Assyria

[Laan Yaa Mo]

If you like ancient history, you might enjoy this book:

'Assyria by Eckart Frahm review — the ultra-violent story of the world’s first empire
The Assyrian Empire ruled the Levant for a thousand years. Then it suddenly collapsed. Why? By Pratinav Anil

A retrospective grandeur attaches itself to all empires, the very word freighted with social sophistication and artistic achievement. But these are the illusions of hindsight. Empires are, in fact, precarious things. And the Assyrian Empire — the world’s first, according to Eckart Frahm, a professor of Assyriology at Yale University, so not a disinterested party — was no different.

It was always expanding or contracting, ushering in a new belle époque or teetering on the edge of collapse. Still, there were more steps forward than back. From its city-state origins in about 2000BC, when it rose from the ashes of the collapsed Akkadian Empire, it spanned all of the Levant by 670BC. Sixty years later, though, it had ceased to exist.

Frahm engagingly chronicles its progress, illustrating how a peaceful polity very gradually lost the plot. Old Assyria was rather like Republican Rome. Kings weren’t despots. Ashur, the capital named after the Assyrian state god, had a parliament of sorts in the city assembly. A city hall was in charge of the granary and treasury.

Later Assyrians, however, made a Faustian bargain. They traded business for war. an individual became something of a Camorra boss. We enter the world of targeted killings and mass deportations. The state became a protection racket, extorting huge sums from its neighbours on pain of war.

By all accounts, its army was a formidable presence. Records testify to it chasing enemies, their “hearts throbbing like those of pursued young pigeons”. Picture them “trampl[ing] the corpses of their fallen soldiers as they pushed on, releasing their excrements inside their chariots”. These weren’t puerile fantasies. It seems they left their rank evidence on chariot floorboards, which Assyrian soldiers later swept up while clearing battlefields.

It’s a pity that the Assyrian Empire is hardly remembered. Time was when Assyromaniac orientalists stoned on Byron and opium were obsessed with its bas-reliefs. But these days it doesn’t quite fit the Plato to Nato story we’re taught in schools and universities. Most Levantines are equally uninterested. They take a dim view of their pre-Islamic past. Isis has destroyed dozens of Assyrian sites. Thankfully, no such fate awaits the Lachish bas-reliefs in the British Museum where scenes from Assyrian life are carefully preserved. One can likewise peruse the 30,000 tablets of its Kuyunjik Collection, the remains of a royal library, covering everything from astrology to extispicy (“the art of reading the entrails of a sacrificial lamb”).

Frahm doesn’t deny you the pleasures of history’s foreignness, showing how remarkably alien the Assyrians were to our sensibilities. They devoured roasted locusts. People lived — literally — with skeletons in their closets, burying their dead under their living rooms to commune with their spirits. They made no distinction between the medical and magical. High infant mortality was blamed on Lamashtu, the baby-snatching demoness often depicted with a piglet nursing on her sagging breasts. The antidote was the priapic Pazuzu (if the name sounds familiar it’s because he appears in the film The Exorcist), “sporting taloned feet and hands, a leonine face with protruding eyes and an erect penis”.

Yet, Assyria was unmistakably modern — an entrepôt like Singapore, no stranger to long-distance trade and state-sponsored arts, tolls and taxes, pandemics and travel bans. We witness antagonistic class relations, with slaves killing merchants. We meet a “brand-conscious” teenage brat carping about his clothes to his mum, a husband fanning the flames of sexual jealousy by taking up with another woman in a trade colony, an aristocrat on the make railing against foreigners, a trader sneaking tin in his underwear to partially offset the crippling customs duty and a sheltered student scribbling “I do not know what that means” in the margin beside a graphic account of intercrural ejaculation.

Frahm has a fine eye for the ironies of history. In their “first joint appearance on the historical stage”, we are told, Arabs and Israelis fought shoulder to shoulder against the Assyrians. He punctures a fair share of myths too. People in every corner of the world, it appears, claim descent from the ten lost tribes of Israel, supposedly displaced by the Assyrian conquest of Samaria in 722BC — Kerala’s Jews, Afghanistan’s Pashtuns, African Americans. “I’m an Israelite, don’t call me black no more,” goes a line by the rapper Kendrick Lamar. Not so. In truth, there was no exile, no glamorous globe-trotting. The tribes were integrated into Assyrian society as construction workers and elite soldiers.

Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire is a work of remarkable synthesis. The range of its sources is truly extraordinary: tablets and stele, of course, but also “faunal and floral analysis”, “advanced forms of pottery studies” and satellite images. Frahm’s prose has a light, aphoristic touch, although there are occasional tonal lapses. In one of his fustier passages, for example, when relating how fiercely protective kings could be of their concubines, cutting the feet of those who so much as mistakenly trespassed into the carnal sanctums, he writes, “The harems represented the correlate in sexualibus of the kings’ political and military power.”

It’s a high style that is happily counterbalanced by the brusque, almost comic tone of official chronicles, which he quotes at length. Sample the boast of a 7th-century ruler, a remarkable piece of six-word flash fiction: “Before me, cities; behind me, ruins.” Move over, Hemingway.

