Dan Snow's History Hit - The Rise and Fall of the Assyrian Empire

Episode Date: June 1, 2025

Was this the world’s first empire? To uncover the story of ancient history's most formidable powers, Dan is joined by Yale University’s Professor Eckart Frahm to explore Assyria’s military machine, its sophisticated communication networks and the monumental architecture that defined its dominance. But what caused this ancient superpower to fall—and why so suddenly?Produced and edited by Dougal PatmoreSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

They called themselves kings of the world. In fact, they called themselves rulers of the universe. They were the lords of Assyria. You're listening to Dan Snow's History, and this is the story of the first empire, an empire of enormous geographical extent. An empire of provinces, of bureaucracy, of monumental buildings, massive armies. The origins of the Assyrian Empire are a little bit complicated.

It began with a city, as you'll hear. But that city morphed and changed, partly through internal pressure, partly because of disasters and external catastrophes and opportunities. But around about 1700 BC or so, a new royal dynasty seized control. And it was the start of a remarkable run of hereditary monarchy. I'm not saying it always went father to son, but rule was parceled out from one generation to the next within that ruling family for a thousand years. The city-state grew. From the 880s BC, it expanded dramatically through a series of stunning conquests. It became the Assyrian Empire, over a million square miles,

at its very peak, stretched from modern Iran, right up to and including much of modern Egypt. It had been quite the journey from the harmless little city-state to what historians now describe as the world's first empire. They conquered the famous city of Babylon, for example, and remodeled it extensively. They built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. They built Nineveh, which at the time was another wonder of the world, at a wall 12 kilometers long surrounding it.

They built the best road system in history to that date. You could pass along the so-called King's Road, it's right at a distance of around 450 miles, in about five days. One of the best things about this empire, one of the reasons historians particularly love it, is we have the archives. We have the libraries, not all of them, of course,

but significant portions. Preserved, as you'll hear, at the moment of their destruction by their enemies, we have thousands, tens of thousands, of tablets on which were written the day-to-day business of running this vast empire. Because after its period of hegemony from the 880s BC, in 609 BC or thereabouts, there was a dramatic and shocking collapse. None of this gradual decline and fall discussions around continuity and change you get with the Roman Empire. This was the sudden and dramatic end.

A coalition of enemies crushed the Assyrian Empire. And yet it left a legacy that later empires from Babylon to Persia to Rome would all embrace. You have to understand Assyria if you want to get a sense of those civilizations, those empires that followed, that we all recognize as foundational. And this, folks, will whet your appetite. This will give you a bit of an understanding of that. We're going to talk about that empire. We're going to also talk about how, folks will whet your appetite. This will give you a bit of an understanding of that. We're going to talk about that empire. We're going to also talk about how really only 60 years or so after it reached its peak, Assyria had ceased to exist. And so joining me to give us an extraordinary insight into this dramatic and important rise and fall is Professor Eckhart Fram. Eckhart Fram is

the John M. Musser Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. Moussa, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. He's a specialist on the Assyrian and Babylonian empires and their wonderful cuneiform texts. His most recent book is Assyria, the Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire. So he's definitely the man to talk to about the First Empire and how it was toppled in what some scholars like to call the real First World War. This, friends, is Assyria. Enjoy. Eckhart, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Well, thank you. I'm grateful that you're having me. Where are we at the moment when this empire starts to take its form? Give us the geography. So the geography is marked by a triangle of three cities located in what is now the northern part of the Republic of Iraq. That's the city of Nineveh opposite of modern Mosul on the eastern bank of the Tigris River. That's the city of Ashur from which Assyria actually gets its name, some 100 kilometers downstream from Mosul and from Nineveh. And in the east of the foothills of the Zagros Mountains near the Iraqi-Iranian border, the city of Arbela, modern Erbil. This is where the kingdom of Assyria emerges.

An empire becomes only later. One can debate when exactly it crosses the threshold towards being an empire. In my view, this is only in the mid-8th century. Some have argued that it's a little earlier in the first of the 9th century it is an empire in my view from roughly 745 onwards up to let's say 640 630 or so during the last decades of the 7th century it experienced a major crisis that results eventually in its very dramatic fall but it is known actually as a political entity much longer, and that is one reason why it's so interesting.

Our first written documentation, extensive written documentation, telling us something about the ancient Assyrians actually comes from the first centuries of the second millennium, from roughly between 2000 and 1700 BC. At this point, there isn't yet really a kingdom of Assyria. There's just a city-state of Ashur, but it already has a broad horizon because the people in Ashur engage in long-distance trade, and this trade, well, essentially leads them 1,000 kilometers away from their hometown, so that these wide geographic horizons are already

there from the very early period onwards. So we've got Egypt bubbling away. The pyramids are built a thousand years before that period you mentioned. What makes an empire? Why do we suddenly start talking about this empire arising at that time, at that place? Yeah, it's interesting to look at the political development that Syria undergoes over these roughly 1,400 years that are documented in our written sources. It starts off, as I said, from roughly 2000 onwards as a city-state. That is actually not an empire at all. It's almost the opposite of an empire.

