2878–2902 AM · 883 BCE — 859 BCE · world history
Ashurnasirpal II and the New Assyria
Assyria returns with campaigns to the west and gains a new capital at Kalhu.
Ashurnasirpal leads his army out almost every year: the mountains in the north, the Aramean kingdoms on the Euphrates, the Phoenician cities on the coast. His annals describe the punishment of the defiant in deliberate detail—terror was part of the policy. He moves the capital to Kalhu and builds a palace there with reliefs of the king hunting lions and receiving tribute; according to the inscription, nearly seventy thousand people were summoned to the opening. The machine is assembled that will grind the Near East for the next century and a half: tribute, garrisons, the deportation of whole peoples.
Sources
Documents of the period
- cuneiform chronicles and king lists — the annals of Ashurnasirpal II and the inscription about the banquet for the opening of Kalhu
Scholarship
- archaeology of Mesopotamia — the palace at Kalhu (Nimrud) with its reliefs of hunts and of tribute
Basis: documents and evidence.