If you've ever wanted to get a good solid understanding the history of Assyria in a relatively short series of videos This is probably it. No, really I tried my best to put about ten to eleven hundred years of Assyrian history into a few hours. Honestly, it's a super interesting topic. So without further adieu, let's begin. For starters, Assyria was a people, culture, kingdom and eventually, an empire which became one of the most formidable states in the ancient world. During the second and first millennium BCE. Though it went through several periods of expansion and contraction, at its height, the empire of the Assyrians was possibly the largest and most powerful that the world had ever seen up until that time. Based in the highlands of Mesopotamia in what is today part of Iraqi Kurdistan? the Empire stretched from the mountains of Asia Minor Down to the Persian Gulf and from Egypt on one side to modern-day Iran on the other Its center of power were the cities of ashlar Nimrod and Nineveh all located in the Assyrian heartland But it also held sway for generations over the wealthy and fabled cities of Babylon Erik Mari Susa and many of the other great cities of the time When you think about it, it's pretty remarkable these cities were the London's New York's tokyo's and Shanghai's of the ancient world and They were all ruled by the assyrian king in northern. Mesopotamia Both their military and commercial acumen were unmatched by any other people of the ancient Near East It's safe to say that the Assyrians were more than a force to be reckoned with They were the epitome of what most civilizations of the time aspired to be Of course This power came at a price especially for their enemies The Assyrians had a well deserved reputation for being ruthless conquerors who had no compunction about massacring entire populations Pretty much today what call and genocide? We know about this not only from the inscriptions and base reliefs that day themselves left behind but also from the words of others These include the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible as well as records kept by Babylonian and Elamites scribes Even Herodotus who was a Greek writes about them in his monumental work the histories and when he does it's not about their magnum energy In terms of their history Assyria logis or those who study Assyria and ancient Mesopotamia have divided it up into three main periods the first of which is the oldest Syrian the second the middle Assyrian and the third being the nero assyrian period This latter period and the empire that was established during it is considered to be the greatest of those founded in Mesopotamia due to its expanse and highly developed inefficient military Overall the Assyrians were highly effective in everything that they did So, let's take a look at the early period of a Syrian history while there are quite a few legends that scholars have uncovered with regard to the original the Assyrian state and its people We're gonna focus on the more historical ones the history of Assyria really starts with the founding of the city of Ashur sometime in the third millennium BCE However Assyria has this somewhat you could say legendary history before that Now I'm using the term Legendary because other than the names of a few rulers or Kings that are written on a document known as the Assyrian kingless Which we'll get to in a few minutes We really have no evidence or mention of Assyria as a people or a state before the 3rd millennium BCE Actually to be honest The only real concrete evidence we have of the Assyrians Themselves comes from the reign of King Kamsa Dada the first who ruled from the years 1809 until 1776 BCE Even he himself though is not believed to have been of a Syrian origin but rather in amirite Because of a lack of sources very little is known about Assyria in the 3rd millennium BCE what we do know is that Assyria was part of the Akkadian Empire of Sargon degrade and his sons as well as The third dynasty of or this can be seen by mention of Hsu bar to the term for Assyria in the text from both dynasties another more prolific source are the many thousands of Qunu form tablets containing information about Assyrian trade colonies in what is today the Cappadocia region of Turkey these documents especially those from the ancient city of knish Contained a wealth of information about Assyrian life and economic activity Kinesha was among the most lucrative Assyrian trading posts Merchants from Ashur traveled there to set up precious metals and textile trading businesses and brought the profits back to Ashur Speaking of Ashur. We need to take a closer Look at this city and what it really meant to both the Syrian identity and their empire To the Assyrians. It was not just any city. It was the city Think of it as what Rome was to the Roman Empire sure. There can be many cities within an empire but only one Rome capitals may change has occasionally happened when barbarians invaded and sacked Rome or when it was officially moved to Byzantium aka Constantinople however the importance of Rome to the identity of the Romans never changed even Today the Tuscan countryside may be the most beautiful part of Italy Florence's cultural and intellectual heart and Milan its center of Industry But Rome will always be the capital of Italy and a symbol of the greatness of Italian civilization Well, at least this is how an Italian friend described it to me The same could be said though of Usher and its importance to the assyrians throughout their ancient history Due to such scant archaeological and written evidence from the time We know very little about Ashur and what life was like there for the earliest Syrians for all practical purposes Asha was probably little more than a medium-sized city state or kingdom along the shores of the western bank of the Tigris River a Holy place perhaps but not one of great importance to the peoples of the ancient world with the exception of course of the Assyrians Like any city it has its own rulers in this cape a group of minor kings or tribal chieftains The lists of these rulers comes from a document known to us as the Assyrian King list So what is the Assyrian