Ethnicity in Empire 169The Assyrian then said that he was sent to address the people on the wall, who would
“eat their own dung and drink their own urine” if they did not surrender. He also ques-
tioned the ability of their god to defend them—“has any of the gods of the nations ever
delivered his land out of the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath
and Arpad?” (II Kings 19). Much more could be (and has been) said about this painful,
but historically rich, episode. For the purposes of understanding ethnic dynamics in the
Assyrian Empire, however, we should note that the Assyrian focus was on political con-
trol rather than on enforcing identity. Linguistic differences were apparently not difficult
to overcome.
The resentment of captured populations is further expressed by biblical prophets, for
whom Nineveh was a center of evil. Jonah was sent to prophesize in the city, and Nahum
(3:1) called it “the bloody city, full of lies and plunder.”
Conclusion
This brief review of ethnicity in the Assyrian Empire has suggested that, while Assyria
encountered a great deal of linguistic and cultural diversity in its expansion, the focus
of Assyrian ideology remained on territory (the land of Ashur), political control, and
the economic benefits of conquest and tribute. There was only a weakly developed idea
of Assyrian cultural identity, and it was continually modified by linguistic, cultural, and
artistic practices of cultures encountered during imperial expansion.
This relative lack of attention to identity is comparatively unusual. Taking just two
ancient Middle Eastern examples, Egypt was defined from the establishment of the
pharaonic state as being a culturally unified and strongly bounded nation (e.g., Baines
1996; Schneider 2010). During its expansion into Kush during the New Kingdom,
imposition of cultural forms, ranging from worship of the Egyptian state god Amun to
forms of dress and burial practice, aimed to make Kush culturally like the homeland.
The Achaemenid Persian Empire, as a successor of the Assyrian hegemony, adopted
many stylistic aspects of Assyrian art, but had a very different and quite explicit idea of
how ethnic diversity within the empire was managed (e.g., Lincoln 2007: 23ff.). The
Apadana reliefs at Persepolis, for example, depict emissaries from the subject peoples
of the empire (Root 1985). As in Assyrian reliefs, each has distinctive dress, hairstyle,
and tribute practices. Yet, they are depicted as if showing the willing and peaceful
participation in a multicultural empire. As a final contrast, it might be noted that the
much-debated process of Romanization (e.g., Webster 2001) in areas conquered by the
Roman Empire is a process scarcely visible in the record of the Assyrian Empire.
Assyrian ideology of ethnicity reduced cultural difference to an epiphenomenon. Actors
were considered political, and motivations such as adhering to agreement and respecting
the wishes of the gods are, or should be, universal (see Oded 1992). One consequence
of this relative indifference may have been the collapse of the empire itself—after military
setbacks toward the end of the seventh century, which included sacking of Assyrian cap-
itals by armies from Babylon and Media, there was no Assyrian core that could easily be
maintained (Yoffee 2010). And although Assyrian identity has persisted to the present
day, it is as a Christian group whose liturgical language is Aramaic (Parpola 2004).