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This article is about ancient Assyrians, for contemporary Assyrians see Assyrian people. For Their empire see Assyria.

Modern Assyrians trace their heritage to an ancient race of the same name. Following the collapse of the world's first major Empire, the Akkadian Empire under Sargon I, they were one of the few major factions to emerge. Ashuru or Anshuru in the Akkadian language either meant "of royal descent, or descendants of the sky god." Image File history File links Please see the file description page for further information. ... This article concerns the Assyrian people. ... This article concerns the Assyrian people. ... Assyria in earliest historical times referred to a region on the Upper Tigris river, named for its original capital, the ancient city of Ashur. ... The Akkadian Empire usually refers to the Semitic speaking state that grew up around the city of Akkad north of Sumer, and reached its greatest extent under Sargon of Akkad. ... Sargon (2334 BC - 2279 BC short chronology) was the first person in recorded history to create an empire, or multi-ethnic state. ...

At its peak in the late 8th and early 7th centuries BC, the Assyrian empire encompassed Babylonia (successor state to Sumer and Akkad) (present-day Iraq), Aram, (modern Syria), Canaan (modern Israel and Lebanon), portions of Persia (Elam), Anatolia (modern Turkey), and much of Egypt. Babylonia, named for the city of Babylon, was an ancient state in Mesopotamia (in modern Iraq), combining the territories of Sumer and Akkad. ... Sumer (or Shumer, Egyptian Sangar, Bib. ... Akkad (or Agade) was a city and its region of northern Mesopotamia, situated on the left bank of the Euphrates, between Sippar and Kish (located in present-day Iraq, ca. ... The term Aram can refer to: Aram is the name of the Armenian Patriarch, whose name was given to the people he led, the Armenians. ... Canaan or Knáan (Arabic کنعان, Hebrew כְּנַעַן, Septuagint Greek Χανααν) is an ancient term for a region roughly corresponding to present-day Israel/Palestine including the West Bank, western Jordan, southern and coastal Syria and Lebanon continuing up until the border of modern Turkey. ... Persia can refer to: the Western name for Iran. ... Elam (Persian: ایلام) is one of the first civilizations on record based in the far west and south-west of what is modern-day Iran (in the Ilam Province and the lowlands of Khuzestan). ... Asia Minor lies east of the Bosporus, between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. ...

The Assyrians were originally situated in the city-state of Ashur, following a religion very similar to that of other ancient Semetic people with Ashur as their supreme deity and head of the Assyrian pantheon. Assyro-Babylonians usually glorified their city's patron god as the supreme deity. Most of the original Assyrians originated in Nimrod a.k.a. Calah, Nineveh, or Dur-Sharrukin which meant Fort Sargon, currently Khorsabad. Sharrukin which later morphed into Sargon meant "the legitimate king." They spoke a dialect of the now-extinct Akkadian language which was also spoken in Babylonia. A city-state is a region controlled exclusively by a city. ... The city of Asshur (or Assur or Ashur) on the Tigris was originally a colony of Babylonia, and later became the first capital city of Assyria, to which it gave its name. ... Semitic is an adjective which in common parlance mistakenly refers specifically to Jewish things, while the term actually refers to things originating among speakers of Semitic languages or people descended from them, and in a linguistic context to the northeastern subfamily of Afro-Asiatic. ... In Akkadian mythology and Sumerian mythology, Anshar (also Anshur, Ashur, Asshur) is the sky god. ... A Pantheon (Greek: παν, pan, all + θεόν, theon, of the gods), is a set of all the gods of a particular religion or mythology, such as the gods of Hinduism, Greek mythology, Norse mythology. ... Nimrod has been the name of more than one person, place, or thing. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Human-headed winged bull, found during Bottas excavation. ... Khorsabad (Khursabad), village in Iraq, 15 km northeast of Mosul, with well-preserved ruins of the large, rectangular Dur-Sharrukin. ... Akkadian (lišānum akkadītum) was a Semitic language (part of the greater Afro-Asiatic language famaily) spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, particularly by the Assyrians and Babylonians. ...

The Assyrians were masters of siege warfare, and among the first to practice forced deportations, a method soon adopted by other world powers. Under Nineveh's direction, the Assyrian army would deport the indegenous inhabitants of conquered lands to urban centers and other conquered areas as workers in order to assimilate them into Assyrian culture and to destroy their sense of national identity. This, ironically, has become the fate of modern Assyrians.

Due to their ill-famed cruelty, their resettlement practices, and their expansionist policies, the ancient Assyrians were greatly hated and feared by other ancient peoples. An excellent example of this is found in the Book of Jonah, in which Jonah the prophet is sent to Nineveh to declare to them God's planned destruction of their city. They quickly repented and God spared them the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, much to Jonah's dismay. In the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Jonah is the 5th book in a series of books called the Minor Prophets (itself a subsection of the Nevi’im or Prophets). ... For other uses of the name, see Sodom. ... The Prophet Jonah, as depicted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel Jonah (יוֹנָה Dove, Standard Hebrew Yona, Latin Ionas, Tiberian Hebrew Yônāh) was a person in the Bible Old Testament and Jewish Tanakh, the son of Amittai, from the Galilean village of Gath-hepher, near Nazareth. ...