by Dan Carlin
It’s difficult to understand just how urban this culture was, and how much in some ways it reminds us of our own modern society. If you were to look at a map of the Mediterranean and west Asia in the Bronze and Iron Ages, it would look a lot like a map of early twentieth-century, pre–First World War Europe. There were several powerful states intertwined with one another through diplomacy and alliances. When they went to war, they often went as coalitions, as the Triple Entente and the Central Powers did in the First World War, and the Allied and Axis powers did in the Second.
To continue the analogy, the Assyrians would be the Germans, because the Germans have always had a reputation for being militarily tough, not just in the twentieth century, but throughout history. An oft-cited rationale proposed for this is that the area of modern Germany is surrounded by other powerful peoples and doesn’t have a lot of natural frontiers, making it difficult to defend. From a social Darwinian perspective, you might say the only people who could survive in an area like that would be those who were tough and warlike. The same is often said about the Assyrians, because ancient Assyria was also ringed by powerful states and suffered a lack of natural frontiers, so the Assyrians had to be very tough, very centralized, very efficient, and very good warriors to survive.
As with the citizens of most powerful states throughout the ages, though, it is highly unlikely that the citizens of ancient Nineveh ever thought their culture would be wiped off the map.
But the fall of Nineveh is probably one of the most significant geopolitical events in world history. It is certainly the geopolitical event of the Near East Iron Age. It’s like the fall of Berlin in the Second World War in that it forever and decisively ended an empire, but the destruction of Nazi Germany toppled a twelve-year regime while Assyria’s fall meant the end of an ancient power. And the Assyrians were often cast, especially by their neighbors, as the equivalent of the Nazis in the biblical era.* These were people who appeared to be proud of the terrible things they did. They created great carvings in stone of their armies at war and the punishments their kings meted out to those who had rebelled against them. In some cases, these reliefs are essentially advertisements publicizing what would amount in the modern day to crimes against humanity.
As if the grotesque illustrations weren’t enough, the Assyrian kings provided cuneiform text narration of their atrocities, too. When one reads what they wrote about their feats, one feels as though the Assyrians didn’t have just one bad Hitler-esque ruler, but rather that they were all like that. The artistic “court style” of Assyria’s royal reliefs is genocidal.
Take, for example, Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859 BCE), one of the most brutal of the Assyrian kings. He had this to say about how he handled a rebellion: “I built a pillar over the city gate, and I flayed all the chiefs who had revolted, and I covered the pillar with their skin. Some of them I walled up in the pillar, some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes. Others I bound to stakes around the pillar. And I cut the limbs off the royal officers who had rebelled.”
Ashurnasirpal II goes on to describe burning captives with fire; cutting off their noses, ears, and fingers; and putting out their eyes. The tens of thousands of warriors who weren’t burned or walled up or beheaded or mutilated were driven into the scorching desert like cattle and left to die of thirst.
