PART VII
Chapter 17
The year 1200 BCE is traditionally seen as the start of the Iron Age in the Near East, the third phase of the Stone-Bronze-Iron Age pattern to ancient history invented by scholars in the nineteenth century. But the moment of the division between the Bronze and Iron Ages is fairly arbitrary. The earliest known evidence for iron smelting has been found in Anatolia at a site that was occupied long before, during the Assyrian Colonies period, but it seems to have had little impact and the technology didn’t spread at that time.1 By about 1000 BCE, there’s more evidence for iron smelting in Anatolia and in the Levant, but, even then, it didn’t immediately change much of anything, even for the people who had access to it. Early iron was not necessarily superior to bronze in strength or availability, and it wasn’t adopted instantly. Eventually, iron did replace bronze as the metal of choice for weapons and tools, but this change took many generations.2
Small Kingdoms in the Eleventh and Tenth Centuries BCE
During the first two centuries of the Iron Age, after the famine and destruction that marked the end of the Late Bronze Age, no great power dominated any part of the region—not in the Levant, Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia, or Elam (Map 4). If iron technology made any difference at all in people’s lives, it’s hard to detect. Small kingdoms continued to exist, but few of them produced many records. They probably didn’t need written records in the same way as before, when vast administrations had been keeping track of taxes, corvée laborers, a military draft, and redistribution of resources, and when diplomatic letters had been written and delivered over long distances. The rulers of the smaller kingdoms of the eleventh and tenth centuries BCE had fewer uses for writing, and they left just a scattering of documents behind. Even Egypt slipped into a time of political disunity and economic weakness during the eleventh and the first half of the tenth centuries BCE. As in the sixteenth century BCE, this era is often referred to as a “Dark Age” simply because we know very little about it.
Map 4 The Near East from 1000 to 323 bce
Three of the peoples that flourished between the eleventh and tenth centuries BCE ultimately did have a powerful influence on future events. None of them kept records in cuneiform, so they don’t exactly fit the profile of the cultures discussed in this book, but they were too influential to leave out here.
One was the Arameans. Over the subsequent centuries, their language of Aramaic became the most widely spoken and written language in the Near East, even though they never ruled an empire or conquered other regions.
The origins of this group are rather obscure. Inscriptions by Middle Assyrian kings of the late twelfth century BCE include some of the first references to the Arameans, whose homeland seems to have been north of the Euphrates, between the Balikh and Habur Rivers.3 It’s possible that they had lived in this region for centuries, or it could be that they had arrived from elsewhere. We just don’t know.
Although they spoke a common language, they were not, strictly speaking, one people. Several different Aramaic-speaking groups, often described as tribes, had spread out across a large area.4 Most of the Aramean kingdoms in Syria and northern Mesopotamia were referred to as the “House of” some shared ancestor.5 Like so many Mesopotamian groups, the Arameans’ sense of kinship with some kind of larger household (whether real or mythical) seems to have been a principal source of their feelings of identity.
For reasons that are hard to explain, by the first millennium BCE, Aramaic had largely replaced Akkadian in Mesopotamia and Hurrian in Syria as the most common spoken language of the Near East. Aramaic only grew in influence through the middle of the first millennium BCE, and, although it was later replaced as the lingua franca in the region by Greek and then Arabic, it is still spoken in some communities today.6
Aramaic is a Semitic language, like Akkadian, and speakers of Aramaic and Akkadian could probably understand one another reasonably well without translation. Aramaic had an advantage, though—it was much easier to write. And that was thanks to the second group of people that flourished in this time—the Phoenicians.
The Phoenicians have a familiar name, but they were not actually referred to as Phoenicians during the eleventh century BCE. That term only came to be used for them much later. Josephine Quinn, a historian at Oxford University, has argued that the so-called Phoenicians didn’t even have a sense of shared identity as a people.7 The area identified as Phoenicia by the later Greeks and Romans was a strip of land on the coast of Canaan, only about 240 kilometers (150 miles) from north to south and barely 50 kilometers (30 miles) from west to east at its widest point. It wasn’t united under a single government; in the eleventh century BCE, the area was home to four diminutive kingdoms: Arwad, Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre. The inhabitants of these cities specialized in seaborne trade, not unlike their entrepreneurial predecessors in Ugarit. They even traded in the same goods as the Ugaritians, especially purple dye and cedar. They had been subject to Egypt during the Late Bronze Age, but flourished as separate small kingdoms after the great powers collapsed. Like the people of Ugarit, they used an alphabetic script, and theirs is the one that was borrowed to write Aramaic, and also gave rise to all the subsequent European and Near Eastern alphabets.
Their alphabet had only twenty-two letters, all of them consonants, which made it a simpler script to learn than Akkadian cuneiform, for which one needed to learn at least 200 signs. The alphabetic signs themselves were also easier to write, consisting of fairly simple shapes that could be drawn by anyone, in contrast to cuneiform’s complicated constructions of numerous wedges, each impressed separately with a stylus. Once the alphabet had developed, it was adopted in many of the regions the Phoenicians came in contact with. And because they were traders, they ended up being in contact with a great many regions around the Mediterranean.
The third people who flourished in the era of small kingdoms were the Israelites, southern neighbors to the Phoenicians, with whom they traded. Their history is known to us because the Israelites developed a tradition of writing about their past, resulting in the Hebrew Bible. It is one of the most remarkable sources for ancient history, written by many different authors over more than a thousand years. Some of the earliest passages of the Bible may have been written during this time, the eleventh century BCE, when the kingdom of Israel was first founded.
During most of the Late Bronze Age, no references to Israelites (outside the Bible) are known from Canaan or Egypt or anywhere else. The cities in the region, when the Amarna letters were written, for example, were clearly occupied by Canaanites. But the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah (1213–1204 BCE) recorded, in a list of his Canaanite conquests, that “Israel is laid waste and his seed is not.”8 It seems therefore that the Israelites were, by the late thirteenth century bce, living in Canaan. According to the Bible, the kingdom of Israel formed later, under a king named Saul, and remained unified under kings David and Solomon. It later split into two kingdoms. Israel, in the north, retained the land’s original name, but eventually created a new capital at a city called Samaria, while Judah, in the south, maintained the Israelite capital at Jerusalem. This split took place around 925 BCE, just a few years before the Assyrians began an unprecedented military expansion, to which we will return.9
The Israelites, like the Arameans, adopted the Phoenicians’ alphabetic script to write their own language of Hebrew. The early years of the Israelite kingdom are known from the Bible rather than from documents found on archaeological sites. In Israel (as in the Aramaic, Canaanite, and Phoenician kingdoms), day-to-day records, such as those written on clay tablets in much of the rest of the Near East, would have been written on perishable organic materials like papyrus and they haven’t survived. Israel and Judah were small kingdoms in their time, especially in comparison with the great power of Assyria that grew to dominate them. But they have left a huge legacy: the Bible itself, of course, along with their monotheistic religion that lies at the roots of modern Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Assyrian Rebirth
As for the Assyrians—they became the greatest power the region had ever seen. Like all the other great powers of the Late Bronze Age, the Middle Assyrian Empire had gone into decline in the early twelfth century bce, and from the mid-eleventh to the mid-tenth century the kingdom of Assyria was limited to its heartland, the area around Ashur. The kings continued to maintain records, and scribes continued to learn to write in cuneiform (the same was true in Babylonia), but in much smaller numbers than before.
