December 612 B.C. Decline of Neo-Assyrian Empire
Ngo, Robin.
“The Decline of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.” Biblical
Archaeology. 13 Nov 2014. http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/ancient-near-eastern-world/the-decline-of-the-neo-assyrian-empire/. Accessed 13
Nov 2014.
The
Decline of the Neo-Assyrian Empire
Did overpopulation and drought contribute to its collapse?
Assyrian King Sargon II (721–705 B.C.E.), holding the
staff of kingship and wearing the royal conical crown, meets with a court
official.
The mighty Neo-Assyrian Empire, which came to
control the lands between the Mediterranean Sea and the Zagros Mountains as
well as Egypt and part of Anatolia, collapsed at the end of the seventh century
B.C.E. It is traditionally believed that the empire began to disintegrate due
to a series of military conflicts as well as civil unrest. The destruction of
the Assyrian capital Nineveh by a coalition of Babylonian and Median invaders
in 612 B.C.E. marked the fall of the empire. A new study published in the scientific journal Climatic Change argues that a population boom and drought—two factors that have
thus far been underexplored—may have contributed to the rapid demise of what
some scholars consider the world’s first true empire.
The study, led by Adam W. Schneider of the
University of California, San Diego, and Selim F. Adalı of Koç University, uses
recently published paleoclimate data from various parts of the Near East as
well as textual and archaeological evidence to suggest that the region
experienced an episode of severe drought in the second half of the seventh
century B.C.E. The Assyrian heartland had undergone a population explosion
during the late eighth and early seventh centuries, largely due to the forced
resettlement of conquered peoples into the empire. The researchers suggest that
the major population growth may have greatly hindered the state’s ability to
withstand the drought that plagued the region in the latter part of the seventh
century.
“We strongly suspect that any economic damage
inflicted upon the Assyrian Empire by drought would have served as a key
stimulus for the increasing unrest which was to characterize its final
decades,” Schneider and Adalı wrote in their paper.
“At a more global level,” the researchers
caution, “the fate of the Assyrian Empire also teaches modern societies about
the consequences of prioritizing policies intended to maximize short-term
economic and political benefit over those which favor long-term economic
security and risk mitigation.”
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Ancient Iraq and the Modern West examines
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