Building a Kingdom

In the year 401 BC, at the height of the period known as the Greek Golden Age, a Persian prince named Cyrus the Younger was fighting a bitter civil war against his brother, and was trying to seize the throne of Persia. To help him in this fight, he hired a mercenary army of mostly Greek soldiers; 10,000 men who travelled the long road to Persia to fight on his behalf. Among them was the Greek writer and adventurer named Xenophon, and he later wrote about this expedition in his work entitled Anabasis. Xenophon and his companions met the enemy Persian army at the battle of Cunaxa, on the banks of the Euphrates River, and they gave the Persian prince Cyrus value for his money. The Greek heavy troops beat the Persians back, and delivered a victory for the man who had hired them. But when the dust of battle had cleared, they heard the bad news. Cyrus the Younger had been killed, apparently knocked from his horse by a young common soldier. His claim to the throne of Persia had died with him, and the war was over. For the Greeks, this must have been heartbreaking. Their long journey, the victorious battle, and all their sacrifices had been for nothing. Their general had also been killed and all of their senior commanders captured, leaving them without a leader and stranded in the middle of a foreign land. Now Xenophon and what remained of his 10,000 men had to find their way home to Greece. They knew that their only route was to reach the Black Sea, which lay across the wide deserts of what is today Iraq. They were terrified. They had few supplies and the enemy army was already pursuing them close behind. They hastily elected some leaders from among them, and Xenophon was one of them. He told his men to throw away everything they carried, shedding weight in order to outrun their enemies. So, they pelted across the deserts and the fertile river lands dotted with date palms, following the course of the river Tigris north. It's while they fled in this manner that they stumbled upon something that must have made them stop in their tracks. It was the enormous crumbling ruin of a city, completely deserted, and full of the vast ruins of ancient buildings. This city was larger than anything Xenophon had seen back home in Greece, and later he wrote about this discovery in his work Anabasis. The Greeks continued their march unmolested through the remainder of the day and arrived at the Tigris River. It was a large, deserted city. This wall was 25 feet in breadth, 100 in height, and the whole circuit of the wall was 11 kilometers. It was built of clay bricks rested upon a stone foundation six meters high. Nearby this city was a pyramid of stone, a plethrum in breadth and two plethora in height. Upon this pyramid were many barbarians who'd fled away from the neighboring villages. But Xenophon didn't have time to linger. The pursuing Persians were right behind them, and he couldn't spare any time to explore the ruins. They dashed onwards, following the river north. But then, only a day or two later, the Greeks came across another ruin, this one even larger and more impressive, surrounded by an enormous series of crumbling walls. The Greeks marched 34 kilometers to a great stronghold, deserted and lying in ruins. The foundation of its wall was made of polished stone, full of shells. It was 15 meters in breadth and 15 in height. Upon this foundation was built a wall of brick 15 meters in breadth and 30 meters in height, and the circuit of the wall was 30 kilometers. Once again, they had no time to stop, but it's clear that the sight of these lonely crumbling ruins affected Xenophon. For days afterwards, he asked any local people he encountered who had built such enormous constructions all alone out there in the desert. No one he spoke to could tell him anything, and it seemed no one even knew the names of these great cities. Some people thought they might have been built by the Medes, a people who now occupied the area. Others told fantastical stories about the gods bringing down fire and thunder to destroy these ancient walls, killing everyone who had once lived within them. Today, we do know the names of these cities, and it's thought that Xenophon, at the end of the 5th century BC, was the earliest person to stumble upon them and write an account. These were the cities of Nimrud and Nineveh. At the time when Xenophon stumbled across these ruins nearly two and a half millennia ago, the first stones of the Parthenon in Athens had been laid only 50 years earlier. The Colosseum in Rome would not be built for another 500 years. But the city of Nineveh had already been an ancient ruin for more than two centuries. This mighty city had flourished, boomed into a towering capital home to hundreds of thousands of people. It had given birth to some of the ancient world's most beautiful art and architecture, and then all at once fallen into dust. Xenophon and his men did eventually return to Greece, and when he wrote his memoirs, he gives special attention to those moments when he looked out over the sand-blasted desert, the grasses sprouting between the crumbling bricks as the wind battered his hair and tugged at his clothes. In those moments, Xenophon must have asked himself, who were these people? Who built such vast cities out here in the desert? How could such a great metropolis vanish so completely beneath the sands? If so many people had once lived there, what in all the world could have happened to them? My name's Paul Cooper and you're listening to The Fall of Civilizations podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask what did they have in common? What led to their fall? What did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of their world? In this episode, I want to look at one of the most remarkable ancient civilizations; the society known today as the Assyrian Empire. I want to explore how the Assyrians built their empire out of the ashes of the Bronze Age and built an empire of iron that lasted for centuries. I want to show how they expanded and developed to become perhaps the world's first military superpower, as well as fostering an extraordinary flourishing of art and learning. Finally, I want to tell the story of what happened to cause their final, devastating collapse. In this episode, we return for the first time to a setting that we've seen before, in Episode 8 on the Sumerians. These are the arid desert lands of Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia is a vast floodplain. For millions of years, its lands have been watered by two great rivers; the river Tigris and the river Euphrates. These great watercourses flow south from the mountains of Turkey, and bring enormous quantities of silt down with them. If we were to soar high above the earth's surface, we would see these two rivers as vivid lines of green snaking through the dusty land. The rivers Tigris and Euphrates form one arm of a geographical feature that has come to be known as the Fertile Crescent. This is an area of land roughly in the shape of a half moon that runs from the marshlands of southern Iraq north up the silt-rich rivers, then west to the humid coast of Syria. The Fertile Crescent continues south through the mountainous lands of Lebanon, down the Mediterranean coast of modern Israel and into Egypt, watered by the river Nile and its rich delta. Surrounded by high, treacherous mountains to the north and east, bounded by the Mediterranean Sea in the west, and the impassable deserts of Arabia to the south, this sweeping corridor created the environment where some of the world's first great societies rose up. To us, the Assyrian Empire feels like a relic of the impossibly distant past, but it's worth reminding ourselves that for them, their world was already ancient. The earliest settlements in this region, like the ones found at Gobekli Tepe and Catalhoyuk are truly ancient, each between 12,000 and 9,000 years old. They are some of the first evidence we have of humans living in large societies after the end of the Ice Age. But the Assyrians also had an incredibly rich awareness of their own ancient history and the cultural roots of their society. Since the invention of writing by the Sumerians around the year 3200 BC, humans had been passing their knowledge down from generation to generation, and it's hard to overstate just how powerful this was. The Assyrians held onto the memory of several of the great kings of the Sumerian age, revering them as semi-mythical heroes. Among these was the legendary hero Gilgamesh, who slayed monsters and went on a quest to find the secret of eternal life. They still told stories about the Akkadian king Sargon the Great, who, for the later Assyrians, had lived nearly two millennia in the past. For them, Sargon was about as distant in the past as Julius Caesar is for us. But his name was still on their lips; they still told stories about him, wrote about him, and drew inspiration from him, as this middle Assyrian text called Sargon the King of Battle demonstrates. While Sargon dwelt in the land, his heroes with him, twelve he chose. He brought his army across the fir-tree land. He conquered the cedar mountain. He took for his weapon the lightning bolt of his god. Like the Sumerians before them, the Assyrians saw the ruins of ancient cities scattering their landscape, and developed stories to explain how they got there. They believed that a great flood had once washed over the world, and that these ruined heaps of stone and brick were a remnant of this destructive, ancient event. So, I think it's worth reminding ourselves right at the outset that the Assyrians did not think of themselves as we might think of them, as an early culture at the dawn of human history, but as a people on the cutting edge of human progress, the product of a long and ancient line, and the culmination of all that humanity was capable of. Since the fall of the Sumerian Empire, the language of Akkadian had become the region's most common tongue, replacing the old Sumerian language, and the cities that had once formed part of the Sumerian empires had broken away. They were now a loose constellation of independent city-states dotted up and down the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Each city had their own king, their own army, and their own god. As we saw in Episode 8, for much of the region's early history, the Akkadians had been something of a junior partner to their Sumerian cousins. But now, with the collapse of Sumer, the Akkadian cities of the north were finally free, and they set out on their own journeys. One of these cities was the city of Ashur. Ashur was occupied from at least the year 2500 BC. It was founded at the height of Sumerian rule on a bank of the river Tigris in northern Iraq, about halfway between the modern cities of Tikrit and Mosul. Ashur was probably an early trading city. It would have been a town of tents and houses built from river clay, thatched with reeds. The smells of cattle and wood smoke would have drifted through its muddy streets, the sounds of people and the fluttering of the leaves of date palms, perhaps already the first canals being dug to water its fields. In its early days it would have been a very humble place, and it would be hard to imagine the glorious legacy that its people would one day construct. Throughout the Sumerian period, the town of Ashur did well, and some of this was down to its natural advantages. It was nestled on a bend of the river Tigris that sheltered it on its north and east side, and its builders improved its natural defenses with a system of strong buttressed walls that made it a strong fortress. The rivers of Mesopotamia were the land's lifeblood. They brought water for drinking and to irrigate the fields, but in the rough landscape, they also acted as the highways along which trade could move on barges and ships. Carvings of the time show long boats powered with oars forging over the brown waters of the rivers, carrying wheat and barley, copper and tin, as well as fine woods and stone from the north. As a crucial stop along one of these rivers, Ashur soon grew to be a wealthy place. Excavations of its houses show that by the second millennium, many of them were spacious mansions. It became common for wealthy families to keep vaults beneath their floors to hide their many valuables; jewelry made of gold and polished brass inlaid with semi-precious stones like carnelian, agate, and the brilliant blue lapis lazuli. Excavations have even uncovered dozens of libraries and archives in the city, where texts written in cuneiform on clay tablets were stored, a clear indicator of a city overflowing with wealth. The wealthy families of Ashur were also able to donate handsomely to religious organizations, and the city would become home to no fewer than 34 temples to the various gods worshiped by all the people of Mesopotamia, gods like the sun god Shamash and the moon god Sin, the storm god Adad, Ishtar, the goddess of love and war, and of course, the king of the gods, Enlil. We can imagine walking through the city streets at this time and hearing the incantations washing out of the temple doors and overlapping in the hot air, the priests of the different gods competing for attention in the crowded city, the ringing of bells and the banging of drums, the singing of hymns. Funeral processions may have floated past, chanting poetry such as this surviving devotional hymn to the Babylonian god Marduk. The man who is departing in glory, may his soul shine radiant as brass. To that man may the son give life, and Marduk, eldest son of heaven, grant him an abode of happiness. The temples also performed services for the sick. If you visited the temple of Ishtar with an ailment, it's likely you would have heard something like this prayer being said over you by one of its priests. Bind the sick man to heaven, for from the earth he is being torn away. Of the brave man who was so strong, his strength has departed. In his bodily frame, he lies dangerously ill, but Ishtar, who in her dwelling is grieved for him, descends from her mountain, unvisited of men. To the door of the sick man she comes. Soon, like most cities of this time, the city of Ashur developed a god of its own. In fact, the city virtually became a god. In the religious systems of Mesopotamia, gods and cities had an intimate and interwoven relationship. The gods of this time performed many of the duties that they do for us today. They could be called for in times of need or given sacrifices to ward off evil. But at this time, each city also had a god in the same way that every sports team has a mascot. The god was believed to quite literally live in the highest chamber of the city's temple, often in a statue dedicated to them. If you visited another city on business, it was considered sensible to give an offering to the city's god while you were there, and if two cities went to war, it was thought that their gods were battling it out in the heavens just as their armies were fighting down on earth. The more a city succeeded, the more power its god was presumed to have. As the city of Ashur grew in importance, its people named the city's god after the city itself, and so, the god Ashur was born. Grand temples were thrown up to this new deity, and as the city went from strength to strength, worship of Ashur rose to become the highest form of religion for its people. This god rapidly took on new symbols and iconography. He became thought of as a robed man wearing a crown and holding a bow, often appearing in carvings at the center of a winged disc, looking down on the world and the golden city over which he presided. As the confidence of the cult of Ashur grew, eventually the position of Enlil as the king of the gods, a