The Assyrian Deep State

These are The Oldest Stories, online at oldeststories.net. We return at long last to the heartland of Assyria for the prelude to one of history's greatest stories. Though Assyria has already had a long and distinguished history, and is already one of the largest and most complex kingdoms yet seen in world history, we're very close to some very big changes.

Our starting point, the year 783 BCE, is not itself a pivotal year. It's just the year that Adad-Nirari III passed away and was replaced by his oldest son, Shalmanasser IV. At the same time as this, the Mediterranean is dominated by Greek and Phoenician colonies that now ring the entire sea and stretch from Russia to Morocco. Egypt is long past its new kingdom glory, while the Etruscans are rising over in Italy.

China has already seen the rise and mostly fall of the Zhou dynasty as warlords fight over the civilizational system of the Yellow River Basin. Vedic traditions are now well-established in shaping the nascent. Indian kingdoms. In Mesoamerica, the Olmec are peaking, and the eastern woodland Indians of North America are trading, crafting, and constructing nascent civilizational centers.

Our story back in 3000 BCE, many, many episodes ago, saw the Sumerians rising in a context with pretty much just the Harappans and Egyptians as civilizational partners. But by this point, what we call the Iron Age in the Near East, every cradle of civilization has at least an infant being coddled within it. while the Assyrians themselves know that at this point they are the inheritors of ages beyond reckoning of countless civilizations.

It seems like a good time to pause and review that inheritance as we sit at the cusp of something remarkable. Around 3000 BCE, possibly earlier but probably not much later, the city of Asher was founded on the Tigris River, a trade outpost for the Sumerian city-states in the north.

The city was founded in the shadow of Mount Asher, which is no more than a 20 or 30 meter high rocky outcrop along the riverbank, but still is the most noteworthy geographical feature in the area. And Mount Asher... as you might imagine, was sacred to the god Asher, who had at the time very little character beyond just being a local deity in charge of the mountain.

Like so many other places, the city Akkadianized during the Akkadian Empire, and it's likely in this period that its long-lasting connection to the city of Nineveh was formed. possibly due also its connection to the eastern city of Arba'il, and these three connections formed an enduring triad of cities that would always be culturally connected and often...

politically connected for the rest of Mesopotamian history. With the rise of the Akkadian Empire, the entire Assyrian Triangle would... become quickly Akkadianized, and may well have been at least partly Akkadian even before Sargon's rise from an ethnic standpoint. The first Assyrian Empire would be almost shockingly different from the empire the world remembers.

Emerging in the Middle Bronze Age following the disruptive entrance of the Amorites, a Western Semitic people into Mesopotamia, the city of Asher alone was able to resist Amorite domination and maintain its Akkadian character. Perhaps because of this, and because of the lingering influence of the Akkadian language as a common tongue for the entire Near East, Assyrian traders were able to establish peaceful, mercantile trading colonies in regions as far-flung as Anatolians.

the Levant, and Central Asia. The city became fantastically wealthy until the 18th century saw the Anatolian colonies caught up in the increasingly complex wars that the region saw in that period. And the final nail in the Assyrian coffin... came with the conquering warlord Shamshiadad, this would be Shamshiadad I, finally bringing Amorite rule to the whole of northern Mesopotamia.

Shamshidad's power was subsequently broken by Hammurabi, and Assyria fell into obscurity a few generations later for the following centuries. That dark period saw the fall of Babylon and the rise of the Mitanni, who dominated Upper Mesopotamia in the first half of the Late Bronze Age, and then saw a resurgent Assyria, looking far more conventionally marked.

than it had in the first incarnation, and they helped to overthrow Mitanni Dominion and establish the first Assyrian Empire, sometimes called the Middle Assyrian Kingdom, which ruled Upper Mesopotamia for a few years. centuries. By 1100 BCE, the pressures of the Bronze Age Collapse era, plus the strain of a failed occupation of Babylon, led to the collapse of Assyrian strength yet again, with the kingdom reduced to its three main cities and the

Heartland region between them. Until 935, with the rise of Asherdan II. For many people, Ashurdan is the beginning of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and in many ways, he is. There's going to be a ton of continuity between this coming series and the 19 episodes of Assyria that we looked at. in previous months.

Certainly, the Assyrians themselves don't seem to have thought that they were in any different polity than had ruled over them since the fall of Shamshidad back in the Middle Bronze Age. In fact, the kings of this period still appear to be men of the Assyrians. Adasai dynasty, which is ruled continuously since Adasi took the throne from Shamshi-Adad's descendants in about 1760 BCE, making this, at this point, an eight- Hundred Year Dynasty.

