Ethnicity in Empire 163however, Tukulti-Ninurta sacked Babylon and removed the cult statue of the city’s
god Marduk. Since gods were considered to inhabit their cult statues, the capture of
Marduk’s statue was a powerful indication of the god’s abandonment of Babylon and
support of Assyria. The practice of capture of divine statues would be used at other times
in the Assyrian Empire, although there is little indication of policies forcing captured
people to worship Ashur. Rather, in this as in other aspects of Assyrian cultural policy,
the emphasis was on political control over cultural identity and practice.
Tukulti-Ninurta was the first Assyrian king to propose moving the capital city from
Ashur. His new city, called Kar Tukulti-Ninurta (“The Harbor of Tukulti-Ninurta”),
was located immediately across the Tigris from Ashur itself, and was planned to be as
much as 500 ha in area, or seven–eight times the size of the old capital. The city was
built in part by captive Hurrian builders (Freydank 1980). Traditionally, this initiative
has been seen as an attempt to disenfranchise the existing Assyrian elite, but it may also
have had a more prosaic motivation: more irrigable land was available on the east side
of the Tigris (Gilibert 2008). In any case, Kar Tukulti-Ninurta was also the scene of the
king’s demise—he was assassinated in the Ashur temple there by pro-Babylonian Assyrian
officials.
The years around 1200BCwere calamitous for governments around the Eastern
Mediterranean, with a period of drought and movement of people, including some
raiders known in Egyptian texts as the “Sea Peoples.” The Assyrian hegemony continued,
however. During the reign of Tukul-apil-esharra I (r. 1114–1076BC), often called
Tiglath-pileser, but an earlier king than the monarch of that name in the Bible, Assyrian
armies raided Hittite cities in Anatolia. In his royal annals, Tukul-apil-esharra I described
building a palace whose royal entrance was guarded by stone carvings of animals and
whose walls were lined with stone slabs (Grayson 1991b: 44). The annals of this king
also mention new techniques of illustrating control of the known world, matching
perhaps his title of “King of the Universe.” During his reign, he gathered trees “from
the lands over which I had gained dominion” and “planted (them) in the orchards of
my land. I took rare orchard fruit which is not found in my land and filled the orchards
of Assyria” (Grayson 1991b: 27). He also took distinctive animals and raw materials and
offered them to temples of Assyrian gods. The ideological focus of these practices is on
control over lands and products rather than over distinctive groups of people.
The timing of Tukul-apil-esharra’s palace construction is also relevant for our under-
standing of Assyrian imperial identity. It is likely that, in diplomatic visits and raids on
Neo-Hittite cities, the Assyrians would have encountered the Hittite style of palace dec-
oration, in which stone guardian figures guarded major gateways and slabs of basalt with
relief-decoration-lined important rooms (Winter 1982). This was probably part of the
inspiration for what was to become the standard technique of Assyrian palace decoration
during the Neo-Assyrian period. As Pittman (1996: 349) suggests, aspects of narrative
may also have been derived from diplomatic contact with the Egyptian court, where
reliefs on temple walls depicted Egyptian military victories—particularly against the Hit-
tites in the battle of Qadesh, located in northern Syria, in 1285BC. The striking aspect of
these suggestions is the notion that Assyrians would so willingly adopt aspects of other
imperial representations, rather than disdaining them as productions of culturally infe-
rior groups. It is entirely consistent with their adoption of aspects of Babylonian literary