Rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire - Ancient Mesopotamia DOCUMENTARY

The end of Bronze Age civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean world initiated a dark age which, from Egypt to Anatolia to Greece, reduced living standards, humbled once proud empires, and turned prosperous maritime trading kingdoms into shadows of their former selves. However, there was one great Mesopotamian state which managed to weather the storm and eventually emerged from it as the most powerful and arguably the most merciless state in near-eastern, and possibly world history - the Assyrian Empire. There are a bunch of reasons why we love Mesopotamian civilizations and the fact that they were the first to preserve

knowledge is on the top of the list. The sponsor of this video Blinkist is all about preserving and sharing knowledge by making it easily digestible even for the busiest among us. Blinkist takes the most interesting and relevant non-fictional books and turns them into 15-minute audios – blinks. More than 3000 titles are already available which means that you can learn on the go, learn fast, and always improve your knowledge, no matter how time-constrained you are. Blinkist titles range from Entrepreneurship to Philosophy, from Psychology to Politics, but most importantly for us, there are 100s of historical books

that you can listen to! Imagine learning the most important facts of 4 books in just 1 hour! Mary Beard’s Civilization and Chip Walter’s Last Ape Standing are perfect if you want to learn more about human civilizations! New titles are added all the time! Support our channel and your growth - get yourself premium access to knowledge! The first 100 people to go to blinkist.com/kingsandgenerals are going to get unlimited access for 1 week to try it out. You’ll also get 25% off if you want the full membership! The Old and Middle Assyrian Empires had waxed and waned

for almost a millennia by the time Bronze Age civilisation came to an end in the late second millennium BC. During that thousand years, Assyria was merely one of many competing states in Mesopotamia and the near-east. During its earlier imperial periods, Shamshi-Adad dominated much of northern Mesopotamia in the 18th century BC. At its weakest, however, the Assyrians had even been subjugated to vassaldom under the Kingdom of Mitanni, but always seemed to resurge and grow in power again. By the late tenth-century BC, the declining Assyrian polity had been diminished by Aramean invasions, left controlling only its traditional

core region in the so-called ‘Assyrian triangle’ on the upper reaches of the Tigris River. Despite that fact, kings in this era still considered themselves rulers of all the previously conquered territory seized by Middle Assyrian kings such as Tukulti-Ninurta I, that were now lost. It was this gulf between imperial expectation and reality which led to the Neo-Assyrian reconquest. While the surrounding polities had been weakened by the Bronze Age Collapse and were still recovering, Assyria was dynamic and demographically vibrant, allowing its kings to once again pursue an expansionist agenda. Beginning in roughly 934BC with king Ashur-dan II,

and continuing with his successors - Adad-nirari II and then Tukulti-Ninurta II - brilliant military expeditions began to recapture the ‘Assyrian territories’ that their predecessors once ruled. This process culminated in the reign of Ashurnasirpal II - whose name can be translated as ‘the god Ashur is the creator of an heir’. He is one of the most famous neo-Assyrian kings, whose reign we are well informed of by numerous royal reliefs. Under his august rule, the great armies of Ashur were far from sated, and he began to direct expeditions to areas never before touched by Assyrian arms. Parts

of northern Babylonia, Zamua - an area in the north near Lake Urmia - Armenian highlands, and the Kashyari mountains all became subject to the iron will of Ashurnasirpal. The king also crossed the Orontes River in the northwest with an army, founding Assyrian colonies there and essentially launching a commercial expedition. He even managed to exact vast sums of tribute from the wealthy Phoenician cities and extracted valuable timber from the Levant. Despite the primarily economic motives for Ashurnasipal’s western expeditions, its further-reaching implications are also incredibly important. Never before had Assyrians, with their desire for stable control, placed

a colony so far away from their centre, and it paved the way for the centuries to come. Back in the homeland of Ashur, on the Tigris, Assyria’s capital - Ashur - was also the centre of all worship of the Assyrian pantheon of gods - the most prominent and powerful of which was also known as Ashur. This god was strange in Mesopotamia as it was not a celestial entity like Enlil or Marduk, but was actually a deified version of the rock formation on which his temple stood. Interestingly, Assyria is not what the people themselves called the

land - they called it ‘Ashur’. So, the country was called ‘Ashur’, as was their god and their city. The fact that Ashur was a holy city didn’t stop what Ashurnasirpal II did next, in what was perhaps his greatest achievement. Taking advantage of the great wealth which was entering his treasuries from constant success in war, the king began sponsoring construction in Assyrian cities from Nineveh to Ashur. However, his greatest achievement was the building of a vast, beautiful new capital city known as Kalhu - modern Nimrud - beginning in 879BC. The site already had a decaying old

settlement of some kind before the works began, but this project was a different thing altogether. Ashurnasirpal employed thousands of corvee labourers and deportees to build several colossal palaces and glorious temples. Massive winged-bull statues fashioned from stone were placed as fearsome guardians at the entrances to the king’s northwestern palace, and extensive rows of carved stone blocks were decorated with depictions of various scenes designed to show the king’s greatness. In one of these reliefs, two figures bear tribute to the Assyrian king. The first is probably a man from Syria, who can be seen clenching his hands and

raising them as a symbol of submission. The second may be a representative from Phoenicia, and comes to Ashurnasirpal to grant his master a pair of monkeys - word must have gotten around that Assyrian kings loved collecting exotic fauna. In 864, Ashurnasirpal celebrated Kalhu’s completion by inviting, according to an Assyrian inscription: 69,574 guests, among them 16,000 citizens of his new capital and 5,000 foreign dignitaries from surrounding realms. They were provided 10,000 pigeons, 10,000 jugs of beer and 10,000 skins of wine along with numerous other foods and beverages in a grand feast. All would know that this

was the grandeur of Ashur’s new realm. “Go home,” Ashurnasirpal must have thought upon the party’s conclusion, “and tell your petty kings of my glory.” The prestige of creating such a glittering new capital would no doubt have been good enough, but there were probably other practical reasons for its construction beyond just aesthetics. Kalhu was located dead centre in the ‘Assyrian triangle’, its points made up of Ashur, Nineveh and Arbela. His new city was therefore right in the middle of the Assyrian world, more adequate for governing a rapidly expanding empire in a more convenient fashion. Ashurnasirpal might

have wished to assert his independence from the great noble families of Old Ashur by just relocating central power away from them. They had been incredibly influential up until this point, and probably served as an obstacle to an increase in central power. Somewhat revealingly, Kalhu’s direct governance was granted to a eunuch upon the city’s completion, rather than one of the powerful aristocrats of Assyria. Eunuchs were generally seen to be subservient and devoted to the king alone, and for this reason were to become massively powerful over the next two-and-a-half centuries. The most powerful of their number would

serve as everything from royal chariot drivers and cup-bearers to provincial governors and generals. Ashurnasirpal ruled from his new fortified citadel until 859 BC, when his son and successor Shalmaneser III took the throne. Continuing in his illustrious father’s footsteps, his reign was yet another series of stunning campaigns directed against Assyria’s traditional enemies, as well as the Neo-Hittite states around and beyond the Taurus Mountains, which were bent to their knees and forced to pay tribute. However, as we all know, expansion on such a scale has a price, and for the Assyrians that price now had to be

paid. In the late 820s, either slightly before or after Shalmaneser III’s death, the Neo-Assyrian Empire descended into a state of weakness known in Professor Eckart Frahm’s ‘Companion to Assyria’ as ‘The Age of Magnates’. It’s entirely possible that this time in Assyrian history was initiated by a civil war between royal sons, or possibly even a rebellion by the aforementioned aristocratic clans against what they saw as sidelining by the monarchy. Whatever the case truly was, it does seem that after this internal strife, noble power dramatically resurged. In the three-quarters of a century-long period lasting from the late

820s to 745BC, five kings reigned, but it seems that true power resided with various governors, family members and high officials, especially the king’s field marshal. The reign of Adad-nirari III stretched from 810 to 783, for example, and for the most part in that time, power lay with his commander-in-chief Nergal-ila’i and his mother Sammu-ramat. It makes sense, because her son was only a child when installed on the throne of Assyria. This might have been engineered; after all, an infant king is a weak king who can be controlled. This queen mother’s extraordinary authority is revealed to us

in a stele dated to the year 805, which mentions her and her royal son as equal guarantors of the official border between two feuding vassal states. Moreover, she is also mentioned together with her son on religious statues constructed by the governor of Kalhu at the time. Finally, Sammu-ramat was probably the very first woman in Assyria to be commemorated on a stele in the holy city of Ashur which were designed to honour the memory of the kingdom’s rulers. Interestingly, many scholars now believe that this Assyrian queen was the inspiration for the future legendary figure Semiramis, who

is mentioned in numerous Greek sources centuries after this point. It’s possible that her ability to successfully rule the great empire made her memorable enough to mythologise after her death. Historian Susan Wise Bauer commented that ‘Sammu-ramat’s hold on power was so striking that it echoed into the distant historical memory of a people just arriving on the scene’. In effect, she was the Empress Wu of Neo-Assyria. We don’t have time to cover it here, but we recommend that you read up on Semiramis for yourself, and perhaps we’ll do a video about her in the future. Carrying on

with the story, throughout the mid-eighth century BC, the strongest figure in Assyrian politics was a military commander named Shamshi-Ilu, a man who directed military campaigns and ran the affairs of state. He essentially performed all the functions of a king, while sidelining his monarch and only formally respecting the king’s authority. Governors of large Assyrian provinces also asserted their individual authority and power in the regions which they ruled, often competing with one another despite remaining unified under the ‘rule’ of the Assyrian king. It was at this moment when Assyria was at its weakest that enemies finally decided

to strike. In the middle of the eighth century, king of the rising northern state of Urartu - Sarduri I - crossed his border and intervened in the fractured neo-Hittite states, forming a strong anti-Assyrian coalition, and presenting a plausible threat to the weakened state’s existence. At a similar time, Shamshi-Ilu passed away and a revolt broke out in the capital at Kalhu. We have hardly any information about it, but the king at the time was probably killed and then replaced by a man named Pulu. We know him better by the throne name he took - Tiglath-Pileser III.

Under this possible-usurper’s effective leadership, as Hardcore History host Dan Carlin put it: ‘Assyria went on a kind of historical sprint’ and began a meteoric rise in power. Indeed, the blistering speed at which Assyria recovered from its low period can be attributed to this truly great reformer. Above all was the viewpoint that the interests of Ashur’s great empire could no longer be served by the aging imperial system of Ashurnasirpal, it would have to be changed to fit a great empire - the greatest empire the world had ever seen, and the culmination of ancient Sumer’s millennia-long history.

Like any Assyrian monarch worth his salt, Tiglath-Pileser began a series of brutal, lightning conquests in all directions in order to assert the final supremacy of his kingdom to all who thought that the century’s long weakness had de-clawed it. First though, he needed to revamp the Assyrian army into a truly fearsome fighting force. Before Tiglath-Pileser, Assyrian militia armies were only called up in the summer due to the fact that the soldiers - most peasants working in agriculture - had to service the land and reap the harvest in May, before being called up by July. This yearly

cycle was probably one of the limiters on Assyrian domination in the times of Ashurnasirpal, as an army can only conquer so much in a year without economic dislocation. Hereafter, tribute giving clients would give way to full Assyrian provinces. This was done away with, and, amongst other reforms, was replaced by a permanent army with contingents raised from each of the provinces, supplemented when needed by units provided by vassal realms, whose service was a part of the tribute they were obliged to pay. The ‘kisir sharruti’, or ‘standing army’ acquired a multiethnic, multicultural aspect, with foreign troops marching

alongside native Assyrian units. A later king reports that he even integrated 50 Israeli chariot teams into his force. They were issued Assyrian uniforms and equipment, thereby becoming indistinguishable from one another in the ranks. A large Assyrian ‘core’ of troops continued to exist primarily within the cavalry and chariot forces - the strike elements of the army. At an even higher level were the ‘qurubti sha shepe’ - the king’s personal elite bodyguard In the first years of his reign, which began in 745, the Assyrian army conquered Babylonia in the south, the consequences of which would affect Assyria

until the end of the empire. The conquest was completed relatively quickly, but Babylon, being the revered and ancient civilisation that it was, required special treatment. So, after defeating the Chaldean tribes that had occupied the area, Tiglath-Pileser took the step of becoming King of Babylon - instituting a kind of dual-monarchy. In the very same year, the army pivoted north and shattered Urartu’s strength, forcing its king to flee for his life. Assaults on that mountain kingdom would continue until it was finally annihilated in the late eighth century, weakened so much that a new nomadic group - the

Medes, managed to conquer it. In the west, the empire’s borders were again pushed further than ever before, even approaching the borders of Egypt, and provincialising client kingdoms along the way. To more completely subjugate and pacify newly conquered territories and treacherous vassals alike, the king formally, and on an unprecedented scale, reintroduced a policy of mass deportation and forced population movement. In 744, for example, Tiglath-Pileser decreed that 65,000 people were to be taken from their homes in Iran and resettled on the Assyrian-Babylonian border on the Diyala River. Two years later, 30,000 people from the Syrian region were

deported to the Zagros mountains. Those human beings who were deported were usually people considered most likely to rebel against Assyria. By ‘decapitating’ possibly dissident elements in this way, it was hoped that subjugated lands would remain amenable to their Assyrian overlords, and remain subjugated. To top it off, deportation allowed the Assyrians to transport people with valuable skills, such as administration, construction, and financial management across the empire to where they were most needed. Within his empire, Tiglath-Pileser also acted decisively to ensure that central rule would never again be challenged and undermined as it had been in the

‘age of magnates’. To do this, he took the provinces of the empire, many of which were very powerful territories in their own right, and sliced them into smaller, more administratively effective pieces. Within seven years of his ascension to the throne, over 80 of these provinces existed, and loyal eunuchs were appointed to govern many of the new divisions in order to further undermine the provincial elites. To monitor this system, Tiglath-Pileser set up a small administrative layer of officials responsible for inspecting the state of his majesty’s holdings and then reporting back to the king the performance and

loyalty of his governors. We’ve heard of Achaemenid Persia and Mongol usage of horseborne postal services, but this, as far as we can tell, was actually an Assyrian innovation. Communications stations were set up across the empire from which riders could deliver orders to the provinces. It also allowed the delivery of reports from the provinces, containing amongst many other general matters, intelligence from operatives in the spy service which had been set up by Tiglath-Pileser to monitor states beyond Assyrian borders. With these reforms, the Neo-Assyrian Empire entered its golden age and we will talk about them more down

the line, so make sure you are subscribed to our channel and have pressed the bell button. We would like to express our gratitude to our Patreon supporters and channel members, who make the creation of our videos possible. Now, you can also support us by buying our merchandise via the link in the description. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we will catch you on the next one. The end of Bronze Age civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean world initiated a dark age which, from Egypt to Anatolia to Greece, reduced living standards, humbled once proud empires,

and turned prosperous maritime trading kingdoms into shadows of their former selves. However, there was one great Mesopotamian state which managed to weather the storm and eventually emerged from it as the most powerful and arguably the most merciless state in near-eastern, and possibly world history - the Assyrian Empire. There are a bunch of reasons why we love Mesopotamian civilizations and the fact that they were the first to preserve knowledge is on the top of the list. The sponsor of this video Blinkist is all about preserving and sharing knowledge by making it easily digestible even for the

busiest among us. Blinkist takes the most interesting and relevant non-fictional books and turns them into 15-minute audios – blinks. More than 3000 titles are already available which means that you can learn on the go, learn fast, and always improve your knowledge, no matter how time-constrained you are. Blinkist titles range from Entrepreneurship to Philosophy, from Psychology to Politics, but most importantly for us, there are 100s of historical books that you can listen to! Imagine learning the most important facts of 4 books in just 1 hour! Mary Beard’s Civilization and Chip Walter’s Last Ape Standing are perfect

if you want to learn more about human civilizations! New titles are added all the time! Support our channel and your growth - get yourself premium access to knowledge! The first 100 people to go to blinkist.com/kingsandgenerals are going to get unlimited access for 1 week to try it out. You’ll also get 25% off if you want the full membership! The Old and Middle Assyrian Empires had waxed and waned for almost a millennia by the time Bronze Age civilisation came to an end in the late second millennium BC. During that thousand years, Assyria was merely one of

many competing states in Mesopotamia and the near-east. During its earlier imperial periods, Shamshi-Adad dominated much of northern Mesopotamia in the 18th century BC. At its weakest, however, the Assyrians had even been subjugated to vassaldom under the Kingdom of Mitanni, but always seemed to resurge and grow in power again. By the late tenth-century BC, the declining Assyrian polity had been diminished by Aramean invasions, left controlling only its traditional core region in the so-called ‘Assyrian triangle’ on the upper reaches of the Tigris River. Despite that fact, kings in this era still considered themselves rulers of all the

previously conquered territory seized by Middle Assyrian kings such as Tukulti-Ninurta I, that were now lost. It was this gulf between imperial expectation and reality which led to the Neo-Assyrian reconquest. While the surrounding polities had been weakened by the Bronze Age Collapse and were still recovering, Assyria was dynamic and demographically vibrant, allowing its kings to once again pursue an expansionist agenda. Beginning in roughly 934BC with king Ashur-dan II, and continuing with his successors - Adad-nirari II and then Tukulti-Ninurta II - brilliant military expeditions began to recapture the ‘Assyrian territories’ that their predecessors once ruled. This process

culminated in the reign of Ashurnasirpal II - whose name can be translated as ‘the god Ashur is the creator of an heir’. He is one of the most famous neo-Assyrian kings, whose reign we are well informed of by numerous royal reliefs. Under his august rule, the great armies of Ashur were far from sated, and he began to direct expeditions to areas never before touched by Assyrian arms. Parts of northern Babylonia, Zamua - an area in the north near Lake Urmia - Armenian highlands, and the Kashyari mountains all became subject to the iron will of Ashurnasirpal.

The king also crossed the Orontes River in the northwest with an army, founding Assyrian colonies there and essentially launching a commercial expedition. He even managed to exact vast sums of tribute from the wealthy Phoenician cities and extracted valuable timber from the Levant. Despite the primarily economic motives for Ashurnasipal’s western expeditions, its further-reaching implications are also incredibly important. Never before had Assyrians, with their desire for stable control, placed a colony so far away from their centre, and it paved the way for the centuries to come. Back in the homeland of Ashur, on the Tigris, Assyria’s capital

- Ashur - was also the centre of all worship of the Assyrian pantheon of gods - the most prominent and powerful of which was also known as Ashur. This god was strange in Mesopotamia as it was not a celestial entity like Enlil or Marduk, but was actually a deified version of the rock formation on which his temple stood. Interestingly, Assyria is not what the people themselves called the land - they called it ‘Ashur’. So, the country was called ‘Ashur’, as was their god and their city. The fact that Ashur was a holy city didn’t stop

what Ashurnasirpal II did next, in what was perhaps his greatest achievement. Taking advantage of the great wealth which was entering his treasuries from constant success in war, the king began sponsoring construction in Assyrian cities from Nineveh to Ashur. However, his greatest achievement was the building of a vast, beautiful new capital city known as Kalhu - modern Nimrud - beginning in 879BC. The site already had a decaying old settlement of some kind before the works began, but this project was a different thing altogether. Ashurnasirpal employed thousands of corvee labourers and deportees to build several colossal palaces

and glorious temples. Massive winged-bull statues fashioned from stone were placed as fearsome guardians at the entrances to the king’s northwestern palace, and extensive rows of carved stone blocks were decorated with depictions of various scenes designed to show the king’s greatness. In one of these reliefs, two figures bear tribute to the Assyrian king. The first is probably a man from Syria, who can be seen clenching his hands and raising them as a symbol of submission. The second may be a representative from Phoenicia, and comes to Ashurnasirpal to grant his master a pair of monkeys - word

must have gotten around that Assyrian kings loved collecting exotic fauna. In 864, Ashurnasirpal celebrated Kalhu’s completion by inviting, according to an Assyrian inscription: 69,574 guests, among them 16,000 citizens of his new capital and 5,000 foreign dignitaries from surrounding realms. They were provided 10,000 pigeons, 10,000 jugs of beer and 10,000 skins of wine along with numerous other foods and beverages in a grand feast. All would know that this was the grandeur of Ashur’s new realm. “Go home,” Ashurnasirpal must have thought upon the party’s conclusion, “and tell your petty kings of my glory.” The prestige of creating

such a glittering new capital would no doubt have been good enough, but there were probably other practical reasons for its construction beyond just aesthetics. Kalhu was located dead centre in the ‘Assyrian triangle’, its points made up of Ashur, Nineveh and Arbela. His new city was therefore right in the middle of the Assyrian world, more adequate for governing a rapidly expanding empire in a more convenient fashion. Ashurnasirpal might have wished to assert his independence from the great noble families of Old Ashur by just relocating central power away from them. They had been incredibly influential up until

this point, and probably served as an obstacle to an increase in central power. Somewhat revealingly, Kalhu’s direct governance was granted to a eunuch upon the city’s completion, rather than one of the powerful aristocrats of Assyria. Eunuchs were generally seen to be subservient and devoted to the king alone, and for this reason were to become massively powerful over the next two-and-a-half centuries. The most powerful of their number would serve as everything from royal chariot drivers and cup-bearers to provincial governors and generals. Ashurnasirpal ruled from his new fortified citadel until 859 BC, when his son and successor

Shalmaneser III took the throne. Continuing in his illustrious father’s footsteps, his reign was yet another series of stunning campaigns directed against Assyria’s traditional enemies, as well as the Neo-Hittite states around and beyond the Taurus Mountains, which were bent to their knees and forced to pay tribute. However, as we all know, expansion on such a scale has a price, and for the Assyrians that price now had to be paid. In the late 820s, either slightly before or after Shalmaneser III’s death, the Neo-Assyrian Empire descended into a state of weakness known in Professor Eckart Frahm’s ‘Companion to

Assyria’ as ‘The Age of Magnates’. It’s entirely possible that this time in Assyrian history was initiated by a civil war between royal sons, or possibly even a rebellion by the aforementioned aristocratic clans against what they saw as sidelining by the monarchy. Whatever the case truly was, it does seem that after this internal strife, noble power dramatically resurged. In the three-quarters of a century-long period lasting from the late 820s to 745BC, five kings reigned, but it seems that true power resided with various governors, family members and high officials, especially the king’s field marshal. The reign of

Adad-nirari III stretched from 810 to 783, for example, and for the most part in that time, power lay with his commander-in-chief Nergal-ila’i and his mother Sammu-ramat. It makes sense, because her son was only a child when installed on the throne of Assyria. This might have been engineered; after all, an infant king is a weak king who can be controlled. This queen mother’s extraordinary authority is revealed to us in a stele dated to the year 805, which mentions her and her royal son as equal guarantors of the official border between two feuding vassal states. Moreover, she

is also mentioned together with her son on religious statues constructed by the governor of Kalhu at the time. Finally, Sammu-ramat was probably the very first woman in Assyria to be commemorated on a stele in the holy city of Ashur which were designed to honour the memory of the kingdom’s rulers. Interestingly, many scholars now believe that this Assyrian queen was the inspiration for the future legendary figure Semiramis, who is mentioned in numerous Greek sources centuries after this point. It’s possible that her ability to successfully rule the great empire made her memorable enough to mythologise after her

death. Historian Susan Wise Bauer commented that ‘Sammu-ramat’s hold on power was so striking that it echoed into the distant historical memory of a people just arriving on the scene’. In effect, she was the Empress Wu of Neo-Assyria. We don’t have time to cover it here, but we recommend that you read up on Semiramis for yourself, and perhaps we’ll do a video about her in the future. Carrying on with the story, throughout the mid-eighth century BC, the strongest figure in Assyrian politics was a military commander named Shamshi-Ilu, a man who directed military campaigns and ran the

affairs of state. He essentially performed all the functions of a king, while sidelining his monarch and only formally respecting the king’s authority. Governors of large Assyrian provinces also asserted their individual authority and power in the regions which they ruled, often competing with one another despite remaining unified under the ‘rule’ of the Assyrian king. It was at this moment when Assyria was at its weakest that enemies finally decided to strike. In the middle of the eighth century, king of the rising northern state of Urartu - Sarduri I - crossed his border and intervened in the fractured

neo-Hittite states, forming a strong anti-Assyrian coalition, and presenting a plausible threat to the weakened state’s existence. At a similar time, Shamshi-Ilu passed away and a revolt broke out in the capital at Kalhu. We have hardly any information about it, but the king at the time was probably killed and then replaced by a man named Pulu. We know him better by the throne name he took - Tiglath-Pileser III. Under this possible-usurper’s effective leadership, as Hardcore History host Dan Carlin put it: ‘Assyria went on a kind of historical sprint’ and began a meteoric rise in power. Indeed,

the blistering speed at which Assyria recovered from its low period can be attributed to this truly great reformer. Above all was the viewpoint that the interests of Ashur’s great empire could no longer be served by the aging imperial system of Ashurnasirpal, it would have to be changed to fit a great empire - the greatest empire the world had ever seen, and the culmination of ancient Sumer’s millennia-long history. Like any Assyrian monarch worth his salt, Tiglath-Pileser began a series of brutal, lightning conquests in all directions in order to assert the final supremacy of his kingdom to

all who thought that the century’s long weakness had de-clawed it. First though, he needed to revamp the Assyrian army into a truly fearsome fighting force. Before Tiglath-Pileser, Assyrian militia armies were only called up in the summer due to the fact that the soldiers - most peasants working in agriculture - had to service the land and reap the harvest in May, before being called up by July. This yearly cycle was probably one of the limiters on Assyrian domination in the times of Ashurnasirpal, as an army can only conquer so much in a year without economic dislocation.

Hereafter, tribute giving clients would give way to full Assyrian provinces. This was done away with, and, amongst other reforms, was replaced by a permanent army with contingents raised from each of the provinces, supplemented when needed by units provided by vassal realms, whose service was a part of the tribute they were obliged to pay. The ‘kisir sharruti’, or ‘standing army’ acquired a multiethnic, multicultural aspect, with foreign troops marching alongside native Assyrian units. A later king reports that he even integrated 50 Israeli chariot teams into his force. They were issued Assyrian uniforms and equipment, thereby becoming indistinguishable

from one another in the ranks. A large Assyrian ‘core’ of troops continued to exist primarily within the cavalry and chariot forces - the strike elements of the army. At an even higher level were the ‘qurubti sha shepe’ - the king’s personal elite bodyguard In the first years of his reign, which began in 745, the Assyrian army conquered Babylonia in the south, the consequences of which would affect Assyria until the end of the empire. The conquest was completed relatively quickly, but Babylon, being the revered and ancient civilisation that it was, required special treatment. So, after defeating

the Chaldean tribes that had occupied the area, Tiglath-Pileser took the step of becoming King of Babylon - instituting a kind of dual-monarchy. In the very same year, the army pivoted north and shattered Urartu’s strength, forcing its king to flee for his life. Assaults on that mountain kingdom would continue until it was finally annihilated in the late eighth century, weakened so much that a new nomadic group - the Medes, managed to conquer it. In the west, the empire’s borders were again pushed further than ever before, even approaching the borders of Egypt, and provincialising client kingdoms along

the way. To more completely subjugate and pacify newly conquered territories and treacherous vassals alike, the king formally, and on an unprecedented scale, reintroduced a policy of mass deportation and forced population movement. In 744, for example, Tiglath-Pileser decreed that 65,000 people were to be taken from their homes in Iran and resettled on the Assyrian-Babylonian border on the Diyala River. Two years later, 30,000 people from the Syrian region were deported to the Zagros mountains. Those human beings who were deported were usually people considered most likely to rebel against Assyria. By ‘decapitating’ possibly dissident elements in this way,

it was hoped that subjugated lands would remain amenable to their Assyrian overlords, and remain subjugated. To top it off, deportation allowed the Assyrians to transport people with valuable skills, such as administration, construction, and financial management across the empire to where they were most needed. Within his empire, Tiglath-Pileser also acted decisively to ensure that central rule would never again be challenged and undermined as it had been in the ‘age of magnates’. To do this, he took the provinces of the empire, many of which were very powerful territories in their own right, and sliced them into smaller,

more administratively effective pieces. Within seven years of his ascension to the throne, over 80 of these provinces existed, and loyal eunuchs were appointed to govern many of the new divisions in order to further undermine the provincial elites. To monitor this system, Tiglath-Pileser set up a small administrative layer of officials responsible for inspecting the state of his majesty’s holdings and then reporting back to the king the performance and loyalty of his governors. We’ve heard of Achaemenid Persia and Mongol usage of horseborne postal services, but this, as far as we can tell, was actually an Assyrian innovation.