The next 200 years would see the rise of psychopath king Asher Nasserpol and his far more conventional son, Shalman Asher, who together restored and expanded the peak territorial borders of Assyria's late Bronze Age em- Empire, this time with a new host of tools like early cavalry, iron equipment, and an improved professional army corps.

After Shalman Asser, however, it's becoming increasingly apparent that the mechanisms of power within the empire are simply insufficient for running an empire of this size and scale without an absolute genius at the helm. Of note in that is that Assyria really has been blessed with more than its fair share of brilliant kings.

While we know almost nothing about the Assyrian educational system aside from how it taught literacy and numeracy, what hints we do have suggests that young noblemen were effectively indoctrinated in pro-national and pro-social values, and then also endowed with the skills to effectively bring what they considered to be a good social order into existence. At least... until 783 BCE with the four sons of Adad Nirari III. It would...

I think be interesting if we could compare the upbringing that Adad Nirari offered his sons, and compared it to the upbringing he himself and his progenitors had received. But such information is... simply unavailable to us. His oldest son, Shalmanassar IV, came to power under the long shadow of the Assyrian state, and was either forced through circumstance into a junior position, or found himself placed there through personal...

neptitude. You see, five years prior to Adad-Nirari's death, the king had appointed a man named Shamshi-Illu. to the post of Turton, which Turton means something like commander-in-chief, and it would turn out that this magnate, as they call them, this royal appointee, would become far more of Adad-Nirari's success. successor than any of his own sons would be.

In fact, Shalmanassar's first full year would, as normal, be named for the king, but the very year after, the coveted and now highly prized first eponym year after the new king's year would be named for the turkey. It is in fact hard to say for sure that Shalmanassar IV actually did anything at all under his own power.

Obviously, he couldn't have been a complete invalid. Assyrian kingship required a certain amount of agency and strength to be demonstrated on a at least ritual basis, multiple times a year, if nothing else. but we have no official royal inscriptions from the king's reign that can be securely attested to the king himself.

Instead, the two best official inscriptions we have are both in the style of royal inscriptions, but written in the name of and on behalf of... two of his greatest magnates, the aforementioned Shamshi-Illu, who quite boldly takes credit for many of the military campaigns of Shalmanasser's decade in power, and the young up-and-comer Belhara Belli Usser, whose career would be one of dramatic rise, fall, and rise again.

Shamshi-Illu, though, for all that he often gets a bad rap for his probably very real policy of usurping the king's practical power, was not obviously some sort of evil vizier. He spends his first few years in control of the army, taking it up north to try and deal with the greatest threat to Assyrian hegemony over the Near East, attacking directly into the teeth of a few Urartian fortresses.

He does claim some amount of success here, but he doesn't seem to have actually accomplished much. With Urartu at its height, he might not have had the tools to score a meaningful victory against them, as... No one would manage a lasting success until after the soon-to-come army reforms.

He's fighting not just for power in the abstract up north, but also because the Assyrian military now desperately needs horses for their developing cavalry arm, and an apparent inability to score those in large quantities is probably something contributing to the limited military activity in these decades. Which, I suppose that doesn't really sell him as powerful and important, the whole losing some battles thing, but...

It marks him as personally significant, as while he acknowledges the king in his texts, Shamshi-Elu makes perfectly clear in his monuments that he's the general going out and fighting wars, which is, of course, the core prerogative of the king for basically all of Mesopotamian history.

and we know he's very good at it. He puts down an outburst from the Ituayan Arameans, a group that Assyria is growing increasingly close with, but of course there are many Ituayan tribes, and they're apparently all quite... warlike, so a few of them creating an outburst from time to time is something that's just going to sort of happen for basically the rest of Assyrian history, while the rest of the Ittouans grow increasingly happy and integrated within...

the growing foreign mercenary auxiliary system of the Assyrian army. More on that later. Shamshi-Elu also takes the army to Lebanon for what sounds like it may have been a plunder-collecting expedition that attempted to also salvage the collapsing diplomatic situation out west.

And whatever he saw on that trip apparently convinced him, just two years later, to muster the entire Assyrian army, apparently without the king even being actively involved in the campaign, to smash Damascus and attempt to... bring the Arameans and Neo-Hittites back into the fold. It was a militarily successful campaign, but at best it only slowed the disintegration of vassalages out west.

