The city of Assur sits on a bluff above the Tigris in northern Iraq. Its god, also called Ashur, gave his name to the city, its people and in time one of the largest empires the world had yet seen. Assyria's history runs for well over a thousand years, and it is a story in two very different moods: first a city of long-distance traders, later a military machine that terrified its neighbors.

The merchants of Kanesh

Around 1950 to 1750 BCE, merchant families from Assur ran a trade network reaching hundreds of miles into Anatolia, in modern Turkey. Their main base was a trading quarter outside the city of Kanesh, at the site now called Kultepe, where about 23,000 of their tablets have been found. Old Assyrian merchants carried tin and woolen textiles to Kanesh on donkey caravans, and sold them for silver and gold, which they sent home.

The letters are vivid and personal. Wives and sisters in Assur wrote to men on the road about money, debts, family quarrels and the quality of goods. Women of merchant families in Assur wove many of the textiles the merchants sold, and they often kept their own accounts and complained when they were not paid. The archive is one of the richest windows on private business in the ancient world.

A harsher law

In the Middle Assyrian period, roughly the fourteenth to eleventh centuries BCE, Assyria became a territorial state. A set of laws from this time, the Middle Assyrian Laws, is one of the harshest legal texts to survive, especially toward women. The Middle Assyrian Laws required respectable married women to wear a veil in public, while slave women and prostitutes were forbidden to veil and could be punished if they did. Penalties for many offenses included beating, mutilation and death.

The empire

The Neo-Assyrian empire, from about 911 to 609 BCE, grew through annual campaigns. Ashurnasirpal II built a new capital at Nimrud and boasted of a feast for nearly seventy thousand guests. The decisive reformer came later. Tiglath-Pileser III, who ruled from 745 BCE, turned Assyria into a state of provinces with a standing army. Instead of leaving defeated kings in place as vassals, he increasingly divided their lands into provinces under Assyrian governors.

He and his successors also used a policy on a scale never seen before. Assyrian kings moved many conquered peoples by force to other regions of the empire. Deportees were resettled to farm empty land, build cities or serve in the army, which broke up local resistance and mixed populations. One modern estimate puts the number moved over three centuries at about four and a half million, though such figures are very uncertain. The northern kingdom of Israel was conquered and many of its people deported in 722 BCE. With so many peoples mixed together, a common language spread. The Aramaic language spread across the empire as a common tongue, gradually replacing Akkadian in daily speech.

Assyrian kings decorated their palaces with stone reliefs showing campaigns, sieges, lion hunts and punishments: prisoners flayed, impaled or beheaded. These images were a message to visitors and envoys about what rebellion would cost. Kings also described themselves as shepherds of their people and builders of gardens and canals.

Nineveh and the fall

Sennacherib, who ruled from 705 to 681 BCE, rebuilt Nineveh as a vast capital with a palace he called "without rival," fed by aqueducts and canals. When Babylon kept rebelling, he destroyed it in 689 BCE. His grandson Ashurbanipal, who ruled from 668 BCE to about 631 BCE, was proud of his scribal education. Ashurbanipal gathered a great library of tablets at Nineveh, collecting omens, prayers, medical texts, dictionaries and literature from across Mesopotamia. Excavators found its remains from 1849 onward, and many of the best known Mesopotamian texts come from it.

Within twenty years of Ashurbanipal's death the empire collapsed. Civil war weakened it, and its enemies combined. The Babylonians and the Medes captured Nineveh in 612 BCE, and the last Assyrian forces were crushed a few years later.

Worked example: The siege of Lachish

In 701 BCE Sennacherib campaigned against Hezekiah, king of Judah. We have four kinds of evidence. First, palace reliefs at Nineveh show the siege of the Judean city of Lachish in detail: a siege ramp, battering rams, defenders on the walls, prisoners impaled and families leaving with carts. Second, Sennacherib's own annals claim he took forty-six walled towns, deported over two hundred thousand people and shut Hezekiah up in Jerusalem like a caged bird, then received heavy tribute. Third, the Hebrew Bible, in Second Kings, says Hezekiah paid tribute but that Jerusalem was saved when an angel struck down the Assyrian army. Fourth, archaeologists at Lachish have found the remains of the siege ramp, a counter-ramp, arrowheads and sling stones.

Each source has an agenda. The reliefs celebrate a victory but are silent about Jerusalem, which suggests the king had nothing better to show. The annals inflate numbers. The biblical account frames events as divine rescue. Yet they agree on the core: Lachish fell, Jerusalem did not, and Hezekiah paid. Comparing hostile sources in this way is one of the historian's most powerful tools.