Modelling the North Assyrian Imperial Core

Between the second and first millennium BCE the Middle and especially Neo-Assyrian empires carried out extensive re-organization projects, which deeply transformed the landscape of northern Mesopotamia through the creation of great territorial infrastructures. Besides involving the establishment of new capital cities, such interventions were implemented through the construction of massive state-created regional networks of canals that supplied water to the Assyrian capitals and their hinterlands as well as to major provincial centres. Their construction enabled the irrigation and agricultural production intensification in large parts of the “Assyrian dry-farming belt” and made available navigable waterways for the transport of goods and people. The paper will discuss these profound changes through a bottom-up approach based on the study of the organization of the rural hinterland of the last Assyrian capitals and its transformation into an imperial landscape by means of fresh data resulting from the survey conducted by the ‘Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project’ of the University of Udine in the Eastern Upper Tigris and the Navkur regions.