King list? well It's as the name implies a list of the kings of ancient Assyria starting around 2500 BCE and in some cases going up to the 8th century BCE. I Say in some cases up to the 8th century BCE because several lists from various eras have been found The most recent of which being updated in the 8th century before the Common Era For the most part though, all of the King lists have been found to have matching names in the same order Thus they're pretty much more or less consistent with each other Written on kuna form tablets and discovered in the ruins of ancient assyrian cities such as a sure do shahrukh khan and Nineveh The king list is the best chronology that we have of both the early rulers of ancient Assyria and greater Mesopotamia however Consistencies between lists do not mean that they are accurate Many of the lists contain the names of Kings especially early ones For which there is no other historical reference or evidence? Another interesting thing is that other Kings for which there is ample historical evidence are not included within the list Thus like anything in archaeology or ancient history one has to take such documents with not a grain but a pound of salt in Fact many a serious believe that the list was originally created to link the King Shamsi ad ad the first who was believed to have been a amirite origin to the native rulers of the land of Assyria Over time scribes would add future Kings to this list basically compiling it into the version of the document that we have discovered today The Assyrian King list is divided into several sections The first is a group of 17 individuals who are known as Kings who lived in tents This suggests that they were perhaps not kings in the sense that we know the word but more like nomadic chieftains who ruled over what? May have been some sort of tribal Confederation The first King was named to diya. We know nothing about this King except for his name The same is more or less true for the next 16 Kings What is interesting is that the first ten of these Kings are the same as the ancestors listed by the Greek Babylonian king Hammurabi? Who is definitely known to have been of a Moroccan origin the same as Shem see a dab the first? Now the last two Kings who lived in tents are a little special Up until their time It seems that the ancient Assyrians didn't have an actual city of their own until about 20 50 BCE when their 16th king bush pia Founded and dedicated a city to usher the head of the assyrian pantheon This city was named after the god and it has been known as Asher ever since Despite having laid the foundation to this new settlement Loose PS seems to have preferred his nomadic way of life and didn't actually set a formal court in Asher That would be a new tradition that his son and successor. Apia shawl would start According to the kingless Apia shawls name was the last of those quote who lived in tents and of code But he's also the first to appear on the next portion of the list known as kings who are ancestors or whose fathers are known There are ten such kings in this portion of the list Now what exactly the term Kings who our ancestors or whose fathers are known actually is a bit of a mystery However, one can speculate that These were less legendary rulers at least to the Assyrians and more historical ones for whom some sort of record existed After this is a list of six other kings who are believed to have been the early rulers of the city of Ashur The fourth of these poozer Ashur the first perhaps started a new Native Assyrian dynasty in Ashur his name Pizarro sure means servant of Ashur and it's a very Assyrian name one could almost say a nationalist type of name This implies that Asher was independent of any other people's or empires of Mesopotamia and/or Anatolia at the time one of the more famous kings of this line was Irish from the first who is credited with either building or restoring the temple of Ashur There are some scholars who even believe that it was he and not iph all mentioned earlier who laid the first foundations of both city and temple of Ashur While these Kings seem to have been very proud to have been a Syrian later rulers often identified with the great kings of old for example Sargon the first of Assyria and Nam cinema Syria are two rulers who probably identified with the great Akkadian kings of the same names from over half a millennium before These Akkadian Kings were larger than life and the supermen of their day Now, of course, this is understandable I mean who doesn't want to identify with some beloved and highly respected godlike personage from history? However, it should be noted that the Assyrians are gone and neuron Singh ruled a fraction of the territory that their Akkadian counterparts did the Assyrian Sargon ruled over the steady state of Ashur while his Akkadian counterpart ruled over the largest empire of his time in Fact up until this point most Assyrian Kings had little real power outside of Ashur and maybe a few nearby villages based on the records of the Acadians and later the Sumerians of the third dynasty of or it is likely that the Assyrians acted as vassals of these two aforementioned empires during various periods of their early history To outsiders. This land was called soup r2 and Ostra was merely an insignificant city-state within it we can kind of think of soup r2 as a borderland in between the wealthy kingdoms and empires of Mesopotamia in the south and those of the Koreans and Hittites of Anatolia to the north a Sure, though would become part of a much bigger entity after the reign of its 38th king Irish from the second the Syrian city state would be conquered by the likes of Anna more at King Shamsi idad the first From this point on a serious destiny would be altered Okay, so if you've stuck with me through this program so far You've heard me mention the name sharm ciudad the first a few times now there are not too many big names that come up during early Assyrian history, but he's one of the exceptions and rightfully so Sharm sia, dad was a king of america region who lived around the same time as the great Babylonian king Hammurabi Now the historical record makes Shamsi a dad out to