Lest Ashurnasirpal II be seen as an aberration, hundreds of years later, another Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal (r. 669–627 BCE), not content with defeating the Elamites in battle, described what he did to their long-dead ancestors, so that they would have no peace in the afterlife: “The tombs of their earlier and later kings, who did not fear Ashur and Ishtar, my lords, and who had plagued my fathers, I destroyed, I devastated, I exposed to the sun. Their bones, I carried off to Assyria. I laid restlessness upon their shades. I deprived them of food-offerings and of water.”*
Many historians will point out that this Assyrian behavior was pretty standard for the era, and that there was a practical purpose to all this boasting of brutality. The Assyrians are considered by many to have built the first major empire in human history, and every empire that has followed has adopted many, if not all, of the strategies and techniques the Assyrians used to govern and administrate theirs. And one of their preferred techniques to keep their subject peoples in line was a form of state terrorism. The formula is well understood today, as it’s been used many times in history. Cities, regions, and peoples that rebel will be utterly destroyed, and the retribution will be devastating. The goal is to keep the conquered in line, but as so often happens, the repression breeds dissatisfaction, and the Assyrians were forever putting down, and then harshly punishing, revolts. The Assyrians made sure that those who might consider revolting understood the stakes involved. Some of the grisly scenes found during archaeological excavations had been intended to intimidate the very people who might be seeing them while waiting to meet with the king. Imagine being the governor of any such troublesome city, and you’re summoned to see the ruler. Arriving, you might come upon a scene carved in stone (and perhaps painted in color) showing what happened to a city and its prominent citizens that had thumbed its nose at Assyria. One such scene found in the ruins of an Assyrian palace shows a rebellious governor named Dananu before his horrible torture and execution—as Dananu walks to his own death, the relief shows him pictured with the severed head of one of his coconspirators hanging around his neck as he is being abused, spat on, and beaten by Assyrians passing by.* Simply having a severed human head draped around one’s neck seems macabre enough, but to have known the dead person makes it particularly horrific and psychologically torturous. The ancient era, as the biblical Old Testament attests, excelled at such exquisite bloody symbolism.
While many historians say such acts were not deliberate cruelty so much as a way of controlling an empire, one does wonder if the Assyrians took pleasure in them. When Ashurbanipal was done laying waste to the Elamites, his army brought back the Elamite king’s severed head, which Ashurbanipal hung from one of the trees in his garden so he could look at it while he feasted with his wives. This macabre scene itself was carved in stone, too, and it can still be seen on a relief in the British Museum today. What was the king trying to say? Was it pleasurable to see one’s enemies’ dead faces while one ate and drank in luxury? Or is this symbolic, and the king didn’t really eat with a dead human head watching over his plate? Either way, he wanted everyone to think that’s what he did. When Ashurnasirpal II had his captives’ skin pulled off their bodies while they were still alive, apparently he made sure his throne was set up where he could watch. Was this part of his royal responsibility, or was it just too enjoyable to miss? Again, many historians will say that’s how the Assyrian imperialists maintained unity and thereby created conditions that moved civilization forward. The trade routes, the stability, the protection from outside barbarian attacks—all are traditionally cited positives in the classic trade-offs-of-empire argument.* The Assyrians were not the first or the last state that maintained itself through frightfully putting down its opposition.
While there were advantages to this violent, perhaps evil, way of running their empire, the backlash it created put new meaning to the phrase “as ye reap so shall ye sow.” When Assyria’s neighbors finally got their chance, they destroyed the Mesopotamian juggernaut so completely and so quickly that, as we have seen, subsequent societies—ones that followed only a couple of generations later—seemed ignorant of its former greatness.
So what happened?
The decline of Assyria was not a long, slow one, as it would be in the case of imperial Rome. The last great Assyrian king, the aforementioned Ashurbanipal, inherited the empire at the height of its territorial expansion and ruled for more than forty years.* But his last statements are tales of woe and bad tidings. The empire did not long survive his death. One factor in the decline of the Assyrian Empire can be traced, paradoxically, to its conquest of surrounding populations. For centuries, the armies of the early Assyrian Empire were m
ade up of the stout and comparatively loyal native Assyrians from the heartland of the territory. By the end of the empire, its armies comprised fewer and fewer Assyrians and more and more mercenaries and subject peoples who had been conscripted from places the Assyrians had conquered. The army was still an organizational and institutional marvel, but its manpower and loyalty were much more brittle and less dependable than they had been.
