The Empire and the "Upper Sea": Assyrian Control Strategies along the Southern Levantine Coast.

The emergence of the Neo-Assyrian Empire marked the beginning of a new phase in the political history of the Mediterranean Sea. The Assyrian kings, being land-based rulers and deprived of their own access to the sea, adopted a flexible policy for administering coastal territories in their expansion westward. As indicated by extensive archaeological work in Palestine's coastal plain dating to Iron Age IIB-C and abundant historical sources, Assyria saw the coast as a distinct geographical zone rather than as an integral part of the empire's non-coastal heartland. In keeping with their policy elsewhere and in light of the prior geopolitical partition of Palestine's coast, the Assyrians divided it into several ecological subregions. Taking into account the unique geographical, political, and economic settings of each region, the Assyrians practiced diverse direct and indirect control strategies: annexation, military control, subjugation, and collaboration with imperial proxies. This analysis of the flexible policies that the Assyrians exercised on their southwestern border sheds new light on the ways in which the first true empire exerted power and administered life in its coastal territories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]