assyria. It didn't have a coastline, and it wasn't right next to a mountain range. So the Assyrian kings always felt vulnerable to attack. From the 14th century onward, these kings wanted to expand their boundaries, and not only for defensive purposes. Conquering neighboring lands for the god Ashur was seen as a religious thing to do, an act of piety. In spite of Assyria's lack of obvious borders, it had some advantages for the people who lived there. There was enough rainfall for farming, so farms were scattered all across the landscape. Unlike in the south, farms weren't located only by the rivers. And Assyria was at the crossroads of several major roads and trading routes. In fact, the cities of Ashur and Nineveh were both located where it was possible to ford the Tigris, so lots of commerce came through. The era of the Assyrian kingdom that thrived during the late 2nd millennium BCE is known as the Middle Assyrian period. It was at its height from around 1365 to 1076 BCE. This was around 500 years after the end of the Old Assyrian period, when Assyrian merchants traded and set up colonies in what is now Turkey. That period had lasted from around 1974 to 1807 BCE. The Middle Assyrian period is also distinct from the later Neo-Assyrian period, which lasted from around 911 to 610 BCE, when the Assyrians built a truly vast empire. The Middle Assyrian kings managed to expand their kingdom all the way to the Euphrates River in the west. These kings tend to get overshadowed by their more famous descendants, who built the Neo-Assyrian empire. But in a way, the Middle Assyrian kings were the ones who created the mold for later rulers to follow. The Middle Assyrian army had a large infantry and a smaller force of chariots. But the soldiers weren't available year-round. Most of them were Assyrian farmers, who were free to fight only about three months a year. This was during the summer between harvest and the sowing season. That changed in later centuries, when kings eventually created a standing army. But the army's organization stayed much the same over time, with divisions of 10, 50, and 100 men. Middle Assyrian military leaders also came up with the idea of deporting conquered peoples from one part of the empire to another. Although this was probably incredibly unpopular with the people being deported, it wasn't a death march. It wasn't really even designed as a punishment. The deportees were given shoes and provisions, and when they arrived at their destinations, they were also given land. The point was not to kill them. They were supposed to survive. Deportation was a way to settle people in underpopulated parts of the empire that could be opened up for farming. It was also a benefit in the king's minds to integrate the population, so that the newly conquered peoples might begin to think of themselves as Assyrian. And of course, these peoples were less likely to rebel if they were busy making new lives for themselves far away from their original homelands. The Middle Assyrian kings, along with all their successors right to the end of the 7th century BCE, were considered to be high priests of the god Ashur. In most Mesopotamian lands, the priests and kings played distinct roles. But Assyrian kings were both. If an important festival came up when a king was away on campaign, he had to return to perform in it. The kings were proud of the many temples they constructed for the gods in cities all over their empire. A lot of the royal inscriptions that survive are about these temples. So the Middle Assyrian kings were war leaders, priests, and builders of cities and temples. But in spite of their tendency towards self-promotion, the Assyrian kings didn't name the years of their reigns after their glorious successes, as southern Mesopotamian kings had done for centuries. Instead, each year was named for an official, called a lemu, who was chosen by lot from the heads of powerful families, and who played a role in the annual New Year's festival. The man who held the post of lemu during the year had the whole year named after him. You can imagine that these lemu year names might have been hard to remember. Suppose you were born in the year called Einam Ashur, son of Begaya. How old would you be in the year Shuli, son of Obkhakum? In our dating system, the year Einam Ashur probably corresponds to 1954 BCE, and the year Shuli was 1941 BCE. But at that time, they had no numbers for their years. Luckily, they did keep lists of lemu names. This would let you figure out, in our example, that you were 13 years old in the year Shuli, son of Obkhakum. Later scribes seem to have used these lists of lemus from each reign to create a larger list of all the Assyrian kings and the lengths of their reigns. This documentation is useful for historians in reconstructing events and in understanding chronology. Chronology is a fascinating field of ancient history because it's a