When the Assyrian kings began to build up their military again, in the late tenth century, the world around Assyria was very different from the one of the Late Bronze Age. No other state had the resources to stand up to them. The old power balance that had maintained the brotherhood of great kings was gone. The Assyrians could sweep in and conquer pretty much any land they wanted to. And they did want to.
The Assyrians had honed and emphasized their military prowess in the Late Bronze Age and they continued to do so. Every king was a warrior, as were all his officials, no matter what other roles they held. Even a king’s barber, his cupbearer, and his queen were in charge of troops. Assyrian kings simply had no choice but to lead the army out on campaign on a regular basis. Whereas Old Babylonian kings, for example, had plenty of different achievements by which they chose to mark their years—offerings to gods, canal constructions, dedications of priestesses, building renovations, and so on—almost every year in an Assyrian king’s reign was remembered as being the occasion of a particular military expedition (or several). This new era of Assyrian aggression is known as the Neo-Assyrian period.
The Neo-Assyrian kings started out by “reclaiming” lands that they thought of as belonging to Assyria, lands that had been within the orbit of the Middle Assyrian Empire more than a century earlier, which were mostly to the north and west of the Assyrian heartland. The regions to the north, around Lake Van, were in a land known as Urartu,10 whereas those to the west in Syria had largely been settled by Arameans. Later, the Assyrians expanded beyond there, into regions that had never been subject to Assyria, and they also reconquered their venerable southern neighbor, Babylonia.
For this Neo-Assyrian period (911–609 BCE), the choices of men and women that we could focus on are almost endless. Between the letters, administrative documents, royal inscriptions, and abundant other texts that survive, an absolute sea of names presents itself. Unlike for most earlier periods, one could fill an entire book just with the history of one particular king and his entourage (and authors have done so),11 because so very much is known about them. Their queens, sons, daughters, officials, rivals, doctors, diviners, scribes, priests, priestesses—all were named and many of them wrote letters, as you will see in the next chapter, about king Esarhaddon.
For this chapter, though, I want to go in pursuit of two categories of people whose names rarely survive, but who are crucial to our understanding of this era. The first category is that of the artists and sculptors who created remarkable stone relief sculptures that lined the walls of Assyrian palaces. The second category is that of the people conquered by the Neo-Assyrian armies, some of them members of the foreign courts, but most of them normal everyday people, many of whom were uprooted from their homes and farms and deported hundreds of miles to start new lives somewhere else.
These two categories may seem unrelated, but that is not the case. It is only because of the artists that we really know much about the deportees. These people are almost invisible in Assyrian written documentation, where they were largely reduced to numbers and place-names, but they were portrayed with attention to detail by the Assyrian court sculptors. They may not have names that we know, but real individuals lie behind the representations on the walls of the palaces.
If you walk through the ancient Near Eastern galleries of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, or many other museums around the world, you cannot miss the work of the extraordinary Assyrian sculptors. Their masterpieces were so abundant in the palaces in the Assyrian capitals at Kalhu, Dur-Sharrukin, and Nineveh that they can become almost overwhelming. You could sit and look at just one relief panel for hours and fail to take in all its detail, and there were acres of these panels lining the walls of the palaces. An army of sculptors must have been involved in carving them. But these men didn’t sign their work and were never credited by the kings, so they remain anonymous to us.
Before looking for evidence for them, though, we need to meet Ashurnasirpal II, who was the first king to employ such sculptors to create a visual story of his achievements. He was also one of the many Assyrian kings who displaced thousands of people from one part of the empire to another.
Ashurnasirpal II: A Militaristic King
King Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BCE) was not a modest man, but then, you would not expect him to be. He was one of the most prolific builders in Assyrian history, as well as being one of the kings most responsible for developing what we know as the Neo-Assyrian Empire. He ruled near the beginning of this new and dramatic era for Assyria, and for the whole Near East.
He created a model of a militaristic, untouchable, divinely appointed, and dangerous Neo-Assyrian king, a model that echoed for almost 300 years across the reigns of his successors. Throughout his annals—the annual records of his achievements—when he described what he thought of as “his” conquests and “his” building projects, he tended not to credit anyone else, not his army, and not his architects, builders, or artists. He did everything himself. He repeatedly wrote, concerning his victories, “I besieged the city and conquered it,” or “I felled 600 of their combat troops,” and so on, and of his constructions, “I rebuilt this city,” and “I built its wall.”12 This, of course, had long been a common conceit in royal inscriptions. Ever since the Early Dynastic period, kings had used the first-person singular to take credit for actions that, in truth, had been organized and implemented by hordes of officials and workers. But in the case of Ashurnasirpal II, the achievements he took credit for were on a different scale, and the hyperbole of his claims could be breathtaking.
In his longest inscription, from a temple to the god Ninurta in the city of Kalhu, he used twenty-eight different epithets and titles to first introduce himself, starting with “(I,) Ashurnasirpal, strong king,” and moving on (thirteen epithets later) to “valiant man who acts with the support of (the god) Ashur, his lord and has no rival among the princes of the four quarters.” He continued the crescendo of self-adulation with the description of himself as a “mighty flood-tide which has no opponent . . . who treads upon the necks of his foes, trampler of all enemies,” and reached the blatantly false statement that he “has conquered all lands . . . he who is victorious over all lands.”13 Ashurnasirpal certainly was aware that there were lands beyond Assyria that he had not conquered, but that was not the point. The god Ashur had made him the ruler of the world, so he could claim this as a fait accompli. It was inevitable.
The litany of self-praise continued for dozens more lines, including, “I am king, I am lord, I am praiseworthy, I am exalted, I am important, I am magnificent, I am foremost, I am a hero, I am a warrior, I am a lion, and I am virile.” It went on and on, as though he was in such a frenzy of self-glorification that he found it hard to stop.
Finally, he reached the story of his first years on the throne, which comprised one long inventory of conquests. With almost every victory over a city or kingdom he noted that “I carried off prisoners and possessions from them, (and) burnt the cities.”14 The relentless descriptions of military victories continued for 300 lines before a brief pause for the one-line description of a wild animal hunt (“I killed 40 strong wild bulls on the other bank of the Euphrates . . .”) and another line about founding two new cities, one on each bank of the Euphrates, and one of them (you will not be surprised to hear) called Kar-Ashurnasirpal. Then the tales of military campaigns, full of glorious conquests, elaborate tribute proffered by groveling vassals, and the unending support of the gods, started up again for another eighty-two lines.