position he had held for a thousand years, was in jeopardy. Over the next centuries, the god Ashur even took over Enlil's wife, the goddess Ninlil, and his sons Ninurta and Zababa. Ashur and not Enlil was now the supreme god for this city's people. The people of the city of Ashur would soon become known as Ashurayeh, but today we call them Assyrians. Like many of the powerful cities of this region, for the next millennium or so, the Assyrians of the city of Ashur would make several attempts to found their own kingdom, and a number of times, they succeeded. One great king named Shamshi-Adad ruled at the end of the 19th century BC, and he conquered large areas outside of Ashur, bringing back great wealth to the city. Under his reign, the people of Ashur built a grand, royal palace, and the temple to the god Ashur was furnished with a ziggurat, an enormous stepped tower that in the Bronze Age was a statement of a city's membership to an elite and powerful club. But this early flourishing of Assyrian power was stamped out by the rival power of Babylon, a powerful city in the south, that established its own empire under the famous King Hammurabi. This was the fate of the people of Ashur for much of the second millennium BC. They were able to rise a little bit before being swallowed up by a bigger fish. They were folded into the empires of Babylon, the Mitanni, and the Hittites, and would usually spend a century or so as a possession before throwing off their rulers and once more going it alone. But throughout this time, there was also a flourishing of Assyrian culture. One epic poem known today as the Tukulti- Ninurta epic, has survived from this time. It glorifies Assyrian military conquests in the south, and sets out a model for how the ideal Assyrian king should behave, and it also contains a vision of the fierce war-like spirit of the Assyrian people. They charged forward furiously to the fray without any armor. They had stripped off their breastplates, discarded their clothing. They tied up their hair and polished their weapons. The fierce, heroic men danced with sharpened weapons. They blasted at one another like struggling lions, with eyes flashing. Particles drawn in a whirlwind swirled around in combat. Death, as if on a day of thirsting, slakes itself at the sight of the warrior. But as the second millennium BC drew to a close around the years 1200 to 1150 BC, the Assyrians would face a challenge of astonishing magnitude. The period that followed has gone down in history with the name the Bronze Age collapse. As we saw in our second episode, for reasons we still don't entirely understand, a wave of destruction would soon wash over this region. Hordes of a mysterious force known as the Sea Peoples would land on its shores. Famine would spread from city to city. This destruction would sweep whole civilizations off the map, and leave virtually no inhabited cities left in the eastern Mediterranean region. Only two great societies emerged on the other side of this destruction; one was Egypt. As we saw in our second episode, the Egyptians managed to stop the Sea Peoples in a daring ambush on the waters of the Nile Delta, and just about held their society together. The other was Assyria. It survived by withdrawing from its recent conquests and holding on to only those territories that were essential to keeping its trade routes open. It withdrew back to its heartland and survived in a diminished form. But as the wave of destruction ended, the challenges that Assyria faced were enormous, as the historian Georges Rue recounts. Towards the end of the 10th century BC, Assyria was at her lowest ebb. Economic collapse was impending. She had lost all her possessions west of the Tigris, and her vital arteries, the great trade routes that ran through the mountain passes, were in foreign lands. Hostile highlanders occupied not only the heights of the Zagros, but the foothills down to the edge of the Tigris Valley, while Aramaean tribes pitched their tents almost at the gates of Ashur. At this time, a serious territory consisted of little more than a strip of land along the river Tigris, surrounded on all sides by determined enemies. But there were also things to be thankful for. For one thing, Assyria's enemies seemed incapable of uniting. For much of this history, they hated each other as much as they hated the Assyrians, and this would prove crucial for Assyrian survival. In the flat plains of Iraq, Assyria had no natural boundaries or defenses. For its survival, it relied on the fact that its enemies could be dealt with one by one. The powerful Assyrian army could march one way, then the other, smashing each enemy in turn, and subsequent kings would do everything they could to ensure that this continued to be the case. The main cities of Assyria were also virtually untouched by the disaster of the Bronze Age collapse, and they continued their economic output throughout the crisis. Assyria still had chariots and horses and weapons. It had access to iron, the new metal that had been used for ceremonial and decorative objects for centuries, but was only just beginning to be used to forge weapons and armor. The introduction of iron meant that Assyria was no longer dependent on the fragile supply of copper that came to them from across the mountains in the far away mines of Afghanistan. Iron occurs ten times more commonly in the earth's crust than copper, and could be found just about anywhere. The warriors of Assyria had been trained by years of constant fighting, and were now among the best in the world. Perhaps most importantly, the line of royal succession had supposedly not been broken for more than 200 years, meaning that the kings of Assyria claimed to draw on an ancient and unchallenged legitimacy among their people. In this region at the time, no other state could say the same. To at least one Assyrian king, it must have seemed clear that if Assyria could only seize its opportunity, it could become a power unlike any that had been seen before. That man's name was Tiglath-Pileser I. Tiglath-Pileser ascended to the throne in the year 1114 BC. He was the son of a harsh ruler named Ashur-resha-ishi I. His father had been remorseless in his campaigns, giving himself the title “the avenger of Assyria” and “merciless hero of battle”. One surviving edict by his father declares that the penalty for fraternizing with palace women was to be thrown into an oven, and it's clear that Tiglath-Pileser inherited at least some of his father's harsh reputation. A series of laws was written during his reign called the Middle Assyrian Law Code, and they included incredibly harsh punishments against women. In one, a married woman who has an affair is decreed to be killed. But he was an energetic ruler and a skillful campaigner. One of his royal inscriptions describes him in the following manner. Unrivaled king of the universe, king of the four kingdoms, king of all princes, lord of lords whose weapons the god Ashur has sharpened, and whose name he has pronounced eternally for control of the four quarters, splendid flame which covers the hostile land like a rainstorm. This kind of overflowing self-praise is quite typical of how all Assyrian kings described themselves, but in the case of Tiglath-Pileser, it's clear that the challenges he faced were indeed formidable. He had inherited an Assyria that was threatened on multiple fronts. In the north, climate shifts have been driving nomadic horsemen into the northern plains. The Mushku people of Syria had occupied certain Assyrian districts in the upper Euphrates Valley. The Hittite people had also snatched some of its territory, and the powerful rival of Babylon still lay to the south. But Tiglath-Pileser didn't waste any time. He attacked the Mushku first and conquered them, and then drove out the Hittites and Arameans, and everywhere he went, he placed a record of his victories. In one of the strong fortresses he built along his border, he engraved the following message on a series of copper plates in the base of the walls. Altogether, I conquered 42 lands and their rulers, from the other side of the Lower Zab in distant mountainous regions to the other side of the Euphrates, people of Hatti, and the Upper Sea in the west. The king at Tiglath-Pileser also loved to hunt, and he delighted in bringing back live specimens of animals from the far away lands that he campaigned in. I killed ten strong bull elephants in the land Harran, and the region of the river Habur, and four live elephants I captured. I brought the hides and tusks of the dead elephants along with the live elephants back to my city of Ashur. It's hard to know how the average Assyrian citizen of the time would have felt about all of this, since their accounts were not recorded. We can imagine that at the very least, a great deal of wealth would now be flowing into the city of Ashur. Teams of construction workers would have been working day and night to build new palaces and gardens in the city. Exotic, never-before-seen animals might now be seen on the streets, while access to new trade routes may have meant that new spices and fabrics would have begun to appear in the city markets. Tiglath-Pileser swept his Assyrian armies west, and when he conquered the Hittite town of Pitru, he gained control of the highway to the Mediterranean Sea, a distant body of water that, for the Assyrians, constituted one edge of the entire world. Assyria at this time was the only great power in this region with no access to a coastline, and we can see something of the wonder in the king Tiglath-Pileser’s words when he boasts about going on board a ship for the first time. The Assyrian chronicles even record that he hunted and killed some kind of sea creature known as a nahiru. I killed a nahiru, which is called horse of the sea in the great sea of the land of Amurru. We don't know what this animal was. Many believe it may have been a dolphin or a whale, while others say it was likely a hippopotamus. But it shows what a novelty it was for the king of the landlocked kingdom of Assyria to finally reach the water. Tiglath-Pileser died in the year 1076 BC, and on his deathbed, he must have looked back on a life of staggering success. During his violent rule, Assyria recovered much of the territory that it had lost over the period of the Bronze Age collapse. He had grown his kingdom into an empire that was all but unmatched in the region, and he must have looked ahead to the dawning of a golden age for Assyria. But the fortunes of Assyria would soon change for good with the reign of a king named Adad-Nirari II. Adad-Nirari was crowned in the year 910 BC, nearly 3,000 years ago, and it's worth mentioning that his reign is perhaps the first event in the entirety of Near Eastern history that can be dated to an exact year with a hundred percent confidence. The Assyrians, like the peoples before them, didn't keep track of years with numbers like we do. Instead, they gave each year a name, sometimes named after a particular person as a kind of honor, or named after a significant event that had taken place, like a great battle or an eclipse of the sun. Assyrian scribes kept long, meticulous lists of these year names, along with brief notes about important events that had taken place, as the following example shows, corresponding to three years at the end of the eighth century BC. The year of chamberlain Tab-shar-Assur, the city of Dur Sharruken was founded. The year of Shamash-upahhir, governor of Habruri; Kummuhi was conquered, and a governor was appointed. The year of Sha-Assur-dubbu, governor of Tushan; the king returned from Babylon, the vizier and nobles, the loot of Dur- -Jakin was destroyed, on the 22nd of Teshrit, the gods of Dur-Sharruken entered the temples. This system worked well enough for people of the time, but it means that if a modern historian wants to work out the date of a particular event, they need to have an unbroken list of year names, and for that list to include a known historical event or an astronomical event that can be clearly dated, like a solar eclipse. Luckily for us, the Assyrians were obsessed with eclipses, believing them to be important omens from the gods, and they kept incredibly careful note of any that occurred. The reign of Adad-Nirari is the beginning of the earliest one of these lists. He was an ambitious king, and he soon began to expand in all directions into what is today Turkey, Iran, and the Mediterranean coast, drawing on the strength of the formidable Assyrian army. The life of an Assyrian soldier was a tough one. Adad-Nirari's armies were made up primarily of men drawn from the fields. They would spend much of their year working on farmsteads with their families, digging canals and turning the dusty earth with plows and hand tools, growing beans and pulses, wheat and barley, raising livestock like sheep, pigs, and cattle. Then when the spring came, the rains stopped and the winter mud hardened across the land, they would be gathered up, given a spear and a shield made of woven reeds, and marched up into the rocky hills or out into the barren desert to fight for the empire. Sometimes they would fight other settled societies who lived in walled towns. Other times, their opponents would be nomadic tribesmen or even other Assyrians who had rebelled. It must have been a confusing and frightening experience for these men, and no doubt many despised being forced into this service. But perhaps there were also those who enjoyed it. Without these annual excursions, many of them may never have seen a mountain or an ocean, or anything of the world outside their town or village. Since the Assyrian army tended to win more than it lost, there must have been a certain sense of pride in their shared accomplishments. This rhythm of a season of harvest in the autumn and a season of war in the spring formed the heartbeat of the Assyrian Empire. It was a drumbeat of expansion and conquest that was continued by the king who came to the throne in the year 883 BC, and who would carry the Assyrian Empire to new and unprecedented heights. His name was Ashurnasirpal II. Ashurnasirpal was a remorseless and ruthless warrior, and many of the things we associate today with the kings of Assyria, their cruelty and harsh treatment of enemies, reached a climax under his rule. Much like many rulers of this time around the world, it's clear that he used terror tactics and tortuous methods of execution to drive fear into the hearts of his enemies. But his inscriptions, out of all those of the kings of Assyria, do stand out for the delight they seem to take in the details of these terror tactics. After crushing one rebellion to his rule, Ashurnasirpal commissioned this inscription describing what happened next. I burnt many captives from them. I captured many troops alive. From some, I cut off their arms and hands. From others, I cut off their noses, ears, and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living and one of heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city. I burnt their adolescent boys and girls. I razed, destroyed, burnt, and consumed the city. Whether because of these tactics or despite them, in the short term, Ashurnasirpal was an effective conqueror. New conquests were turned into client states and ordered to pay tribute to the Assyrian Empire. Enormous wealth began to flow once again into the imperial center, and Ashurnasirpal celebrated his victories with the construction of even more grand palaces. I founded a palace of cedar, cypress, juniper, boxwood, terebinth, and tamarisk as my royal residence, and for my lordly leisure for eternity, I made sculptures of beasts of the mountains and the seas in white limestone and alabaster, and placed them at its doors. I