Rise of Empires: Akkadians and Assyrians

The Land Between the Rivers

Mesopotamia is the land between and around the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (in present-day Iraq). There are some river valleys like the Nile that flood predictably, making it easy to live and farm near them. The Mesopotamian rivers are not the Nile. The currents are more violent, and people living there had to work harder to produce food. To make matters worse, resources like wood were scarce. This meant that societies in Mesopotamia had to trade or fight with each other to get the resources they needed.

In 3000 BCE, Mesopotamia was a land of city- states.¹ Most people lived in walled cities under the rule of a king. Dozens of city-states along the Tigris and Euphrates fought with each other in a struggle for power and limited resources. Around 2334 BCE, one city grew powerful enough to start conquering the others.

Five-thousand-year-old text messages!

Before 3000 BCE, the cities of Mesopotamia were predominately Sumerian. Sumerian was the dominant language of Mesopotamia until this time, and it was the first written language. The Sumerians developed a system of writing called cuneiform that became the basis of several later written languages. Around 3000 BCE, a new people migrated into northern Mesopotamia. They spoke a Semitic language.² We call them Akkadians after the city they built, Akkad. The Akkadians ruled history’s first empire.

As you’ve read, an empire is a political organization with a dominant core state that controls weaker states around that core. Empires have flexible borders and a core culture that exerts control over other cultures. A bunch of different ancient empires rose in Mesopotamia because it was pretty easy to get to. The Nile river valley, by contrast, was surrounded by hundreds of miles of desert and quite hard to reach. This is why Mesopotamia was home to the first empires: it was a bunch of separate city-states in an agriculturally rich land that was easy to march an army across. Many foreign invaders did just that, building new empires and destroying old ones.

The Akkadians

In 2334 BCE, Sargon of Akkad launched a series of conquests from his city on the Euphrates River. The empire he conquered extended from the Persian Gulf, up the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers as far as Anatolia (modern Turkey). To support his wars, Sargon created the world’s first permanent army. Other states in this era only had armies during war, but not in times of peace. Sargon’s professional army allowed him to build the world’s first empire. With 5,400 soldiers, Sargon quickly extended Akkad’s control over several weaker city-states in the region.

The Akkadian Empire did not last long after Sargon’s death. In just a few generations, it collapsed, and Mesopotamia returned to a collection of warring city-states. However, the region would not be long without an empire.

The Assyrians

They might not have been the first, but the Assyrian Empire was much longer-lived than the Akkadian, and its influence was much larger. The empire lasted from 2025 to 609 BCE, though it was interrupted a few times. Historians divide the Assyrian empire into three parts: “Old Kingdom,” “Middle Empire,” and “Neo-Assyrian Empire”.³ For about 1,400 years, the Assyrian Empire dominated Mesopotamia.

The Assyrians were originally a group of pastoralists who spoke the Akkadian language and migrated south into Mesopotamia. The Assyrian Empire began modestly, with its city of Asur originally ruled by Akkad. After the Akkadian empire collapsed, Asur dominated several nearby cities like Nineveh, which later became the Assyrian capital. By the seventh century BCE, they ruled an empire stretching from Egypt to Iran.

Empire and power, violence and management

The Assyrians were really good at war. They’re remembered in particular for their ruthlessness. They demolished cities that resisted and executed people in horrific ways. One of their tactics when conquering a new people was to steal statues and religious symbols from temples and bring them home. This practice of “godnapping” was intended to lower the morale of conquered peoples. The Assyrians also probably believed that taking the statues would prevent the gods of the conquered from hearing their prayers. But the Assyrians didn’t just deport gods. They also moved conquered people around their empire. Relocating conquered peoples made cities less unified, less likely to organize a rebellion, and easier to rule over.

In addition to their fearsome abilities at warfare, the Assyrians were also very good administrators. While the Akkadian Empire had taken a more hands-off approach, the Assyrians micromanaged the areas they conquered. They appointed Assyrian governors and officials to run conquered cities and maintain political control. The power of the Assyrian military rested on the control of its periphery (outlying areas) and a hierarchy that increased production.