giant puzzle. Historians still aren't at all sure that we have the right dates for events before the first millennium BCE. Whenever I mention a date of an event or a king's reign, it means that modern scholars have reconstructed that date from several different types of evidence. And other scholars have certainly argued about it. And it may well still be wrong. Translating a lemu date to a year BCE isn't a simple process. For example, 1400 BCE was 1400 years before Jesus was born. But of course, the people living at that time had no idea that they were in 1400 BC or BCE because C hadn't been born yet. I did actually see on a message board once that a man claimed that the oldest coin he owned was 2200 years old. He said it was stamped 225 BC. I hope he didn't pay much for it. Anyway, these Assyrian lists of lemu names and lists of kings have helped historians count backwards from known dates so that they can assign BCE dates to historical events. From the 12th century BCE onwards, we can be pretty sure that the dates we use are correct for the main Mesopotamian kingdoms. Before that, there's a lot more uncertainty. Scholars have to look at things like ancient records of eclipses and of planets in the night sky. They look at tree rings and volcanic eruptions that left layers of ash in ice cores recovered from the Arctic Circle. And then they try to correlate those with kings and ancient events. It's a fascinating mystery. The longer ago the event, the more wrong the date we've come up with is likely to be. Some really early lemu lists that have recently been found have been a huge help. It seems now that for events in the 2nd millennium BCE, we're probably within a decade or so of being correct about most of the dates. So, let's go back to the end of the Middle Assyrian period. Between 1200 and 1100 BCE, the Kingdom of Hatti collapsed, Egypt went into decline, and Assyria suffered too. Many lands that had been ruled by the Middle Assyrian kings gained their independence, and Assyria shrank back to its heartland. But the Assyrian people didn't forget about their glorious past. In the late 10th century BCE, an Assyrian king named Adad-Nirari II came to the throne. Throughout his reign, he set about reconquering the lands in Syria that Assyria had lost control of more than 200 years before. Every summer, his troops went off on campaign to fight and raid and conquer. And if a land rebelled against him, then the troops would show up again and put down the rebellion. Earlier Mesopotamian kings fought only when they needed to. Adad-Nirari II started the tradition of campaigning every single year. With Adad-Nirari II, we come to the period when Assyria was its most powerful, the Neo-Assyrian period. It lasted for almost exactly 300 years. Adad-Nirari's grandson was one of the most influential of all Assyrian kings. His name was Ashur-Nazirpal II, and he ruled from 883 to 859 BCE. Ashur-Nazirpal II made a very radical decision. He moved the capital city from Ashur up the Tigris to Qalhu, which is better known by its modern name of Nimrud. It had been occupied for centuries, but it had fallen into decay by this time. Still, it was where Ashur-Nazirpal wanted to live and rule. He didn't move the temple of Ashur, of course. Its home in the city of Ashur was sacred. But the Assyrian government never returned to Ashur after the reign of Ashur-Nazirpal II. Assyrian architects, builders, and sculptors worked for 15 years to transform Qalhu into the most impressive city anyone could imagine. A new city wall enclosed almost 900 acres. And this urban center had nine new temples, along with a giant pyramid-shaped step tower called a ziggurat, and several palaces. In the center of the city, Ashur-Nazirpal had his workers construct a new citadel. In an inscription, he claimed the foundations under it were very deep, 120 layers of brick. The city's crowning achievement was the king's palace, which is known today as the Northwest Palace. It covered at least seven acres, which is more than five American football fields. It might even have been larger, but the rest hasn't been excavated. The palace was built around three huge courtyards. And the king's throne room alone was 150 feet long and 35 feet wide, or 4,500 square feet. You could fit three medium-sized modern houses into just that throne room. The palace doors and gateways were guarded by giant stone sculptures of winged lions and winged bulls with human heads, like the ones that impressed me so much as a child at the British Museum. They weigh from nine tons to as much as 36 tons, each one of them carved out of a single block of stone. They were there to protect the king and the palace. In a modern museum, when just one of these statues has to be moved, it often means closing the gallery for weeks or months. The Oriental Institute in Chicago needed to reinforce the floor in order to support the weight of one of these