It wasn’t an empty boast. Assyrian rulers were sadists to a man. Here is Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled from 883 to 859BC: “I captured many troops alive. From some I cut off their noses, ears and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I hung their heads on trees around the city. I burnt many of their adolescent boys and girls.” After putting the rebellious governor of Nippur to death, Ashurbanipal (668-631BC) had his sons grind the bones of their father. “Even by the standards of the ancient world,” Frahm writes, “there were acts that could be considered war crimes.”

But it is precisely this ruthlessness in the service of imperial ambitions that spurred Assyria’s rise. By 720BC it had assumed all the characteristics of an empire: it was a massive, multi-ethnic, militarist, interconnected, decentralised, extractive and ever-expanding affair. So what, then, explains its sudden collapse, so unlike Rome’s protracted, Gibbonian decline? This is the big question that animates Assyriology. Frahm rehearses two plausible theories, giving both a fair hearing, before proposing one of his own.

The first turns to climate change. Intensive agriculture brought on an apocalyptic drought that did for Assyria. All was well during the “Assyrian megapluvial”, from 925BC onwards, a period of heavy annual rainfall underwriting regime stability and expansion. The trouble began two centuries later when the rains dried up. Frahm is unconvinced. What the reductio ad clima doesn’t allow for is that Assyria’s imperial age began in earnest only during the “Assyrian megadrought” and the Assyrians proved remarkably successful at extracting resources from their periphery to fatten the metropole. So much for climate change.

The second theory is that the Scythians mounted a brutally efficient invasion, decimating the Assyrians in a handful of years. There’s just one snag. Only one historian, and an unreliable one at that, suggests something of the sort. Now, Herodotus is the same historian who believed that the Assyrians were trounced at Eltekeh in 701BC because field mice gnawed through their bow strings one serendipitous night, allowing the Egyptians to score an easy triumph the next day.

Rains or raids? Neither, Frahm concludes, pinning the Götterdämmerung on leadership failure. Ashurbanipal fiddled while Assyria burned. He cultivated an air of scholarly sprezzatura, but in fact was scarcely literate. The word “profit” had to be explained to him as if he were a child. Worse, he surrounded himself with cronies, elevating his favourite crooner to the top civil service job. In quick succession, he went on to lose Egypt and embark on a war with his brother, who lost no time in assembling an anti-Assyrian coalition with the help of the Arabs, Arameans, Chaldeans and Elamites.

What’s more, Ashurbanipal managed to delude himself that his people were thriving. Gardeners and publicans owned camels and slaves, he wrote. Price controls guaranteed bread for all. None of this was true. Grain prices were a staggering 1,500 times higher during his reign. Ordinary Assyrians had to sell their children or pawn them to creditors to make ends meet.

In 620BC Nabopolassar spearheaded a powerful liberation movement in Babylon, overthrowing the yoke of Assyrian rule. The coup de grâce was administered eight years later when a combined army of Babylonians and Medians — a gaggle of sedentary Iranian tribes — laid Ashur to waste. Assyrians got a taste of their own medicine: the royal tombs were disinterred and vandalised, as was the temple of the state god Ashur. So it was that the imperial baton passed from Assyria to Babylon.

Ultimately, Assyria’s downfall can be pinned on great men — that is, great men falling short of greatness. It’s an unfashionable view of history, Frahm recognises, but perhaps we should sympathise with him. Great men — and women — do indeed shape history. For one thing, we’re still reeling from the Trussonomics experiment, our government borrowing costs being higher than those of peer countries. In finance circles, they call it the “moron premium”.

Pratinav Anil is a lecturer in history at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford

Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire by Eckart Frahm (Bloomsbury, 528pp; £30). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/assy ... -t672r53hx

[Whistler]

Like I said on the non binary man

[Laan Yaa Mo]

There could be a few readers in Thailand who like topics such as this. Obviously, you are one who wants to restrict your reading to Udon Thani topics. Go ahead. No-one is ordering you not to.

Seventy-seven people have looked at the topic so far, and Whistler is one of them.

[noosard]

There could be a few readers in Thailand who like topics such as this. Obviously, you are one who wants to restrict your reading to Udon Thani topics. Go ahead. No-one is ordering you not to.

Seventy-seven people have looked at the topic so far, and Whistler is one of them.

Restricted to Udon Thani
That is a laugh

As for your post it is interesting
how empires/countries crumble
See it happening in todays world

[Doodoo]

"Seventy-seven people have looked at the topic so far, and Whistler is one of them."

This counter on Udon Map is not an indicator of Interest. This was an old argument of Lone Star's(for those that can remember) when he would say how popular he was. As is mentioned it indicates how many times the page was opened even if only for a few seconds. It does not indicate how many time the article was read.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

"Seventy-seven people have looked at the topic so far, and Whistler is one of them."

This counter on Udon Map is not an indicator of Interest. This was an old argument of Lone Star's(for those that can remember) when he would say how popular he was. As is mentioned it indicates how many times the page was opened even if only for a few seconds. It does not indicate how many time the article was read.

I know, Doodoo. This is why I wrote 'looked at', and did not write 'read'.

I had forgotten about Lone Stars' argument. Thanks for the reminder.