It’s been estimated that Ashurnasirpal II led an army of about 20,000 soldiers,15 though in his time they were largely farmers called up seasonally for military service, as in all previous eras of Mesopotamian history. They probably were highly successful in battle, as the king claimed, but they couldn’t campaign year-round.
Only at the very end of the inscription did Ashurnasirpal come to mention one of his biggest and most expensive projects: he had moved the capital city. This was a particularly radical idea in Assyria because the original and very ancient capital city, Ashur, was intimately bound to the kingdom and the state god: they all shared the same name. As we have seen, the god Ashur was embodied in the very landscape of the city of Ashur as the divine force of the rocky plateau on which the city was built.
Ashurnasirpal chose for his new capital a city that had fallen into ruin—Kalhu, which was to the north of Ashur and more centrally located in the kingdom. He wrote that “this city had become dilapidated; it lay dormant (and) had turned into ruin hills. I rebuilt this city.”16 He didn’t want to build on top of the previous ruins, though, as had been the norm when other cities had been rebuilt in the past. Instead, “I cleared away the old ruin hill (and) dug down to water level; I sank (the foundation pit) down to a depth of 120 layers of brick.” Imagine the manpower needed for this, before the new city even began to be built. And then the king commissioned the construction of a city wall, along with public buildings, nine temples,17 and an immense palace. In his inscription in the Ninurta temple, in contrast to his detailed accounts of his wars, he included just a few lines about the new capital, a project that took years to complete by tens of thousands of workmen, to say nothing of all the engineers and supervisors.
Once the city was built, as he wrote, “I took people which I had conquered from lands over which I had gained dominion. . . . I settled (them) therein.”18 This effort to create a cosmopolitan capital was an innovation; Kalhu would be a microcosm of the empire. To celebrate the completion of his new city, Ashurnasirpal II threw a ten-day party, attended by 69,574 people from across his empire and beyond. The king described the menu in proud detail.19 He fed his guests meat (18,300 oxen, sheep, and deer were slaughtered and cooked), and poultry (34,000 birds), along with vast quantities of fish, eggs, bread, cheese, beer, wine, fruits, nuts, and vegetables. He pampered his guests: “I gave them food, I gave them drink, I had them bathed, I had them anointed,” he wrote.20 He clearly anticipated that everyone would go home in awe of his wealth and largesse.
Of all the new buildings in Kalhu, Ashurnasirpal II was most proud of his palace. It’s known to archaeologists as the Northwest Palace. He recounted its wonders in a different inscription that he had chiseled into many of the decorative alabaster slabs that lined the mudbrick walls.21 He boasted of the many types of woods that had been used in the palace construction, presumably for reinforcing the brick walls, and for the ceilings and decoration: cedar, cypress, juniper, boxwood, terebinth, and tamarisk.22 He noted the giant sculptures of fantastic animals that guarded its doorways: “I made (replicas of) beasts of mountains in white limestone and . . . alabaster (and) stationed (them) at its doors.” These were known as lamassu figures (see Fig. 17.1). They were (and are) enormous, ranging from 3 meters (10 feet) to 4.25 meters (14 feet) tall, towering over anyone who walked through the doorways. Each had the body of a bull or lion, the wings of an eagle, and the head of a man. On their heads they wore horned crowns, revealing them to be gods.
Fig. 17.1 Alabaster lamassu sculpture (human-headed winged lion) from the palace of King Ashurnasirpal II of Assyria at Kalhu, 865–860 bce. (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Within the doorframes that were guarded by the lamassus, “I fastened with bronze bands doors of cedar, cypress, dapranu-juniper, boxwood, (and) meskannu-wood.”23 The wood that was used to make these doors has long since disintegrated, but the doors must have been beautifully crafted in order to warrant being mentioned in several inscriptions. Some bronze bands survive from doors that Ashurnasirpal commissioned in another city—each one was decorated with intricate scenes of Ashurnasirpal’s great achievements.24
Sculptors Working for Ashurnasirpal II
As for the sculpted alabaster panels, which are the most striking objects to survive from the palace, Ashurnasirpal noted only that “I depicted in greenish glaze on their walls my heroic praises, in that I had gone right across highlands, lands, (and) seas, (and) the conquest of all lands.”25 Who designed these sculptures? Who carved them? The king didn’t say. The alabaster reliefs represented, in visual form, some of the same events that were commemorated in Ashurnasirpal’s extensive written inscriptions. They represented a fascinating innovation. Previous stone reliefs commissioned by kings had usually shown just one scene, like Naram-Sin’s victory stela, or at most a few scenes, in registers on a single block, like Ur-Namma’s stela. Ashurnasirpal II wanted to tell a story on multiple blocks that lined the walls of a room, as though in a giant graphic novel on stone, advancing from plot point to plot point as one walked past them.
Although Ashurnasirpal’s were the earliest of this type of narrative relief sculpture, the idea behind them may not have been entirely new. Perhaps earlier palaces had boasted similar narrative images, but in the form of wall paintings, which have disintegrated. (The fragmentary frescoes in Zimri-Lim’s earlier Mari palace suggest this may have been the case, though his were images not of warfare, but of ceremonial processions.) If so, Ashurnasirpal II made such visual records more durable by having them carved and painted on stone instead of wall plaster. And the techniques and scale of the stone carving represented something brand new.
The stone slabs bearing the reliefs were to stand 2 meters (6 feet) tall, most of them with two horizontal registers of images on each slab. A lot of artisans must have been needed to realize the king’s dream, and many of them must have been trained at one time to do stone carving on a different scale from before. Anyone learning a craft or profession did so by apprenticing to a master, and such skills often passed down from a man to his sons, or from a woman to her daughters. The unnamed sculptors of Ashurnasirpal’s reliefs all had a sure hand by the time the final sculptures were carved, but they must have gone through many phases of training to reach that point. The apprentice sculptors learned to use the hammers, chisels, points, and drills that they would need; they learned to smooth the stone with abrasives, and to create shallow planes on the stone that created an illusion of much greater depth.
The relief sculptures of battle scenes and sieges were intended to show that Ashurnasirpal II and his army had traveled across the world (or at least the world that they knew), overcoming every difficulty, easily bringing every city into the empire. No mountain was too high, no river too deep or fast to be crossed; the army kept moving and kept conquering. No other land stood a chance of resisting.26 More than that, the reliefs (like the royal inscriptions) needed to show that the world outside Assyria, which was seen as chaotic and strange, had been brought into a comforting order by becoming Assyrian.27 Another message that was to be projected in the sculptures was that Ashurnasirpal was the gods’ choice to lead the Assyrians in this inevitable (as he saw it) domination of the known world. This was a lot of propaganda for the sculptors to convey.
