The Neo-Assyrian Period

The Neo-Assyrian Period, 911 to 609 BCE, was the era in which the Assyrian state of northern Mesopotamia built the largest and most militarily formidable empire the ancient Near East had yet seen, eventually controlling territory stretching from the Persian Gulf to Egypt under kings including Tiglath-Pileser III, Sargon II, Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal. Assyrian military success rested on innovations including a large standing professional army, iron weaponry, siege engineering capable of breaching fortified cities, and a deliberate, well-documented policy of terror and mass deportation of conquered populations used to suppress rebellion, practices depicted in extensive relief carvings recovered from Assyrian royal palaces. Ashurbanipal, who reigned from 668 to 627 BCE, assembled a vast library at Nineveh containing tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets, including the most complete surviving copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh, making his reign a high point of Mesopotamian scholarship as well as military power. The overextended empire collapsed with startling speed after Ashurbanipal's death, and the Assyrian capital Nineveh fell to a coalition of Babylonians and Medes in 612 BCE, with the last Assyrian resistance ending by 609 BCE.