Fall of Civilizations #13: The Assyrians—Empire of Iron
(Okay look this is a three hour episode, approximately none of the names are in my orthography which means I have trouble telling people apart, and the dates don’t mean much to me either. I’d be amazed if I don’t misremember anything here.)
During some Persian civil war, one of the combatants hired a bunch of Greek mercenaries. They won one particular battle, but the Persian dude got killed so there wasn’t much left for the greeks and they started running away towards the Black Sea. On the way they found two large abandoned cities that they had no idea what was going on. This was before the Parthenon or the Colusseum. Now we know the names of the cities (one was Nineveh, I forget the other) and that they were part of the Assyrian empire.
The empire started with a city named Assur, somehow related to the previous Sumerian empire. It became pretty good at fighting. The god of the city (also called Assur, it was normal for a city to have a god back then) came to take over the place of the king of the gods. Then came the bronze age collapse and it survived better than most.
They started conquering places around them. For a while Babylon kept them in check, but then didn’t, and they conquered Babylon. Their kings got pretty brutal. They could field large armies, over 100k when the world population was only like 50m. The armies did have to go home for harvest though, so there were only a few months of the year where they could campaign. Their subjects could time insurrections carefully to avoid getting spanked. Except then they didn’t need that, either, and laid siege to a city for three years. They also had army engineers making siege engines and digging roads through mountains and stuff. A lot of their subjects didn’t much like them, but they didn’t much like each other either, so they didn’t team up and Assyria was able to suppress them one at a time even if they rebelled simultaneously.
They also have a lot of writing, on clay tablets which means a lot of it has survived, enough that most has never even been looked at by an expert. There’s a letter from a child at school to his mum, complaining that you never buy me new clothes. Father’s servant’s son gets new clothes. His mother loves him even though he’s adopted, but you don’t love me.
Babylon was still starting shit, and at some point they got tired of it and completely destroyed the place. They took its god, Marduk, to Nineveh, and later made Nineveh the capital city. Some people think the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were actually there.
At some point there was a lot of insurrections at once, partly aided by Egypt which didn’t like Assyria. This included Judah, which had been separated from Israel by previous Assyrian conquests. Assyria marched on Lakish, sacked and destroyed it, and scattered the population throughout the empire—that was a thing they did a lot. Then tried to do the same to Jerusalem. The king had put up a new wall and a tunnel to a water supply, and paid a tribute, but they still besieged. But then something, possibly plague, killed a bunch of them and they had to turn back. This episode is something we have from both sides, because it’s in the Bible, though the Assyrians didn’t say much about their eventual defeat.
The king who did that seems to have become a lot less warlike and a lot more buildy afterwards. It might have been him who decided to rebuild Babylon in exactly its previous layout. When his eldest son died, he named his eldest remaining son his successor, but then changed his mind and named a different son. Eldest remaining son got pissed and started conspiring with the other sons, the successor had to flee. Successor came back with a big army, and a lot of usurper’s army surrendered because usurper had done something or other shitty. Successor killed the conspirators and their families. (Not sure at what point in this the previous king had died.)
This new king wants to avoid that kind of succession crisis, so he appoints his younger son king of Assyria, and elder son king of Babylon, underneath Assyria, when he dies. Which happens after a prolonged bout of possibly-depression, illness and paranoia, on a campaign to kill a bunch of people spreading a prophecy of his doom, in the town where the prophecy was made.
So his sons ascend. The new-new Assyrian king gets tired of the egyptians and attacks them. But then things kind of blow up with the Elamites(?), in modern-day Iran. King of Babylon has been feeling hard done by, no one takes him seriously, his brother is meddling and his advisors listen to his brother instead of him. So he offers to help the Elamites possibly in exchange for getting to be king of Babylon not subject to anyone else. Assyria beats the Elamites, we don’t know if they know Babylon was involved. In any case, then Babylon rebels and declares independence. So Assyria besieges Babylon, reduces them to cannibalism, finally enters and sacks the place again. Then goes on a war of extermination against Elam, completely destroys their capital Susa.
Also, this king hadn’t originally been intended for Kingship. He’d been going to do some temple work or something. So unlike most kings, he could read and write, and he was proud of it. He built a library and sent around for copies of every book published, which got preserved well when the city got burned later. But towards the end of his reign he seems to get depressed too, his last writing is a woe-is-me. Around this point we stop getting Assyrian chronicles and have to pick up with Babylonian ones a bit later.
So what goes wrong for Assyria? Part of it might be climate change. Until now they’d been in an unusually wet period, but now things started to dry up. In the north they had to start constructing irrigation like they’d been doing already in the south. This would have shaken their power. But the price of wheat didn’t change much, so it’s not clear how much difference it made.
Narrator thinks it’s more significant that the Elamites left a power vacuum, that was filled by the Medes, their old enemies who Assyria hadn’t had much contact with. And the Medes decided to attack Assyria, and came and burned Assur. Babylon declared independence again, joined forces with Media (a Babylonian prince married a Median princess, or something), and together they went on to completely destroy Nineveh. The king dies at some point (I think this was a new king by now?) and a general holds out for a bit but they beat him too, and that’s it for Assyria. Before too long no one in the area remembers them.
