The Assyrians were among the most feared and hated empires of antiquity in the ancient Near East. They feature prominently in a number of biblical stories and are often seen as the agents of God’s wrath and retribution for the people of Israel and Judah.

The Assyrians were around as a people by the early second millennium BCE. But it is at the end of that millennium that they began their rise to prominence, amid the chaos that marked the end of the Bronze Age.

Their homeland was in northeast Mesopotamia, in the upper reaches of the Tigris basin. Among their great cities was the fabled Nineveh, which is featured prominently in a great many biblical stories, chief among them in the Book of Jonah.

The Assyrians initially emerged to fill up the power vacuum that arose when the Hittites destroyed the powerful kingdom of Mitanni in northern Mesopotamia, between the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in the latter part of the second millennium BCE. When the Hittites themselves collapsed at the end of the Bronze Age (circa 1200 BCE), the Assyrians began their inexorable march toward the Mediterranean, destroying or neutralizing any power that stood in their way.

Initially, they were kept in check by the powerful Aramaean kingdom of Damascus,  which had organized a powerful coalition to oppose the Assyrians. One of the leaders of the coalition was Ahab, son of Omri, king of Israel (it was this same Ahab who was married to the infamous Jezebel, the Phoenician princess from Tyre). Judging from the Assyrian accounts, which have come down to us, Ahab played a prominent role in this alliance, supplying it with 2,000 chariots and 10,000 men. The coalition met the Assyrians at the Battle of Qarqar in 853 BCE, where the Assyrian expansion was temporarily halted. Unfortunately, the members of the alliance began to fight among themselves, allowing the Assyrians to employ the old tactic of “divida et impera,” divide and conquer.

We have plenty of archeological evidence about the relationship Israel and Judah had with the Assyrians. There is hardly a site in both kingdoms that escaped the ravages of the brutal Assyrian war machine. Archeological excavations throughout the past century have borne vivid testimony to this fact.

In what was the northern kingdom of Israel, archeological excavations have, over most of the last century, shown us that the Assyrians destroyed most of the major sites. Places such as the northern capital, Samaria, which was captured by the Assyrians and had its population deported, tell an all-too-familiar story. The same fate befell both Megiddo and Hazor, two other important cities in the northern kingdom of Israel that have been the subject of intense archeological excavations and that have previously been discussed in this column.

Yet archeology indicates that all was not lost, either. Jerusalem increased in size immediately after the fall of the northern kingdom, which some archeologists attribute to an influx of refugees who fled the Assyrian destruction of Israel in the north. This would indicate that not all of the “Lost Tribes” were lost.

Ultimately, however, the Assyrians did descend on Judah, and the swath of destruction they wrought is still quite vivid. Sites such as Lachish, which was excavated by David Ussishkin of Tel Aviv University, were completely demolished, and the horrors inflicted on their defenders can still be seen on the wall reliefs of the Assyrian palace at their capital, Nineveh.

But in the end Judah survived, thanks to the foresight of its king, Hezekiah (who built the so-called Broad Wall, whose remains can still be seen in the Old City) and his adviser, the great prophet Isaiah. As for the Assyrians, they were relegated to the dustbin of the Past, while our ancestors would continue to march Forward into history.