Assyrians after Assyria
by Dr. Simo Parpola,
University of Helsinki
The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project (State Archives
of Assyria)
Presented at The Assyrian National Convention in Los
Angeles,
September 4, 1999
Published in the Journal of Assyrian Academic
Studies, Vol. XIII No. 2, 1999
In 612
BC, after a prolonged civil war, Assyria's two
former vassals, the Babylonians and the Medes,
conquered and destroyed Nineveh, the capital of the
Neo-Assyrian Empire. The great city went up in
flames, never to regain its former status. Three
years later the same rebels razed
Assyria's
Western metropolis, Harran,
crushing the last-ditch resistance of
Assyria's last king,Ashur-uballit II. This event
sealed the fate of the Assyrian Empire, and that is
where the story of Assyria usually ends in history
books.
What
happened to the Assyrians after the fall of Assyria?
This is a question that is not easy to answer for
two reasons. Firstly, the issue has hardly been
touched by Assyriologists. Most of them seem to
tacitly agree with the idea of a more or less total
wipe-out, as suggested by Sidney Smith in 1925: "The
disappearance of the Assyrian people will always
remain a unique and striking phenomenon in ancient
history. Other, similar kingdoms and empires have
indeed passed away but the people have lived on...
No other land seems to have been sacked and pillaged
so completely as was Assyria."
Secondly, in contrast to the abundance of
information from the imperial period, information on
post-empire Assyria and Assyrians is scanty and
scattered. The near-total lack of information from
Assyria itself would seem to support the idea of a
genocide, which also seems to be supported by
ancient eye-witness testimonies. When the Greek
historian Xenophon 200 years after Nineveh's fall
passed through the Assyrian heartland and visited
the sites of two great Assyrian cities, he found
nothing but ruin and could not retrieve much about
them from the nearby villagers. The territory where
these deserted cities lay was now Median, and the
Greeks assumed that their former inhabitants had
likewise been Medes.
Yet it
is clear that no such thing as a wholesale massacre
of all Assyrians ever happened. It is true that some
of the great cities of Assyria were utterly
destroyed and looted -- archaeology confirms this
--, some deportations were certainly carried out,
and a good part of the Assyrian aristocracy was
probably massacred by the conquerors. However,
Assyria
was a vast and densely populated country, and
outside the few destroyed urban centers life went on
as usual. This is proved by a recently discovered
post-imperial archive from the Assyrian provincial
capital Dur-Katlimmu, on the Chabur river, which
contains business documents drawn up in Assyrian
cuneiform more than a decade after the fall of
Nineveh. Apart from the fact that these documents
are dated by the regal years of a Babylonian king,
Nebuchadnezzar II, nothing in their formulation or
external appearance would suggest that they were not
written under the Assyrian Empire. Another small
archive discovered in Assur, written in a previously
unknown, presumably Mannean variety of cuneiform,
proves that Assyrian goldsmiths still worked in the
city in post-empire times, though now under Median
command.
Moreover, over a hundred Assyrians with
distinctively Assyrian names have recently been
identified in economic documents from many
Babylonian sites dated between 625 and 404 BC, and
many more Assyrians undoubtedly remain to be
identified in such documents. We do not know whether
these people were deportees or immigrants from
Assyria; their families may have settled in
Babylonia already under the Assyrian rule. In any
case, they unequivocally prove the survival of many
Assyrians after the empire and the continuity of
Assyrian identity, religion and culture in
post-empire times. Many of these names contain the
divine name Ashur, and some of the individuals
concerned occupied quite high positions: one
Pan-Ashur-lumur was the secretary of the crown
prince Cambyses under Cyrus II in 530 BC.
Distinctively Assyrians names are also found in
later Aramaic and Greek texts from Assur, Hatra,
Dura-Europus and Palmyra, and continue to be
attested until the beginning of the Sasanian period.
These names are recognizable from the Assyrian
divine names invoked in them; but whereas earlier
the other name elements were predominantly Akkadian,
they now are exclusively Aramaic. This coupled with
the Aramaic script and language of the texts shows
that the Assyrians of these later times no longer
spoke Akkadian as their mother tongue. In all other
respects, however, they continued the traditions of
the imperial period. The gods Ashur, Sherua, Istar,
Nanaya, Bel, Nabu and Nergal continued to be
worshiped in Assur at least until the early third
century AD; the local cultic calendar was that of
the imperial period; the temple of Ashur was
restored in the second century AD; and the stelae of
the local rulers resemble those of Assyrian kings in
the imperial period. It is also worth pointing out
that many of the Aramaic names occurring in the
post-empire inscriptions and graffiti from Assur are
already attested in imperial texts from the same
site that are 800 years older.