Communications stations were set up across the empire from which riders could deliver orders to the provinces. It also allowed the delivery of reports from the provinces, containing amongst many other general matters, intelligence from operatives in the spy service which had been set up by Tiglath-Pileser to monitor states beyond Assyrian borders. With these reforms, the Neo-Assyrian Empire entered its golden age and we will talk about them more down the line, so make sure you are subscribed to our channel and have pressed the bell button. We would like to express our gratitude to our Patreon supporters and

channel members, who make the creation of our videos possible. Now, you can also support us by buying our merchandise via the link in the description. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we will catch you on the next one. The end of Bronze Age civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean world initiated a dark age which, from Egypt to Anatolia to Greece, reduced living standards, humbled once proud empires, and turned prosperous maritime trading kingdoms into shadows of their former selves. However, there was one great Mesopotamian state which managed to weather the storm and eventually emerged from

it as the most powerful and arguably the most merciless state in near-eastern, and possibly world history - the Assyrian Empire. There are a bunch of reasons why we love Mesopotamian civilizations and the fact that they were the first to preserve knowledge is on the top of the list. The sponsor of this video Blinkist is all about preserving and sharing knowledge by making it easily digestible even for the busiest among us. Blinkist takes the most interesting and relevant non-fictional books and turns them into 15-minute audios – blinks. More than 3000 titles are already available which means

that you can learn on the go, learn fast, and always improve your knowledge, no matter how time-constrained you are. Blinkist titles range from Entrepreneurship to Philosophy, from Psychology to Politics, but most importantly for us, there are 100s of historical books that you can listen to! Imagine learning the most important facts of 4 books in just 1 hour! Mary Beard’s Civilization and Chip Walter’s Last Ape Standing are perfect if you want to learn more about human civilizations! New titles are added all the time! Support our channel and your growth - get yourself premium access to knowledge!

The first 100 people to go to blinkist.com/kingsandgenerals are going to get unlimited access for 1 week to try it out. You’ll also get 25% off if you want the full membership! The Old and Middle Assyrian Empires had waxed and waned for almost a millennia by the time Bronze Age civilisation came to an end in the late second millennium BC. During that thousand years, Assyria was merely one of many competing states in Mesopotamia and the near-east. During its earlier imperial periods, Shamshi-Adad dominated much of northern Mesopotamia in the 18th century BC. At its weakest, however, the

Assyrians had even been subjugated to vassaldom under the Kingdom of Mitanni, but always seemed to resurge and grow in power again. By the late tenth-century BC, the declining Assyrian polity had been diminished by Aramean invasions, left controlling only its traditional core region in the so-called ‘Assyrian triangle’ on the upper reaches of the Tigris River. Despite that fact, kings in this era still considered themselves rulers of all the previously conquered territory seized by Middle Assyrian kings such as Tukulti-Ninurta I, that were now lost. It was this gulf between imperial expectation and reality which led to the

Neo-Assyrian reconquest. While the surrounding polities had been weakened by the Bronze Age Collapse and were still recovering, Assyria was dynamic and demographically vibrant, allowing its kings to once again pursue an expansionist agenda. Beginning in roughly 934BC with king Ashur-dan II, and continuing with his successors - Adad-nirari II and then Tukulti-Ninurta II - brilliant military expeditions began to recapture the ‘Assyrian territories’ that their predecessors once ruled. This process culminated in the reign of Ashurnasirpal II - whose name can be translated as ‘the god Ashur is the creator of an heir’. He is one of the most

famous neo-Assyrian kings, whose reign we are well informed of by numerous royal reliefs. Under his august rule, the great armies of Ashur were far from sated, and he began to direct expeditions to areas never before touched by Assyrian arms. Parts of northern Babylonia, Zamua - an area in the north near Lake Urmia - Armenian highlands, and the Kashyari mountains all became subject to the iron will of Ashurnasirpal. The king also crossed the Orontes River in the northwest with an army, founding Assyrian colonies there and essentially launching a commercial expedition. He even managed to exact vast

sums of tribute from the wealthy Phoenician cities and extracted valuable timber from the Levant. Despite the primarily economic motives for Ashurnasipal’s western expeditions, its further-reaching implications are also incredibly important. Never before had Assyrians, with their desire for stable control, placed a colony so far away from their centre, and it paved the way for the centuries to come. Back in the homeland of Ashur, on the Tigris, Assyria’s capital - Ashur - was also the centre of all worship of the Assyrian pantheon of gods - the most prominent and powerful of which was also known as Ashur.

This god was strange in Mesopotamia as it was not a celestial entity like Enlil or Marduk, but was actually a deified version of the rock formation on which his temple stood. Interestingly, Assyria is not what the people themselves called the land - they called it ‘Ashur’. So, the country was called ‘Ashur’, as was their god and their city. The fact that Ashur was a holy city didn’t stop what Ashurnasirpal II did next, in what was perhaps his greatest achievement. Taking advantage of the great wealth which was entering his treasuries from constant success in war, the

king began sponsoring construction in Assyrian cities from Nineveh to Ashur. However, his greatest achievement was the building of a vast, beautiful new capital city known as Kalhu - modern Nimrud - beginning in 879BC. The site already had a decaying old settlement of some kind before the works began, but this project was a different thing altogether. Ashurnasirpal employed thousands of corvee labourers and deportees to build several colossal palaces and glorious temples. Massive winged-bull statues fashioned from stone were placed as fearsome guardians at the entrances to the king’s northwestern palace, and extensive rows of carved stone blocks

were decorated with depictions of various scenes designed to show the king’s greatness. In one of these reliefs, two figures bear tribute to the Assyrian king. The first is probably a man from Syria, who can be seen clenching his hands and raising them as a symbol of submission. The second may be a representative from Phoenicia, and comes to Ashurnasirpal to grant his master a pair of monkeys - word must have gotten around that Assyrian kings loved collecting exotic fauna. In 864, Ashurnasirpal celebrated Kalhu’s completion by inviting, according to an Assyrian inscription: 69,574 guests, among them 16,000

citizens of his new capital and 5,000 foreign dignitaries from surrounding realms. They were provided 10,000 pigeons, 10,000 jugs of beer and 10,000 skins of wine along with numerous other foods and beverages in a grand feast. All would know that this was the grandeur of Ashur’s new realm. “Go home,” Ashurnasirpal must have thought upon the party’s conclusion, “and tell your petty kings of my glory.” The prestige of creating such a glittering new capital would no doubt have been good enough, but there were probably other practical reasons for its construction beyond just aesthetics. Kalhu was located dead

centre in the ‘Assyrian triangle’, its points made up of Ashur, Nineveh and Arbela. His new city was therefore right in the middle of the Assyrian world, more adequate for governing a rapidly expanding empire in a more convenient fashion. Ashurnasirpal might have wished to assert his independence from the great noble families of Old Ashur by just relocating central power away from them. They had been incredibly influential up until this point, and probably served as an obstacle to an increase in central power. Somewhat revealingly, Kalhu’s direct governance was granted to a eunuch upon the city’s completion, rather

than one of the powerful aristocrats of Assyria. Eunuchs were generally seen to be subservient and devoted to the king alone, and for this reason were to become massively powerful over the next two-and-a-half centuries. The most powerful of their number would serve as everything from royal chariot drivers and cup-bearers to provincial governors and generals. Ashurnasirpal ruled from his new fortified citadel until 859 BC, when his son and successor Shalmaneser III took the throne. Continuing in his illustrious father’s footsteps, his reign was yet another series of stunning campaigns directed against Assyria’s traditional enemies, as well as the

Neo-Hittite states around and beyond the Taurus Mountains, which were bent to their knees and forced to pay tribute. However, as we all know, expansion on such a scale has a price, and for the Assyrians that price now had to be paid. In the late 820s, either slightly before or after Shalmaneser III’s death, the Neo-Assyrian Empire descended into a state of weakness known in Professor Eckart Frahm’s ‘Companion to Assyria’ as ‘The Age of Magnates’. It’s entirely possible that this time in Assyrian history was initiated by a civil war between royal sons, or possibly even a rebellion

by the aforementioned aristocratic clans against what they saw as sidelining by the monarchy. Whatever the case truly was, it does seem that after this internal strife, noble power dramatically resurged. In the three-quarters of a century-long period lasting from the late 820s to 745BC, five kings reigned, but it seems that true power resided with various governors, family members and high officials, especially the king’s field marshal. The reign of Adad-nirari III stretched from 810 to 783, for example, and for the most part in that time, power lay with his commander-in-chief Nergal-ila’i and his mother Sammu-ramat. It makes

sense, because her son was only a child when installed on the throne of Assyria. This might have been engineered; after all, an infant king is a weak king who can be controlled. This queen mother’s extraordinary authority is revealed to us in a stele dated to the year 805, which mentions her and her royal son as equal guarantors of the official border between two feuding vassal states. Moreover, she is also mentioned together with her son on religious statues constructed by the governor of Kalhu at the time. Finally, Sammu-ramat was probably the very first woman in Assyria

to be commemorated on a stele in the holy city of Ashur which were designed to honour the memory of the kingdom’s rulers. Interestingly, many scholars now believe that this Assyrian queen was the inspiration for the future legendary figure Semiramis, who is mentioned in numerous Greek sources centuries after this point. It’s possible that her ability to successfully rule the great empire made her memorable enough to mythologise after her death. Historian Susan Wise Bauer commented that ‘Sammu-ramat’s hold on power was so striking that it echoed into the distant historical memory of a people just arriving on the

scene’. In effect, she was the Empress Wu of Neo-Assyria. We don’t have time to cover it here, but we recommend that you read up on Semiramis for yourself, and perhaps we’ll do a video about her in the future. Carrying on with the story, throughout the mid-eighth century BC, the strongest figure in Assyrian politics was a military commander named Shamshi-Ilu, a man who directed military campaigns and ran the affairs of state. He essentially performed all the functions of a king, while sidelining his monarch and only formally respecting the king’s authority. Governors of large Assyrian provinces also

asserted their individual authority and power in the regions which they ruled, often competing with one another despite remaining unified under the ‘rule’ of the Assyrian king. It was at this moment when Assyria was at its weakest that enemies finally decided to strike. In the middle of the eighth century, king of the rising northern state of Urartu - Sarduri I - crossed his border and intervened in the fractured neo-Hittite states, forming a strong anti-Assyrian coalition, and presenting a plausible threat to the weakened state’s existence. At a similar time, Shamshi-Ilu passed away and a revolt broke out

in the capital at Kalhu. We have hardly any information about it, but the king at the time was probably killed and then replaced by a man named Pulu. We know him better by the throne name he took - Tiglath-Pileser III. Under this possible-usurper’s effective leadership, as Hardcore History host Dan Carlin put it: ‘Assyria went on a kind of historical sprint’ and began a meteoric rise in power. Indeed, the blistering speed at which Assyria recovered from its low period can be attributed to this truly great reformer. Above all was the viewpoint that the interests of Ashur’s

great empire could no longer be served by the aging imperial system of Ashurnasirpal, it would have to be changed to fit a great empire - the greatest empire the world had ever seen, and the culmination of ancient Sumer’s millennia-long history. Like any Assyrian monarch worth his salt, Tiglath-Pileser began a series of brutal, lightning conquests in all directions in order to assert the final supremacy of his kingdom to all who thought that the century’s long weakness had de-clawed it. First though, he needed to revamp the Assyrian army into a truly fearsome fighting force. Before Tiglath-Pileser, Assyrian

militia armies were only called up in the summer due to the fact that the soldiers - most peasants working in agriculture - had to service the land and reap the harvest in May, before being called up by July. This yearly cycle was probably one of the limiters on Assyrian domination in the times of Ashurnasirpal, as an army can only conquer so much in a year without economic dislocation. Hereafter, tribute giving clients would give way to full Assyrian provinces. This was done away with, and, amongst other reforms, was replaced by a permanent army with contingents raised

from each of the provinces, supplemented when needed by units provided by vassal realms, whose service was a part of the tribute they were obliged to pay. The ‘kisir sharruti’, or ‘standing army’ acquired a multiethnic, multicultural aspect, with foreign troops marching alongside native Assyrian units. A later king reports that he even integrated 50 Israeli chariot teams into his force. They were issued Assyrian uniforms and equipment, thereby becoming indistinguishable from one another in the ranks. A large Assyrian ‘core’ of troops continued to exist primarily within the cavalry and chariot forces - the strike elements of the army.

At an even higher level were the ‘qurubti sha shepe’ - the king’s personal elite bodyguard In the first years of his reign, which began in 745, the Assyrian army conquered Babylonia in the south, the consequences of which would affect Assyria until the end of the empire. The conquest was completed relatively quickly, but Babylon, being the revered and ancient civilisation that it was, required special treatment. So, after defeating the Chaldean tribes that had occupied the area, Tiglath-Pileser took the step of becoming King of Babylon - instituting a kind of dual-monarchy. In the very same year, the

army pivoted north and shattered Urartu’s strength, forcing its king to flee for his life. Assaults on that mountain kingdom would continue until it was finally annihilated in the late eighth century, weakened so much that a new nomadic group - the Medes, managed to conquer it. In the west, the empire’s borders were again pushed further than ever before, even approaching the borders of Egypt, and provincialising client kingdoms along the way. To more completely subjugate and pacify newly conquered territories and treacherous vassals alike, the king formally, and on an unprecedented scale, reintroduced a policy of mass deportation

and forced population movement. In 744, for example, Tiglath-Pileser decreed that 65,000 people were to be taken from their homes in Iran and resettled on the Assyrian-Babylonian border on the Diyala River. Two years later, 30,000 people from the Syrian region were deported to the Zagros mountains. Those human beings who were deported were usually people considered most likely to rebel against Assyria. By ‘decapitating’ possibly dissident elements in this way, it was hoped that subjugated lands would remain amenable to their Assyrian overlords, and remain subjugated. To top it off, deportation allowed the Assyrians to transport people with valuable

skills, such as administration, construction, and financial management across the empire to where they were most needed. Within his empire, Tiglath-Pileser also acted decisively to ensure that central rule would never again be challenged and undermined as it had been in the ‘age of magnates’. To do this, he took the provinces of the empire, many of which were very powerful territories in their own right, and sliced them into smaller, more administratively effective pieces. Within seven years of his ascension to the throne, over 80 of these provinces existed, and loyal eunuchs were appointed to govern many of the

new divisions in order to further undermine the provincial elites. To monitor this system, Tiglath-Pileser set up a small administrative layer of officials responsible for inspecting the state of his majesty’s holdings and then reporting back to the king the performance and loyalty of his governors. We’ve heard of Achaemenid Persia and Mongol usage of horseborne postal services, but this, as far as we can tell, was actually an Assyrian innovation. Communications stations were set up across the empire from which riders could deliver orders to the provinces. It also allowed the delivery of reports from the provinces, containing amongst

many other general matters, intelligence from operatives in the spy service which had been set up by Tiglath-Pileser to monitor states beyond Assyrian borders. With these reforms, the Neo-Assyrian Empire entered its golden age and we will talk about them more down the line, so make sure you are subscribed to our channel and have pressed the bell button. We would like to express our gratitude to our Patreon supporters and channel members, who make the creation of our videos possible. Now, you can also support us by buying our merchandise via the link in the description. This is the

Kings and Generals channel, and we will catch you on the next one. The end of Bronze Age civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean world initiated a dark age which, from Egypt to Anatolia to Greece, reduced living standards, humbled once proud empires, and turned prosperous maritime trading kingdoms into shadows of their former selves. However, there was one great Mesopotamian state which managed to weather the storm and eventually emerged from it as the most powerful and arguably the most merciless state in near-eastern, and possibly world history - the Assyrian Empire. There are a bunch of reasons why we

love Mesopotamian civilizations and the fact that they were the first to preserve knowledge is on the top of the list. The sponsor of this video Blinkist is all about preserving and sharing knowledge by making it easily digestible even for the busiest among us. Blinkist takes the most interesting and relevant non-fictional books and turns them into 15-minute audios – blinks. More than 3000 titles are already available which means that you can learn on the go, learn fast, and always improve your knowledge, no matter how time-constrained you are. Blinkist titles range from Entrepreneurship to Philosophy, from Psychology

to Politics, but most importantly for us, there are 100s of historical books that you can listen to! Imagine learning the most important facts of 4 books in just 1 hour! Mary Beard’s Civilization and Chip Walter’s Last Ape Standing are perfect if you want to learn more about human civilizations! New titles are added all the time! Support our channel and your growth - get yourself premium access to knowledge! The first 100 people to go to blinkist.com/kingsandgenerals are going to get unlimited access for 1 week to try it out. You’ll also get 25% off if you want

the full membership! The Old and Middle Assyrian Empires had waxed and waned for almost a millennia by the time Bronze Age civilisation came to an end in the late second millennium BC. During that thousand years, Assyria was merely one of many competing states in Mesopotamia and the near-east. During its earlier imperial periods, Shamshi-Adad dominated much of northern Mesopotamia in the 18th century BC. At its weakest, however, the Assyrians had even been subjugated to vassaldom under the Kingdom of Mitanni, but always seemed to resurge and grow in power again. By the late tenth-century BC, the declining

Assyrian polity had been diminished by Aramean invasions, left controlling only its traditional core region in the so-called ‘Assyrian triangle’ on the upper reaches of the Tigris River. Despite that fact, kings in this era still considered themselves rulers of all the previously conquered territory seized by Middle Assyrian kings such as Tukulti-Ninurta I, that were now lost. It was this gulf between imperial expectation and reality which led to the Neo-Assyrian reconquest. While the surrounding polities had been weakened by the Bronze Age Collapse and were still recovering, Assyria was dynamic and demographically vibrant, allowing its kings to once

again pursue an expansionist agenda. Beginning in roughly 934BC with king Ashur-dan II, and continuing with his successors - Adad-nirari II and then Tukulti-Ninurta II - brilliant military expeditions began to recapture the ‘Assyrian territories’ that their predecessors once ruled. This process culminated in the reign of Ashurnasirpal II - whose name can be translated as ‘the god Ashur is the creator of an heir’. He is one of the most famous neo-Assyrian kings, whose reign we are well informed of by numerous royal reliefs. Under his august rule, the great armies of Ashur were far from sated, and he

began to direct expeditions to areas never before touched by Assyrian arms. Parts of northern Babylonia, Zamua - an area in the north near Lake Urmia - Armenian highlands, and the Kashyari mountains all became subject to the iron will of Ashurnasirpal. The king also crossed the Orontes River in the northwest with an army, founding Assyrian colonies there and essentially launching a commercial expedition. He even managed to exact vast sums of tribute from the wealthy Phoenician cities and extracted valuable timber from the Levant. Despite the primarily economic motives for Ashurnasipal’s western expeditions, its further-reaching implications are also

incredibly important. Never before had Assyrians, with their desire for stable control, placed a colony so far away from their centre, and it paved the way for the centuries to come. Back in the homeland of Ashur, on the Tigris, Assyria’s capital - Ashur - was also the centre of all worship of the Assyrian pantheon of gods - the most prominent and powerful of which was also known as Ashur. This god was strange in Mesopotamia as it was not a celestial entity like Enlil or Marduk, but was actually a deified version of the rock formation on which

his temple stood. Interestingly, Assyria is not what the people themselves called the land - they called it ‘Ashur’. So, the country was called ‘Ashur’, as was their god and their city. The fact that Ashur was a holy city didn’t stop what Ashurnasirpal II did next, in what was perhaps his greatest achievement. Taking advantage of the great wealth which was entering his treasuries from constant success in war, the king began sponsoring construction in Assyrian cities from Nineveh to Ashur. However, his greatest achievement was the building of a vast, beautiful new capital city known as Kalhu -

modern Nimrud - beginning in 879BC. The site already had a decaying old settlement of some kind before the works began, but this project was a different thing altogether. Ashurnasirpal employed thousands of corvee labourers and deportees to build several colossal palaces and glorious temples. Massive winged-bull statues fashioned from stone were placed as fearsome guardians at the entrances to the king’s northwestern palace, and extensive rows of carved stone blocks were decorated with depictions of various scenes designed to show the king’s greatness. In one of these reliefs, two figures bear tribute to the Assyrian king. The first is

probably a man from Syria, who can be seen clenching his hands and raising them as a symbol of submission. The second may be a representative from Phoenicia, and comes to Ashurnasirpal to grant his master a pair of monkeys - word must have gotten around that Assyrian kings loved collecting exotic fauna. In 864, Ashurnasirpal celebrated Kalhu’s completion by inviting, according to an Assyrian inscription: 69,574 guests, among them 16,000 citizens of his new capital and 5,000 foreign dignitaries from surrounding realms. They were provided 10,000 pigeons, 10,000 jugs of beer and 10,000 skins of wine along with numerous

other foods and beverages in a grand feast. All would know that this was the grandeur of Ashur’s new realm. “Go home,” Ashurnasirpal must have thought upon the party’s conclusion, “and tell your petty kings of my glory.” The prestige of creating such a glittering new capital would no doubt have been good enough, but there were probably other practical reasons for its construction beyond just aesthetics. Kalhu was located dead centre in the ‘Assyrian triangle’, its points made up of Ashur, Nineveh and Arbela. His new city was therefore right in the middle of the Assyrian world, more adequate

for governing a rapidly expanding empire in a more convenient fashion. Ashurnasirpal might have wished to assert his independence from the great noble families of Old Ashur by just relocating central power away from them. They had been incredibly influential up until this point, and probably served as an obstacle to an increase in central power. Somewhat revealingly, Kalhu’s direct governance was granted to a eunuch upon the city’s completion, rather than one of the powerful aristocrats of Assyria. Eunuchs were generally seen to be subservient and devoted to the king alone, and for this reason were to become massively

powerful over the next two-and-a-half centuries. The most powerful of their number would serve as everything from royal chariot drivers and cup-bearers to provincial governors and generals. Ashurnasirpal ruled from his new fortified citadel until 859 BC, when his son and successor Shalmaneser III took the throne. Continuing in his illustrious father’s footsteps, his reign was yet another series of stunning campaigns directed against Assyria’s traditional enemies, as well as the Neo-Hittite states around and beyond the Taurus Mountains, which were bent to their knees and forced to pay tribute. However, as we all know, expansion on such a scale

has a price, and for the Assyrians that price now had to be paid. In the late 820s, either slightly before or after Shalmaneser III’s death, the Neo-Assyrian Empire descended into a state of weakness known in Professor Eckart Frahm’s ‘Companion to Assyria’ as ‘The Age of Magnates’. It’s entirely possible that this time in Assyrian history was initiated by a civil war between royal sons, or possibly even a rebellion by the aforementioned aristocratic clans against what they saw as sidelining by the monarchy. Whatever the case truly was, it does seem that after this internal strife, noble power

dramatically resurged. In the three-quarters of a century-long period lasting from the late 820s to 745BC, five kings reigned, but it seems that true power resided with various governors, family members and high officials, especially the king’s field marshal. The reign of Adad-nirari III stretched from 810 to 783, for example, and for the most part in that time, power lay with his commander-in-chief Nergal-ila’i and his mother Sammu-ramat. It makes sense, because her son was only a child when installed on the throne of Assyria. This might have been engineered; after all, an infant king is a weak king

who can be controlled. This queen mother’s extraordinary authority is revealed to us in a stele dated to the year 805, which mentions her and her royal son as equal guarantors of the official border between two feuding vassal states. Moreover, she is also mentioned together with her son on religious statues constructed by the governor of Kalhu at the time. Finally, Sammu-ramat was probably the very first woman in Assyria to be commemorated on a stele in the holy city of Ashur which were designed to honour the memory of the kingdom’s rulers. Interestingly, many scholars now believe that

this Assyrian queen was the inspiration for the future legendary figure Semiramis, who is mentioned in numerous Greek sources centuries after this point. It’s possible that her ability to successfully rule the great empire made her memorable enough to mythologise after her death. Historian Susan Wise Bauer commented that ‘Sammu-ramat’s hold on power was so striking that it echoed into the distant historical memory of a people just arriving on the scene’. In effect, she was the Empress Wu of Neo-Assyria. We don’t have time to cover it here, but we recommend that you read up on Semiramis for yourself,

and perhaps we’ll do a video about her in the future. Carrying on with the story, throughout the mid-eighth century BC, the strongest figure in Assyrian politics was a military commander named Shamshi-Ilu, a man who directed military campaigns and ran the affairs of state. He essentially performed all the functions of a king, while sidelining his monarch and only formally respecting the king’s authority. Governors of large Assyrian provinces also asserted their individual authority and power in the regions which they ruled, often competing with one another despite remaining unified under the ‘rule’ of the Assyrian king. It was

at this moment when Assyria was at its weakest that enemies finally decided to strike. In the middle of the eighth century, king of the rising northern state of Urartu - Sarduri I - crossed his border and intervened in the fractured neo-Hittite states, forming a strong anti-Assyrian coalition, and presenting a plausible threat to the weakened state’s existence. At a similar time, Shamshi-Ilu passed away and a revolt broke out in the capital at Kalhu. We have hardly any information about it, but the king at the time was probably killed and then replaced by a man named Pulu.

We know him better by the throne name he took - Tiglath-Pileser III. Under this possible-usurper’s effective leadership, as Hardcore History host Dan Carlin put it: ‘Assyria went on a kind of historical sprint’ and began a meteoric rise in power. Indeed, the blistering speed at which Assyria recovered from its low period can be attributed to this truly great reformer. Above all was the viewpoint that the interests of Ashur’s great empire could no longer be served by the aging imperial system of Ashurnasirpal, it would have to be changed to fit a great empire - the greatest empire

the world had ever seen, and the culmination of ancient Sumer’s millennia-long history. Like any Assyrian monarch worth his salt, Tiglath-Pileser began a series of brutal, lightning conquests in all directions in order to assert the final supremacy of his kingdom to all who thought that the century’s long weakness had de-clawed it. First though, he needed to revamp the Assyrian army into a truly fearsome fighting force. Before Tiglath-Pileser, Assyrian militia armies were only called up in the summer due to the fact that the soldiers - most peasants working in agriculture - had to service the land and

reap the harvest in May, before being called up by July. This yearly cycle was probably one of the limiters on Assyrian domination in the times of Ashurnasirpal, as an army can only conquer so much in a year without economic dislocation. Hereafter, tribute giving clients would give way to full Assyrian provinces. This was done away with, and, amongst other reforms, was replaced by a permanent army with contingents raised from each of the provinces, supplemented when needed by units provided by vassal realms, whose service was a part of the tribute they were obliged to pay. The ‘kisir

sharruti’, or ‘standing army’ acquired a multiethnic, multicultural aspect, with foreign troops marching alongside native Assyrian units. A later king reports that he even integrated 50 Israeli chariot teams into his force. They were issued Assyrian uniforms and equipment, thereby becoming indistinguishable from one another in the ranks. A large Assyrian ‘core’ of troops continued to exist primarily within the cavalry and chariot forces - the strike elements of the army. At an even higher level were the ‘qurubti sha shepe’ - the king’s personal elite bodyguard In the first years of his reign, which began in 745, the Assyrian

army conquered Babylonia in the south, the consequences of which would affect Assyria until the end of the empire. The conquest was completed relatively quickly, but Babylon, being the revered and ancient civilisation that it was, required special treatment. So, after defeating the Chaldean tribes that had occupied the area, Tiglath-Pileser took the step of becoming King of Babylon - instituting a kind of dual-monarchy. In the very same year, the army pivoted north and shattered Urartu’s strength, forcing its king to flee for his life. Assaults on that mountain kingdom would continue until it was finally annihilated in the

late eighth century, weakened so much that a new nomadic group - the Medes, managed to conquer it. In the west, the empire’s borders were again pushed further than ever before, even approaching the borders of Egypt, and provincialising client kingdoms along the way. To more completely subjugate and pacify newly conquered territories and treacherous vassals alike, the king formally, and on an unprecedented scale, reintroduced a policy of mass deportation and forced population movement. In 744, for example, Tiglath-Pileser decreed that 65,000 people were to be taken from their homes in Iran and resettled on the Assyrian-Babylonian border on

the Diyala River. Two years later, 30,000 people from the Syrian region were deported to the Zagros mountains. Those human beings who were deported were usually people considered most likely to rebel against Assyria. By ‘decapitating’ possibly dissident elements in this way, it was hoped that subjugated lands would remain amenable to their Assyrian overlords, and remain subjugated. To top it off, deportation allowed the Assyrians to transport people with valuable skills, such as administration, construction, and financial management across the empire to where they were most needed. Within his empire, Tiglath-Pileser also acted decisively to ensure that central rule

would never again be challenged and undermined as it had been in the ‘age of magnates’. To do this, he took the provinces of the empire, many of which were very powerful territories in their own right, and sliced them into smaller, more administratively effective pieces. Within seven years of his ascension to the throne, over 80 of these provinces existed, and loyal eunuchs were appointed to govern many of the new divisions in order to further undermine the provincial elites. To monitor this system, Tiglath-Pileser set up a small administrative layer of officials responsible for inspecting the state of

his majesty’s holdings and then reporting back to the king the performance and loyalty of his governors. We’ve heard of Achaemenid Persia and Mongol usage of horseborne postal services, but this, as far as we can tell, was actually an Assyrian innovation. Communications stations were set up across the empire from which riders could deliver orders to the provinces. It also allowed the delivery of reports from the provinces, containing amongst many other general matters, intelligence from operatives in the spy service which had been set up by Tiglath-Pileser to monitor states beyond Assyrian borders. With these reforms, the Neo-Assyrian

