The Assyrian Empire

Abstract

This chapter offers an overview of the Assyrian Empire’s society and culture—inevitably selective due to the wealth of sources and of research perspectives. After tracing continuities going back to the Late Bronze Age, a survey of the textual evidence (learned, official, and mundane) is used to reveal the multilayered culture of the empire, supplemented with evidence from figurative art, a further key source of narrative-historical information, with a particular focus on the depictions of war. The cosmopolitan character of the Assyrian imperial court is investigated by an analysis of the textual data and artifacts reflecting external cultural imprints from Anatolia to the Levant and Egypt. The multiethnic patchwork of peoples forming the empire’s population is analyzed through two distinct and complementary lenses: ethnicity, as a cultural and social construct that shapes group identities from within and outside; and language, as the archival data shed much light on the coexistence of languages and cultures in the cities and the countryside throughout the empire. In the first case, the crucial difference of status that was perceived between “Assyrians” and “others” is elucidated through positive and negative examples. In the second case, onomastics serve to highlight the diffuse tolerance of the imperial ruling class for the linguistically and culturally diverse component communities of the empire—provided that they honored the “Assyrian way of life.” Contextualizing the extraordinary “superiority complex” at state level that marked the Assyrian imperial experience, the chapter emphasizes the optimistic and ultimately positive dimensions of the Assyrian Empire.