It's a small place which engages in this long-distance trade, but it has no territorial ambitions. It's very peaceful, actually. The people and leaders of Ashur during this time are not particularly belligerent. It's also not marked by autocracy. On the contrary, you have in place what one could describe with the Roman historian Polybius as a mixed constitution.

So you have hereditary dynasties of political leaders, but they are not even allowed to use the title king. And they share power with an institution known as the city hall that deals with taxes and weights and measures and things like that, and a popular assembly that is also quite powerful. So you have essentially a monocratic, aristocratic, democratic elements in place. The changes, so in the second half of the second millennium, when Ashur moves into Syria and becomes a territorial state and also becomes a kingdom.

So at this point, actually, you have autocratic rulers who are kings. But the geographic horizon is still limited. And then in the first millennium, as I mentioned, suddenly there's this massive expansion. And Ashura and Assyria becomes the predominant state of the ancient world, much larger than any other state had ever been before. And this is what I would argue Assyria crosses the threshold, this imperial threshold. What makes an empire? There are a number of criteria. They include that a state rules territories far outside its original territory. That's clearly the case because Assyria, during the later 8th and 7th century,

That's clearly the case because Assyria during the later 8th and 7th century rules from southern Turkey to the Persian Gulf and from western Iran to the Levant to Phoenicia and the southern Levant for a while even actually rules over Egypt. So it's very, very large, about 1 million square kilometers. It's characterized by a kind of osmotic imbalance between center and periphery with the center siphoning off the wealth of the periphery it's also characterized by a great deal of diversity ethnic religious linguistic many many different peoples living in the empire speaking different languages worshiping different gods and is characterized well, using different types of political power, direct rule within Assyria itself, an area organized into very small provinces, some 70 provinces in the 7th century, and an outer area of client kingdoms where Assyrian rulers dominate the particular scene indirectly, but where formally local rulers are still in place.

These, I would say, are criteria that can be used to describe this political entity of Syria as an empire. Of course, it's always the question, how big does the state have to be? How diverse does it have to be in order to qualify as an empire? There will never be a full consensus. So there will be others who would say that, let's say, New Kingdom Egypt is an empire, or even the Akkad state of the time of roughly 2300, 2200 BCE, Invisible Tenia. In one respect, though, I think one can say that Assyria really is the first empire in

the world, and that is in later memory and tradition. Because there, with the Greek and Roman historians, and then throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, it is Assyria that is considered the world's first empire. So authors like Herodotus or the roman historian papyrus torus or the christian historian rosios and later on dante in the middle ages in his demonarchia they describe syria as the first empire long chain of empires that follow it and that sort of sets all these other empires on their path and in this regard of course the syria really is also important in world history because it provides a blueprint for all these other empires on their path. And in this regard, of course, the Syria video is also important in world history

because it provides a blueprint for all these many, many later empires. And as we all know, even though today modern states don't like to call each other empires, we still have imperial political traditions in place even today. We certainly do.

We certainly do. Why, Eckhart, why does this reasonably sounds rather nice Pacific harmless city-state morph into this mighty military ortoxy become the first empire? How does it do that? answers that will satisfy everyone. So firstly, after the transformation of the city-state, this peaceful, commercially-oriented city-state into a kingdom that already is pretty aggressive. So in the second half of the second millennium, that already expands, even though not to such an extent that it can be called an empire. That's a so-called Middle Assyrian period from roughly 1350 BCE to 1000 BCE. During this time, we see that the Assyrians essentially replaced trade with conquest.

And I would say that probably the trade in which they were engaged beforehand and that this trade network that collapses around 1700 BCE or so under pressure from outside people, the Hittites and others, etc. That memory of this trade network played a role here. And, well, the ability of the Assyrians, of course, also logistically to travel far away. And this idea that you want to be acquisitive, you want to acquire things. They found out at this point in the wake of this crisis that they experienced after 1700 that besides trade, there is another way of becoming wealthy, and that is actually conquest. and they engaged in this conquest more intensely, I would say, than many of the other states of the ancient East, even though, of course, conquest was not alien to other states as well. It sounds a little bit perhaps like a story that Lenin tells of capitalism turning into imperialism. That's certainly not rule as Lenin makes it one.

That has to apply everywhere. But the story is a bit like that, I would say. It's a little bit perhaps also like the East India Company and the situation with Britain in India. First, the commercial enterprise, later on it becomes a political enterprise. And once Syria is established as this kingdom, it experienced a number of other crises, first around 1100, 1000 or so, and then again in the mid-8th century. And it emerges from each of these crises stronger because it's faster than other places in the region that also probably underwent some crises during this time to recover. The last crisis is characterized by a set of plagues. So there's a plague in Assyria and probably also in surrounding areas, first in 765 and then again in 759.