decorated it in a splendid fashion; I hung doors of cedar and cypress in its doorways, and put therein silver, gold, tin, bronze, and iron, treasure from the lands I conquered. I took people which I had conquered from the lands over which I had gained domination and settled them there. This policy of resettling conquered people in Assyria wasn't new, but Ashurnasirpal seems to have employed it far more frequently than his predecessors. The Assyrians understood a very simple calculation in the ancient world, that population size meant power, and they quite happily filled their cities with people from all corners of their empire. They created what must have been some of the most cosmopolitan urban environments before the modern age, and we can only imagine what it must have been like for these conquered peoples to be uprooted from their villages and deposited unceremoniously in the vast metropolitan cities of the Assyrian heartland, larger than any town they had ever seen, and where hundreds of languages would have been heard on the streets. But the Assyrians also used deportations and relocations in a much more punitive way, and this policy also reached its height under Ashurnasirpal. Deportation may sound like something of a light punishment when compared to the fates of some of those who stood in the way of the kings of Assyria, but it was a brutally effective tactic for crushing resistance to the empire. Human beings during this time and throughout history are so connected to our landscape that this kind of uprooting had a devastating psychological impact on the peoples it was done to. This technique of mass deportations was so effective that it has been employed by modern dictators. Joseph Stalin famously deported at least six million people in the 20th century from more than 20 ethnic minority groups considered to be troublemakers, and in the early days of the American colonies when indigenous people were taken as slaves, they were always transported to another region to break their relationship with the land and reduce their chance of escaping. Whether despite this cruelty or because of it, King Ashurnasirpal did manage to keep the empire together and dramatically expanded it, but he was followed by his son, a man named Shalmaneser III, who would not be so capable. Shalmaneser enthusiastically continued his father's policies of aggressive expansion and mass deportation, but in the final years of his reign, the people of Assyria had had enough. An enormous rebellion led by his son broke out across the entire empire. 27 cities, including the city of Ashur, rose up in rebellion, and this long and bitter civil war allowed virtually all of the people that Ashurnasirpal had conquered to shake off Assyrian rule. Assyria’s heavy-handed military domination of the region had made them hated, and it was clear that if they hoped to ever build a lasting empire, something would have to change. One king named Tiglath-Pileser III thought he knew what that thing was, and it was not a softer and more diplomatic approach. He decided in characteristic Assyrian fashion that what the empire needed was a much more powerful army. Up until the middle of the 8th century BC, the Assyrian army was much the same as any other force in the region, only a good deal larger, and the numbers really are staggering for the time. Shalmaneser III, the son of Ashurnasirpal, once boasted a force of 120,000 men at a time when the world population has been estimated at only 50 million. If his inscriptions are to be believed, then at that time, around 0.25 percent, or one in every 400 of the world's entire population, was at that time serving in the Assyrian army. But it was still a force made up of virtually untrained peasants. The only professional soldiers were bodyguards that protected the king and other nobles, but these were mostly deployed in the cities and palaces, and rarely saw battle. The vast bulk of the Assyrian army was made up of farmers, who as we've seen, were plucked from their lands whenever the need arose, following the heartbeat of the seasons. Although the empire could summon a vast horde of soldiers, it was an ineffective force. When the autumn came around and the barley grew golden in the fields, these armies of farmers had to march right back home and bring in the crops, otherwise the people of the empire would go hungry. Gathering this huge army from the fields was an immensely time-consuming and difficult task. Rebellions could break out at any time of year, but if one occurred in some far corner of the empire, the Assyrians had to wait until summer for their campaign to begin. It would take months to gather all the soldiers required, and then another month or two to march across the region to face it. By the time they arrived, it would be nearly time for the annual harvest, and the men would have to march all the way back home. If they were clever, a rebellious city could simply lock its gates and wait behind their walls for the armies of Assyria to go away, and in many cases, this is exactly what they did. But in the year 745 BC, the king Tiglath- -Pileser came to the throne. He chose his royal name after the king who had brought Assyria to such greatness more than three centuries before, who had forged a path to the Mediterranean and killed that sea creature known as a nahiru. This new king Tiglath-Pileser engaged in a radical program of reforming the Assyrian military into perhaps the first truly modern army. He reformed the core of the military into a body of elite armored troops, cavalry, and chariots, and he demanded that conquered territories on the edges of the empire supplied all of the army's light infantry who were considered expendable and often bore the brunt of the casualties. The Assyrian army also pioneered the use of a large engineering component to its fighting force. Assyrian soldiers could build bridges and dig tunnels, construct fortifications and siege engines, as well as maintain the supply lines needed to keep an army going. This combined fighting force of soldiers and engineers was similar to the formula that would make the Roman military so formidable seven centuries in the future. Assyrian carvings show remarkably detailed scenes of the army crossing one of the land's great rivers, something they must have had to do multiple times a year. We see Assyrian men blowing into tied-up sheepskins to inflate them and use as buoyancy aids, chariots dismantled and turned into boats, rafts constructed to transport supplies and equipment; army engineers could even cut paths through the treacherous mountains, as this inscription written by the late Assyrian king Sargon II seems particularly proud of. Mount Simirria is a great mountain peak that points upward like the blade of a spear. Its summit touches the sky above, and its roots are made to reach down below into the netherworld. It is not fit for the ascent of chariotry or for allowing horses, and its access is very difficult for even the passage of foot soldiers. I had my vanguard carry strong copper axes; they cut through the high mountain crags as if they were limestone, and thereby improved the path. I took the lead of my army and made the chariotry, cavalry, and battle troops fly over the mountain as if they were brave eagles. I had the common soldiers and like infantry follow behind them. The camels and donkeys bearing the baggage leapt up its peaks like the ibexes native to the mountains. I had the numerous troops of the god Ashur ascend its difficult slopes in a good order, and then I set up camp on top of that mountain. Tiglath-Pileser also increased production of iron in the empire. It was a small-scale industrial revolution. Assyrian cities of this time must have become increasingly smoke-filled, the furnaces belching charcoal smoke, the sound of billows and clanging hammers echoing off the buildings. The use of iron allowed the Assyrians to enter the era of true mass production. Assyrians could now use iron to make arrowheads, knives, pins, and chains, while Assyrian soldiers now marched with iron swords, iron spear blades, iron helmets, and iron scales sewn into their tunics. The effect was immediate. In the year 743 BC, only two years after coming to the throne, King Tiglath-Pileser marched north against the kingdom of Urartu, and conquered it easily. Two years later, he marched west into Syria against the kingdom of Arpad. The people of the city of Arpad had fought the Assyrians before, and they knew what to do. They would simply close their gates and hold tight. The Assyrian army may have looked fearsome, but they knew that when the summer came to an end, they would have to go home and harvest their fields just as they always had. But as autumn came, the people of Arpad must have realized that something was wrong. The Assyrians showed no sign of going home. In fact, it looked like they were settling in for a long stay. Tiglath-Pileser lay siege to the city of Arpad for three years, something that would have been impossible with the old seasonal armies. When the city finally fell, the Assyrian king ordered Arpad to be destroyed and its inhabitants slaughtered. It was a clear message to all those who stood in the empire's way, that a new age was dawning. Much like superpowers today, the Assyrian Empire treated the areas outside its boundaries as zones of extraction, where life was cheap and all that mattered was the empire's continued access to their resources. Assyria would grow rich from the vast wealth it extracted from these areas. One text written during the reign of that cruel king Ashurnasirpal II lists all the wealth drawn from a single campaign of terror against the region of Bit-Zamani. I received harnessed chariots, equipment for troops and horses, 460 harness-trained horses, two talents of silver, two talents of gold, 100 talents of tin, 100 talents of bronze, 300 talents of iron, 3,000 bronze receptacles, bronze bowls, bronze containers, 1,000 linen garments with multi-colored trim, dishes, chests, couches of ivory and decorated with gold, the treasure of his palace, also 2,000 oxen, 5,000 sheep, his sister with her rich dowry, and the daughters of his nobles. On top of this, 15,000 slaves were rounded up and brought back to Assyria to labor in manual jobs and provide a workforce for the empire. In campaign after campaign, Tiglath- -Pileser conquered lands in Syria, and marched all the way down the Mediterranean coast, taking coastal cities all the way to Egypt. He invaded the northern kingdom of Israel, destroyed their army, installed a puppet king, and deported large numbers of Hebrew tribes back to lands in Assyria. Tiglath-Pileser also added one more remarkable new possession to the list of Assyrian conquests; that was the mighty and ancient capital of the south, the great city of Babylon. The city of Babylon had been the political and religious heart of southern Mesopotamia for more than a thousand years. It was perhaps the most ancient and revered great city in the region, and at this time, it ruled over an area known today as Babylonia. This is a landscape of marshes covering much of the south of what is today Iraq on the coast of the Persian Gulf. This was once the largest wetland in the Middle East, home to countless rare species of bird, and the reeds often grow so high that you can't see over them. Mesopotamia had once been divided between the Sumerians in the south and the Akkadians in the north, but this had now evolved to become Babylonians in the south and Assyrians in the north, and it's a cultural division that still exists today. In modern times, the distribution of the Sunni and Shia regions of modern Iraq roughly follow this same geographical divide. Babylon was the largest city in the world at several points in history, and it was perhaps the first city to ever reach a population above 200,000. Today, its awe-inspiring ruins sit about 85 kilometers south of Baghdad, a sprawling mass of crumbling walls. Its famous Ishtar Gate, with its ornate blue glazed tiles, its depictions of oxen, lions, and dragons were at this time still several centuries in the future, but Babylon would have still been a resplendent city glittering in the sun. Tiglath-Pileser's conquest of Babylon shifted the balance of power in Mesopotamia. By the year 736 BC, the empire encompassed almost the whole of the region known as the Fertile Crescent. It now formed an unbroken corridor from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, linking up the trade routes of the Indian Ocean with those of North Africa and Europe. Its roads would have been thick with caravans of donkeys and camels, its rivers full of barges carrying spices and precious stones, wheat, barley and fruit, gold and silver, and brass. It was this empire and the formidable army it now commanded that the king Tiglath-Pileser III would pass down to his younger son, who would found the greatest dynasty of the Assyrian age. His name was Sargon II, named after that great ancient Sumerian hero. His dynasty would be known as the Sargonid Kings. They would rule for three generations that would form the highest point of the empire's achievements in war, art, and literature, but they would also be the twilight of its age. When these three generations ended, the empire would finally collapse in ash and flame. At this point, I think it's worth pausing and asking what was life like for the average citizen of the Assyrian Empire? Due to their officious record-keeping, we actually have a great deal of detail about how the people of ancient Mesopotamia lived. Like the Sumerians ,the Assyrians wrote on clay tablets, which is lucky for us since it has made their texts incredibly durable. An enormous number of these pieces of writing have been recovered, so many that an estimated 90% have still never been looked at by a trained expert, and far less translated. The experience of reading these tablets is like hearing the babbling of countless voices speaking up to us from the impossibly distant past about a remarkable array of everyday matters. Just one out of countless examples is this letter from a child away at school complaining to his mother that the other children have nicer clothes than he does. Tell the lady Zinu her son Iddin-Sin sends the following message; from year to year, the clothes of the young gentleman here become better, but you let my clothes get worse from year to year. The son of Adad-Iddinam, whose father is only an assistant of my father, has two new sets of clothes, while you fuss even about a single set for me. In spite of the fact that you gave birth to me and his mother only adopted him, his mother loves him while you, you do not love me. As a result of this rich collection of texts, we can paint a remarkably clear picture of what life was like for these very ancient people. Walking the streets of a great Assyrian city during this time would have engaged every one of your senses. One such city was Nineveh, which would soon become the capital of the empire, the same city that the Greek writer Xenophon would one day pass by while fleeing from the Persian army pursuing him. Nineveh was an enormous city for the time. Its city walls were 12 kilometers long, built of a stone foundation surmounted by mud bricks and enclosing an area of seven and a half square kilometers. The wall was broken by fifteen gates, many of them named after gods such as the Adad Gate named after the god of storms, or the Shamash Gate after the god of the sun, while others carried more descriptive names like the Desert Gate or the Gate of the Water Carriers. The city was surrounded by a moat filled with water from the river Tigris. The city would have been a kaleidoscope of rooftops, built in a largely unplanned manner, and its alleyways