Evaluation of the Assyrian War

In the long history, the new Assyrian Empire once rose and disappeared. What is the reason? The answer may lie in its strong military strength. In order to get more slaves and trophies, Assyrian kings launched a cruel war, which led to the high development of Assyrian military organizations. After the 8th century BC, Tigray Parashar III and Sargon II carried out a series of military administrative reforms, which made the Assyrian army a powerful force with well-equipped and large numbers.

Assyrian kings have continuously established and developed a powerful military force with a large number of people and well-equipped, so that all state power institutions serve military needs. The Assyrian army consists of military immigrants, supplemented by recruiting soldiers, and is carried out among the vast number of free residents. The chief executive of each region recruits soldiers in his area. Assyrian troops also have auxiliary forces subordinate to the state, guarding the capital and suppressing the rebellion.

In addition, the king himself has a special guard, which has established a certain combat formation, including infantry, cavalry and chariot soldiers, and sometimes stipulates that a certain proportion relationship should be maintained among all arms. However, the prosperity of the new Assyrian kingdom seems destined to be short-lived, and its collapse may be related to its cruel military expansion. History once again proves that haste makes waste, and the development of any country needs to be promoted cautiously and steadily, otherwise it will be a complete failure.

For example, 1 chariot 10 cavalry, 200 infantry. During the reign of Ashuna Chirpaz, chariots and cavalry were used in the battlefield for the first time, which greatly strengthened the mobility and attack power of the Assyrian army. However, the basic soldiers of the army are still archers, shield soldiers, spearmen and javelin soldiers. The Assyrian army is famous for its excellent equipment. Its soldiers have armor, shields and helmets. The most common weapons are bows and arrows, daggers and spears.

For the first time, "engineering" troops appeared in the Assyrian army. They opened roads along mountains, bridged bridges when encountering water and built cities. At that time, the camp construction was quite developed. Assyrians are good at building permanent huge fortress barracks with towers and walls. Most of these barracks are rectangular and oval. Assyrians also used siege hammers on the battlefield for the first time. The extensive and persistent policy of aggression and expansion has greatly developed the art of military command.

Assyrian commanders learned the tactics of frontal and lateral attacks. Assyrians often use various military tactics, such as attacking the enemy at night, annihilating tactics and cutting off the support of the enemy by cutting off food and water. In order to control the enemy's supply lines, Assyrians often occupied all mountain passes, controlled water sources, wells and river crossings, cut off all enemy traffic, and deprived them of water and food supplies and reinforcements.

The great fighting capacity of the Assyrian army also lies in its rapid attack, which is good at giving lightning strikes to the enemy, making it too late for them to gather troops. Assyrians also know the importance of destroying the enemy's effective strength, so Assyrian troops usually pursue the fleeing enemy until they are completely destroyed. However, with the passage of time, this military advantage gradually lost.

First of all, the Assyrian empire maintained its rule by brutal force suppression, so ethnic contradictions were very sharp. People in the conquered areas are constantly fighting with each other. Although Syria, Phoenicia, Babylon and Egypt were brutally suppressed by Assyrians, they never stopped fighting. Although the Assyrian Empire has a vast territory, it is a giant with strong external strength and hollow internal strength. The parts of this giant are not closely linked economically.

At the same time, once the military superiority is lost, the rule of the empire is bound to have a serious crisis. Secondly, within the imperial ruling group, with the further development of the slave economy during the war, the contradiction between the merchant-monk slave owner group and the military-aristocratic slave owner group deepened day by day. The former requires expanding industrial and commercial interests and urban autonomy, while the latter is keen on foreign conquest and plunder. Due to different interests, conflicts between them occur from time to time, thus weakening their ruling power from within the ruling group.

Third, the Assyrian kings have been fighting for years, which has seriously consumed the effective strength of the yeomen as the core of Assyrian power. These simple farmers, mainly from northern Iraq, have concentrated many excellent qualities such as Bedouin's courage, farmers' tenacity and highland people's diligence. The failure of yeomen greatly weakened the fighting capacity of Assyrian army, and the symptoms of this failure appeared in the era of sinatra Hrib.

He recruited soldiers from the residents of the first subordinate country to supplement the Assyrian main force, so that the fighting capacity of the Assyrian main force began to decline. Because the conquered and enslaved soldiers were unwilling to serve the Assyrians, when Ashabani ended the Elam War, only a few Assyrians were the core of his army. Facing the Ionian and Galician mercenaries of Egyptian Pharaoh Pushatik, he hesitated and finally had to give up his plan to conquer Egypt again.

Assyrians finally acquiesced that their troops were not as effective as western troops. Fourth, the change of war art eventually led to the failure of Assyrians. This change took place between 850 BC and 700 BC, and its origin was in the vast Eurasian steppe. In essence, this change is very simple, that is, in this century, grassland nomads began to get used to riding horses.

With the development and utilization of horses' strength and speed, these grassland nomads have become flexible cavalry. When the cavalry gradually became a recognized military force, the whole grassland nomadic tribe naturally had a flexible offensive force beyond any other settled nation. So they invaded everywhere, harassed caravans, burned villages and hijacked people and animals.

Only with the same mobility, better discipline or more cavalry units can we hope to stop this endless attack. Assyrians find it increasingly difficult to do this. Assyrian land is not suitable for raising horses. It lacks fertile pastures, so horses must be imported from Medea. When Medea declared independence and became the enemy of Assyria, Assyria's doom was coming.

The Assyrian empire was completely destroyed and never stood up from the ruins as before. After centuries of bloody and brutal conquest, it brought great suffering to people of all ethnic groups in ancient near east, so that the only impression it left in people's memory was the bloodthirsty nature of Assyrians.

However, in the world military history, Assyrians wrote a glorious page. They founded many new arms and tactics, which were imitated by later Persians and Romans, laying the foundation for the further development of military art, and the lessons left by the Assyrian war were extremely profound. Any power politics and wars of expansion and aggression that ignore other peoples' basic rights to subsistence and self-determination are bound to die out.