And I would argue that probably the loss of labor, the loss of wealth that occurred at this time, prompted a very important Assyrian king, King Tiglapiles III, who is also mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, to make up for this loss of wealth and labor by intensifying the conquest's activities. Because it is during this reign of Tiglapiles III, who was from 745 to 727 BCE, that Assyria's territory more than doubles in size. And he creates many, many new provinces. So he reacts to this crisis that may have been prompted by plague through this massive expansion, which of course means the crisis cannot have been as massive that almost all the population of Assyria was wiped out, but probably some parts of the population were wiped out. There was economic crisis. Tiglapilesa reacts to that with intensified conquest. This leads to this stepping over the threshold of empire, in my view.

And then for 120 years or so, Assyria really is an empire under great kings such as Sargon II, Sennacherib, Asahodon, Ashurbanipal, all perhaps to some extent known to some of your listeners. That's the height of the empire. We'll get on to the height of the empire in a second, but let's just quickly, we talked about the plagues, and you talked about various crises that seem to affect everyone in the region. I mean, it's no accident this sees the end of the new kingdom in Egypt. We enter what people refer to as the ancient Greek dark ages.

People will be familiar with the term Bronze Age collapse. Exactly. It's going on for, what, a couple of hundred years at the end of that second millennium BC. So everyone's experiencing this kind of multi-dimensional crisis, these headwinds. But you just think Assyria is just able to roll with the punches, see the opportunity in this chaos, and emerge stronger. Yes, it is. Of course, it's not easy to account for that. But I think what we can see is that first, this late Bronze Age

collapse. Assyria suffers from the consequences of this event only later when groups of semi-nomadic Arameans actually infiltrated and on the long term also really reshaped the cultural and linguistic landscape of Assyria. And this is especially in the 11th and early 10th century when Assyria is at a kind of low point. And it emerges again faster than everyone else, perhaps because it manages to keep the memory of the conquest period of the Middle Assyrian period alive and to instill in its military and elites this belligerent spirit that enables it to reconquer, enact in a kind of reconquest, a reconquista period that leads to the recovery of the lost territories. You can see this memory in the names that are chosen by the kings of the first millennium.

They all hark back to great kings of the Middle Eastern period, to the great conqueror kings like Adad-Naravi or Dukulti-Ninolta. And this is not by chance. They deliberately put themselves into this tradition. And their dynasty, and that's also important, their dynasty, the Syrian royal dynasty, is never interrupted. So there's more continuity in Assyria than in other places such as Babylonia and certainly you mentioned Egypt, such as Egypt. So Assyria then, even though affected by these events of the late Bronze Age collapse, emerges from them faster and profits from the chaos elsewhere because of course in this situation where large parts of syria and the levant are essentially completely broken up in

very very small political entities it's actually fairly easy to conquer and that's what they do that's when they maybe eventually emerge as this empire how interesting you mentioned that the the royal dynasties remain coherent, intact for generations. And that's something, of course, the Roman Empire suffers terribly from. The father-son succession is actually quite a rare event across the history of Rome. It's amazing it lasts as long as it did. And if you look at medieval France, you get the Capetian miracle, where you just get a long line of successful transfer of power in the male line of one family. So do you think that's important here as well? And if so, how do the Syrians manage that?

Do they succeed in building up a culture or religion around the importance of transmitting power from one generation to the next? Certainly the role of the king from some point onwards, once kingship is established in Syria, is very strong. It has various reasons. In fact, it's a 1,000- year span of time that the same family is in power it's not always sons it's sometimes also nephews or so but it really seems that we have no evidence that ever anyone from another family manages to usurp power so that's really quite unique and of

course a sign of stability throughout all this change that assyria experiences and again i mean they're very good in keeping up certain traditions, but also adapting. That's one of their great strengths. They're not at all worried of when they see that, let's say, the Samarians in Israel have a great cavalry, they integrate that cavalry once they have conquered Samaria into their own military. Syria is the origins of traditional of classical Assyrian era, the great beliefs and bull colossi that maybe some people know, at least those who have ever been in the British Museum. So, they can do that. That's one of the reasons why they managed to be flexible while at the same time also sticking to certain continuities. The Assyrian king is very closely associated with the god Ashur. So, that provides ideological support. Originally, the king of Ashur is actually this very god. I mentioned that the first centuries of the second millennium, the Assyrian hereditary dynasts are not yet allowed to call themselves king. Only the god

is king. Later on, they are calling themselves king. And they are very close to the Assyrian state god Ashur, who is very closely associated with the city of Ashur. There's a very compact ideological concept where indeed the king is the linchpin of the whole system that is to some extent, it seems really accepted by the elites who may try to get rid of specific kings. And we can see that there are actually very exciting moments of rebellion and internal strife, but it really is within the same family. So this is Shakespearean-like royal dramas where one king is killed