would have been covered with mats and reed awnings to keep off the heat, much as they still are in Iraq today. In the courtyards of houses, skins of wine and jars of water hang from the rafters to cool. We can imagine a joint of meat boiling in a clay pot on a fireplace, the smells of baking bread wafting from a clay charcoal oven nearby. The following recipe for lamb stew translated from a clay tablet shows the kinds of smells that would have been wafting through the city streets in the afternoon. Stew of lamb; meat is used. You prepare water. You add fat. You add fine grain salt, dried barley cakes, onion, shallot, and milk. You crush together and add leek and garlic. Like the Sumerians before them, the Assyrians loved to drink beer. They drank it in groups, sipping it from large urns through hollow reed straws. Beer held a prominent place in Assyrian culture, and this inscription by the late king Ashurbanipal shows that even in the highest royal circles, it was considered among life's greatest pleasures. In my reign, there is prosperity. In my years, there is abundance. My kingship is good as the choicest oil. Good beer I have placed in my palace. Nineveh sat on the river Tigris, and had a bustling dock and waterfront beside the gate known as the dock gate. This would have been a vibrant place full of the smells of dried and fresh fish, stagnant water, and mud, the babbling of the crowd, people arguing over prices and shouting greetings in dozens of languages. Merchants would sail downstream on barges or ships woven from reeds, perhaps traveling south to Ashur or Babylon with clay urns full of beer or wine. The following letter contains instructions from a wine merchant to a friend. Tell Ahuni Belanum sends the following message; may the god Shamash keep you in good health. Make ready for me the myrtle and the sweet-smelling reeds I spoke to you about, as well as a boat for transporting wine. Buy and bring along with you ten silver shekels’ worth of wine and join me here in Babylon sometime tomorrow. But the Tigris was a fast-flowing river, much faster than the Euphrates, and sailing back upstream was very difficult. So, traders would often make the journey back by road, accompanied by caravans of donkeys. The road system was now much improved since the time of the Sumerians, and a sophisticated highway network now joined all of Assyria's major cities, with milestones at regular intervals telling travelers how much further they had to go. But the roads were often dangerous, and although soldiers would patrol them, banditry was extremely common. One letter from a local governor shows his frustration with the lack of response to the bandit problem. Tell Sin-Iddinam Sillee sends the following message; I have written to you repeatedly to bring here the criminal and all the robbers, but you have not brought them, and so, fires started by the robbers are still raging and ravaging the countryside. I am holding you responsible for the crimes which are committed in the country. In the cities, a great deal of life took place on the roofs of houses. During the day, women would gather on these roofs to perform the duties of maintaining their homes. They would pound grains into flour and knead the dough to make bread, prepare food, wash linen, and hang it out to dry. We can imagine them talking with their neighbors from roof to roof as they worked, and the sounds of their laughter drifting overhead. During the hottest hours of the day, with the Iraqi sun often reaching more than 40 degrees Celsius or 104 degrees Fahrenheit, the heat would drive everyone indoors. The finer houses of the city often had a kind of cool room, with a floor made of polished alabaster or marble, and the walls painted with plaster. During the hottest parts of the day, the floor and walls would be splashed with water to cool the air inside. The city's poor would sleep on reed mats while the rich had wooden bed frames with mattresses and coverings. The richest of the citizens had beds made of ivory and fine carved woods. It's not just people that were thought to live in this city; the Assyrians believed that the world was populated by countless demons and spirits who could not be seen or heard, but whose influence could constantly be felt, and who often manifested as bad smells. These demons were responsible for illnesses and disease, and they required the constant attention of exorcists to expel them. The following letter recounts the procedure for one exorcism for a person suffering from epilepsy. As soon as something has afflicted him, the exorcist rises and hangs a mouse and a shoot of thornbush on the vault of the patient's door. The exorcist dresses in a red garment and puts on a red cloak. He holds a raven on his right arm, a falcon on his left, and recites the incantation “Truly, you are evil!” After he has finished, he makes another exorcist go around the bed of the patient, followed by incense and a torch, and recites the incantation “Begone evil hutupu!” until the demon is driven out. He does this every morning and evening. Talismans were often used to ward off these evil spirits, often small statues in bronze or clay, sometimes precious stones like jasper. They were often frightening images of demons with the wings and heads of goats and dogs, and the tails of scorpions. These would be kept in every corner of the house to ward off evil. As you walked the city, you would see these small talismans hanging from the rooftops. For many Assyrians, one crucial everyday object was what's called a cylinder seal. These were a small cylinder of stone, some no larger than a battery, which had complicated designs and symbols carved into them. The idea was that someone could prove their identity using this seal, and they could be used to sign contracts just like a signature. People would wear them around their necks on a string, and when a contract was written on clay, they would roll the cylinder over it so that their unique image was left printed on it. You could even seal a chest, an urn, or a door using clay or wax, and then print it with an official seal so that everyone knew the last person to open it. The following letter of instruction to a member of the king's household shows the importance that these seals held in all manners of official business. Tell Manaya that Siqi-ilani will be coming to you carrying the cylinder seals to reseal the entrance of the warehouse, and also the cylinder showing a lahmu monster for resealing the chests. Get everyone together, open the storehouse, and take as many as you can carry of the garments which are in the chests under my seal. Put your cylinder seal on whatever has been returned, and send me back the seal cylinders. But these cylinders were expensive, and they signified that their holder was an important person of high class. Regular people had to get by without one, and to sign a contract, they would simply press their fingernails into the clay, meaning that the marks of these ancient people's hands are still left on some of these documents. The people who lived these countless lives in the streets of the great Assyrian cities were probably largely unaware of what was going on in the vast, grand palaces that loomed over their cities. They would have likely followed the comings and goings of kings with some interest the way we might pay attention to celebrity gossip, but to them, the inner workings of the royal palace would have been as inaccessible and mysterious as the center of the earth. But what happened in those inner chambers would have an enormous effect on their lives, and as that final great dynasty of Assyria, the Sargonid Kings, took to the throne, the dramas of the royal court would soon have deadly consequences for all those who called Assyria their home. The drama of the Sargonid Kings truly begins with the son of Sargon, a man named Sennacherib. He came to the throne in the year 705 BC, and he would begin one of the most remarkable family dramas to come down to us from the ancient world, and he would be the father and the grandfather of the last two great kings of Assyria; Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal. This great drama got off to a remarkably rocky start. Sennacherib's father, Sargon, had been a respected and feared king, but it's clear that something about Sennacherib meant that he didn't quite hold the same level of command. After only two years of his rule, several Assyrian vassals in the foothills to the east, in Syria, and along the Mediterranean coast all suddenly stopped paying their tribute to the empire. The Egyptians, always happy to throw sand in the eyes of the Assyrians, moved to back the rebels’ fight for independence, and the young Sennacherib quickly found himself plunged into a fight for the empire's survival. The young king quickly gathered the full force of the imperial army and dealt with the rebel kings in the usual Assyrian fashion, taking them on one by one. He first marched east and crushed the peoples of the Iranian lowlands. Then he marched north and around the Fertile Crescent to the Mediterranean coast, and reconquered the rebellious kingdoms there, as he recalls in the following inscription. With the weapons of the god Ashur, my lord, and my fierce battle array, I turned them back and made them retreat. I quickly slaughtered and defeated the king of the land of Elam, together with his magnates who wore gold jewelry like fattened bulls restrained with chains. I slit their throats like sheep and cut off their precious lives like thread. Like a flood after a rainstorm, I made their blood flow over the broad earth. The swift horses, harnessed to my chariot, pulled into floods of their blood. The wheels of my war chariot, which lays criminals and villains low, were bathed in blood and gore. I filled the plane with the corpses of their warriors like grass. I cut off their lips. I cut off their hands like the stems of cucumbers in season. One of these campaigns is remarkable because we have accounts of it written by both the winners and the losers in a level of detail almost unprecedented anywhere else in the 8th century BC. This is because its records have survived not just in the chronicles of Assyria, but also in the Bible. This was Sennacherib's campaign against the Kingdom of Judah. The Kingdom of Judah was one of the region's two major Hebrew kingdoms, and it centered on the powerful city of Jerusalem. It had once been part of a united Kingdom of Israel, but in the face of Assyrian aggression, the kingdom had been broken up. It was now divided into the Kingdom of Israel in the north ruled by a puppet king, and Judah in the south. The Judean king at the time was a man named Hezekiah. He was an energetic ruler and seems to have been driven by religious fervor. The religion of the ancient Israelites was something of an oddity in this region at the time, because it disallowed the worship of any god but the Hebrew god Yahweh. As we've seen, worship in places like Assyria was a much more eclectic affair. You might make offerings to Marduk while you were visiting Babylon on business, and make an offering to Ashur when you got home. You might make an offering to Ea if your son was going on a long voyage by boat, or to Gula if someone you knew was sick. In the Assyrian worldview, the gods of other cities were often seen as hostile and were thought to be subordinate to the great god Ashur, but they were still thought to very much exist. In fact, the Assyrians had a habit of kidnapping the gods of their conquered enemies. Sometimes when they captured a new city, they would take the statues of its gods back to the Assyrian capital as a way of harnessing their power for themselves. But the religion of the Hebrews was different; it held that there was only one god. If you worshiped any other deity, it was believed that you were at best talking to the air, and at worst communing with evil spirits. King Hezekiah was one of the most strident religious rulers of ancient Judah. He enacted sweeping religious reforms, including strict instructions to worship only the Jewish god Yahweh. He removed all other statues and icons from the temple of Jerusalem, as the Book of Kings, Chapter 2:18 in the Hebrew Bible recalls. Now it came to pass in the third year of Hoshea, son of Elah, king of Israel, that Hezekiah, the son of Ahaz, king of Judah began to reign, and he did that which was right in the eyes of the lord, according to all that David, his father, had done. He removed the high places and broke the pillars, and he broke in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made, for unto those days, the children of Israel did offer to it. Perhaps it was Hezekiah's religious devotion that led him to make the enormous gamble of defying the Assyrian Empire, or perhaps the recent rebellions in Assyria had emboldened him, and he believed that it might be on the brink of collapse. Whatever his calculation, it backfired completely. He soon heard news that the Assyrian king Sennacherib was marching out to punish the Kingdom of Judah with the full might of the Assyrian army. The news coming from the north would have been terrifying. Sennacherib first conquered the rebels of Ekron, and then swung his armies south to march on Jerusalem. On the road, he came across the fortified Judean city of Lachish. Lachish was the second-most important of the cities of Judah. It was built on a hill about 40 kilometers to the southwest of Jerusalem, and had a strong wall running all the way around it. The hill was steeper on the north side and for defensive purposes, this is where its gate had been built. We can imagine the sight that the citizens of Lachish would have seen one day in the year 701 BC. From the north, a great cloud of dust would have begun to gather on the horizon, looking like some great natural disaster on its way. As the dust grew closer and thicker, you would have been able to hear the vibrations through the earth. If you've ever been inside a large sports stadium at full capacity, try to imagine what three or four times as many people would sound like all marching together in their heavy armor, along with their horses and the clattering of chariot wheels and harnesses. Finally, the enormous force would have come into view like a shadow on the land. In the center of their formations, the main body of infantry would have massed, organized into tight, compact units, their spear points glittering in the sun. Even more terrifying would be the trundling wheels of enormous siege engines come to tear down the walls of the city. The Judean military was insignificant in comparison. They were made up of militias and mercenaries huddled behind the walls of Lachish that must have suddenly seemed like a pitiful defense. What happened next is depicted on a remarkable series of carvings etched in meticulous detail in gypsum, designed to decorate the walls of Sennacherib's southwest palace in Nineveh. In their day, these carvings would have been coloured, their details picked out with dyes of green, blue, red, and yellow. The Lachish relief is an incredible piece of art, although the events it depicts are horrific. It's a perfect snapshot of a moment in history that would otherwise be completely lost, capturing the clothes and the faces of the soldiers and the frenzied action of the battle. The Assyrians first built a camp and began to settle in for a long siege of the city, and it's here that their expertise at engineering came into play. As the weeks dragged by, they slowly built a ramp of stone and earth leading up to the city's walls. It would have been around-the-clock effort. Assyrian workers toiled to form the mud bricks that made up the ramp, baking them in the sun, while soldiers shielded the workers as