Iraqi History · Chronicle V of XII
Ancient Mesopotamia
The war-machine that ruled from Egypt to the Gulf, from Nimrud to Nineveh.
Neo-Assyrian EmpirePolitical
Ashurnasirpal II builds a magnificent new capital at Nimrud and crowns it with palaces lined in carved stone.
His annals boast in chilling detail of cities burned and captives flayed — terror as an instrument of rule. Yet he also opened his new capital with a feast for nearly seventy thousand guests, recorded on a stele. The winged human-headed bulls and reliefs of his palace set the template for Assyrian royal art.
Neo-Assyrian EmpireMilitary
Shalmaneser III fights a great coalition of western kings at Qarqar and later receives tribute from Jehu of Israel.
At Qarqar on the Orontes, Shalmaneser met a dozen allied kings — including Ahab of Israel and the king of Damascus — in one of the largest battles of the age. His Black Obelisk, now in the British Museum, shows Jehu of Israel bowing to the Assyrian king, the earliest surviving portrait of a named biblical ruler.
Neo-Assyrian EmpirePolitical
Tiglath-Pileser III builds a standing army, reorganizes conquered lands into provinces, and perfects mass deportation.
Seizing the throne in a coup, Tiglath-Pileser turned Assyria from a raiding power into a true empire. He replaced unreliable vassals with governors, created a professional army loyal to the crown, and uprooted whole peoples to break their resistance — deporting hundreds of thousands and reshaping the map of the Near East.
Sargonid DynastyMilitary
Sargon II completes the conquest of Israel, deports its people, and builds a vast new capital at Dur-Sharrukin.
The fall of Samaria ended the northern kingdom of Israel; its deported inhabitants became the 'ten lost tribes' of later legend. Sargon, whose name deliberately echoed the ancient Sargon of Akkad, poured his plunder into a brand-new city, Dur-Sharrukin, complete with palace and temples — abandoned almost the moment he died in battle.
Sargonid DynastyMilitary
Sennacherib storms the fortress of Lachish and shuts up King Hezekiah in Jerusalem 'like a bird in a cage.'
Sennacherib's assault on Judah is told from both sides — in his own annals and reliefs of the siege of Lachish, and in the Hebrew Bible, which says an angel struck down his army before Jerusalem. He made Nineveh his capital, building the 'Palace Without Rival' and bringing water to it by a great stone aqueduct.
Sargonid DynastyMilitary
After years of revolt, Sennacherib razes Babylon itself, flooding the holy city and shocking the whole Near East.
Babylon's repeated rebellions finally exhausted Sennacherib's patience. He sacked the ancient city, tore down its temples, and diverted the Euphrates through the ruins — an act so shocking that his own people saw his later murder as divine punishment. His successors would rebuild Babylon to atone for the sacrilege.
Sargonid DynastyMilitary
Esarhaddon invades the Nile and takes Memphis, carrying Assyria to its greatest extent, from Nubia to Iran.
Having rebuilt Babylon and secured his frontiers, Esarhaddon achieved what no Mesopotamian king had before: the conquest of Egypt. His victory stele shows the pharaoh's son and the king of Tyre kneeling on leashes. Yet Egypt was too far to hold, and his succession arrangements sowed the seeds of a ruinous civil war.
Sargonid DynastyCultural
Ashurbanipal, a rare literate king, gathers tens of thousands of tablets into the first great library of the world.
Ashurbanipal sent scribes across Mesopotamia to copy every text they could find, assembling a systematic royal library at Nineveh. Its charred tablets, unearthed in the nineteenth century, preserved the Epic of Gilgamesh, the creation epic, omens, and medicine — the single richest source we have for the literature of ancient Mesopotamia.
Sargonid DynastyMilitary
Ashurbanipal crushes his rebel brother in Babylon and then annihilates the ancient kingdom of Elam.
The bitter war against his brother Shamash-shum-ukin left Babylon starved into surrender. Ashurbanipal then turned on Elam, sacking Susa and boasting that he sowed it with salt and desecrated its royal tombs. Assyria stood without a rival — yet these victories had bled the empire white, and within a generation it would collapse.
Fall of AssyriaMilitary
A coalition of Medes and Babylonians storms Nineveh, and within three years the Assyrian Empire is gone forever.
The Babylonian king Nabopolassar and the Median king Cyaxares besieged and destroyed Nineveh in 612 BCE, and the last Assyrian remnant fell at Harran in 609. So complete was the ruin that within two centuries Greek soldiers marched past the mounds without knowing a great empire had stood there. Its lands passed to Babylon.
2 more entries, to 612 BC