and one of his sons tries to defeat another royal prince to take over the crown, but it's not outsiders to do that. It's actually insiders of a royal family. There's me thinking it was all the Plantagenets and the Mughals who had the dysfunctional families, but clearly the Assyrians. They are clearly dysfunctional in some regards but also very functional and very functional yeah there's a resilience to the system okay so we're around 750 bc slightly later we got tiglath pelessa the third you mentioned after these terrible

pandemics he emerges he extends the empire enormously. Then you get Sargon II. I love that name, one of the great names of antiquity. He rules towards the end of that 8th century BC, so 722 to almost 700. And we have fascinating colour and detail about Sargon's reign, don't we? I mean, we know how they lived, what they wrote down in terms of governmentally, but also culturally. Looking at all that wonderful richness of information, to what do you credit the strength of this empire? How was it held together? Yeah, as the first you mentioned, the sources, and I think it might be of interest briefly, at least to mention that indeed, our sources for the imperial period of Syria are extremely rich. Most of this is, of course, owed to archaeological excavations,

but Assyria is also mentioned in the Bible and in classical sources. But the really important discoveries were made from the middle of the 19th century onwards, first by British and French and later also by other teams, archaeological teams, including Iraqi ones, in the capitals of Syria, such as Nineveh, Ashur, and Qalakh, Nimrud, located between Nineveh, Ashur, and Qalakh, Nimrud, located between Nineveh and Ashur. And what is particularly important is that many, many texts were found. Those include, on one hand, royal inscriptions, some of them very long. So Ashurbanipal's inscriptions are 1,000 or so lines long.

That's much longer, for instance, than the famous Monumentum Ancyranum, one of the longest leader inscriptions from the Rome world, both the emperor Augustus. But we also have numerous letters, state letters. We have what has been recovered at Neneri and at Nimrud, parts of the state archives of Assyria. The reason for this recovery is the fact that the Assyrians, like all people in ancient Mesopotamia, beginning roughly 3,400 BCE, wrote not on parchment or on papyrus, but on clay. And clay is essentially, when used as a medium for writing, is nearly indestructible. So these tablets may break, and modern scholars like me have to put them together again, which

is kind of difficult, but also fun. But they are not lost. And while the royal inscriptions describe what the kings wanted to read about themselves, geared towards the gods and later generations, and also the contemporaries. It was essentially propagandistic, if you want, even though the term has its problems. The letters written by spies and provincial governors and royal agents from far away, from various provinces,

but also from scholars within the capitals of Assyria to the Assyrian kings, those letters actually describe what goes wrong. You write a letter when things are not going well. And so we have this very, very extensive documentation. We also, of course, then from the 7th century have Ashurbanipat's libraries, which includes numerous thousands actually of religious and literary texts. We know about Assyrian culture very much actually indebted to Babylonian culture, like Roman

culture was indebted to Greek culture. We know about that as well. And this enormous richness, of course, enables us really to paint a pretty detailed picture of some of these rulers, including Sargon, where we can see that he was, in fact, despite his protestations to the opposite, not very much beloved at the beginning of his reign. He was probably kind of an usurper. Again, he was a member of the royal family, but not a direct son of the previous king. He came from a side branch of the royal family. And he, for instance, had to deport 6,300 Assyrians to the periphery at some point early in his reign, who had apparently opposed him.

Nonetheless, what he also did was quite remarkable. He created a new capital. So this is what some of these Assyrian kings during the imperial era do. They create new massive capitals. These are big, big cities. Kingston imperial era. Do they create new massive capitals? These are big, big cities.

Nineveh, eventually created by Sennacherib, is surrounded by a wall 12 kilometers long. That's very extensive. And the palace is built by Sargon, by Sennacherib, and later kings are enormously large. So we can see that Sargon does that as well. He also conquers, though. He continues the previous expansion under tecla peleza and

charmeniza the fifth but he takes a very sad end because when he's roughly 65 years old or so and seven or five he goes on the last campaign this seems like a routine thing almost to a pretty nondescript place tabal in central anatolia the assyrian army is routed, the camp is conquered, and Sargon is actually killed, and his body cannot be recovered, which is a major crisis for the Assyrian crown, because this is, of course, important that you're able to bury your dead, and a powerful king like Sargon, if he's not buried, might lurk around as a dangerous ghost. So there's a lot of information on that. His death is probably even described in the Bible,

even though in a context that doesn't mention his name. In Isaiah 14, the mocking dirge on the king of Babel, that's probably Sargon, who also was king of Babylonia at the time. Because for the Israelites and the Judeans, of course, the death of that king was a reason to be happy. It was a triumph. They were not fond of this ruler. You listened to Dan Snow's history hit.

More on Assyria coming up after this. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions

and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Is the death of Sargon in battle? Is this a decisive moment? Is this a death blow for the empire? Does it go on? Does it flourish? No, it goes on, but it is clearly a crisis. And we can see that the Assyrian elites made attempts to elaborate on what actually had happened, what had prompted the death of Sargon. They engaged in liver divination in order to figure that out and were looking for a sin that Sargon had committed. And what they came up with, in my view, the text is a little bit broken here, is that Sargon had worshipped the Babylonian gods too much over the Assyrian gods.

