A manual for deconstructing Assyrian propaganda

When the kings of ancient Assyria wanted to tell the world about their achievements, they didn’t publish press releases or give interviews. Instead, they had their deeds carved into stone and clay: lengthy texts that celebrated victories and praised the gods for granting them power. These are the Assyrian Royal Inscriptions: a huge body of texts that give us a direct line into how Assyrian rulers wanted to be remembered.

On the surface, these inscriptions can seem like straightforward historical accounts: the king marched to war, defeated his enemies, and brought back tribute. But it doesn’t take long to realize that they are far from neutral reports. They are propaganda, written to glorify the king and intimidate anyone who might think of resisting. Enemies are always crushed, cities are always captured, and rebellions are always put down. If you take the inscriptions at face value, Assyria looks unstoppable, its rulers larger than life.

And yet, that’s exactly what makes them so fascinating. Hidden behind the bombast are glimpses of the real political world the Assyrians lived in. Why did the king need to emphasize this particular victory? Why describe his enemy in such exaggerated terms? Why repeat certain stock phrases again and again? Reading these texts is a bit like doing a puzzle: you know the pieces are distorted, but with a little practice you can start to see what lies behind the spin.

In this blogpost, I want to share a few rules of thumb: simple strategies historians use to read between the lines of Assyrian propaganda. They won’t solve every mystery, but they can help you approach the inscriptions with a critical eye and appreciate both their artistry and their hidden messages.

1. Remember the goal: to glorify the king
Assyrian royal inscriptions were not written to inform posterity or to give neutral, factual accounts. They were written to glorify the king as the heroic defender of cosmic order, the one chosen by the gods to uphold peace and stability in a dangerous world. Every narrative detail serves that end. If the king builds a temple, it is not just architecture, it is proof of divine favor. If he crushes an enemy, it is not just politics, it is cosmic justice. This doesn’t mean the events are invented from scratch, but it does mean that the way they are told always bends toward the image of the ideal Assyrian monarch. Once you keep that goal in mind, the grandiose tone makes a lot more sense.

2. Treat every detail with suspicion
Modern readers often long for “hard facts” in ancient sources, but with Assyrian inscriptions, there are very few to be found. Apart from the year and the general target of a campaign, most details should be taken with a large pinch of salt. Numbers of enemies killed? Almost certainly inflated. Lists of conquered cities? Often padded or recycled from earlier texts. Even the supposed spoils of war – exotic animals, precious metals, or captives – were rhetorical devices as much as records. The safest reading strategy is to assume that if it makes the king look strong, rich, or divinely favored, then the truth is probably more modest.

3. Watch for patterns, and their breaks
One of the striking things about these inscriptions is how formulaic they are. Campaign after campaign is described in almost the same words: the king marches out, devastates rebellious lands, slaughters thousands, carries off booty, and dedicates it all to the gods. Read enough of them, and the effect is numbing. But here’s the trick: when a text deviates from the script, it’s usually a clue. If an episode is described in unusual detail, or if the narrative lingers on a particular opponent, or if the rhetoric suddenly shifts, that’s a signal that something special – or problematic – was going on. In a way, the boredom of the standard formula is what allows us to spot the moments of real tension.

4. Order does not equal chronology
The inscriptions don’t tell stories in a straightforward, chronological order. Instead, they are often arranged for rhetorical effect. Cooperative rulers – those who submitted quickly or paid tribute without resistance – are placed at the beginning, so the king appears to collect easy victories effortlessly. The real opponents, those who resisted, are reserved for the end, where their defeat looks like the inevitable climax of the campaign. The result is a narrative arc designed to make the king look unstoppable, even if the actual events on the ground happened in a much messier, less linear way. Reading these texts is like watching a movie trailer: it’s edited to make the story flow, not to tell you what really happened.

5. Major rivals play strangely minor roles
One of the quirks of Assyrian inscriptions is how they handle great powers like Urartu, Egypt, or Elam. You might expect these rivals to loom large in the narrative, but instead they often appear as background actors, mentioned briefly, and usually as helpers of the “real” villain, some minor city-state or tribal leader. Why? Because acknowledging them as equal rivals would undercut the king’s image as supreme ruler of the world. It was safer to portray the great powers as meddling outsiders, never as central threats. This narrative choice tells us less about the actual balance of power than about how carefully Assyrian scribes managed appearances.