they built it, the occasional arrow or slingstone whistling down from the defenders on the walls. The desperation of the city's defenders can be clearly seen in the archaeological record at the site of Lachish. At some point, we can see that they ran out of iron, and in desperation began to carve new arrowheads out of bone. Finally, when the ramp was completed, the vast Assyrian siege engines would have rumbled into life. These siege engines were something like an iron age tank. They were made up of a large wooden frame like a mobile fortress on enormous wheels. They had a tower on top from which archers could rain fire on the defenders. At the front of the engine was a large, heavy instrument, somewhere between a battering ram, a spear, and a hammer. This was used to break the mud brick walls of enemy cities, jimmying between the gaps in the bricks and stones, and slowly wearing them down. Defenders would constantly try to set these engines on fire, and so, they were covered in thick layers of wet animal hides. A constant stream of Assyrian workers would hurry up to the front lines, carrying jars and skins of water, dousing the engine and putting out the fires. As well as these engines, the Assyrians would have laid countless ladders against the walls. The defenders rained down arrows and stones, but the result was inevitable. The defense collapsed. People fled the city in all directions, and the Assyrian army finally marched into Lachish. From here on, the carvings begin to look like a depiction of hell. As a punishment for resisting, the city of Lachish was utterly destroyed. The inhabitants of the city were rounded up and deported to faraway lands on the other side of the river Tigris. The carvings show them leaving the city in long columns, men and women riding bullock carts piled high with all their possessions, children sitting on the carts or cradled in their mother's arms. The carvings even show some prisoners being forced to play musical instruments as they march away from their home, an episode perhaps also recorded in the ancient lament of Psalm 137. By the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the poplars we hung our hearts, for there, our captors asked us for songs. Our tormentors demanded songs of joy. They said sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the songs of the lord while in a foreign land? It's in this psalm too that we get one of the first recorded warnings delivered to the empire of Assyria about the fate that might befall it in the future, a fate that its various enemies were increasingly beginning to long for. Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks. Next, the Assyrian army marched on Jerusalem, and Hezekiah was ready for them. He'd built a new wall around the great city, and dug an underground tunnel through solid stone that would bring fresh water directly into the city. But even so, the situation must have looked bleak. The Judean king decided that he would have to negotiate. "Now in the 14th year of King Hezekiah did Sennacherib, King of Assyria, come up against all the fortified cities of Judah and took them. Hezekiah, king of Judah, sent to the king of Assyria to Lachish, saying “I have offended. Return from me that which thou putted on me will I bear.” The king of Assyria appointed Hezekiah, king of Judah, 300 talents of silver and 30 talents of gold." In order to pay the bounty, he even stripped the gold from the great temple, something that must have been a heart-rending decision for this devout king. But this seems to have hardly appeased the Assyrian king Sennacherib, who continued his siege. At one point, he sent his general, a man named Rab-Shakeh, to approach the walls of Jerusalem and demand the surrender of its defenders. The Assyrian general Rab-Shakeh reminded the Jewish holdouts of all the other lands that had fallen to the military might of the Assyrians. Have any of the gods of the nations ever delivered his land out of the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and of Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? Of Hena? Have they delivered Samaria out of my hand? It looked as though all was lost, but it's at this point that luck began to turn in Hezekiah's favor. The Hebrew Bible recalls him praying to his god Yahweh to deliver him from the Assyrian siege, and the Hebrew poet historians who wrote the Book of Kings record this reply coming down to him from the heavens. Now have I brought it to pass. Yea, it is done, that fortified cities should be laid waste into ruinous heaps. Their inhabitants were as the grass of the field and as the green herb, and as the grass on the housetops, and as corn blasted before it is grown up. Thus saith the lord concerning the king of Assyria; he shall not come unto this city, nor shoot an arrow there. Neither shall he come before it with shield, nor cast a mound against it. It came to pass that night that the angel of the lord went forth and smote in the camp of the Assyrians 104 score and 5,000. When men arose early in the morning, behold; they were all dead corpses. We may never know the truth of what happened to bring an end to the siege of Jerusalem. The most likely explanation is probably an outbreak of plague among the army of Assyria. Plague was a constant threat to any campaigning army, and it wouldn't have been the first campaign to end in this way. One Egyptian account repeated by the later historian Herodotus, recounts how the Assyrian army was turned back after an infestation of field mice swarmed their camp. The mice are said to have gnawed away at the Assyrian bowstrings and shield handles, making them unable to fight. This is possibly another slightly fanciful description of a plague decimating an army. The Assyrian sources are understandably quiet about what must have been an embarrassing failure. The only source to mention this campaign focuses on the early victories won by the Assyrians, and on the tribute that Hezekiah handed over. This campaign gives just one brief snapshot of what the Assyrian war machine was like, and how it felt to be on the receiving end of its fury. Still, the campaign had ended in an embarrassment, and it was perhaps this defeat that led the city of Babylon in the south to desire its freedom. The question of what to do with Babylon was one of the constant pressing concerns of the Assyrian kings, and it had been a thorn in their side for centuries. Babylon was a proud and ancient city with a distinct culture, and it was so powerful that it was exceptionally difficult to keep it in the empire. Various Assyrian kings tried different approaches to this problem. Some simply allowed a native Babylonian to rule the city and its surrounding territories, which kept the Babylonian people happy, but this often led to the Babylonian king declaring independence whenever the central power of Assyria was distracted or deployed elsewhere. Others tried imposing an Assyrian governor on the Babylonians. This naturally enraged them, and these Assyrian kings of Babylon would often face plots and rebellions, and would quite often be toppled in favor of some Babylonian noble who would then immediately declare independence. The third option was to keep the throne of Babylon in the family. This usually involved the king of Assyria crowning his brother or uncle as the king of Babylon, but this held another danger. If this brother was a little too ambitious, he might consider using the might of Babylon as a springboard to try and take the whole empire for himself. By the year 694 BC, this repeated cycle and seemingly impossible problem had become too much for King Sennacherib, and for him, the conflict had become personal. Babylonian rebels were partly responsible for the death of one of his sons, and after crushing his enemies in the north in the Kingdom of Judah and along the Mediterranean coast, he swung around and set out on campaign to decisively beat the city of Babylon and solve the Babylonian problem for good. In the year 689 BC, the Assyrians laid siege to Babylon. The siege lasted for 15 months, and when the city finally fell, Sennacherib wrote this description of what happened next. I destroyed the city and its houses from foundation to parapets. I devastated and burned them. I razed the brick and earthen work of the outer and inner wall of the city, of the temples, and of the ziggurat, and I dumped these into the Arahtu canal. I dug canals through the midst of that city. I overwhelmed it with water. I made its very foundations disappear, and I destroyed it more completely than a devastating flood so that it might be impossible in future days to recognize the sight of that city and its temples. I utterly dissolved it with water and made it like an inundated land. Even by the standards of the time, this action was considered excessive. Burning a Judean or Elamite city to the ground was one thing, but to do the same to the cultured, ancient, and holy city of Babylon was too much. There was a great outcry in Assyria, and Sennacherib responded by kidnapping the Babylonian god Marduk, carrying him back to Nineveh, and placing him on trial. We can imagine the scenes as a group of Assyrian legal officials gathered in court to condemn the silent stone statue of the god. Marduk was eventually found guilty, but the broken text recounting this episode gives no clue about what punishment was handed down. Sennacherib's goal had been to utterly destroy Babylon, and he had succeeded. Its northern provinces were folded into the Assyrian Empire, and the city itself was left in ruins. The war in Babylon seems to have drained something from King Sennacherib. After destroying the ancient city, he no longer seems to have had any appetite for war. Instead of destruction, he dedicated the later years of his reign to building. He settled down in the city of Nineveh and named it his new capital. Nineveh had been an important city for millennia, but when Sennacherib moved there, it was in a sorely neglected state. He renovated its palaces and built new ones, decorating them with carvings of his early victories like the one at the siege of Lachish, as the following inscription recounts. I had a palace built with elephant ivory, ebony, boxwood, cedar, cypress, juniper, and terebinth, a palace that I named The Palace Without A Rival. I roofed its rooms with beams of cedar grown on Mount Amanus. I fastened bands of shining bronze on magnificent doors of cypress, whose scent is sweet on opening and closing. I installed eight striding lions standing opposite one another, which were made from 11,400 talents of shining copper cast by the god Ninagal, and were filled with radiance. One inscription on a stone lion in the quarter associated with Sennacherib's queen, named Tashmetu-sharrat, contains hopes that the royal couple would both live long and healthy lives within the new palace. Sennacherib constructed beautiful gardens at his new palace, importing various plants and herbs from across his empire and beyond. Cotton trees may have been imported from as far away as India, and it's been suggested that the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, may actually have been these gardens in Nineveh, which were designed to represent the empire in miniature form. Sennacherib recounts these efforts in the following inscription. I planted alongside the palace a botanical garden, a replica of Mount Amanus which has all kinds of aromatic plants and fruit trees, trees that are the mainstay of the mountains and Chaldea, collected inside it. By the end of Sennacherib's reign, Nineveh must have shone, a resplendent city fit for the world's mightiest empire. I think in this change we see in Sennacherib, we see a possible different path that history might have taken. The war-like king who had torn down the walls of Lachish and burned Babylon to the ground now seemed to turn away from battle. He settled down and began building instead. If this really indicates a change of personality in this Assyrian king, the tragedy is that he would not live to pass on this spirit to his sons. Sennacherib had at least seven sons, but when the crown prince, the oldest of them all, died in battle against the Elamites, Sennacherib was left to choose between the remaining younger sons who would be the next king. In the end, he had to decide between only two candidates. These two sons were named Udru-Mulissu and Esarhaddon. For Sennacherib, this seems to have been a difficult decision. At first, the older son Udru-Mulissu was named the crown prince, but after a few years, he seems to have fallen out of favor with his father. We can only guess what it was that made the king change his mind, but considering what would go on to happen, we might offer a guess. It may be that Sennacherib detected something cold and hard in the character of Udru-Mulissu, a hunger for power that frightened him. Whatever it was, Sennacherib decided to name the youngest of his sons as crown prince instead, the man named Esarhaddon. Esarhaddon's brothers were enraged. In a later inscription, he recalls the effect this announcement had on them. I am my older brother's youngest brother, but by the command of the gods, my father elevated me firmly in the assembly of my brothers, saying this is the son who will succeed me. He questioned the god Samas and Adad by divination, and they answered him with a firm yes, saying he is your replacement. He heeded their important words and gathered together the people of Assyria, young and old, and my brothers, and told them. Afterwards, my brothers went out of their minds and did everything that is displeasing to the gods of mankind, and they plotted evil. They butted each other like goats for the right to exercise kingship, and then my brothers went mad. They drew their swords godlessly in the middle of Nineveh. The other brothers begged their father to reconsider, but King Sennacherib's mind was made up. Udru-Mulissu was forced to swear an oath of allegiance to his brother. We know the kind of thing this oath would have contained because we have surviving copies of this kind of treaty that Assyrian kings always sent out to their vassals. These were long legal documents running over many pages containing an oath in which they swore their loyalty to the new crown prince, complete with terrifying heavenly punishments if they broke their word. This is the treaty which the king of Assyria has concluded with you in the presence of the great gods of heaven and earth. If you should remove it, consign it to the fire, throw it into the water, bury it in the earth or destroy it by any cunning device, annihilate or deface it, may Anu, king of the gods, let disease, exhaustion, malaria, sleeplessness, worries, and ill health reign upon all your houses, clothe you with leprosy, and forbid your entering into the presence of the gods or king roam the desert like the wild ass and the gazelle. May Shamash, the light of heaven and earth, remove your eyesight. Walk about in darkness. May Ishtar, lady of battle and war, smash your bow in the thick of battle. May Nabu, bearer of the tablet of fates of the gods, erase your name and destroy your seed from the land. But still, the bitter former crown prince Udru-Mulissu refused to accept it. Esarhaddon's brothers began plotting to have him killed, forcing him to flee to the western regions far from the increasingly dangerous atmosphere in Nineveh. Esarhaddon later remembers this exile with bitterness. They started evil rumors, falsehoods, and slander about me against the will of the gods, and they were constantly telling insincere lies, hostile things behind my back. They alienated the well-meaning heart of my father from me against the will of the gods, but deep down he was compassionate, and his eyes