Assyria is best known for events which took place before the invention of coinage. The warlike Neo-Assyrian kingdom with its capital at Nineveh, whose armies ravaged from Urartu to Egypt, used a system of weighing out bullion, as had other ancient states from the beginning of the Bronze Age. The importance of the place declined with the destruction of that empire in 612 BC; it was a minor province of Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians and Seleukids, before becoming a client-kingdom of the Parthians under the name of Adiabene. It subsequently became a Roman province, albeit briefly, under the old name of Assyria, before once again falling to the Persians. As a petty kingdom it received Christian influence early, as Syriac Christianity entered the country in the early third century. By the 220s, however, it had been absorbed into the Sasanian empire despite the best efforts of their Armenian allies.

The coinage of this region consists of a few extremely rare issues of autonomous bronzes of the Parthian period.