Empire entered its golden age and we will talk about them more down the line, so make sure you are subscribed to our channel and have pressed the bell button. We would like to express our gratitude to our Patreon supporters and channel members, who make the creation of our videos possible. Now, you can also support us by buying our merchandise via the link in the description. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we will catch you on the next one. The end of Bronze Age civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean world initiated a dark age which,

from Egypt to Anatolia to Greece, reduced living standards, humbled once proud empires, and turned prosperous maritime trading kingdoms into shadows of their former selves. However, there was one great Mesopotamian state which managed to weather the storm and eventually emerged from it as the most powerful and arguably the most merciless state in near-eastern, and possibly world history - the Assyrian Empire. There are a bunch of reasons why we love Mesopotamian civilizations and the fact that they were the first to preserve knowledge is on the top of the list. The sponsor of this video Blinkist is all

about preserving and sharing knowledge by making it easily digestible even for the busiest among us. Blinkist takes the most interesting and relevant non-fictional books and turns them into 15-minute audios – blinks. More than 3000 titles are already available which means that you can learn on the go, learn fast, and always improve your knowledge, no matter how time-constrained you are. Blinkist titles range from Entrepreneurship to Philosophy, from Psychology to Politics, but most importantly for us, there are 100s of historical books that you can listen to! Imagine learning the most important facts of 4 books in just

1 hour! Mary Beard’s Civilization and Chip Walter’s Last Ape Standing are perfect if you want to learn more about human civilizations! New titles are added all the time! Support our channel and your growth - get yourself premium access to knowledge! The first 100 people to go to blinkist.com/kingsandgenerals are going to get unlimited access for 1 week to try it out. You’ll also get 25% off if you want the full membership! The Old and Middle Assyrian Empires had waxed and waned for almost a millennia by the time Bronze Age civilisation came to an end in the

late second millennium BC. During that thousand years, Assyria was merely one of many competing states in Mesopotamia and the near-east. During its earlier imperial periods, Shamshi-Adad dominated much of northern Mesopotamia in the 18th century BC. At its weakest, however, the Assyrians had even been subjugated to vassaldom under the Kingdom of Mitanni, but always seemed to resurge and grow in power again. By the late tenth-century BC, the declining Assyrian polity had been diminished by Aramean invasions, left controlling only its traditional core region in the so-called ‘Assyrian triangle’ on the upper reaches of the Tigris River. Despite

that fact, kings in this era still considered themselves rulers of all the previously conquered territory seized by Middle Assyrian kings such as Tukulti-Ninurta I, that were now lost. It was this gulf between imperial expectation and reality which led to the Neo-Assyrian reconquest. While the surrounding polities had been weakened by the Bronze Age Collapse and were still recovering, Assyria was dynamic and demographically vibrant, allowing its kings to once again pursue an expansionist agenda. Beginning in roughly 934BC with king Ashur-dan II, and continuing with his successors - Adad-nirari II and then Tukulti-Ninurta II - brilliant military expeditions

began to recapture the ‘Assyrian territories’ that their predecessors once ruled. This process culminated in the reign of Ashurnasirpal II - whose name can be translated as ‘the god Ashur is the creator of an heir’. He is one of the most famous neo-Assyrian kings, whose reign we are well informed of by numerous royal reliefs. Under his august rule, the great armies of Ashur were far from sated, and he began to direct expeditions to areas never before touched by Assyrian arms. Parts of northern Babylonia, Zamua - an area in the north near Lake Urmia - Armenian highlands,

and the Kashyari mountains all became subject to the iron will of Ashurnasirpal. The king also crossed the Orontes River in the northwest with an army, founding Assyrian colonies there and essentially launching a commercial expedition. He even managed to exact vast sums of tribute from the wealthy Phoenician cities and extracted valuable timber from the Levant. Despite the primarily economic motives for Ashurnasipal’s western expeditions, its further-reaching implications are also incredibly important. Never before had Assyrians, with their desire for stable control, placed a colony so far away from their centre, and it paved the way for the centuries

to come. Back in the homeland of Ashur, on the Tigris, Assyria’s capital - Ashur - was also the centre of all worship of the Assyrian pantheon of gods - the most prominent and powerful of which was also known as Ashur. This god was strange in Mesopotamia as it was not a celestial entity like Enlil or Marduk, but was actually a deified version of the rock formation on which his temple stood. Interestingly, Assyria is not what the people themselves called the land - they called it ‘Ashur’. So, the country was called ‘Ashur’, as was their god

and their city. The fact that Ashur was a holy city didn’t stop what Ashurnasirpal II did next, in what was perhaps his greatest achievement. Taking advantage of the great wealth which was entering his treasuries from constant success in war, the king began sponsoring construction in Assyrian cities from Nineveh to Ashur. However, his greatest achievement was the building of a vast, beautiful new capital city known as Kalhu - modern Nimrud - beginning in 879BC. The site already had a decaying old settlement of some kind before the works began, but this project was a different thing altogether.

Ashurnasirpal employed thousands of corvee labourers and deportees to build several colossal palaces and glorious temples. Massive winged-bull statues fashioned from stone were placed as fearsome guardians at the entrances to the king’s northwestern palace, and extensive rows of carved stone blocks were decorated with depictions of various scenes designed to show the king’s greatness. In one of these reliefs, two figures bear tribute to the Assyrian king. The first is probably a man from Syria, who can be seen clenching his hands and raising them as a symbol of submission. The second may be a representative from Phoenicia, and

comes to Ashurnasirpal to grant his master a pair of monkeys - word must have gotten around that Assyrian kings loved collecting exotic fauna. In 864, Ashurnasirpal celebrated Kalhu’s completion by inviting, according to an Assyrian inscription: 69,574 guests, among them 16,000 citizens of his new capital and 5,000 foreign dignitaries from surrounding realms. They were provided 10,000 pigeons, 10,000 jugs of beer and 10,000 skins of wine along with numerous other foods and beverages in a grand feast. All would know that this was the grandeur of Ashur’s new realm. “Go home,” Ashurnasirpal must have thought upon the party’s

conclusion, “and tell your petty kings of my glory.” The prestige of creating such a glittering new capital would no doubt have been good enough, but there were probably other practical reasons for its construction beyond just aesthetics. Kalhu was located dead centre in the ‘Assyrian triangle’, its points made up of Ashur, Nineveh and Arbela. His new city was therefore right in the middle of the Assyrian world, more adequate for governing a rapidly expanding empire in a more convenient fashion. Ashurnasirpal might have wished to assert his independence from the great noble families of Old Ashur by just

relocating central power away from them. They had been incredibly influential up until this point, and probably served as an obstacle to an increase in central power. Somewhat revealingly, Kalhu’s direct governance was granted to a eunuch upon the city’s completion, rather than one of the powerful aristocrats of Assyria. Eunuchs were generally seen to be subservient and devoted to the king alone, and for this reason were to become massively powerful over the next two-and-a-half centuries. The most powerful of their number would serve as everything from royal chariot drivers and cup-bearers to provincial governors and generals. Ashurnasirpal ruled

from his new fortified citadel until 859 BC, when his son and successor Shalmaneser III took the throne. Continuing in his illustrious father’s footsteps, his reign was yet another series of stunning campaigns directed against Assyria’s traditional enemies, as well as the Neo-Hittite states around and beyond the Taurus Mountains, which were bent to their knees and forced to pay tribute. However, as we all know, expansion on such a scale has a price, and for the Assyrians that price now had to be paid. In the late 820s, either slightly before or after Shalmaneser III’s death, the Neo-Assyrian Empire

descended into a state of weakness known in Professor Eckart Frahm’s ‘Companion to Assyria’ as ‘The Age of Magnates’. It’s entirely possible that this time in Assyrian history was initiated by a civil war between royal sons, or possibly even a rebellion by the aforementioned aristocratic clans against what they saw as sidelining by the monarchy. Whatever the case truly was, it does seem that after this internal strife, noble power dramatically resurged. In the three-quarters of a century-long period lasting from the late 820s to 745BC, five kings reigned, but it seems that true power resided with various governors,

family members and high officials, especially the king’s field marshal. The reign of Adad-nirari III stretched from 810 to 783, for example, and for the most part in that time, power lay with his commander-in-chief Nergal-ila’i and his mother Sammu-ramat. It makes sense, because her son was only a child when installed on the throne of Assyria. This might have been engineered; after all, an infant king is a weak king who can be controlled. This queen mother’s extraordinary authority is revealed to us in a stele dated to the year 805, which mentions her and her royal son as

equal guarantors of the official border between two feuding vassal states. Moreover, she is also mentioned together with her son on religious statues constructed by the governor of Kalhu at the time. Finally, Sammu-ramat was probably the very first woman in Assyria to be commemorated on a stele in the holy city of Ashur which were designed to honour the memory of the kingdom’s rulers. Interestingly, many scholars now believe that this Assyrian queen was the inspiration for the future legendary figure Semiramis, who is mentioned in numerous Greek sources centuries after this point. It’s possible that her ability to

successfully rule the great empire made her memorable enough to mythologise after her death. Historian Susan Wise Bauer commented that ‘Sammu-ramat’s hold on power was so striking that it echoed into the distant historical memory of a people just arriving on the scene’. In effect, she was the Empress Wu of Neo-Assyria. We don’t have time to cover it here, but we recommend that you read up on Semiramis for yourself, and perhaps we’ll do a video about her in the future. Carrying on with the story, throughout the mid-eighth century BC, the strongest figure in Assyrian politics was a

military commander named Shamshi-Ilu, a man who directed military campaigns and ran the affairs of state. He essentially performed all the functions of a king, while sidelining his monarch and only formally respecting the king’s authority. Governors of large Assyrian provinces also asserted their individual authority and power in the regions which they ruled, often competing with one another despite remaining unified under the ‘rule’ of the Assyrian king. It was at this moment when Assyria was at its weakest that enemies finally decided to strike. In the middle of the eighth century, king of the rising northern state of

Urartu - Sarduri I - crossed his border and intervened in the fractured neo-Hittite states, forming a strong anti-Assyrian coalition, and presenting a plausible threat to the weakened state’s existence. At a similar time, Shamshi-Ilu passed away and a revolt broke out in the capital at Kalhu. We have hardly any information about it, but the king at the time was probably killed and then replaced by a man named Pulu. We know him better by the throne name he took - Tiglath-Pileser III. Under this possible-usurper’s effective leadership, as Hardcore History host Dan Carlin put it: ‘Assyria went on

a kind of historical sprint’ and began a meteoric rise in power. Indeed, the blistering speed at which Assyria recovered from its low period can be attributed to this truly great reformer. Above all was the viewpoint that the interests of Ashur’s great empire could no longer be served by the aging imperial system of Ashurnasirpal, it would have to be changed to fit a great empire - the greatest empire the world had ever seen, and the culmination of ancient Sumer’s millennia-long history. Like any Assyrian monarch worth his salt, Tiglath-Pileser began a series of brutal, lightning conquests in

all directions in order to assert the final supremacy of his kingdom to all who thought that the century’s long weakness had de-clawed it. First though, he needed to revamp the Assyrian army into a truly fearsome fighting force. Before Tiglath-Pileser, Assyrian militia armies were only called up in the summer due to the fact that the soldiers - most peasants working in agriculture - had to service the land and reap the harvest in May, before being called up by July. This yearly cycle was probably one of the limiters on Assyrian domination in the times of Ashurnasirpal, as

an army can only conquer so much in a year without economic dislocation. Hereafter, tribute giving clients would give way to full Assyrian provinces. This was done away with, and, amongst other reforms, was replaced by a permanent army with contingents raised from each of the provinces, supplemented when needed by units provided by vassal realms, whose service was a part of the tribute they were obliged to pay. The ‘kisir sharruti’, or ‘standing army’ acquired a multiethnic, multicultural aspect, with foreign troops marching alongside native Assyrian units. A later king reports that he even integrated 50 Israeli chariot teams

into his force. They were issued Assyrian uniforms and equipment, thereby becoming indistinguishable from one another in the ranks. A large Assyrian ‘core’ of troops continued to exist primarily within the cavalry and chariot forces - the strike elements of the army. At an even higher level were the ‘qurubti sha shepe’ - the king’s personal elite bodyguard In the first years of his reign, which began in 745, the Assyrian army conquered Babylonia in the south, the consequences of which would affect Assyria until the end of the empire. The conquest was completed relatively quickly, but Babylon, being the

revered and ancient civilisation that it was, required special treatment. So, after defeating the Chaldean tribes that had occupied the area, Tiglath-Pileser took the step of becoming King of Babylon - instituting a kind of dual-monarchy. In the very same year, the army pivoted north and shattered Urartu’s strength, forcing its king to flee for his life. Assaults on that mountain kingdom would continue until it was finally annihilated in the late eighth century, weakened so much that a new nomadic group - the Medes, managed to conquer it. In the west, the empire’s borders were again pushed further than

ever before, even approaching the borders of Egypt, and provincialising client kingdoms along the way. To more completely subjugate and pacify newly conquered territories and treacherous vassals alike, the king formally, and on an unprecedented scale, reintroduced a policy of mass deportation and forced population movement. In 744, for example, Tiglath-Pileser decreed that 65,000 people were to be taken from their homes in Iran and resettled on the Assyrian-Babylonian border on the Diyala River. Two years later, 30,000 people from the Syrian region were deported to the Zagros mountains. Those human beings who were deported were usually people considered most

likely to rebel against Assyria. By ‘decapitating’ possibly dissident elements in this way, it was hoped that subjugated lands would remain amenable to their Assyrian overlords, and remain subjugated. To top it off, deportation allowed the Assyrians to transport people with valuable skills, such as administration, construction, and financial management across the empire to where they were most needed. Within his empire, Tiglath-Pileser also acted decisively to ensure that central rule would never again be challenged and undermined as it had been in the ‘age of magnates’. To do this, he took the provinces of the empire, many of which

were very powerful territories in their own right, and sliced them into smaller, more administratively effective pieces. Within seven years of his ascension to the throne, over 80 of these provinces existed, and loyal eunuchs were appointed to govern many of the new divisions in order to further undermine the provincial elites. To monitor this system, Tiglath-Pileser set up a small administrative layer of officials responsible for inspecting the state of his majesty’s holdings and then reporting back to the king the performance and loyalty of his governors. We’ve heard of Achaemenid Persia and Mongol usage of horseborne postal services,

but this, as far as we can tell, was actually an Assyrian innovation. Communications stations were set up across the empire from which riders could deliver orders to the provinces. It also allowed the delivery of reports from the provinces, containing amongst many other general matters, intelligence from operatives in the spy service which had been set up by Tiglath-Pileser to monitor states beyond Assyrian borders. With these reforms, the Neo-Assyrian Empire entered its golden age and we will talk about them more down the line, so make sure you are subscribed to our channel and have pressed the bell

button. We would like to express our gratitude to our Patreon supporters and channel members, who make the creation of our videos possible. Now, you can also support us by buying our merchandise via the link in the description. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we will catch you on the next one. The end of Bronze Age civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean world initiated a dark age which, from Egypt to Anatolia to Greece, reduced living standards, humbled once proud empires, and turned prosperous maritime trading kingdoms into shadows of their former selves. However, there was one

great Mesopotamian state which managed to weather the storm and eventually emerged from it as the most powerful and arguably the most merciless state in near-eastern, and possibly world history - the Assyrian Empire. There are a bunch of reasons why we love Mesopotamian civilizations and the fact that they were the first to preserve knowledge is on the top of the list. The sponsor of this video Blinkist is all about preserving and sharing knowledge by making it easily digestible even for the busiest among us. Blinkist takes the most interesting and relevant non-fictional books and turns them into

15-minute audios – blinks. More than 3000 titles are already available which means that you can learn on the go, learn fast, and always improve your knowledge, no matter how time-constrained you are. Blinkist titles range from Entrepreneurship to Philosophy, from Psychology to Politics, but most importantly for us, there are 100s of historical books that you can listen to! Imagine learning the most important facts of 4 books in just 1 hour! Mary Beard’s Civilization and Chip Walter’s Last Ape Standing are perfect if you want to learn more about human civilizations! New titles are added all the time!

Support our channel and your growth - get yourself premium access to knowledge! The first 100 people to go to blinkist.com/kingsandgenerals are going to get unlimited access for 1 week to try it out. You’ll also get 25% off if you want the full membership! The Old and Middle Assyrian Empires had waxed and waned for almost a millennia by the time Bronze Age civilisation came to an end in the late second millennium BC. During that thousand years, Assyria was merely one of many competing states in Mesopotamia and the near-east. During its earlier imperial periods, Shamshi-Adad dominated much

of northern Mesopotamia in the 18th century BC. At its weakest, however, the Assyrians had even been subjugated to vassaldom under the Kingdom of Mitanni, but always seemed to resurge and grow in power again. By the late tenth-century BC, the declining Assyrian polity had been diminished by Aramean invasions, left controlling only its traditional core region in the so-called ‘Assyrian triangle’ on the upper reaches of the Tigris River. Despite that fact, kings in this era still considered themselves rulers of all the previously conquered territory seized by Middle Assyrian kings such as Tukulti-Ninurta I, that were now lost.

It was this gulf between imperial expectation and reality which led to the Neo-Assyrian reconquest. While the surrounding polities had been weakened by the Bronze Age Collapse and were still recovering, Assyria was dynamic and demographically vibrant, allowing its kings to once again pursue an expansionist agenda. Beginning in roughly 934BC with king Ashur-dan II, and continuing with his successors - Adad-nirari II and then Tukulti-Ninurta II - brilliant military expeditions began to recapture the ‘Assyrian territories’ that their predecessors once ruled. This process culminated in the reign of Ashurnasirpal II - whose name can be translated as ‘the god

Ashur is the creator of an heir’. He is one of the most famous neo-Assyrian kings, whose reign we are well informed of by numerous royal reliefs. Under his august rule, the great armies of Ashur were far from sated, and he began to direct expeditions to areas never before touched by Assyrian arms. Parts of northern Babylonia, Zamua - an area in the north near Lake Urmia - Armenian highlands, and the Kashyari mountains all became subject to the iron will of Ashurnasirpal. The king also crossed the Orontes River in the northwest with an army, founding Assyrian colonies

there and essentially launching a commercial expedition. He even managed to exact vast sums of tribute from the wealthy Phoenician cities and extracted valuable timber from the Levant. Despite the primarily economic motives for Ashurnasipal’s western expeditions, its further-reaching implications are also incredibly important. Never before had Assyrians, with their desire for stable control, placed a colony so far away from their centre, and it paved the way for the centuries to come. Back in the homeland of Ashur, on the Tigris, Assyria’s capital - Ashur - was also the centre of all worship of the Assyrian pantheon of gods

- the most prominent and powerful of which was also known as Ashur. This god was strange in Mesopotamia as it was not a celestial entity like Enlil or Marduk, but was actually a deified version of the rock formation on which his temple stood. Interestingly, Assyria is not what the people themselves called the land - they called it ‘Ashur’. So, the country was called ‘Ashur’, as was their god and their city. The fact that Ashur was a holy city didn’t stop what Ashurnasirpal II did next, in what was perhaps his greatest achievement. Taking advantage of the

great wealth which was entering his treasuries from constant success in war, the king began sponsoring construction in Assyrian cities from Nineveh to Ashur. However, his greatest achievement was the building of a vast, beautiful new capital city known as Kalhu - modern Nimrud - beginning in 879BC. The site already had a decaying old settlement of some kind before the works began, but this project was a different thing altogether. Ashurnasirpal employed thousands of corvee labourers and deportees to build several colossal palaces and glorious temples. Massive winged-bull statues fashioned from stone were placed as fearsome guardians at the

entrances to the king’s northwestern palace, and extensive rows of carved stone blocks were decorated with depictions of various scenes designed to show the king’s greatness. In one of these reliefs, two figures bear tribute to the Assyrian king. The first is probably a man from Syria, who can be seen clenching his hands and raising them as a symbol of submission. The second may be a representative from Phoenicia, and comes to Ashurnasirpal to grant his master a pair of monkeys - word must have gotten around that Assyrian kings loved collecting exotic fauna. In 864, Ashurnasirpal celebrated Kalhu’s

completion by inviting, according to an Assyrian inscription: 69,574 guests, among them 16,000 citizens of his new capital and 5,000 foreign dignitaries from surrounding realms. They were provided 10,000 pigeons, 10,000 jugs of beer and 10,000 skins of wine along with numerous other foods and beverages in a grand feast. All would know that this was the grandeur of Ashur’s new realm. “Go home,” Ashurnasirpal must have thought upon the party’s conclusion, “and tell your petty kings of my glory.” The prestige of creating such a glittering new capital would no doubt have been good enough, but there were probably

other practical reasons for its construction beyond just aesthetics. Kalhu was located dead centre in the ‘Assyrian triangle’, its points made up of Ashur, Nineveh and Arbela. His new city was therefore right in the middle of the Assyrian world, more adequate for governing a rapidly expanding empire in a more convenient fashion. Ashurnasirpal might have wished to assert his independence from the great noble families of Old Ashur by just relocating central power away from them. They had been incredibly influential up until this point, and probably served as an obstacle to an increase in central power. Somewhat revealingly,

Kalhu’s direct governance was granted to a eunuch upon the city’s completion, rather than one of the powerful aristocrats of Assyria. Eunuchs were generally seen to be subservient and devoted to the king alone, and for this reason were to become massively powerful over the next two-and-a-half centuries. The most powerful of their number would serve as everything from royal chariot drivers and cup-bearers to provincial governors and generals. Ashurnasirpal ruled from his new fortified citadel until 859 BC, when his son and successor Shalmaneser III took the throne. Continuing in his illustrious father’s footsteps, his reign was yet another

series of stunning campaigns directed against Assyria’s traditional enemies, as well as the Neo-Hittite states around and beyond the Taurus Mountains, which were bent to their knees and forced to pay tribute. However, as we all know, expansion on such a scale has a price, and for the Assyrians that price now had to be paid. In the late 820s, either slightly before or after Shalmaneser III’s death, the Neo-Assyrian Empire descended into a state of weakness known in Professor Eckart Frahm’s ‘Companion to Assyria’ as ‘The Age of Magnates’. It’s entirely possible that this time in Assyrian history was

initiated by a civil war between royal sons, or possibly even a rebellion by the aforementioned aristocratic clans against what they saw as sidelining by the monarchy. Whatever the case truly was, it does seem that after this internal strife, noble power dramatically resurged. In the three-quarters of a century-long period lasting from the late 820s to 745BC, five kings reigned, but it seems that true power resided with various governors, family members and high officials, especially the king’s field marshal. The reign of Adad-nirari III stretched from 810 to 783, for example, and for the most part in that

time, power lay with his commander-in-chief Nergal-ila’i and his mother Sammu-ramat. It makes sense, because her son was only a child when installed on the throne of Assyria. This might have been engineered; after all, an infant king is a weak king who can be controlled. This queen mother’s extraordinary authority is revealed to us in a stele dated to the year 805, which mentions her and her royal son as equal guarantors of the official border between two feuding vassal states. Moreover, she is also mentioned together with her son on religious statues constructed by the governor of Kalhu

at the time. Finally, Sammu-ramat was probably the very first woman in Assyria to be commemorated on a stele in the holy city of Ashur which were designed to honour the memory of the kingdom’s rulers. Interestingly, many scholars now believe that this Assyrian queen was the inspiration for the future legendary figure Semiramis, who is mentioned in numerous Greek sources centuries after this point. It’s possible that her ability to successfully rule the great empire made her memorable enough to mythologise after her death. Historian Susan Wise Bauer commented that ‘Sammu-ramat’s hold on power was so striking that it

echoed into the distant historical memory of a people just arriving on the scene’. In effect, she was the Empress Wu of Neo-Assyria. We don’t have time to cover it here, but we recommend that you read up on Semiramis for yourself, and perhaps we’ll do a video about her in the future. Carrying on with the story, throughout the mid-eighth century BC, the strongest figure in Assyrian politics was a military commander named Shamshi-Ilu, a man who directed military campaigns and ran the affairs of state. He essentially performed all the functions of a king, while sidelining his monarch

and only formally respecting the king’s authority. Governors of large Assyrian provinces also asserted their individual authority and power in the regions which they ruled, often competing with one another despite remaining unified under the ‘rule’ of the Assyrian king. It was at this moment when Assyria was at its weakest that enemies finally decided to strike. In the middle of the eighth century, king of the rising northern state of Urartu - Sarduri I - crossed his border and intervened in the fractured neo-Hittite states, forming a strong anti-Assyrian coalition, and presenting a plausible threat to the weakened state’s

existence. At a similar time, Shamshi-Ilu passed away and a revolt broke out in the capital at Kalhu. We have hardly any information about it, but the king at the time was probably killed and then replaced by a man named Pulu. We know him better by the throne name he took - Tiglath-Pileser III. Under this possible-usurper’s effective leadership, as Hardcore History host Dan Carlin put it: ‘Assyria went on a kind of historical sprint’ and began a meteoric rise in power. Indeed, the blistering speed at which Assyria recovered from its low period can be attributed to this

truly great reformer. Above all was the viewpoint that the interests of Ashur’s great empire could no longer be served by the aging imperial system of Ashurnasirpal, it would have to be changed to fit a great empire - the greatest empire the world had ever seen, and the culmination of ancient Sumer’s millennia-long history. Like any Assyrian monarch worth his salt, Tiglath-Pileser began a series of brutal, lightning conquests in all directions in order to assert the final supremacy of his kingdom to all who thought that the century’s long weakness had de-clawed it. First though, he needed to

revamp the Assyrian army into a truly fearsome fighting force. Before Tiglath-Pileser, Assyrian militia armies were only called up in the summer due to the fact that the soldiers - most peasants working in agriculture - had to service the land and reap the harvest in May, before being called up by July. This yearly cycle was probably one of the limiters on Assyrian domination in the times of Ashurnasirpal, as an army can only conquer so much in a year without economic dislocation. Hereafter, tribute giving clients would give way to full Assyrian provinces. This was done away with,

and, amongst other reforms, was replaced by a permanent army with contingents raised from each of the provinces, supplemented when needed by units provided by vassal realms, whose service was a part of the tribute they were obliged to pay. The ‘kisir sharruti’, or ‘standing army’ acquired a multiethnic, multicultural aspect, with foreign troops marching alongside native Assyrian units. A later king reports that he even integrated 50 Israeli chariot teams into his force. They were issued Assyrian uniforms and equipment, thereby becoming indistinguishable from one another in the ranks. A large Assyrian ‘core’ of troops continued to exist primarily

within the cavalry and chariot forces - the strike elements of the army. At an even higher level were the ‘qurubti sha shepe’ - the king’s personal elite bodyguard In the first years of his reign, which began in 745, the Assyrian army conquered Babylonia in the south, the consequences of which would affect Assyria until the end of the empire. The conquest was completed relatively quickly, but Babylon, being the revered and ancient civilisation that it was, required special treatment. So, after defeating the Chaldean tribes that had occupied the area, Tiglath-Pileser took the step of becoming King of

Babylon - instituting a kind of dual-monarchy. In the very same year, the army pivoted north and shattered Urartu’s strength, forcing its king to flee for his life. Assaults on that mountain kingdom would continue until it was finally annihilated in the late eighth century, weakened so much that a new nomadic group - the Medes, managed to conquer it. In the west, the empire’s borders were again pushed further than ever before, even approaching the borders of Egypt, and provincialising client kingdoms along the way. To more completely subjugate and pacify newly conquered territories and treacherous vassals alike, the

king formally, and on an unprecedented scale, reintroduced a policy of mass deportation and forced population movement. In 744, for example, Tiglath-Pileser decreed that 65,000 people were to be taken from their homes in Iran and resettled on the Assyrian-Babylonian border on the Diyala River. Two years later, 30,000 people from the Syrian region were deported to the Zagros mountains. Those human beings who were deported were usually people considered most likely to rebel against Assyria. By ‘decapitating’ possibly dissident elements in this way, it was hoped that subjugated lands would remain amenable to their Assyrian overlords, and remain subjugated.

