The End of the Neo-Assyrian Empire

Abstract

The Neo-Assyrian empire collapsed under the attack of Babylonians and Medes after some years of harsh military confrontation, which rapidly reached the heart of the empire, and ended with the destruction of its major cities and the capital Nineveh (612 BC). The reasons and dynamics of this final collapse are however largely shrouded in the dark, since the last decades of Neo-Assyrian history are scarcely documented and official sources reduced to a minimum. Various causes have been proposed and their combined effects hypothesized: dynastic struggles, rivalry and war with Babylonia, hostility of urban and tribal ruling elites, rebellion of the Median troops, economic and demographic problems deriving from an excessive military engagement, difficulties in controlling the provinces, the new economic circuits and the flow of incomes, climatic changes, etc. The paper provides an updated overview and discussion of data and interpretations, especially in the light of sources concerning the organization of the imperial complex body and its detectable weak points.

Assyria became a proto-imperial power in the ninth cent BC (under king Aššurnasirpal II, r. 883–859 BC) and expanded afterwards during the eighth and seventh centuries as a territorial empire of unprecedented size and highly developed organization, with division in provinces and institutionalized administrative procedures, until its final collapse in 612 BC, under assault by Babylonian and Median troops.¹

This collapse is dramatically portrayed in a letter from the periphery of the empire; it was written in—but seemingly never sent from—the northern town of Tušhan, situated in the Upper Tigris valley, where an Assyrian administrative office seems still to have been in function in 611 BC, i.e. soon after the fall of Nineveh, while frantic, but vain, resistance was being organized in the west. The Assyrian official in Tušhan, who was charged with the task of organizing chariot troops, desperately claimed that he could not find anyone and closed his message with one of the most impressive epitaphs on the end of the empire: mu-a-tú ina ŠÀ-bi il-la-ka la-a 1-en [ú-še-za-ab] ep-šá-ak, “Death will come out of it! No one [will escape]. I am done”.²

The letter is not dated but has been associated with an entry in the Babylonian Chronicle (no. 3, ll. 53–55) which narrates the conquest of the northern town and province:

In the 15th year (of Nabopolassar = 611 BC), in the month Tammuz, the king of Babylon [mustered his troops] and went to Assyria. [He marched about] imperiously [in Ass]yria and conquered the [citie]s of T[u]šha[n ...] and Šu[br]ia. They took [their people] as captives and [carried away] a hea[vy] booty from them.³

The end of the Assyrian empire under the attack of the Babylonian and Median armies was an epochal event due to the role of arbiter of the destinies of a large part of the ancient Near East that Assyria had exercized, but, as might be expected, the sources that recount this event are mainly external and subsequent. Particularly interesting are the interpretations provided by the texts from Hellenistic Babylonia that preserve the local tradition on the fall of Assyria and that have as their main protagonist king Nabopolassar, the actual winner of the Assyro-Babylonian conflict. These texts build the myths of revenge against Assyrian cruelty and sacrilegious behaviour and mix historical facts and their distortions,⁴ as also attested by Beroso. In the Classical and Biblical interpretations,⁵ loaded with ideological, moral and religious conceptions and overtones, two causes appear mostly evoked: hubris and injustice that elicit divine punishment, and the corruption and decadence of manly and military valour, even combining motifs of previous narratives with some evident transformations of the historical events.⁶ The devastation of a once rich, magnificent and powerful city, such as Nineveh, also became a metaphor for changing human destinies.⁷ These documents, although biased, attest to the fact that the end of the Assyrian empire had a worldwide impact, which changed the equilibrium of an area extending from Egypt to Iran, to Arabia, the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea, and provided the basis for the fundamental concept of the translatio imperii, which is obviously linked to the theme of the end of empires and their heritage.⁸

Regrettably, contemporaneous and local sources allow us to draw only a partial sketch of the last years of Assyria, and many questions concerning the remote and immediate causes of the final catastrophe remain unanswered. Explanations have been variously sought in an economic and demographic crisis, possibly also enhanced by climatic adversities,⁹ excessive military efforts in various directions and especially in occasion of the Babylonian and Elamite wars some decades before, excessive exploitation of the provinces, etc.. Various causes probably combined and together contributed to determine a situation in which more immediate causes—such as the dynastic crisis in Assyria and the Babylonian rebellion—brought about the final catastrophe. These last interconnected causes opened the way to a third cause:¹⁰ the defection of the Medes, who had provided troops for the Assyrian army and now directed them against their former lords.

