Exploring the Civilization of Assyria: A Study of the Middle to Late Bronze Ages

[This is a lecture written for the course 'HIST 262: History of the Ancient Near East,' taught Fall 2023 at God's Bible School and College, a regionally accredited College in Cincinnati, Ohio. Bibliographical material will be posted under Research on this site.]

Throughout much of the Near East, the Middle Bronze Age comes on the cusp of a severe drying phase that brought an end to the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, the Early Dynastic Period in Egypt, and the Southern Levantine proto-city-states or peer-polity systems. Depending on the region, the Middle Bronze Age was either a time of darkness or a time of revival. In Mesopotamia, the Middle Bronze Age is best known, after a post-Akkadian transitional period, for the Old Assyrian kingdom in the north and Old Babylonian kingdom in the south.

	Mesopotamia	Egypt	Levant
1300	Dark Age	New Kingdom	Middle Bronze
1400
1500
1600	Old Babylonian (South)	Old Assyrian (North)
1700	Second Intermediate
1800	Middle Kingdom
1900
2000
2100	Ur III	First Intermediate	Early Bronze
2200	Guti
2300	Dynasty of Akkad	Old Kingdom
2400	Early Dynastic III
2500
2600	Early Dynastic II Early Dynastic I
2700	Early Dynastic
2800
2900
3000
3100	Jemdet-Nasr

The Akkadian empire, the very first successful attempt to unite Mesopotamia, ended with the invasion of the Gutians (Liverani and Tabatabai 2014: 137) and the destruction of Akkad by Gutian hands (Adamo and Al-Ansari 2020: 32). The Gutians, a people believed to have originated from the Zagros region (Adamo and Al-Ansari 2020: 20), attacked Mesopotamia, and Elam in modern day Iran, devastating the territories (Liverani and Tabatabai 2014: 142-43). Unfortunately for the illiterate and nomadic Gutians, rulership in Mesopotamia was difficult, as they were not akin to the agricultural lifestyle (Adamo and Al-Ansari 2020: 20). Sumerian cities from Lagash to Uruk rebelled against the Gutian invaders, and ultimately defeated them in (Mieroop 2002: 409), restoring Sumerian dominance, though with obvious Akkadian influence.

After the defeat of the Gutians, Uruk established a short-lived hegemonic power over the rest of the Mesopotamian cities; this was quickly replaced when Ur-Nammu, king of Ur, took power of the region, establishing the Ur III empire (Liverani and Tabatabai 2014: 156).

Old Assyrian Period.

Shortly after the collapse of the Ur III Dynasty, individual city-states began to again regain power (Veenhof and Eidem 2008: 20). One of these, Aššur, located on the Tigris River, developed a distinct culture from the rest of southern Mesopotamia (Highcock 2000), a culture which would spread throughout the region. This period is characterized by the Old Assyrian dialect, Assyrian calendar, written records, and trade (Veenhof and Eidem 2008: 21), and is known as the Old Assyrian Period, which dates from ca. 1972-1718 B.C. (Schlüter 2020: 23).

Trade and Bureaucracy.

Very little evidence exists concerning the early years of Aššur, the time of the Akkadian and Ur III kingdoms, and again for the later years of the Old Assyrian period, but a wealth of information is available for the emergence of Aššur as a small but economically strong city-state between 2100 and 1900 B.C. (Highcock 2000), some of which comes from the houses of individual traders (Veenhof 2013: 27) in the Anatolian town of Kaniš (Michel 2017: 80).

The Old Assyrian trade network appears to have been a long-distance system including trade with Babylonia, Anatolia, Elamite and other Zagros sources, and Syria, thus exchange reaching into all four cardinal directions (Palmisano 2018: 25). At Kaniš, Assyrians settled in a commercial district of the city where they traded tin and textiles in exchange for gold and silver, which was brought back to Aššur (Schlüter 2020: 23). These textiles traded appear to have been wool, rather than linen (Michel and Veenhof 2010: 211-12), and the rather large amounts recorded suggest a government controlled sheep industry at Aššur (Lassen 2010: 176). Likewise, the thus far counted amounts of tin within the Kaniš records, the amount will likely rise, suggests a strong palace economy in search of precious metals (Palmisano 2018: 13).

One rather interesting concept at Aššur concerns the governance of the city, specifically the fact that Aššur himself, the deity of which the city received its name, is the only true king of the city, and in fact, Assyrians were expected to take sacred oaths on the weapon of Aššur (Michel 2017: 99). In his place stands the overseer or vice regent who acts as a simple governor appointed by the god (Veenhof and Eidem 2008: 20). This vice regent, who also acted as the high priest, stood at the head of an assembly of influential citizens (Maul 2017: 341) who, together with the governor, established law and order (Highcock 2000) and tended to and expanded the land of the king, the god Aššur (Maul 2017: 341). Of note, while no Old Assyrian law code remains today, secondary evidences, including judicial records and letters often associated with verdicts, make reference to such a law, referring to it as ‘the words upon the stele’ (Veenhof 1995: 1717).

Daily Life.

Interestingly, the Old Assyrians divided the world topography between two concepts, the city, Aššur, and the country, everything else, specifically those regions where exchange occurred (Highcock 2018: 15). For those involved in trade in the ‘country,’ dwellings usually consisted of both a house in Aššur and in the business district of the city in which they exchanged goods (Veenhof and Eidem 2008: 105).

