Dictionary of the Bible
- Title
- Dictionary of the Bible
- Creator
- John L. McKenzie
- Date
- 1965
- Description
- John L. McKenzie’s entry “Assyria” sketches both the empire’s rise and its abrupt extinction. He says the collapse followed the death of Ashurbanipal: after a century of almost continuous warfare Assyria had exhausted its manpower, while new forces gathered on its borders—the Medes and Scythians to the north and Chaldeans in the south. In 612 B.C. Nineveh was stormed and thoroughly destroyed; its cities, he notes, were so completely ruined that they were never rebuilt. A last Assyrian remnant under Ashur-uballit attempted to carry on from Harran with Egyptian help, but the final blow came when the Babylonians and their allies crushed them at Carchemish in 605 B.C., after which, McKenzie concludes, “the Assyrians disappeared from history.”
- Language
- English
- Item sets
- assyrians
