(Page 9 of 31) - Balancing and Balancing Failure in Biblical Times authored by Kaufman, Stuart. and Wohlforth, William.

Sennacherib’s grandson Ashurbanipal (668-635), who ruled Assyria at its peak
of ascendancy, Assyria was conquered, never to reappear as a historical actor.

ISE TO

ARTIAL

EGEMONY

: 883-824

Ashurnasirpal II: 883-59

Ashurnasirpal II inherited a kingdom comprising roughly the northern

half of modern Iraq, but extending a bit further north and west (Map 1).
Ashurnasirpal’s inscriptions are remarkable in part for the detail with which he
recorded his atrocities, such as flaying rebellious leaders, burning captured
men and women alive, and displaying the corpses, decapitated heads, and skins
of flayed leaders around the defeated cities (Roux 1964, p. 241). These grisly
details clarify the choices facing the leaders of Assyria’s neighbors threatened
by Assyrian expansion. Bandwagoning meant submission to Assyria’s often-
onerous demands for tribute and troops. But balancing efforts that failed could
mean excruciating death for key leaders. In later years wholesale exile of large
portions of the defeated population, as happened most famously to the ten “lost
tribes” of Israel, was also possible.

The importance of Ashurnasirpal’s career was to set the stage for

Assyria’s later expansion. Most of his early campaigns aimed at establishing or
enforcing Assyrian suzerainty over neighboring hill tribes to the north and east,
a Sisyphean task that Ashurnasirpal accomplished better than most. In the
north, one factor explaining this success was undoubtedly the undeveloped
character of the Urartian state, which had not yet achieved the rank of a great
power. In the south, Ashurnasirpal simply won, decisively wresting from
Babylonia suzerainty over disputed areas along the middle Euphrates. And in
the west, he forced his near neighbors Bit Adini and Carchemish not only to
provide tribute, but to join him in a demonstration march all the way to the
Mediterranean—the first Assyrian monarch to do so in centuries.

Whether balancing theory is relevant to this story is arguable.

Rhetorically, Assyria’s hegemonic ambition was unambiguous, as
Ashurnasirpal’s self-proclaimed titles included, “king of the world, . . .
subjugator of the unsubmissive, who rules the total sum of all humanity” (tr.
Paley 1976, p. 126). But in practice, the size of Ashurnasirpal’s empire was not
unprecedented, and in the later part of his reign he was quite restrained: he
launched only seven military campaigns in his last 17 years of rule (Paley 1976,
p. 149; Kuhrt 1995, p. 483). Thus while Ashurnasirpal faced little balancing,
Assyriologists disagree over the degree to which his policy was expansionist
enough to warrant it (see Paley 1976 vs. Liverani 1992).

Shalmaneser III (858-824)

Campaigns in the West. Shalmaneser III was much more clearly

expansionist than was his father. In his first full year on the throne he
repeated his father’s march to the Mediterranean, though this time he had to
fight his way there. Bit-Adini allied with Carchemish and several neo-Hittite
city-states to the west to oppose him, but Shalmaneser defeated the coalition,
and the neo-Hittites, joined by Arpad, paid tribute to him. Bit-Adini did not
submit, so Shalmaneser destroyed and annexed it.

States to the west and south now apparently identified Shalmaneser as a

threat, and a dozen of them led by Hamath, Damascus, and Israel formed the