A carved stone relief panel from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud
Relief panel, ca. 883–859 BCE
Marked Nineveh

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The Assyrian empire

From cities on the Tigris, the kings of Assyria built the largest empire the world had yet seen, by war, terror and moving whole peoples. At Nineveh, King Ashurbanipal gathered a great library of clay tablets.

Place
Nineveh · Nimrud · Ashur · LachishThe Middle East
Laid out as
An empireOne power across a long stretch of time: how it grew, held together, and came apart.
Lessons
5 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IKings of the world
  2. IIDeporting peoples
  3. IIIThe siege of Lachish
  4. IVAshurbanipal’s library
  5. VThe fall of Nineveh

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Ashurnasirpal II
  • Sennacherib
  • Ashurbanipal
  • Austen Henry Layard

Objects

  • The Lachish reliefs
  • Lamassu gateway figures
  • The Flood tablet

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

911 BC to 609 BC. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?