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The Iron Age Empires The I RON AGE Marshall High School Mr. Cline Western Civilization I: Ancient Foundations Unit Two EA * The Iron Age Empires • Neo-Assyrians • Around 935 BC, the ancient civilization of Assyria had begun to stir once more. • Due to its distance from the main centers of invasion and its own military might, Assyria had weathered the Bronze Age collapse better than most. • In the interim, they had mastered the art of iron working. • Iron tools enabled an explosion of building, in which the Assyrians made use of their ample supply of stone and began to establish their own artistic style. • They continued to build ziggurats and to plan their cities along much the same lines as the Sumerians, with gardens and zoos, palaces and temples, and walls, of course. But stone allowed the Assyrians to build larger, more enduring structures, and their choice in decor was distinctly Assyrian. * The Iron Age Empires • Neo-Assyrians • Yet the Assyrians were not as interested in architecture as they were in conquest. • Their mastery of iron made Assyrian soldiers some of the most dangerous in the world. • They had also begun the full-scale construction of siege equipment, which allowed their tide of conquest to flow quickly, without getting held up at fortified cities. • Perhaps the most ruthless aspect of Assyrian conquest was their system of deportation. • Under Assyrian rule, conquered peoples were forcibly relocated from their lands to other parts of the empire, while Assyrian colonists settled the newly conquered territory. * The Iron Age Empires • Neo-Assyrians • By breaking people from their lands, the Assyrians smashed resistance before it could start and sought to assimilate the new peoples into their empires. • Following the Bronze Age collapse, the ancient world was in constant turmoil for nearly four centuries. Amid this chaos, kingdoms quickly rose and fell. • Perhaps the most famous of these short-lived kingdoms was the Kingdom of Israel. • Within a century, the Assyrians had conquered most of the Fertile Crescent, and had begun to push against the Levant. • Through alliance with their neighbors, the Israelites fought off the invading Assyrians for a while, but the closest they ever came to victory was a stalemate at the Battle of Qarqar in 853 BC. * The Iron Age Empires • Neo-Assyrians • Emboldened by instability in the Assyrian homeland, the Israelites spent the next century trying to throw off their Assyrian overlords, until 744 BC, when Assyria finally found a leader to match their imperial ambitions. • His name was Tiglath-Pileser III. • Tiglath staged a military coup, reunited the Assyrian empire and recovered the lost territories. • He reorganized these territories into imperial provinces which paid a set tribute and provided soldiers in war time. • Well-organized and rich with tribute, Tiglath organized his soldiers into the world's first proper standing army and began a war of expansion. • The kingdom of Israel managed to hold off the Assyrian expansion until in 738 BC, the King of Judah betrayed the Kingdom of Israel, allying his kingdom with the conquerors. * The Iron Age Empires • Neo-Assyrians • With Judah's help, Tiglath wiped the Kingdom of Israel off the map, expelling its inhabitants from the land and spreading them within the empire. • However, with the aid of allies as far flung as Egypt, the Israelites continued to resist Assyrian rule and refused to pay tribute. • Infuriated by this perpetual insurrection, Tiglath's successors would continue the practice of displacing the rebellious Israelites. • His son Shalmanaser seems to have done little else in his three-year reign. • He died besieging the Israelite capital of Samaria. • His top general Sargon seized power and established himself by completely destroying Israel. * The Iron Age Empires • Neo-Assyrians • Within 20 years, ten tribes of Israel were lost forever. Only the two tribes of the Kingdom of Judah remained. • We call this mass displacement the First Israelite Diaspora and the ten tribes the Lost Tribes of Israel. • With the Israelites finally quelled, Sargon turned east to smash the Elamites and bring the Babylonians back into the Assyrian empire. • At home, he built a new capital at Dur Sharrukin, near the ancient city of Nineveh. • His successors would do much the same, spending half their lives conquering and the other half erecting temples and palaces to commemorate their conquests. • The Sargonid dynasty would rule the Assyrian empire until its fall nearly a century later. * The Iron Age Empires • Neo-Assyrians • Each successive generation added new lands to the empire, even conquering Egypt in 675 BC. • At its height, the Assyrian Empire spanned two continents and covered about 550,000 square miles. • Assyrian rule was incredibly savage. Assyrian Kings boast of their vicious cruelty in inscriptions and even commemorated some of their more vicious exploits in engravings. • Though this excessive cruelty served the Assyrians well