The process behind the creation of the reliefs must have been complex, and must have involved many people. First, the king, in consultation with his officials, diviners, and priests, had to decide what scenes he wanted and where in the palace he wanted them, for maximum effect on viewers and the most auspicious involvement of the gods.28 The images needed to represent real achievements that had taken place while also creating the morality tale of Assyria’s inevitable domination, for the edification of palace visitors. In addition to images of war, Ashurnasirpal II decided that he needed scenes of lion hunts and of the performance of rituals (both starring himself, of course).
His immense throne room, which was 45.5 meters (150 feet) long and 10.5 meters (almost 35 feet) wide,29 would feature relief sculptures that fulfilled a different purpose, ones showing himself flanked by gods, genies, sacred trees, and other symbols that would be brought to divine life so as to actually protect him. Sculptures of this kind ended up being the most common reliefs in the palace; more than half of the stone slabs portray various kinds of religious scenes.30 The sculptures were to be placed carefully to have the greatest effect on visitors, even taking into consideration the locations of doors and lines of sight.31
During the second stage, after planning, an artist (or several) began to design the reliefs, addressing in visual form all the components of the king’s desired message. Who were these artists? How were the plans sketched out? What medium was used? Unfortunately, there are no easy answers to these questions. It seems likely that in the early planning stages, the artists incised sketches of the proposed scenes onto wax tablets mounted on wooden boards.32 They may also have made small models, perhaps of clay.
We can get a glimpse of this process from the words of an artist named Nabu-ashared, who was commissioned to create a statue of a later Neo-Assyrian king (though it apparently was not a wall relief, in this case). He had been working on drafts for the sculpture with some other artists, but they were not in agreement on particular details. So Nabu-ashared sent some sketches and models to the king and wrote to him about them: “We have now sent two ro[yal im]ages to the king. I myself sketched the royal image which is an outline. They fashioned the royal image which is in the round. The king should examine them, and whichever the king finds acceptable we will execute accordingly.”33 Now he came to his particular concerns: “Let the king pay attention to the hands, the chin, and the hair.” Nabu-ashared alerted the king about the disagreements among the artists regarding how the king’s arm and scepter should be portrayed. He (not-too-subtly) campaigned for his own design and for some royal support: “As for the royal image which they are making, the scepter is lying across his arm and his arm is resting on his thighs. I myself do not agree with this and I will not fashion (it so). I could speak with them about features—about anything whatsoever—but they wouldn’t listen to me.”34 No doubt if he got the king’s approval, the other artists would do as Nabu-ashared wished.
Ashurnasirpal’s artists might well have had similar disagreements and questions. Given the vast number of individual stone slabs that they were designing, the consultation process must have been long and possibly contentious. One can imagine one of Ashurnasirpal’s artists leaning over a wax tablet, trying to come up with a way to show enough soldiers, horses, and chariots to indicate the might of the army, along with an imposing image of the king (who needed to appear on many panels), and a convincing representation of, for example, a besieged city and its defenders. People and animals had to seem to stand behind one another, though the reliefs would not be deeply incised. Perhaps the artist erased the image from his tablet many times before coming up with the solution for each composition.
In their designs, the artists followed the conventions of Assyrian relief sculpture. Bodies could be shown either frontally or from the side; the musculature beneath the skin should be carefully observed and represented, but faces were always in profile and expressionless. No one was ever shown smiling or frowning, no one had wrinkles or hollow cheeks, and no one ever looked out at the viewer. Also common to the Assyrian style was that artists included minute details—exact depictions of the jewelry and embroidery on clothing, for example—so that the closer you looked at the sculptures, the more you saw.35
The men who designed the religious scenes—the sacred trees, genies, libation scenes, divine figures, and so on—were probably not just artists, but priestly scholars as well.36 They needed to have a great deal of knowledge about the divine world in order to create scenes that would have the power to protect the king.
Eventually the king (along with his advisors, diviners, and priests) must have approved a set of designs for the sculptures, so, in the third stage of the process, the actual manufacture got underway. Most importantly, the stone blocks had to be quarried and transported to the palace. The colossal lamassu bull-figures that guarded the doorways were roughly shaped at the quarry before transport. We know this because stone reliefs from the palace of a later king, Sennacherib (705–681 bce), actually showed the (very difficult) process of quarrying and transporting an unfinished lamassu.
In the first scene, the alabaster was being chiseled into an oblong shape from the living rock, as dozens of prisoners of war with baskets on their backs climbed up and down the steep sides of the quarry (see Fig. 17.2). The baskets of the men struggling on their way up were full of rocky debris. The baskets of the men coming back down were empty, as they tripped and dislodged loose boulders in their hurry to return to the bottom to pick up more rocks. Their speed was no doubt influenced by the Assyrian armed guards posted around their work area.37
Fig. 17.2 Gypsum relief, and close-up, showing workmen removing stone from a quarry during the carving of a lamassu sculpture, from the palace of King Sennacherib of Assyria at Nineveh, 700-692 bce. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
Once the basic shape of the lamassu had been separated from the native rock, it was hauled out of the quarry and across the countryside on a massive boat-shaped sled that rolled over logs. At the back of the sled, men manipulated a giant lever to gradually ease it forward. At the front, dozens more prisoners of war leaned forward, putting all their weight and effort into pulling the four ropes attached to the sled.38 Foremen with sticks stood ready to lash any worker who was not pulling hard enough. The process must have been hot, exhausting, and loud, with men shouting at the workers, and punctuated by blasts from two men with trumpets who rode on top of the sculpture itself.
Finishing touches on the lamassus were added later. In a letter to a later king, an official wrote about this: “As to the bull colossi about which the king my lord wrote to me, I have worked out their positions at the . . . palaces and they are hewing them.” He continued, noting that “they will trim the big ones and we shall place them before the middlemost gate.”39 Likewise, the limestone panels were probably carved to a rectangular shape at the quarry, but left blank to be finished later in situ. Transporting them to the palace was done by boat: “Let the king, my lord, send word that they bring (boats) [to me] . . . so that I can get the stone slabs across.”40
Once the blocks were in place, the master artist transferred his drawings from the preliminary sketches to the surface of the stone,41 after which all the sculptors, many of whom must have trained just for Ashurnasirpal’s building program, began chiseling away, presumably following the drawn lines, to create the relief sculptures. The hands of different artists can sometimes be distinguished from one another, as some created thicker or thinner versions of the same basic image.42
They were masters at their art, carving away the background and creating a smooth, flat alabaster backdrop from which their figures stood out. They paid close attention to detail; so much so, that some studies of Assyrian textiles have been done based only on their representations in relief sculptures.43 Details like the curls in hair and the embroidery on clothing were added with a sharp point, toward the end of the process.44
The artists worked with scribes who laid out inscriptions in cuneiform that accompanied the images, and whose words were carved into the stone by masons.45 In Ashurnasirpal’s palace, the inscription was written between the two horizontal scenes on each block, repeating over and over throughout the palace. In some other buildings, his choice of inscriptions varied. On one occasion an official hadn’t been given instructions about inscriptions for a temple wall, but he knew they needed to be there. He wrote to the king, first quoting another man: “ ‘Should we really not put any inscriptions in the walls of the temple?’ I am now writing to the king, my lord: let one inscription be written and sent to me (as a model), and let them write the rest according to it and put them in the wall of the temple.”46
After the reliefs had been carved, they would have been painted, presumably by artisans with different expertise from that of the sculptors. The painters used surprisingly bright colors, traces of which have survived. Trees were painted with black trunks and green leaves.47 An attendant was dressed entirely in red.48 The harness of one horse was found to have been painted in bright red and blue stripes.49 The sculptures might even have looked almost gaudy to modern eyes, familiar as we are with the plain stone of Assyrian reliefs, stripped of their ancient color.
