What Is the Capital of Assyria?

In recent weeks the group variously known as ISIS, ISIL, Islamic State or Daesh has perpetrated some of the worst crimes of its short but sordid career by destroying ancient artifacts in a museum in Mosul and ancient ruins in Nimrud and Hatra. However, rather than dwell too much on the depressing destruction wrought by ISIL, I’d prefer to talk a bit about some of the region’s history.

If you’ve seen the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail (and if you haven’t, you should), you may recognize the title of this essay as the question from the bridge keeper that tripped up Sir Robin (the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Lancelot) when he attempted to cross the Bridge of Death. But unlike Sir Robin (and, it is probably safe to say, most other people), I actually knew the answer to the question the first time I watched the movie – or at least I knew a couple of possible answers to the question. In the many centuries when Assyria was a powerful independent state, it had several capitals. The two that I had long been familiar with and so leapt to mind when I heard the bridge keeper’s question were Assur (also spelled Ashur) and Nineveh; a third, Nimrud, was recently in the news for tragic reasons due to the senseless destruction visited on it by ISIL, and there was at least one other significant one. To be sure, the name Assyria was used for various political entities long after the destruction of the ancient Assyrian Empire (the name is still used of an ethnic group in the region), and without looking it up I have no idea what their capitals were. But it is ancient Assyria and its capitals that have the most historical prominence.

Ashur was the center of the Assyrian kingdom that first appeared in the 3nd millennium BCE. Though kings occasionally moved the capital away temporarily in later centuries, Ashur was the capital of Assyria for most of its history, and remained the country’s most important religious center and burial site for most of Assyria’s kings even when the capital was moved away permanently at the peak of Assyrian power. The Assyrians were a Semitic people, like many other ancient peoples of West Asia, such as the Akkadians, the Amorites, the Phoenicians, the Aramaeans, the Hebrews and the Arabs. The Assyrian kingdom waxed and waned in power many times over its long existence, though each successive peak was higher than the last. Assyria first appeared in the mid to late 3rd millennium BCE, though little is known of its early history. It first became a regional power in the period around 2000 BCE to 1800 BCE (the so-called Old Assyrian Empire), not long before Hammurabi reigned in Babylon, and in the same era Assyrian merchants had a trading settlement in central Anatolia from which they traded with local kingdoms such as that of the Hittites. Historians have learned a great deal about the ancient Middle East from the documents they left behind (some of which I saw last month in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums). After several centuries of decline, Assur was once again the center of a powerful Assyrian kingdom from the 14th to the 11th century BCE (the Middle Assyrian Empire).

Assyria's final and greatest period of strength began around 900 BCE with the rise of what later historians have sometimes called the Neo-Assyrian Empire. One of the important early kings of this era, Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BCE), was the one who moved the capital from Ashur to the city of Kalhu (called Calah in the Bible), which the Arabs in later centuries gave the name Nimrud. Several of my books have pictures of some of the monuments, sculptures and reliefs installed there by Ashurnasirpal II and his successors, much of which presumably have now been destroyed by ISIL, who are so idiotic that they try to compare their destruction of the ancient heritage of humanity with Muhammad's destruction of idols in Mecca, even though in the latter case, for better or for worse, he was trying to end active worship of pagan gods by destroying objects that were contemporary and so at the time had no particular historical value, while the things ISIL is destroying are not worshiped by anyone now but have immense historical value. Not to mention the fact that you'd think they'd have better things to do than engaging wanton destruction, seeing as they are in a war that they currently seem to be losing. But I digress....

Kalhu (or Nimrud) remained the Assyrian capital for over 150 years, and major Assyrian kings like Shalmaneser II and Tiglath-pileser III built palaces there (indeed, the later king Esarhaddon also built a palace there, even though by then the capital had been moved), though as noted earlier kings from Ashurnasirpal II on also continued to build and be buried at Assur. Sargon II (721 - 705 BCE) moved the capital to a new city he built called Dur-Sharrukin (meaning Sargon's Fortress). This site, now called Khorsabad, has reportedly also been damaged or destroyed by ISIL. Dur-Sharrukun was only the capital for the reign of Sargon II, as after his death his son Sennacherib moved it to what is probably the most well-known of Assyria's capitals, Nineveh.

Nineveh was already an old city when it became Assyria's capital, but under Sennacherib and his successors Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal it became the largest city in the world at that time and the center of the biggest empire so far in history. In the 7th century BCE Assyria reached the height of its power, ruling or dominating not only all of Mesopotamia but also Syria, Cilicia (the southeast corner of Anatolia), Palestine and even briefly the delta region of Egypt. The Assyrian Empire and its kings have a reputation for ruthlessness and cruelty which is not entirely undeserved. Of course, most ancient empires were founded on harsh rule of their subjects, so the Assyrians were hardly unique in this regard. But their own reliefs often make a particular point of showing such things as the impaling or torture of defeated enemies, and they made frequent use of mass deportations of conquered peoples (most notoriously the so-called "ten tribes" of the kingdom of Israel, but they were just one of many groups that was treated this way), an effective but cruel method of control. On the other hand, they also created a highly efficient governmental structure. The efficient Assyrian mail system would later be adopted by the Persians, and later empires also made use of other elements of the Assyrian empire's administrative system. Ashurbanipal also created the greatest library that the world had yet seen, collecting many thousands of texts, including more than 10,000 cuneiform tablets, from all over the empire and covering over two millenia of Mesopotamian history back to the days of Sumer and Akkad (Ashurbanipal himself was supposedly able to read Sumerian and Akkadian, even though by that time Assyrians spoke their own dialect of Aramaic). Indeed, much of what we know of Mesopotamian history comes from the texts recovered in modern times from Ashurbanipal's library.

But the harshness of Assyrian rule eventually caused the empire's subject peoples and neighbors to rebel and attack it. A coalition of peoples led by the Babylonians under their new Chaldean ruler Nabopolassar and the Iranian Medes eventually defeated Ashurbanipal's successors, sacking Ashur in 614 BCE and destroying Ninevah and Kalhu in 612 BCE, bringing the Assyrian Empire to a final, crushing end. But despite the destruction wrought by the victors (who despite a brief period of glory under rulers such as Nabopolassar's son, the famous Nebuchadnezzar, would be conquered by the Persians under Cyrus a few decades later), substantial ruins remained, even aside from artifacts hauled away by later rulers such as the lamassu (winged bull men) we saw in the museum in Istanbul. But now thanks to ISIL, much that had survived for thousands of years, in Nineveh as well as Kalhu and Dur-Sharrukun, has now been destroyed, as have later ruins such as the well-preserved Seleucid-Parthian city of Hatra. We can only hope that ISIL is defeated before they do any more damage to our common heritage.