Tiglath-Pileser III

Tiglath-Pileser III turned Assyria from a state that raided into an empire that governed, and invented the machinery every later Near Eastern empire used. He came to the throne in 745 BC during a civil war, probably by usurpation, at a moment when Assyrian power had been contracting for decades. His reforms were administrative before they were military. He broke the great provincial governorships into smaller units answering directly to him, appointed eunuchs to them because they could found no dynasty, built a system of royal messengers and required regular written reports, and replaced the seasonal levy of farmers with a standing professional army paid from tribute. He also industrialised deportation: conquered populations were moved wholesale and settled elsewhere in the empire, with skilled workers taken to the centre, on the reasoning that a people separated from its land and its gods will not revolt. Something like a million and a half people were moved under the Assyrians, and he is the ruler who made it policy. He conquered Babylon and had himself crowned there under the name Pulu, which is how he appears in the Hebrew Bible; he annexed most of Syria, reduced Israel to a rump and Judah to a tributary, and the Assyrian deportations of the northern kingdom begin in his reign. His successors ran the system he designed for another century. The Assyrian royal annals for his reign are unusually complete, partly because he had them carved on the palace walls at Nimrud. Later empires copied the provincial system almost intact: the Persians took it, and the satrapy is recognisably its descendant. Deportation as an instrument of rule survived very much longer than that.

• Lived: 795 BCE – 727 BCE
• Nationality: Assyrian
• Roles: monarch, military_leader