To top it off, deportation allowed the Assyrians to transport people with valuable skills, such as administration, construction, and financial management across the empire to where they were most needed. Within his empire, Tiglath-Pileser also acted decisively to ensure that central rule would never again be challenged and undermined as it had been in the ‘age of magnates’. To do this, he took the provinces of the empire, many of which were very powerful territories in their own right, and sliced them into smaller, more administratively effective pieces. Within seven years of his ascension to the throne, over 80 of

these provinces existed, and loyal eunuchs were appointed to govern many of the new divisions in order to further undermine the provincial elites. To monitor this system, Tiglath-Pileser set up a small administrative layer of officials responsible for inspecting the state of his majesty’s holdings and then reporting back to the king the performance and loyalty of his governors. We’ve heard of Achaemenid Persia and Mongol usage of horseborne postal services, but this, as far as we can tell, was actually an Assyrian innovation. Communications stations were set up across the empire from which riders could deliver orders to the

provinces. It also allowed the delivery of reports from the provinces, containing amongst many other general matters, intelligence from operatives in the spy service which had been set up by Tiglath-Pileser to monitor states beyond Assyrian borders. With these reforms, the Neo-Assyrian Empire entered its golden age and we will talk about them more down the line, so make sure you are subscribed to our channel and have pressed the bell button. We would like to express our gratitude to our Patreon supporters and channel members, who make the creation of our videos possible. Now, you can also support us

by buying our merchandise via the link in the description. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we will catch you on the next one. The end of Bronze Age civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean world initiated a dark age which, from Egypt to Anatolia to Greece, reduced living standards, humbled once proud empires, and turned prosperous maritime trading kingdoms into shadows of their former selves. However, there was one great Mesopotamian state which managed to weather the storm and eventually emerged from it as the most powerful and arguably the most merciless state in near-eastern, and possibly world

history - the Assyrian Empire. There are a bunch of reasons why we love Mesopotamian civilizations and the fact that they were the first to preserve knowledge is on the top of the list. The sponsor of this video Blinkist is all about preserving and sharing knowledge by making it easily digestible even for the busiest among us. Blinkist takes the most interesting and relevant non-fictional books and turns them into 15-minute audios – blinks. More than 3000 titles are already available which means that you can learn on the go, learn fast, and always improve your knowledge, no matter

how time-constrained you are. Blinkist titles range from Entrepreneurship to Philosophy, from Psychology to Politics, but most importantly for us, there are 100s of historical books that you can listen to! Imagine learning the most important facts of 4 books in just 1 hour! Mary Beard’s Civilization and Chip Walter’s Last Ape Standing are perfect if you want to learn more about human civilizations! New titles are added all the time! Support our channel and your growth - get yourself premium access to knowledge! The first 100 people to go to blinkist.com/kingsandgenerals are going to get unlimited access for 1

week to try it out. You’ll also get 25% off if you want the full membership! The Old and Middle Assyrian Empires had waxed and waned for almost a millennia by the time Bronze Age civilisation came to an end in the late second millennium BC. During that thousand years, Assyria was merely one of many competing states in Mesopotamia and the near-east. During its earlier imperial periods, Shamshi-Adad dominated much of northern Mesopotamia in the 18th century BC. At its weakest, however, the Assyrians had even been subjugated to vassaldom under the Kingdom of Mitanni, but always seemed to

resurge and grow in power again. By the late tenth-century BC, the declining Assyrian polity had been diminished by Aramean invasions, left controlling only its traditional core region in the so-called ‘Assyrian triangle’ on the upper reaches of the Tigris River. Despite that fact, kings in this era still considered themselves rulers of all the previously conquered territory seized by Middle Assyrian kings such as Tukulti-Ninurta I, that were now lost. It was this gulf between imperial expectation and reality which led to the Neo-Assyrian reconquest. While the surrounding polities had been weakened by the Bronze Age Collapse and were

still recovering, Assyria was dynamic and demographically vibrant, allowing its kings to once again pursue an expansionist agenda. Beginning in roughly 934BC with king Ashur-dan II, and continuing with his successors - Adad-nirari II and then Tukulti-Ninurta II - brilliant military expeditions began to recapture the ‘Assyrian territories’ that their predecessors once ruled. This process culminated in the reign of Ashurnasirpal II - whose name can be translated as ‘the god Ashur is the creator of an heir’. He is one of the most famous neo-Assyrian kings, whose reign we are well informed of by numerous royal reliefs. Under his

august rule, the great armies of Ashur were far from sated, and he began to direct expeditions to areas never before touched by Assyrian arms. Parts of northern Babylonia, Zamua - an area in the north near Lake Urmia - Armenian highlands, and the Kashyari mountains all became subject to the iron will of Ashurnasirpal. The king also crossed the Orontes River in the northwest with an army, founding Assyrian colonies there and essentially launching a commercial expedition. He even managed to exact vast sums of tribute from the wealthy Phoenician cities and extracted valuable timber from the Levant. Despite

the primarily economic motives for Ashurnasipal’s western expeditions, its further-reaching implications are also incredibly important. Never before had Assyrians, with their desire for stable control, placed a colony so far away from their centre, and it paved the way for the centuries to come. Back in the homeland of Ashur, on the Tigris, Assyria’s capital - Ashur - was also the centre of all worship of the Assyrian pantheon of gods - the most prominent and powerful of which was also known as Ashur. This god was strange in Mesopotamia as it was not a celestial entity like Enlil or

Marduk, but was actually a deified version of the rock formation on which his temple stood. Interestingly, Assyria is not what the people themselves called the land - they called it ‘Ashur’. So, the country was called ‘Ashur’, as was their god and their city. The fact that Ashur was a holy city didn’t stop what Ashurnasirpal II did next, in what was perhaps his greatest achievement. Taking advantage of the great wealth which was entering his treasuries from constant success in war, the king began sponsoring construction in Assyrian cities from Nineveh to Ashur. However, his greatest achievement was

the building of a vast, beautiful new capital city known as Kalhu - modern Nimrud - beginning in 879BC. The site already had a decaying old settlement of some kind before the works began, but this project was a different thing altogether. Ashurnasirpal employed thousands of corvee labourers and deportees to build several colossal palaces and glorious temples. Massive winged-bull statues fashioned from stone were placed as fearsome guardians at the entrances to the king’s northwestern palace, and extensive rows of carved stone blocks were decorated with depictions of various scenes designed to show the king’s greatness. In one of

these reliefs, two figures bear tribute to the Assyrian king. The first is probably a man from Syria, who can be seen clenching his hands and raising them as a symbol of submission. The second may be a representative from Phoenicia, and comes to Ashurnasirpal to grant his master a pair of monkeys - word must have gotten around that Assyrian kings loved collecting exotic fauna. In 864, Ashurnasirpal celebrated Kalhu’s completion by inviting, according to an Assyrian inscription: 69,574 guests, among them 16,000 citizens of his new capital and 5,000 foreign dignitaries from surrounding realms. They were provided 10,000

pigeons, 10,000 jugs of beer and 10,000 skins of wine along with numerous other foods and beverages in a grand feast. All would know that this was the grandeur of Ashur’s new realm. “Go home,” Ashurnasirpal must have thought upon the party’s conclusion, “and tell your petty kings of my glory.” The prestige of creating such a glittering new capital would no doubt have been good enough, but there were probably other practical reasons for its construction beyond just aesthetics. Kalhu was located dead centre in the ‘Assyrian triangle’, its points made up of Ashur, Nineveh and Arbela. His new

city was therefore right in the middle of the Assyrian world, more adequate for governing a rapidly expanding empire in a more convenient fashion. Ashurnasirpal might have wished to assert his independence from the great noble families of Old Ashur by just relocating central power away from them. They had been incredibly influential up until this point, and probably served as an obstacle to an increase in central power. Somewhat revealingly, Kalhu’s direct governance was granted to a eunuch upon the city’s completion, rather than one of the powerful aristocrats of Assyria. Eunuchs were generally seen to be subservient and

devoted to the king alone, and for this reason were to become massively powerful over the next two-and-a-half centuries. The most powerful of their number would serve as everything from royal chariot drivers and cup-bearers to provincial governors and generals. Ashurnasirpal ruled from his new fortified citadel until 859 BC, when his son and successor Shalmaneser III took the throne. Continuing in his illustrious father’s footsteps, his reign was yet another series of stunning campaigns directed against Assyria’s traditional enemies, as well as the Neo-Hittite states around and beyond the Taurus Mountains, which were bent to their knees and forced

to pay tribute. However, as we all know, expansion on such a scale has a price, and for the Assyrians that price now had to be paid. In the late 820s, either slightly before or after Shalmaneser III’s death, the Neo-Assyrian Empire descended into a state of weakness known in Professor Eckart Frahm’s ‘Companion to Assyria’ as ‘The Age of Magnates’. It’s entirely possible that this time in Assyrian history was initiated by a civil war between royal sons, or possibly even a rebellion by the aforementioned aristocratic clans against what they saw as sidelining by the monarchy. Whatever the

case truly was, it does seem that after this internal strife, noble power dramatically resurged. In the three-quarters of a century-long period lasting from the late 820s to 745BC, five kings reigned, but it seems that true power resided with various governors, family members and high officials, especially the king’s field marshal. The reign of Adad-nirari III stretched from 810 to 783, for example, and for the most part in that time, power lay with his commander-in-chief Nergal-ila’i and his mother Sammu-ramat. It makes sense, because her son was only a child when installed on the throne of Assyria. This

might have been engineered; after all, an infant king is a weak king who can be controlled. This queen mother’s extraordinary authority is revealed to us in a stele dated to the year 805, which mentions her and her royal son as equal guarantors of the official border between two feuding vassal states. Moreover, she is also mentioned together with her son on religious statues constructed by the governor of Kalhu at the time. Finally, Sammu-ramat was probably the very first woman in Assyria to be commemorated on a stele in the holy city of Ashur which were designed to

honour the memory of the kingdom’s rulers. Interestingly, many scholars now believe that this Assyrian queen was the inspiration for the future legendary figure Semiramis, who is mentioned in numerous Greek sources centuries after this point. It’s possible that her ability to successfully rule the great empire made her memorable enough to mythologise after her death. Historian Susan Wise Bauer commented that ‘Sammu-ramat’s hold on power was so striking that it echoed into the distant historical memory of a people just arriving on the scene’. In effect, she was the Empress Wu of Neo-Assyria. We don’t have time to cover

it here, but we recommend that you read up on Semiramis for yourself, and perhaps we’ll do a video about her in the future. Carrying on with the story, throughout the mid-eighth century BC, the strongest figure in Assyrian politics was a military commander named Shamshi-Ilu, a man who directed military campaigns and ran the affairs of state. He essentially performed all the functions of a king, while sidelining his monarch and only formally respecting the king’s authority. Governors of large Assyrian provinces also asserted their individual authority and power in the regions which they ruled, often competing with one

another despite remaining unified under the ‘rule’ of the Assyrian king. It was at this moment when Assyria was at its weakest that enemies finally decided to strike. In the middle of the eighth century, king of the rising northern state of Urartu - Sarduri I - crossed his border and intervened in the fractured neo-Hittite states, forming a strong anti-Assyrian coalition, and presenting a plausible threat to the weakened state’s existence. At a similar time, Shamshi-Ilu passed away and a revolt broke out in the capital at Kalhu. We have hardly any information about it, but the king at

the time was probably killed and then replaced by a man named Pulu. We know him better by the throne name he took - Tiglath-Pileser III. Under this possible-usurper’s effective leadership, as Hardcore History host Dan Carlin put it: ‘Assyria went on a kind of historical sprint’ and began a meteoric rise in power. Indeed, the blistering speed at which Assyria recovered from its low period can be attributed to this truly great reformer. Above all was the viewpoint that the interests of Ashur’s great empire could no longer be served by the aging imperial system of Ashurnasirpal, it would

have to be changed to fit a great empire - the greatest empire the world had ever seen, and the culmination of ancient Sumer’s millennia-long history. Like any Assyrian monarch worth his salt, Tiglath-Pileser began a series of brutal, lightning conquests in all directions in order to assert the final supremacy of his kingdom to all who thought that the century’s long weakness had de-clawed it. First though, he needed to revamp the Assyrian army into a truly fearsome fighting force. Before Tiglath-Pileser, Assyrian militia armies were only called up in the summer due to the fact that the soldiers

- most peasants working in agriculture - had to service the land and reap the harvest in May, before being called up by July. This yearly cycle was probably one of the limiters on Assyrian domination in the times of Ashurnasirpal, as an army can only conquer so much in a year without economic dislocation. Hereafter, tribute giving clients would give way to full Assyrian provinces. This was done away with, and, amongst other reforms, was replaced by a permanent army with contingents raised from each of the provinces, supplemented when needed by units provided by vassal realms, whose service

was a part of the tribute they were obliged to pay. The ‘kisir sharruti’, or ‘standing army’ acquired a multiethnic, multicultural aspect, with foreign troops marching alongside native Assyrian units. A later king reports that he even integrated 50 Israeli chariot teams into his force. They were issued Assyrian uniforms and equipment, thereby becoming indistinguishable from one another in the ranks. A large Assyrian ‘core’ of troops continued to exist primarily within the cavalry and chariot forces - the strike elements of the army. At an even higher level were the ‘qurubti sha shepe’ - the king’s personal elite bodyguard

In the first years of his reign, which began in 745, the Assyrian army conquered Babylonia in the south, the consequences of which would affect Assyria until the end of the empire. The conquest was completed relatively quickly, but Babylon, being the revered and ancient civilisation that it was, required special treatment. So, after defeating the Chaldean tribes that had occupied the area, Tiglath-Pileser took the step of becoming King of Babylon - instituting a kind of dual-monarchy. In the very same year, the army pivoted north and shattered Urartu’s strength, forcing its king to flee for his life. Assaults

on that mountain kingdom would continue until it was finally annihilated in the late eighth century, weakened so much that a new nomadic group - the Medes, managed to conquer it. In the west, the empire’s borders were again pushed further than ever before, even approaching the borders of Egypt, and provincialising client kingdoms along the way. To more completely subjugate and pacify newly conquered territories and treacherous vassals alike, the king formally, and on an unprecedented scale, reintroduced a policy of mass deportation and forced population movement. In 744, for example, Tiglath-Pileser decreed that 65,000 people were to be

taken from their homes in Iran and resettled on the Assyrian-Babylonian border on the Diyala River. Two years later, 30,000 people from the Syrian region were deported to the Zagros mountains. Those human beings who were deported were usually people considered most likely to rebel against Assyria. By ‘decapitating’ possibly dissident elements in this way, it was hoped that subjugated lands would remain amenable to their Assyrian overlords, and remain subjugated. To top it off, deportation allowed the Assyrians to transport people with valuable skills, such as administration, construction, and financial management across the empire to where they were most

needed. Within his empire, Tiglath-Pileser also acted decisively to ensure that central rule would never again be challenged and undermined as it had been in the ‘age of magnates’. To do this, he took the provinces of the empire, many of which were very powerful territories in their own right, and sliced them into smaller, more administratively effective pieces. Within seven years of his ascension to the throne, over 80 of these provinces existed, and loyal eunuchs were appointed to govern many of the new divisions in order to further undermine the provincial elites. To monitor this system, Tiglath-Pileser set

up a small administrative layer of officials responsible for inspecting the state of his majesty’s holdings and then reporting back to the king the performance and loyalty of his governors. We’ve heard of Achaemenid Persia and Mongol usage of horseborne postal services, but this, as far as we can tell, was actually an Assyrian innovation. Communications stations were set up across the empire from which riders could deliver orders to the provinces. It also allowed the delivery of reports from the provinces, containing amongst many other general matters, intelligence from operatives in the spy service which had been set up

by Tiglath-Pileser to monitor states beyond Assyrian borders. With these reforms, the Neo-Assyrian Empire entered its golden age and we will talk about them more down the line, so make sure you are subscribed to our channel and have pressed the bell button. We would like to express our gratitude to our Patreon supporters and channel members, who make the creation of our videos possible. Now, you can also support us by buying our merchandise via the link in the description. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we will catch you on the next one. The end of

Bronze Age civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean world initiated a dark age which, from Egypt to Anatolia to Greece, reduced living standards, humbled once proud empires, and turned prosperous maritime trading kingdoms into shadows of their former selves. However, there was one great Mesopotamian state which managed to weather the storm and eventually emerged from it as the most powerful and arguably the most merciless state in near-eastern, and possibly world history - the Assyrian Empire. There are a bunch of reasons why we love Mesopotamian civilizations and the fact that they were the first to preserve knowledge is on

the top of the list. The sponsor of this video Blinkist is all about preserving and sharing knowledge by making it easily digestible even for the busiest among us. Blinkist takes the most interesting and relevant non-fictional books and turns them into 15-minute audios – blinks. More than 3000 titles are already available which means that you can learn on the go, learn fast, and always improve your knowledge, no matter how time-constrained you are. Blinkist titles range from Entrepreneurship to Philosophy, from Psychology to Politics, but most importantly for us, there are 100s of historical books that you can

listen to! Imagine learning the most important facts of 4 books in just 1 hour! Mary Beard’s Civilization and Chip Walter’s Last Ape Standing are perfect if you want to learn more about human civilizations! New titles are added all the time! Support our channel and your growth - get yourself premium access to knowledge! The first 100 people to go to blinkist.com/kingsandgenerals are going to get unlimited access for 1 week to try it out. You’ll also get 25% off if you want the full membership! The Old and Middle Assyrian Empires had waxed and waned for almost a

millennia by the time Bronze Age civilisation came to an end in the late second millennium BC. During that thousand years, Assyria was merely one of many competing states in Mesopotamia and the near-east. During its earlier imperial periods, Shamshi-Adad dominated much of northern Mesopotamia in the 18th century BC. At its weakest, however, the Assyrians had even been subjugated to vassaldom under the Kingdom of Mitanni, but always seemed to resurge and grow in power again. By the late tenth-century BC, the declining Assyrian polity had been diminished by Aramean invasions, left controlling only its traditional core region in

the so-called ‘Assyrian triangle’ on the upper reaches of the Tigris River. Despite that fact, kings in this era still considered themselves rulers of all the previously conquered territory seized by Middle Assyrian kings such as Tukulti-Ninurta I, that were now lost. It was this gulf between imperial expectation and reality which led to the Neo-Assyrian reconquest. While the surrounding polities had been weakened by the Bronze Age Collapse and were still recovering, Assyria was dynamic and demographically vibrant, allowing its kings to once again pursue an expansionist agenda. Beginning in roughly 934BC with king Ashur-dan II, and continuing with

his successors - Adad-nirari II and then Tukulti-Ninurta II - brilliant military expeditions began to recapture the ‘Assyrian territories’ that their predecessors once ruled. This process culminated in the reign of Ashurnasirpal II - whose name can be translated as ‘the god Ashur is the creator of an heir’. He is one of the most famous neo-Assyrian kings, whose reign we are well informed of by numerous royal reliefs. Under his august rule, the great armies of Ashur were far from sated, and he began to direct expeditions to areas never before touched by Assyrian arms. Parts of northern Babylonia,

Zamua - an area in the north near Lake Urmia - Armenian highlands, and the Kashyari mountains all became subject to the iron will of Ashurnasirpal. The king also crossed the Orontes River in the northwest with an army, founding Assyrian colonies there and essentially launching a commercial expedition. He even managed to exact vast sums of tribute from the wealthy Phoenician cities and extracted valuable timber from the Levant. Despite the primarily economic motives for Ashurnasipal’s western expeditions, its further-reaching implications are also incredibly important. Never before had Assyrians, with their desire for stable control, placed a colony so

far away from their centre, and it paved the way for the centuries to come. Back in the homeland of Ashur, on the Tigris, Assyria’s capital - Ashur - was also the centre of all worship of the Assyrian pantheon of gods - the most prominent and powerful of which was also known as Ashur. This god was strange in Mesopotamia as it was not a celestial entity like Enlil or Marduk, but was actually a deified version of the rock formation on which his temple stood. Interestingly, Assyria is not what the people themselves called the land - they

called it ‘Ashur’. So, the country was called ‘Ashur’, as was their god and their city. The fact that Ashur was a holy city didn’t stop what Ashurnasirpal II did next, in what was perhaps his greatest achievement. Taking advantage of the great wealth which was entering his treasuries from constant success in war, the king began sponsoring construction in Assyrian cities from Nineveh to Ashur. However, his greatest achievement was the building of a vast, beautiful new capital city known as Kalhu - modern Nimrud - beginning in 879BC. The site already had a decaying old settlement of some

kind before the works began, but this project was a different thing altogether. Ashurnasirpal employed thousands of corvee labourers and deportees to build several colossal palaces and glorious temples. Massive winged-bull statues fashioned from stone were placed as fearsome guardians at the entrances to the king’s northwestern palace, and extensive rows of carved stone blocks were decorated with depictions of various scenes designed to show the king’s greatness. In one of these reliefs, two figures bear tribute to the Assyrian king. The first is probably a man from Syria, who can be seen clenching his hands and raising them as

a symbol of submission. The second may be a representative from Phoenicia, and comes to Ashurnasirpal to grant his master a pair of monkeys - word must have gotten around that Assyrian kings loved collecting exotic fauna. In 864, Ashurnasirpal celebrated Kalhu’s completion by inviting, according to an Assyrian inscription: 69,574 guests, among them 16,000 citizens of his new capital and 5,000 foreign dignitaries from surrounding realms. They were provided 10,000 pigeons, 10,000 jugs of beer and 10,000 skins of wine along with numerous other foods and beverages in a grand feast. All would know that this was the grandeur

of Ashur’s new realm. “Go home,” Ashurnasirpal must have thought upon the party’s conclusion, “and tell your petty kings of my glory.” The prestige of creating such a glittering new capital would no doubt have been good enough, but there were probably other practical reasons for its construction beyond just aesthetics. Kalhu was located dead centre in the ‘Assyrian triangle’, its points made up of Ashur, Nineveh and Arbela. His new city was therefore right in the middle of the Assyrian world, more adequate for governing a rapidly expanding empire in a more convenient fashion. Ashurnasirpal might have wished to

assert his independence from the great noble families of Old Ashur by just relocating central power away from them. They had been incredibly influential up until this point, and probably served as an obstacle to an increase in central power. Somewhat revealingly, Kalhu’s direct governance was granted to a eunuch upon the city’s completion, rather than one of the powerful aristocrats of Assyria. Eunuchs were generally seen to be subservient and devoted to the king alone, and for this reason were to become massively powerful over the next two-and-a-half centuries. The most powerful of their number would serve as everything

from royal chariot drivers and cup-bearers to provincial governors and generals. Ashurnasirpal ruled from his new fortified citadel until 859 BC, when his son and successor Shalmaneser III took the throne. Continuing in his illustrious father’s footsteps, his reign was yet another series of stunning campaigns directed against Assyria’s traditional enemies, as well as the Neo-Hittite states around and beyond the Taurus Mountains, which were bent to their knees and forced to pay tribute. However, as we all know, expansion on such a scale has a price, and for the Assyrians that price now had to be paid. In the

late 820s, either slightly before or after Shalmaneser III’s death, the Neo-Assyrian Empire descended into a state of weakness known in Professor Eckart Frahm’s ‘Companion to Assyria’ as ‘The Age of Magnates’. It’s entirely possible that this time in Assyrian history was initiated by a civil war between royal sons, or possibly even a rebellion by the aforementioned aristocratic clans against what they saw as sidelining by the monarchy. Whatever the case truly was, it does seem that after this internal strife, noble power dramatically resurged. In the three-quarters of a century-long period lasting from the late 820s to 745BC,

five kings reigned, but it seems that true power resided with various governors, family members and high officials, especially the king’s field marshal. The reign of Adad-nirari III stretched from 810 to 783, for example, and for the most part in that time, power lay with his commander-in-chief Nergal-ila’i and his mother Sammu-ramat. It makes sense, because her son was only a child when installed on the throne of Assyria. This might have been engineered; after all, an infant king is a weak king who can be controlled. This queen mother’s extraordinary authority is revealed to us in a stele

dated to the year 805, which mentions her and her royal son as equal guarantors of the official border between two feuding vassal states. Moreover, she is also mentioned together with her son on religious statues constructed by the governor of Kalhu at the time. Finally, Sammu-ramat was probably the very first woman in Assyria to be commemorated on a stele in the holy city of Ashur which were designed to honour the memory of the kingdom’s rulers. Interestingly, many scholars now believe that this Assyrian queen was the inspiration for the future legendary figure Semiramis, who is mentioned in

numerous Greek sources centuries after this point. It’s possible that her ability to successfully rule the great empire made her memorable enough to mythologise after her death. Historian Susan Wise Bauer commented that ‘Sammu-ramat’s hold on power was so striking that it echoed into the distant historical memory of a people just arriving on the scene’. In effect, she was the Empress Wu of Neo-Assyria. We don’t have time to cover it here, but we recommend that you read up on Semiramis for yourself, and perhaps we’ll do a video about her in the future. Carrying on with the story,

throughout the mid-eighth century BC, the strongest figure in Assyrian politics was a military commander named Shamshi-Ilu, a man who directed military campaigns and ran the affairs of state. He essentially performed all the functions of a king, while sidelining his monarch and only formally respecting the king’s authority. Governors of large Assyrian provinces also asserted their individual authority and power in the regions which they ruled, often competing with one another despite remaining unified under the ‘rule’ of the Assyrian king. It was at this moment when Assyria was at its weakest that enemies finally decided to strike. In

the middle of the eighth century, king of the rising northern state of Urartu - Sarduri I - crossed his border and intervened in the fractured neo-Hittite states, forming a strong anti-Assyrian coalition, and presenting a plausible threat to the weakened state’s existence. At a similar time, Shamshi-Ilu passed away and a revolt broke out in the capital at Kalhu. We have hardly any information about it, but the king at the time was probably killed and then replaced by a man named Pulu. We know him better by the throne name he took - Tiglath-Pileser III. Under this possible-usurper’s

effective leadership, as Hardcore History host Dan Carlin put it: ‘Assyria went on a kind of historical sprint’ and began a meteoric rise in power. Indeed, the blistering speed at which Assyria recovered from its low period can be attributed to this truly great reformer. Above all was the viewpoint that the interests of Ashur’s great empire could no longer be served by the aging imperial system of Ashurnasirpal, it would have to be changed to fit a great empire - the greatest empire the world had ever seen, and the culmination of ancient Sumer’s millennia-long history. Like any Assyrian

monarch worth his salt, Tiglath-Pileser began a series of brutal, lightning conquests in all directions in order to assert the final supremacy of his kingdom to all who thought that the century’s long weakness had de-clawed it. First though, he needed to revamp the Assyrian army into a truly fearsome fighting force. Before Tiglath-Pileser, Assyrian militia armies were only called up in the summer due to the fact that the soldiers - most peasants working in agriculture - had to service the land and reap the harvest in May, before being called up by July. This yearly cycle was probably

one of the limiters on Assyrian domination in the times of Ashurnasirpal, as an army can only conquer so much in a year without economic dislocation. Hereafter, tribute giving clients would give way to full Assyrian provinces. This was done away with, and, amongst other reforms, was replaced by a permanent army with contingents raised from each of the provinces, supplemented when needed by units provided by vassal realms, whose service was a part of the tribute they were obliged to pay. The ‘kisir sharruti’, or ‘standing army’ acquired a multiethnic, multicultural aspect, with foreign troops marching alongside native Assyrian

units. A later king reports that he even integrated 50 Israeli chariot teams into his force. They were issued Assyrian uniforms and equipment, thereby becoming indistinguishable from one another in the ranks. A large Assyrian ‘core’ of troops continued to exist primarily within the cavalry and chariot forces - the strike elements of the army. At an even higher level were the ‘qurubti sha shepe’ - the king’s personal elite bodyguard In the first years of his reign, which began in 745, the Assyrian army conquered Babylonia in the south, the consequences of which would affect Assyria until the end

of the empire. The conquest was completed relatively quickly, but Babylon, being the revered and ancient civilisation that it was, required special treatment. So, after defeating the Chaldean tribes that had occupied the area, Tiglath-Pileser took the step of becoming King of Babylon - instituting a kind of dual-monarchy. In the very same year, the army pivoted north and shattered Urartu’s strength, forcing its king to flee for his life. Assaults on that mountain kingdom would continue until it was finally annihilated in the late eighth century, weakened so much that a new nomadic group - the Medes, managed to

conquer it. In the west, the empire’s borders were again pushed further than ever before, even approaching the borders of Egypt, and provincialising client kingdoms along the way. To more completely subjugate and pacify newly conquered territories and treacherous vassals alike, the king formally, and on an unprecedented scale, reintroduced a policy of mass deportation and forced population movement. In 744, for example, Tiglath-Pileser decreed that 65,000 people were to be taken from their homes in Iran and resettled on the Assyrian-Babylonian border on the Diyala River. Two years later, 30,000 people from the Syrian region were deported to the

Zagros mountains. Those human beings who were deported were usually people considered most likely to rebel against Assyria. By ‘decapitating’ possibly dissident elements in this way, it was hoped that subjugated lands would remain amenable to their Assyrian overlords, and remain subjugated. To top it off, deportation allowed the Assyrians to transport people with valuable skills, such as administration, construction, and financial management across the empire to where they were most needed. Within his empire, Tiglath-Pileser also acted decisively to ensure that central rule would never again be challenged and undermined as it had been in the ‘age of magnates’.

To do this, he took the provinces of the empire, many of which were very powerful territories in their own right, and sliced them into smaller, more administratively effective pieces. Within seven years of his ascension to the throne, over 80 of these provinces existed, and loyal eunuchs were appointed to govern many of the new divisions in order to further undermine the provincial elites. To monitor this system, Tiglath-Pileser set up a small administrative layer of officials responsible for inspecting the state of his majesty’s holdings and then reporting back to the king the performance and loyalty of his

governors. We’ve heard of Achaemenid Persia and Mongol usage of horseborne postal services, but this, as far as we can tell, was actually an Assyrian innovation. Communications stations were set up across the empire from which riders could deliver orders to the provinces. It also allowed the delivery of reports from the provinces, containing amongst many other general matters, intelligence from operatives in the spy service which had been set up by Tiglath-Pileser to monitor states beyond Assyrian borders. With these reforms, the Neo-Assyrian Empire entered its golden age and we will talk about them more down the line, so

make sure you are subscribed to our channel and have pressed the bell button. We would like to express our gratitude to our Patreon supporters and channel members, who make the creation of our videos possible. Now, you can also support us by buying our merchandise via the link in the description. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we will catch you on the next one. The end of Bronze Age civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean world initiated a dark age which, from Egypt to Anatolia to Greece, reduced living standards, humbled once proud empires, and turned prosperous

maritime trading kingdoms into shadows of their former selves. However, there was one great Mesopotamian state which managed to weather the storm and eventually emerged from it as the most powerful and arguably the most merciless state in near-eastern, and possibly world history - the Assyrian Empire. There are a bunch of reasons why we love Mesopotamian civilizations and the fact that they were the first to preserve knowledge is on the top of the list. The sponsor of this video Blinkist is all about preserving and sharing knowledge by making it easily digestible even for the busiest among us.

