In the Middle Assyrian period, the empire of Assyria twice took the leading position in Mesopotamia. The first time was in the 13th century, during the reigns of Adad-Nirari I, Sulmanu-asaridu I and Tukulti-apil-Esarra I. Assyria first appeared on the international stage in the later Bronze Age, during the reign of King Assur-uballit (second half of the 14th century). Suddenly, but with all the more determination. The king, writing to the Egyptian pharaoh, called himself a 'great king' and sought to negotiate as an equal with the other great powers, which, while not officially recognising Assyria as one of the great nations, in practice behaved very much as if they were aware that a new protagonist had appeared on the political and economic stage of the age. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In fact, barely 30 years after the death of Assur-uballit, the first great Assyrian king, Adad-nirari, was already enjoying full international acclaim. Despite this, his policies were largely focused on military affairs, with Upper Mesopotamia being his main focus. Thanks to Adad-Nirari, the remnants of the former Mitanni Empire, then known as Hanigalbat, were transferred from the Hittite sphere of influence to the Assyrian sphere of interest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hostilities between the Hittites and the Assyrians intensified, and although the two empires used a whole range of economic instruments against each other, the situation remained basically unchanged. In the first year of the reign of Tukulti-Ninurta I, the king who succeeded Sulmanu-Asaridu, worked to consolidate the borders. He opposed the Hittites in the west and the hill tribes in the north, and then turned southwards, king of Babylonia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tukulti-Ninurta was very active in all areas of Assyrian politics, and gradually broke away from tradition to show more and more originality. The ideology of the kingdom was expressed in the king's inscriptions, which praised his architectural and military successes. The inscriptions of the period, such as the king's prayers to the god Assur, are of considerable literary value. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The plans to resolve the \"Babylonian question\" were primarily aimed at restoring Babylonian cultural and religious - priestly - supremacy. Some elements of Babylonian 'high culture' were attempted to be adopted and adapted to the policies of the Assyrian king. Tukulti-Ninurta's scribal schools began to adopt the Babylonian dialect, in which the epic poem was written, in which Tukulti-Ninurta himself was the protagonist of the war against the Kassu king. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The great literary work commissioned by the Assyrian king is a kind of summary of Tukulti-Ninurta's ideological programme. He is the king who must take up the fight against the traitors and defeat them in order to restore the order of justice betrayed by the god Assur, the infidelity and wickedness of Assyria's enemies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tukulti- Ninurta was undoubtedly a powerful ruler. Not only did he order the writing of an epic poem, but he also built a new capital for his empire, foreshadowing the typical features of the Assyrian Empire of the 1st millennium. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet Tukulti-Ninurta was about to die a violent death. But the Assyrian Empire, despite losing its leading position in the Middle East for nearly another century, managed to survive the crisis of the Bronze Age to Iron Age transition. Once the crisis of the 12th century was over, the Assyrian kings' warrior spirit returned. Assur I of Assyria put an end to the Kassu dynasty in Babylonia (around 1155). However, he did not succeed in gaining a hegemony. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The beneficiaries of the power vacuum left in Babylonia were the Elamites, who in the mid-12th century recognised the opportunity to exploit the advantage. The Elamites ravaged Babylon on several occasions. Among the treasures they took away as spoils of war were the statue of Marduk and the pillars of law dedicated to the sun god Hamurapi Samas. In the last decades of the century, the kings of Isin took power in southern Babylonia under King Nabu-kudurri-uzur I. But his successors were again faced with a resurgent Assyrian power. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The long reign of Tukulti-apil-Esarra I (1114-1076) revived the greatness that Assyria enjoyed under Sulmanu-asaridu and Tukulti-Ninurta. The last great king of the Middle Assyrian period not only excelled as a military leader, but also made significant achievements in the cultural sphere. He founded a library that housed works that had been looted during his reign and during the conquests of his predecessor Tukulti-Ninurta. In addition, the quality of the royal inscriptions reached a remarkable level. Yet the power of Tukulti-apil-Esarra proved to be phenomenal. Throughout the rest of the 11th century, all the Mesopotamian states suffered a fundamental demographic and economic crisis. The 10th century was the most disastrous century in Mesopotamia, and especially in Babylonia. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But in the 12th century, Assyria set about laying the foundations for the largest empire in Middle Eastern history. The great kings of the Middle Assyrian period, which flourished between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, virtually proved that with bold, enterprising policies, a nation could wield overwhelming radical power.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The rise and power of the Central Assyrian Empire during the reigns of great Assyrian kings such as Adad-Nirari and Tukulti-Ninurta, and the role of Assyria in the history of Mesopotamia.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":265,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tortenelem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kozelkeletblog.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kozelkeletblog.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kozelkeletblog.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kozelkeletblog.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kozelkeletblog.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kozelkeletblog.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":266,"href":"https:\/\/kozelkeletblog.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262\/revisions\/266"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kozelkeletblog.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kozelkeletblog.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kozelkeletblog.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kozelkeletblog.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}