50 Fun Facts About Assyrian Empire

Which animals were released from cages into an arena for Assyrian kings to kill with arrows, spears or swords?

Lions had been reserved for royalty to kill for over a thousand years in Mesopotamia, and carvings of the staged hunts now fill a room at the British Museum.

To which Assyrian capital does the Bible's Book of Jonah send its reluctant prophet to preach?

Nineveh was the largest city in the world for about fifty years, and a shrine to the prophet stood on one of its ruin mounds until 2014.

Which ancient epic, famous for its flood story, was pieced together from tablets found in an Assyrian royal library?

Gilgamesh caused a sensation in 1872, when George Smith translated its flood tablet and a London newspaper paid for him to go and hunt for the missing pieces.

Which Wonder of the Ancient World may really have been built by an Assyrian king, scholar Stephanie Dalley argues?

The Hanging Gardens have left no trace at Babylon, and Dalley's theory moves them north to a palace fed by an 80-kilometre chain of canals and aqueducts.

Which modern country holds the ruins of all four great Assyrian capitals, one of them inside the city of Mosul?

Iraq's Assyrian sites sit close together: a second capital lies just 30 kilometres south of Mosul, and a third only 15 kilometres to its northeast.

Which script, pressed into wet clay with a cut reed, did Assyrian scribes use for letters and royal records?

Cuneiform is named for the Latin word for wedge, the mark a reed stylus leaves in clay, and it stayed in use for more than three thousand years.

Which militant group bulldozed and blew up Assyrian palace ruins in 2015, calling the ancient carvings blasphemous?

Islamic State filmed its fighters at work with hammers, bulldozers and explosives, and the head of UNESCO called the destruction a war crime.

According to Herodotus, which creatures gnawed through an Assyrian army's quivers and bowstrings as it attacked Egypt?

Mice may be a memory of disease in the camp: the Bible has an angel strike down 185,000 men of the same army in one night, and some historians suspect plague.

Which religion did the Assyrians adopt in the first centuries AD, long after their empire fell?

Christianity took root among the Assyrians so early that their Church of the East became one of the faith's great missionary bodies, spreading it across Asia.

Which Assyrian wind demon, made famous by the film The Exorcist, was worn on amulets to protect pregnant women?

Pazuzu was feared in his own right, but his image was thought to drive the baby-snatching demoness Lamashtu back to the underworld, so mothers wore his head as a charm.

What name is given to the human-headed winged bulls that guarded the gateways of Assyrian palaces?

Lamassu at the earlier palaces were carved with five legs, so that a visitor sees two from the front and four from the side.

Which wheeled siege weapon do Assyrian palace carvings show being pushed up earthen ramps to smash city walls?

The battering ram was one of Assyria's great contributions to siege warfare, and crews draped it in wet animal skins so that defenders could not set it alight.

Which stepped temple tower did Assyrian kings raise beside their shrines, as Sumerians and Babylonians had before them?

A ziggurat had a core of sun-baked brick under a skin of fired brick, and kings sometimes had their names stamped on the glazed outer layer.

Which fragrant timber did Assyrian kings bring from distant western mountains to roof their grandest palaces?

Cedar was so admired that one king planted a man-made hill with it beside his new capital, copying the mountains of north Syria.

On which river did the Assyrians build their first capital and, further upstream, their largest city?

The Tigris flows faster than its siltier twin to the west, and its old Sumerian name can be read as the swift river.

Which Babylonian crown prince crushed Egypt's army at Carchemish in 605 BC, ending hopes of an Assyrian revival?

Nebuchadnezzar took the throne that same year when his father died, and went on to rule Babylon for 43 years, the longest reign of his dynasty.

Which English poet wrote the 1821 tragedy Sardanapalus, about a pleasure-loving last king of Assyria?

Lord Byron's play was a source for Delacroix's huge canvas of the king's death, and Berlioz won the Prix de Rome in 1830 with a cantata on the same story.

Which legendary warrior-queen of Greek tradition grew out of the real Assyrian queen Shammuramat?

Semiramis was credited in legend with founding Babylon and even with inventing trousers; the real queen's husband and son both ruled Assyria.

In which modern country did Assyrian merchants run a trading colony at Kanesh nearly 4,000 years ago?

Turkey's Kültepe mound has given up over 22,000 clay tablets from the colony, nearly all from the merchants' quarter rather than the local king's upper city.

Which small engraved stones did Assyrian officials roll across wet clay to mark documents as their own?

Cylinder seals were usually pierced through the middle and worn on a necklace, so that the owner's signature was always to hand.

Which Assyrian king, remembered as the empire's last great ruler, sent out scribes to stock his vast library?

Ashurbanipal's collection may have held over 100,000 texts, and it was not surpassed in size until the Library of Alexandria several centuries later.

Which Assyrian king razed Babylon in 689 BC and was murdered eight years later by two of his sons?

Sennacherib destroyed the city after years of Babylonian revolts had cost him a son, and his own murder shocked his contemporaries.

Which biblical kingdom, land of the Ten Lost Tribes, was conquered by Assyria around 720 BC?

Israel was not emptied by the conquest: many people stayed on around Samaria and eventually came to be known as the Samaritans.

Which people from ancient Iran joined the Babylonians to sack Assyria's greatest city in 612 BC?

The Medes, ruled by King Cyaxares, had already sacked the sacred city of Assur two years earlier, before their Babylonian allies had even arrived.

Which language overtook Akkadian as the everyday tongue of the Assyrian Empire from the 9th century BC onwards?

Aramaic pushed Akkadian back into the palace as a language of the elite, and it remained the common tongue of the region until the 14th century AD.