I mentioned that he had conquered Babylonia. He was very fond of Babylonian culture. His successor, Sennacherib, not so much. Eventually, he will actually completely destroy the city of Babylon. And so he establishes that Sargon's worship of these Babylonian gods had been excessive. So there's this ideological discourse

about what had actually prompted his death. But Assyria continues. This is not the final moment of the empire. Nearly 100 years longer, the Assyrian empire prevails. And in fact, in the 7th century, under Asahaddon and Ashurbanipal, between 680 and 631, reaches its greatest expansion. When Babylonia is again conquered. Elam in the southeast in modern southwestern Iran is conquered and even Egypt under Aser Hadon and later on again under Ashurbanipal becomes for a while, not very long, but for a while part of the Assyrian empire.

Just absolutely vast. So Egypt to Iran. Again, no state, no king has ever governed an entity this large in recorded history. Are all these sources, is the archive in fact the clue? Was the pen mightier than the sword? Was it about messengers and roads and instructions and communication, allowing troops to move fast and nip problems in the bud? How is this empire governed? Clearly, the roads, actually is a good point, are strength of Assyria. So this is also an information empire. Information is being carried along those roads very fast. So there are road stations every 20 kilometers or so, the Beid Maldeti, as they're called in the Assyrian sources.

And you have sort of relays with horses and onagers that are being used by mounted emissaries, messengers who carry messages from one place to the next, and that goes very, very fast. And it's, of course, important in order to keep up the empire because you need to be informed about crises in regions far away. And the Assyrians, by building roads, the royal road, actually is not, as is often assumed, an invention of the Persians, the Persian empire, but this already exists under the Assyrians. Those roads are the arteries through which this information runs.

So this is very important, obviously. The discipline with which the provincial governors follow the king, with which the elites, the Assyrian elites that, of course, run in actual fact the various provinces and are in charge of political and economic administration, the discipline with which they, too, follow orders by the king, this is quite crucial. One reason why that works may be that the Assyrian kings use a lot of eunuchs for very high-ranking positions,

for instance, those of provincial governors. And eunuchs, of course, by not having any offspring of their own, tend to be loyal to those who give them their prestige and their wealth that would have been in the case of the surreal the ascending king so this too may have helped then there is the implementation of loyalty oaths to those very elites but essentially to everyone in the empire including even vessel rulers and their subjects. We have a number of those treaties, very long and elaborate,

that require loyalty to the king and his chosen successor. They had to be sworn by all these different subjects of the king. And to some extent, it seems to have worked. Then there's also a network of informers. I mentioned the informers so far away, but there are also informers within the Assyrian capital themselves. So inside Assyria, who informed the king, essentially the eyes and ears of the king, again, term better attested for the Persian rulers of later times used by Greek authors, but that can be applied to those Syrian spies as well. They really look out at

everyone who may seem to be somehow disloyal. And whenever someone says something critical of the king, they report to the king. And this is required of them through the loyalty oaths. And we know that they do this because we have many, many letters that actually include such denunciations. It's not very nice. It has a certain Stalinistic ring to it, if you wish. But for a while, at least, this works quite well. And the number of rebellions and insurgencies we know were actually quelled in this way. And under Asahaddon, for instance,

quite a large number of Assyrian members of the Assyrian elite were killed because they were apparently involved in one of these rebellions against the king. You talk about the invasion and conquest of Egypt. This might not be familiar to people. So this is obviously after Eurameses the Great, great after the new kingdom period the assyrians managed to conquer they become one of the pharaonic dynasties they are at least for a while really the rulers of egypt up to the city of thebes so there is an unsuccessful attempt by as a hundred and 674 bce to conquer egypt it doesn't succeed but then there's a successful one three years later in 671. And at this time,

the Assyrians managed to take Thebes. Egypt at this time is kind of divided up into smaller kingdoms in the north in particular, with the 25th dynasty, the so-called Kushite dynasty, ruling from Nubia in the south.

And perhaps the Assyrians are able to conquer the north also because the northern small sort of traditional rulers of egypt who kind of buy into the pharaonic ideology consider those kushites also kind of aliens not so clear but the assyrians clearly try to present themselves as liberators if you wish and that works for a while but not for that long ashurbanipal's assad and successor has to go back to Egypt twice. This is when the Assyrians actually seize the city of Thebes

and, among other things, take with them a gigantic obelisk, apparently made of electron, must have been enormously valuable, take it to Nineveh and many, many other things they take as well. And during this time, they call themselves the rulers of Pataresi, that's the southern land that would be Egypt. This is an Egyptian word. So we find these titles in Assyrian sources. We have no hieroglyphic inscriptions in which the Assyrian kings actually feature as pharaohs. That may be because in later Egyptian tradition, this phase of Assyrian

