AVisitWithJesus: Bible Empire Details

"Assyria" originally referred to a region on the Upper Tigris river, named for its original capital, the ancient city of Assur. Later, as a nation and empire that came to control all of the Fertile Crescent, Egypt and much of Anatolia, the term "Assyria proper" referred to roughly the northern half of Mesopotamia (the southern half being Babylonia), with Nineveh as its capital.

The Assyrian homeland was located near a mountainous region, extending along the Tigris as far as the high Gordiaean or Carduchian mountain range of Armenia, sometimes known as the "Mountains of Ashur". The Assyrian kings controlled a large kingdom at three different times in history. These are called the Old, Middle, and Neo-Assyrian kingdoms. The most powerful and best-known nation of these periods is the Neo-Assyrian Empire, 934–609 BC.

Shalmaneser III (858–823 BC) attacked and reduced Babylonia to vassalage, and defeated Aramea, Israel, Urartu, Phoenicia and the Neo-Hittite states, forcing all of these to pay tribute to Assyria. Shamshi-Adad V (822–811 BC) inherited an empire beset by civil war which he took most of his reign to quell. He was succeeded by Adad-nirari III who was merely a boy. The Empire was thus ruled by the famed queen Semiramis until 806 BC. In that year Adad-nirari III took the reins of power, and after his premature death, Assyria failed to expand further during the reigns of Shalmaneser IV (782–773 BC), Ashur-dan III (772–755 BC) and Ashur-nirari V (754–746 BC).

Under Ashurbanipal (669–627 BC) its domination spanned from the Caucasus Mountains in the north to Nubia, Egypt and Arabia in the south, and from Cyprus and Antioch in the west to Persia in the east. Ashurbanipal destroyed Elam and smashed a rebellion led by his own brother Shamash-shum-ukim who was the Assyrian king of Babylon, exacting savage revenge on the Chaldeans, Nabateans, Arabs and Elamites who had supported him. Persia and Media were regarded as vassals of Ashurbanipal. He built vast libraries and initiated a surge in the building of temples and palaces.

The Assyrian captivity, also called the Assyrian exile, is the period in the history of ancient Israel and Judah during which several thousand Israelites from the Kingdom of Israel were dispossessed and forcibly relocated by the Neo-Assyrian Empire. One of many instances attesting Assyrian resettlement policy, this mass deportation of the Israelite nation began immediately after the Assyrian conquest of Israel, which was overseen by the Assyrian kings Tiglath-Pileser III and Shalmaneser V.

The later Assyrian kings Sargon II and Sennacherib also managed to subjugate the Israelites in the neighbouring Kingdom of Judah following the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem in 701 BCE, but were unable to annex their territory outright. The Assyrian captivity's victims are known as the Ten Lost Tribes, and Judah was left as the sole Israelite kingdom until the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem in 587 BCE, which resulted in the Babylonian captivity of the Jewish people. Not all of Israel's populace was deported by the Assyrians; those who were not expelled from the former kingdom's territory eventually became known as the Samaritan people.

Unlike the Kingdom of Judah, which was allowed to return from its Babylonian captivity, the ten tribes of the Northern Kingdom never had a foreign edict granting permission to return and rebuild their homeland. Many centuries later, rabbis of the restored Kingdom of Judah were still debating the return of the lost ten tribes.