Which crime novelist cleaned ancient Assyrian ivories with her face cream while her husband led the excavation?

Agatha Christie also used a fine knitting needle and an orange stick on the carvings, which her husband Max Mallowan was finding by the thousand.

Which sky event sent Assyrian kings into hiding while a stand-in sat on the throne to take the bad luck?

An eclipse was read as a death sentence for a king, so a substitute reigned for up to a hundred days and was then put to death in his place.

Which animals did Assyrian state messengers ride in pairs between relay stations to speed the king's letters?

Mules were picked for their strength and hardiness, and riding with two meant a messenger could swap mounts and was never stranded by a lame one.

Which metal did Assyrian armies adopt for weapons and armour as the empire expanded after 900 BC?

Iron and the large-scale use of cavalry were the two most important military developments of the age, and Assyrian tactics were copied for millennia.

Assyrian kings headed off revolts by forcing an estimated four million conquered people to do what over 250 years?

Made to resettle far from home, peoples were swapped between regions to blur old identities, while skilled deportees were put to work in their own trades.

Which Assyrian king built a new capital named after himself, only to die in battle a year after moving in?

Sargon II's body was never recovered from the battlefield, and his son promptly abandoned the unfinished city and moved the court elsewhere.

Tiglath-Pileser III replaced Assyria's summer-only levy of conscripts with what, starting in the 740s BC?

Professional soldiers, formed into what was called the king's unit, could campaign in any season, and some historians date Assyria's true beginning as an empire from his reign.

Which Assyrian king captured Memphis in 671 BC and rebuilt the Babylon that his own father had destroyed?

Esarhaddon's conquest of Egypt made his empire the largest the world had ever seen, and his inscriptions blame Babylon's ruin on its gods, never on his father.

Which biblical king did an Assyrian ruler boast of shutting up like a caged bird inside his own city?

Hezekiah bought the Assyrians off with gold stripped from the doors of the Temple, along with silver, jewels and ivory-inlaid furniture.

Which Judean city's fall to Assyria in 701 BC was carved across the walls of a whole palace room?

Lachish was stormed up a siege ramp, and the carvings, now in London, are the most elaborate picture of a siege made for any Assyrian monarch.

Which British explorer excavated two Assyrian capitals in the 1840s before entering Parliament as a Liberal MP?

Austen Henry Layard wrote up his digs in travel books ranked among the best in English, and ended his career as ambassador in Madrid and Constantinople.

Which Assyrian capital, the Calah of the Bible, held four queens' tombs that Iraqi archaeologists began finding in 1988?

Nimrud was where Assyria buried its queens, while the kings lay in Assur, and the tombs held a treasure of 613 pieces of gold jewellery and precious stones.

Which Mesopotamian goddess of love and war, worshipped at Arbela, was held to protect Assyrian kings?

Ishtar of Arbela spoke to the king through prophets, and more of the surviving Assyrian prophecies come from her than from any other deity.

Which state's forces carried out the Sayfo, the mass killing of Assyrians during the First World War?

The Ottoman Empire's troops and allied Kurdish tribes killed and drove out Assyrians from 1915, and survivors named the slaughter Sayfo, meaning sword.

Which city did an Assyrian army besiege in 701 BC yet fail to capture, an escape the Bible credits to an angel?

Jerusalem was spared at a price: its king submitted and paid a heavy tribute, which is why the Assyrian annals record the campaign as a success.

Which Assyrian king opened his new palace at Kalhu with a ten-day banquet for almost 70,000 guests?

Ashurnasirpal II was notorious for his brutality, and he used enslaved captives to build the city whose opening feast he recorded so proudly.

Which mountain kingdom centred on Lake Van was Assyria's great northern rival in the 8th century BC?

Urartu shares its name with the Bible's Ararat; it frequently fought Assyria and became, for a time, the most powerful state in the Near East.

Which Elamite capital did an Assyrian army level in 647 BC, boasting of sowing salt across the land?

Susa recovered and later passed to the Persian Empire; it is the setting of the Bible's Book of Esther and the place where Hammurabi's law stone was dug up.

Which Hurrian-speaking kingdom, a rival of Egypt and the Hittites, held Assyria as a vassal in the 15th century BC?

Mitanni was crippled by a Hittite invasion in the 14th century BC, and Assyria seized some of its old overlord's land to become a great power again.

Which Egyptian city of great temples did an Assyrian army sack in 663 BC, carrying off two giant obelisks?

Thebes's fall echoed across the Near East, and the Bible's Book of Nahum holds it up as an example of the ruin that can befall a great city.

Which metal, vital to Bronze Age smiths, did Assyrian donkey caravans haul by the ton to their distant trading colonies?

Tin came from distant mountains to the east, and about a hundred tons of it went out with 100,000 textiles, paid for with some twenty-five tons of silver.

The Assyrian King List describes Assyria's earliest rulers as kings who lived in what kind of dwelling?

Tents suggest that these first names, if they were real people at all, were nomadic tribal chieftains who never actually ruled the city of Assur.

On which Mediterranean island did local kings pay tribute to Assyria and set up a stele of its king around 707 BC?

Cyprus was too distant for Assyria to control, so the stele simply marked the edge of its king's world; found at Larnaca in 1845, it is now in Berlin.

A polished oval of rock crystal found in an Assyrian palace in 1850 may have served as what optical aid?

A magnifying glass of about three-times power is one reading, handy for engravers, though the British Museum suspects it was only a piece of furniture inlay.

In which month do modern Assyrians celebrate Kha b-Nisan, a New Year festival rooted in the ancient Akitu rites?

April the first is the date, so the Assyrian New Year now shares its day with April Fools' and tends to be more lighthearted than the ancient festival.