were permanently fixed on me exercising kingship. Esarhaddon's escape from Nineveh probably saved his life, but his father Sennacherib failed to see the danger that was increasingly growing against his own person. On the twentieth day of Tebet, the tenth month of the Assyrian calendar in the year 681 BC, the snubbed oldest prince Urdu-Mulissu, accompanied by another brother, fell upon the king Sennacherib while he prayed in one of Nineveh's temples, and killed him. The death of Sennacherib sent shockwaves across the whole region. In Judah and in all the other places where the Assyrians were despised, people must have celebrated in the streets. But in Assyria, the murder of the king was an abomination. The treacherous prince Udru-Mulissu and the other brothers had miscalculated the strength of the reaction against them. Riding this tide of outrage, the crown prince Esarhaddon quickly gathered an army and marched out to meet his treacherous brothers in battle. They also mustered a mighty force, but on the eve of the first battle, the soldiers of the brothers deserted en masse, unwilling to fight for the men who had murdered the old king. Esarhaddon now marched on Nineveh, facing virtually no resistance. One of his later inscriptions recalls his emotion upon retaking the city where his father had been murdered. I entered into Nineveh, my royal city, joyful, and took my seat upon the throne of my father in safety. The south wind blew, the breath of Ea, the wind whose blowing is favorable for exercising kingship. They awaited me favorable signs in heaven and on earth, a message of the soothsayers, tidings from the gods and goddesses, giving my heart courage. Esarhaddon's rage against the conspirators was overwhelming. He quickly moved to execute all of their accomplices and the entire families of his brothers, as one chilling inscription recounts. I sought out every one of the guilty soldiers who wrongly incited my brothers to exercise kingship over Assyria, and imposed a grievous punishment on them. I exterminated their offspring. Esarhaddon had retaken the throne that his father had left for him, but the way he was forced to take it forever scarred the young king. The rest of his life he lived in a cloud of paranoia, never knowing who he could trust. Messages written on clay tablets show that he frequently sought the advice of oracles and priests, asking them whether any of his relatives or officials wished to harm him. He spent much of his time in a heavily fortified palace in the city of Kalhu, with high walls and only one entrance and exit, designed to be impregnable to assassins. Perhaps fearing that the gods were angry with him, Esarhaddon also set out to undo some of the damage that his warlike father had done. He especially wanted to repair relations with the southern metropolis of Babylon after the destruction that his father Sennacherib had wrought on it. He ordered that various statues of Babylonian gods should be returned to their rightful home, and in the year 680 BC, he announced that he would rebuild the ancient city. Many letters written between King Esarhaddon and his chief architects have survived, and in them we get a clear sense that he wanted to rebuild Babylon just as it had been before the destruction. I laid its foundation platform over its previous foundations, and in exact accordance with this earlier plan. I did not diminish it by one cubit or increase it by half a cubit. I drew its grand plan exactly as it had been written. I made its foundation platform as strong as the base of a mighty mountain, and built its structure as it was in former days. Esarhaddon's rebuilding was a clear message to Babylon's people, and if reports are to be believed, it seems the Babylonians were grateful for the work done on their city. One message written by the governor that Esarhaddon installed in Babylon gives a glowing impression. I have entered Babylon. The people of Babylon welcomed me, and they blessed the king every day, saying he is the one who returned Babylon's captives and booty. Also, the chiefs of Chaldea from Sippar to the mouth of the sea blessed the king, saying he is the one who resettled Babylon. But Esarhaddon was also a fierce war-maker. He even invaded Egypt, sick and tired of their activities funding and supporting rebels in Assyrian lands. His first campaign in 673 BC was an embarrassing failure, but he succeeded with another push two years later. One victory monument put up in the south of modern Turkey proclaimed the totality of his victory. Memphis, his royal city, in half a day with mines, tunnels, assaults, I besieged, I captured, I destroyed, I devastated, I burned with fire. But around this time, Esarhaddon's health began to deteriorate. It's not exactly clear what his illness was, but I think there's a good argument to be made that this Assyrian king was suffering from one of the first recorded cases of depression. The king would often spend days in his sleeping quarters without food, drink, or human contact, and matters were made much worse when his queen, the great love of his life, passed away. Esarhaddon began writing letters to his chief exorcist and medicine man, a person named Adad-shumu-usur. This man was the one most responsible for Esarhaddon's wellbeing, and he often replied with hopelessness to the king's constant requests, as this letter written by him to the king shows. As to what the king, my lord, wrote to me, I'm feeling very sad. How did we act that I have become so depressed for this little one of mine? Had it been curable, you would have given away half of your kingdom to have it cured, but what can we do? Oh, king, my lord, it is something that cannot be done. Letters preserved from Esarhaddon's royal court describe his condition in some detail. He suffered violent vomiting, constant fevers, nosebleeds, and dizziness, painful earaches, and melancholy. The king often feared that his death was near, and a rash began to cover most of his body, including his face. His royal physicians could do nothing to help him, and they often wrote despondently back to him. The king, my lord, keeps on saying to me why do you not diagnose the nature of this illness of mine and bring about its cure? I spoke to the king at the audience and could not clarify his symptoms. As Esarhaddon's death neared, the question of his succession became a pressing concern. He had seen firsthand what a civil war over the throne could do to tear the empire apart, and he wanted to do everything he could to ensure a smooth transition. Determined not to repeat his father's mistakes, Esarhaddon decided on an inventive course of action. He would name one of his young sons the king of Assyria, ruling the whole empire from Nineveh, and another son he would name the king of Babylon, who would rule over that city, swearing an oath to the Assyrian Empire. In Babylon, he appointed his eldest surviving son Shamash-shum-ukin, and in Nineveh to be the king of the whole empire in his place, he appointed a younger son named Ashurbanipal. It was a beautiful vision; two brothers ruling over the world's two greatest cities together, the two of them uniting these two cities, bringing in an age of peace and prosperity. It was a beautiful vision, but a mistaken one. In fact, Esarhaddon's miscalculation would backfire enormously, and the war he caused would usher in the final chapter of the Assyrian age. One day in the year 670 BC, in the city of Harran in northern Mesopotamia, a woman fell into an ecstatic fit and began speaking in tongues. She ran through the street and shouted out for all to hear a clear and unmistakable prophecy. A slave girl of Bel-ahu-usur in the suburb of Harran; since the month of Sivan she is enraptured and speaks these prophecies about him. It is the word of Nusku. I will destroy the name and seed of Sennacherib. King Esarhaddon's network of spies soon delivered this information to him, and he was appalled at the news. He immediately ordered a crackdown across the empire, burning the homes of anyone found to be spreading this conspiracy, but the news of the prophecy does seem to have shaken him. During the final years of his life, Esarhaddon became obsessed with omens and prophecies, and his court astrologers spent a lot of their time reassuring him, as this letter from one of them shows. The eclipse of the moon moved from the eastern quadrant and settled over the entire western quadrant to the moon. The planets Jupiter and Venus were visible during the eclipse until it cleared. This is fortunate for your majesty, and portends evil for your enemies in the westland. Because of the dark omens seeming to gather around him, Esarhaddon undertook a number of times a bizarre ritual known as the substitute king. The substitute king ritual involved the Assyrian monarch going into hiding for a hundred days, during which a substitute was found to take his place. This was often a commoner, and he would spend those hundred days living in the palace, sleeping in the king's bed, wearing his crown and royal clothes, and eating his food. During this time, the actual king remained hidden, and even took on the title “the farmer” to try to fool the evil spirits out to harm him. At the end of the hundred days, having absorbed whatever negative energy was out to get the king, the substitute was put to death and the real monarch was returned to the throne, the evil supposedly having passed him by. Esarhaddon repeated this ritual three times during the final years of his reign, showing just how desperate he was to shake the feeling of doom that had begun to gather around him. But it was no use. After a rebellion in Egypt, Esarhaddon marched out to fight against those who opposed him, and on the way, his health worsened. His condition became critical as his army passed through the north of Mesopotamia, and he died in the town of Harran. This was the same town where only a few years before, the woman had run through the streets, shouting in ecstasy about the prophecy of his doom. When Esarhaddon died, his sons Ashurbanipal and Shamash-shum-ukin successfully ascended the thrones of Assyria and Babylon, and began the twin rule that their father had planned. This began as a remarkable success. Shamash-shum-ukin journeyed to Babylon and brought with him the statue of Marduk that his grandfather had put on trial, the last artifact that remained to be returned to Babylon. The two princes took up their thrones without any turmoil or unrest, and at first it seemed like the old king's plan was about to usher in a new age of peace. But for a number of reasons, that peace wasn't to last. The reign of Ashurbanipal is without doubt the golden age of the Assyrian Empire. At the time of his reign, it was the largest empire that the world had ever seen, and its capital of Nineveh was probably the largest city on the planet. The king Ashurbanipal himself springs out of the historical sources as a fully formed character, full of his own preoccupations and obsessions. One of the most interesting aspects of his character is that he was possibly the first Assyrian king to be able to read. Up until this time, reading wasn't considered a particularly kingly activity. Kings had servants and scribes to do their reading for them, and rulers were supposed to take part in more manly pursuits like hunting and fighting. But Ashurbanipal hadn't been intended for the throne. Before being named the crown prince, he had been preparing for some kind of position in the temples, and this meant he was taught to read from a young age. It's something he was clearly quite proud of, as this inscription written by him attests. I, Ashurbanipal, understood the wisdom of Nabu, the god of learning, all the art of writing of every kind. I made myself the master of them all. I read the cunning tablets of Sumer and the dark Akkadian language which is difficult to rightly use. I took my pleasure in reading stones inscribed before the flood, such works as none of the kings who went before me had ever learnt. I wrote on tablets, checked and collated, and deposited within my palace for perusing and reading. Ashurbanipal's collection of clay tablets was something quite unprecedented in the world at the time. It was the first attempt to create a universal library, a place where all the books ever written could be kept. He wrote to cities and centers of learning all across the empire, requesting copies of every written work ever set in clay. Eventually, he would amass a collection of over 30,000 clay tablets. Most were observations of events and omens, texts detailing the behavior of certain peoples and animals, texts on the movements of heavenly bodies, the planets, and stars. But the library also contained dictionaries for the languages of Sumerian, Akkadian, and others, as well as religious texts, rituals, fables, prayers, and incantations, even comical satirical pieces of writing, as well as the great ancient mythology and poetry of Mesopotamia. Many of the traditional Mesopotamian stories and tales known today, among them the epic of Gilgamesh, have only survived into the modern day because they were included in Ashurbanipal's library. But Ashurbanipal would soon have to deal with the very real challenges of ruling the Assyrian Empire. Egypt, Assyria's newest imperial possession, was already in full rebellion, and so in the year 667 BC, Ashurbanipal marched the Assyrian army as far south as Thebes and sacked numerous Egyptian cities in classic Assyrian fashion. This campaign crushed the insurgency, but as usual, it only created more resistance in the long term. Rebellions sprang up once again the very next year, forcing him to march back to Egypt and stamp it out even harder. But despite his efforts, the Assyrians would never successfully integrate Egypt into their empire. At this time, another power on the opposite side of the empire began to become an increasingly painful thorn in the side of Assyria. These were the Elamite peoples of southern Iran. The Elamites were an ancient people. They had been instrumental in the fall of Sumerian society more than a millennium before, and since then had built a powerful and wealthy kingdom centered on the capital of Suza. The people of Elam had clashed with the Assyrians a number of times, and today their border is more or less in the same place as the modern border between Iraq and Iran. Ashurbanipal's father Esarhaddon had taken pains to exist peacefully with the people of Elam, and even allowed outbursts of violence on the border to go unpunished. Now, Elam was growing in confidence. Without much hope of defeating Assyria on the battlefield, they had settled for a similar tactic as the Egyptians in dealing with their powerful neighbor, supplying and arming rebel groups in Assyria, and causing as much trouble for them as they could without provoking an all-out war. But in the year 653 BC, it's thought that the Elamite king, a man named Teumann, received a secret message. This message was from the older brother of King Ashurbanipal, then ruling as the king of Babylon as their father had decreed, the man named Shamash- -shum-ukin. Shamash-shum-ukin had been dissatisfied with his lot in life for a long time now. Since their father's death 13 years before, he had ruled as king of Babylon while his brother ruled over the whole empire. He must have had a pretty good life, but he didn't feel all that powerful. In theory, he ruled over all of Babylonia, but in practice, most of his governors simply ignored him and considered Ashurbanipal to be their true king. Inscriptions show that Ashurbanipal would often dictate orders to him and would frequently meddle in the affairs of Babylon. His anger at this situation was clearly growing, and if he did send a message to Teumann, the