Assyria

Assyria was the northern Mesopotamian kingdom centred on the cities of Ashur, Nimrud and Nineveh, and its distinctive religious feature is the near identity of its chief god with the political entity itself. Ashur is the name of the city, of the god and of the country, and the god has almost no mythology of his own: what he has is a temple, a king who serves as his priest, and an obligation on that king to extend his territory.

That produced a body of royal inscription in which conquest is reported as an act of worship. Campaigns are undertaken at the god's command and at his direction, defeated cities are described as punished for breaking oaths sworn by him, and the booty and tribute are brought into his house. The annals are propaganda, and their patterned exaggeration is well understood, but they are also the fullest surviving account anywhere of how an ancient state understood war as a religious duty.

Assyria also assembled and preserved. The library collected at Nineveh under Ashurbanipal in the seventh century BCE gathered omen series, incantations, rituals, hymns and literature from across Mesopotamia, including the fullest text of the Gilgamesh epic, and it survived because the city was burned in 612 BCE and the clay was baked rather than destroyed. Much of what is known about Mesopotamian religion in general comes from an Assyrian king's collecting habit.

Assyria as a state ended abruptly. A coalition took Nineveh in 612 BCE and the empire disappeared within a few years, an event the Hebrew prophets celebrate at length. The name did not disappear with it.

Christianity spread early and deeply through northern Mesopotamia, and the churches of the region developed in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, largely outside the Roman empire and therefore outside the imperial councils that shaped western and Byzantine doctrine. The Church of the East, based in the Persian empire and later under Islamic rule, held a christology the councils condemned, organised itself under its own patriarch, and ran the most geographically extensive mission of the medieval world, reaching Central Asia, India and China. Monasteries of this tradition produced the scholars who later translated Greek philosophy and medicine into Arabic.

The modern Assyrian identity, taken up in the nineteenth century by Syriac-speaking Christians of the region and connecting them explicitly to the ancient kingdom, belongs to that long church history rather than to unbroken descent from Nineveh, and the connection is debated by historians while being held firmly by the community itself.

The twentieth century emptied much of the homeland. Massacres during the First World War, later displacements, and the destruction and expulsion carried out in the Nineveh plains after 2014 have left the population concentrated in diaspora, with the ancient sites themselves damaged or destroyed.