Early Assyrian period

The Early Assyrian period was the earliest stage of Assyrian history, preceding the Old Assyrian period and covering the history of the city of Assur and surrounding areas of Upper Mesopotamia, and its people and culture, prior to the foundation of Assyria as an independent city-state under Puzur-Ashur I c. 2025 BC. Very little material and textual evidence survives from this period. The earliest archaeological evidence at Assur dates to the Early Dynastic Period, c. 2600 BC, but the city may have been founded even earlier since the area had been inhabited for thousands of years prior and other nearby cities, such as Nineveh, are significantly older.

The archaeological evidence suggests that Assur was originally inhabited by Hurrians as well as Semites and was the site of a fertility cult devoted to the Assyrian goddess Ishtar. The name "Assur" is not historically attested prior to the age of the Akkadian Empire in the 24th century BC; it is possible that the city was originally named Baltil, used in later times to refer to its oldest portion. From approximately 3000 BC, centuries before the rise of the Akkadian Empire in the 24th Century BC, the Semitic-speaking ancestors of the Assyrians, Akkadians and Babylonians settled in Assur and throughout Mesopotamia, either displacing or assimilating earlier populations. Founded in a both holy and strategic location, the city itself was gradually deified during the Early Assyrian period and eventually became personified as the god Ashur, firmly established as the Assyrian national deity by the time of Puzur-Ashur I in the late 21st century BC.

There is no evidence so far discovered that Assur was independent at any point in the Early Assyrian period. Throughout the centuries prior to Puzur-Ashur I or Ushpia in the early 21st Century BC, it is instead evident that the city was dominated by a sequence of powerful states and empires from southern Mesopotamia. In the Early Dynastic Period, Assur and other Assyrian cities experienced considerable Sumerian influence, and for a time fell under the hegemony of the Sumerian city of Kish. In the 24th to 22nd centuries BC, the city was part of the Akkadian Empire as an administrative centre in northern Mesopotamia, a time later Akkadian speaking Assyrian kings saw as a golden age. In the final geopolitical stage preceding Assur's independence, the city became a peripheral city within the Sumerian empire of the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2112–2004 BC).