king of Elam, we can imagine that it contained a clear proposition. I will help you invade Assyria, topple Ashurbanipal, and destroy your ancient rival, and in return I want to rule over Babylon as its only king. The Elamites were all too eager to accept. When the season of war came back around in the year 664, the Elamites launched a surprise attack. They swept down from the mountains and attacked the Assyrian’s southern territories. Ashurbanipal was enraged. He gathered his armies and marched down the rivers to face them. He successfully repelled their attack and chased their soldiers back into Elam. He defeated them in battle beside the river Ulay, close to their capital of Suza, and one of Ashurbanipal's inscriptions boasts about this victory, which is also immortalized in a series of carvings that were displayed on his palace walls. By the command of the gods Ashur and Marduk, I blocked up the Ulay River with their corpses and filled the plane of the city Suza with their bodies like water weeds. In the midst of his troops, I cut off the head of Teumann, the king of the land Elam. One remarkable carving even depicts the king Ashurbanipal relaxing in his gardens with his queen, surrounded by musicians and servants fanning him, bringing him drinks and food, and all the while the head of his conquered enemy Teumann hangs in the branches of a nearby tree. It's not clear whether Ashurbanipal suspected his brother's hand in the surprise attack. Either way, one year later, Shamash-shum-ukin revealed his true intentions. He rose his armies in rebellion against his brother, and declared the lands of Babylonia to be independent. This clearly shook King Ashurbanipal. We can almost hear the betrayal, the hurt, and the anger speaking directly from his official inscriptions. Shamash-shum-ukin, my unfaithful brother, for whom I performed many acts of kindness and whom I had installed as king of Babylon, I made and gave him everything that kingship calls for. I assembled soldiers, horses, and chariots, and placed them in his hands. I gave him more cities, fields, orchards, and people to live inside them than the father who had engendered me had commanded. He forgot these acts of kindness that I had done for him, and constantly sought out evil deeds. Aloud with his lips he was speaking friendship, but deep down his heart was scheming for murder. He lied to the citizens of Babylon who had been devoted to Assyria, servants who belonged to me, and he spoke words of deceit with them. But privately, Ashurbanipal was clearly afraid. He frequently wrote messages to his oracles and soothsayers, giving them questions that he wanted to ask the gods, and in these questions we get a remarkable sense for the uncertainties and doubts that plagued him during these dark days. Will the Elamite army gather, get organized, march, and fight with the men and army of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria? His fears were soon realized, and the Elamite army, still stinging from their defeat the previous year, joined with his brother to fight him. Ashurbanipal responded by marching with his full force on the city of Babylon. His brother Shamash-shum-ukin was forced to retreat behind its mighty walls, and the Assyrians settled in for a siege. The siege of Babylon went on for four years. Conditions within the city of Babylon became horrific during this time. People began to starve and resort to cannibalism. When the city finally fell, the Assyrian soldiers poured over its walls and into its streets. Shamash-shum-ukin himself appears to have died in a fire, although it's not clear how it was started. The citizens of the city who had held out for so long under horrific conditions were cut down by the Assyrian soldiers, as Ashurbanipal's inscriptions recall. Those of them who fled before the murderous iron dagger, famine, want and flaming fire, and found a refuge; the net of the great gods, my lords, which cannot be eluded, brought them low. Not one escaped. Not one sinner slipped through my hands. As for those men and their vulgar mouths who uttered vulgarity against Ashur, my god, and plotted evil against me, I slit their tongues and brought them low. The rest of those living I destroyed, and their carved-up bodies I fed to dogs, to pigs, to wolves, to eagles, to birds of the heavens, to fishes of the deep. After all his father Esarhaddon's efforts to rebuild Babylon, Ashurbanipal had now turned it back into ruin. With his vengeance on Babylon complete, Ashurbanipal turned his attention to Elam. In the next year, he marched up into the mountains, but this time he would not simply punish Elam. This campaign was waged as a war of extermination, designed to utterly remove it as a political entity in its entirety. Carried by wounded rage, Ashurbanipal scattered the armies of Elam and rounded on its capital city of Suza. One Assyrian carving shows what happened next. It shows the city of Suza in the background. Flames are rising from its towers and pouring out the mouth of its gate. In the foreground, Assyrian soldiers are carrying off all kinds of loot, and on the walls and towers of Suza, more soldiers are steadily and meticulously going to work demolishing every building in the city brick by brick. Ashurbanipal, in one of his inscriptions, describes the destruction he ordered. Suza, the great holy city, abode of their gods, seat of their mysteries, I conquered. I entered its palaces, I opened their treasuries where silver and gold, goods and wealth were amassed. I destroyed the ziggurat of Suza. I smashed its shining copper horns. I reduced the temples of Elam to naught. Their gods and goddesses I scattered to the winds. The tombs of their ancient and recent kings I devastated. I exposed to the sun and I carried away their bones toward the land of Ashur. I devastated the provinces of Elam, and on their lands I sowed salt. The Assyrians had once more emerged victorious, their army undefeated, all challenges overcome, and now one of their oldest rivals utterly eradicated. The empire was at the height of its confidence, but in little over 30 years, its end would come, and all that would be left would be a series of enormous smoking ruins crumbling into the desert sands. It's in the final decade of his reign, perhaps around the year 640 BC, that King Ashurbanipal commissioned the works of art that would stand as perhaps the defining and lasting legacy of his entire civilization. These are the lion hunt reliefs of the northwest palace in Nineveh. At this time, a breed of lion known as the Asiatic lion roamed freely right across the Middle East. They are slightly smaller than their African counterparts, with a much shorter mane and a distinctive fold of skin running down their bellies. Although we think of them today as endangered animals to be protected, lions were a constant menace for the people of Assyria. They would often roam down from the hills and take away livestock, and they could be a very real danger to the people. This letter, written by a panicking servant to his master who's away from the house on business, shows how prevalent this danger could be. Tell my lord your servant Yakim-Addu sends the following message. A short time ago I wrote to my lord as follows; a lion was caught in the loft of a house in Akkaka. My lord should write me whether this lion should remain in that same loft until the arrival of my lord or whether I should have it brought to my lord, but letters from my lord were slow in coming, and the lion has been in the loft for five days. Although they threw him a dog and a pig, he refused to eat them. I was worrying; heaven forbid that this lion pine away. I became scared, but eventually I got the lion into a wooden cage and loaded it on a boat to have it brought to my lord. The kings of Assyria had hunted lions for centuries, and the killing of these creatures had taken on a symbolic meaning. For the kings of Assyria, the lion came to represent all the dangers that menaced their people, and by triumphing over a lion, they were shown to be capable of protecting their people from all other dangers. In the early days, these hunts would take the form of expeditions out into the wilderness to find wild lions in the hills, but in the later years of the empire, lions were rounded up from the countryside and brought to the capital to be bred in captivity, as one inscription by the 9th century king Ashurnasirpal recounts. With my outstretched hand and my fierce heart, I captured 15 strong lions from the mountains and forests. I took away fifty lion cubs. I herded them into Kalhu and the palaces of my land into cages. I bred their cubs in great numbers. These lions could be hunted in more controlled performances in full view of all the city's inhabitants, and it's one of these incredible spectacles that the lion hunt reliefs portray. We can see the king in his chariot fighting with spear and bow. We can see the lions in their cages with a small person or child in a smaller cage above, tasked with the job of opening the cage door. We can see the soldiers penning in the lions with shields and spears, with trained dogs straining on their leashes. We can imagine the thunder of the king's chariot as it rides around the arena, and the whistling of his arrows as they find their mark. These reliefs show the craft of the Assyrians at its most realistic, and demonstrate an art form that had matured over centuries. The immaculate details in the human figures in the embroidered clothes and the details of the chariot, even the fingernails and eyelashes of the figures are all realized in perfect detail. But while the human figures are depicted formally with little or no emotion on their faces, it's these lions that carry almost a human expressiveness. As the arrows and spears strike them, the faces of the lions seem to cry out with human sorrow, and it can be tempting as a modern observer to see in that sorrow a distillation of the mood that must have been enveloping the empire in its final years as things began to crumble around it. These would be the last great pieces of art to ever be created in the empire of Assyria in the final years of its last great king. Within little more than three decades, the empire of Assyria would collapse, and all of its great cities would be abandoned to the sands. As is always the case, there were multiple causes of the Assyrian collapse, and the latest research suggests that one of these was something we've encountered a number of times throughout this series. That's a rapid and dramatic climate shift. In the south of Mesopotamia, what was then the lands of Babylon, the land is arid, broken only by the rivers and marshland, while in the north there is a great deal of rainfall in the winter. This means that in the south, vast networks of irrigation canals have been necessary since the earliest Sumerian days. But in the north, irrigation was less of a concern, since the seasonal rains were able to water the crops. The last 200 years had been a time of unusually high rainfall. But new studies of stalagmites in the Kuna Ba caves of northern Iraq have suggested that around the year 675 BC, in the final years of the reign of King Esarhaddon, this situation began to change. Stalagmites are rock formations that form slowly as mineral deposits drip down from the roofs of caves. This means that they grow outwards, leaving rings just like the rings of a tree. Studying the chemical composition of these rings can tell us a lot about how the climate changed over the course of their formation, and these stalagmites clearly show that there were two distinct phases in the climate of the Assyrian age. The first was one of the wettest periods of the whole 4,000-year span that the stalagmites show. During this time, Assyrian fields would have been thick with barley and wheat, its grazing lands rich and capable of supporting huge herds of animals. But this phase came to an end around 725 BC, just before King Ashurbanipal came to the throne. This second period was marked by increasingly dry conditions. In fact, the region was soon gripped by a mega drought. Even today with all our modern farming techniques, crop productivity in northern Iraq is highly sensitive to small changes in rainfall, and it's possible that a protracted period of drought may have acted to weaken the imperial center of Assyria. There is some evidence that during the decades of drought, the people of the north began to dig irrigation canals of the kind more usually found in the dry south, suggesting that the rains were becoming increasingly unreliable. But there's little evidence to be found in historical texts, and no real mention of devastating droughts. After all, drought was one of the problems that Assyrians had learned to deal with expertly. Records show that the prices of grain and slaves remained relatively stable throughout this period, meaning that the picture wasn't one of starvation or people dying in the streets. But it's still worth bearing in mind that the Assyrian state was now under pressure from its environment and were suddenly put at an economic disadvantage to their southern neighbors. Whether this was a major factor in their downfall is still subject to lively debate, but I think another factor is perhaps the most important. Assyria was perhaps the first true military superpower. Their military was easily the most powerful in the region, a hammer that crushed all opposition, but their heavy-handed approach to maintaining their empire made them incredibly unpopular. This meant their subject peoples were constantly on the verge of rebellion, and whenever this happened, the Assyrians did the only thing they knew how; crush the rebellions even harder and make themselves even more hated. Eventually, they were left with no other option but the kind of thing Ashurbanipal did to the lands of Elam, to crush their enemies so ruthlessly that they simply ceased to exist. But nature abhors a vacuum, and beyond the blackened and smoking lands of Elam, another power had been building for centuries, just waiting for their opportunity to expand, an opportunity that the Assyrians had just dropped right into their laps. These were the people of Medea, who were called the Medes. The Medes were an ancient Iranian people who spoke the Medean language and lived in the region of northern and western Iran. For centuries now, the powerful Elamites had been their rivals and kept their ambitions in check, but with the Elamites now virtually eradicated, that was no longer the case. In the next decades, the Medeans expanded rapidly and moved to occupy the lands of Elam, gathering its scattered and angry peoples beneath its banner. Soon they were a formidable force, and they were all animated with a common purpose; a burning hatred for the Assyrian Empire and everything it stood for. All they would need was an opening, and that opening would come in the form of the death of the great king Ashurbanipal. For someone whose early life was so meticulously recorded and who professed his love of literature and writing, the final 12 years of Ashurbanipal's reign are a surprising mystery. We don't actually know how he died or really how he spent the last decade of his life. It's possible that the king was struck with a period of illness, or like his father, he fell to the family tendency for depression and paranoia. One inscription, possibly the last ever written by Assyria's last great king, does seem to represent a kind of lament, a wail of pain for the misfortunes that have befallen him. It stands out among all the boasting and bluster of the Assyrian kings as a true moment of vulnerability and suffering speaking up to us through the ages. I did well unto god and man, to dead and living. Why have sickness and