In addition, the Assyrians, like all the peoples of ancient Mesopotamia, had a problem with succession. When a ruler died, there was often a major struggle over which son would ascend the throne in his place—and that’s when there wasn’t a coup. Civil wars happened a lot throughout Assyria’s history, and a significant number of its kings were killed by their own children. Dynastic struggles probably did more damage to the Assyrian state than any of its enemies, and they opened the door to what happened at Nineveh.*
But similar events in Assyria’s past hadn’t always had negative repercussions. The kickoff to arguably the most glorious period in Assyria’s history* began with a particularly bad coup that could perhaps be compared with the Bolshevik takeover in Russia in 1917. In 745 BCE, the entire Assyrian royal family was apparently wiped out, and a general who afterward adopted the name Tiglath-Pileser III took the reins. It was Tiglath-Pileser III who reorganized the army into the most sophisticated fighting force the ancient world had ever seen. Assyria was the first of the major settled societies to employ cavalry in the modern, drilled sense, probably the first to have a real modern-style general staff,* the first to put large numbers of troops in the field routinely—as many as fifty thousand men, and up to three hundred thousand men across the empire. Just consider the logistics of putting that many people on the battlefield—feeding and watering and supplying and maintaining that many people through marches across hundreds of miles, through all sorts of terrain and conditions, in the era of the biblical Old Testament.*
The Assyrians were better trained and drilled than any army up until the time of Alexander the Great, and maybe even more than some of Alexander’s troops. Looking back at all the great armies in the history of the Middle East, we can see that the one thing they usually lacked was good, disciplined close-order infantry, men whose job it was to stand shoulder to shoulder and engage in hand-to-hand melee with the shock troops of the enemy. Think Roman legionary, or Greek hoplite. Western Asia has always been home to some of the best cavalry in the world, but its infantry historically was often much less formidable than, say, Europe’s. The Assyrians bucked this trend. They fielded drilled infantry formations as the main core of their armies. Their units often combined archers and spearmen, which provided great tactical flexibility.*
As befits an empire that came of age in what used to be called “the biblical era,” the Assyrians fielded wonderful chariotry. Before the appearance of true cavalry,* armies took advantage of the mobility of horses by hooking them up to carts and chariots. The Assyrians, like most other powers, employed light chariots that were fast and usually contained archers. After about 900 BCE, as true horsemen began to take the place of charioteers in mobility-related tasks like scouting and pursuing beaten foes, chariots began to get bigger and heavier and their role evolved. The chariots of Ashurbanipal’s era (686–628 BCE)* were huge vehicles drawn by four horses with three or four fighting men in each one. They were like biblical-era tanks or armored personnel carriers. Being on the opposing side of the battlefield must have been awe inspiring and terrifying. Hundreds of these machines lined up wheel to wheel—taking off across a plain at ten or fifteen miles per hour, the men inside them shooting arrows at their targets as the distance closed, then crashing into the closely packed mass of humanity facing them—must have been psychologically hard to bear. So much of war is about nerve and morale and avoiding panic,* and it’s interesting to speculate how many of the units in front of such an oncoming assault stood their ground to await the collision.* By this era, the chariots’ wheels were themselves six feet high and covered in metal studs, which were necessary (as one Assyrian account makes clear) because otherwise the chariots would slip and slide amid all the blood and gore.
The Assyrian horseman—perhaps the first true cavalry in history that was drilled and organized by modern standards*—was the most fearsome thing in their army. Multiple references in the old Hebrew Bible describe it as a “thunderbolt” and a “whirlwind.” It was likely developed to deal with the barbarian Cimmerian and Scythian horse archers that swept out of what is now southern Russia after 1000 BCE (in what was probably the worst military threat to the civilized world of that time and place, and perhaps also the inspiration for the Gog and Magog of the Bible). Many historians say the Assyrians deserve credit for saving the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent from these tribal onslaughts because they were the only military power with the strength, flexibility, and manpower to blunt these invasions. If they hadn’t done so, human history might have been vastly different. The Assyrians were certainly brutal, but their efforts may have saved the Iron Age civilization of west Asia from the rape, pillage, and brutality of the ancient world’s version of the Mongol or Hunnic hordes.*
Alas, the Assyrians’ enemies who were being slaughtered at the time weren’t so grateful as later historians sometimes would be. It’s easy to attribute altruistic or heroic motives to a “preserver of civilization,” but in truth the Assyrians may simply have been trying to preserve their conquests and booty from being purloined by another. The magnificent army that the Assyrians created wasn’t just a tool for the protection of their state but also for the furthering of their interests. Such interests included mass-scale piracy. Annual razzias and large raids were more common than not. Such forays were vital for keeping the Assyrian economy thriving.
