Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Assyria (/ ə ˈ s ɪər i ə /) was a short-lived Roman province in Mesopotamia that was created by Trajan in 116 during his campaign against the Parthian Empire. After Trajan's death, the newly proclaimed emperor Hadrian ordered the evacuation of Assyria in 118.
A giant lamassu from the royal palace of the Neo-Assyrian king Sargon II (r. 722–705 BC) at Dur-Sharrukin The history of the Assyrians encompasses nearly five millennia, covering the history of the ancient Mesopotamian civilization of Assyria, including its territory, culture and people, as well as the later history of the Assyrian people after the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 609 BC.
The Old Assyrian period was the second stage of Assyrian history, covering the history of the city of Assur from its rise as an independent city-state under Puzur-Ashur I c. 2025 BC [c] to the foundation of a larger Assyrian territorial state after the accession of Ashur-uballit I c. 1363 BC, [d] which marks the beginning of the succeeding Middle Assyrian period.
The library is an archaeological discovery credited to Austen Henry Layard; most tablets were taken to England and can now be found in the British Museum, but the first discovery was made in late 1849 in the so-called South-West Palace, which was the Royal Palace of king Sennacherib (705–681 BCE).
Before Assyrian hegemony ended, the Assyrians brought the highest civilization to the then known world. From the Caspian to Cyprus, from Anatolia to Egypt, Assyrian imperial expansion would bring into the Assyrian sphere nomadic and barbaric communities, and would bestow the gift of civilization upon them." [16]
The language was at first called Babylonian and/or Assyrian, but has now come to be known as Akkadian. [19] From 1850 onwards, there was a growing suspicion that the Semite inhabitants of Babylon and Assyria were not the inventors of cuneiform system of writing, and that they had instead borrowed it from some other language and culture.
In the Old Assyrian period, when Assyria was merely a city-state centered on the city of Assur, the state was typically referred to as ālu Aššur ("city of Ashur"). From the time of its rise as a territorial state in the 14th century BC and onward, Assyria was referred to in official documents as māt Aššur ("land of Ashur"), marking its shift to being a regional polity.
Assyrian populations are distributed between the Assyrian homeland and the Assyrian diaspora. There are no official statistics, and estimates vary greatly, between less than one million in the Assyrian homeland, [2] and 3.3 million with the diaspora included, [72] mostly due to the uncertainty of the number of Assyrians in Iraq and Syria.