be this very respected and admired person and probably he was Though he was not in the Syrian and technically a conqueror of Ashur The Assyrians themselves seem to have considered him to be one of their own After all, there were several kings in the future that took the name sham sia dad as their throne name This was no doubt because they actually wanted to be identified with the original shams and on His early life is shrouded in mystery and also seemingly uneventful He succeeded his father Ella Cobb Cobham in the year 1836 BCE and became the ruler of a city-state named Turki in what is today eastern Syria? He later set up shop in a city called a callosum just a few kilometers from uh, sure Now around this time a king named na Ramzan of the city-state of eshnunna Attacked in over an to kingdom shall see a dot Samsara, Dan was exiled to Babylon which was at the time ruled by fellow alma rights and likely distant relatives of his As we mentioned before the first 10 or so Ancestors of sham sia dad are listed in the Assyrian King list and are more or less identical to those cited by Hammurabi as his ancestors showing that the two rulers were linked by a common ancestry Sorry, that's a bit of a mouthful Anyway after the death of Nara Mason in 1811, BCE sham cidade returned to ecolo 'tom He stayed there for three years before conquering Asher and the rest of Assyria He then began conquering the surrounding areas including the city of Juba in Lille, which eventually became his capital This also gave him control of important trade routes that linked Mesopotamia to both Anatolia and Syria His actions though didn't go unnoticed by his neighbors. In fact the king of mari. Yep Doon Lim also took an interest in the region and considered Shamsi adadz incursions close to his kingdom as a great threat after all Mari had grown from the wealthy from such trade and noctilum wasn't planning to share his potential profits with anyone The two kings went to war with each other for several years, but eventually yoktan Lim was defeated and later assassinated in 1796 BCE some say dad captured mari and out stood yuk Tomlin's successor soon William on From then on and until the end of his reign sham SIA dad remained in the city of Shabbat in Lille After his death in 1776 BCE one of his sons ish Madigan became ruler over most of his empire Unfortunately, the son was not as capable a ruler as his father and with the exception of Akhil Optum and the primary assyrian cities of Asher Nineveh and Erbil ish Madigan lost most of the empire that Shamsi and dad had won For the next 300 years the historical record of Assyria is mostly silent there are currently few records from both Assyrian sources as well as those of their neighbors that Detail the current happenings of those years with any sort of certainty Actually all we have are the names of the various kings who ruled Asher from the Assyrian King lists The fact that the unbroken list of names is more or less of a Syrian origin Seems to indicate that at least Asher was governed by native. Rulers Still the fact that there is little to no mention of Assyria or sabar - indicates that the authority of these kings Probably didn't extend too far outside the city's defensive walls If it did in any significant way We'd surely have heard about it from both the Assyrians themselves as well as from the archives of their more powerful neighbors Whatever is going on during that time. We do know that by the 15th century the hurryin king of the Mitanni Shasta thar invaded Assyria and annexed, uh, sure into his realm Records indicated that he looted the city and then forced its rulers as well as those of Nineveh Erbil and kir could to become his vassals the Mitanni ruled over Assyria for at least several generations but by the 14th century BCE their power seems to have waned with the Assyrians once again asserting their There are actually several pieces of evidence to support this I'm actually gonna quote the greatest serial Aegis Hwf SAG's for he can explain it much better than I can in his book the might that was Assyria SAG's writes that in that quote By the very end of the 15th century, we have indications of the beginning of a Syrian revival There was rebuilding of the walls of Ashur significant since in ancient Near Eastern capital with strong walls was potentially Independent and a boundary treaty was made between Assyria and Babylonia By about 1400 BCE a king of Assyria was Sufficiently his own man to correspond with the king of Egypt and to merit a present of 20 talents of gold a fact mentioned by his successor, uh, sure or ballot the first a Mitanni and King tells us of the circumstances though Not the precise year in which Assyria finally and decisively threw off Mitanni control The information comes from a treaty between the Mitanni and the Hittites Basic to the situation was the existence alongside Mitani of a second Korean Kingdom known as hurry with rivalry between the two dynastic Lee related rulers When border friction developed between Mitanni and the Hittites the prohi tight stance of hurry allowed the Hittites to invade Mitani Crisis ensued in Mitanni the Assyrians and another Kingdom all she took advantage of the situation to seize Mitanni and territory The Assyrian King concern is not named but the chronology makes it likely that it was a sure or Biltz father Ariba a dad end of quote Now that's a mouthful but I think you get the idea Assyria was well on its way to becoming a regional power something that was made even more clear when usher who billet was able to directly influence the succession of the king of Babylonia a state that was often a rival of Assyria It's from here onward that Assyria starts tis transformation from a small Kingdom into that of an empire This will be the subject of the next episode stay tuned as we about the expansion of the Assyrian state and its development into a mighty empire Thanks everyone for checking out the program part two of the series is coming up along with many other videos on history and Basically any other topics that I like so if you're interested in hearing more, please hit that subscribe button Thanks for stopping by and see you soon