6. The louder the boast, the bigger the problem
Typical of Assyrian inscriptions is that the more space they devote to an enemy, the more trouble that enemy probably caused. If a rebellious king is vilified over and over, if his armies are described in grotesque detail, if his defeat is narrated with relish, then you can be sure the conflict was difficult and costly. Boasting was a way of masking embarrassment. Easy victories didn’t require paragraphs of gore, they could be dismissed in a line or two. It’s the stubborn enemies, the ones who refused to fall in line, that forced the Assyrian king to work hard at the spin. Ironically, the more words the king spends on someone, the stronger that opponent probably was.

7. The audience knew better
It’s important to remember that these texts were not intended for ordinary people. Literacy in Assyria was limited, and the inscriptions were written in cuneiform on clay tablets or carved into palace walls where only scribes, priests, and courtiers could access them. The audience was therefore the elite: governors, nobles, generals, and high priests. These were men who had been present at campaigns, who had seen the results, and who often competed with the king for influence. They knew perfectly well that defeats could not be erased. The king’s task was not to fool them, but to present events in a way that justified his choices, emphasized his tireless efforts, and reframed setbacks as partial successes. It was less about lying and more about “managing the narrative.”

8. A “great victory” followed by years of fighting? Not so great
Sometimes the spin is easy to spot. If a text boasts of annihilating a particular enemy one year, only to describe fresh campaigns against the same foe a year or two later, then clearly the earlier victory was not as final as advertised. This is where cross-reading different inscriptions, or simply paying attention to repetition, can be revealing. Assyria’s kings loved to speak of “decisive” victories, but real history shows us that enemies had a way of bouncing back. A good rule of thumb: if they keep showing up, they were never really destroyed.

9. Battles make better stories
Assyrian royal inscriptions weren’t just records, they were performances. The king’s scribes knew that the elite audience expected drama: thrilling sieges, rivers of blood, and enemy rulers humiliated before the gods. That demand for spectacle often led them to frame encounters in military terms, even if little fighting actually happened. A minor skirmish could be turned into a “decisive battle,” and a peaceful surrender could be recast as a conquest. In short, the narratives needed action, and if reality was too tame, it was dressed up as war.

10. The boring reality was often diplomacy
Behind the martial rhetoric, many Assyrian campaigns were more about showing up than striking down. The king toured his realm, collected tribute, renewed treaties, and reminded allies and rivals alike who was in charge. Hostile rulers often yielded before swords were drawn. Archaeology backs this up: traces of large-scale destruction are surprisingly rare compared to the lurid accounts in the texts. For all their talk of conquest, most Assyrian campaigns probably looked more like carefully choreographed political theater than epic battles.

11. Submission was rarely all-or-nothing
Assyrian texts love to present a stark choice: total obedience or total destruction. The reality was murkier. As long as a territory wasn’t annexed into the empire, local kings usually remained in power and exercised real autonomy. They could collect taxes, administer justice, pursue local politics, and even maneuver diplomatically, as long as they didn’t cross certain red lines. Many of these rulers played a delicate game, staying just close enough to Assyria to survive, while hedging their bets with other regional powers like Egypt, Elam, or Urartu.

12. Treaties were two-way streets
It’s tempting to imagine smaller kingdoms being forced into contracts at swordpoint, but treaties often offered them tangible benefits: military protection, trade privileges, prestige through recognition by the “Great King.” Yes, the power balance was unequal, but Assyrian kings also needed allies to stabilize their frontiers. A treaty might be oppressive on paper, yet in practice it could be a useful tool for a local dynasty to strengthen its own position at home and abroad.

13. “Lawbreakers” had their own logic
When Assyrian texts accuse an enemy of treachery, rebellion, or breaking divine order, remember that the other side almost certainly saw it differently. Many Near Eastern traditions held that treaties expired when a ruler died, or that loyalty was owed only as long as reciprocity was maintained. A king who stopped sending tribute might have been asserting sovereignty, or redirecting resources toward a more immediate threat. What Assyria branded as rebellion might have looked to local eyes like normal politics.