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Introduction
This is the Palace of Assur-nasir-pal, the man who is the high priest of the god Assur, the man who is the favorite of Enlil and Ninurta, the beloved one of Anu and Dagan, the king who is the divine weapon of the great gods ... mighty king, king of the universe, king of Assyria.....

These are Assur-nasir-pal's own words, the words that the king had engraved in cuneiform characters, in the Akkadian language across all the limestone slabs that adorned the walls of his buildings at Nimrud.

These words identify the palace at Nimrud as Assur-nasir-pal's very own. They also identify the king as favored by and belonging to the gods. He is the "high-priest" of the god Assur and the "divine weapon of the great gods." Assur-nasir-pal himself whose kingship has been legitimized by the god Anu is the weapon that the gods use when they vote in divine assembly to destroy.

The site of Nimrud was occupied as early as the first part of the third millennium, BC. But it was not until the ninth century B.C. that it became a royal choice for a new town. Situated on the east bank of the Tigris River Assur-nasir-pal's new city is located about 22 miles south of the ancient Assyrian capital of Nineveh. Both Nineveh and the old tribal religious center of Assur had been political and religious capitals of Assyria long before Assur-nasir-pal decided, on the advice of Ea, the god of wisdom and magic, to create a new capital city for his empire, at Nimrud.

For purposes of defense and control kings established households, that is palaces, in major cities all over the empire. They were fully staffed with servants and militarily organized. These palaces and their personnel functioned as garrisons. In Sumerian times the god DLUGAL, the personification of kingship, had the job of patrolling the temples and guarding the city wall.
Since the days of the legendary ruler Gilgamesh one of the main obligations and satisfactions of kingship had been to build and maintain the walls of temple and city. The author of the Gilgamesh epic exhorts his listener to:

Look at the Uruk city wall with its frieze like bronze! Gaze at its bastions, which none can equal! Take the stone stairs that exist since times of old, approach Eanna, the temple of Ishtar the like of which no later king - no man - will ever make.

After Gilgamesh fails to find the secret of eternal life and returns empty-handed to his city, he walks out on Uruk's ramparts and says with some satisfaction to his immortal companion:

Go up on the wall of Uruk, walk around, examine the terrace, look closely at the brickwork; Is not the base of its brickwork of baked brick? Have not the seven master gods laid its foundations?

In fact the walls of Uruk seemed so splendid to later generations that they were thought to have built by the gods.

No less formidable a task was the building of the city of Nimrud. It too was a huge undertaking. The city is surrounded by a mud-brick wall at least five miles long. This curtain wall encloses an area of roughly 1 and 1/2 square miles.

The southwest corner of this walled city contains the citadel, the highest and best fortified point in the town. On this acropolis, high above the Tigris, Assur-nasir-pal built temples, palaces and administrative buildings. He enclosed this high ground within a second wall, This one measures 120 feet thick and 42 - 50 feet high. Below this immense wall, at the western foot of the acropolis flowed the Tigris, a treacherous river at all times but particularly fearful in flood. On the south side Nimrud was defended by yet more water for Assur-nasir-pal built a canal there that linked Nimrud to the River Zab, some seven miles distant.

In 879 B.C, Assur-nasir-pal gave one of the greatest house warming parties of all time. He invited 90,574 people to be his guests at a ten day celebration. His inscription reads: "The happy people of all the lands, together with the people of Kalhu, for ten days I feasted, wined, bathed and honored. Then I sent them home in peace and joy."

Such a party with guests from all parts of the empire should have been easy to attend because Nimrud is built on one of the five major fords of the Tigris river.

Nimrud, the city built by Assur-nasir-pal, stands athwart the major west to east route that leads from the confluence of the river Khabur with the Euphrates through Karana (now called Tell Rimah) to Nimrud. At Nimrud this trade and military road crossed the Tigris and sped north to Arbila, thence towards the lands of Urartu and further still to the north and east.

For Assyria's wealth and power did not depend upon her agricultural surplus which had never attained the size of that produced by irrigation agriculture in southern Mesopotamia. Rather, Assyria's predominance as an empire owed much to her dominance of all the major fords of the Tigris and its tributaries. The accident of settlement of a few related tribes in this particular geographical location in northern Mesopotamia gave Assyria access to the major overland and sea going trade routes in the middle east.

As early as the days of Shamshi-Adad I, in the early years of the sescond millennium B,C, Assyrian merchants were firmly ensconsed at Kanish, an Assyrian trading outpost in Turkey, even at Boghazkeui the old Hittite capital. There they sold textiles manufactured in or traded through the town of Assur and acted as middle men between the mining and smelting centers and the distributors in the copper and iron trade with Asia Minor. These merchants issued letters of credit to pay for their purchases and grew wealthy from the large returns in gold and silver gained from the profits of their trade. They sent letters home to the city of Assur, the old capital city on the Tigris, describing the details of their doings. Merchant traffic over the trade routes was free. No armies impeded the merchants' comings and goings. The social status of the merchant families at home in the city of Assur was great.

From the cilty of Mari, on the Euphrates route to the west we have texts that tell of the route that linked the Persian Gulf, the island emporium of Dilmun, - the Mesopotamian version of the garden of Eden - via Aleppo and the Orontes Valley to the Mediterranean. Mari also seems to have been a way station in the tin trade route between inner Asia and the Mediterranean, a rout that earlier had been in Assyrian hands.

Caravans enjoyed royal protection and brought foreign merchants from court to court. They were granted something akin to diplomatic status. At the end of the bronze age all this commerce ended. There are reports of attacks on caravans and murders of merchants. After abvout 1400 B.C. the texts are silent abut trade. How it continued we do not know. With the Neo-Assyrian kings,however, we once again seem the movement of huge quantities of goods from one end of the known world to the other. Merchants no longer, however, carry out this busines. It becomes the perogatives of kings. There is little evidence of import and export business. Rather, the Assyrians seem to have devoted themselves almost entirely the the more profitable "carrying trade", i.e. the transshipment of goods. It is no accident that the "chief trader" at the court of Nebuchadnezzar II was Hanno, a man with a typically Phoenician name.

In fact, the Neo-Assyrian Empire's warlike behavior can be seen as a determined attempt to follow the trade routes that crossed her territory to their terminal points and to control absolutely all access to such things as the tin mines of "Afghanistan, the lapis lazuli quarries of Badakshan, the gold of India, the products and raw materials from the regions of the proto-urban cultures of Central Asia and the land of the early Indus civilization as well as the precious woods and metals from Egypt, the cedars from the Lebanon and the ivory and gold from Phoenicia. Perhaps the Assyrians even witnessed the transshipment of luxury goods from China itself, for scholars have found silk threads in the tombs of the pharaohs." (after Diakonoff)

Perhaps more important, however, than Assyria's determination to control the sources of goods may have been her attempt to control the trade routes themselves and allow no non-Assyrian traffic of any kind to travel over them. This would have made the Assyrian king a king of the universe indeed.

In 612 B.C. a coalition of Medes and Babylonians from the south overwhelmed Nimrud and the whole of northern Mesopotamia. After that, with few exceptions, we hear of it no more.