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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.
Further east the Sutean, Aramean and Arab tribes formed confederations in the Syrian Desert and the Middle Euphrates region. Further south in the region of modern day Israel and Jordan were Hebrew and Canaanite-spreaking Biblical kingdoms of Israel, Judah, Ammon, Edom and Moab. There was also the Arab tribe of the Qedarites.
The giving of traditional Assyrian names was banned and Assyrian schools, political parties, churches and literature were repressed. Assyrians were heavily pressured into identifying as Iraqi/Syrian Christians. Assyrians were not recognized as an ethnic group by the governments and they fostered divisions among Assyrians along religious lines ...
The Neo-Assyrian Empire succeeded the Old Assyrian Empire (c. 2025–1378 BCE), and the Middle Assyrian Empire (1365–934 BCE) of the Late Bronze Age. During this period, Aramaic was also made an official language of the empire, alongside Akkadian. [6] The Assyrian army is said to have included as high as 300,000 soldiers at its prime.
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.
While the Assyrian rulers of the Old Assyrian period had governed with the title iššiak ("governor") jointly with a city assembly made up of influential figures from Assur, the Middle Assyrian kings were autocratic rulers who used the title šar ("king") and sought equal status to the monarchs of other empires. The transition into an empire ...
He consolidated Assyrian control over the regions conquered by his predecessors and, by the end of his 27-year reign, Assyria was master of Mesopotamia, The Levant, western Iran, Israel, Jordan and much of Asia Minor. Due to old age, in the last six years of his reign, he passed command of his armies to the "Turtanu" (General) Dayyan-Assur.
Assyrians primarily lived in the provinces of Hakkari, Şırnak, and Mardin in southeastern Turkey, These areas had sizable Kurdish and Armenian populations. Starting in the nineteenth century, the Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians of eastern Anatolia, including the Hakkari mountains in Van province, were the subject of forced relocations and executions, a possible cause being religious persecution.