conquest was considered an abomination. The Egyptians were not fond of it. So they essentially struck it from the official record. The Syrian kings also don't appear in the Egyptian king list of Manisa also, but they do appear, quite interestingly, in a number of popular tales, mostly known from pretty late times, the so-called Inaro cycle recorded in Demotic,

the latest stage of the Egyptian writing system and language. And there we have references to kings like Sennacherib and Asahadon, etc. And they are mentioned as conquerors of Egypt there. Amazing. Where does this empire sit on the sliding scale of the amount of control that was exerted? Well, the amount of

uniformity that they tried to create over religious ideas, weights and measures, language. Was this a live-and-let-live empire? Were cities and statelets allowed to have a degree of autonomy as long as they paid lip service and sent the odd-billed tribute to the imperial center? Or were they trying to make the world Assyria? Were they building colonies, architectural styles, language, culture on all of their conquered territory?

It's a very good and important question, of course. And the answer is quite clear. The Assyrians, unlike, let's say, the Romans, certainly unlike some modern empires, had no interest at all to, for instance, transfer religion, their own religion, to other places. for the god Asher. The god Asher was to be worshipped in Assyria, in Asher, nowhere else. It would not have been okay if anyone had done this. That said, yes,

there is uniformity on some levels, especially through the provincial system. They established a provincial system. Again, I mentioned, I think, that in the end of the 7th century, Assyria comprises some 70 provinces, ranging from the Zagros Mountains in western Iran to the southern Levant.

And these provinces are kind of mini centers modeled upon the royal palace and its surrounding territory so you have a palace in which the provincial governor as the deputy of the Assyrian king resides he's kind of the mini king within this province and he's in charge for instance of collecting taxes and making sure that conscription activities occur that is people have to work for the crown and they have to pay taxes especially on farming that's the basic area from which wealth is being produced and that is of course implemented strictly so these deliveries of taxes and the requirement of work, these are things that the Assyrian kings require, and they require political obedience. So the people in these various regions that are eventually conquered by Assyrians can continue to speak their own languages. They can continue to worship their own gods.

There is no Assyrianization in the kind of way that you can talk of a Romanization, a Roman empire. It doesn't happen. of a way that you can talk of a Romanization of the Roman Empire. It doesn't happen. Kind of on the contrary, it's quite interesting, as I mentioned, the Aramaic language spoken by these other nondescript Arameans who enter the world stage in the late second millennium as of semi nomadic people. This very language, Aramaic, becomes the predominant language in the Assyrian administration and probably is spoken eventually throughout much of the empire it's not a syrian so this is really interesting again you can see the syrians are not interested in implementing their own culture and language somewhere else but they want uniformity in terms of political order they are very interested in order for them of course that also means peace

for the people there you can say that sometimes the peace of the graveyard, for instance, when an enemy city has been destroyed. But from an Assyrian point of view, this is what they actually have to offer. They have to offer peace and protection to those who fall into line politically. And whoever falls into line can essentially do what they want in terms of their daily lives, as long as they are paying taxes and as long as they provide troops and workmen for building projects, etc. Of course, this isn't freedom in any way as we would consider it. These people are not free in that sense, but they're also not slaves, if you wish.

They have areas in which they are autonomous. You're listening to my podcast all about Syria. There is more coming up. Don't go away. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history.

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by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. was the end of this empire sudden was that decisive defeat collapse because of human or environmental causes or was it a slow decline was a very sudden one so i often really like to compare the certain empire to Empire to the Roman Empire. I think they have a lot in common. I mentioned the dependency, cultural terms, on another ancient civilization, in both cases the Greeks, in the case of Rome, Babylon, in the case of Assyria, etc. But the Roman Empire's fall, of course, was a long process, really a process over centuries

which no one knows when it really happened. What is really the moment when we speak of the fallout? Well, Eckhart, some people say it didn't happen. I mean, come on, we can't even get into that. We haven't got time here, jeepers. So in the case of Assyria, this is clearly not so. It's just within a decade or two that Assyria falls between 626 and 609, basically. What happens is quite clear in terms of the political and military events.

We have a Babylonian chronicle that describes this all in quite in detail. Essentially, Assyria fights suddenly two major enemies. Babylonia had for a long time been dominated by Assyria, but in 626 manages to regain its independence under a ruler who comes from a family from the city of Uruk that actually worked for the Assyrians for a long time.

That's Nebopolassar. So actually worked for the Assyrians for a long time. That's Nebopolassar. So he knew how the Assyrians operated. He had inside knowledge of how military affairs were handled by the Assyrians, how the Assyrian administration worked. The other big power, and that was a new commandment, but we've seen where the Medes.

