Neo-Assyrian Empire

The Neo-Assyrian Empire, conventionally dated from 911 BC, was the first state to hold the whole Near East, and it is generally described as the first empire in the modern sense - governed by provinces and governors rather than by tribute from vassal kings left in place. Assyria had existed for a thousand years as a northern Mesopotamian kingdom; what changed under Ashurnasirpal II and his successors was a standing professional army, iron weapons, siege engineering, and a deliberate policy of terror recorded in the royal inscriptions with a frankness later empires avoided - flayings and impalements described as the king's own accomplishments. It also practised mass deportation as an instrument of government, moving whole populations from one end of the empire to the other to break their capacity to revolt; the northern kingdom of Israel disappeared this way in 722 BC. At its height under Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal it ran from Egypt to the Persian Gulf. Ashurbanipal assembled the library at Nineveh, which is why the Epic of Gilgamesh survives. The end was extraordinarily fast. Civil war after Ashurbanipal's death in 631 BC, and a coalition of Babylonians under Nabopolassar with the Medes under Cyaxares, destroyed Ashur in 614 and Nineveh in 612; a rump held out at Harran until 609 BC. The empire vanished so completely that when Xenophon marched past the ruins two centuries later nobody could tell him whose they were. The deported populations of Israel are the origin of the lost tribes tradition. Assyrian royal reliefs, now largely in the British Museum, are the fullest visual record of any ancient army. The name survives in modern Assyrian Christian communities of northern Iraq and Syria.

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