The New Empire of Assyria, 900–600 B.C.E.

By 900 B.C.E., Assyrian armies had punched westward all the way to the Mediterranean coast. The Neo-Assyrian kings conquered Babylon and then Egypt. Foot soldiers were the Assyrians’ main strike force. They deployed siege towers and battering rams, while chariots carried archers. Foreign wars brought in revenues to supplement agriculture, herding, and long-distance trade.

Neo-Assyrian kings treated conquered peoples brutally. Those allowed to stay in their homelands had to make annual payments to the Assyrians. The kings also deported many defeated people to Assyria for work on huge building projects. One unexpected consequence of this policy was the undermining of the kings’ native language: so many Aramaeans, for example, were deported from Canaan to Assyria that Aramaic had largely replaced Assyrian as the land’s everyday language by the eighth century B.C.E.

Neo-Assyrian men displayed their status and masculinity in waging war and in hunting wild animals. The king hunted lions to demonstrate his vigor and power and thus his capacity to rule. Practical technology and knowledge also mattered to the kings. One boasted that he invented new irrigation equipment and a novel method of metal casting. Another one proclaimed, “I have read complicated texts, whose versions in Sumerian are obscure and in Akkadian hard to understand. I do research on the cuneiform texts on stone from before the Flood.” Women of the social elite could become literate, but they were excluded from the male dominions of war and hunting.

Public religion reflected the prominence of war in Assyrian culture: the cult of Ishtar, the goddess of love and war, glorified warfare. The Neo-Assyrian rulers’ desire to demonstrate their respect for the gods motivated them to build huge temples. These shrines’ staffs of priests and slaves grew so large that the revenues from temple lands were insufficient; the kings had to supply extra funds from the spoils of conquest.

The Neo-Assyrian kings’ harsh rule and demand for revenue made their own people, especially the social elite, resentful. Rebellions therefore became common, and a seventh-century B.C.E. revolt fatally weakened the kingdom. The Medes, an Iranian people, and the Chaldeans, a Semitic people who had driven the Assyrians from Babylonia, combined forces to defeat the Neo-Assyrian Empire.