Assyria in the Late Bronze Age

Abstract

This chapter discusses the history of Assyria between the sixteenth and eleventh centuries BC, which saw a small merchant city-state with little political clout rise to prominence in Upper Mesopotamia and beyond to become one of the leading powers on the Late Bronze Age. Through the study of royal inscriptions, archival documents, and archaeological records, the chapter examines the political, ideological, and cultural evolutions that accompanied the drastic change in the conception of power in Assyria, as well as the accompanying socioeconomic evolutions, both during the kingdom’s apex in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC and in the crisis years in the twelfth and early eleventh centuries BC, at the transition of the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age. The chapter offers a critical examination of scholarship pertaining to Late Bronze Age chronology, (proto-)imperialism, and socioeconomic decline and its relationship to climatic and environmental change.