A catalog of what one raid netted against an insignificant opponent gives a good idea of what constituted movable wealth and assets in that place and time:
40 chariots with men and horses
460 horses broken to the yoke
120 pounds of silver
120 pounds of gold
6,000 pounds of lead
6,000 pounds of copper
18,000 pounds of iron
1,000 vessels of copper
2,000 pans of copper
Assorted bowls and cauldrons of copper
1,000 brightly colored garments of wool
Assorted wooden tablets
Couches made of ivory and overlaid with gold from the ruler’s palace
2,000 head of cattle
5,000 sheep
15,000 slaves
Assorted daughters of noblemen with dowries
The ruler’s sister
An annual tribute of 1,000 sheep, 2,000 bushels of grain, 2 pounds of gold, and 26 pounds of silver
While minor foes might be regularly sheared like sheep for profit, the other major Near Eastern states faced much more permanent levels of destruction. Elam, located in modern-day Iran, was a long-term implacable foe that Assyria “permanently crushed” several times over the eras. Obviously these conquests were less permanent than the boasting Assyrian rulers thought. Babylon, much closer to home, was a different sort of problem, one that they never managed to completely solve. The Assyrians had always treated Babylon better than they’d treated most of their other adversaries because the city was the cultural center of the very, very old world—the Paris of its day. Many historians have compared the relationship of Babylon and Assyria to the one between Greece and Rome. The Romans were militarily superior, but they had a real admiration for Greek culture, and they adopted aspects of their statue making, philosophy, literature, and architecture. The Assyrians were similar in their estimation of Babylon’s ancient—and for that time and place, very advanced—culture. This regard and admiration had saved Babylon from the fate so many other cities and states had suffered at the hand of the Assyrians.
But every empire has its limits, and after yet another rebellion by the famously hard-to-pacify Babylonians (after the Assyrians had tried the
“soft” approach with them), the Assyrian king Sennacherib got fed up and initiated what we might call the “final solution” to the Babylonian problem in 689 BCE. Stone reliefs narrate what happened next in the voice of the Assyrian ruler: “As a hurricane precedes, I attacked it, and like a storm, I overthrew it. Its inhabitants young and old I did not spare, and with their corpses, I filled the streets of the city. The town itself and its houses, from their foundations to their roofs, I devastated, I destroyed. By fire, I overthrew in order that in future, even the soil of its temples would be forgotten.”
The historian Gwynne Dyer has said that Sennacherib destroyed Babylon as thoroughly as a nuclear bomb would have. In fact, the only difference between the ancient world and the modern is that it took a lot more human muscle power to accomplish the same thing. The Assyrian soldiers pulled the walls down and burned the city. (Imagine what would be involved trying to create a Hiroshima or Nagasaki if human hands had to do the work.)
In addition to killing the citizens of Babylon, the angry “king of the world” diverted a river over the city, and then had salt and thorny plants sowed into the soil to create an environmental wasteland.
The end for the Assyrian Empire may have come in part because of its success. In waging all these wars, the Assyrians ended up beating down some of the most ferocious and powerful tribes in the Middle East. Some historians have suggested that many of the peoples battered into submission remained pacified even after the Assyrians had left the scene. By the time the Persian Empire that succeeded the Assyrians stepped in, it’s possible that the Persians may not have had to have been as brutal, because Assyria had already cowed many of the tribes, peoples, and states who otherwise would have posed a threat.* It’s even been suggested that the reason Alexander the Great’s invasion of Persia three centuries later seemed easier than perhaps anyone thought it would be was because the region had already been broken to the yoke of empire after centuries of wars with Assyria.