Blinkist takes the most interesting and relevant non-fictional books and turns them into 15-minute audios – blinks. More than 3000 titles are already available which means that you can learn on the go, learn fast, and always improve your knowledge, no matter how time-constrained you are. Blinkist titles range from Entrepreneurship to Philosophy, from Psychology to Politics, but most importantly for us, there are 100s of historical books that you can listen to! Imagine learning the most important facts of 4 books in just 1 hour! Mary Beard’s Civilization and Chip Walter’s Last Ape Standing are perfect if you want

to learn more about human civilizations! New titles are added all the time! Support our channel and your growth - get yourself premium access to knowledge! The first 100 people to go to blinkist.com/kingsandgenerals are going to get unlimited access for 1 week to try it out. You’ll also get 25% off if you want the full membership! The Old and Middle Assyrian Empires had waxed and waned for almost a millennia by the time Bronze Age civilisation came to an end in the late second millennium BC. During that thousand years, Assyria was merely one of many competing states

in Mesopotamia and the near-east. During its earlier imperial periods, Shamshi-Adad dominated much of northern Mesopotamia in the 18th century BC. At its weakest, however, the Assyrians had even been subjugated to vassaldom under the Kingdom of Mitanni, but always seemed to resurge and grow in power again. By the late tenth-century BC, the declining Assyrian polity had been diminished by Aramean invasions, left controlling only its traditional core region in the so-called ‘Assyrian triangle’ on the upper reaches of the Tigris River. Despite that fact, kings in this era still considered themselves rulers of all the previously conquered territory

seized by Middle Assyrian kings such as Tukulti-Ninurta I, that were now lost. It was this gulf between imperial expectation and reality which led to the Neo-Assyrian reconquest. While the surrounding polities had been weakened by the Bronze Age Collapse and were still recovering, Assyria was dynamic and demographically vibrant, allowing its kings to once again pursue an expansionist agenda. Beginning in roughly 934BC with king Ashur-dan II, and continuing with his successors - Adad-nirari II and then Tukulti-Ninurta II - brilliant military expeditions began to recapture the ‘Assyrian territories’ that their predecessors once ruled. This process culminated in the

reign of Ashurnasirpal II - whose name can be translated as ‘the god Ashur is the creator of an heir’. He is one of the most famous neo-Assyrian kings, whose reign we are well informed of by numerous royal reliefs. Under his august rule, the great armies of Ashur were far from sated, and he began to direct expeditions to areas never before touched by Assyrian arms. Parts of northern Babylonia, Zamua - an area in the north near Lake Urmia - Armenian highlands, and the Kashyari mountains all became subject to the iron will of Ashurnasirpal. The king also

crossed the Orontes River in the northwest with an army, founding Assyrian colonies there and essentially launching a commercial expedition. He even managed to exact vast sums of tribute from the wealthy Phoenician cities and extracted valuable timber from the Levant. Despite the primarily economic motives for Ashurnasipal’s western expeditions, its further-reaching implications are also incredibly important. Never before had Assyrians, with their desire for stable control, placed a colony so far away from their centre, and it paved the way for the centuries to come. Back in the homeland of Ashur, on the Tigris, Assyria’s capital - Ashur -

was also the centre of all worship of the Assyrian pantheon of gods - the most prominent and powerful of which was also known as Ashur. This god was strange in Mesopotamia as it was not a celestial entity like Enlil or Marduk, but was actually a deified version of the rock formation on which his temple stood. Interestingly, Assyria is not what the people themselves called the land - they called it ‘Ashur’. So, the country was called ‘Ashur’, as was their god and their city. The fact that Ashur was a holy city didn’t stop what Ashurnasirpal II

did next, in what was perhaps his greatest achievement. Taking advantage of the great wealth which was entering his treasuries from constant success in war, the king began sponsoring construction in Assyrian cities from Nineveh to Ashur. However, his greatest achievement was the building of a vast, beautiful new capital city known as Kalhu - modern Nimrud - beginning in 879BC. The site already had a decaying old settlement of some kind before the works began, but this project was a different thing altogether. Ashurnasirpal employed thousands of corvee labourers and deportees to build several colossal palaces and glorious temples.

Massive winged-bull statues fashioned from stone were placed as fearsome guardians at the entrances to the king’s northwestern palace, and extensive rows of carved stone blocks were decorated with depictions of various scenes designed to show the king’s greatness. In one of these reliefs, two figures bear tribute to the Assyrian king. The first is probably a man from Syria, who can be seen clenching his hands and raising them as a symbol of submission. The second may be a representative from Phoenicia, and comes to Ashurnasirpal to grant his master a pair of monkeys - word must have gotten

around that Assyrian kings loved collecting exotic fauna. In 864, Ashurnasirpal celebrated Kalhu’s completion by inviting, according to an Assyrian inscription: 69,574 guests, among them 16,000 citizens of his new capital and 5,000 foreign dignitaries from surrounding realms. They were provided 10,000 pigeons, 10,000 jugs of beer and 10,000 skins of wine along with numerous other foods and beverages in a grand feast. All would know that this was the grandeur of Ashur’s new realm. “Go home,” Ashurnasirpal must have thought upon the party’s conclusion, “and tell your petty kings of my glory.” The prestige of creating such a glittering

new capital would no doubt have been good enough, but there were probably other practical reasons for its construction beyond just aesthetics. Kalhu was located dead centre in the ‘Assyrian triangle’, its points made up of Ashur, Nineveh and Arbela. His new city was therefore right in the middle of the Assyrian world, more adequate for governing a rapidly expanding empire in a more convenient fashion. Ashurnasirpal might have wished to assert his independence from the great noble families of Old Ashur by just relocating central power away from them. They had been incredibly influential up until this point, and

probably served as an obstacle to an increase in central power. Somewhat revealingly, Kalhu’s direct governance was granted to a eunuch upon the city’s completion, rather than one of the powerful aristocrats of Assyria. Eunuchs were generally seen to be subservient and devoted to the king alone, and for this reason were to become massively powerful over the next two-and-a-half centuries. The most powerful of their number would serve as everything from royal chariot drivers and cup-bearers to provincial governors and generals. Ashurnasirpal ruled from his new fortified citadel until 859 BC, when his son and successor Shalmaneser III took

the throne. Continuing in his illustrious father’s footsteps, his reign was yet another series of stunning campaigns directed against Assyria’s traditional enemies, as well as the Neo-Hittite states around and beyond the Taurus Mountains, which were bent to their knees and forced to pay tribute. However, as we all know, expansion on such a scale has a price, and for the Assyrians that price now had to be paid. In the late 820s, either slightly before or after Shalmaneser III’s death, the Neo-Assyrian Empire descended into a state of weakness known in Professor Eckart Frahm’s ‘Companion to Assyria’ as ‘The

Age of Magnates’. It’s entirely possible that this time in Assyrian history was initiated by a civil war between royal sons, or possibly even a rebellion by the aforementioned aristocratic clans against what they saw as sidelining by the monarchy. Whatever the case truly was, it does seem that after this internal strife, noble power dramatically resurged. In the three-quarters of a century-long period lasting from the late 820s to 745BC, five kings reigned, but it seems that true power resided with various governors, family members and high officials, especially the king’s field marshal. The reign of Adad-nirari III stretched

from 810 to 783, for example, and for the most part in that time, power lay with his commander-in-chief Nergal-ila’i and his mother Sammu-ramat. It makes sense, because her son was only a child when installed on the throne of Assyria. This might have been engineered; after all, an infant king is a weak king who can be controlled. This queen mother’s extraordinary authority is revealed to us in a stele dated to the year 805, which mentions her and her royal son as equal guarantors of the official border between two feuding vassal states. Moreover, she is also mentioned

together with her son on religious statues constructed by the governor of Kalhu at the time. Finally, Sammu-ramat was probably the very first woman in Assyria to be commemorated on a stele in the holy city of Ashur which were designed to honour the memory of the kingdom’s rulers. Interestingly, many scholars now believe that this Assyrian queen was the inspiration for the future legendary figure Semiramis, who is mentioned in numerous Greek sources centuries after this point. It’s possible that her ability to successfully rule the great empire made her memorable enough to mythologise after her death. Historian Susan

Wise Bauer commented that ‘Sammu-ramat’s hold on power was so striking that it echoed into the distant historical memory of a people just arriving on the scene’. In effect, she was the Empress Wu of Neo-Assyria. We don’t have time to cover it here, but we recommend that you read up on Semiramis for yourself, and perhaps we’ll do a video about her in the future. Carrying on with the story, throughout the mid-eighth century BC, the strongest figure in Assyrian politics was a military commander named Shamshi-Ilu, a man who directed military campaigns and ran the affairs of state.

He essentially performed all the functions of a king, while sidelining his monarch and only formally respecting the king’s authority. Governors of large Assyrian provinces also asserted their individual authority and power in the regions which they ruled, often competing with one another despite remaining unified under the ‘rule’ of the Assyrian king. It was at this moment when Assyria was at its weakest that enemies finally decided to strike. In the middle of the eighth century, king of the rising northern state of Urartu - Sarduri I - crossed his border and intervened in the fractured neo-Hittite states, forming

a strong anti-Assyrian coalition, and presenting a plausible threat to the weakened state’s existence. At a similar time, Shamshi-Ilu passed away and a revolt broke out in the capital at Kalhu. We have hardly any information about it, but the king at the time was probably killed and then replaced by a man named Pulu. We know him better by the throne name he took - Tiglath-Pileser III. Under this possible-usurper’s effective leadership, as Hardcore History host Dan Carlin put it: ‘Assyria went on a kind of historical sprint’ and began a meteoric rise in power. Indeed, the blistering speed

at which Assyria recovered from its low period can be attributed to this truly great reformer. Above all was the viewpoint that the interests of Ashur’s great empire could no longer be served by the aging imperial system of Ashurnasirpal, it would have to be changed to fit a great empire - the greatest empire the world had ever seen, and the culmination of ancient Sumer’s millennia-long history. Like any Assyrian monarch worth his salt, Tiglath-Pileser began a series of brutal, lightning conquests in all directions in order to assert the final supremacy of his kingdom to all who thought

that the century’s long weakness had de-clawed it. First though, he needed to revamp the Assyrian army into a truly fearsome fighting force. Before Tiglath-Pileser, Assyrian militia armies were only called up in the summer due to the fact that the soldiers - most peasants working in agriculture - had to service the land and reap the harvest in May, before being called up by July. This yearly cycle was probably one of the limiters on Assyrian domination in the times of Ashurnasirpal, as an army can only conquer so much in a year without economic dislocation. Hereafter, tribute giving

clients would give way to full Assyrian provinces. This was done away with, and, amongst other reforms, was replaced by a permanent army with contingents raised from each of the provinces, supplemented when needed by units provided by vassal realms, whose service was a part of the tribute they were obliged to pay. The ‘kisir sharruti’, or ‘standing army’ acquired a multiethnic, multicultural aspect, with foreign troops marching alongside native Assyrian units. A later king reports that he even integrated 50 Israeli chariot teams into his force. They were issued Assyrian uniforms and equipment, thereby becoming indistinguishable from one another

in the ranks. A large Assyrian ‘core’ of troops continued to exist primarily within the cavalry and chariot forces - the strike elements of the army. At an even higher level were the ‘qurubti sha shepe’ - the king’s personal elite bodyguard In the first years of his reign, which began in 745, the Assyrian army conquered Babylonia in the south, the consequences of which would affect Assyria until the end of the empire. The conquest was completed relatively quickly, but Babylon, being the revered and ancient civilisation that it was, required special treatment. So, after defeating the Chaldean tribes

that had occupied the area, Tiglath-Pileser took the step of becoming King of Babylon - instituting a kind of dual-monarchy. In the very same year, the army pivoted north and shattered Urartu’s strength, forcing its king to flee for his life. Assaults on that mountain kingdom would continue until it was finally annihilated in the late eighth century, weakened so much that a new nomadic group - the Medes, managed to conquer it. In the west, the empire’s borders were again pushed further than ever before, even approaching the borders of Egypt, and provincialising client kingdoms along the way. To

more completely subjugate and pacify newly conquered territories and treacherous vassals alike, the king formally, and on an unprecedented scale, reintroduced a policy of mass deportation and forced population movement. In 744, for example, Tiglath-Pileser decreed that 65,000 people were to be taken from their homes in Iran and resettled on the Assyrian-Babylonian border on the Diyala River. Two years later, 30,000 people from the Syrian region were deported to the Zagros mountains. Those human beings who were deported were usually people considered most likely to rebel against Assyria. By ‘decapitating’ possibly dissident elements in this way, it was hoped

that subjugated lands would remain amenable to their Assyrian overlords, and remain subjugated. To top it off, deportation allowed the Assyrians to transport people with valuable skills, such as administration, construction, and financial management across the empire to where they were most needed. Within his empire, Tiglath-Pileser also acted decisively to ensure that central rule would never again be challenged and undermined as it had been in the ‘age of magnates’. To do this, he took the provinces of the empire, many of which were very powerful territories in their own right, and sliced them into smaller, more administratively effective

pieces. Within seven years of his ascension to the throne, over 80 of these provinces existed, and loyal eunuchs were appointed to govern many of the new divisions in order to further undermine the provincial elites. To monitor this system, Tiglath-Pileser set up a small administrative layer of officials responsible for inspecting the state of his majesty’s holdings and then reporting back to the king the performance and loyalty of his governors. We’ve heard of Achaemenid Persia and Mongol usage of horseborne postal services, but this, as far as we can tell, was actually an Assyrian innovation. Communications stations were

set up across the empire from which riders could deliver orders to the provinces. It also allowed the delivery of reports from the provinces, containing amongst many other general matters, intelligence from operatives in the spy service which had been set up by Tiglath-Pileser to monitor states beyond Assyrian borders. With these reforms, the Neo-Assyrian Empire entered its golden age and we will talk about them more down the line, so make sure you are subscribed to our channel and have pressed the bell button. We would like to express our gratitude to our Patreon supporters and channel members, who

make the creation of our videos possible. Now, you can also support us by buying our merchandise via the link in the description. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we will catch you on the next one. The end of Bronze Age civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean world initiated a dark age which, from Egypt to Anatolia to Greece, reduced living standards, humbled once proud empires, and turned prosperous maritime trading kingdoms into shadows of their former selves. However, there was one great Mesopotamian state which managed to weather the storm and eventually emerged from it as the

most powerful and arguably the most merciless state in near-eastern, and possibly world history - the Assyrian Empire. There are a bunch of reasons why we love Mesopotamian civilizations and the fact that they were the first to preserve knowledge is on the top of the list. The sponsor of this video Blinkist is all about preserving and sharing knowledge by making it easily digestible even for the busiest among us. Blinkist takes the most interesting and relevant non-fictional books and turns them into 15-minute audios – blinks. More than 3000 titles are already available which means that you can

learn on the go, learn fast, and always improve your knowledge, no matter how time-constrained you are. Blinkist titles range from Entrepreneurship to Philosophy, from Psychology to Politics, but most importantly for us, there are 100s of historical books that you can listen to! Imagine learning the most important facts of 4 books in just 1 hour! Mary Beard’s Civilization and Chip Walter’s Last Ape Standing are perfect if you want to learn more about human civilizations! New titles are added all the time! Support our channel and your growth - get yourself premium access to knowledge! The first 100

people to go to blinkist.com/kingsandgenerals are going to get unlimited access for 1 week to try it out. You’ll also get 25% off if you want the full membership! The Old and Middle Assyrian Empires had waxed and waned for almost a millennia by the time Bronze Age civilisation came to an end in the late second millennium BC. During that thousand years, Assyria was merely one of many competing states in Mesopotamia and the near-east. During its earlier imperial periods, Shamshi-Adad dominated much of northern Mesopotamia in the 18th century BC. At its weakest, however, the Assyrians had even

been subjugated to vassaldom under the Kingdom of Mitanni, but always seemed to resurge and grow in power again. By the late tenth-century BC, the declining Assyrian polity had been diminished by Aramean invasions, left controlling only its traditional core region in the so-called ‘Assyrian triangle’ on the upper reaches of the Tigris River. Despite that fact, kings in this era still considered themselves rulers of all the previously conquered territory seized by Middle Assyrian kings such as Tukulti-Ninurta I, that were now lost. It was this gulf between imperial expectation and reality which led to the Neo-Assyrian reconquest. While

the surrounding polities had been weakened by the Bronze Age Collapse and were still recovering, Assyria was dynamic and demographically vibrant, allowing its kings to once again pursue an expansionist agenda. Beginning in roughly 934BC with king Ashur-dan II, and continuing with his successors - Adad-nirari II and then Tukulti-Ninurta II - brilliant military expeditions began to recapture the ‘Assyrian territories’ that their predecessors once ruled. This process culminated in the reign of Ashurnasirpal II - whose name can be translated as ‘the god Ashur is the creator of an heir’. He is one of the most famous neo-Assyrian kings,

whose reign we are well informed of by numerous royal reliefs. Under his august rule, the great armies of Ashur were far from sated, and he began to direct expeditions to areas never before touched by Assyrian arms. Parts of northern Babylonia, Zamua - an area in the north near Lake Urmia - Armenian highlands, and the Kashyari mountains all became subject to the iron will of Ashurnasirpal. The king also crossed the Orontes River in the northwest with an army, founding Assyrian colonies there and essentially launching a commercial expedition. He even managed to exact vast sums of tribute

from the wealthy Phoenician cities and extracted valuable timber from the Levant. Despite the primarily economic motives for Ashurnasipal’s western expeditions, its further-reaching implications are also incredibly important. Never before had Assyrians, with their desire for stable control, placed a colony so far away from their centre, and it paved the way for the centuries to come. Back in the homeland of Ashur, on the Tigris, Assyria’s capital - Ashur - was also the centre of all worship of the Assyrian pantheon of gods - the most prominent and powerful of which was also known as Ashur. This god was

strange in Mesopotamia as it was not a celestial entity like Enlil or Marduk, but was actually a deified version of the rock formation on which his temple stood. Interestingly, Assyria is not what the people themselves called the land - they called it ‘Ashur’. So, the country was called ‘Ashur’, as was their god and their city. The fact that Ashur was a holy city didn’t stop what Ashurnasirpal II did next, in what was perhaps his greatest achievement. Taking advantage of the great wealth which was entering his treasuries from constant success in war, the king began sponsoring

construction in Assyrian cities from Nineveh to Ashur. However, his greatest achievement was the building of a vast, beautiful new capital city known as Kalhu - modern Nimrud - beginning in 879BC. The site already had a decaying old settlement of some kind before the works began, but this project was a different thing altogether. Ashurnasirpal employed thousands of corvee labourers and deportees to build several colossal palaces and glorious temples. Massive winged-bull statues fashioned from stone were placed as fearsome guardians at the entrances to the king’s northwestern palace, and extensive rows of carved stone blocks were decorated with

depictions of various scenes designed to show the king’s greatness. In one of these reliefs, two figures bear tribute to the Assyrian king. The first is probably a man from Syria, who can be seen clenching his hands and raising them as a symbol of submission. The second may be a representative from Phoenicia, and comes to Ashurnasirpal to grant his master a pair of monkeys - word must have gotten around that Assyrian kings loved collecting exotic fauna. In 864, Ashurnasirpal celebrated Kalhu’s completion by inviting, according to an Assyrian inscription: 69,574 guests, among them 16,000 citizens of his

new capital and 5,000 foreign dignitaries from surrounding realms. They were provided 10,000 pigeons, 10,000 jugs of beer and 10,000 skins of wine along with numerous other foods and beverages in a grand feast. All would know that this was the grandeur of Ashur’s new realm. “Go home,” Ashurnasirpal must have thought upon the party’s conclusion, “and tell your petty kings of my glory.” The prestige of creating such a glittering new capital would no doubt have been good enough, but there were probably other practical reasons for its construction beyond just aesthetics. Kalhu was located dead centre in the

‘Assyrian triangle’, its points made up of Ashur, Nineveh and Arbela. His new city was therefore right in the middle of the Assyrian world, more adequate for governing a rapidly expanding empire in a more convenient fashion. Ashurnasirpal might have wished to assert his independence from the great noble families of Old Ashur by just relocating central power away from them. They had been incredibly influential up until this point, and probably served as an obstacle to an increase in central power. Somewhat revealingly, Kalhu’s direct governance was granted to a eunuch upon the city’s completion, rather than one of

the powerful aristocrats of Assyria. Eunuchs were generally seen to be subservient and devoted to the king alone, and for this reason were to become massively powerful over the next two-and-a-half centuries. The most powerful of their number would serve as everything from royal chariot drivers and cup-bearers to provincial governors and generals. Ashurnasirpal ruled from his new fortified citadel until 859 BC, when his son and successor Shalmaneser III took the throne. Continuing in his illustrious father’s footsteps, his reign was yet another series of stunning campaigns directed against Assyria’s traditional enemies, as well as the Neo-Hittite states around

and beyond the Taurus Mountains, which were bent to their knees and forced to pay tribute. However, as we all know, expansion on such a scale has a price, and for the Assyrians that price now had to be paid. In the late 820s, either slightly before or after Shalmaneser III’s death, the Neo-Assyrian Empire descended into a state of weakness known in Professor Eckart Frahm’s ‘Companion to Assyria’ as ‘The Age of Magnates’. It’s entirely possible that this time in Assyrian history was initiated by a civil war between royal sons, or possibly even a rebellion by the aforementioned

aristocratic clans against what they saw as sidelining by the monarchy. Whatever the case truly was, it does seem that after this internal strife, noble power dramatically resurged. In the three-quarters of a century-long period lasting from the late 820s to 745BC, five kings reigned, but it seems that true power resided with various governors, family members and high officials, especially the king’s field marshal. The reign of Adad-nirari III stretched from 810 to 783, for example, and for the most part in that time, power lay with his commander-in-chief Nergal-ila’i and his mother Sammu-ramat. It makes sense, because her

son was only a child when installed on the throne of Assyria. This might have been engineered; after all, an infant king is a weak king who can be controlled. This queen mother’s extraordinary authority is revealed to us in a stele dated to the year 805, which mentions her and her royal son as equal guarantors of the official border between two feuding vassal states. Moreover, she is also mentioned together with her son on religious statues constructed by the governor of Kalhu at the time. Finally, Sammu-ramat was probably the very first woman in Assyria to be commemorated

on a stele in the holy city of Ashur which were designed to honour the memory of the kingdom’s rulers. Interestingly, many scholars now believe that this Assyrian queen was the inspiration for the future legendary figure Semiramis, who is mentioned in numerous Greek sources centuries after this point. It’s possible that her ability to successfully rule the great empire made her memorable enough to mythologise after her death. Historian Susan Wise Bauer commented that ‘Sammu-ramat’s hold on power was so striking that it echoed into the distant historical memory of a people just arriving on the scene’. In effect,

she was the Empress Wu of Neo-Assyria. We don’t have time to cover it here, but we recommend that you read up on Semiramis for yourself, and perhaps we’ll do a video about her in the future. Carrying on with the story, throughout the mid-eighth century BC, the strongest figure in Assyrian politics was a military commander named Shamshi-Ilu, a man who directed military campaigns and ran the affairs of state. He essentially performed all the functions of a king, while sidelining his monarch and only formally respecting the king’s authority. Governors of large Assyrian provinces also asserted their individual

authority and power in the regions which they ruled, often competing with one another despite remaining unified under the ‘rule’ of the Assyrian king. It was at this moment when Assyria was at its weakest that enemies finally decided to strike. In the middle of the eighth century, king of the rising northern state of Urartu - Sarduri I - crossed his border and intervened in the fractured neo-Hittite states, forming a strong anti-Assyrian coalition, and presenting a plausible threat to the weakened state’s existence. At a similar time, Shamshi-Ilu passed away and a revolt broke out in the capital

at Kalhu. We have hardly any information about it, but the king at the time was probably killed and then replaced by a man named Pulu. We know him better by the throne name he took - Tiglath-Pileser III. Under this possible-usurper’s effective leadership, as Hardcore History host Dan Carlin put it: ‘Assyria went on a kind of historical sprint’ and began a meteoric rise in power. Indeed, the blistering speed at which Assyria recovered from its low period can be attributed to this truly great reformer. Above all was the viewpoint that the interests of Ashur’s great empire could

no longer be served by the aging imperial system of Ashurnasirpal, it would have to be changed to fit a great empire - the greatest empire the world had ever seen, and the culmination of ancient Sumer’s millennia-long history. Like any Assyrian monarch worth his salt, Tiglath-Pileser began a series of brutal, lightning conquests in all directions in order to assert the final supremacy of his kingdom to all who thought that the century’s long weakness had de-clawed it. First though, he needed to revamp the Assyrian army into a truly fearsome fighting force. Before Tiglath-Pileser, Assyrian militia armies were

only called up in the summer due to the fact that the soldiers - most peasants working in agriculture - had to service the land and reap the harvest in May, before being called up by July. This yearly cycle was probably one of the limiters on Assyrian domination in the times of Ashurnasirpal, as an army can only conquer so much in a year without economic dislocation. Hereafter, tribute giving clients would give way to full Assyrian provinces. This was done away with, and, amongst other reforms, was replaced by a permanent army with contingents raised from each of

the provinces, supplemented when needed by units provided by vassal realms, whose service was a part of the tribute they were obliged to pay. The ‘kisir sharruti’, or ‘standing army’ acquired a multiethnic, multicultural aspect, with foreign troops marching alongside native Assyrian units. A later king reports that he even integrated 50 Israeli chariot teams into his force. They were issued Assyrian uniforms and equipment, thereby becoming indistinguishable from one another in the ranks. A large Assyrian ‘core’ of troops continued to exist primarily within the cavalry and chariot forces - the strike elements of the army. At an even

higher level were the ‘qurubti sha shepe’ - the king’s personal elite bodyguard In the first years of his reign, which began in 745, the Assyrian army conquered Babylonia in the south, the consequences of which would affect Assyria until the end of the empire. The conquest was completed relatively quickly, but Babylon, being the revered and ancient civilisation that it was, required special treatment. So, after defeating the Chaldean tribes that had occupied the area, Tiglath-Pileser took the step of becoming King of Babylon - instituting a kind of dual-monarchy. In the very same year, the army pivoted north

and shattered Urartu’s strength, forcing its king to flee for his life. Assaults on that mountain kingdom would continue until it was finally annihilated in the late eighth century, weakened so much that a new nomadic group - the Medes, managed to conquer it. In the west, the empire’s borders were again pushed further than ever before, even approaching the borders of Egypt, and provincialising client kingdoms along the way. To more completely subjugate and pacify newly conquered territories and treacherous vassals alike, the king formally, and on an unprecedented scale, reintroduced a policy of mass deportation and forced population

movement. In 744, for example, Tiglath-Pileser decreed that 65,000 people were to be taken from their homes in Iran and resettled on the Assyrian-Babylonian border on the Diyala River. Two years later, 30,000 people from the Syrian region were deported to the Zagros mountains. Those human beings who were deported were usually people considered most likely to rebel against Assyria. By ‘decapitating’ possibly dissident elements in this way, it was hoped that subjugated lands would remain amenable to their Assyrian overlords, and remain subjugated. To top it off, deportation allowed the Assyrians to transport people with valuable skills, such as

administration, construction, and financial management across the empire to where they were most needed. Within his empire, Tiglath-Pileser also acted decisively to ensure that central rule would never again be challenged and undermined as it had been in the ‘age of magnates’. To do this, he took the provinces of the empire, many of which were very powerful territories in their own right, and sliced them into smaller, more administratively effective pieces. Within seven years of his ascension to the throne, over 80 of these provinces existed, and loyal eunuchs were appointed to govern many of the new divisions in

order to further undermine the provincial elites. To monitor this system, Tiglath-Pileser set up a small administrative layer of officials responsible for inspecting the state of his majesty’s holdings and then reporting back to the king the performance and loyalty of his governors. We’ve heard of Achaemenid Persia and Mongol usage of horseborne postal services, but this, as far as we can tell, was actually an Assyrian innovation. Communications stations were set up across the empire from which riders could deliver orders to the provinces. It also allowed the delivery of reports from the provinces, containing amongst many other general

matters, intelligence from operatives in the spy service which had been set up by Tiglath-Pileser to monitor states beyond Assyrian borders. With these reforms, the Neo-Assyrian Empire entered its golden age and we will talk about them more down the line, so make sure you are subscribed to our channel and have pressed the bell button. We would like to express our gratitude to our Patreon supporters and channel members, who make the creation of our videos possible. Now, you can also support us by buying our merchandise via the link in the description. This is the Kings and Generals

channel, and we will catch you on the next one. The end of Bronze Age civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean world initiated a dark age which, from Egypt to Anatolia to Greece, reduced living standards, humbled once proud empires, and turned prosperous maritime trading kingdoms into shadows of their former selves. However, there was one great Mesopotamian state which managed to weather the storm and eventually emerged from it as the most powerful and arguably the most merciless state in near-eastern, and possibly world history - the Assyrian Empire. There are a bunch of reasons why we love Mesopotamian civilizations

and the fact that they were the first to preserve knowledge is on the top of the list. The sponsor of this video Blinkist is all about preserving and sharing knowledge by making it easily digestible even for the busiest among us. Blinkist takes the most interesting and relevant non-fictional books and turns them into 15-minute audios – blinks. More than 3000 titles are already available which means that you can learn on the go, learn fast, and always improve your knowledge, no matter how time-constrained you are. Blinkist titles range from Entrepreneurship to Philosophy, from Psychology to Politics, but

most importantly for us, there are 100s of historical books that you can listen to! Imagine learning the most important facts of 4 books in just 1 hour! Mary Beard’s Civilization and Chip Walter’s Last Ape Standing are perfect if you want to learn more about human civilizations! New titles are added all the time! Support our channel and your growth - get yourself premium access to knowledge! The first 100 people to go to blinkist.com/kingsandgenerals are going to get unlimited access for 1 week to try it out. You’ll also get 25% off if you want the full membership!