Every scene is a window onto the era. Admittedly they are all full of propaganda, but so are the royal inscriptions. And, unlike in the royal inscriptions, the battle scenes do not permit Ashurnasirpal II to take sole credit for every victory. They depict many other individuals who fought or helped with the campaigns. In some, the king dominates the picture, but in others he merges with the crowds. He is depicted as being of normal height but can always be distinguished by his distinctive headdress—a flat-topped conical hat with a small point on the top. Only the king could wear it. The images also include details that the king never thought to include in an inscription: the types of weapons used on campaign, the shapes of the chariots, the strategies for undermining city walls, and so much more, including representations of the treatment of the defeated enemies.
We tend to think of ancient warfare as being full of pitched battles on open fields, thousands of chariots and cavalry charging at one another, dirt flying from the horses’ hooves, infantry engaged in one-on-one sword fights or lobbing showers of arrows toward the opposing army, a riot of violence resulting in a bloodied plain strewn with bodies. But such battles were actually very rare.50 They were rare enough that the names of the battles were remembered and the events retold for centuries. The Battle of Kadesh, as we have seen, marked the only occasion when two of the great kings of the Late Bronze Age met on the same battlefield. And even when such confrontations did take place, they were planned in advance, organized by diplomats, and timed on the basis of propitious omens from the gods. The result of such a battle was also usually seen as definitive. One didn’t need to have any more.51
Given the power and size of the Assyrian army, few of Assyria’s adversaries had any desire to meet them on the battlefield. When Ashurnasirpal’s army showed up, people were much more likely to retreat behind the high fortified walls of their city and to try to defend it. Small towns tended to fall easily, but a major city with strong defenses could hold out for months, even years.52 Not every siege resulted in a violent conquest, though. The Assyrians could be effective at persuading the inhabitants of cities to surrender. They promised amnesty and were true to their word; populations that surrendered were not killed (though vast amounts of tribute were required of the local king and much of the population was still often deported). But if the city didn’t give in, the Assyrians were expert at sieges, and likely to succeed. Siege warfare was much more common as the subject of palace wall reliefs than were pitched battles.
In one remarkable panel from Ashurnasirpal’s palace, the artist and sculptors managed to depict, in an animated scene of troops battling for control of a city, just about every tactic the Assyrians utilized during a siege (see Fig. 17.3).53 Three walls, one inside the other, protected the besieged inhabitants. The walls were topped with triangular crenellations and pierced by arched doorways, with turreted towers flanking the main entranceway. From behind the walls, the local soldiers had their bows drawn, ready to rain arrows down upon the invading Assyrians. Some had thrown flaming torches. One man, though, had put down his bow and looked nervously behind him. Assyrian archers were never shown dropping their bows; this gesture showed that the enemy was not going to win.54 In art commissioned for the palace, as in the king’s inscriptions, the enemy never won.55
Fig. 17.3 Gypsum relief showing the troops of Ashurnasirpal II of Assyria besieging a city, with close-up of archers, from the palace at Kalhu, 865-860 bce. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
All was not going well for the city’s defenders. A woman at the top of a tower raised her arms, perhaps in surrender or horror. One Assyrian soldier crouched on the ground, his bow drawn, ready to fire, as another held up a large shield to protect them both. The artist showed just the two soldiers in this pose but they represented any number of troops. That was a common convention in battle scenes. For every soldier and civilian depicted in the art, hundreds of real people had experienced the event, performing the same risky actions, and often dying in the process.
Other Assyrians in the scene were busily breaking a hole in the outside wall—the artist showed the bricks tumbling. The wall was barely standing; it was shown, frozen, just before its collapse. Another soldier had created a tunnel and was already crawling through the outer wall. To the right of the scene we see that the Assyrians had rolled in a huge battering ram, covered in armor and positioned to attack. An archer and his shield bearer were positioned on its turret, and the crown prince and his shield bearer stood behind it. The battering ram even bore a decorative plaque at the front, showing a helmeted soldier, or perhaps the king himself, in miniature, launching himself forward, his bow drawn. Throughout the scene, the artist included the figures of enemy soldiers falling from the ramparts, their limbs flailing, their hair in disarray.
Ever since the Early Dynastic period, enemy soldiers had been portrayed lying on the ground beneath the wheels of the chariots and the hooves of the donkeys or horses of the victors. This was true in the scenes from Ashurnasirpal’s palace as well, and the weakness of the enemy in comparison to the Assyrian army was a constant theme. Art historians have argued that every detail of the reliefs was designed to show the Assyrians as inevitably victorious and divinely ordained to dominate their enemies.56
Be that as it may, and without breaking the no-facial-expression rule that applied to every person in the scenes, the artists managed to portray the enemies of Assyria with humanity. In one scene, a soldier, whose back had been pierced by two Assyrian arrows, struggled to raise himself onto his hands and knees, his left leg bent, his right leg stretched out behind him, his body a study in futile effort, as the horses pulling the king’s chariot heedlessly galloped over him.57 What did the king want the viewer to think by including individuals like these? That they were inferior and deserved to die? Perhaps, but by emphasizing their suffering, the artist seems to have given the viewer permission to feel for them, or perhaps to worry that he or she might become one of them. Fear this king, says the image; he kills indiscriminately. You too could lose your home and family. You too could become food for vultures.
Deportees
The wall panels in Ashurnasirpal’s palace also reveal a lot about the fate of the people who ended up on the wrong side of all those arrows and daggers after the Assyrian battles were over, the fate of those who died and those who didn’t die. The many images of beheaded bodies, of Assyrian soldiers carrying severed heads, and of scribes counting piles of heads—these could not have been fictional. They were battlefield realities, confirmed by Ashurnasirpal’s own inscriptions. When his troops conquered a city named Nishtun, for example, he wrote that “I felled 260 of their combat troops with the sword. I cut off their heads and formed (therewith) a pile.”58 The same was true in the descriptions of many other Assyrian conquests. Representations of captives and deportees also ring true. Certainly they were included as propaganda, but they were based on real people and can be interpreted like any primary source.