Assur
was by no means the only city where Assyrian
religion and cults survived the fall of the empire.
The temple of Sin, the great moon god of Harran, was
restored by the Babylonian king Nabonidus in the
mid-sixth century BC, and the Persian king Cyrus
claims to have returned Ishtar of Nineveh to her
temple in Nineveh. Classical sources attest to the
continuity of Assyrian cults in other Syrian cities
until late antiquity; in Harran, the cults of Sin,
Nikkal, Bel, Nabu, Tammuz and other Assyrian gods
persisted until the 10th century AD and are still
referred to in Islamic sources. Typically Assyrian
priests with their distinctive long conical hats and
tunics are depicted on several Graeco-Roman
monuments from Northern Syria and East Anatolia.
We
know little of the political status of Assyria in
the decades following its fall, but it seems that
the western part of the Empire as far as the Tigris
fell into the hands of the Babylonians, while the
eastern Transtigridian areas, including the Assyrian
heartland north of Assur, came under Median rule.
Under the Achaemenid Empire, the western areas
annexed to Babylonia formed a satrapy called Athura
(a loanword from Imperial Aramaic Athur, "Assyria"),
while the Assyrian heartland remained incorporated
in the satrapy of Mada (Old Persian for "Media").
Both satrapies paid yearly tribute and contributed
men for the military campaigns and building projects
of the Persian kings. Assyrian soldiers participated
in the expedition of Xerxes against Greece (480 BC)
according to Herodotus, and Assyrians from both
Athura and Mada participated in the construction of
the palace of Darius at Susa (500-490 BC).
Interestingly, it was the "Median" Assyrians who
executed the gold works and glazing of this palace,
whereas the Assyrians from the satrapy of Athura
provided the timber for the palace from Mt.
Lebanon. In the Babylonian version of the Persian
inscription, the name Athura is at this point
rendered Eber nari, "land beyond the river
(Euphrates)." This shows that the Western,
originally Aramean, half of the Assyrian Empire was
already at this time firmly identified with Assyria
proper, an important issue to which we shall return
later on.
We
thus see that by Achaemenid times, Assyria, though
split in two, had re-emerged as a political entity
of considerable military and economic strength. In
520 BC, both Athura and Mada joined the revolt
against Darius, trying to regain their independence.
This revolt was a failure, but in a sense the
Assyrian Empire had already been re-established long
ago. Actually, in the final analysis, it had never
been destroyed at all but had just changed
ownership: first to Babylonian and Median dynasties,
and then to a Persian one.
Contemporaries and later Greek historians did not
make a big distinction between the Assyrian Empire
and its successors: in their eyes, the "monarchy" or
"universal hegemony" first held by the Assyrians had
simply passed to or been usurped by other nations.
For example, Ctesias of Cnidus writes: "It was under
[Sardanapallos] that the empire (hegemonia) of the
Assyrians fell to the Medes, after it had lasted
more than thirteen hundred years. "
The
Babylonian king Nabonidus, who reigned sixty years
after the fall of Nineveh and actually originated
from an Assyrian city, Harran, refers to
Ashurbanipal and Esarhaddon as his "royal
forefathers." His predecessor Nebuchadnezzar and the
Persian kings Cyrus and Artaxerxes are
correspondingly referred to as "Kings of Assyria" in
Greek historical tradition and in the Bible. Strabo,
writing at the time of the birth of Christ, tells us
that "the customs of the Persians are like those of
the Assyrians," and calls Babylon a "metropolis of
Assyria" (which it, of course, in fact was too,
having been completely destroyed and rebuilt by the
Assyrians in the early seventh century BC).
The
Babylonian, Median and Persian empires should thus
be seen (as they were seen in antiquity) as
successive versions of the same multinational power
structure, each resulting from an internal power
struggle within this structure. In other words, the
Empire was each time reborn under a new leadership,
with political power shifting from one nation to
another.
Of
course, the Empire changed with each change of
leadership. On the whole, however, the changes were
relatively slight, one could almost say cosmetic
only. The language of the ruling elite changed, of
course, first from Assyrian to Babylonian, Median,
and Persian, and finally to Greek. In its dress the
elite likewise followed its national customs, and it
naturally venerated its own gods, from whom its
power derived. Thus Ashur was replaced as imperial
god first by the Babylonian Marduk, and then by the
Iranian Ahura Mazda, Greek.
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