Assyria, the Legendary Empire

Modern archaeology and scholarship, as well some of the books of the Bible, give us today an enormously better sense of what the Assyrian Empire was than the ancient Greeks and Romans knew. Unlike for their own history, they had no access to writing that is now lost. Thus, my criticisms of John of Nikiu, were not for his lack of truth, but his odd way of making things up. While, as names for literature, the figures of Sardanapalus, Semiramis, and Ninus were not uncommon, they were types for "oriental" luxuriousness or aggression, not historical personages. My purpose in this post is not to say anything about real Assyrian history, or the myths that the Assyrians told, but how the ancient Greeks and Romans put their limited knowledge into their idea of history.

I will be illustrating this through two historians: Herodotus and Velleius Paterculus. A third historian, Diodorus Siculus, wrote somewhat more extensively about the subject, in my understanding, but I have not read that part of his work.

While I will be getting much more extensively into both Herodotus and his work in the future, I just want to point out that he lived significantly closer in time to the final fall of the Assyrian Empire than he did to the time of Julius Caesar. In fact, he was born closer to the fall of Assyria than he was to the death of Alexander the Great, let alone the beginning of Roman involvement and conquest in Greece. Yet, already for Herodotus, Assyria was just a memory from the hazy and distant past. In the first chapter of the first book of his Histories, the Assyrians are named as an ancient people who did commerce with the Phoenicians. At 1.95, he explains that they held dominion over "inland Asia" (Robin Waterford's translation for Oxford World Classics) for about 500 years, when the Medes began to rebel, soon followed by their other subjugated people, based on Persians sources Herodotus considers especially accurate. At 1.102, the Medes made war anew on the Assyrians, who had been reduced to little more than Nineveh, in order to enlarge their own empire. At 1.106, Babylon is considered the one part of Assyria that remained independent of Medea at its height. Chapter 131 of book 1 includes some discussion of how the Assyrians (now just a people, not an empire) influenced Persian religion. Cyrus' conquest of Babylonia in 1.178-200 equates the Babylonians with the Assyrians (John of Nikiu, remember, equated Assyria with Persia).

Going through Egyptian history in Book 2, Herodotus mentions the Assyrian king Sennacherib's invasion at chapter 141. At 2.150, he relates that Sardanapalus, the son of Ninus, dug subterranean tunnels in Nineveh to protect his treasures. Listing the Persian provinces under Darius in Book 3, Babylon is considered the leading city of Assyria in chapter 92. In Book 6, Herodotus tells the story of Perseus, and considers (John's) an Assyrian origin to be a Persian variant at chapter 54. Finally, at 7.63, he says that the Greeks called "Syrians" the Assyrian soldiers in the Persian army.

Velleius Paterculus wrote about 500 years later, in the middle of the first century of the common era. He was a Roman soldier, whose endeavors writing history were of an amateur quality. The first book of two in his Compendium of Roman History (Frederick W. Shipley's translation for the Loeb Classical Library) is very fragmentary, and dealt with events prior to the Punic Wars. At 1.6.1, he says that Assyrian hegemony in Asia passed to the Medes 870 years before his time, after holding it for 1,070 years (1.6.2). He considers Ninus and Semiramis the founders of the dynasty, and Sardanapalus the last, with 32 generations in between. At 1.6.6, which the notes consider a later gloss, Assyria is called the "first…world power."

Thus we can say that the basic Classical understanding of the Assyrian Empire was something like the following: The Assyrians held the first empire, stemming from a time before we can really remember, a time possibly coeval with the events of Greek mythology – Herodotus places the Trojan War in the 13^th century BCE and Velleius puts Ninus and Semiramis in the 19^th or 20^th. They were centered in Nineveh/Ninus, and had kings named Ninus and Sardanapalus, and a queen named Semiramis. Eventually, just as our historical understanding comes to light in the 7^th century or so, the empire was broken apart by the Medes (and the Babylonians to the more sophisticated). Nineveh was destroyed, and, by the sixth century, the first Persian emperor Cyrus (after defeating the Medes) conquered Mesopotamia, which includes the Assyrian homeland in the north of the region. Soon, at least to outsiders, they were indistinguishable from the Babylonians to the south, or Syrians to the west (although I don't exactly know that "Syria" was a meaningful term before Greek dealings in the area). Perhaps their loss of identity (to outsiders, at least) is a fitting retribution for their own policy of transferring conquered peoples from their native land to extinguish national sentiments – the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel are the obvious example.