The Old and Middle Assyrian Empires had waxed and waned for almost a millennia by the time Bronze Age civilisation came to an end in the late second millennium BC. During that thousand years, Assyria was merely one of many competing states in Mesopotamia and the near-east. During its earlier imperial periods, Shamshi-Adad dominated much of northern Mesopotamia in the 18th century BC. At its weakest, however, the Assyrians had even been subjugated to vassaldom under the Kingdom of Mitanni, but always seemed to resurge and grow in power again. By the late tenth-century BC, the declining Assyrian polity had

been diminished by Aramean invasions, left controlling only its traditional core region in the so-called ‘Assyrian triangle’ on the upper reaches of the Tigris River. Despite that fact, kings in this era still considered themselves rulers of all the previously conquered territory seized by Middle Assyrian kings such as Tukulti-Ninurta I, that were now lost. It was this gulf between imperial expectation and reality which led to the Neo-Assyrian reconquest. While the surrounding polities had been weakened by the Bronze Age Collapse and were still recovering, Assyria was dynamic and demographically vibrant, allowing its kings to once again pursue an

expansionist agenda. Beginning in roughly 934BC with king Ashur-dan II, and continuing with his successors - Adad-nirari II and then Tukulti-Ninurta II - brilliant military expeditions began to recapture the ‘Assyrian territories’ that their predecessors once ruled. This process culminated in the reign of Ashurnasirpal II - whose name can be translated as ‘the god Ashur is the creator of an heir’. He is one of the most famous neo-Assyrian kings, whose reign we are well informed of by numerous royal reliefs. Under his august rule, the great armies of Ashur were far from sated, and he began to direct

expeditions to areas never before touched by Assyrian arms. Parts of northern Babylonia, Zamua - an area in the north near Lake Urmia - Armenian highlands, and the Kashyari mountains all became subject to the iron will of Ashurnasirpal. The king also crossed the Orontes River in the northwest with an army, founding Assyrian colonies there and essentially launching a commercial expedition. He even managed to exact vast sums of tribute from the wealthy Phoenician cities and extracted valuable timber from the Levant. Despite the primarily economic motives for Ashurnasipal’s western expeditions, its further-reaching implications are also incredibly important. Never

before had Assyrians, with their desire for stable control, placed a colony so far away from their centre, and it paved the way for the centuries to come. Back in the homeland of Ashur, on the Tigris, Assyria’s capital - Ashur - was also the centre of all worship of the Assyrian pantheon of gods - the most prominent and powerful of which was also known as Ashur. This god was strange in Mesopotamia as it was not a celestial entity like Enlil or Marduk, but was actually a deified version of the rock formation on which his temple stood.

Interestingly, Assyria is not what the people themselves called the land - they called it ‘Ashur’. So, the country was called ‘Ashur’, as was their god and their city. The fact that Ashur was a holy city didn’t stop what Ashurnasirpal II did next, in what was perhaps his greatest achievement. Taking advantage of the great wealth which was entering his treasuries from constant success in war, the king began sponsoring construction in Assyrian cities from Nineveh to Ashur. However, his greatest achievement was the building of a vast, beautiful new capital city known as Kalhu - modern Nimrud -

beginning in 879BC. The site already had a decaying old settlement of some kind before the works began, but this project was a different thing altogether. Ashurnasirpal employed thousands of corvee labourers and deportees to build several colossal palaces and glorious temples. Massive winged-bull statues fashioned from stone were placed as fearsome guardians at the entrances to the king’s northwestern palace, and extensive rows of carved stone blocks were decorated with depictions of various scenes designed to show the king’s greatness. In one of these reliefs, two figures bear tribute to the Assyrian king. The first is probably a man

from Syria, who can be seen clenching his hands and raising them as a symbol of submission. The second may be a representative from Phoenicia, and comes to Ashurnasirpal to grant his master a pair of monkeys - word must have gotten around that Assyrian kings loved collecting exotic fauna. In 864, Ashurnasirpal celebrated Kalhu’s completion by inviting, according to an Assyrian inscription: 69,574 guests, among them 16,000 citizens of his new capital and 5,000 foreign dignitaries from surrounding realms. They were provided 10,000 pigeons, 10,000 jugs of beer and 10,000 skins of wine along with numerous other foods and

beverages in a grand feast. All would know that this was the grandeur of Ashur’s new realm. “Go home,” Ashurnasirpal must have thought upon the party’s conclusion, “and tell your petty kings of my glory.” The prestige of creating such a glittering new capital would no doubt have been good enough, but there were probably other practical reasons for its construction beyond just aesthetics. Kalhu was located dead centre in the ‘Assyrian triangle’, its points made up of Ashur, Nineveh and Arbela. His new city was therefore right in the middle of the Assyrian world, more adequate for governing a

rapidly expanding empire in a more convenient fashion. Ashurnasirpal might have wished to assert his independence from the great noble families of Old Ashur by just relocating central power away from them. They had been incredibly influential up until this point, and probably served as an obstacle to an increase in central power. Somewhat revealingly, Kalhu’s direct governance was granted to a eunuch upon the city’s completion, rather than one of the powerful aristocrats of Assyria. Eunuchs were generally seen to be subservient and devoted to the king alone, and for this reason were to become massively powerful over the

next two-and-a-half centuries. The most powerful of their number would serve as everything from royal chariot drivers and cup-bearers to provincial governors and generals. Ashurnasirpal ruled from his new fortified citadel until 859 BC, when his son and successor Shalmaneser III took the throne. Continuing in his illustrious father’s footsteps, his reign was yet another series of stunning campaigns directed against Assyria’s traditional enemies, as well as the Neo-Hittite states around and beyond the Taurus Mountains, which were bent to their knees and forced to pay tribute. However, as we all know, expansion on such a scale has a price,

and for the Assyrians that price now had to be paid. In the late 820s, either slightly before or after Shalmaneser III’s death, the Neo-Assyrian Empire descended into a state of weakness known in Professor Eckart Frahm’s ‘Companion to Assyria’ as ‘The Age of Magnates’. It’s entirely possible that this time in Assyrian history was initiated by a civil war between royal sons, or possibly even a rebellion by the aforementioned aristocratic clans against what they saw as sidelining by the monarchy. Whatever the case truly was, it does seem that after this internal strife, noble power dramatically resurged. In

the three-quarters of a century-long period lasting from the late 820s to 745BC, five kings reigned, but it seems that true power resided with various governors, family members and high officials, especially the king’s field marshal. The reign of Adad-nirari III stretched from 810 to 783, for example, and for the most part in that time, power lay with his commander-in-chief Nergal-ila’i and his mother Sammu-ramat. It makes sense, because her son was only a child when installed on the throne of Assyria. This might have been engineered; after all, an infant king is a weak king who can be

controlled. This queen mother’s extraordinary authority is revealed to us in a stele dated to the year 805, which mentions her and her royal son as equal guarantors of the official border between two feuding vassal states. Moreover, she is also mentioned together with her son on religious statues constructed by the governor of Kalhu at the time. Finally, Sammu-ramat was probably the very first woman in Assyria to be commemorated on a stele in the holy city of Ashur which were designed to honour the memory of the kingdom’s rulers. Interestingly, many scholars now believe that this Assyrian queen

was the inspiration for the future legendary figure Semiramis, who is mentioned in numerous Greek sources centuries after this point. It’s possible that her ability to successfully rule the great empire made her memorable enough to mythologise after her death. Historian Susan Wise Bauer commented that ‘Sammu-ramat’s hold on power was so striking that it echoed into the distant historical memory of a people just arriving on the scene’. In effect, she was the Empress Wu of Neo-Assyria. We don’t have time to cover it here, but we recommend that you read up on Semiramis for yourself, and perhaps we’ll

do a video about her in the future. Carrying on with the story, throughout the mid-eighth century BC, the strongest figure in Assyrian politics was a military commander named Shamshi-Ilu, a man who directed military campaigns and ran the affairs of state. He essentially performed all the functions of a king, while sidelining his monarch and only formally respecting the king’s authority. Governors of large Assyrian provinces also asserted their individual authority and power in the regions which they ruled, often competing with one another despite remaining unified under the ‘rule’ of the Assyrian king. It was at this moment

when Assyria was at its weakest that enemies finally decided to strike. In the middle of the eighth century, king of the rising northern state of Urartu - Sarduri I - crossed his border and intervened in the fractured neo-Hittite states, forming a strong anti-Assyrian coalition, and presenting a plausible threat to the weakened state’s existence. At a similar time, Shamshi-Ilu passed away and a revolt broke out in the capital at Kalhu. We have hardly any information about it, but the king at the time was probably killed and then replaced by a man named Pulu. We know him

better by the throne name he took - Tiglath-Pileser III. Under this possible-usurper’s effective leadership, as Hardcore History host Dan Carlin put it: ‘Assyria went on a kind of historical sprint’ and began a meteoric rise in power. Indeed, the blistering speed at which Assyria recovered from its low period can be attributed to this truly great reformer. Above all was the viewpoint that the interests of Ashur’s great empire could no longer be served by the aging imperial system of Ashurnasirpal, it would have to be changed to fit a great empire - the greatest empire the world had

ever seen, and the culmination of ancient Sumer’s millennia-long history. Like any Assyrian monarch worth his salt, Tiglath-Pileser began a series of brutal, lightning conquests in all directions in order to assert the final supremacy of his kingdom to all who thought that the century’s long weakness had de-clawed it. First though, he needed to revamp the Assyrian army into a truly fearsome fighting force. Before Tiglath-Pileser, Assyrian militia armies were only called up in the summer due to the fact that the soldiers - most peasants working in agriculture - had to service the land and reap the harvest

in May, before being called up by July. This yearly cycle was probably one of the limiters on Assyrian domination in the times of Ashurnasirpal, as an army can only conquer so much in a year without economic dislocation. Hereafter, tribute giving clients would give way to full Assyrian provinces. This was done away with, and, amongst other reforms, was replaced by a permanent army with contingents raised from each of the provinces, supplemented when needed by units provided by vassal realms, whose service was a part of the tribute they were obliged to pay. The ‘kisir sharruti’, or ‘standing

army’ acquired a multiethnic, multicultural aspect, with foreign troops marching alongside native Assyrian units. A later king reports that he even integrated 50 Israeli chariot teams into his force. They were issued Assyrian uniforms and equipment, thereby becoming indistinguishable from one another in the ranks. A large Assyrian ‘core’ of troops continued to exist primarily within the cavalry and chariot forces - the strike elements of the army. At an even higher level were the ‘qurubti sha shepe’ - the king’s personal elite bodyguard In the first years of his reign, which began in 745, the Assyrian army conquered Babylonia

in the south, the consequences of which would affect Assyria until the end of the empire. The conquest was completed relatively quickly, but Babylon, being the revered and ancient civilisation that it was, required special treatment. So, after defeating the Chaldean tribes that had occupied the area, Tiglath-Pileser took the step of becoming King of Babylon - instituting a kind of dual-monarchy. In the very same year, the army pivoted north and shattered Urartu’s strength, forcing its king to flee for his life. Assaults on that mountain kingdom would continue until it was finally annihilated in the late eighth century,

weakened so much that a new nomadic group - the Medes, managed to conquer it. In the west, the empire’s borders were again pushed further than ever before, even approaching the borders of Egypt, and provincialising client kingdoms along the way. To more completely subjugate and pacify newly conquered territories and treacherous vassals alike, the king formally, and on an unprecedented scale, reintroduced a policy of mass deportation and forced population movement. In 744, for example, Tiglath-Pileser decreed that 65,000 people were to be taken from their homes in Iran and resettled on the Assyrian-Babylonian border on the Diyala River.

Two years later, 30,000 people from the Syrian region were deported to the Zagros mountains. Those human beings who were deported were usually people considered most likely to rebel against Assyria. By ‘decapitating’ possibly dissident elements in this way, it was hoped that subjugated lands would remain amenable to their Assyrian overlords, and remain subjugated. To top it off, deportation allowed the Assyrians to transport people with valuable skills, such as administration, construction, and financial management across the empire to where they were most needed. Within his empire, Tiglath-Pileser also acted decisively to ensure that central rule would never again

be challenged and undermined as it had been in the ‘age of magnates’. To do this, he took the provinces of the empire, many of which were very powerful territories in their own right, and sliced them into smaller, more administratively effective pieces. Within seven years of his ascension to the throne, over 80 of these provinces existed, and loyal eunuchs were appointed to govern many of the new divisions in order to further undermine the provincial elites. To monitor this system, Tiglath-Pileser set up a small administrative layer of officials responsible for inspecting the state of his majesty’s holdings

and then reporting back to the king the performance and loyalty of his governors. We’ve heard of Achaemenid Persia and Mongol usage of horseborne postal services, but this, as far as we can tell, was actually an Assyrian innovation. Communications stations were set up across the empire from which riders could deliver orders to the provinces. It also allowed the delivery of reports from the provinces, containing amongst many other general matters, intelligence from operatives in the spy service which had been set up by Tiglath-Pileser to monitor states beyond Assyrian borders. With these reforms, the Neo-Assyrian Empire entered its

golden age and we will talk about them more down the line, so make sure you are subscribed to our channel and have pressed the bell button. We would like to express our gratitude to our Patreon supporters and channel members, who make the creation of our videos possible. Now, you can also support us by buying our merchandise via the link in the description. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we will catch you on the next one. The end of Bronze Age civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean world initiated a dark age which, from Egypt to

Anatolia to Greece, reduced living standards, humbled once proud empires, and turned prosperous maritime trading kingdoms into shadows of their former selves. However, there was one great Mesopotamian state which managed to weather the storm and eventually emerged from it as the most powerful and arguably the most merciless state in near-eastern, and possibly world history - the Assyrian Empire. There are a bunch of reasons why we love Mesopotamian civilizations and the fact that they were the first to preserve knowledge is on the top of the list. The sponsor of this video Blinkist is all about preserving and

sharing knowledge by making it easily digestible even for the busiest among us. Blinkist takes the most interesting and relevant non-fictional books and turns them into 15-minute audios – blinks. More than 3000 titles are already available which means that you can learn on the go, learn fast, and always improve your knowledge, no matter how time-constrained you are. Blinkist titles range from Entrepreneurship to Philosophy, from Psychology to Politics, but most importantly for us, there are 100s of historical books that you can listen to! Imagine learning the most important facts of 4 books in just 1 hour! Mary

Beard’s Civilization and Chip Walter’s Last Ape Standing are perfect if you want to learn more about human civilizations! New titles are added all the time! Support our channel and your growth - get yourself premium access to knowledge! The first 100 people to go to blinkist.com/kingsandgenerals are going to get unlimited access for 1 week to try it out. You’ll also get 25% off if you want the full membership! The Old and Middle Assyrian Empires had waxed and waned for almost a millennia by the time Bronze Age civilisation came to an end in the late second millennium

BC. During that thousand years, Assyria was merely one of many competing states in Mesopotamia and the near-east. During its earlier imperial periods, Shamshi-Adad dominated much of northern Mesopotamia in the 18th century BC. At its weakest, however, the Assyrians had even been subjugated to vassaldom under the Kingdom of Mitanni, but always seemed to resurge and grow in power again. By the late tenth-century BC, the declining Assyrian polity had been diminished by Aramean invasions, left controlling only its traditional core region in the so-called ‘Assyrian triangle’ on the upper reaches of the Tigris River. Despite that fact, kings

in this era still considered themselves rulers of all the previously conquered territory seized by Middle Assyrian kings such as Tukulti-Ninurta I, that were now lost. It was this gulf between imperial expectation and reality which led to the Neo-Assyrian reconquest. While the surrounding polities had been weakened by the Bronze Age Collapse and were still recovering, Assyria was dynamic and demographically vibrant, allowing its kings to once again pursue an expansionist agenda. Beginning in roughly 934BC with king Ashur-dan II, and continuing with his successors - Adad-nirari II and then Tukulti-Ninurta II - brilliant military expeditions began to recapture

the ‘Assyrian territories’ that their predecessors once ruled. This process culminated in the reign of Ashurnasirpal II - whose name can be translated as ‘the god Ashur is the creator of an heir’. He is one of the most famous neo-Assyrian kings, whose reign we are well informed of by numerous royal reliefs. Under his august rule, the great armies of Ashur were far from sated, and he began to direct expeditions to areas never before touched by Assyrian arms. Parts of northern Babylonia, Zamua - an area in the north near Lake Urmia - Armenian highlands, and the Kashyari

mountains all became subject to the iron will of Ashurnasirpal. The king also crossed the Orontes River in the northwest with an army, founding Assyrian colonies there and essentially launching a commercial expedition. He even managed to exact vast sums of tribute from the wealthy Phoenician cities and extracted valuable timber from the Levant. Despite the primarily economic motives for Ashurnasipal’s western expeditions, its further-reaching implications are also incredibly important. Never before had Assyrians, with their desire for stable control, placed a colony so far away from their centre, and it paved the way for the centuries to come. Back

in the homeland of Ashur, on the Tigris, Assyria’s capital - Ashur - was also the centre of all worship of the Assyrian pantheon of gods - the most prominent and powerful of which was also known as Ashur. This god was strange in Mesopotamia as it was not a celestial entity like Enlil or Marduk, but was actually a deified version of the rock formation on which his temple stood. Interestingly, Assyria is not what the people themselves called the land - they called it ‘Ashur’. So, the country was called ‘Ashur’, as was their god and their city.

The fact that Ashur was a holy city didn’t stop what Ashurnasirpal II did next, in what was perhaps his greatest achievement. Taking advantage of the great wealth which was entering his treasuries from constant success in war, the king began sponsoring construction in Assyrian cities from Nineveh to Ashur. However, his greatest achievement was the building of a vast, beautiful new capital city known as Kalhu - modern Nimrud - beginning in 879BC. The site already had a decaying old settlement of some kind before the works began, but this project was a different thing altogether. Ashurnasirpal employed thousands

of corvee labourers and deportees to build several colossal palaces and glorious temples. Massive winged-bull statues fashioned from stone were placed as fearsome guardians at the entrances to the king’s northwestern palace, and extensive rows of carved stone blocks were decorated with depictions of various scenes designed to show the king’s greatness. In one of these reliefs, two figures bear tribute to the Assyrian king. The first is probably a man from Syria, who can be seen clenching his hands and raising them as a symbol of submission. The second may be a representative from Phoenicia, and comes to Ashurnasirpal

to grant his master a pair of monkeys - word must have gotten around that Assyrian kings loved collecting exotic fauna. In 864, Ashurnasirpal celebrated Kalhu’s completion by inviting, according to an Assyrian inscription: 69,574 guests, among them 16,000 citizens of his new capital and 5,000 foreign dignitaries from surrounding realms. They were provided 10,000 pigeons, 10,000 jugs of beer and 10,000 skins of wine along with numerous other foods and beverages in a grand feast. All would know that this was the grandeur of Ashur’s new realm. “Go home,” Ashurnasirpal must have thought upon the party’s conclusion, “and tell

your petty kings of my glory.” The prestige of creating such a glittering new capital would no doubt have been good enough, but there were probably other practical reasons for its construction beyond just aesthetics. Kalhu was located dead centre in the ‘Assyrian triangle’, its points made up of Ashur, Nineveh and Arbela. His new city was therefore right in the middle of the Assyrian world, more adequate for governing a rapidly expanding empire in a more convenient fashion. Ashurnasirpal might have wished to assert his independence from the great noble families of Old Ashur by just relocating central power

away from them. They had been incredibly influential up until this point, and probably served as an obstacle to an increase in central power. Somewhat revealingly, Kalhu’s direct governance was granted to a eunuch upon the city’s completion, rather than one of the powerful aristocrats of Assyria. Eunuchs were generally seen to be subservient and devoted to the king alone, and for this reason were to become massively powerful over the next two-and-a-half centuries. The most powerful of their number would serve as everything from royal chariot drivers and cup-bearers to provincial governors and generals. Ashurnasirpal ruled from his new

fortified citadel until 859 BC, when his son and successor Shalmaneser III took the throne. Continuing in his illustrious father’s footsteps, his reign was yet another series of stunning campaigns directed against Assyria’s traditional enemies, as well as the Neo-Hittite states around and beyond the Taurus Mountains, which were bent to their knees and forced to pay tribute. However, as we all know, expansion on such a scale has a price, and for the Assyrians that price now had to be paid. In the late 820s, either slightly before or after Shalmaneser III’s death, the Neo-Assyrian Empire descended into a

state of weakness known in Professor Eckart Frahm’s ‘Companion to Assyria’ as ‘The Age of Magnates’. It’s entirely possible that this time in Assyrian history was initiated by a civil war between royal sons, or possibly even a rebellion by the aforementioned aristocratic clans against what they saw as sidelining by the monarchy. Whatever the case truly was, it does seem that after this internal strife, noble power dramatically resurged. In the three-quarters of a century-long period lasting from the late 820s to 745BC, five kings reigned, but it seems that true power resided with various governors, family members and

high officials, especially the king’s field marshal. The reign of Adad-nirari III stretched from 810 to 783, for example, and for the most part in that time, power lay with his commander-in-chief Nergal-ila’i and his mother Sammu-ramat. It makes sense, because her son was only a child when installed on the throne of Assyria. This might have been engineered; after all, an infant king is a weak king who can be controlled. This queen mother’s extraordinary authority is revealed to us in a stele dated to the year 805, which mentions her and her royal son as equal guarantors of

the official border between two feuding vassal states. Moreover, she is also mentioned together with her son on religious statues constructed by the governor of Kalhu at the time. Finally, Sammu-ramat was probably the very first woman in Assyria to be commemorated on a stele in the holy city of Ashur which were designed to honour the memory of the kingdom’s rulers. Interestingly, many scholars now believe that this Assyrian queen was the inspiration for the future legendary figure Semiramis, who is mentioned in numerous Greek sources centuries after this point. It’s possible that her ability to successfully rule the

great empire made her memorable enough to mythologise after her death. Historian Susan Wise Bauer commented that ‘Sammu-ramat’s hold on power was so striking that it echoed into the distant historical memory of a people just arriving on the scene’. In effect, she was the Empress Wu of Neo-Assyria. We don’t have time to cover it here, but we recommend that you read up on Semiramis for yourself, and perhaps we’ll do a video about her in the future. Carrying on with the story, throughout the mid-eighth century BC, the strongest figure in Assyrian politics was a military commander named

Shamshi-Ilu, a man who directed military campaigns and ran the affairs of state. He essentially performed all the functions of a king, while sidelining his monarch and only formally respecting the king’s authority. Governors of large Assyrian provinces also asserted their individual authority and power in the regions which they ruled, often competing with one another despite remaining unified under the ‘rule’ of the Assyrian king. It was at this moment when Assyria was at its weakest that enemies finally decided to strike. In the middle of the eighth century, king of the rising northern state of Urartu - Sarduri

I - crossed his border and intervened in the fractured neo-Hittite states, forming a strong anti-Assyrian coalition, and presenting a plausible threat to the weakened state’s existence. At a similar time, Shamshi-Ilu passed away and a revolt broke out in the capital at Kalhu. We have hardly any information about it, but the king at the time was probably killed and then replaced by a man named Pulu. We know him better by the throne name he took - Tiglath-Pileser III. Under this possible-usurper’s effective leadership, as Hardcore History host Dan Carlin put it: ‘Assyria went on a kind of

historical sprint’ and began a meteoric rise in power. Indeed, the blistering speed at which Assyria recovered from its low period can be attributed to this truly great reformer. Above all was the viewpoint that the interests of Ashur’s great empire could no longer be served by the aging imperial system of Ashurnasirpal, it would have to be changed to fit a great empire - the greatest empire the world had ever seen, and the culmination of ancient Sumer’s millennia-long history. Like any Assyrian monarch worth his salt, Tiglath-Pileser began a series of brutal, lightning conquests in all directions in

order to assert the final supremacy of his kingdom to all who thought that the century’s long weakness had de-clawed it. First though, he needed to revamp the Assyrian army into a truly fearsome fighting force. Before Tiglath-Pileser, Assyrian militia armies were only called up in the summer due to the fact that the soldiers - most peasants working in agriculture - had to service the land and reap the harvest in May, before being called up by July. This yearly cycle was probably one of the limiters on Assyrian domination in the times of Ashurnasirpal, as an army can

only conquer so much in a year without economic dislocation. Hereafter, tribute giving clients would give way to full Assyrian provinces. This was done away with, and, amongst other reforms, was replaced by a permanent army with contingents raised from each of the provinces, supplemented when needed by units provided by vassal realms, whose service was a part of the tribute they were obliged to pay. The ‘kisir sharruti’, or ‘standing army’ acquired a multiethnic, multicultural aspect, with foreign troops marching alongside native Assyrian units. A later king reports that he even integrated 50 Israeli chariot teams into his force.

