Who ruled Assur?

Assur, also known as Ashur and today as Qal'at Sherqat, stands on a rocky spur above the west bank of the Tigris in Saladin Governorate, northern Iraq, a little north of where the Little Zab joins the river. It was the city of the god Ashur, who gave his name to the land of Assyria, and it served as the political capital of the Assyrians for centuries and as their religious centre for much longer. People lived there for roughly three thousand years, from the early third millennium BCE until the Sasanian sack of the mid-third century CE.

The oldest remains lie beneath the temple of Ishtar, where early excavators found statues of seated and standing women from the Early Dynastic period. A radiocarbon date obtained in 2024 suggests the first temple was built between about 2900 and 2700 BCE. Under the Third Dynasty of Ur, in the late third millennium, Assur was a provincial town ruled by a governor sent from the south, and after Ur fell it came briefly under the kingdom of Eshnunna.

In the early second millennium Assur flourished as the hub of a long-distance trading network reaching through Syria into Anatolia, where Kültepe was another key centre of the system. The city was governed largely by an assembly of citizens, with an official chosen each year whose name was used to date documents; its own rulers seem to have intervened only lightly.

The Amorite king Shamshi-Adad I conquered Assur in the eighteenth century BCE and made it the religious capital of his kingdom of Upper Mesopotamia, enlarging the temple of Ashur with a ziggurat. After his line weakened, Hammurabi of Babylon absorbed the city into his empire, and later Assyrian rulers were his vassals. In the late fifteenth century BCE the Mitanni king Shaushtatar subdued Assur and carried off the gold and silver doors of its temple.

When the Hittites broke the power of Mitanni, Ashur-uballit I took over its eastern lands and created the Middle Assyrian Empire, and Assur once again became an imperial capital. Kings such as Tukulti-Ninurta I and Tiglath-Pileser I rebuilt its temples and palaces, and the walled city covered about 1.2 square kilometres.

In the ninth century BCE Ashurnasirpal II moved the royal seat to Kalhu, now Nimrud, and later kings ruled from Dur-Sharrukin and then Nineveh. Assur nevertheless remained the spiritual heart of the empire because of the temple of its national god. Sennacherib built a New Year festival house there, and many Assyrian kings were buried beneath the Old Palace. As the empire collapsed, Median and Babylonian armies besieged the city, and it was sacked and largely destroyed.

Under the Achaemenid Empire, Assyria became the province of Athura, and the region recovered as an agricultural and administrative centre despite a failed revolt in 520 BCE. Assur itself revived most strongly under the Parthian Empire, especially between about 150 BCE and the mid-third century CE. New administrative buildings and a palace were built, the temple of Ashur was restored, and inscriptions show that its people wrote in a local form of Aramaic. Some historians, such as Simo Parpola and Patricia Crone, have suggested that Assur may even have been self-governing in this period. Around 257 CE the Sasanian Empire under Ardashir I captured and sacked the city. A smaller population lingered until the campaigns of Tamerlane in the fourteenth century, which drove its remaining Christian inhabitants into the countryside.

Layard and Rassam dug briefly at Assur in the nineteenth century, but systematic work began with German teams from 1898, led from 1903 to 1914 by Robert Koldewey and then Walter Andrae. They cleared temples, the ziggurat and the Old Palace and found more than 16,000 cuneiform tablets, now in Berlin. Iraqi, German and international excavations followed, most recently a project begun in 2023.

Assur became a UNESCO World Heritage Site and in 2003 was placed on the list of sites in danger because a planned dam threatened to flood part of it; the project was later revived. Islamic State fighters held the area in 2015, and some sources reported damage to the citadel, though after the area was retaken a local historian quoted by the Associated Press described it as minor.