misery befallen me? I cannot do away with the strife in my country and the dissensions in my family. Disturbing scandals oppress me always. Illness of mind and flesh bow me down. With cries of woe, I bring my days to an end. On the day of the city god, the day of the festival, I am wretched. Death is seizing hold upon me and bears me down. With lamentation and mourning, I wail day and night. I groan oh, god, grant even to one who is impious that he may see the light. Whatever the cause, in the year 639 BC, the chronicles that had until then kept detailed records of the life of the king suddenly stop. For this period, virtually the only sources we have to work from are the Bible and the writings of Herodotus, who compiled his histories 200 years later, and for whom Mesopotamia was a distant and mysterious land. But one thing is clear; after the death of Ashurbanipal, chaos began to reign in Assyria. There was fighting in the streets, and all its provinces rose up in rebellion. Babylon once more declared independence, and civil war split the empire. In the year 616 BC, a series of Babylonian chronicles begins, and they tell the story of the final collapse of Assyrian society. The great instigators of this downfall would be the people who the Assyrians had so inadvertently helped. These were their enemies waiting and watching in the hills, the people of Medea. In a startling surprise attack, the Medean armies marched down through the foothills of the Zagros mountains and invaded the lands of Assyria. First, they marched to the great ancient capital of Ashur, birthplace of the Assyrian nation and the home of its god. The Babylonian chronicles record what happened next. He made an attack on the town and destroyed the city wall. He inflicted a terrible massacre upon the greater part of the people, plundering it and carrying off prisoners from it. This victory must have rocked the ancient world. This was the first time in centuries that a city of the Assyrian heartlands had been captured and sacked, and it must have sent a clear message to all of its enemies; the empire of Assyria was weak, and with enough of a push, perhaps it could even be toppled. One man heard this message loud and clear. He was one of the new kings of the independent Babylon who had big plans for the ancient city he ruled, and his name was Nabo-polassar. Nabo-polassar was a curious character. We don't know anything about his origins, but he refers to himself in his inscriptions using the phrase ‘mar la mammana’, or the son of a nobody. No other Mesopotamian king had ever described himself in this way, and it shows that in the social upheaval of this period of chaos, some of the power of the nobility was being eroded, and men were rising from the ranks of the common people to rule. When he heard about the Medean victory at Ashur, Nabo-polassar must have been overjoyed. He had spent years fortifying his borders, strengthening them for a conflict with Assyria that he knew must be around the corner. But now, he began to dream of even bigger things. He gathered his armies and marched to Ashur as fast as he could to join forces with the Medes. The Babylonian armies arrived too late for the fighting, but in the ruins of the Assyrian city of Ashur, they formalized their alliance. The Medean king Cyaraxes married his daughter Amytis to the Babylonian prince Nabu-kudurri-Usur, and they joined forces for war. This is the situation that had been the Assyrian nightmare for centuries, and it had finally come to pass. Its enemies had united against it at its moment of greatest weakness. For the rest of that year, the joint Medean and Babylonian forces pushed north up the river Euphrates, but they found that even a wounded lion can still bite. The Assyrian army, even in its weakened state, was still a formidable force and made them pay for every inch of land. It wasn't until the year 612 BC, a full two years after the invasion had begun, that the Medean army reached the walls of Assyria's greatest city, the capital of Nineveh. We can only imagine how that army must have felt, looking out over that great city, the capital of the world, with its towering ziggurat, its glorious palaces, and its double line of defensive walls. The Babylonian chronicles record what happened next. Cyaxeres ferried across the river and marched upstream on the embankment of the Tigris, and pitched camp against Nineveh. From the month Simanu till the month Abu, three battles were fought. Then they made a great attack against the city. We can see evidence of the fierce battle that unfolded here, left in the archaeological record. Excavations in Nineveh's southeastern gate, the Halzi Gate, have found the ground here littered with skeletons lying one on top of another on the cobbled pavement. The bodies of horses also litter this gateway, along with countless iron spearheads and arrows. All of them are lying exactly where they fell, in the last ditch defense of the city over 2,600 years ago. The Babylonian chronicles recall the last desperate attempts of the defenders. In the month of Abu, the city was seized, and a great defeat inflicted on the entire population. On that day, Sin-shar-ishkun, the king of Assyria, fled. The great spoil of the city and the temple they carried off. Many prisoners of the city, beyond counting, they carried away. They turned the city into ruined hills and heaps of debris. The destruction of Nineveh was recorded by Hebrew scholars of the time with an understandable delight. One vivid account has survived in the Hebrew Bible in a chapter known as the Book of Nahum, and in these lines we can almost hear the sound and fury of the battle as the soldiers of Medea and Babylon rampaged through the streets of Nineveh. Chariots rush madly in the streets. They jostle one against another. They run to and fro like the lightnings. The shield of his mighty men is made red, and the valiant men are in scarlet. Chariots of fire, of steel, in this day of his preparation and the cypress spears are made to quiver. Behold, I am against thee, said the lord of hosts, and I will burn her chariots in the smoke, and the sword shall devour thy young lions. I will cut off thy prey from the earth, and the voice of thy messenger shall no more be heard. Woe to the bloody city. It is full of lies. The horsemen charging and the flashing sword and the glittering spear, and a multitude of slain, and a heap of carcasses. There is no end of the corpses, and they stumble upon their corpses. All thy fortresses shall be like fig trees with the first ripe figs. If they be shaken, they fall into the mouth of the eater. For Nahum, the destruction of Nineveh was a moral judgment on an empire that had wrought such suffering on the lands of others. The lord is a jealous and avenging god. The lord avengeth and is full of wrath. The lord taketh vengeance on his adversaries and he reserveth wrath for his enemies. The lord has given commandment concerning thee, that no more of thy name be sown, for thou art become worthless. Behold, the gates of thy land are set wide open unto thine enemies. The fire hath devoured thy bars. Oh, king of Syria, thy people are scattered upon the mountains and there is none to gather them. There is no assuaging of thy hurt. Thy wound is grievous. All that hear the report of thee, clap the hands over thee, for upon whom has not thy wickedness past continually? By the end of the year 612 BC, the three great capitals of Assyria, Ashur, the religious heart, Nineveh, the administrative center, and Nimrud, the military capital, all lay in ruins. The Medes made no attempt to occupy them, and instead set about destroying the cities with the same viciousness that the Assyrians had once reserved for the cities of Elam. The Assyrian king was killed in the battle, and one general named Ashur-Uballit seems to have held out a brave resistance to the invaders, gathering what remained of the Assyrian army around him. These were mostly troops brought back from Egypt who had arrived too late for the defense of Nineveh, but they must have known that it was hopeless. They shut themselves up in the town of Harran, and I wonder whether any of them remembered that this was the place where a century before, that woman had given her prophecy of doom for the empire of Assyria. In 610 BC, two years after the sacking of Nineveh, the Medean armies finally marched on Harran and crushed what remained of Assyrian resistance. The general Ashur-Uballit faded from history, and the empire of Assyria passed into dust. The Babylonian king Nabo-polassar wrote the following inscriptions celebrating the destruction of his great enemy. As for the Assyrians, who had ruled over the land of Akkad because of the hatred of the gods and had made the people of the land suffer under its heavy yoke, I, the weak and powerless one who constantly seeks out the lord of lords Marduk, with the powerful strength of the gods Nabu and Marduk, my lords, I barred their feet from the land of Akkad and had the Babylonians cast off their yoke. As he grew older, Nabo-polassar increasingly relied on his son, the prince Nabu-kudurri-Usur, who we know by the biblical name Nebuchadnezzer. His reign would begin the line of Babylonian kings which would usher in the next phase of history in this region, but the great cities of Assyria would never be reoccupied. The ruins of Nineveh would have stood for some time as smoking heaps of blackened rubble, its streets carpeted with bodies, but slowly the wind-blown desert sands would have rolled over them. Its walls and houses were covered in dust and earth. The skeletons lying in its streets were buried by the sands. The great library of the king Ashurbanipal was also buried. In a twist of ironic fate, it was the destruction of Nineveh that ensured that its texts would survive. The fires that tore through the city baked the clay, hardening it, and meaning that the writing on these tablets was just as sharp on the day they were unearthed by archaeologists as the day an Assyrian scribe wrote them twenty-six centuries in the past. The people who destroyed Nineveh celebrated by rampaging through the palaces of Ashurbanipal, Esarhaddon, and Sennacherib. They looted them of all their valuables, and celebrated by defacing some of the carvings that lined the palace walls. They struck particularly at the carved faces of the Assyrian kings, cracking the soft alabaster, and reveling in their destruction. But of all the carvings, those depicting the lion hunt remained untouched. The sorrowful expressions of those hunted lions would have stared out with their sad eyes over the abandoned halls, once so full of life, as the days and months rolled by. Ash and dust soon filled the rooms. Eventually, the roof beams rotted and collapsed. Grasses would have begun to grow in the halls of the Assyrian kings. Birds and wild foxes would have made their homes among the ruins, and bluish tamarisk bushes would have soon filled up the corridors. Hundreds of years later, when the Greek writer Xenophon marched past with his 10,000 Greeks, fleeing from the Persian army that pursued them, the people who lived in this region would not even remember the names of the people who had built this city. They would say only that it might have been the Medes and that for some reason, the gods had punished them and turned their cities into a mound of ruins. Writing in the 1850s, the Victorian archaeologist Austen Henry Layard visited the ruins of Nineveh and wrote the following account of the sight of these desolate ruins. During a short stay in this town, we visited the great ruins on the east bank of the river, which have been generally believed to be the remains of Nineveh. From the summit of an artificial eminence, we looked down upon a broad plain separated from us by the river. A line of lofty mounds bounded it to the east, and one of a pyramidical form rose high above the rest. Its position rendered its identification easy; this was the pyramid which Xenophon had described, and near which the 10,000 had encamped. The ruins around it were those which the Greek generals saw 22 centuries before, and which were, even then, the remains of an ancient city. Layard was struck with the haunting beauty of these empty places, where the ruins hardly even seemed to bear the marks of human construction. Were the traveler to cross the Euphrates and seek for such ruins in Mesopotamia as he had left behind him in Asia Minor or Syria, his search would be in vain. The graceful column rising above the thick foliage of tile myrtle, ilex, and oleander, the gradines of the amphitheater covering a gentle slope and overlooking the dark blue water of a lake. None of this can be found. All are replaced by the stern, shapeless mound rising like a hill from the scorched plain, the fragments of pottery, and the stupendous mass of brickwork occasionally laid bare by the winter rains. Layard, like Xenophon more than two millennia before, was struck by the immensity of what these ruins represented, their silent testimony to the vast gulf of time that separates their time from ours. The scene around is worthy of the ruin he is contemplating. Desolation meets desolation. A feeling of awe succeeds to wonder. There is nothing to relieve the mind, to lead to hope, or to tell of what has gone by. These huge mounds of Assyria made a deeper impression upon me, gave rise to more serious thoughts and more earnest reflection than all the temples of Balbec and the theatres of Ionia. It's only through the painstaking and meticulous work of generations of scholars that the texts of the ancient Assyrians have been slowly deciphered and translated, and their voices have once more been allowed to speak to us from the clay, breaking the silence of millennia. I want to end the episode with one of these voices. It's a mysterious poem written by an unknown author in the language of Akkadian, and it's known as The Lament for a City. While these kinds of sorrowful laments were common in the earlier language of Sumerian, they're less well-known in the Assyrian age. The poem speaks in the voice of a goddess whose city has been destroyed, and who now wanders the bare and level deserts alone, mourning for the place that she once called home. This poem, broken and fragmentary, full of gaps and silences, captures what must have been the feeling of loss felt in those days by all the peoples of Assyria. As you listen, imagine what it would feel like to live in the rich heart of the world, knowing that the final days of the empire stretched out before you. Imagine how it would feel to live in the center of an empire that had caused so much suffering to others as the other peoples of the world finally gathered around you and demanded their revenge. Imagine how it would feel to watch the grand painted halls covered in carved alabaster, the gardens overflowing with rare trees and flowers, the libraries full of books and stories, the city full of your memories of childhood, your family and loved ones, all of it going up in flames and then covered finally in the drifting dust and sand of the desert. Who stood where I stand to cry out, to cry out like a helpless one on her bed? Among the established cities, my city has been smashed. Among the established populace, my man has gone away. Among the gods residing there, I too have surely fled. My lost lamb cries out in the land of the enemy. My lamb is bleating. My sheep and her lamb, they have been taken away. When my sheep crossed the river, she abandoned her lamb on the bank. My birds, all of them with their wings cut off. Where is my house that I used to dwell in? Thank you once again for listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast.

By Edwin RutashobyaPublished about a year ago • 90 min read