Ashurnasirpal II, like many kings before him, used deportation as a means to quell rebellions. Inhabitants of conquered cities were rounded up and forced to march to new lands where they would begin new lives, far from their homelands. The Assyrians might have rationalized deportation in many ways—perhaps the people needed to be punished for their resistance; or the new land needed cultivation and the government would benefit from the taxes on newly farmed land; or the people were less likely to rebel if far from home; or they would culturally become Assyrians by being compelled to live with others. It could be simply that the god Ashur had willed that they should move—but, whatever the rationale, deportations caused great suffering to those forced to move.
The officials chose which individuals to deport and which to allow to remain; we don’t know how. Royal family members and officials often were led away, along with professionals who had valuable expertise, such as singers and physicians. But many manual laborers and farmers were chosen for deportation as well. Relief sculptures show that armed guards led separate groups of male and female prisoners to King Ashurnasirpal II, who stood under a canopy, attended by more armed men, along with an all-important servant waving a fan to swat away the flies.59 The captives might have been powerful leaders of the conquered city, humiliated now, and forced to grovel before the Assyrian king. From there, the deportees were sent off across the empire, while the people left in the city were obligated to pay crippling amounts of tribute.
But Ashurnasirpal II’s approach to maintaining his empire, described in his inscriptions and seen in his reliefs, doesn’t seem to have worked for long. Without a clear imperial structure, it was fear alone that initially kept tribute payments coming. But after a while, subsequent, less fearsome, kings watched the river of wealth from conquered lands dry up. By the early eighth century bce, governors who supposedly ruled on behalf of Assyrian kings were inheriting their positions and behaving like independent rulers. Some of them commissioned inscriptions that give no clue that they even had an overlord. Many lands that were nominally subject to Assyria stopped paying tribute.
At this point Assyria was no longer the great behemoth that Ashurnasirpal II had created; it was now matched, in its power, by the neighboring lands of Babylonia to the south, Elam to the east, and Urartu to the north, and by more distant Egypt far to the southwest. A number of smaller kingdoms even managed to exist independently of these larger states. This era, the late ninth and early eighth centuries bce, is often described as a time of “Assyrian decline,” almost as though this was a bad thing. But the respite from Assyrian attacks was no doubt welcomed by the lands that had been on the receiving end of the assaults and on the giving end of the precious metals, textiles, horses, and other riches that the Assyrian kings had demanded. People in these lands perhaps thought, with relief, that the worst of the Assyrian aggression was over. If so, they were wrong.
A king named Tiglath-Pileser III (744–727 bce) reformed and restructured the Assyrian government so that he could not just reconquer the empire; he could hold onto to it. His reforms successfully gave the empire new life; it was to last for over 120 more years. Tiglath-Pileser III replaced all those almost-independent governors by appointees of his own choosing, beholden to him for their power. He divided up big provinces so that the new governors controlled less territory, and had less power, than their predecessors. He split high official positions so that each man had half the responsibilities and authority of someone who had held that position in the past. He chose eunuchs for many government and military jobs; these men had no sons, no one who could inherit their position. He created a network of spies, traveling through the empire, who would inform him of any treachery, and any possible rebellions before they broke out. And he no longer depended on farmers called up for military service; he seems to have created a vast standing army, recruiting and training men from across the empire to fight for Assyria. It may have included as many as 60,000 men.
The new army was unrelenting; soldiers campaigned throughout his reign, expanding the borders of the empire farther and farther, beyond lands that had been subject to Assyria during the Late Bronze Age to regions with no previous history of submission to Assyria. A conquered king might become a vassal at first. If he paid the required tribute on time, he might keep his throne. If not, Tiglath-Pileser replaced him with a puppet king, who often was replaced, in turn, by an Assyrian governor. A vassal kingdom had at that point become an Assyrian province. Through all of this, the Assyrian king increased deportations, moving hundreds of thousands of people from one end of the empire to the other. Provinces were no longer occupied mostly by people with centuries of ancestral connections to their land, but by newly arrived groups of deportees, forced there from somewhere else, or from several other places.
Tiglath-Pileser III was even able to take control of Babylonia. He seems to have been seen by the Babylonians, initially, as something of an ally in their struggle against Arameans and a new population group known as the Chaldeans. Later, Tiglath-Pileser III deposed a Chaldean man who had taken the throne of Babylon and, in 728 bce, the Assyrian king proclaimed himself to be king of Babylonia as well. This was a first. It marked the beginning of more than a century of rocky, often antagonistic relations between Assyria and Babylonia. Right at the start, Tiglath-Pileser III deported hundreds of thousands of Chaldeans from Babylonia, according to the king’s inscriptions.
Tiglath-Pileser III’s successor, Sargon II (722–705 BCE), continued his same practices, especially with regard to imperial expansion and deportation. But he emulated King Ashurnasirpal II as well, in deciding that he needed a new capital city. Kalhu had been the capital for 150 years; Sargon wanted to live in a place of his own, in a palace decorated with relief sculptures of his own achievements. He called the new city Dur-Sharrukin (Fort Sargon). It was as ambitious a building project as any that we’ve encountered before, the city extending over 288 hectares (712 acres) and surrounded by a massive city wall, with an administrative complex that was dominated by an immense palace. Remarkably, the entire city was constructed within eleven years, from 717 to 706 BCE.60 Like Ashurnasirpal II, Sargon II must have had a great many artists and sculptors on his staff, and they worked fast to meet his needs for relief sculptures and giant lamassu figures. Unfortunately, the sculptures from Dur-Sharrukin fared much less well in modern times than those from Kalhu. They were in poor condition when excavated by a French team in the mid-nineteenth century, and many of them (more than 200 crates full) were lost forever in the Tigris River in 1855 when being shipped to Paris.61
We do know, though, that some of the reliefs commemorated Sargon’s campaign to the Levant in 721 BCE to quash a rebellion by a coalition of kingdoms there. One of the troublesome kingdoms was Israel, which had ceased to pay its required tribute to Assyria. In several of the inscriptions set up in his palace, Sargon II mentioned the conquest of Israel’s capital city, Samaria (among many Levantine cities), claiming that he “conquered the city Samaria and all of the land Bit-Humria.”62 (Bit-Humria or “House of Omri” was the Assyrian term for Israel, named for a king named Omri whom the Assyrians viewed as Israel’s founder.) In more detail Sargon II noted that “I surrounded and conquered the city Samaria. I carried off as booty 27,290 of its inhabitants, conscripted fifty chariots from them, and allowed the remainder to practice their (normal) occupations.”63 This conquest is corroborated in the Bible (though attributed to the brief reign of Shalmaneser V [727–722 BCE], Sargon’s immediate predecessor who began the actions against the Levantine rebellion). After Israel’s defeat, according to the author of the book of 2 Kings in the Bible, “The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim and settled them in the towns of Samaria to replace the Israelites.”64 This marked the end of the northern kingdom of Israel; the land had become an Assyrian province. Judah and its capital of Jerusalem were spared conquest and deportation at that time, though Judah was required to pay tribute to the Assyrian king.
