The Empire Strikes Back: Trajectories of Imperial Institutions in the Assyrian Empire

This study, which focuses on the Assyrian Empire in southwestern Asia (ca. 1350–609 BC), provides an overview of the political institutions enabled by the Assyrian authorities across space and time. It reviews established models of imperialism in the light of the available textual and archaeological evidence to assess to what degree the institutions of governance of the Assyrians varied significantly by region and depended, in part, on the long-term socio-ecological dynamics prevailing in different cultural enclaves. A comparison between the Middle Assyrian (ca. 1350–935 BC) and the Neo-Assyrian (ca. 883–609 BC) periods reveals that the institutions enabled in both periods were similar and are to be interpreted along a temporal continuum. The overall picture is that the Assyrian Empire is not to be considered a homogenous and monolithic political unit exerting a standardized system of control over the dominated territories. In contrast, the Assyrians used a variety of flexible and adaptative institutions to avoid centrifugal tendencies of the subject communities and to consolidate their power over a multi-ethnical polity stretching over one million square kilometres at its maximum extent during the Neo-Assyrian period.