Again, Shamshi-Illu is using the tools available to the Assyrian Empire at the time. He hasn't got the authority to really think outside the box, like later kings will be able to, and he might not have had the resources to bring the...

full might of Assyria to bear like the previous kings were able to do. But even as the vassalage system is collapsing, now that foreign kings no longer have any respect for the Assyrian king, The system of the Assyrian heartland is as strong as ever at this point, possibly even stronger. This is very much the age of the magnates, the governors and important men rather than the king.

and each magnate's personal success and influence was directly tied to their ability to improve their house and their holdings. while the Assyrian king had always been economically and politically incentivized to wage constant wars of plunder and conquest just by the structure of national taxation, because, in theory at least, the... Temple of Asher was the one that would receive most domestic taxation, while the king, personally, was usually the recipient of...

spoils of war. So of course that creates an incentive for the king because he's not getting the same amount of tax revenue that he might otherwise have expected. He incentivizes him to go out and just wage constant war from an economic perspective. The magnates, however, were much more strongly incentivized just by the nature of their incomes and power sources to tend their personal fiefdoms like gardens.

slowly improving them through the maintenance of general order and the construction of logistical and productive improvements and the fostering of religious institutions. Even as the king becomes less powerful in these decades, and very real problems are starting to arise from that, the magnates are keeping their own ships as steady as they can manage. The overall effect in these decades seems to be that...

While some pretty rough things will happen and the empire as an institution will go into decline, the economic prosperity of the heartland and Haber regions will be able to solidify itself. It's like the people... of Assyria are being gifted a few mostly peaceful decades in which they can build, sort of an era of consolidation that's probably badly needed after the last century of conquest, and which will itself serve

as the foundation for another century of unrivaled dominance. Shamanasa IV dies in 772 BCE, apparently without a son of his own and having accomplished very little. It's because he leaves behind no accomplishments, not even the very human accomplishment of fathering a baby, that people wonder if perhaps he was, in fact, disabled to some degree. More likely, however, is that the children he did have simply perished due to the harsh era in which he lived, or were just way too young.

He was, therefore, succeeded by his brother, Ashurdan III, who manages the curious trick of ruling longer than his brother, and yet still finding a way of being even more of a non-entity than Shalman Asur IV. forth had been. The story in this age is again really Shamshi-Illu's story. He gets the first eponym year after the kings again, and he will eventually have three separate years named after him across his career.

more than any individual Assyrian king. His relative, probably a daughter, appears to have married Ashurdan III, tying him even more closely to the royal house. Shamshi Ilu was, of course, already a nobleman of high birth before this, but he is... with all this, secured for himself basically all the power he can hold in his hands, short of usurping the throne directly. Something he's never seen to attempt.

But he's not the only powerful man. Out in the west, we already mentioned a governor named Belharan Beleusser, who was probably a key figure in the loss of the vassals who are further west than he is. He's likely involved in a pretty significant retrenchment of defensive strength, tied on one hand to the increasing wealth of the western part of the empire proper, and on the other hand to the collapse of Assyrian authority past the Euphrates River.

As the governor of an absolutely massive chunk of western territory, and neighboring both the unsettled Levant and the region of the Middle Euphrates that has recently become the independent kingdom of Suhu, and also now starting to suffer camel raids from the Arabs who have only recently mastered the ability to strike out from the desert in ways that even previous nomads had struggled with, Belharam Beli Usser, has both the means and very much the need to defend his lands.

To that end, he takes what had previously been a royal prerogative and founds a fortress city in his own name and takes much more direct control of the local garrison forces, probably even raising his own defenses beyond what a... governor would have normally controlled. In a royal voice, he even declares that his personal city would be eternally exempt from all taxes and levies, the act of a king in all but name.

Belharan Beleusser spares little thought for controlling anything outside his own borders. That's the responsibility of a king, after all, and therefore through that likely contributes to the loss of the Western... vassals by pulling resources into his own western territories. I wonder if it also played a role in the longevity of Suhu, the rebel territory on the Middle Euphrates that we looked at a couple months ago, but I don't really know either way.

What he does become, however, is a very important firebreak. The decay of the Assyrian Empire does not appear to worsen anywhere east of his border. Of course... Most of his legacy is the question of his political ambitions. At some point during the Age of the Magnates, Belharan Belyusser appears to lose his position and fall victim of a damnatio edict where at least some of his his names are scratched out of official records. Curiously, he's later restored evidence that beyond his actions...

In his territory, he was clearly also active in an apparently quite chaotic political situation in the capital. And it was a situation that he didn't always come out on top of, but did manage to survive. a long time, despite not always winning. A lot of the time, when you lose, you don't get another chance, but Belharambeleuser was clever enough to keep on going. Says something about him. Now that...

Politics could have affected record-keeping in this period, like with that damnatio edict, is the sign of an actually fairly serious breakdown of social norms, specifically among the upper classes. Throughout Mesopotamian history, historical records are never fully neutral. They're always written from the perspective of the powerful members of a kingdom. But for all the massaging...