1 Looking for Premises of Collapse

The quite abundant Assyrian sources of the last two centuries of the empire’s existence offer a wider perspective on the last events and their causes since they reveal mechanisms of power management implemented by the Assyrians and reactions to this system and to the spreading across the empire of the image of the crown and principles of loyalty. Particularly significant are the texts dated to Assurbanipal’s reign (669–631 BC), that, although lacking for his last years, provide data concerning especially the Babylonian problem.

Among the inscriptions that record and celebrate Assurbanipal’s campaigns, the inscription for the Ištar temple, dated on internal criteria to around 638 BC, appears to be a comprehensive view of his achievements, almost a king’s legacy. The description is organized in two parts: the first describes the centre of the territorial empire with an account of the care for temples in various towns of Assyria and Babylonia; the second part outlines the wide extension of the empire and the “marginalization” of its periphery whose rulers are described as defeated and who were forcefully overcome or spontaneously submitted.¹¹ They appear to constitute a pacified world that encircles Assyria, but over whom control cannot be directly exercized, thus located outside of the provincial system and also revealing the limits of Assyrian expansion and, in some cases at least, potential dangers.¹² The conceptualization of the empire is in any case universalistic, insofar as Assyria is the arbiter of the destinies of all the known countries, and theological, insofar as divine support grants success to the king who reveres and accomplishes the divine will—and as the inversion of the more usual narrative sequence with the extensive description of temple construction/restoration before military campaigns also suggests. In this view the episode of the rebellion of the Cimmerian leader Tugdammi and the punishment the gods inflicted on him was considered worthy of special elaboration as a premise to the occasion the inscription commemorates:¹³ the restoration of the Emašmaš temple of Mullissu/Ištar at Niniveh (ca. 640–639 BC).

This conceptualization of the empire is to be considered together with other more concrete results of imperial expansion, i.e. its multiethnic character, the plurality of relationships, and the effort put into the instillation and diffusion of sentiments of loyalty to and faith in the legitimate dynasty to contrast opposition and resistance. The ideological apparatus as well as the practical opportunities offered by the imperial dimension can be considered as fundamental for the adhesion of local elites.

The problem of maintaining their support for the dynasty was particularly acute during and after the failure of the attempt to solve the Babylonian problem through the institution of a twin monarchy in the southern capital under a brother of Assurbanipal, and the ensuing long fratricidal war, which also divided the southern regions. A small group of letters relating to this phase concern the southernmost scenario of Uruk, a city that had an important role in the last years of Assyria, since it was seemingly the hometown of Nabopolassar, the Babylonian king finally responsible for Assyrian collapse.

During the reign of Assurbanipal and especially during the revolt of his brother and king of Babylon Šamaš-šumu-ukin (652–648 BC), Uruk, like other Babylonian cities,¹⁴ had sided with the Assyrians. Letters were sent by Assurbanipal to the governors of the town, Nabû-ušabši¹⁵ and, later, Kudurru—who succeeded to the governorship after the war, in 647 BC—and to Uruk’s citizens. These letters illustrate two important points: first, the organization of the network of military intervention in which the governors and officials of other provinces had an important role in a common effort coordinated with the local and the central governments;¹⁶ second, the role of urban communities and elites linked by family ties.¹⁷ This is also revealed by the formula of address of the royal letters to Uruk, where the citizens “great and small” are indicated as addressees together with the governor. In a nutshell, this type of address hints at the problems local administrators had to face: they were pressed between local interests and loyalty to the crown, they needed to obtain and exhibit the trust and favour of the king and to maintain those of their fellow citizens, kin or tribal members.¹⁸ In the ideological, and to a certain extent also practical scheme of the imperial government, a direct relation was established between the king and his subjects; as evidenced by the letters sent by Assurbanipal to Babylonian citizens during the civil war and, more in general, by the so-called loyalty oaths, all were responsible for behaving correctly and protecting the king.¹⁹