giant sculptures. Ashurnasirpal's palace had dozens of them. Mesopotamian royal palace walls had always been decorated. About 900 years before the time of Ashurnasirpal II, King Zimri-Lim of the Mari Kingdom in Syria had brightly colored paintings on his palace walls. These must have been the norm in all eras. But they've mostly disintegrated so we don't see them. Anyway, Ashurnasirpal came up with a plan for decorating the walls of his palace that surpassed all earlier attempts. In the public areas of the palace, all the brick walls were faced with giant stone panels made of a type of local gypsum. Each panel was as much as 14 feet in length and 8 feet high. Quarrying this stone and getting it into place would have been quite a feat. Many of the panels weigh a ton each. The panels were then decorated with elaborately detailed relief sculptures that were brightly painted. Unfortunately, the paint is long gone. Only tiny fragments of it survive. An artist must have designed all the panels and planned with the king and the priests exactly where each sculpted image would go. After the designs were sketched onto the stone, teams of expert sculptors carved the intricate images onto each block. If you get close, you can see more and more detail. Exact shapes embroidered on the clothing of every person depicted. The granulation of the jewelry. The shapes and tooling of every horse trapping. The paint on these sculptures would have made these details even more apparent. Some of the relief sculptures show the king being protected by the gods. He often has a winged genie standing behind him and a sacred tree in front of him, with a winged god hovering overhead. These weren't just for decoration. People believed that these sculptures possessed their own power and protected the king. The architects even consulted with priests to find out exactly where the protective gods should be placed. Other reliefs show life-sized images of people bringing tribute to the king. These line the palace walls near where actual dignitaries would have walked, bringing their own gifts. And there are lots of scenes of the king hunting lions, and of the king and his army fighting enemies. These progress like a graphic novel, from one panel to the next. A visitor to the palace could follow what happened in a war by walking along beside the sculptures. The king wasn't depicted as being larger than everyone else. You can pick him out because of his headdress. It looks a little like an upside-down flowerpot. He's shown right in the middle of battle, surrounded by the army in their many victorious campaigns. Across every stone panel, even the ones that didn't have relief sculptures, there's a cuneiform inscription. This is almost always the same one. It's known as Ashur-Nazipal's standard inscription, and it proclaims the king's greatness, and the support he had from the gods, and the victories he achieved in battle. Of course, most people couldn't read. But the standard inscription probably wasn't designed just to be read by palace visitors. After all, why would they need to see it repeated over and over again? It was probably mostly for the gods, and for the future. For centuries before this, Mesopotamian kings had stamped inscriptions on the bricks they used to construct their temples and palaces. Even though the inscriptions were covered by other bricks, and weren't visible to viewers, every brick noted the king's name, and the name of the building, and the god it was dedicated to. No future king could falsely claim that the building was his work if every brick showed that he was lying. The stone reliefs in Ashur-Nazipal's palace had the same effect. If the inscription was omnipresent, his deeds would never be forgotten, and no future king could take credit for his achievements. It worked. The stone panels ended up in at least 23 museums around the world, and every one of them proclaims Ashur-Nazipal's greatness. When his palace was complete, Ashur-Nazipal threw a huge party to celebrate. He invited almost 70,000 people from across the Assyrian Empire, and from lands beyond the empire as well. His guests were given food, beer, and wine, and they were entertained for 10 days. No doubt, they were all completely wowed by the architecture and the sculpture of the new capital city, and by the power of the Assyrian king. Among the guests, 16,000 were citizens of Kalhu itself. These people had all moved there from around the empire. Meanwhile, the Assyrian Empire had been expanding. The standard inscription, written all over the palace, describes how this was achieved. And the relief sculptures show details of tactics that the Assyrian military used for battles and sieges. The language Ashur-Nazipal II used to describe himself was very different from that of some of the earlier Mesopotamian kings. He wasn't a kind shepherd to his subjects, like the 18th century BCE Babylonian king Hammurabi. He