They typically do an admirable job of recording what was actually happening, to the extent that they're often silent when they can't make a situation look good, rather than just fabricating things as we sometimes see from Greek... and Egyptian records. This comes, I think, from the accounting roots of all scribal education. Even a royal scribe was spending 90% of his time on economic and legal records, things which are not to be...

fudged at the risk of severe social and legal consequences. The written record was not quite a sacred and inviolable temple.

but it was still held in extremely high regard by the scribes who made their living through the power of these records and their reliability. During this period, though, even something as fundamental as the eponym lists... show signs of tampering with, as if later scribes came in and adjusted certain years to deny the lasting religious and political fame to certain Limu officials who later fell out of favor.

While this was perhaps understandable, because, of course, the decision of who to appoint as Limu official in order to give his name to an entire year was a deeply political one, but it's also a... a decision that strikes at the heart of record-keeping. It's… This eponym system is the date system on which all legal transactions were based. This is how you know what year something happened in.

While I don't have any hard evidence for this, I would suggest that this violation of scholarly standards for the sake of politics became emblematic for the Assyrians at large of a breakdown in the social order. records themselves and their dating could no longer be trusted to be independent of the whims of a bickering nobility.

It's hugely important culturally for Mesopotamians to feel like they're living in a stable and ancient social order, where things are regular, predictable, and profoundly conservative. I would suggest that this is why one of Tiglath-Pelacer's first reforms will be to remove politics entirely from the selection of Limu officials, replacing it instead with a fixed order of offices. King first, then... high court officials in sequence than governors in a set order.

Because it's in the reign of Ashurdan III that the Assyrian order really starts to fall apart, and not just in these symbolic ways. Of his 18 years, the army would march... only seven times on foreign expeditions, each of these to places that the Empire had in previous generations pacified. In the other 11 years, the kingdom was so paralyzed, either by a failure of the royal treasury to properly supply the army or by internal politicking, that it simply...

couldn't march out, despite no other apparent obstruction in five of these years. And then... Two more years, 765 and 759, were completely dominated by outbreaks of plague so massive that very little business of any sort is recorded for these years at all. Then, in 763, the sun vanished from the sky.

For historians, of course, this is great, since, of course, this is the solar eclipse of Bursagile, and we're able to precisely date that event to the hour, thanks to astronomical calculations, and thus... everything in the entire Neo-Assyrian period can also be precisely dated in reference to that. But for the Assyrians, It seems that the solar eclipse unleashed a bout of madness into their already shaky world.

A palace revolt would break out in its wake, and perhaps still going on when a second revolt in Arapa further destabilized the regime. Two years later, with no clear indication that either of the previous revolts had actually ceased, we hear that Guzana also revolted, taking probably a decent chunk of the Northwest with it.

The fire of revolt sparked by the eclipse would only be smothered with the advent of the Second Plague in 759. And the year after that, the army marched to Ghazana, probably under Tertan Shamshan. Ilu, not the king himself, to restore what could be restored of the kingdom. The next three years record nothing but peace. a sign that the Assyrian army and state was so exhausted that there was simply no way they could go out to deal with even one of the multiple hostile threats surrounding them.

This was a time of profound religious terror among the people of Assyria. We hear of official declarations of prayer, mourning, and fasting, and Asherdan spent at least some of his very limited resources improving some temples. Much of what we know was, of course, dedicated to the god Asher, but all the gods were sought out and appeased as best as possible, for such chaos in the world could only be the product of deep displeasure in the heavens. By a coincidence of history, you could say,

This also happened to be the time of significant development for the cult of Yahweh in Jerusalem. And the very best secular explanation for the book of Jonah's mission to... is that he presented to the Assyrians as an exotic... preacher from the far west with an unusual god, making just the right sort of claims about divine anger to resonate with at least a portion of the Assyrian population.

There is no historical suggestion that any significant number of Assyrians ever accepted the biblical monolatry of Yahweh. But as a polytheist, people, especially one who might be uncertain about Asher's might in this time, they would have had no problem attempting to appease this foreign angry god with prayer and fasting for a period. and then, like so many other Yahwists throughout history, forgetting about their divine patron once the hard times had passed and prosperity had returned.

Jonah's mission is, at the very least, plausible under that lens, even as our current prophetic book does show signs of the same sort of massaging to favor a particular worldview as so many other ancient Near Eastern texts show. Now, Asherdan's year and circumstances of death are highly uncertain, thanks in part to the inconsistent year lists around this time, as discussed earlier.