As is well known, in the last days of Assyria a key role was played by the army of the Medes, whose fragmented tribes, according to Classical sources, had been unified by Cyaxares (Umakištar), and whose development towards a “secondary state” organization was due to their relationships with the Assyrians.²⁰ The most explicit documents showing an institutionalized relation between the Assyrian dynasty and the Medes are the treaties of loyalty sworn by the “city-lords” of these Zagric polities in 672 BC.²¹ As clearly demonstrated by the copy of the same type of treaty recently unearthed in the western province of Kunalia,²² this was not an exceptional practice, but the treaties sworn by the Medes nevertheless show that the local elites—and not the Assyrian governor and establishment as in the western province—were recognized as the institutional interlocutors. This was certainly due to the presence of the Medes in the Assyrian military ranks,²³ but also seems to imply that they had a special role in the Zagros, somehow comparable with that hypothesized for the southern enclave of Uruk. Lanfranchi (2003) points out that their adhesion to the Assyrian cause had been crucial during the conflict against Urarṭu and continued afterwards, especially to guarantee the delivery of a fundamental resource such as horses—in addition, as noted by Liverani, to the control of access to the Iranian plateau. These reasons induced the Assyrians to preserve “both the connection between local rule and governed territory and the intimate relationship between man and land”.²⁴ The local rulers maintained the right to dynastic succession and mediated imperial power by exercising their rule over the population, that was not subjected to the extensive deportations that had been inflicted on other areas. Against this scenario, the alliance of the Medes with the Babylonians reported in the Chronicles and the role of Cyaxares as leader of a unified Median force represent the dramatic failure of the Assyrian attempt to create another bulwark of the empire through the special treatment and “political Assyrianization” of local Median elites.²⁵

If the Assyrian communication and intelligence system was well organized and the army trained to intervene successfully in various sectors to quell rebellions and support faithful allies and subjects, it appears that their adhesion to the empire was fundamental for maintaining the possibility of intervention in all sectors and to avoid the spreading of hostility and the constitution of alternative leaderships.

2 Assyrian Dynastic Succession and Babylonian Elites

During the last years of Assurbanipal’s reign and after his death, it became even more difficult to maintain this faltering equilibrium. From a royal grant from Nineveh (SAA 12 35) we apprehend that the son and heir of Assurbanipal, Aššur-etel-ilani (630–627 BC),²⁶ was installed on the throne by the chief eunuch Sin-šumu-lišir.²⁷ This act can be considered vis-à-vis the attempts to regulate and guarantee the succession of Assurbanipal to the throne of his father Esarhaddon through rules meticulously defined in a pact sworn by all the subjects of the king, some decades before.²⁸ In the light of the provisions of that document, the behaviour of the chief eunuch Sin-šumu-lišir, who supported the accession of Aššur-etel-ilani son of Assurbanipal, apparently still a minor, seems to have been perfectly correct.²⁹ It is not clear though, how exactly Aššur-etel-ilani was related to the other contender to the throne, Sin-šarru-iškun,³⁰ who also was a son (or grandson/nephew) of Assurbanipal. We wonder if Sin-šarru-iškun’s was a regular succession after the death of Aššur-etel-ilani, but hindered by the rebellion of Sin-šumu-lišir, or whether Sin-šarru-iškun rebelled against Aššur-etel-ilani’s succession, possibly because he was an elder son of Assurbanipal, but not son of the king’s principal wife, or not designated as heir. It is also possible that Aššur-etel-ilani was in fact the son of an heir designated by Assurbanipal but prematurely deceased. The circumstances are also obscure in which the eunuch Sin-šumu-lišir ascended the throne presumably in 627/626 BC, perhaps after the death of the young legitimate king.

The sources at our disposal do not provide details of this dynastic crisis or about the support the contenders had. Assyrian royal inscriptions are few and much less informative than those of the preceding kings. Babylonian Chronicles describe the events from the Babylonian perspective: the accession of Nabopolassar to the throne of Babylon, the hostilities against Assyria and, with a gap of some years, the reign of the Babylonian king,³¹ including the destruction of Assyrian cities with the help of the Medes. Other sources are variously, but not directly, useful to illuminate reasons and developments of the Assyrian loss of power: the King List from Uruk (another later document, drafted in Seleucid times) which preserves information on the sequence of the kings,³² and the legal and economic documents stemming from Babylonian cities, which were dated according to the regnal years of the kings of either Assyria or Babylonia, thus revealing who had control of those cities. They are useful for reconstructing some precise dates since they can be anchored to the Julian calendar thanks to connections with astronomical diaries.³³

Combining the available sources, it appears that after the death of Assurbanipal in Assyria (presumably 631/630 BC) and that of Kandalanu in Babylonia, which occurred before the 8th month of 627 BC,³⁴ various protagonists took the stage:

• Aššur-etel-ilani³⁵: 630/31-627/26?