Sargon II had only occupied his grand new capital city for one year before he led his troops out on an ill-fated campaign to the land of Tabal far away in south-central Anatolia. He was about sixty years old. In the course of the campaign, in 705 BCE, “the king was killed, the camp of the king of Assyria was pl[undered].”65 This was a shock. Assyrian kings were rarely killed in battle, and subsequent kings seem to have been careful to avoid actual combat.
Sargon II’s son Sennacherib took the throne in 705 BCE and decided that his father’s capital of Dur-Sharrukin—even though it had cost a fortune, was newly occupied, and was still incomplete—wouldn’t meet his needs. So Sennacherib set about construction of yet another capital city, this one at Nineveh, only 20 kilometers (12 miles) to the south of Dur-Sharrukin. He built another new palace for himself there. He, too, decorated the walls with many alabaster panels, carved by his artists with scenes of his victories and other proofs of his divine appointment to rule the world. One imagines that the sculptors, though perhaps happy to have the work, might have been astonished to find they were needed again, so soon after creating so many relief panels and lamassus for Sargon II. It was Sennacherib who commissioned the reliefs showing the quarrying and transport of a lamassu sculpture.
He devoted one room of his palace to the commemoration of a specific siege, that of Lachish in Judah, which took place in 701 BCE—the images he commissioned of the event extended along 26.85 meters (88 feet) of the walls of the room.66 As far as Sennacherib was concerned, his successful attack on Judah was a highlight of his reign.
For as long as Judah had been paying the required tribute, the Assyrian kings had pretty much left the country alone, as was the usual practice.67 But when the Judeans decided to withhold tribute, hoping for support from the neighboring kingdom of Egypt, Sennacherib paid attention. The region was no longer “submitting to the heavy yoke of Ashur,” to use a favorite expression of the Assyrian kings. The Assyrian army marched on Judah to crush its rebellious tendencies. Once again, many of the people would be dispatched elsewhere.
Sennacherib emphasized the victory not just in relief sculptures but also in his inscriptions and annals, though, curiously, he didn’t mention the city of Lachish by name. One of the inscriptions reads as follows:
(As for) Hezekiah of the land Judah, I surrounded (and) conquered forty-six of his fortified walled cities and small(er) settlements in their environs, which were without number, by having ramps trodden down and battering rams brought up, the assault of foot soldiers, sapping, breaching, and siege engines. I brought out of them 200,150 people, young (and) old, male and female, horses, mules, donkeys, camels, oxen, and sheep and goats, which were without number, and I counted (them) as booty.68
Judah was not alone in its suffering. Scholars have calculated that as many as 4,500,000 people are likely to have been deported from regions across the Neo-Assyrian Empire during the periods when mass deportations were at their height, including during the reign of Sennacherib.69 To get a sense of the scale of that migration, note that about 13.3 million Syrians have been displaced during their civil war, with devastating effects on the region.70 The modern population of the Middle East is many times greater than it was in the first millennium BCE, so the impact of Assyrian deportations would have been extreme. The roads and rivers—wide stretches of the countryside—must have been packed with families and livestock on the move.
And, as was true everywhere, just as people were being rounded up and moved away from Judah, other populations were moved in to replace them. Everyone involved would have been unsettled by this, thrown into a limbo in which all the ties to land, tradition, and ancestors had been severed. Everyone had to find their way in a new place, around new people, while also being required to continue to pay their taxes to the state. It is not surprising that the people of the northern state of Israel, who had been much more completely conquered and displaced by the Assyrians than was true of Judah, simply disappeared from the records, becoming the “ten lost tribes of Israel.”
The Assyrian campaign against Judah in 701 bce also features in the Bible, in one of the few episodes for which both Assyrian and biblical accounts survive. For this reason, as you might imagine, it has been the subject of many studies for a very long time. Concerning the wider conflict in Judah, beyond Jerusalem, the writer of the biblical book of 2 Kings simply stated that “King Sennacherib of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them.”71 The author of 2 Chronicles added that “while King Sennacherib of Assyria was at Lachish with all his forces, he sent his servants to Jerusalem.”72 Neither author recorded anything about the Judean deportees who were counted in Sennacherib’s annals and represented in his reliefs, though the biblical authors did acknowledge that the Assyrian sieges of Judean cities were successful. Only Jerusalem was miraculously spared, according to the Bible, and Hezekiah, its king, still had to send vast amounts of tribute to Assyria.
The site of Lachish (modern Tell ed-Duweir in Israel) has been excavated, which has allowed historians to compare historical accounts (Sennacherib’s inscriptions, the relief sculptures in his palace, and the biblical accounts of the campaign in Judah), with the physical remains in the ground.73
At the time of the Assyrian attack, the city of Lachish extended over 12.5 hectares (31 acres) and was surrounded by a strong city wall. The archaeologists discovered evidence of a huge ramp that the Assyrians had built up against the wall in order to be able to move their siege machines into place (this is the only such ramp to survive anywhere). It had been constructed with heavy boulders and topped by mortar so that soldiers and wheeled vehicles could mount it more easily. The ramp was made up of between 13,000 and 19,000 tons of stone.74 A major siege was, in many ways, as much a building project as it was a battle, though the process of building the ramp must have been more dangerous than most, probably taking place under a shower of arrows, rocks, and flaming torches thrown down by the inhabitants of the city. Just such a ramp is shown in Sennacherib’s scenes of the siege of Lachish (though the angle of the ramp in the relief defies gravity, being much steeper than could ever have been possible). The Assyrian artists depicted five siege machines in the process of attacking the city walls from the ramp (see Fig. 17.4).
Fig. 17.4 Two details from a drawing by Austin Henry Layard of the relief of the siege of Lachish from the palace of King Sennacherib of Assyria at Nineveh, 700-692 bce. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
The Assyrian forces had also constructed an armed camp for the soldiers near the city. This wasn’t found during the excavations but was shown in the reliefs. Its oval enclosure wall boasted towers and crenellations, like a scaled-down version of a city wall. Inside, the artists depicted the tents and huts of the Assyrian soldiers.