didn't try to make sure that weak people were protected from strong people, like the 22nd century BCE Sumerian king Ornama. Here's what Ashur-Nazipal said about himself. He said, he had no rival among the princes of the four quarters. He was fearless in battle, a king who subdues those insubordinate to him. He who rules all peoples. Strong male who treads upon the necks of his foes. Trampler of all enemies. He who smashes the forces of the rebellious. His successors followed this same model. They also described themselves as tramplers and smashers and subduers. And they increased the Assyrian military might. Soon, they had standing armies that were available to campaign year round. They recruited men with military expertise from across the empire, so that normal Assyrian farmers weren't called up to serve anymore, though they still had to work on imperial building projects. In a way, the army became a reflection of the empire. The men spoke many different languages and carried many different local types of weapons and armor. Military divisions were stationed near the borders, ready to campaign at any time. Fighting techniques improved as well. For hundreds of years, the Assyrian army had consisted of foot soldiers and chariot soldiers. Now, the Assyrians added cavalry. The chariots got bigger and bigger until four horses were needed to pull each one, and up to four men rode in each. After Ashurnasirpal, later Neo-Assyrian kings also decorated the walls of their palaces with relief sculptures of military campaigns, so we can see the technological advances. The reliefs often show attacks on cities. The warriors had battering rams that they could thrust against gates, with protection for the men pushing them. They looked like tanks. The Assyrian attackers set up siege towers. They tunneled under city walls or sapped the walls to weaken them. They rained arrows over the walls and threw flaming torches. But sieges were long and tough and expensive, so the generals often tried to negotiate with the people of a rebellious city. If diplomacy didn't work, the Assyrians would terrify citizens by impaling prisoners on stakes in public view. And if the local population still didn't give up and physical attacks didn't work, Assyrian soldiers were willing to spend months camped around a city until the people inside were starving and sick. So the Assyrian army was quite successful, but you can see how it wouldn't have been very popular. People in the provinces had to pay taxes and tribute. They had to fight for the Assyrian army, and they would have heard about the brutal ways the army treated rebels. In fact, the people who were subject to Assyria stood almost no chance of being able to rebel and gain their independence. The Israelites tried to break free of the empire, but their rebellions were put down repeatedly. Eventually, according to the Bible, most of the Israelites were deported to other parts of the Assyrian empire. The Judeans saw the Assyrians as harsh oppressors. In the book of Nahum in the Hebrew Bible, the prophet wrote directly to the Assyrians. He said, who has not suffered your relentless cruelty? This view was probably common among many of the conquered peoples. The whole idea of how to maintain an empire was now very different than it had been in earlier times. Kings like Hammurabi and Shamshi-Adad and Tushrata hadn't tried to terrify their subjects into submission. The Assyrians used terror frequently. On the other hand, the Assyrian army was no more brutal than the armies of some later empires, like the Romans. And this Neo-Assyrian period marks an important moment in world history because empires, truly vast and expansionist empires, became the norm for hundreds of years after this. Although Sargon of Akkad had created the world's first empire 14 centuries before Ashurnasirpal II, the earlier empire hadn't lasted for long. Most of Mesopotamia's previous kingdoms had been city-states or territorial states, not empires. Experiments in empire building hadn't gone very well before. Also, ideas about democracy, human rights, and international law hadn't developed yet. Every state in the Near East at this time was ruled by a king. That had also been true of every state previously, even if past leaders hadn't all had the title of king. And kings ruled every state the Mesopotamians encountered. So it was obvious to them that a king was essential for running a state, just as it's obvious to us today that a CEO typically runs a large organization. In spite of the Assyrians' reputation for brutality, it was entirely possible for someone to live a happy life under Assyrian rule. Thousands of everyday documents from this era show that. The Assyrians developed a form of empire that was stable and successful, even though their tactics for ruling it shock us today. It must have seemed, after a century or so, as though the empire would go on forever.