as they grew their empire, these same shock-and-awe tactics would bring about the downfall of the Assyrians. • When the Babylonians decided to throw off Assyrian rule, they found ready allies throughout the empire. • Medes, Scythians, Cimmerians and Judeans all rose up. * The Iron Age Empires • Neo-Assyrians • The only land that remained faithful to Assyria was Egypt, at the other extreme of the empire. • Between the two, lands broke into rebellion, until at last a combined force sacked the Assyrian capital of Nineveh in 612 BC. • Neo-Babylonians • One thousand years after Hammurabi built the first Babylonian empire, Babylon had not forgotten its former primacy in all that time. • Throughout Assyrian reign, Babylon was always the first to rebel - the first to take advantage of every weakness. Now, with the Assyrians out of the picture, Babylon attempted to reclaim its former glory. • After defeating Assyria, the Babylonian leader, Nabopolassar, became the King of an empire that covered most of the modern middle eastern countries, from Turkey to the Persian Gulf, and from the Red Sea to the Tigris. * The Iron Age Empires • Neo-Babylonians • He and his son, Nebuchadnezzer rebuilt Babylon in lavish style, making it the most magnificent city of the ancient Near East. • At the head of this expansion was the ambitious king Nebuchadnezzar II. • Nebuchadnezzar conquered much of the previous Assyrian Empire, though he didn't make it all the way to Egypt. • While the Babylonians were focused on fighting the Assyrians, the Egyptians had made great territorial expansions into the Levant. This led to war between Nebuchadnezzar and Egypt, and in the end there developed a stale mate between the two. • In his conquest he made use of the same imperial bureaucracy, road system, and military tactics that had made the Assyrians so successful. • Like the Assyrians, he struggled with the descendants of Abraham. * The Iron Age Empires • Neo-Babylonians • During this period, the Egyptians attempted to incite revolts amongst Babylonian dependent kingdoms, including the Jews in Palestine. • To bring them to heel, he did to Judea what the Assyrians had done to Israel. • He drove out their inhabitants and began what his victims called the Babylonian Captivity. • When Nebuchadnezzer put the revolt in Judah down, he deported most of the population, as previously mentioned. • They also sacked Jerusalem. * The Iron Age Empires • Neo-Babylonians • As a result, their reputation has suffered, because The Bible has cast the Babylonians as evil gluttons, and Babylon as a den of luxurious decadence and unnatural vice, a reputation which it deserves no more than any other ancient city. • At home, Nebuchadnezzar restored Babylon to its former glory, with ambitious new building projects including the famous Hanging Gardens and the massive ziggurat Etemenanki, whose sheer massiveness may have made it the inspiration for the Biblical Tower of Babel. • Though none of these fabulous buildings survive, the beauty of the Babylonian style can still be seen in the restored Ishtar Gate. * The Iron Age Empires • Nebuchadnezzer rebuilt Babylon, and in doing so added what is considered to one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Hanging Gardens, a zigguraut bedecked in flowing waters, waterfalls, and lavish floral gardens, said to have been built so his wife would not miss her mountain home. As its location has not ever been verified, many consider it to be purely legendary, and not real. • He also reinforced the city building brick walls, and monumental gateways. * The Iron Age Empires • This period of Babylonian glory proved to be brief, after Nebuchadnezzer’s death the throne passed to his son, brother in law, and grandson in quick succession. When his grandson was murdered, a man named Nabodinus became king. • Nabonidus’s mother, who lived to be 104, was a priestess of the Moon God, and Nabonidus was equally as devoted. This however, made him unpopular with the population that still worshipped Marduk. • As a result, Narbodinus fled into exile, leaving his son, Bel-shar-usur (the biblical Belshazzar) as ruler. This made Nabonidus even more unpopular, as the popular, and important to Babylonian society, New Year festival could not be celebrated without the king. • Absorbed in their religious controversies, the Babylonians had ignored the rising power of the Persians under Cyrus the Great. In September 539, Cyrus invaded Babylonia, there was little opposition, and the city of Babylon fell without a fight. • Thus, very anti climatically, ended the 2,000 year history of the Mesopotamian imperial tradition, and only one empire, the greatest of them, would command the ancient near east from that time. * The Iron Age Empires • The Persian (Archemeneid) Empire • To the east, Babylon’s old allies, the Medes, were having trouble with a group of invaders from the Bronze Age collapse, the Persians. • The Persians had been vassals - first of the Assyrians, then of the Medes.
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