• Sin-šumu-lišir: 630/31-626/25? (as tutor of Aššur-etel-ilani and then king)

• Sin-šarru-iškun: 628/627-620? recognized as king of Babylonia; 628?-612 king of Assyria³⁶

• Nabopolassar: 626-605 king of Babylonia.³⁷

In this dramatic phase, dates are crucial in order to reconstruct the development of the events and the question of legitimacy. Especially crucial are the years 628 and 627 BC, defined as kingless in the Babylonian Chronicle. From the Uruk king list and the legal documents it can be argued that both Sin-šumu-lišir and Sin-šarru-iškun were in control of some Babylonian cities although there was no king of Babylon de iure.³⁸ The eunuch Sin-šumu-lišir is mentioned as king in the date formulas of some documents from Babylon, Nippur and Ru’a (in the territory of Nippur), and seemingly Sippar, dated up to the 6th month of his accession year. Na’aman (1991: 248) maintains that: “early in 626 Sšl rebelled and dominated northern Babylonia for several months, while approximately at the same time Npl rebelled in southern Babylonia”. In Da Riva’s opinion, the documents from Sippar allow us to reconstruct the temporary holding of this town by Sin-šumu-lišir, which lasted a few months (in 626 BC), before the town was retaken by Sin-šarru-iškun.³⁹ The latter lost the city definitely when it was conquered by Nabopolassar in 625 BC, after the whole Sippar region had been the theater of a fight between Assyrians and Babylonians in 626–625 BC.

Sin-šarru-iškun, on the other hand, is known from his own royal inscriptions and appears to have been recognized as king of Babylonia as revealed by date formulas in legal documents from various towns. In Na’aman’s reconstruction he was the legitimate heir of the throne to which he ascended in 627 BC and had to face the rebellion of Sin-šumu-lišir in 626 BC, when the latter took control of some cities and was perhaps an ally of Nabopolassar. According to another perspective—which takes into account archival texts from Uruk—Sin-šarru-iškun’s accession year should be dated to 628 BC, thus before the death of Kandalanu.⁴⁰

The lack of clear-cut documents and sound chronology has led to different reconstructions that, for the sake of brevity, can be summarized as follows: according to one interpretation, Sin-šarru-iškun claimed the Babylonian throne at the death of Assurbanipal and also claimed the throne of Assyria when Aššur-etel-ilani ascended it; according to a second interpretation, Sin-šarru-iškun ascended the throne of Assyria with minor turmoils at the death of his brother, but a rebellion arose against his rule in the years badly documented by the Chronicles (from 623 BC). In either case, the Assyrian internal struggle for the throne chronologically overlapped and interconnected with the mounting Babylonian rebellion, giving fuel to the anti-Assyrian party in Babylonian cities.

Let us return to the southern Assyrian outpost of Uruk. Nabopolassar (Nabû-aplu-uṣur) was seemingly a member of the town’s aristocracy. It has been hypothesized that he was actually a son of the Kudurru who had served as governor (šakin ṭēmi) of Uruk under Assurbanipal.⁴¹ From the dates of some archival texts it has been deduced that the town was in Nabopolassar’s hands when he took the throne of Babylonia in 626 BC and until his 3rd year of reign, when the town was besieged by the Assyrians.⁴² Some letters from Nineveh possibly date from this period and corroborate the hypothesis that the pro-Assyrian party had at a certain point opposed Nabopolassar, re-taken control of the town and therefore caused his reaction and the siege.⁴³

The case of Uruk, but also those of other towns, reveals how in the ever-fragmented situation of Babylonia, Assyrian control was based on the capacity to maintain in function a network of communication and consensus, and intervening quickly and successfully to sustain the pro-Assyrian parties and their interests. Uruk was seemingly a crucial enclave to keep the kingship of Babylonia under control and represented an Assyrian bulwark in the south towards the region of Sealand—which was particularly difficult to keep under authority because of its geographical and social landscapes—and had seemingly a role also in the relations with Elam.⁴⁴ This system, that exploited local forces, required anyway the employment of considerable resources to back the pro-Assyrian parties. It was evidently exposed to various risks, as the repeated Babylonian rebellions show, and it seems that renewed anti-Assyrian struggles in Babylonia determined a progressive deterioration of the Assyrian political, ideological and economic network in the south. In this situation, internal dynastic rivalries and the attempts to gain the favour of elites and cities by different Assyrian competitors for the throne could evidently have further weakened Assyrian grasp on Babylonia and opened the way to an alternative leadership, which in its turn stemmed from the same Assyrian organization of local power.

