Mark Healy reveals why the Assyrian Empire was a power to be reckoned with
The great civilisations of ancient Mesopotamia are often overlooked or play supporting roles in the history of neighbouring powers, but the ancient Assyrians were a remarkable people. Between 912 and 612 BCE in particular, in what is called the Neo-Assyrian period, at its height this kingdom ruled from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf and from the Red Sea to the Caspian Sea and is considered by some to be the first world empire in history. We spoke with Mark Healy, author of a new book on the empire called The Ancient Assyrians, to dig into how they built such an extensive powerbase and how it collapsed very suddenly.
What attributes made the Assyrians unique among their contemporaries that helped them build their empire?
I think a number of things: ruthlessness, particularly. I think they were pretty efficient when it came to the use of the military. They clearly thought about their army in a way which doesn’t seem to have been the case with their opposition. The core of their army was fully professional and I think they thought pretty carefully about things like tactics and how best to use the forces in battle. I also think a major factor would have been their development of an independent cavalry arm, which would have been the first in history and the progenitor of all the types of cavalry arms that came afterwards.
How did the Assyrian Empire compare in terms of its economy or its agricultural base to its regional neighbours of the period?
What we do know is that for the first two centuries of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, rainfall was very high, which led to very high grain harvests. I make the point at the beginning of the book that the grain harvest was so important to the Assyrian kings and allowed their troops to be given food to conduct the campaigns. Where they had famines, they obviously couldn’t provide food for the soldiers any more than for their population, which is where you tend to see a decline in Assyrian military actions. Assyria itself, when the rains fell and the crops regularly appeared on an annual basis, was a very fertile part of the ancient Near East, and was a fairly major factor in underpinning the ability of the Assyrian army to go to war on such a regular basis. That being said, most of the resources that were needed by the Assyrian army to equip its army were taken from other cultures, other polities, and certainly part of their imperialistic expansion was to locate and gain control of sources of the resources necess
