From the accession of Tiglath-pileser III in 744 BCE the Assyrian state made two-way mass deportation a standing instrument of rule, moving whole communities out of conquered or rebellious territories and settling other deported groups in their place. The purposes recorded in the inscriptions and reconstructed by modern scholarship were to break political cohesion in annexed provinces, to supply skilled craftsmen, scribes and soldiers to the imperial centre, to repopulate the Assyrian heartland and its new capitals, and to bring marginal land under cultivation. Deportees were normally moved as family units under military escort, given land and obligations at their destination, and absorbed into the imperial population; palace reliefs at Nineveh and Nimrud depict them travelling with carts, animals and children. The commonly quoted total of some 4.5 million derives from Oded's compilation of the royal inscriptions themselves, which are victory texts, and the practice is better documented than any of its individual numbers.
Neo-Assyrian kings from Tiglath-pileser III through Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal systematically uprooted conquered populations across the Near East and resettled them in distant provinces of the empire
Bustenay Oded's standard study counts about 157 recorded deportations in the royal inscriptions and sums the stated totals to roughly 4.5 million people between the ninth and seventh centuries, a figure many Assyriologists regard as inflated by royal rhetoric and double-counting. There is no census, tax roll or settlement survey that would give the population of the conquered lands over the programme's span: broad estimates put the whole Near East from Egypt to Iran at somewhere between 10 and 20 million in 700 BCE, but the empire's boundaries and the areas actually raided shifted constantly, so a percentage would be arbitrary.
No aggregate death toll is recoverable. Assyrian campaigns involved sieges, massacres of defenders and exemplary executions recorded in the inscriptions and shown on the palace reliefs, but the deportation programme itself was designed to preserve populations for labour and settlement; mortality on the marches is undocumented.
The Assyrian royal inscriptions and palace reliefs, catalogued by Oded and summarised in the Oracc Assyrian Empire Builders project, document the destruction of settlements and the assignment of deportees to imperial labour and military service.
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