'They made a great defeat'.

'They made a great defeat'.

Suddenly and dramatically the prophecy was fulfilled. The Tigris, swollen by exceptional rains, rose in a flash flood and tore away a stretch of the fortification wall. Through this breach the Medes and Babylonians stormed into the city. In the terse phrases of a Babylonian chronicler: 'They made a great defeat of the chief people; they carried off the spoil of the city and temple; and they turned the city into a mound of rubble.' Sin-shar-ishkun perished with Nineveh. The classical historian, Diodorus, relates that, preferring death to dishonorable captivity, he built a great pyre in his palace upon which he heaped up his gold, silver and robes of state, and then consigned himself, the women of his harem, and his palace to the flames. With the fall of Nineveh, the Assyrian nation vanished from history. Its empire was divided up between Kyaxares and Nabopolassar. Many of its people were carried into captivity and those who remained became subject to Babylon. Despoiled and sacked, its great cities lay deserted except for a remnant of poverty-stricken inhabitants sheltering within the crumbling walls.

 

A marble slab shows Ashur-nasir-pal(883-859BC)
receiving wine from an officer of his court:
69,574 guest were invited to the celebration
feast when his palace at Kalkhu was completed.

The empire which had been so dramatically overthrown by the Medes and Babylonians was the climax of a series of attempts by the Assyrians to dominate the Near East. Their past history had been one of violent oscillation between expansion and contraction. Brief periods of imperial power were succeeded by sudden collapse when their rule was reduced to the limits of their native land. This was small in extent, without natural frontiers and possessed of few economic resources apart from agriculture. It lay along the middle Tigris from the mouth of the Lower Zab River to the edge of the mountain zone of eastern Turkey. An undulating country of low hills, it was brilliant in spring with growing crops and wild flowers, but parched and swept by dust storms in the heat of summer. To the east the horizon stretched away to the snow-capped Zagros Mountains of Iran; to the west the fertile land merged into arid steppe. Strung out along the Tigris River lay the great cities of Assyria. Furthest south was Ashur, the earliest capital, which gave its name to both the state and the national god, whose temple lay within its walls. This city was always the religious Centre of the nation, an Assyrian 'Canterbury'; in the ninth century the capital was moved upstream to Kalkhu, and finally in the seventh century still further upstream to Nineveh.

The Assyrians themselves traced their history back to a time when they were a nomadic tribe roaming over the western steppe under the leadership of 'kings who lived in tents'. Towards the end of the third millennium BC they seized and settled in Ashur, an important commercial centre from which their merchants engaged in a lucrative and highly organized trading venture. Donkey caravans laden with woven fabrics and Caucasian tin trekked the long journey to Cappadocia, where their wares were exchanged for local products such as copper and silver. The first military expansion came under Shamshi-Adad I (c. 1813–1781 BC), who imposed his rule on the numerous small states of upper Mesopotamia. This Old Assyrian Empire, however, did not survive his death for very long. His successors retained only the Tigris valley from Nineveh to Ashur and for over four centuries Assyria was an insignificant dependency first of Babylonia, its southern neighbour, and then of Mitanni, a state established in upper Mesopotamia in about the sixteenth century by Hurrian invaders from the mountains to the north.

 

A beautifully carved ivory fragment shownig an Ethiopian
being slain by a lion. Once richly decorated with precoius
stones and gold, it was probably plundered from the Phoenicians.

The power of Mitanni, which at one time stretched from the Syrian coast to eastern Assyria, was seriously weakened by the Hittites of Anatolia about 1360 BC. Regaining its independence and showing the remarkable capacity for rapid recuperation which is so marked a feature of its history, Assyria embarked on a policy of foreign conquest which in the thirteenth century made it one of the greatest powers of the Near East. This was the formative period of Assyrian imperial power when the objectives of foreign policy were clearly defined. The practical means for their realization was provided by the development of an extra-ordinarily efficient military machine; and the psychological impetus for expansion by the concept that world domination was the will of the national god, Ashur. It was at his command that wars were fought and with his support that they were won.