Some have suggested he was killed either in the plagues or the civil unrest, while others suggest that whatever his cause of death, there may have been a period where there simply was no king. The eponymous list usually tells us when a king died and how many years they reigned, but we don't actually have that here, suggesting either confusion or more likely scribal embarrassment about whatever the situation is.

happened to be. If there was no king, it's almost certain that Shamshi-Illu served to keep the kingdom together, never claiming the king's titles, but at this point acting as king in all but name. A third son of Adad-Nirari was found, a younger brother of the previous two kings, though by this point he was, of course, well into adulthood.

and he took the crown around 755 or 753, and this new king, Adad-Nirari V, spent his eight to ten years doing basically nothing, possibly unable to act independently. so deeply had the division of the kingdom and the power of the magnates reshaped Assyrian high society.

The only fragments of any text that we get from this king is him giving tax-free status to a fellow named Marduk Shara-User for his distinguished performance in assaulting the walls of some city. The text is very... badly damaged. He was already a magnate of some standing, and it's likely that his prize was the result of his power more broadly speaking, and his participation in the battle more like the excuse to gift him rewards that his status...

had already in general earned. That's our only fragment from an Assyrian king, and that it's giving honors and awards to someone else is telling. It's far from clear that Esher Nurari accomplished anything at all in his own right, quite possibly living his whole reign as the puppet of Shamshi-Illu. Beyond things like this, however, we can say objectively that Ashanurari was a bad king who failed at his job.

The first four years of his reign are recorded as years with no war, where the king remained in the Assyrian heartland and did not even attempt a campaign in any direction. We don't have any explanation for this inexcusable, irresponsible, and impious years of peace. But there can be no doubt that a man with the curse of peace in his heart must surely be despised by Asher and the other gods. It could be that the Empire simply couldn't afford a war.

It could be that the court was so divided against itself that it wasn't safe to leave Kalhu. It could be that Shamshi'ilu had some... other sort of priorities, and just didn't permit the king to go on the campaigns expected of him in the first years. Or it could be that Asher Nirari was a deeply immoral person who hated the gods so much that he would neglect such an important royal duty as the violent subjugation of his neighbors.

The specific reason is unknowable and honestly not that important. The king who failed to achieve his goals must obviously be both personally impious or sinful, and at the same time also must be hated by the gods. And I really can't stress enough the extent to which this seems to have mattered. Under the previous king, the gods were clearly...

upset. And no matter how important Shamshi-Illu became in the actual political order, it was still the Assyrian king who was the religious conduit between Asher and the Assyrian lands and peoples. But for this king, right after so much chaos in the previous decades, to have neglected so fundamental a duty as the need to conquer, That just showed that he both hated God and was hated by God in return.

And at that point, it didn't even really matter what his tax rates or his construction policies were. It didn't matter that in later years, he did attempt to campaign out in Namri, fundamentally. If God hates your king, this is very much the only thing that matters on a political level in your kingdom. And the Assyrian people as a whole were keenly aware of this lack in their leadership.

The previous decades had been rough ones, obvious indicators of divine disfavor. But the nation, it seems, had been willing to try prayer and fasting. Not just, of course, for Yahweh, they had been undertaking prayer. prayer and fasting directed at multiple gods throughout their entire pantheon without any clear signs of success. But the rot... was visible at the top now. And there is, and has always been, only one solution to that.

The revolt appears to have begun in or around the year 747, and would be fully complete by 744. Very little is known about the revolt itself. It's believed that there was one faction advocating for greater power for the magnates, while another faction supported a more absolute totalitarian king. A faction which may or may not map onto the previous two factions seems to have supported Shamshi-Illu's personal power, as well as his puppet king, Asher Nirari.

Well, another faction, back to man about whom little is known today. At the time, he was clearly a man of some importance in the larger field of Assyrian nobility, and quite possibly was a fourth son of Adad-Nirari, or a grandchild. by a lesser line. He could have been the youngest brother of the previous four kings by a less prestigious mother, or he could be... a grandchild in not a direct line of succession, but he was clearly still in the dynasty as a whole, is the point.

This man arose with a clear sense of the problems facing Assyria. The divine misfortune, the logistical challenges, the instability. and he came with a plan for changing the nation at a fundamental level. His plan, the reforms of Tiglath-Pileser, would be implemented at lightning pace and shape the coming century. So join us next time for the explosive birth of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

And don't forget to help me out by sharing these episodes on social media. Let your friends know if you enjoyed the Urartu series or if you're hyped for Neo-Assyria. Your help in sharing the show around really makes a difference for the show being able to continue. It's gonna be good. We got a lot coming up. It's gonna be dense and thick and full of... War and reforms and good stuff. I really appreciate you being here for it. Thank you for listening.