Neo-Assyrian

After the long shadow centuries that follow the Bronze Age collapse, a new power rises in the upper Tigris. Assyria, an old kingdom centred on the city of Ashur, had been a regional player for over a millennium. From the ninth century BCE onward, under a series of warrior kings — Ashurnasirpal II, Shalmaneser III, Tiglath-Pileser III, Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, Ashurbanipal — it builds the largest empire the ancient world has yet seen.

Assyrian rule is famously brutal. Royal inscriptions describe the impaling of rebels, the deportation of whole populations, the systematic destruction of cities. The art of palace reliefs at Nimrud and Nineveh shows captured kings paraded in chains, eyes put out, leashed like dogs to the throne. This was a deliberate strategy of terror, designed to make rebellion unthinkable. It mostly worked.

But Assyrian rule is also extraordinarily literate. The royal annals — long inscriptions narrating each campaign — are written in a high Akkadian style, full of archaisms and literary references. Provincial governors send daily reports to the king in Akkadian. Astronomers in Babylon, now an Assyrian-administered city, write reports on planetary positions that the king's diviners use to interpret omens. The political theology is intricate: the king is the high priest of Ashur, and every campaign is a holy war.

The greatest single act of Assyrian scholarship is the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. King Ashurbanipal — uniquely literate among Mesopotamian rulers; he boasts in his inscriptions of his ability to read both Sumerian and Akkadian — orders the collection of all the literary, scientific, and religious texts of Mesopotamia. Scribes scour the temple archives of every city in his empire, making copies, sending originals where possible. The library, when buried in 612 BCE by the sack of Nineveh, contains tens of thousands of tablets. It is rediscovered in the 1840s. Most of what we know about Mesopotamian literature — the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Atrahasis, the Enuma Elish, lexical lists, omen series, royal hymns — comes from this single deposit.

The empire's collapse is sudden. In 612 BCE, an alliance of Babylonians and Medes — peoples Assyria had subjugated for a century — storms Nineveh and burns it. The fall is so total that within decades the city is forgotten; Greek travellers passing the mound a few generations later do not know what it is. Three years after Nineveh, the last Assyrian army is destroyed at Carchemish.

Out of the rubble emerges Babylon, now restored to greatness for a final flowering. But the tablets we read from this period — most of them — come from Ashurbanipal's library. They are the cultural inheritance of three thousand years of Mesopotamian writing, gathered into one place, then buried by their collectors' enemies, then dug up by ours.