3 The Empire’s Overthrow

The first phases of the war between Nabopolassar and the Assyrians took place in Babylonia, since the Assyrians tried to overthrow Nabopolassar’s kingship. Our main source, the Babylonian Chronicles, incompletely covers the following events, but it seems that important cities such as Der passed to the Babylonians and that in a short time-span the Assyrian towns were attacked. When the Chronicles’ narrative resumes, the Medes appear on the scene. The Medes’ offensive was fatal to the enfeebled Assyrians, especially because the Medes were well acquainted with the Assyrian military machine.⁴⁵ Their attack on Arrapha (modern Kerkuk) in 615 BC—after the battle the Babylonians had fought in the region in 616—was an important contribution to the Babylonian strategy, since this city and her province appear to have always functioned as an Assyrian military headquarter for the operations in the south-east and as a fundamental connection with the Assyrian core.⁴⁶ According to the Babylonian Chronicle, Arrapha’s capitulation was followed, in the next year, by the conquest of Tarbiṣu—located a few kilometers north of Nineveh, and therefore by a direct menace to the capital and by the march southwards to besiege and sack Assur, the religious capital, ancient seat of the Assyrian dynasty, and a cosmopolitan centre where people of Egyptian and Zagric origin appear among the protagonists of the town’s economic life.⁴⁷

The archaeological evidence from Assur shows the violence of the attack, which began with the enemies breaching the Tabira Gate, situated in the northern section of the walls. The plunder and burning of temples and buildings followed and even reached the royal graves beneath the ancient palaces.⁴⁸ Traces of destruction and fire are also visible in the residential area, as well as of barricades within the town’s streets. Interesting are the clear indications that the city was prepared for an attack, since parts of the state buildings had been transformed into grain reserves—the burnt contents of which were still visible to the excavators.⁴⁹

According to the Babylonian chronicle it was next to the walls of Assur that the Medes stipulated peace and alliance with the Babylonians, which sanctioned the Median defection from their loyalty to the Assyrian dynasty to acknowledgment of the Babylonian one, as well as the recognizance of the Median’s role by the Babylonians, and possibly negotiated the terms of intervention and division of booty.

That the Median contribution was fundamental is also suggested by the other front of military operations, that shows how already in 616 BC Assyria was being closed in a grip that clasped both the Tigris and the Euphrates fronts. The Chronicle records a Babylonian offensive in 616 BC. that the Assyrians tried to stop from the fortress of Gablini.⁵⁰ The fortress was however taken, Mannean auxiliary troops captured, and Egyptian help was insufficient to recover this position. Babylonian conquest of, or the adhesion to Babylonian rule by towns and provinces under attack met with some resistance, as the opposition of the Middle Euphrates area to Nabopolassar in 613 BC attests. The Babylonian army had to overcome the resistance organized around the Euphratic fortresses and towns of Rahilu and Anat. And the case of Dur-Katlimmu, discussed below, suggests that in some cases the Babylonians might have had to come to terms with local authorities and forces.

In the core region of the empire the blow was directed with determination at annihilating the centre of power. In 612 BC Nineveh, a metropolis built to be the magnificent heart of a prosperous empire, not a stronghold to be easily defended, was assaulted by joint Babylonian and Median forces, taken after 3 months of desperate resistance, largely destroyed, looted and its people massacred.⁵¹ The reigning dynasty had no hope: Sin-šarru-iškun died and the prince Aššur-uballiṭ had to abandon the capital.

This event marks the end of the Assyrian empire, although the Assyrian prince organized a last resistance in Harran, trusting in Egyptian help,⁵² but finally capitulated in 609 BC. The Babylonian Chronicle records repeated incursions into Assyrian territory, as well as in the provinces of Naṣibina and Raṣappa,⁵³ after 612 BC and this is supported by archeological evidence of destruction, which is visible even in the countryside.⁵⁴

In general, it has been recognized that the destruction of the Assyrian centres in 612 BC was widespread, and was followed by what has been defined as a phase of squatters’ re-occupation. The lack of a clear-cut change in material culture from the previous period and the general great impoverishment and contraction of the settled urban areas suggest that neither the Babylonians nor the Medes consistently exercized their power in the area to restructure it and assign it a place in the new organization, so that the disastrous consequences of the destruction of the system of towns that had made Assyria the core of political and economic communication and exchange were still evident a couple of centuries later in Xenophon’s Anabasis.⁵⁵

