abstract
| - While the Sumerians were still engaged in their heydey, the Assyrians were settling in further up the Tigris river. Chief among their cities were Assur and Nineveh. At various times they were held as part of the various Sumerian empires. Later Babylonia conquered and held Assyria as a vassal state. It was somewhere around 1100 BCE that the fortunes of Babylonian and Assyrian were changed by the conquest of Babylon by Assyria under the leadership Tiglath Pileser I. But their hold on Babylonia was never all that strong, and control over the region kept shifting between the two powers. It wasn't until 745 BCE that the Assyrians were finally able to assert full dominance. Under the leadership of Tiglath Pileser III, Assyria not only conquered Babylonia in full, he created what would be known as the New Assyrian Empire. Among other practices initiated by Tiglath Pileser III and continued by his son, Shalmaneser V, was the practice of moving entire nations of people to other parts of the empire. scattering. Such was the fate of the ten tribes of Israel. 725 BCE was the year that Shalmaneser V began the invasion of Israel as a result of Israel's refusal to pay tribute. Before he could finish, he was himself deposed by Sargon the Tartan. Also known as Sargon II, Sargon took over as the new ruler of Assyria and quickly took over Israel and effectively terminated it's existence by having its people moved and scattered throughout the rest of the empire. Having destroy Israel, Sargon then took over Judah, only to lose control of Babylonia in 721. Sargon II eventually regained control of Babylon in 710. In 705 Sargon was no longer. His son Sennacherib would eventually gain control over Egypt. Nonetheless, within about a hundred years of Sargon II's death, the Assyrian Empire would be reduced to nothing more than a memory.
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