Production, women, and enslavement

Mesopotamian (including Akkadian and Assyrian) society was patriarchal, but women played important public roles. They could act as witnesses in legal and financial matters and own property. Generally, women were employed in the home, in food production, or textile weaving. But women sometimes worked in typically male jobs and vice versa. Women also wielded political power. At least one woman ruled the Assyrian Empire, and female officials known as sakintus acted as palace administrators.

Conditions for Mesopotamian women declined over time. By the end of the Assyrian period, they were more restricted in job opportunities and public life. One Assyrian law divided women based on whether a man controlled them. The law declared that “a wife-of- a-man” and any “daughters-of-a-man” were to wear veils while in public, which signaled a higher status. Women who were on their own, enslaved women, and women who worked as prostitutes could not wear a veil in public. Adultery was punishable by death, and many other restrictions were placed on women’s bodies and sexuality.

Women weren’t the only people who were restricted in this society. The use of forced labor was central to production and distribution in Mesopotamia. Agricultural work was difficult and dangerous on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Both the Akkadians and Assyrians enslaved their prisoners of war. Enslaved women were forced into textile production or housekeeping for elites, and men worked in agriculture, mines, and construction. The Assyrians administered a nearly industrial level of textile weaving with the labor of enslaved men and women. They used these textiles to trade for silver from the west, and could spend that on luxuries from the east.

Trade networks

The Akkadians and Assyrians came to Mesopotamia as foreign invaders. Both empires started because their rulers wanted to control more trade routes. Both Akkad and Asur were inland cities, far away from the ports of the eastern Mediterranean and Persian Gulf. They began their conquests with the goal of seizing important trading centers and getting access to the sea. The conquests of both empires united the divided city-states of Mesopotamia, enabling them to trade peacefully with each other and with distant regions. Beginning with Akkad, strong empires made it possible for merchants to create trade networks between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley.

The fun of buying nice things didn’t begin with the modern shopping mall. The Mesopotamian empires often traded with distant societies for luxury goods. They traded with the Indus River valley cities by sea, and overland routes connected them as far west as Egypt and as far east as Afghanistan. As luxury goods moved along these networks, so did ideas and new technology. Assyrian advances in chariot warfare and ironworking spread through trade and conquest, as did Mesopotamian gods and cuneiform. The Assyrians extended regional networks across their empire and beyond. Assyrian roads and a postal system connected the region internally and improved trade. As one of the first empires to adopt iron in weapon making, the Assyrian conquests spread new iron technology across their conquered lands.

Conclusion: The land between the empires

You’re going to read a lot about empires in this class. They’ve been a really popular way to organize human communities ever since Sargon declared himself the “True King.” One thing you’ll notice is that all empires eventually collapse. They might last for 100 years or 1,000. They might decline or fall to invasion or become something new. But they all end.

The Akkadian Empire lasted for somewhere between 100 and 200 years. Why did it collapse so quickly? Archaeologists now believe they have identified the small but powerful culprit: dust. Several centuries of dry and dusty conditions—caused by climate change and over-farming—crippled the mighty Akkadian empire. As dust and drought choked Mesopotamian agriculture, whole cities disappeared from the archeological record. By contrast, the Assyrian Empire, like many empires since, collapsed because it depended on military expansion. Dust they could handle, but this expansion was expensive and made a lot of enemies. The financial and administrative burden of running the empire made it crumble from within and gave enemy armies an easier target. Though these two empires collapsed, they were inspirations and lessons for later empires. The Assyrians replaced the Akkadians with an even larger, more powerful empire. The Assyrians were in turn replaced by the Persian Achaemenid Empire, which were replaced by… well you get the idea.

1 A city-state is a city and the surrounding territory around that city that are under the control of a government or ruler.
2 Semitic languages are part of a language family now spoken widely in North Africa and the Middle East. Languages in this family include Arabic, Hebrew, and Assyrian, among others.
3 Neo is just a fancy way to say “new”.