Across the shores of the ancient Mediterranean, a quiet revolution once took place. From the ninth century BCE onward, the Phoenicians of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos began to establish new towns and trading enclaves far from home. They built their first stations on Cyprus, then along the coasts of North Africa, Sicily, and Spain. Each outpost — from Kition on Cyprus to Gadir (modern Cádiz) on the Atlantic — was both a port and a cultural bridgehead. Here, Phoenician merchants exchanged goods and ideas with local peoples. Over time, these settlements evolved into enduring centers of mixed identity, culminating in the rise of Carthage, itself the offspring of Tyre.
The Greeks soon followed. From the Aegean and Ionian coasts, settlers from cities such as Miletus, Corinth, and Megara founded colonies across the central and western Mediterranean, from Syracuse and Tarentum in Italy to Cyrene in Libya and Sinope on the Black Sea. These were purposefully founded communities: civic offshoots of their mother cities, tied to them by language and religion, yet politically independent. Each became an island of Hellenic life in a foreign landscape: a place where Greek temples rose beside indigenous shrines and where local artisans copied Greek styles as much as Greeks borrowed from them. Together, these settlements spread not only trade but also a shared visual language and worldview.
While these maritime peoples expanded westward, another power was transforming the lands between the Mediterranean and the Zagros Mountains. The Assyrian kings, ruling from cities like Kalhu (Nimrud), Dur-Šarrukin (Khorsabad), and Nineveh, were not seafarers but empire-builders on land. Through conquest and administration they linked the highlands of Iran with the plains of Syria and the shores of the Mediterranean. Yet their control depended not only on armies, but on settlements: enclaves established to channel goods, monitor borders, and assert imperial presence. The Assyrians called them karû, a word meaning “harbor” or “quay,” which came to designate trading quarters and frontier outposts under royal supervision.
These karû did not exist in isolation. They formed part of a much wider policy of resettlement and population transfer that gave the Assyrian Empire its distinctive structure. When the Assyrians conquered a region, they frequently deported tens of thousands of its inhabitants and resettled them elsewhere in the empire. Some were brought to newly founded cities in Assyria itself, but many were placed in strategic frontier zones or along major trade routes — precisely the locations where karû were established. This policy served several purposes at once: it depopulated rebellious areas, repopulated regions devastated by war, and created communities that owed their livelihoods directly to the Assyrian state. Over time, these mixed populations — administrators, soldiers, craftsmen, and deportees from every corner of the empire — became the human fabric of Assyrian power. The karû were thus not only trading outposts but also social laboratories, places where conquered peoples were absorbed into an imperial order through daily cooperation and dependence.
One of the best-documented examples is Kar-Šulmānu-ašarēd, the new name given by Tiglath-pileser III to Til Barsip (modern Tell Ahmar on the Euphrates). The site controlled river traffic between Carchemish and northern Syria and served as a tax and customs hub for westbound trade. Its name — “the Port of Shalmaneser” — captured its new role as an Assyrian enclave in a foreign land, a base from which royal merchants and soldiers oversaw the movement of goods and people across the frontier.
In the Levant, after the revolt of Ashdod in 711 BCE, Sargon II turned the city into what the inscriptions call the karû of Egypt. Situated on the Mediterranean coast of modern Israel, it became the chief Assyrian station for supervising commerce along the coastal route and for keeping watch over Egypt’s political maneuvers. A generation later, Esarhaddon established Kar-Aššur-ahhe-iddina at Sidon, following his conquest of the Phoenician city in 677 BCE. Like its western counterpart at Ashdod, this “Port of Esarhaddon” was both a trading hub and a permanent reminder of imperial power along the Levantine coast.
To the east, Sargon II extended the same model deep into the Zagros. Between 716 and 713 BCE he founded a chain of new karû across the lands of the Medes and Mannaeans: frontier settlements anchoring Assyrian control along the route later known as the Great Khorasan Road. At Kiššesim and Harhar, in the mordern Iranian province of Kermanshah, he founded Kar-Nergal and Kar-Šarrukīn (“Fort Sargon”). These fortified outposts guarded the mountain passes leading into the Iranian highlands and drew the horse-breeding and metal-producing regions of the east into the Assyrian economic sphere. Their foundation inscriptions describe them not only as strongholds but as royal settlements and trade centers: living links between the Mesopotamian plain and the highland world beyond.
Taken together, these karû formed a network of imperial enclaves stretching from the Mediterranean to the Zagros. Each combined military, administrative, and commercial functions. Each projected Assyrian authority into the spaces between provinces. Goods, languages, and ideas moved through them just as surely as orders and tribute did. They were the connective tissue of the empire.
Yet they were not colonies in the sense of Carthage or Neapolis. No Assyrian citizens set sail to found new communities abroad. The karû were created by royal command, staffed by officials, soldiers, merchants, and deportees. Their purpose was not to populate empty lands but to control the movement of goods and people. Where the Greek colony offered opportunity, the Assyrian karû imposed order.
Still, the resemblance is not accidental. Both kinds of settlement extended influence through exchange. Both became conduits of culture as much as commerce. And both reveal a broader truth about the Iron Age: that from the Atlantic to the Iranian plateau, societies were learning to knit vast distances together through permanent outposts and shared networks of trade.
So was Assyria a colonial empire? Not in the modern or even the Greek sense of the term. But it was an empire of settlements. One that used chains of karû to turn trade routes into arteries of control. In the same centuries that Phoenician and Greek sailors dotted the Mediterranean with colonies, the Assyrian kings were doing something strikingly similar on land, anchoring their world with stations of power, and in doing so, reshaping the map of the Near East.