Although scarcely documented, the years from ca. 620 to 609 BC are obviously crucial to an understanding of the fall of Assyria and its immediate aftermath. The documents from the ancient capital Assur pose some interesting questions. W. Andrae, who dug the site of Assur before World War I, clearly recognized evidence of destruction and the town’s subsequent deterioration, although some signs of continuity were also evident in some buildings, such as the “Große Haus”; moreover, he identified two temples that had been newly built in Babylonian style.⁵⁶ The evidence of reconstruction and resettlement has since often been discussed, but interpretations differ. Particularly interesting is the case of the temple complex designated A and N. Temple A is described by Miglus as not only a sanctuary “sondern auch ein Raum, in dem die alte kultische Tradition und die Reichsgeschichte in ständiger Erinnerung gehalten werden sollten”.⁵⁷ There is also evidence for the reconstruction of some residential buildings. K. Radner has recently argued that the temple complex was not associated with reconstruction after 614 BC, but rather to a disposition of Cyrus, the Persian emperor, who about 70 years later allowed the descendants of the deported Assur elite to come back to their hometown and rebuild the temple, similarly to what happened in Jerusalem.⁵⁸

The rich epigraphical remains from the town add useful but—at least at our present state of knowledge, not decisive—data on the situation. The main problem is the impossibility of fixing the chronology of the last years of the empire: the sequence of post-canonical eponyms is variously reconstructed and especially the years from 614 to 612 BC are disputed. This means that it is impossible to say if legal texts from the town date to before or after 614 BC, i.e. whether they might attest to the continuity of the city’s life after the plunder and, most importantly, provide clues concerning the rule imposed on the town.

The documentation, epigraphical and archaeological, from Dur-Katlimmu—which had been an important centre in the Khabur valley, in an intermediate position between the Assyrian core and the Syrian provinces—is clearer in this respect. The most relevant fact is the lack of destruction traces and the apparent cultural and material continuity from the Neo- to post-Assyrian phase, which is illustrated for instance by the pottery remains from the town’s main building, the “Rote Haus”, which, as proved by texts unearthed there, was in use after 612 BC. Text SH 199 is dated by an eponym not attested elsewhere, Se’-ila’i, and this fact suggests that it was a post-612 eponym.⁵⁹ The same text, as stressed by K. Radner has a particular formula against the breaking of the contract referring to the adê of the crown prince, and the scholar hypothesizes that this formula indicates adhesion to the Assyrian dynasty and its last representative, Aššur-uballiṭ, who attempted to resist in Harran. The same attitude would be expressed by the name of the eponym attested in texts from Guzana, i.e. the turtānu Nabû-mar-šarri-uṣur, whose name means “Nabû, protect the prince”. These are tiny hints that possibly Dur-Katlimmu was not attacked by the Babylonians and Medes, although still adhering to the Assyrian cause, and that during and slightly after the attack on Nineveh there were areas, even in Assur, where some traits of an Assyrian system could be maintained—as the use of eponym dates, instead of the Babylonian ones, would suggest.

Only a few years later after the last Assyrian opposition had been defeated, contracts were drafted in Dur-Katlimmu, still according to Assyrian conventions and in Assyrian script, but dated according to the Babylonian system—as demonstrated by a small group of texts dated to the 2nd and 5th year of Nebuchadnezer, king of Babylon.⁶⁰ Considering the information of the Babylonian Chronicle and the documents from Tušhan mentioned above, we wonder if the preservation of the city was due to her sudden acknowledgment of Babylonian leadership,⁶¹ or to the Babylonian strategy of control of the defeated country, which privileged the maintenance of some important hubs, located at the margins of what had been the ancient Assyrian core, after it had been devastated.

4 Concluding Remarks

In brief, the sources allow us to assess a series of facts, although doubts and obscurities remain. The destruction of Assyrian dominion was quick and complete, implemented by forces which originated from within the Assyrian system, despite their different ethnic and cultural characterizations.

At a general level, the progressive switch towards the preeminence of a theological interpretation of history—as is especially noticeable in Assyrian royal inscriptions from Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal, is a symptom of the growing need to buttress control of the empire with an ideological apparatus which provided an artificial explanation of shared belonging to a political body personified by the ruling king. This horizon acquired special importance vis-à-vis some specific problems the king had to cope with.