So Media had for a long time, it's an area in Western Iran, had for a long time been divided up in very, very small entities, had not been particularly powerful because of the disrupted nature of these different tribes which it comprised. But at some point in the later 7th century, the Medes unite. And then the Medes and the Babylonians together form an alliance and start actually attacking Assyria and attacking Assyrian cities. And that eventually leads to the conquest of those cities and to the complete destruction of many of the major cities of Assyria. It begins with the city of Ashur, the religious center.

This is a major blow to Assyria in 614. The city is conquered and destroyed by the Medes. And it culminates in 612, two years later, in the fall of Nineveh, which kind of ironically probably suffers strategically from the fact that under Sennacherib, it had been surrounded by a big, big wall with gigantic gate buildings, 18 altogether. Those gates were just too big. It was too easy to get through. But those gates were just too big.

It was too easy to get through. Archaeologists actually found civilian military dead people lying inside the gates. So this is where some of the battling must have taken place. It must have been surprisingly easy for the attacking forces to get through there. So we can see what happens. We can see that Nineveh is destroyed. The palace is looted. Syria, by the way, during these years in which it fights with Babylonia and the Medes, is supported somewhat ironically by Egypt. Apparently

Egyptians realizing at this point they have regained their independence that Babylonia is now going to be the next really dangerous opponent to them. So they side with the Assyrians. Other players engage in this as well, and so some have called this whole scenario the First

World War. And while slightly hyperbolic, the term is not entirely inappropriate because it really involves all the major powers of this period. The whole thing ends really with the fall of the Syrian royal dynasty, 1,000 years old, as I mentioned. And since the royal family was so enormously important for the identity of Assyria, really embodied Assyria in such a significant way. And since the civilian elites didn't really have an identity, let's say religious or civic or whatever, strong enough perhaps to continue Assyrian statehood in a different way, this really was the end of Assyrian statehood. There really never again was an Assyrian state as it had existed before, after 612 or 609. There is some evidence for continued religious activities of Assyrian style. The city of Asher remains settled by people, apparently speaking Assyrian. In Asher,

we can trace the worship of Assyrian gods, Asherria and his wife, Sheruah, well into the common era. We have inscriptions in Aramaic from the 2nd and 3rd century AD, where we can see that people there actually still worship the same deities they had worshipped in the imperial period during festival times that had been in place already during the assyrian empire so there is some continuity on the cultural level but politically it really is all over what also comes to an end and that's also really striking is cuneiform writing so once the medes and the babylonians have conquered in any way essentially assyrian writing ends there are few tablets from places like dokat luma in syria where we still have some assy, but very, very few fundamentally cuneiform writing comes to an end. And that also means it's a problem for us that it's a little bit of a black box. We don't really know exactly what happens in the centuries after the fall of the empire

in Assyria. But even though we may not see certain things, I think it's clear that it was no longer an Assyrian state. And so those tablets that we have, all the cuneiform, all the writing from the royal archives, we know exactly when the roof came down on that archive, on those libraries in Nineveh. I mean, that was the fall of Nineveh. That was the sack of Nineveh. And they remained under all that collapsed debris and then dust and sand and earth until they were dug up by 19th century explorers. So that wonderful archive dates from that. Well, the preservation, ironically, so that wonderful archive dates from that well the

the preservation ironically that wonderful archive dates from that exact moment of destruction yes so um wow most of the tablets that were found probably really come from this destruction horizon however the tablets were also found for instance in the fill of floors in the palace and of course also in private houses in various places in Assyria in various cities which means we also of course have tablets from much earlier times but we have a lot of evidence from the very late period of Assyrian history this is always the irony that destruction layers of course are very very revealing for archaeologists so where you have destruction you can learn a lot about what was going on the same time must be said of course our information is

also a little bit limited with regard to the last decades of history because the Syrian kings no longer felt a great need to write their own inscriptions. There wasn't much to brag about at this time. So we also rely on sources from other places, especially from Babylonia. So the so-called Babylonian Chronicles,

the community from texts that describes, rather objectively, I would say, what's going on politically. A question I haven't answered, I should say very briefly, something about is, well, was it something like climate change or was it migration? So bigger non-political issues that actually played a role in the fall of the empire so that military events are mere epiphenomena, if you wish. recently and it is indeed true that during the 7th century we can see a beginning or in the 8th century a decrease in rainfall in assyria and surrounding areas which probably led to some kind of decrease in agricultural production but i'm not so sure that this really is a major reason for the

fall of the empire first because as i mentioned the decrease occurs much earlier and then second because the assyrians again again, adapt very well. This is one of their strengths, because they build massive canal systems in northern Iraq that they use to irrigate fields near their capitals, especially at Nineveh. So they actually managed to deal with the situation. The loss of Babylonia was probably a problem, because Babylonia must have produced some of the grain that Assyria actually used for its people. But when I was excavating in Oshua with Peter Milos in 2001, in one palace, huge amounts of grain, burnt of course, were found, stored there, apparently

