The Neo-Assyrians: The History of the Iron Age’s Most Powerful Empire

When scholars study the history of the ancient Near East, several wars that had extremely brutal consequences (at least by modern standards) often stand out. Forced removal of entire populations, sieges that decimated entire cities, and wanton destruction of property were all tactics used by the various peoples of the ancient Near East against each other, but the Assyrians were the first people to make war a science. When the Neo-Assyrians are mentioned, images of war and brutality are among the first that come to mind, despite the fact that their culture prospered for nearly 2,000 years. Like a number of ancient individuals and empires in that region, the negative perception of ancient Assyrian culture was passed down through Biblical accounts, and regardless of the accuracy of the Bible’s depiction of certain events, the Neo-Assyrians clearly played the role of adversary for the Israelites. 

Although the Biblical accounts of the Assyrians are among the most interesting and are often corroborated with other historical sources, the Neo-Assyrians were much more than just the enemies of the Israelites and brutal thugs. A historical survey of their culture reveals that although they were the supreme warriors of their time, they were also excellent merchants, diplomats, and highly literate people who recorded their history and religious rituals and ideology in great detail. Like their other neighbors in Mesopotamia, they were literate and developed their own dialect of the Akkadian language that they used to write tens of thousands of documents in the cuneiform script (Kuhrt 2010, 1:84). The Assyrians themselves viewed their history as a long succession of rulers from an archaic period until the collapse of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the 7th century B.C., and the current divisions have been made by modern scholars based on linguistic changes, not on political dynasties (van de Mieroop 2007, 179).