They were issued Assyrian uniforms and equipment, thereby becoming indistinguishable from one another in the ranks. A large Assyrian ‘core’ of troops continued to exist primarily within the cavalry and chariot forces - the strike elements of the army. At an even higher level were the ‘qurubti sha shepe’ - the king’s personal elite bodyguard In the first years of his reign, which began in 745, the Assyrian army conquered Babylonia in the south, the consequences of which would affect Assyria until the end of the empire. The conquest was completed relatively quickly, but Babylon, being the revered and ancient

civilisation that it was, required special treatment. So, after defeating the Chaldean tribes that had occupied the area, Tiglath-Pileser took the step of becoming King of Babylon - instituting a kind of dual-monarchy. In the very same year, the army pivoted north and shattered Urartu’s strength, forcing its king to flee for his life. Assaults on that mountain kingdom would continue until it was finally annihilated in the late eighth century, weakened so much that a new nomadic group - the Medes, managed to conquer it. In the west, the empire’s borders were again pushed further than ever before, even

approaching the borders of Egypt, and provincialising client kingdoms along the way. To more completely subjugate and pacify newly conquered territories and treacherous vassals alike, the king formally, and on an unprecedented scale, reintroduced a policy of mass deportation and forced population movement. In 744, for example, Tiglath-Pileser decreed that 65,000 people were to be taken from their homes in Iran and resettled on the Assyrian-Babylonian border on the Diyala River. Two years later, 30,000 people from the Syrian region were deported to the Zagros mountains. Those human beings who were deported were usually people considered most likely to rebel

against Assyria. By ‘decapitating’ possibly dissident elements in this way, it was hoped that subjugated lands would remain amenable to their Assyrian overlords, and remain subjugated. To top it off, deportation allowed the Assyrians to transport people with valuable skills, such as administration, construction, and financial management across the empire to where they were most needed. Within his empire, Tiglath-Pileser also acted decisively to ensure that central rule would never again be challenged and undermined as it had been in the ‘age of magnates’. To do this, he took the provinces of the empire, many of which were very powerful

territories in their own right, and sliced them into smaller, more administratively effective pieces. Within seven years of his ascension to the throne, over 80 of these provinces existed, and loyal eunuchs were appointed to govern many of the new divisions in order to further undermine the provincial elites. To monitor this system, Tiglath-Pileser set up a small administrative layer of officials responsible for inspecting the state of his majesty’s holdings and then reporting back to the king the performance and loyalty of his governors. We’ve heard of Achaemenid Persia and Mongol usage of horseborne postal services, but this, as

far as we can tell, was actually an Assyrian innovation. Communications stations were set up across the empire from which riders could deliver orders to the provinces. It also allowed the delivery of reports from the provinces, containing amongst many other general matters, intelligence from operatives in the spy service which had been set up by Tiglath-Pileser to monitor states beyond Assyrian borders. With these reforms, the Neo-Assyrian Empire entered its golden age and we will talk about them more down the line, so make sure you are subscribed to our channel and have pressed the bell button. We would

like to express our gratitude to our Patreon supporters and channel members, who make the creation of our videos possible. Now, you can also support us by buying our merchandise via the link in the description. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we will catch you on the next one. The end of Bronze Age civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean world initiated a dark age which, from Egypt to Anatolia to Greece, reduced living standards, humbled once proud empires, and turned prosperous maritime trading kingdoms into shadows of their former selves. However, there was one great Mesopotamian state

which managed to weather the storm and eventually emerged from it as the most powerful and arguably the most merciless state in near-eastern, and possibly world history - the Assyrian Empire. There are a bunch of reasons why we love Mesopotamian civilizations and the fact that they were the first to preserve knowledge is on the top of the list. The sponsor of this video Blinkist is all about preserving and sharing knowledge by making it easily digestible even for the busiest among us. Blinkist takes the most interesting and relevant non-fictional books and turns them into 15-minute audios –

blinks. More than 3000 titles are already available which means that you can learn on the go, learn fast, and always improve your knowledge, no matter how time-constrained you are. Blinkist titles range from Entrepreneurship to Philosophy, from Psychology to Politics, but most importantly for us, there are 100s of historical books that you can listen to! Imagine learning the most important facts of 4 books in just 1 hour! Mary Beard’s Civilization and Chip Walter’s Last Ape Standing are perfect if you want to learn more about human civilizations! New titles are added all the time! Support our channel

and your growth - get yourself premium access to knowledge! The first 100 people to go to blinkist.com/kingsandgenerals are going to get unlimited access for 1 week to try it out. You’ll also get 25% off if you want the full membership! The Old and Middle Assyrian Empires had waxed and waned for almost a millennia by the time Bronze Age civilisation came to an end in the late second millennium BC. During that thousand years, Assyria was merely one of many competing states in Mesopotamia and the near-east. During its earlier imperial periods, Shamshi-Adad dominated much of northern Mesopotamia

in the 18th century BC. At its weakest, however, the Assyrians had even been subjugated to vassaldom under the Kingdom of Mitanni, but always seemed to resurge and grow in power again. By the late tenth-century BC, the declining Assyrian polity had been diminished by Aramean invasions, left controlling only its traditional core region in the so-called ‘Assyrian triangle’ on the upper reaches of the Tigris River. Despite that fact, kings in this era still considered themselves rulers of all the previously conquered territory seized by Middle Assyrian kings such as Tukulti-Ninurta I, that were now lost. It was this

gulf between imperial expectation and reality which led to the Neo-Assyrian reconquest. While the surrounding polities had been weakened by the Bronze Age Collapse and were still recovering, Assyria was dynamic and demographically vibrant, allowing its kings to once again pursue an expansionist agenda. Beginning in roughly 934BC with king Ashur-dan II, and continuing with his successors - Adad-nirari II and then Tukulti-Ninurta II - brilliant military expeditions began to recapture the ‘Assyrian territories’ that their predecessors once ruled. This process culminated in the reign of Ashurnasirpal II - whose name can be translated as ‘the god Ashur is the

creator of an heir’. He is one of the most famous neo-Assyrian kings, whose reign we are well informed of by numerous royal reliefs. Under his august rule, the great armies of Ashur were far from sated, and he began to direct expeditions to areas never before touched by Assyrian arms. Parts of northern Babylonia, Zamua - an area in the north near Lake Urmia - Armenian highlands, and the Kashyari mountains all became subject to the iron will of Ashurnasirpal. The king also crossed the Orontes River in the northwest with an army, founding Assyrian colonies there and essentially

launching a commercial expedition. He even managed to exact vast sums of tribute from the wealthy Phoenician cities and extracted valuable timber from the Levant. Despite the primarily economic motives for Ashurnasipal’s western expeditions, its further-reaching implications are also incredibly important. Never before had Assyrians, with their desire for stable control, placed a colony so far away from their centre, and it paved the way for the centuries to come. Back in the homeland of Ashur, on the Tigris, Assyria’s capital - Ashur - was also the centre of all worship of the Assyrian pantheon of gods - the most

prominent and powerful of which was also known as Ashur. This god was strange in Mesopotamia as it was not a celestial entity like Enlil or Marduk, but was actually a deified version of the rock formation on which his temple stood. Interestingly, Assyria is not what the people themselves called the land - they called it ‘Ashur’. So, the country was called ‘Ashur’, as was their god and their city. The fact that Ashur was a holy city didn’t stop what Ashurnasirpal II did next, in what was perhaps his greatest achievement. Taking advantage of the great wealth which

was entering his treasuries from constant success in war, the king began sponsoring construction in Assyrian cities from Nineveh to Ashur. However, his greatest achievement was the building of a vast, beautiful new capital city known as Kalhu - modern Nimrud - beginning in 879BC. The site already had a decaying old settlement of some kind before the works began, but this project was a different thing altogether. Ashurnasirpal employed thousands of corvee labourers and deportees to build several colossal palaces and glorious temples. Massive winged-bull statues fashioned from stone were placed as fearsome guardians at the entrances to the

king’s northwestern palace, and extensive rows of carved stone blocks were decorated with depictions of various scenes designed to show the king’s greatness. In one of these reliefs, two figures bear tribute to the Assyrian king. The first is probably a man from Syria, who can be seen clenching his hands and raising them as a symbol of submission. The second may be a representative from Phoenicia, and comes to Ashurnasirpal to grant his master a pair of monkeys - word must have gotten around that Assyrian kings loved collecting exotic fauna. In 864, Ashurnasirpal celebrated Kalhu’s completion by inviting,

according to an Assyrian inscription: 69,574 guests, among them 16,000 citizens of his new capital and 5,000 foreign dignitaries from surrounding realms. They were provided 10,000 pigeons, 10,000 jugs of beer and 10,000 skins of wine along with numerous other foods and beverages in a grand feast. All would know that this was the grandeur of Ashur’s new realm. “Go home,” Ashurnasirpal must have thought upon the party’s conclusion, “and tell your petty kings of my glory.” The prestige of creating such a glittering new capital would no doubt have been good enough, but there were probably other practical reasons

for its construction beyond just aesthetics. Kalhu was located dead centre in the ‘Assyrian triangle’, its points made up of Ashur, Nineveh and Arbela. His new city was therefore right in the middle of the Assyrian world, more adequate for governing a rapidly expanding empire in a more convenient fashion. Ashurnasirpal might have wished to assert his independence from the great noble families of Old Ashur by just relocating central power away from them. They had been incredibly influential up until this point, and probably served as an obstacle to an increase in central power. Somewhat revealingly, Kalhu’s direct governance

was granted to a eunuch upon the city’s completion, rather than one of the powerful aristocrats of Assyria. Eunuchs were generally seen to be subservient and devoted to the king alone, and for this reason were to become massively powerful over the next two-and-a-half centuries. The most powerful of their number would serve as everything from royal chariot drivers and cup-bearers to provincial governors and generals. Ashurnasirpal ruled from his new fortified citadel until 859 BC, when his son and successor Shalmaneser III took the throne. Continuing in his illustrious father’s footsteps, his reign was yet another series of stunning

campaigns directed against Assyria’s traditional enemies, as well as the Neo-Hittite states around and beyond the Taurus Mountains, which were bent to their knees and forced to pay tribute. However, as we all know, expansion on such a scale has a price, and for the Assyrians that price now had to be paid. In the late 820s, either slightly before or after Shalmaneser III’s death, the Neo-Assyrian Empire descended into a state of weakness known in Professor Eckart Frahm’s ‘Companion to Assyria’ as ‘The Age of Magnates’. It’s entirely possible that this time in Assyrian history was initiated by a

civil war between royal sons, or possibly even a rebellion by the aforementioned aristocratic clans against what they saw as sidelining by the monarchy. Whatever the case truly was, it does seem that after this internal strife, noble power dramatically resurged. In the three-quarters of a century-long period lasting from the late 820s to 745BC, five kings reigned, but it seems that true power resided with various governors, family members and high officials, especially the king’s field marshal. The reign of Adad-nirari III stretched from 810 to 783, for example, and for the most part in that time, power lay

with his commander-in-chief Nergal-ila’i and his mother Sammu-ramat. It makes sense, because her son was only a child when installed on the throne of Assyria. This might have been engineered; after all, an infant king is a weak king who can be controlled. This queen mother’s extraordinary authority is revealed to us in a stele dated to the year 805, which mentions her and her royal son as equal guarantors of the official border between two feuding vassal states. Moreover, she is also mentioned together with her son on religious statues constructed by the governor of Kalhu at the time.

Finally, Sammu-ramat was probably the very first woman in Assyria to be commemorated on a stele in the holy city of Ashur which were designed to honour the memory of the kingdom’s rulers. Interestingly, many scholars now believe that this Assyrian queen was the inspiration for the future legendary figure Semiramis, who is mentioned in numerous Greek sources centuries after this point. It’s possible that her ability to successfully rule the great empire made her memorable enough to mythologise after her death. Historian Susan Wise Bauer commented that ‘Sammu-ramat’s hold on power was so striking that it echoed into the

distant historical memory of a people just arriving on the scene’. In effect, she was the Empress Wu of Neo-Assyria. We don’t have time to cover it here, but we recommend that you read up on Semiramis for yourself, and perhaps we’ll do a video about her in the future. Carrying on with the story, throughout the mid-eighth century BC, the strongest figure in Assyrian politics was a military commander named Shamshi-Ilu, a man who directed military campaigns and ran the affairs of state. He essentially performed all the functions of a king, while sidelining his monarch and only formally

respecting the king’s authority. Governors of large Assyrian provinces also asserted their individual authority and power in the regions which they ruled, often competing with one another despite remaining unified under the ‘rule’ of the Assyrian king. It was at this moment when Assyria was at its weakest that enemies finally decided to strike. In the middle of the eighth century, king of the rising northern state of Urartu - Sarduri I - crossed his border and intervened in the fractured neo-Hittite states, forming a strong anti-Assyrian coalition, and presenting a plausible threat to the weakened state’s existence. At a

similar time, Shamshi-Ilu passed away and a revolt broke out in the capital at Kalhu. We have hardly any information about it, but the king at the time was probably killed and then replaced by a man named Pulu. We know him better by the throne name he took - Tiglath-Pileser III. Under this possible-usurper’s effective leadership, as Hardcore History host Dan Carlin put it: ‘Assyria went on a kind of historical sprint’ and began a meteoric rise in power. Indeed, the blistering speed at which Assyria recovered from its low period can be attributed to this truly great reformer.

Above all was the viewpoint that the interests of Ashur’s great empire could no longer be served by the aging imperial system of Ashurnasirpal, it would have to be changed to fit a great empire - the greatest empire the world had ever seen, and the culmination of ancient Sumer’s millennia-long history. Like any Assyrian monarch worth his salt, Tiglath-Pileser began a series of brutal, lightning conquests in all directions in order to assert the final supremacy of his kingdom to all who thought that the century’s long weakness had de-clawed it. First though, he needed to revamp the Assyrian

army into a truly fearsome fighting force. Before Tiglath-Pileser, Assyrian militia armies were only called up in the summer due to the fact that the soldiers - most peasants working in agriculture - had to service the land and reap the harvest in May, before being called up by July. This yearly cycle was probably one of the limiters on Assyrian domination in the times of Ashurnasirpal, as an army can only conquer so much in a year without economic dislocation. Hereafter, tribute giving clients would give way to full Assyrian provinces. This was done away with, and, amongst other

reforms, was replaced by a permanent army with contingents raised from each of the provinces, supplemented when needed by units provided by vassal realms, whose service was a part of the tribute they were obliged to pay. The ‘kisir sharruti’, or ‘standing army’ acquired a multiethnic, multicultural aspect, with foreign troops marching alongside native Assyrian units. A later king reports that he even integrated 50 Israeli chariot teams into his force. They were issued Assyrian uniforms and equipment, thereby becoming indistinguishable from one another in the ranks. A large Assyrian ‘core’ of troops continued to exist primarily within the cavalry

and chariot forces - the strike elements of the army. At an even higher level were the ‘qurubti sha shepe’ - the king’s personal elite bodyguard In the first years of his reign, which began in 745, the Assyrian army conquered Babylonia in the south, the consequences of which would affect Assyria until the end of the empire. The conquest was completed relatively quickly, but Babylon, being the revered and ancient civilisation that it was, required special treatment. So, after defeating the Chaldean tribes that had occupied the area, Tiglath-Pileser took the step of becoming King of Babylon - instituting

a kind of dual-monarchy. In the very same year, the army pivoted north and shattered Urartu’s strength, forcing its king to flee for his life. Assaults on that mountain kingdom would continue until it was finally annihilated in the late eighth century, weakened so much that a new nomadic group - the Medes, managed to conquer it. In the west, the empire’s borders were again pushed further than ever before, even approaching the borders of Egypt, and provincialising client kingdoms along the way. To more completely subjugate and pacify newly conquered territories and treacherous vassals alike, the king formally, and

on an unprecedented scale, reintroduced a policy of mass deportation and forced population movement. In 744, for example, Tiglath-Pileser decreed that 65,000 people were to be taken from their homes in Iran and resettled on the Assyrian-Babylonian border on the Diyala River. Two years later, 30,000 people from the Syrian region were deported to the Zagros mountains. Those human beings who were deported were usually people considered most likely to rebel against Assyria. By ‘decapitating’ possibly dissident elements in this way, it was hoped that subjugated lands would remain amenable to their Assyrian overlords, and remain subjugated. To top it

off, deportation allowed the Assyrians to transport people with valuable skills, such as administration, construction, and financial management across the empire to where they were most needed. Within his empire, Tiglath-Pileser also acted decisively to ensure that central rule would never again be challenged and undermined as it had been in the ‘age of magnates’. To do this, he took the provinces of the empire, many of which were very powerful territories in their own right, and sliced them into smaller, more administratively effective pieces. Within seven years of his ascension to the throne, over 80 of these provinces existed,

and loyal eunuchs were appointed to govern many of the new divisions in order to further undermine the provincial elites. To monitor this system, Tiglath-Pileser set up a small administrative layer of officials responsible for inspecting the state of his majesty’s holdings and then reporting back to the king the performance and loyalty of his governors. We’ve heard of Achaemenid Persia and Mongol usage of horseborne postal services, but this, as far as we can tell, was actually an Assyrian innovation. Communications stations were set up across the empire from which riders could deliver orders to the provinces. It also

allowed the delivery of reports from the provinces, containing amongst many other general matters, intelligence from operatives in the spy service which had been set up by Tiglath-Pileser to monitor states beyond Assyrian borders. With these reforms, the Neo-Assyrian Empire entered its golden age and we will talk about them more down the line, so make sure you are subscribed to our channel and have pressed the bell button. We would like to express our gratitude to our Patreon supporters and channel members, who make the creation of our videos possible. Now, you can also support us by buying our

merchandise via the link in the description. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we will catch you on the next one. The end of Bronze Age civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean world initiated a dark age which, from Egypt to Anatolia to Greece, reduced living standards, humbled once proud empires, and turned prosperous maritime trading kingdoms into shadows of their former selves. However, there was one great Mesopotamian state which managed to weather the storm and eventually emerged from it as the most powerful and arguably the most merciless state in near-eastern, and possibly world history - the

Assyrian Empire. There are a bunch of reasons why we love Mesopotamian civilizations and the fact that they were the first to preserve knowledge is on the top of the list. The sponsor of this video Blinkist is all about preserving and sharing knowledge by making it easily digestible even for the busiest among us. Blinkist takes the most interesting and relevant non-fictional books and turns them into 15-minute audios – blinks. More than 3000 titles are already available which means that you can learn on the go, learn fast, and always improve your knowledge, no matter how time-constrained you

are. Blinkist titles range from Entrepreneurship to Philosophy, from Psychology to Politics, but most importantly for us, there are 100s of historical books that you can listen to! Imagine learning the most important facts of 4 books in just 1 hour! Mary Beard’s Civilization and Chip Walter’s Last Ape Standing are perfect if you want to learn more about human civilizations! New titles are added all the time! Support our channel and your growth - get yourself premium access to knowledge! The first 100 people to go to blinkist.com/kingsandgenerals are going to get unlimited access for 1 week to try

it out. You’ll also get 25% off if you want the full membership! The Old and Middle Assyrian Empires had waxed and waned for almost a millennia by the time Bronze Age civilisation came to an end in the late second millennium BC. During that thousand years, Assyria was merely one of many competing states in Mesopotamia and the near-east. During its earlier imperial periods, Shamshi-Adad dominated much of northern Mesopotamia in the 18th century BC. At its weakest, however, the Assyrians had even been subjugated to vassaldom under the Kingdom of Mitanni, but always seemed to resurge and grow

in power again. By the late tenth-century BC, the declining Assyrian polity had been diminished by Aramean invasions, left controlling only its traditional core region in the so-called ‘Assyrian triangle’ on the upper reaches of the Tigris River. Despite that fact, kings in this era still considered themselves rulers of all the previously conquered territory seized by Middle Assyrian kings such as Tukulti-Ninurta I, that were now lost. It was this gulf between imperial expectation and reality which led to the Neo-Assyrian reconquest. While the surrounding polities had been weakened by the Bronze Age Collapse and were still recovering, Assyria

was dynamic and demographically vibrant, allowing its kings to once again pursue an expansionist agenda. Beginning in roughly 934BC with king Ashur-dan II, and continuing with his successors - Adad-nirari II and then Tukulti-Ninurta II - brilliant military expeditions began to recapture the ‘Assyrian territories’ that their predecessors once ruled. This process culminated in the reign of Ashurnasirpal II - whose name can be translated as ‘the god Ashur is the creator of an heir’. He is one of the most famous neo-Assyrian kings, whose reign we are well informed of by numerous royal reliefs. Under his august rule, the

great armies of Ashur were far from sated, and he began to direct expeditions to areas never before touched by Assyrian arms. Parts of northern Babylonia, Zamua - an area in the north near Lake Urmia - Armenian highlands, and the Kashyari mountains all became subject to the iron will of Ashurnasirpal. The king also crossed the Orontes River in the northwest with an army, founding Assyrian colonies there and essentially launching a commercial expedition. He even managed to exact vast sums of tribute from the wealthy Phoenician cities and extracted valuable timber from the Levant. Despite the primarily economic

motives for Ashurnasipal’s western expeditions, its further-reaching implications are also incredibly important. Never before had Assyrians, with their desire for stable control, placed a colony so far away from their centre, and it paved the way for the centuries to come. Back in the homeland of Ashur, on the Tigris, Assyria’s capital - Ashur - was also the centre of all worship of the Assyrian pantheon of gods - the most prominent and powerful of which was also known as Ashur. This god was strange in Mesopotamia as it was not a celestial entity like Enlil or Marduk, but was

actually a deified version of the rock formation on which his temple stood. Interestingly, Assyria is not what the people themselves called the land - they called it ‘Ashur’. So, the country was called ‘Ashur’, as was their god and their city. The fact that Ashur was a holy city didn’t stop what Ashurnasirpal II did next, in what was perhaps his greatest achievement. Taking advantage of the great wealth which was entering his treasuries from constant success in war, the king began sponsoring construction in Assyrian cities from Nineveh to Ashur. However, his greatest achievement was the building of

a vast, beautiful new capital city known as Kalhu - modern Nimrud - beginning in 879BC. The site already had a decaying old settlement of some kind before the works began, but this project was a different thing altogether. Ashurnasirpal employed thousands of corvee labourers and deportees to build several colossal palaces and glorious temples. Massive winged-bull statues fashioned from stone were placed as fearsome guardians at the entrances to the king’s northwestern palace, and extensive rows of carved stone blocks were decorated with depictions of various scenes designed to show the king’s greatness. In one of these reliefs, two

figures bear tribute to the Assyrian king. The first is probably a man from Syria, who can be seen clenching his hands and raising them as a symbol of submission. The second may be a representative from Phoenicia, and comes to Ashurnasirpal to grant his master a pair of monkeys - word must have gotten around that Assyrian kings loved collecting exotic fauna. In 864, Ashurnasirpal celebrated Kalhu’s completion by inviting, according to an Assyrian inscription: 69,574 guests, among them 16,000 citizens of his new capital and 5,000 foreign dignitaries from surrounding realms. They were provided 10,000 pigeons, 10,000 jugs

of beer and 10,000 skins of wine along with numerous other foods and beverages in a grand feast. All would know that this was the grandeur of Ashur’s new realm. “Go home,” Ashurnasirpal must have thought upon the party’s conclusion, “and tell your petty kings of my glory.” The prestige of creating such a glittering new capital would no doubt have been good enough, but there were probably other practical reasons for its construction beyond just aesthetics. Kalhu was located dead centre in the ‘Assyrian triangle’, its points made up of Ashur, Nineveh and Arbela. His new city was therefore

right in the middle of the Assyrian world, more adequate for governing a rapidly expanding empire in a more convenient fashion. Ashurnasirpal might have wished to assert his independence from the great noble families of Old Ashur by just relocating central power away from them. They had been incredibly influential up until this point, and probably served as an obstacle to an increase in central power. Somewhat revealingly, Kalhu’s direct governance was granted to a eunuch upon the city’s completion, rather than one of the powerful aristocrats of Assyria. Eunuchs were generally seen to be subservient and devoted to the

king alone, and for this reason were to become massively powerful over the next two-and-a-half centuries. The most powerful of their number would serve as everything from royal chariot drivers and cup-bearers to provincial governors and generals. Ashurnasirpal ruled from his new fortified citadel until 859 BC, when his son and successor Shalmaneser III took the throne. Continuing in his illustrious father’s footsteps, his reign was yet another series of stunning campaigns directed against Assyria’s traditional enemies, as well as the Neo-Hittite states around and beyond the Taurus Mountains, which were bent to their knees and forced to pay tribute.

However, as we all know, expansion on such a scale has a price, and for the Assyrians that price now had to be paid. In the late 820s, either slightly before or after Shalmaneser III’s death, the Neo-Assyrian Empire descended into a state of weakness known in Professor Eckart Frahm’s ‘Companion to Assyria’ as ‘The Age of Magnates’. It’s entirely possible that this time in Assyrian history was initiated by a civil war between royal sons, or possibly even a rebellion by the aforementioned aristocratic clans against what they saw as sidelining by the monarchy. Whatever the case truly was,

it does seem that after this internal strife, noble power dramatically resurged. In the three-quarters of a century-long period lasting from the late 820s to 745BC, five kings reigned, but it seems that true power resided with various governors, family members and high officials, especially the king’s field marshal. The reign of Adad-nirari III stretched from 810 to 783, for example, and for the most part in that time, power lay with his commander-in-chief Nergal-ila’i and his mother Sammu-ramat. It makes sense, because her son was only a child when installed on the throne of Assyria. This might have been

engineered; after all, an infant king is a weak king who can be controlled. This queen mother’s extraordinary authority is revealed to us in a stele dated to the year 805, which mentions her and her royal son as equal guarantors of the official border between two feuding vassal states. Moreover, she is also mentioned together with her son on religious statues constructed by the governor of Kalhu at the time. Finally, Sammu-ramat was probably the very first woman in Assyria to be commemorated on a stele in the holy city of Ashur which were designed to honour the memory

of the kingdom’s rulers. Interestingly, many scholars now believe that this Assyrian queen was the inspiration for the future legendary figure Semiramis, who is mentioned in numerous Greek sources centuries after this point. It’s possible that her ability to successfully rule the great empire made her memorable enough to mythologise after her death. Historian Susan Wise Bauer commented that ‘Sammu-ramat’s hold on power was so striking that it echoed into the distant historical memory of a people just arriving on the scene’. In effect, she was the Empress Wu of Neo-Assyria. We don’t have time to cover it here, but

we recommend that you read up on Semiramis for yourself, and perhaps we’ll do a video about her in the future. Carrying on with the story, throughout the mid-eighth century BC, the strongest figure in Assyrian politics was a military commander named Shamshi-Ilu, a man who directed military campaigns and ran the affairs of state. He essentially performed all the functions of a king, while sidelining his monarch and only formally respecting the king’s authority. Governors of large Assyrian provinces also asserted their individual authority and power in the regions which they ruled, often competing with one another despite remaining

unified under the ‘rule’ of the Assyrian king. It was at this moment when Assyria was at its weakest that enemies finally decided to strike. In the middle of the eighth century, king of the rising northern state of Urartu - Sarduri I - crossed his border and intervened in the fractured neo-Hittite states, forming a strong anti-Assyrian coalition, and presenting a plausible threat to the weakened state’s existence. At a similar time, Shamshi-Ilu passed away and a revolt broke out in the capital at Kalhu. We have hardly any information about it, but the king at the time was

probably killed and then replaced by a man named Pulu. We know him better by the throne name he took - Tiglath-Pileser III. Under this possible-usurper’s effective leadership, as Hardcore History host Dan Carlin put it: ‘Assyria went on a kind of historical sprint’ and began a meteoric rise in power. Indeed, the blistering speed at which Assyria recovered from its low period can be attributed to this truly great reformer. Above all was the viewpoint that the interests of Ashur’s great empire could no longer be served by the aging imperial system of Ashurnasirpal, it would have to be

changed to fit a great empire - the greatest empire the world had ever seen, and the culmination of ancient Sumer’s millennia-long history. Like any Assyrian monarch worth his salt, Tiglath-Pileser began a series of brutal, lightning conquests in all directions in order to assert the final supremacy of his kingdom to all who thought that the century’s long weakness had de-clawed it. First though, he needed to revamp the Assyrian army into a truly fearsome fighting force. Before Tiglath-Pileser, Assyrian militia armies were only called up in the summer due to the fact that the soldiers - most peasants

working in agriculture - had to service the land and reap the harvest in May, before being called up by July. This yearly cycle was probably one of the limiters on Assyrian domination in the times of Ashurnasirpal, as an army can only conquer so much in a year without economic dislocation. Hereafter, tribute giving clients would give way to full Assyrian provinces. This was done away with, and, amongst other reforms, was replaced by a permanent army with contingents raised from each of the provinces, supplemented when needed by units provided by vassal realms, whose service was a part

of the tribute they were obliged to pay. The ‘kisir sharruti’, or ‘standing army’ acquired a multiethnic, multicultural aspect, with foreign troops marching alongside native Assyrian units. A later king reports that he even integrated 50 Israeli chariot teams into his force. They were issued Assyrian uniforms and equipment, thereby becoming indistinguishable from one another in the ranks. A large Assyrian ‘core’ of troops continued to exist primarily within the cavalry and chariot forces - the strike elements of the army. At an even higher level were the ‘qurubti sha shepe’ - the king’s personal elite bodyguard In the first

years of his reign, which began in 745, the Assyrian army conquered Babylonia in the south, the consequences of which would affect Assyria until the end of the empire. The conquest was completed relatively quickly, but Babylon, being the revered and ancient civilisation that it was, required special treatment. So, after defeating the Chaldean tribes that had occupied the area, Tiglath-Pileser took the step of becoming King of Babylon - instituting a kind of dual-monarchy. In the very same year, the army pivoted north and shattered Urartu’s strength, forcing its king to flee for his life. Assaults on that mountain

kingdom would continue until it was finally annihilated in the late eighth century, weakened so much that a new nomadic group - the Medes, managed to conquer it. In the west, the empire’s borders were again pushed further than ever before, even approaching the borders of Egypt, and provincialising client kingdoms along the way. To more completely subjugate and pacify newly conquered territories and treacherous vassals alike, the king formally, and on an unprecedented scale, reintroduced a policy of mass deportation and forced population movement. In 744, for example, Tiglath-Pileser decreed that 65,000 people were to be taken from their

homes in Iran and resettled on the Assyrian-Babylonian border on the Diyala River. Two years later, 30,000 people from the Syrian region were deported to the Zagros mountains. Those human beings who were deported were usually people considered most likely to rebel against Assyria. By ‘decapitating’ possibly dissident elements in this way, it was hoped that subjugated lands would remain amenable to their Assyrian overlords, and remain subjugated. To top it off, deportation allowed the Assyrians to transport people with valuable skills, such as administration, construction, and financial management across the empire to where they were most needed. Within his

empire, Tiglath-Pileser also acted decisively to ensure that central rule would never again be challenged and undermined as it had been in the ‘age of magnates’. To do this, he took the provinces of the empire, many of which were very powerful territories in their own right, and sliced them into smaller, more administratively effective pieces. Within seven years of his ascension to the throne, over 80 of these provinces existed, and loyal eunuchs were appointed to govern many of the new divisions in order to further undermine the provincial elites. To monitor this system, Tiglath-Pileser set up a small

administrative layer of officials responsible for inspecting the state of his majesty’s holdings and then reporting back to the king the performance and loyalty of his governors. We’ve heard of Achaemenid Persia and Mongol usage of horseborne postal services, but this, as far as we can tell, was actually an Assyrian innovation. Communications stations were set up across the empire from which riders could deliver orders to the provinces. It also allowed the delivery of reports from the provinces, containing amongst many other general matters, intelligence from operatives in the spy service which had been set up by Tiglath-Pileser to

monitor states beyond Assyrian borders. With these reforms, the Neo-Assyrian Empire entered its golden age and we will talk about them more down the line, so make sure you are subscribed to our channel and have pressed the bell button. We would like to express our gratitude to our Patreon supporters and channel members, who make the creation of our videos possible. Now, you can also support us by buying our merchandise via the link in the description. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we will catch you on the next one. The end of Bronze Age civilisation

in the Eastern Mediterranean world initiated a dark age which, from Egypt to Anatolia to Greece, reduced living standards, humbled once proud empires, and turned prosperous maritime trading kingdoms into shadows of their former selves. However, there was one great Mesopotamian state which managed to weather the storm and eventually emerged from it as the most powerful and arguably the most merciless state in near-eastern, and possibly world history - the Assyrian Empire. There are a bunch of reasons why we love Mesopotamian civilizations and the fact that they were the first to preserve knowledge is on the top of

the list. The sponsor of this video Blinkist is all about preserving and sharing knowledge by making it easily digestible even for the busiest among us. Blinkist takes the most interesting and relevant non-fictional books and turns them into 15-minute audios – blinks. More than 3000 titles are already available which means that you can learn on the go, learn fast, and always improve your knowledge, no matter how time-constrained you are. Blinkist titles range from Entrepreneurship to Philosophy, from Psychology to Politics, but most importantly for us, there are 100s of historical books that you can listen to! Imagine

learning the most important facts of 4 books in just 1 hour! Mary Beard’s Civilization and Chip Walter’s Last Ape Standing are perfect if you want to learn more about human civilizations! New titles are added all the time! Support our channel and your growth - get yourself premium access to knowledge! The first 100 people to go to blinkist.com/kingsandgenerals are going to get unlimited access for 1 week to try it out. You’ll also get 25% off if you want the full membership! The Old and Middle Assyrian Empires had waxed and waned for almost a millennia by the

time Bronze Age civilisation came to an end in the late second millennium BC. During that thousand years, Assyria was merely one of many competing states in Mesopotamia and the near-east. During its earlier imperial periods, Shamshi-Adad dominated much of northern Mesopotamia in the 18th century BC. At its weakest, however, the Assyrians had even been subjugated to vassaldom under the Kingdom of Mitanni, but always seemed to resurge and grow in power again. By the late tenth-century BC, the declining Assyrian polity had been diminished by Aramean invasions, left controlling only its traditional core region in the so-called ‘Assyrian

triangle’ on the upper reaches of the Tigris River. Despite that fact, kings in this era still considered themselves rulers of all the previously conquered territory seized by Middle Assyrian kings such as Tukulti-Ninurta I, that were now lost. It was this gulf between imperial expectation and reality which led to the Neo-Assyrian reconquest. While the surrounding polities had been weakened by the Bronze Age Collapse and were still recovering, Assyria was dynamic and demographically vibrant, allowing its kings to once again pursue an expansionist agenda. Beginning in roughly 934BC with king Ashur-dan II, and continuing with his successors -

Adad-nirari II and then Tukulti-Ninurta II - brilliant military expeditions began to recapture the ‘Assyrian territories’ that their predecessors once ruled. This process culminated in the reign of Ashurnasirpal II - whose name can be translated as ‘the god Ashur is the creator of an heir’. He is one of the most famous neo-Assyrian kings, whose reign we are well informed of by numerous royal reliefs. Under his august rule, the great armies of Ashur were far from sated, and he began to direct expeditions to areas never before touched by Assyrian arms. Parts of northern Babylonia, Zamua - an

area in the north near Lake Urmia - Armenian highlands, and the Kashyari mountains all became subject to the iron will of Ashurnasirpal. The king also crossed the Orontes River in the northwest with an army, founding Assyrian colonies there and essentially launching a commercial expedition. He even managed to exact vast sums of tribute from the wealthy Phoenician cities and extracted valuable timber from the Levant. Despite the primarily economic motives for Ashurnasipal’s western expeditions, its further-reaching implications are also incredibly important. Never before had Assyrians, with their desire for stable control, placed a colony so far away from

their centre, and it paved the way for the centuries to come. Back in the homeland of Ashur, on the Tigris, Assyria’s capital - Ashur - was also the centre of all worship of the Assyrian pantheon of gods - the most prominent and powerful of which was also known as Ashur. This god was strange in Mesopotamia as it was not a celestial entity like Enlil or Marduk, but was actually a deified version of the rock formation on which his temple stood. Interestingly, Assyria is not what the people themselves called the land - they called it ‘Ashur’.

