ASSYRIANS
The Assyrians are a (still-extant) ethnicity tracing its roots back to Mesopotamian civilization in the third millennium BCE, when much of northern Mesopotamia was united under the rule of the Akkadian culture. The center of Assyrian civilization was the upper parts of the Tigris river, including parts of what are now northern Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran.
Akkadian influence was prominent in the culture of the city-states of Assur (Ashur) and Nineveh, which were to become two of the centers of later Assyrian civilization. Assyria gained independence from the influence of Sumerian and Akkadian kings during the upheaval of the 22nd and 21st centuries BCE, which also saw Amorite tribes descend upon Mesopotamia and gain great influence in the region. This permitted the rise of the Old Assyrian Empire circa 2025 BCE.
While Amorites made inroads into Assyria by putting Amorite kings on Assyrian thrones more than once, the characteristically Assyrian culture in the region remained distinct, and the Assyrians' defenses remained solid. The upheavals that eventually led to the downfall of Amorite control further south in Mesopotamia made little impression on the Assyrians, who were able to make favorable arrangements with the new Kassite rulers of Babylon in the 16th century BCE.
The Assyrians continued to hold a broad expanse of territory against the Kassites, the Mitanni, and others, until roughly 1450 BCE, at which time the Indo-European Mitanni and their Hurrian subjects appear to have gained considerable strength. After the Assyrians made an alliance with the pharaohs of Egypt aimed at weakening the Mitanni, the Mitanni reacted aggressively. Fearing the consequence of being surrounded on three sides by hostile Hittites, Assyrians, and Egyptians, the Mitanni struck to the west, sacking Ashur and reducing Assyria to a vassal tributary state in 1430 BCE.
Even during this time, though, the Assyrians were too powerful to be thoroughly controlled. They continued to pursue projects meant to strengthen their defenses and their ties with foreign nations such as the Babylonians. This struggle went on until the early 14th century BCE, when the Assyrians grew strong enough once again to shift the balance of power in their favor and begin exerting power over the Mitanni in turn. This heralded the beginning of the Middle Assyrian Empire in 1365 BCE, with the ascension of a new king who comprehensively defeated and subjugated the Mitanni. Growing Assyrian strength after they absorbed the Mitanni became so much of a threat to the balance of power that the Egyptians and Hittites, long rivals, made peace, and the Hittites and Babylonians in turn began to work together in an attempt to reduce Assyria's economic influence over the Middle East as a whole.
However, the Assyrians had grown too powerful to be contained by such measures. In the reign of King Tukulti-Ninurta I (1244-1207 BCE), the Assyrians defeated the Hittites decisively in the Battle of Nihriya, then turned south to seize Babylon and send its king, Kashtiliash IV, into humiliating exile, also crushing the Elamites and several kingdoms to the south of Babylon almost in passing, as a side effect. This secured a tremendous reputation and standing for the kings of Ashur. Tukulti-Ninurta crowned himsef "King of Sumer and Akkad," the title first used by Sargon the Great over a thousand years earlier.
The Assyrians also conquered sizeable portions of the Mediterranean coast along the Levant, subduing several of the Canaanite-Phoenician city-states in the region, such as Berytus (present-day Beirut). The Middle Assyrian Empire remained very powerful in Mesopotamia and the Levant up until the middle of the 11th century BCE. In 1056 BCE, King Ashur-bel-kala, faced a powerful rebellion that demanded much of his attention, and many of the empire's outlying provinces were lost in the following decade, particularly in the west near the Mediterranean.
The Middle Empire period as a whole consolidated Assyrian culture into a warlike, militaristic society united under the rule of powerful central kings who also served as the head of the priesthood. Widespread conscription of all able-bodied males in and around Ashur into the armed forces sustained the army at a size capable of subduing distant city-states. Assyrian law was unusually strict and brutal in its punishments by Mesopotamian standards, and their society had harsh, chauvinistic attitudes towards women.
The Bronze Age Collapse (1200-900 BCE) was a period of difficulty for the Assyrians, although one that they survived with the core of their powerbase intact. Many new ethnicities emerged in and around Assyrian territory, or migrated from distant lands, during the upheavals of this period. The Assyrian Empire shrank (particularly after the civil war mentioned above), and many of these new groups established kingdoms on its borders. Their preferred strategy for weathering the period of the Collapse seems to have been to remain securely based within a readily defensible core territory, while staging strong, punitive raids against any more distant enemies that might emerge, thus avoiding becoming dangerously overextended by trying to conquer wide stretches of territory that would be vulnerable to incursions from further out.
It was in 911 BCE, with the coronation of Adad-Nirari II, that the neo-Assyrian Empire began. This was the third and most famous of the 'Assyrian Empires' of history, and by far outstretched even the Middle Assyrian Empire in its military achievements, while also gaining a reputation for brutality and tyranny that would last for millenia.
The neo-Assyrians made extensive use of iron tools and weaponry to equip their military, enabling them to raise very large fighting forces. They drilled their armies extensively, using well armored heavy infantry. In addition to their iron weapons and armor, the neo-Assyrians pioneered one of the great unsung inventions of history: the army boot. The iron-shod boots of Assyrian soldiers were far more durable than the sandals favored by their more tradition-bound enemies, enabling Assyrian armies to march and fight in difficult weather and terrain more easily.
