From city-state to empire
Assyria took its name from the city of Ashur on the west bank of the Tigris, in what is now northern Iraq. The heartland was a fairly small area, roughly the triangle between the cities of Ashur, Nineveh and Arbela, and it relied on rain-fed farming more than the irrigation that sustained the south. Historians usually divide its history into three broad phases: an Old Assyrian period (early second millennium BCE), a Middle Assyrian period (roughly the fourteenth to eleventh centuries BCE) and the Neo-Assyrian period, from about 911 to 612 BCE. The Assyrian Empire in the sense most people mean belongs to the last phase.
In the Old Assyrian period, Ashur was a trading city whose merchants ran networks into Anatolia, a story told through the Kanesh merchant colonies. In the Middle Assyrian period the kings, beginning with Ashur-uballit I in the fourteenth century BCE, claimed a place among the great powers, exchanging letters with Egypt and fighting over the old territory of Mitanni. Then, around the end of the Bronze Age, Assyrian power shrank sharply, and the kings spent generations defending what they had.
Recovery and the first conquests
From the late tenth century BCE a series of kings began to win back lost ground. Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled from 883 to 859 BCE according to the usual chronology, moved the capital to Nimrud (ancient Kalhu) and campaigned toward the Mediterranean. His son Shalmaneser III pushed further into Syria and the Levant. Their own inscriptions describe tribute and punishment in the same breath, and they should be read as royal statements, not neutral reports.
This early expansion was real but unstable. Conquered regions often paid tribute and then withheld it when the army went home, and Assyria itself went through periods of weakness and internal revolt in the eighth century BCE.
Tiglath-Pileser III and the reorganised state
The turning point is usually placed in 745 BCE, when Tiglath-Pileser III took the throne after a period of unrest. Over the next two decades he changed how Assyria held its conquests. Rather than only demanding tribute from local rulers, he increasingly turned conquered kingdoms into provinces run by Assyrian governors, who collected taxes, raised troops and answered to the king. Some states remained vassals under local rulers, but a vassal who rebelled risked being absorbed.
He also expanded the use of a standing army. Earlier armies relied heavily on seasonal levies; the later Assyrian forces included permanent royal units, with chariots, cavalry, spearmen and archers, and troops drawn from conquered peoples. Assyrian engineers used ramps, battering rams and other siege engines to take fortified cities, and these are shown in detail on palace reliefs. Their weapons included the composite bow, and iron was in common use, a pattern consistent with the wider ironworking spread of the period.
Deportation as policy
Assyrian kings deported large numbers of people from conquered lands and resettled them elsewhere in the empire. The practice served several purposes at once: it weakened local identity and rebellion, moved skilled workers and farmers to where the king wanted them, and filled under-used land. The best-known example is the conquest of the kingdom of Israel with its capital at Samaria, traditionally dated to about 722 BCE, after which part of the population was moved.
Figures given in the royal inscriptions run into tens of thousands for single campaigns. They are hard to verify and may be exaggerated, but the policy itself is well attested in both Assyrian and biblical sources. It is best understood as state policy applied to whole populations, not as random cruelty, though it was undoubtedly brutal for those who experienced it.
The kings from Sargon II to Ashurbanipal
Sargon II (722 to 705 BCE) built a new capital at Dur-Sharrukin, modern Khorsabad, and finished the conquest of Israel and other western states. He died in battle in Anatolia, which his successors apparently regarded as a bad omen.
Sennacherib (705 to 681 BCE) made Nineveh the capital and rebuilt it on a grand scale. He campaigned against Judah in 701 BCE, where his army besieged Lachish and threatened Jerusalem, and he destroyed Babylon in 689 BCE after repeated rebellions there, a decision that later Assyrians treated with unease. He was killed in 681 BCE by members of his own family.
Esarhaddon (681 to 669 BCE) rebuilt Babylon and in 671 BCE led an army into Egypt, capturing Memphis. Ashurbanipal (669 to about 631 BCE) saw the empire at its widest extent, including the sack of Thebes in Egypt around 664 BCE and campaigns against Elam, whose capital was the city of Susa. He is remembered above all for the library at Nineveh, a collection of tens of thousands of tablet fragments covering omens, medicine, myths such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, and royal letters.
How the empire was run
Holding an area from the Persian Gulf to Egypt required communication. Assyrian provinces were linked by roads and by relay messengers, and governors wrote reports to the king that survive in large numbers. Officials also used the Assyrian eponym system, naming each year after a high official, for dating. Scholars and diviners attached to the court sent omen reports about the king’s fortunes, which tells us something about how the throne used religion. Such sources also show that kings could be anxious and suspicious of their own officials.
The collapse in 612 BCE
The end came quickly after the empire’s peak. After Ashurbanipal’s long reign, Assyria was troubled by civil conflict among his successors, and Babylonia broke away under Nabopolassar, who founded the Neo-Babylonian dynasty. He allied with the Medes, and in 614 BCE the city of Ashur fell. In 612 BCE a coalition of Babylonian and Median forces took and sacked Nineveh, and the king Sin-shar-ishkun apparently died in the fighting. A remnant under Ashur-uballit II held out at Harran for a few years before being defeated, around 609 BCE.
Why such a large state fell so fast is still debated. Suggested factors include the cost of constant war, dynastic disputes, resentment in conquered regions and the rise of capable opponents. No single explanation is generally accepted.
What remained
Assyrian territory was divided among its successors, and the Babylonian state, heir to a long Babylonian civilization, took over much of the Assyrian west before falling in turn to Persia, which adopted a province system with a comparable logic in its satrapy system. Assyrian people did not disappear, and communities in northern Iraq kept an Assyrian identity into later periods. The records, buildings and sculptures left behind remain among the richest sources for the Mesopotamian empires.