The excavators found other clues about the violent destruction of the city, such as hundreds of iron arrowheads, many slingstones, and some metal scales from armor. The dead may have been laid to rest in a mass burial of about 1,500 people that was found in some caves nearby.75
Many Judeans were forced to leave Lachish, and, among all those millions of anonymous deportees across the Assyrian Empire, we can see them vividly represented on Sennacherib’s reliefs. The families were allowed to take bags of possessions with them, along with some of their cattle. Although their situation was impossibly hard, at least they had not died in the siege, and at least they could hold out hope that perhaps a new home lay at the end of their march, if they managed to survive it. They were portrayed walking out of the city, past the end of the siege ramp, leaving their homes forever. Assyrian soldiers carrying booty from the campaign joined the deportees, and eventually they all passed in front of the king, who was seated in a throne on a hill.76 (In this sculpture and just about every other depiction of him, Sennacherib’s face has since been chiseled away by attackers who conquered Nineveh itself almost a century later, in 612 BCE. Their treatment of the Assyrian capital was just as violent as the Assyrian treatment of Lachish had been, as you will see in Chapter 19.) The figure of the king was provided with a label: “Sennacherib, king of the world, king of Assyria, took (his) place on the nemedu throne, and the booty of Lachish passed before him.”77
The artist showed two women of Lachish walking together, wearing shawls over their hair, followed by two girls, all of them apparently holding flasks of drinking water (see Fig. 17.5, bottom left of the close-up image). A small child reached up as though to take the hand of his father, but the man was using both hands to manage a large sack across his shoulders, perhaps containing all the possessions the family could take with them. Next to them, a woman sat on top of two full sacks of family possessions on a wagon. One of her children sat behind her with his arms around her waist, another sat on her lap, her face right up against that of her mother as though about to kiss her (see Fig. 17.5, top right of the close-up image).78
Fig. 17.5 Gypsum relief, with a close-up showing deportees from Lachish after the Assyrian victory, from the palace of King Sennacherib of Assyria at Nineveh, 700-692 bce. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
Some of the inhabitants of Lachish were treated very differently from the deportees. A group of men, probably the leaders of the rebellion, were singled out for torture and execution. These men carried no possessions; they were not going to live to need them. The artists showed their treatment in gruesome detail, as they were being impaled on stakes, stabbed, or flayed by Assyrian soldiers.79 All the deportees seem to have been marched past these men, people they must have known and perhaps followed in life. Sennacherib was clearly sending a message about what would happen to leaders of rebellions against his regime.80
Deportees from another of Sennacherib’s campaigns were captured in the same detail by the artists. In this sculpture we see a mother leaning down to give her child a drink from a full skin of water, as they paused in the shade of a date palm tree (see Fig. 17.6). The thirsty child rushed toward her. A woman beside the mother and child had a basket on her head and a woman in front of them had a large bag on her back. These two were straight-backed, proud, continuing on their march in their long robes and bare feet.81 The journey to a new land was not intended to kill the deportees, according to Assyrian records. They were provided with provisions by the government, who wanted them to survive in order to settle in new places. And whatever the Assyrian king might have intended, the deportees were not shown by the Assyrian artists as hated enemies but as struggling families, heading off to an unknown future in a land that had been chosen for them by their Assyrian conquerors.
Fig. 17.6 Gypsum relief showing a group of deportees, including a woman giving a child a drink, from the palace of King Sennacherib of Assyria at Nineveh, 700–692 bce. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
The Assyrians kept track of the people who had been deported. One tablet lists 977 people from Que, the land in the northeast corner of the Mediterranean that had previously been called Kizzuwatna.82 None of the deportees was named, but all the children had been counted in groups based on height. Since the ancient people of the Near East never kept track of ages or birthdays, a child’s height provided a way of determining how ready he or she might be for work. Behind the statistics on this tablet one can envision a process—someone, or a group of people, gathered this vast crowd of people together, perhaps at the beginning of their trek, perhaps at the end, to count and classify them. Was the crowd quiet and nervous or clamorous and unruly? Did the children stay with their parents, or were they separated out? Families were not split up in the course of deportation, so the children would have been reunited with their parents after being measured. The officials must have had each of the 293 children (172 boys and 121 girls), stand against some sort of measuring post, which was marked with lines at 3 spans, 4 spans, and 5 spans, in order to roughly categorize them by height. Children taller than that were considered to be adults. Among the youngest children, forty-five were toddlers, while fifty babies were still nursing. Some of their mothers must have given birth to them shortly before undertaking the grueling march to their new home.
Once they had been documented and their long journey was complete, not all deportees were treated alike. A very small number of them became officials in the Assyrian government, holding the title of “guide” or “translator” and assigned to help the king negotiate his way through his dealings with their homeland and people.83 Others were provided with farms in previously uncultivated areas of the empire, or in regions that themselves had been subject to deportation. Yet others were chosen to live in Ashurnasirpal’s new city of Kalhu or, later, in Sennacherib’s rebuilt city of Nineveh. The later kings asserted that these deportees were free, were considered to be Assyrians, and could continue to work in the same professions they had held in their homelands.84 It’s hard to know if there was any truth to this. We do know that some served in the Assyrian military as charioteers.85 But yet others, as we have seen, toiled in the quarries under the lash of Assyrian soldiers.
The attacks on Samaria and Israel and the displacement of Israelites across the empire were bemoaned by biblical authors. Their treatment at the hands of the Assyrians struck a chord with readers of the Bible for hundreds of years. But, as we have seen, the Israelites and Judeans were far from alone, they just happen to be the one group that left a record of their treatment that has survived. Deportation had become a standard strategy of imperial control, one that the kings extolled in their inscriptions and depicted on their reliefs.
Ever since the time of Sargon of Akkad, more than 1,500 years before Ashurnasirpal II, the idea of empire had existed as a dream in the minds of ambitious leaders in the Near East, but the Neo-Assyrian kings, starting with Tiglath-Pileser III, were the first to turn it a long-lasting reality. They came up with a system that maintained control over far-flung regions as well as their own populations. They built roads so that messages and troops could travel quickly. They stationed garrisons in forts across the empire. They appointed governors over provinces. They maintained a professional military. They punished, tortured, and killed rebel leaders in extreme ways to deter would-be rebels from following their lead. They imposed taxes and tribute so that wealth flooded into the capital and other Assyrian cities. And they moved whole populations from one region to another, not, as we have seen, with the goal of killing them (though many died),86 but, in a way, to pull the ground out from under their feet. The deportees had to build whole new lives; they had little energy left for rebellion. The palace artists gave these anonymous people a human face and showed us their tragic situations in a way that still can tug at our hearts, even though centuries have passed since their lifetimes.
Once this imperial system had been invented, it never went away. Each subsequent empire in turn, in the Near East, Europe, and South Asia, adopted many of the same practices, and for people in those regions, living under an empire became the norm. Given the reputation of Neo-Assyrian kings as tyrants, it is surprising to remember that their distant predecessors had been the kings of second-millennium Ashur, with its merchant colonies and town councils, who were among the least autocratic rulers in any era of Near Eastern history.