Though evidence from Aššur itself is lacking archaeologically (Highcock 2000), evidence from Kaniš suggests that those who exchanged goods participated in a type of dual citizenship, adopting local customs, intermarrying and having children from these marriages, and engaging in partnerships with non-Assyrian individuals; ultimately, the prerogatives of these traders was that of economics and politics (Highcock 2018: 19).

What is known from Aššur is that despite the common belief that ancient Mesopotamia was a strict patriarchal society in which women were subservient to men, women had a great amount of equality in Old Assyrian times; they had to pay the same fines as men, they could inherit property and participate in trade, lend money, buy and sell, and execute their own last will and testaments (Michel 2017: 84), all with an income likely generated from their own business dealings (Veenhof and Eidem 2008: 107). These regulations as identified within Old Assyrian texts were quite different from Babylonian traditions and may had originated from Anatolian influence where spouses appeared to have equal rights (Michel 2017: 87).

Mitannian Empire.

Overlapping the end of both the Old Assyrian and Old Babylonian empires was the Mitanni Empire in northern Mesopotamia (Novák 2007: 389). As the Old Assyrian empire was winding down, Mitanni came into power, possibly as the Assyrians diminished in strength but more likely due to the power vacuum left after Hatti destroyed the Amorite-Hurrian (Nathanson 2013: 72) kingdom of Yamhad in Syria and could not maintain its presence there (de Martino 2014: 61). Of note, the kingdom of Mitanni was characterized by Hurrian linguistics but non-Hurrian leadership (Novák 2013: 347).

Though the settlement patterns of the Mitanni people are poorly understood (Bonacossi 2018: 61), the Mitanni kingdom is understood to have ruled during the 15th century and early 14th century from the Upper Khabur River in Syria to the Middle Euphrates and from eastern Anatolia to northwestern Syria (Martino 2014: 61), beginning just a couple of generations before the sack of Babylon (Novák 2007: 398).

By ca. 1420s B.C., Mitanni overwhelmed Assyria and incorporated the Old Assyrian empire into its own (Novák 2013: 348). Šauštatar, perhaps the greatest Mitannian king (Novák 2013: 348), conquered Aššur (Veenhof and Eidem 2008: 23), the Assyrian capital, and carried away the gold and silver gates of the city (Novák 2013: 347), ending the Old Assyrian period. Aššur would remain under the suzerainty of Mitanni until Mitanni’s decline (Kantor 1999: 649).

Middle Assyrian Period.

Establishing a beginning point for the Middle Assyrian period can be difficult. For some, the period begins with Šamši-Adad I who conquered the city ca. 1800 B.C. (Veenhof and Eidem 2008: 24) and attempted something of a religious change by combining the cults of Enlil and Aššur (Maul 2017: 343), but realistically, the resurgence under the native Assyrian Aššur-uballit I decides a turning point in the city’s history.

Laying dormant as a vassal to Mitanni, Assyria would soon take advantage of their weakening overlords. With Hittite invasion, Aššur-uballit I took the opportunity to advance Aššur’s power (Bryce 2003: 10), not only freeing itself from Mitanni (Brown 2013: 99) but subduing what was left of Mitanni and becoming a major political power once again (Lemche 1995: 1206). During this time, 80% of all Mitannian sites had either been destroyed or abandoned (Kertai 2009: 29), leaving a renewed Assyrian empire in its wake.

Kingship and Administration.

Some major differences existed in this Middle Assyria when contrasted with the Old Assyrian kingdom. For one, during the Middle Assyrian period, rulers of the city of Aššur began not only to use the title ‘king,’ following Babylonian culture (Maul 2017: 341), but they also ruled as kings, a concept that began with the Amorite usurper Šamši-Adad I who styled himself both Steward of Aššur and ‘king of the universe,’ ‘strong king,’ and ‘king of Akkad’ (Rubin 2021: 97-98).

Aššur-uballit I was the first to use the phrase ‘the land of Aššur,’ reorganizing Assyria from a city-state to an actual territorial state (Rubin 2021: 98). And over time, Middle Assyrian rulers adopted the titles used by Šamši-Adad (Maul 2017: 341). By the time of Šalmanassar I, an elaborate administrative system was created including a Vizier and Grand Vizier, where the Grand Vizier was second to the king and governed the western parts of the Assyrian lands, and, at least along the Khabur River, provinces were created that were ruled by governors (Kertai 2009: 34).

Religion.

A second major change that occurred during the Middle Assyrian period involved religion. Perhaps, the most important aspect of an Assyrian ruler’s duties was to care for the god, Aššur, who embodied the land (Maul 2017: 341), but with Šamši-Adad’s equation of Aššur with Enlil, the cult of Enlil became increasingly popular within the ruling class (Rubin 2021: 99). The city of Aššur would ultimately become the seat of the Assyrian Enlil, ‘lord of all lands,’ and this doctrine would remain at the ideological core of Assyrian politics throughout both the Middle and Neo-Assyrian periods (Maul 2017: 343).

It should be noted that although the Middle Assyrian empire begins in the Late Bronze Age, it continues well into the Iron Age and therefore discussion of this kingdom will be split between here and a later in this study.