So, the country was called ‘Ashur’, as was their god and their city. The fact that Ashur was a holy city didn’t stop what Ashurnasirpal II did next, in what was perhaps his greatest achievement. Taking advantage of the great wealth which was entering his treasuries from constant success in war, the king began sponsoring construction in Assyrian cities from Nineveh to Ashur. However, his greatest achievement was the building of a vast, beautiful new capital city known as Kalhu - modern Nimrud - beginning in 879BC. The site already had a decaying old settlement of some kind before the

works began, but this project was a different thing altogether. Ashurnasirpal employed thousands of corvee labourers and deportees to build several colossal palaces and glorious temples. Massive winged-bull statues fashioned from stone were placed as fearsome guardians at the entrances to the king’s northwestern palace, and extensive rows of carved stone blocks were decorated with depictions of various scenes designed to show the king’s greatness. In one of these reliefs, two figures bear tribute to the Assyrian king. The first is probably a man from Syria, who can be seen clenching his hands and raising them as a symbol of

submission. The second may be a representative from Phoenicia, and comes to Ashurnasirpal to grant his master a pair of monkeys - word must have gotten around that Assyrian kings loved collecting exotic fauna. In 864, Ashurnasirpal celebrated Kalhu’s completion by inviting, according to an Assyrian inscription: 69,574 guests, among them 16,000 citizens of his new capital and 5,000 foreign dignitaries from surrounding realms. They were provided 10,000 pigeons, 10,000 jugs of beer and 10,000 skins of wine along with numerous other foods and beverages in a grand feast. All would know that this was the grandeur of Ashur’s new

realm. “Go home,” Ashurnasirpal must have thought upon the party’s conclusion, “and tell your petty kings of my glory.” The prestige of creating such a glittering new capital would no doubt have been good enough, but there were probably other practical reasons for its construction beyond just aesthetics. Kalhu was located dead centre in the ‘Assyrian triangle’, its points made up of Ashur, Nineveh and Arbela. His new city was therefore right in the middle of the Assyrian world, more adequate for governing a rapidly expanding empire in a more convenient fashion. Ashurnasirpal might have wished to assert his independence

from the great noble families of Old Ashur by just relocating central power away from them. They had been incredibly influential up until this point, and probably served as an obstacle to an increase in central power. Somewhat revealingly, Kalhu’s direct governance was granted to a eunuch upon the city’s completion, rather than one of the powerful aristocrats of Assyria. Eunuchs were generally seen to be subservient and devoted to the king alone, and for this reason were to become massively powerful over the next two-and-a-half centuries. The most powerful of their number would serve as everything from royal chariot

drivers and cup-bearers to provincial governors and generals. Ashurnasirpal ruled from his new fortified citadel until 859 BC, when his son and successor Shalmaneser III took the throne. Continuing in his illustrious father’s footsteps, his reign was yet another series of stunning campaigns directed against Assyria’s traditional enemies, as well as the Neo-Hittite states around and beyond the Taurus Mountains, which were bent to their knees and forced to pay tribute. However, as we all know, expansion on such a scale has a price, and for the Assyrians that price now had to be paid. In the late 820s, either

slightly before or after Shalmaneser III’s death, the Neo-Assyrian Empire descended into a state of weakness known in Professor Eckart Frahm’s ‘Companion to Assyria’ as ‘The Age of Magnates’. It’s entirely possible that this time in Assyrian history was initiated by a civil war between royal sons, or possibly even a rebellion by the aforementioned aristocratic clans against what they saw as sidelining by the monarchy. Whatever the case truly was, it does seem that after this internal strife, noble power dramatically resurged. In the three-quarters of a century-long period lasting from the late 820s to 745BC, five kings reigned,

but it seems that true power resided with various governors, family members and high officials, especially the king’s field marshal. The reign of Adad-nirari III stretched from 810 to 783, for example, and for the most part in that time, power lay with his commander-in-chief Nergal-ila’i and his mother Sammu-ramat. It makes sense, because her son was only a child when installed on the throne of Assyria. This might have been engineered; after all, an infant king is a weak king who can be controlled. This queen mother’s extraordinary authority is revealed to us in a stele dated to the

year 805, which mentions her and her royal son as equal guarantors of the official border between two feuding vassal states. Moreover, she is also mentioned together with her son on religious statues constructed by the governor of Kalhu at the time. Finally, Sammu-ramat was probably the very first woman in Assyria to be commemorated on a stele in the holy city of Ashur which were designed to honour the memory of the kingdom’s rulers. Interestingly, many scholars now believe that this Assyrian queen was the inspiration for the future legendary figure Semiramis, who is mentioned in numerous Greek sources

centuries after this point. It’s possible that her ability to successfully rule the great empire made her memorable enough to mythologise after her death. Historian Susan Wise Bauer commented that ‘Sammu-ramat’s hold on power was so striking that it echoed into the distant historical memory of a people just arriving on the scene’. In effect, she was the Empress Wu of Neo-Assyria. We don’t have time to cover it here, but we recommend that you read up on Semiramis for yourself, and perhaps we’ll do a video about her in the future. Carrying on with the story, throughout the mid-eighth

century BC, the strongest figure in Assyrian politics was a military commander named Shamshi-Ilu, a man who directed military campaigns and ran the affairs of state. He essentially performed all the functions of a king, while sidelining his monarch and only formally respecting the king’s authority. Governors of large Assyrian provinces also asserted their individual authority and power in the regions which they ruled, often competing with one another despite remaining unified under the ‘rule’ of the Assyrian king. It was at this moment when Assyria was at its weakest that enemies finally decided to strike. In the middle of

the eighth century, king of the rising northern state of Urartu - Sarduri I - crossed his border and intervened in the fractured neo-Hittite states, forming a strong anti-Assyrian coalition, and presenting a plausible threat to the weakened state’s existence. At a similar time, Shamshi-Ilu passed away and a revolt broke out in the capital at Kalhu. We have hardly any information about it, but the king at the time was probably killed and then replaced by a man named Pulu. We know him better by the throne name he took - Tiglath-Pileser III. Under this possible-usurper’s effective leadership, as

Hardcore History host Dan Carlin put it: ‘Assyria went on a kind of historical sprint’ and began a meteoric rise in power. Indeed, the blistering speed at which Assyria recovered from its low period can be attributed to this truly great reformer. Above all was the viewpoint that the interests of Ashur’s great empire could no longer be served by the aging imperial system of Ashurnasirpal, it would have to be changed to fit a great empire - the greatest empire the world had ever seen, and the culmination of ancient Sumer’s millennia-long history. Like any Assyrian monarch worth his

salt, Tiglath-Pileser began a series of brutal, lightning conquests in all directions in order to assert the final supremacy of his kingdom to all who thought that the century’s long weakness had de-clawed it. First though, he needed to revamp the Assyrian army into a truly fearsome fighting force. Before Tiglath-Pileser, Assyrian militia armies were only called up in the summer due to the fact that the soldiers - most peasants working in agriculture - had to service the land and reap the harvest in May, before being called up by July. This yearly cycle was probably one of the

limiters on Assyrian domination in the times of Ashurnasirpal, as an army can only conquer so much in a year without economic dislocation. Hereafter, tribute giving clients would give way to full Assyrian provinces. This was done away with, and, amongst other reforms, was replaced by a permanent army with contingents raised from each of the provinces, supplemented when needed by units provided by vassal realms, whose service was a part of the tribute they were obliged to pay. The ‘kisir sharruti’, or ‘standing army’ acquired a multiethnic, multicultural aspect, with foreign troops marching alongside native Assyrian units. A later

king reports that he even integrated 50 Israeli chariot teams into his force. They were issued Assyrian uniforms and equipment, thereby becoming indistinguishable from one another in the ranks. A large Assyrian ‘core’ of troops continued to exist primarily within the cavalry and chariot forces - the strike elements of the army. At an even higher level were the ‘qurubti sha shepe’ - the king’s personal elite bodyguard In the first years of his reign, which began in 745, the Assyrian army conquered Babylonia in the south, the consequences of which would affect Assyria until the end of the empire.

The conquest was completed relatively quickly, but Babylon, being the revered and ancient civilisation that it was, required special treatment. So, after defeating the Chaldean tribes that had occupied the area, Tiglath-Pileser took the step of becoming King of Babylon - instituting a kind of dual-monarchy. In the very same year, the army pivoted north and shattered Urartu’s strength, forcing its king to flee for his life. Assaults on that mountain kingdom would continue until it was finally annihilated in the late eighth century, weakened so much that a new nomadic group - the Medes, managed to conquer it. In

the west, the empire’s borders were again pushed further than ever before, even approaching the borders of Egypt, and provincialising client kingdoms along the way. To more completely subjugate and pacify newly conquered territories and treacherous vassals alike, the king formally, and on an unprecedented scale, reintroduced a policy of mass deportation and forced population movement. In 744, for example, Tiglath-Pileser decreed that 65,000 people were to be taken from their homes in Iran and resettled on the Assyrian-Babylonian border on the Diyala River. Two years later, 30,000 people from the Syrian region were deported to the Zagros mountains. Those

human beings who were deported were usually people considered most likely to rebel against Assyria. By ‘decapitating’ possibly dissident elements in this way, it was hoped that subjugated lands would remain amenable to their Assyrian overlords, and remain subjugated. To top it off, deportation allowed the Assyrians to transport people with valuable skills, such as administration, construction, and financial management across the empire to where they were most needed. Within his empire, Tiglath-Pileser also acted decisively to ensure that central rule would never again be challenged and undermined as it had been in the ‘age of magnates’. To do this,

he took the provinces of the empire, many of which were very powerful territories in their own right, and sliced them into smaller, more administratively effective pieces. Within seven years of his ascension to the throne, over 80 of these provinces existed, and loyal eunuchs were appointed to govern many of the new divisions in order to further undermine the provincial elites. To monitor this system, Tiglath-Pileser set up a small administrative layer of officials responsible for inspecting the state of his majesty’s holdings and then reporting back to the king the performance and loyalty of his governors. We’ve heard

of Achaemenid Persia and Mongol usage of horseborne postal services, but this, as far as we can tell, was actually an Assyrian innovation. Communications stations were set up across the empire from which riders could deliver orders to the provinces. It also allowed the delivery of reports from the provinces, containing amongst many other general matters, intelligence from operatives in the spy service which had been set up by Tiglath-Pileser to monitor states beyond Assyrian borders. With these reforms, the Neo-Assyrian Empire entered its golden age and we will talk about them more down the line, so make sure you

are subscribed to our channel and have pressed the bell button. We would like to express our gratitude to our Patreon supporters and channel members, who make the creation of our videos possible. Now, you can also support us by buying our merchandise via the link in the description. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we will catch you on the next one. The end of Bronze Age civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean world initiated a dark age which, from Egypt to Anatolia to Greece, reduced living standards, humbled once proud empires, and turned prosperous maritime trading kingdoms

into shadows of their former selves. However, there was one great Mesopotamian state which managed to weather the storm and eventually emerged from it as the most powerful and arguably the most merciless state in near-eastern, and possibly world history - the Assyrian Empire. There are a bunch of reasons why we love Mesopotamian civilizations and the fact that they were the first to preserve knowledge is on the top of the list. The sponsor of this video Blinkist is all about preserving and sharing knowledge by making it easily digestible even for the busiest among us. Blinkist takes the

most interesting and relevant non-fictional books and turns them into 15-minute audios – blinks. More than 3000 titles are already available which means that you can learn on the go, learn fast, and always improve your knowledge, no matter how time-constrained you are. Blinkist titles range from Entrepreneurship to Philosophy, from Psychology to Politics, but most importantly for us, there are 100s of historical books that you can listen to! Imagine learning the most important facts of 4 books in just 1 hour! Mary Beard’s Civilization and Chip Walter’s Last Ape Standing are perfect if you want to learn more

about human civilizations! New titles are added all the time! Support our channel and your growth - get yourself premium access to knowledge! The first 100 people to go to blinkist.com/kingsandgenerals are going to get unlimited access for 1 week to try it out. You’ll also get 25% off if you want the full membership! The Old and Middle Assyrian Empires had waxed and waned for almost a millennia by the time Bronze Age civilisation came to an end in the late second millennium BC. During that thousand years, Assyria was merely one of many competing states in Mesopotamia and

the near-east. During its earlier imperial periods, Shamshi-Adad dominated much of northern Mesopotamia in the 18th century BC. At its weakest, however, the Assyrians had even been subjugated to vassaldom under the Kingdom of Mitanni, but always seemed to resurge and grow in power again. By the late tenth-century BC, the declining Assyrian polity had been diminished by Aramean invasions, left controlling only its traditional core region in the so-called ‘Assyrian triangle’ on the upper reaches of the Tigris River. Despite that fact, kings in this era still considered themselves rulers of all the previously conquered territory seized by Middle

Assyrian kings such as Tukulti-Ninurta I, that were now lost. It was this gulf between imperial expectation and reality which led to the Neo-Assyrian reconquest. While the surrounding polities had been weakened by the Bronze Age Collapse and were still recovering, Assyria was dynamic and demographically vibrant, allowing its kings to once again pursue an expansionist agenda. Beginning in roughly 934BC with king Ashur-dan II, and continuing with his successors - Adad-nirari II and then Tukulti-Ninurta II - brilliant military expeditions began to recapture the ‘Assyrian territories’ that their predecessors once ruled. This process culminated in the reign of Ashurnasirpal

II - whose name can be translated as ‘the god Ashur is the creator of an heir’. He is one of the most famous neo-Assyrian kings, whose reign we are well informed of by numerous royal reliefs. Under his august rule, the great armies of Ashur were far from sated, and he began to direct expeditions to areas never before touched by Assyrian arms. Parts of northern Babylonia, Zamua - an area in the north near Lake Urmia - Armenian highlands, and the Kashyari mountains all became subject to the iron will of Ashurnasirpal. The king also crossed the Orontes

River in the northwest with an army, founding Assyrian colonies there and essentially launching a commercial expedition. He even managed to exact vast sums of tribute from the wealthy Phoenician cities and extracted valuable timber from the Levant. Despite the primarily economic motives for Ashurnasipal’s western expeditions, its further-reaching implications are also incredibly important. Never before had Assyrians, with their desire for stable control, placed a colony so far away from their centre, and it paved the way for the centuries to come. Back in the homeland of Ashur, on the Tigris, Assyria’s capital - Ashur - was also the

centre of all worship of the Assyrian pantheon of gods - the most prominent and powerful of which was also known as Ashur. This god was strange in Mesopotamia as it was not a celestial entity like Enlil or Marduk, but was actually a deified version of the rock formation on which his temple stood. Interestingly, Assyria is not what the people themselves called the land - they called it ‘Ashur’. So, the country was called ‘Ashur’, as was their god and their city. The fact that Ashur was a holy city didn’t stop what Ashurnasirpal II did next, in

what was perhaps his greatest achievement. Taking advantage of the great wealth which was entering his treasuries from constant success in war, the king began sponsoring construction in Assyrian cities from Nineveh to Ashur. However, his greatest achievement was the building of a vast, beautiful new capital city known as Kalhu - modern Nimrud - beginning in 879BC. The site already had a decaying old settlement of some kind before the works began, but this project was a different thing altogether. Ashurnasirpal employed thousands of corvee labourers and deportees to build several colossal palaces and glorious temples. Massive winged-bull statues

fashioned from stone were placed as fearsome guardians at the entrances to the king’s northwestern palace, and extensive rows of carved stone blocks were decorated with depictions of various scenes designed to show the king’s greatness. In one of these reliefs, two figures bear tribute to the Assyrian king. The first is probably a man from Syria, who can be seen clenching his hands and raising them as a symbol of submission. The second may be a representative from Phoenicia, and comes to Ashurnasirpal to grant his master a pair of monkeys - word must have gotten around that Assyrian

kings loved collecting exotic fauna. In 864, Ashurnasirpal celebrated Kalhu’s completion by inviting, according to an Assyrian inscription: 69,574 guests, among them 16,000 citizens of his new capital and 5,000 foreign dignitaries from surrounding realms. They were provided 10,000 pigeons, 10,000 jugs of beer and 10,000 skins of wine along with numerous other foods and beverages in a grand feast. All would know that this was the grandeur of Ashur’s new realm. “Go home,” Ashurnasirpal must have thought upon the party’s conclusion, “and tell your petty kings of my glory.” The prestige of creating such a glittering new capital would

no doubt have been good enough, but there were probably other practical reasons for its construction beyond just aesthetics. Kalhu was located dead centre in the ‘Assyrian triangle’, its points made up of Ashur, Nineveh and Arbela. His new city was therefore right in the middle of the Assyrian world, more adequate for governing a rapidly expanding empire in a more convenient fashion. Ashurnasirpal might have wished to assert his independence from the great noble families of Old Ashur by just relocating central power away from them. They had been incredibly influential up until this point, and probably served as

an obstacle to an increase in central power. Somewhat revealingly, Kalhu’s direct governance was granted to a eunuch upon the city’s completion, rather than one of the powerful aristocrats of Assyria. Eunuchs were generally seen to be subservient and devoted to the king alone, and for this reason were to become massively powerful over the next two-and-a-half centuries. The most powerful of their number would serve as everything from royal chariot drivers and cup-bearers to provincial governors and generals. Ashurnasirpal ruled from his new fortified citadel until 859 BC, when his son and successor Shalmaneser III took the throne. Continuing

in his illustrious father’s footsteps, his reign was yet another series of stunning campaigns directed against Assyria’s traditional enemies, as well as the Neo-Hittite states around and beyond the Taurus Mountains, which were bent to their knees and forced to pay tribute. However, as we all know, expansion on such a scale has a price, and for the Assyrians that price now had to be paid. In the late 820s, either slightly before or after Shalmaneser III’s death, the Neo-Assyrian Empire descended into a state of weakness known in Professor Eckart Frahm’s ‘Companion to Assyria’ as ‘The Age of Magnates’.

It’s entirely possible that this time in Assyrian history was initiated by a civil war between royal sons, or possibly even a rebellion by the aforementioned aristocratic clans against what they saw as sidelining by the monarchy. Whatever the case truly was, it does seem that after this internal strife, noble power dramatically resurged. In the three-quarters of a century-long period lasting from the late 820s to 745BC, five kings reigned, but it seems that true power resided with various governors, family members and high officials, especially the king’s field marshal. The reign of Adad-nirari III stretched from 810 to

783, for example, and for the most part in that time, power lay with his commander-in-chief Nergal-ila’i and his mother Sammu-ramat. It makes sense, because her son was only a child when installed on the throne of Assyria. This might have been engineered; after all, an infant king is a weak king who can be controlled. This queen mother’s extraordinary authority is revealed to us in a stele dated to the year 805, which mentions her and her royal son as equal guarantors of the official border between two feuding vassal states. Moreover, she is also mentioned together with her

son on religious statues constructed by the governor of Kalhu at the time. Finally, Sammu-ramat was probably the very first woman in Assyria to be commemorated on a stele in the holy city of Ashur which were designed to honour the memory of the kingdom’s rulers. Interestingly, many scholars now believe that this Assyrian queen was the inspiration for the future legendary figure Semiramis, who is mentioned in numerous Greek sources centuries after this point. It’s possible that her ability to successfully rule the great empire made her memorable enough to mythologise after her death. Historian Susan Wise Bauer commented

that ‘Sammu-ramat’s hold on power was so striking that it echoed into the distant historical memory of a people just arriving on the scene’. In effect, she was the Empress Wu of Neo-Assyria. We don’t have time to cover it here, but we recommend that you read up on Semiramis for yourself, and perhaps we’ll do a video about her in the future. Carrying on with the story, throughout the mid-eighth century BC, the strongest figure in Assyrian politics was a military commander named Shamshi-Ilu, a man who directed military campaigns and ran the affairs of state. He essentially performed

all the functions of a king, while sidelining his monarch and only formally respecting the king’s authority. Governors of large Assyrian provinces also asserted their individual authority and power in the regions which they ruled, often competing with one another despite remaining unified under the ‘rule’ of the Assyrian king. It was at this moment when Assyria was at its weakest that enemies finally decided to strike. In the middle of the eighth century, king of the rising northern state of Urartu - Sarduri I - crossed his border and intervened in the fractured neo-Hittite states, forming a strong anti-Assyrian

coalition, and presenting a plausible threat to the weakened state’s existence. At a similar time, Shamshi-Ilu passed away and a revolt broke out in the capital at Kalhu. We have hardly any information about it, but the king at the time was probably killed and then replaced by a man named Pulu. We know him better by the throne name he took - Tiglath-Pileser III. Under this possible-usurper’s effective leadership, as Hardcore History host Dan Carlin put it: ‘Assyria went on a kind of historical sprint’ and began a meteoric rise in power. Indeed, the blistering speed at which Assyria

recovered from its low period can be attributed to this truly great reformer. Above all was the viewpoint that the interests of Ashur’s great empire could no longer be served by the aging imperial system of Ashurnasirpal, it would have to be changed to fit a great empire - the greatest empire the world had ever seen, and the culmination of ancient Sumer’s millennia-long history. Like any Assyrian monarch worth his salt, Tiglath-Pileser began a series of brutal, lightning conquests in all directions in order to assert the final supremacy of his kingdom to all who thought that the century’s

long weakness had de-clawed it. First though, he needed to revamp the Assyrian army into a truly fearsome fighting force. Before Tiglath-Pileser, Assyrian militia armies were only called up in the summer due to the fact that the soldiers - most peasants working in agriculture - had to service the land and reap the harvest in May, before being called up by July. This yearly cycle was probably one of the limiters on Assyrian domination in the times of Ashurnasirpal, as an army can only conquer so much in a year without economic dislocation. Hereafter, tribute giving clients would give

way to full Assyrian provinces. This was done away with, and, amongst other reforms, was replaced by a permanent army with contingents raised from each of the provinces, supplemented when needed by units provided by vassal realms, whose service was a part of the tribute they were obliged to pay. The ‘kisir sharruti’, or ‘standing army’ acquired a multiethnic, multicultural aspect, with foreign troops marching alongside native Assyrian units. A later king reports that he even integrated 50 Israeli chariot teams into his force. They were issued Assyrian uniforms and equipment, thereby becoming indistinguishable from one another in the ranks.

A large Assyrian ‘core’ of troops continued to exist primarily within the cavalry and chariot forces - the strike elements of the army. At an even higher level were the ‘qurubti sha shepe’ - the king’s personal elite bodyguard In the first years of his reign, which began in 745, the Assyrian army conquered Babylonia in the south, the consequences of which would affect Assyria until the end of the empire. The conquest was completed relatively quickly, but Babylon, being the revered and ancient civilisation that it was, required special treatment. So, after defeating the Chaldean tribes that had occupied

the area, Tiglath-Pileser took the step of becoming King of Babylon - instituting a kind of dual-monarchy. In the very same year, the army pivoted north and shattered Urartu’s strength, forcing its king to flee for his life. Assaults on that mountain kingdom would continue until it was finally annihilated in the late eighth century, weakened so much that a new nomadic group - the Medes, managed to conquer it. In the west, the empire’s borders were again pushed further than ever before, even approaching the borders of Egypt, and provincialising client kingdoms along the way. To more completely subjugate

and pacify newly conquered territories and treacherous vassals alike, the king formally, and on an unprecedented scale, reintroduced a policy of mass deportation and forced population movement. In 744, for example, Tiglath-Pileser decreed that 65,000 people were to be taken from their homes in Iran and resettled on the Assyrian-Babylonian border on the Diyala River. Two years later, 30,000 people from the Syrian region were deported to the Zagros mountains. Those human beings who were deported were usually people considered most likely to rebel against Assyria. By ‘decapitating’ possibly dissident elements in this way, it was hoped that subjugated lands

would remain amenable to their Assyrian overlords, and remain subjugated. To top it off, deportation allowed the Assyrians to transport people with valuable skills, such as administration, construction, and financial management across the empire to where they were most needed. Within his empire, Tiglath-Pileser also acted decisively to ensure that central rule would never again be challenged and undermined as it had been in the ‘age of magnates’. To do this, he took the provinces of the empire, many of which were very powerful territories in their own right, and sliced them into smaller, more administratively effective pieces. Within seven

years of his ascension to the throne, over 80 of these provinces existed, and loyal eunuchs were appointed to govern many of the new divisions in order to further undermine the provincial elites. To monitor this system, Tiglath-Pileser set up a small administrative layer of officials responsible for inspecting the state of his majesty’s holdings and then reporting back to the king the performance and loyalty of his governors. We’ve heard of Achaemenid Persia and Mongol usage of horseborne postal services, but this, as far as we can tell, was actually an Assyrian innovation. Communications stations were set up across

the empire from which riders could deliver orders to the provinces. It also allowed the delivery of reports from the provinces, containing amongst many other general matters, intelligence from operatives in the spy service which had been set up by Tiglath-Pileser to monitor states beyond Assyrian borders. With these reforms, the Neo-Assyrian Empire entered its golden age and we will talk about them more down the line, so make sure you are subscribed to our channel and have pressed the bell button. We would like to express our gratitude to our Patreon supporters and channel members, who make the creation

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