Fall of Civilizations #13: The Assyrians—Empire of Iron
(Okay look this is a three hour episode, approximately none of the names are in my orthography which means I have trouble telling people apart, and the dates don’t mean much to me either. I’d be amazed if I don’t misremember anything here.)
During some Persian civil war, one of the combatants hired a bunch of Greek mercenaries. They won one particular battle, but the Persian dude got killed so there wasn’t much left for the greeks and they started running away towards the Black Sea. On the way they found two large abandoned cities that they had no idea what was going on. This was before the Parthenon or the Colusseum. Now we know the names of the cities (one was Nineveh, I forget the other) and that they were part of the Assyrian empire.
The empire started with a city named Assur, somehow related to the previous Sumerian empire. It became pretty good at fighting. The god of the city (also called Assur, it was normal for a city to have a god back then) came to take over the place of the king of the gods. Then came the bronze age collapse and it survived better than most.
They started conquering places around them. For a while Babylon kept them in check, but then didn’t, and they conquered Babylon. Their kings got pretty brutal. They could field large armies, over 100k when the world population was only like 50m. The armies did have to go home for harvest though, so there were only a few months of the year where they could campaign. Their subjects could time insurrections carefully to avoid getting spanked. Except then they didn’t need that, either, and laid siege to a city for three years. They also had army engineers making siege engines and digging roads through mountains and stuff. A lot of their subjects didn’t much like them, but they didn’t much like each other either, so they didn’t team up and Assyria was able to suppress them one at a time even if they rebelled simultaneously.
They also have a lot of writing, on clay tablets which means a lot of it has survived, enough that most has never even been looked at by an expert. There’s a letter from a child at school to his mum, complaining that you never buy me new clothes. Father’s servant’s son gets new clothes. His mother loves him even though he’s adopted, but you don’t love me.
Babylon was still starting shit, and at some point they got tired of it and completely destroyed the place. They took its god, Marduk, to Nineveh, and later made Nineveh the capital city. Some people think the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were actually there.
At some point there was a lot of insurrections at once, partly aided by Egypt which didn’t like Assyria. This included Judah, which had been separated from Israel by previous Assyrian conquests. Assyria marched on Lakish, sacked and destroyed it, and scattered the population throughout the empire—that was a thing they did a lot. Then tried to do the same to Jerusalem. The king had put up a new wall and a tunnel to a water supply, and paid a tribute, but they still besieged. But then something, possibly plague, killed a bunch of them and they had to turn back. This episode is something we have from both sides, because it’s in the Bible, though the Assyrians didn’t say much about their eventual defeat.
The king who did that seems to have become a lot less warlike and a lot more buildy afterwards. It might have been him who decided to rebuild Babylon in exactly its previous layout. When his eldest son died, he named his eldest remaining son his successor, but then changed his mind and named a different son. Eldest remaining son got pissed and started conspiring with the other sons, the successor had to flee. Successor came back with a big army, and a lot of usurper’s army surrendered because usurper had done something or other shitty. Successor killed the conspirators and their families. (Not sure at what point in this the previous king had died.)
This new king wants to avoid that kind of succession crisis, so he appoints his younger son king of Assyria, and elder son king of Babylon, underneath Assyria, when he dies. Which happens after a prolonged bout of possibly-depression, illness and paranoia, on a campaign to kill a bunch of people spreading a prophecy of his doom, in the town where the prophecy was made.
So his sons ascend. The new-new Assyrian king gets tired of the egyptians and attacks them. But then things kind of blow up with the Elamites(?), in modern-day Iran. King of Babylon has been feeling hard done by, no one takes him seriously, his brother is meddling and his advisors listen to his brother instead of him. So he offers to help the Elamites possibly in exchange for getting to be king of Babylon not subject to anyone else. Assyria beats the Elamites, we don’t know if they know Babylon was involved. In any case, then Babylon rebels and declares independence. So Assyria besieges Babylon, reduces them to cannibalism, finally enters and sacks the place again. Then goes on a war of extermination against Elam, completely destroys their capital Susa.
Also, this king hadn’t originally been intended for Kingship. He’d been going to do some temple work or something. So unlike most kings, he could read and write, and he was proud of it. He built a library and sent around for copies of every book published, which got preserved well when the city got burned later. But towards the end of his reign he seems to get depressed too, his last writing is a woe-is-me. Around this point we stop getting Assyrian chronicles and have to pick up with Babylonian ones a bit later.
So what goes wrong for Assyria? Part of it might be climate change. Until now they’d been in an unusually wet period, but now things started to dry up. In the north they had to start constructing irrigation like they’d been doing already in the south. This would have shaken their power. But the price of wheat didn’t change much, so it’s not clear how much difference it made.
Narrator thinks it’s more significant that the Elamites left a power vacuum, that was filled by the Medes, their old enemies who Assyria hadn’t had much contact with. And the Medes decided to attack Assyria, and came and burned Assur. Babylon declared independence again, joined forces with Media (a Babylonian prince married a Median princess, or something), and together they went on to completely destroy Nineveh. The king dies at some point (I think this was a new king by now?) and a general holds out for a bit but they beat him too, and that’s it for Assyria. Before too long no one in the area remembers them.