The neo-Assyrians were also masters of engineering and siegecraft, being the first people to form dedicated army units whose job was construction rather than combat: a corps of engineers. These engineers built bridges and earthworks, and with the aid of the potent Assyrian siege engines could reduce the defenses of virtually any city or fortress into rubble.
Once a city's fortifications were broken, the neo-Assyrians were generally merciless to the conquered, often selling much or all of a population into slavery, forcibly relocating the peasantry and scattering them across the empire in ethnic cleansing campaigns, and brutally torturing and killing the elites of city-states that resisted them too vigorously.
This proved to be a combination that the Middle East was ill-equipped to withstand. Neo-Assyrian armies advanced outwards in all directions from Ashur, winning battle after battle and taking city after city. Among the nations that were to feel the neo-Assyrian boot in the period from 911 to 783 BCE were the Arabs, the Arameans, the Phoenicians, the Philistines, Israelites, the neo-Hittites, the Edomites, the Persians, the Medes, the Chaldeans, the Suteans, and the Manneans. While the neo-Assyrians didn't succeed in conquering Egypt, they did defeat the Egyptians and drive them backwards towards their homeland.
After the death of King Adad-Nirari III in 783 BCE, the neo-Assyrians destabilized somewhat, losing control of many of their outlying vassals... only for King Tiglath-Pileser III to take the throne in 745 BCE and start the process all over again. Tiglath-Pileser formalized and professionalized the army, introduced a single official language for the empire, and created new bureaucratic structures to ensure that he could govern his conquests. He then marched out and reconquered most of the lands lost by his predecessors, including not only the conquest of Babylon but his own choice to crown himself as its king.
Following neo-Assyrian kings pushed out further, once again conquering the Levant and Canaan, large parts of Anatolia, and effectively all of Mesopotamia Eventually they conqeured Egypt as well, fighting a dizzying array of military campaigns in all directions, often having to subdue the same lands several times, despite (or perhaps because of) the brutality of their conquests.
At its height, the neo-Assyrian Empire ruled over Babylonia, Chaldea, Elam, Media, Persia, Armenia, Phoenicia, Aramea, Phrygia, what remained of the Hittites and Hurrians, large parts of Arabia, all of the states associated with the various Israelite tribes, and what is now Egypt.
However, after the death of king Ashurbanipal in 627 BCE, the neo-Assyrian empire began to fall apart. Rival kings fought one another in civil war. Scythian and Cimmerian barbarian raiders attacked the borders of the empire and struck down along the Mediterranean coast. The Egyptians quietly disengaged from the larger empire, and none had the strength to compel them back into obedience. Finally, the Medes, Persians, and Parthians united into a powerful force strong enough to smash one Assyrian force after another.
The Assyrian state was battered into submission, its cities sacked and devasted, over the course of the 610s BCE, finally drowning in a sea of attacks from all sides, with the last gasp of even vaguely independent Assyrian action being the Battle of Carchemish in 605 BCE.
The Assyrians now ceased to exist on the historical record as an independent state, being successively ruled over by subsequent generations of Medes and Persians. The Persians had little or no interest in allowing the Assyrians to rebuild their once-mighty empire, though they did rely heavily on Assyria's economy and soldiery to strengthen their own forces. Due to the long period of neo-Assyrian domination over the Persians in earlier centuries, though, many Assyrian influences can be seen in Persian culture. Some of the Assyrian cities were allowed to recover; others were not. Assyrian-based Aramaic remained the lingua franca of the Persian Empire for two centuries.
Ultimately, criss-crossing struggles for imperial power turned the Assyrian territories into the battlefield, rather than the players, of the clash of empires. Alexander's Greeks crossed through and conquered Assyria and made it their own under the Seleucids, in the process rather ignorantly referring to their territories by the partially related name of 'Syria.' In time the Seleucids gave way to the conflict between the Romans and the Parthian Empire, then to the Byzantines against the Persians, the Byzantines against the Arabs, the Byzantines against the Turks, the Turks against the Mongols, and so forth.
In more recent times, the remnant Assyrian ethnicity has remained characteristically Semitic, as were their ancestors of three or four thousand years ago. Having converted to Christianity in the days of the Roman and Byzantine Empires, many Assyrians continue to adhere to that faith, though many have converted to Islam over the centuries. Interestingly, some Assyrians held to the old Mesopotamian gods as late as the 10th or 11th century AD.
The city of Assur itself was ultimately destroyed by the Turkic ruler Timur (Tamerlane) in the 1300s AD, as part of a campaign to suppress Christianity in the lands he controlled; Timur himself was a Muslim. The Assyrians came under the power of the Ottoman Empire and were frequently targeted for massacres and suppression along with various other minorities. Much like the Armenians, the Assyrians underwent a genocide at Ottoman hands during World War One. After that time, Assyrians fought for the British colonial regime in Iraq, even reviving traditional Assyrian military ranks from the days of their ancient empires in the 1920s.
The Assyrians, now an embattled minority in the lands they once ruled, remain locked in ethnic rivalry against the Kurds and Arabs of the region, and continued to be targeted for persecution by many regimes throughout the 20th century. Most recently they have been persecuted by the forces of ISIL in the Syrian Civil War, which frequently attacks and destroys ancient Assyrian archaeological sites, which has at least given the Assyrians cause to unite with Kurds, Armenians, and other regional minorities against the common foe. However, many ethnic Assyrians have fled the region; there are approximately 100,000 Assyrians living in the United States, for instance.
) 
"