in preparation for the Median siege of 614. So it doesn't look like they were desperate in terms of not having enough to eat anymore. And I'm also not so sure about the idea that Scythian migrations, for instance, played a role as the Greek historian Herodotus claims. I do think, though, that leadership failure is an issue here, especially with the very long and culturally very glorious reign of King Ashurbanipal. You can see that the king very much is oriented inwards. He no longer goes on campaign. He doesn't seem to interact very much with his elites. You have royal cooks and singers suddenly assuming very high offices,

such as the office of eponym, after whom years are being named. Ashurbanipal is portrayed in later Greek tradition under the name of Sardanapal or Sardanapolis as a weak king essentially sitting with his harem of women inside his palaces and spinning wool and making love and otherwise not being interested in politics this has often been presented or portrayed as orientalizing stereotyping and it certainly is it's not like this is how he was ashurban did engage in hunting and things like that so he clearly isn't exactly how he's portrayed hereurbanip did engage in hunting and things like that. So he clearly isn't exactly how

he's portrayed here in these Greek sources. But I also think that this depiction isn't entirely wrong. And this probably did actually diminish the authority of the late Assyrian kings quite substantially. And as those kings were so important for the overall identity of Assyria, I think this had a major impact on the fall of Assyria as well. I think this had a major impact on the fall of Assyria as well. Given it was the first empire, did the Babylonians, did the Medes think, well, it's not empires we reject, it's just other people's empires? I mean, did the DNA, did the organizing principles of the Assyrian empire then get absorbed into, well, all future imperial states? I mean, we're entering an age of empires now. Yes, I think actually it is. It is very much this DNA that is passed on. And that's actually,

of course, very exciting. And that's one of the reasons why Assyria is important. It's not only that Assyria is remembered in later traditions as having been the first empire, I mentioned the Bible, I mentioned the Greek and Roman sources. It really is also that the institutions, the Assyrians create the imperial institutions, the provincial system, the bureaucracy, the artistic language of empire, these massive monumental buildings and monuments and other things. These things are actually, the succeeding empires, they are actually adopted to a certain extent. The Neo-Babylonian Empire, beginning with Nabopolassar, that follows the Assyrian, for instance, uses a bureaucracy whose leading officials bear titles that are very Assyrian. So clearly, the Assyrian model is important. With the Persians, who in 539 take over, that's when the last Babylonian king, Nebunidus, is defeated by the Persian king Cyrus. Cyrus the Great, as he's sometimes called.

is defeated by the Persian king Cyrus, Cyrus the Great, as he's sometimes called, and the Persians create this much larger empire, much larger than the Neo-Babylonian, also much larger than the Assyrian empire. The Persians quite emphatically actually endorse the Assyrian art, not Neo-Babylonian art. They start off with essentially building, and Persepolis is a recent find, very exciting,

they start off with building a gate there that looks very much like the Ishtar Gate in Babylon, Babylonian style. But then they give up on this kind of architecture I think they start off with building a gate there that looks very much like the Ishtar Gate in Babylon, Babylonian style. But then they give up on this kind of architecture with these glazed mosaics, etc. And instead, Persepolis built these massive palaces out of stone with bas-reliefs and bull colossi and all these things that look extremely Assyrian. They also adopt Babylonian and Egyptian and other elements, but they look very Assyrian. Babylonian and Egyptian and other elements, but they look very Assyrian. And the stories that a Greek historian, Theseus, for instance, hears when he spends some years as the physician of King Artaxerxes at the Persian court are all about Assyrians, not about Babylonians.

They are distorted already. They no longer really reflect that much the reality of the Assyrian empire, but they are about Assyrians, it seems very much that Persians really quite deliberately imitated Assyria. I mean, already Cyrus, in his famous Cyrus Cylinder, the one document in which he speaks extensively about himself, found in Babylon,

created shortly after the conquest of Babylon in 539, mentions King Ashurbanipal as an earlier builder of the walls of Babylon. And the inscription as such also has a certain Assyrian ring to it. The titles that Cyrus uses, King of the World, etc., are Assyrian titles. So, yes, Assyria looms large at the very beginning in this chain of empires. And, of course, then it recedes at some point when eventually the Seleucids

and then the Parthians, the Sasanians, and later on other empires take over. Of course, then there's no deliberate imitation of Assyria anymore. But you used this very nice metaphor of DNA. I think the Assyrian DNA stays with these later empires. Well, Eckhart, thank you so much for telling us all about that. And I think people with a general interest in history will be able to spot so many parallels in the bits of history that they particularly enjoy and are familiar with.

So subsequent history owes an enormous amount to Assyria. Thank you very much for coming on and telling us all about it. Yeah, thank you very much. It was a real pleasure. Thank you so much to you for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit. We could not make this podcast without you. That's actually true. So make sure, if you want to keep it going, that is, to hit follow in your podcast player right now you'll get new episodes dropped into your podcast library automatically by the power of tech you can listen anywhere you get your pods apple spotify even bbc sounds imagine a world just imagine you never miss an episode of this podcast i mean it's there the technology makes that possible. That could be your reality

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