The first problem was the rivalry within the royal family. This is illustrated by various revolts that during the ninth to seventh centuries involved the main cities of the Assyrian heartland, which took the side of one or other contender.⁶² The participation of towns and officials of the area organized in the provincial system and especially of the so-called home provinces shows that different interests were at stake, and that the Assyrian dynasty was dependent upon a network of relations between the royal family and officialdom and urban aristocracies, especially in the kingdom’s core. Sennacherib-Esarhaddon’s succession was a particularly critical point and was accompanied by measures meant to secure the position of the heir apparent, such as the constitution of military corps directly at the orders of the queen mother and the crown prince,⁶³ but was nevertheless followed by open fighting and seemingly protracted conspiratory activity until the execution of the highest officials by Esarhaddon in 670 BC. This situation, obviously detrimental to the kingdom’s cohesion, contributed to foster a climate of suspicion and rivalry within the ruling class and the town communities, as letters of denunciations dated especially to the reigns of Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal show, and possibly alienated devotion to the ruling dynasty.

The other fundamental issue concerns the management of the extended empire which required optimization of the system of control and relations between the provinces and the centre, particularly important in some sensitive enclaves. The Assyrian monarchs and their functionaries organized an innovative and quite efficient system as far as communications and logistics were concerned, as can be gauged from the letters sent from the provinces to the capital, and that remained the basis for later imperial organizations. At the same time it is evident that this system came up against the limits represented by the necessity of educating a ruling class, civilian and military, in order to guarantee its absorption of the principles of Assyrian imperial ideology as well as the loyalty to the reigning dynasty. The diffusion of the symbols of Assyrian rule, the imposition of the Assyrian language as the administrative language in a multilingual territory, and the spread of Assyro-Babylonian culture were the means employed in addition to more immediately effective ones, such as deportations and the education at the Assyrian court of the offspings of the local elites, inclusion in the Assyrian core cities of foreign groups fully integrated in the civic and economic life of the urban community, as attested by the Egyptians in Assur, and training troops to fill the ranks of an armed force that Assyria alone could not sustain.

The problem was particularly acute in some areas due to their position in the geo-political landscape and their socio-economic and institutional structures, such as in the Zagric sector and Babylonia, where—although these contexts differed notably from one another—the Assyrians chose a partly similar strategy of control. The Assyrian reliance on local elites in the Zagros sector might be considered in comparison to the special relation with Uruk in southern Babylonia: both areas provided a support to Assyrian organization within their territories, and they were expected to continue during the worsening of relations with Babylonia. The Babylonian problem had not been solved during the preceding decades by the opposite, but equally costly, strategies of repression and favour, nor by Assurbanipal’s war against his “twin” brother Šamaš-šumu-ukin, king of Babylon—a war that had absorbed enormous resources, and had unleashed strife within Babylonian towns as the case of Uruk exemplifies.

If we can rely on the scarce written evidence concerning the empire’s last years, it may be observed that the Assyrian provincial system was still in function, but that defections and dearth of forces had almost transformed the Assyrian communication system into an adverse factor. Alliances, such as that with the Egyptians, were also functioning, but only to a limited extent, since the Egyptians seem to have profited by empowering of the western provinces of the empire and provided their help mainly to curb Babylonian expansion in that sector.

On one hand Assyria achieved the dimensions of a real empire, in which the centre was the connecting point of the whole apparatus through the involvement of local elites in government and their absorption of the imperial system and ideology, besides the organization of local and general infrastructures. On the other hand, these connecting ties were imperfectly organized, and exposed to the risk of excessive personalization, increasing costs to be maintained, and the creation of alternative leaderships, especially under the stimulus of changing economical and relational circuits that can not be clearly reconstructed on the basis of the extant sources. Already during Assurbanipal’s rule, and probably especially during the last and scarcely documented phase of his reign, these dynamics and problems reached a critical point and their combined negative effects were impossible to cope with.

The final destruction and dismantling of the offices and directive centre of the empire—with all its palace, urban and rural buildings—has been largely attributed to the ravaging wrath of the Medes, eager to plunder the enormous richness of the Assyrian cities, but was probably planned by those who were conscious of the potential, actual and symbolic, of the imperial apparatus, that only complete erasure could have prevented from regaining control of its former relations, and of the need of re-creating these symbols in the new centre of imperial power.