13. The Assyrians - Empire of Iron

Introduction to Assyria

0:00In the year 401 BC, at the height of the period known as the Greek Golden Age, a Persian prince named Cyrus the Younger was fighting a bitter civil war against his brother and was trying to

0:31seize the throne of Persia. To help him in this fight, he hired a mercenary army of mostly Greek soldiers, 10,000 men who traveled the long road to Persia to fight on his behalf. Among them was the Greek writer and adventurer named Xenophon, and he later wrote about this expedition in his work entitled Anabasis. Xenophon and his companions met the enemy Persian army at the Battle of Kunaxa

1:05on the banks of the Euphrates River, and they gave the Persian prince Cyrus value for his money.

Battle of Kunaxa

1:13The Greek heavy troops beat the Persians back and delivered a victory for the man who had hired them. But when the dust of battle had cleared, they heard the bad news. Cyrus the Younger had been killed, apparently knocked from his horse by a young common soldier. His claim to the throne of Persia had died with him, and the war was over. For the Greeks, this must have been heartbreaking.

1:46Their long journey, the victorious battle, and all their sacrifices had been for nothing.

Greek Mercenaries

1:54Their general had also been killed, and all of their senior commanders captured, leaving them without a leader and stranded in the middle of a foreign land. Now, Xenophon and what remained of his 10,000 men had to find their way home to Greece. They knew that their only route was to reach the Black Sea, which lay across the wide deserts of what is today Iraq. They were terrified, they had few supplies,

2:25and the enemy army was already pursuing them close behind. They hastily elected some leaders from among them, and Xenophon was one of them. He told his men to throw away everything they carried, shedding weight in order to outrun their enemies. So, they pelted across the deserts and the fertile river lands dotted with date palms, following the course of the river Tigris north.

2:55And it's while they fled in this manner that they stumbled upon something that must have made them

Discovery of Ruins

3:01stop in their tracks. It was the enormous, crumbling ruin of a city, completely deserted and full of the vast ruins of ancient buildings. This city was larger than anything Xenophon had seen back home in Greece. And later, he wrote about this discovery in his work, Anabasis. The Greeks continued their march unmolested through the remainder of the day, arrived at the Tigris

3:42River. Here was a large, deserted city. Its wall was 25 feet in breadth, 100 in height. The whole circuit of the wall was 11 kilometres. It was built of clay bricks, rested upon a stone foundation, six metres high. Nearby this city was a pyramid of stone, a plethrum in breadth, and two plethrum in height. And upon this pyramid were many barbarians who had fled away from the neighbouring villages.

4:15But Xenophon didn't have time to linger. The pursuing Persians were right behind them, and he couldn't spare any time to explore the ruins. They dashed onwards, following the river north. But then, only a day or two later, the Greeks came across another ruin, this one even larger and more impressive, surrounded by an enormous series

4:53of crumbling walls.

5:04The Greeks marched 34 kilometres to a great stronghold, deserted and lying in ruins. The foundation of its wall was made of polished stone full of shells. It was 15 metres in breadth and 15 in height. Upon this foundation was built a wall of brick, 15 metres in breadth and 30 metres in height, and the circuit of the wall was 30 kilometres.

5:38Once again, they had no time to stop. But it's clear that the sight of these lonely, crumbling ruins affected Xenophon. For days afterwards, he asked any local people he encountered who had built such enormous constructions all alone out there in the desert. No one he spoke to could tell him anything, and it seemed no one even knew the names of these great cities. Some people thought they might have been built by the Medes, a people who now occupied the area.

6:14Others told fantastical stories about the gods bringing down fire and thunder to destroy these ancient walls, killing everyone who had once lived within them.

Assyrian Empire

6:28Today, we do know the names of these cities, and it's thought that Xenophon, at the end of the 5th century BC, was the earliest person to stumble upon them and write an account. These were the cities of Nimrud and Nineveh. At the time when Xenophon stumbled across these ruins nearly two and a half millennia ago, the first stones of the Parthenon in Athens had been laid only 50 years earlier. The

7:00Colosseum in Rome would not be built for another 500 years. But the city of Nineveh had already been an ancient ruin for more than two centuries. This mighty city had flourished, boomed into a towering capital, home to hundreds of thousands of people. It had given birth to some of the ancient world's most beautiful art and architecture, and then, all at once, fallen into dust.

7:32Xenophon and his men did eventually return to Greece, and when he wrote his memoirs, he gives special attention to those moments. When he looked out over the sand-blasted desert, the grasses sprouting between the crumbling bricks as the wind battered his hair and tugged at his clothes. In those moments, Xenophon must have asked himself, who were these people who built such vast cities out here in the desert? How could such a great metropolis vanish so completely beneath the

8:08sands? And if so many people had once lived there, what in all the world could have happened to them?

Fall of Civilizations Podcast

8:38My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask, what did they have in common? What led to their fall? And what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of their world? In this episode,

9:15I want to look at one of the most remarkable ancient civilizations, the society known today as the Assyrian Empire. I want to explore how the Assyrians built their empire out of the ashes of the Bronze Age and built an empire of iron that lasted for centuries. I want to show how they expanded and developed to become perhaps the world's first military superpower, as well as fostering an extraordinary flourishing of art and learning. And finally, I want to tell the story

9:53of what happened to cause their final devastating collapse.

Mesopotamia

10:06In this episode, we return for the first time to a setting that we've seen before, in episode 8 Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia is a vast floodplain. For millions of years, its lands have been watered by two great rivers, the River Tigris and the River Euphrates. These great watercourses flow south from the

10:41mountains of Turkey and bring enormous quantities of silt down with them. If we were to soar high above the earth's surface, we would see these two rivers as vivid lines of green snaking through the dusty land. The rivers Tigris and Euphrates form one arm of a geographical feature that has come to be known as the Fertile Crescent. This is an area of land roughly in the shape of a half moon that runs

11:15from the marshlands of southern Iraq, north up the silt-rich rivers, then west to the humid coast of Syria. The Fertile Crescent continues south through the mountainous lands of Lebanon, down the Mediterranean coast of modern Israel and into Egypt, watered by the river Nile and its rich delta. Surrounded by high, treacherous mountains to the north and east, bounded by the Mediterranean Sea in the west and the

11:49impassable deserts of Arabia to the south, this sweeping corridor created the environment where some of the the world's first great societies rose up.

12:05To us, the Assyrian Empire feels like a relic of the impossibly distant past. But it's worth reminding ourselves that for them, their world was already ancient. The earliest settlements in this region, like the ones found at Gobekli Tepe and Chatelhoiuk, are truly ancient, each between 12 and 9,000 years old. They are some of the first evidence we have of humans living in large societies after the end of

12:40the Ice Age. But the Assyrians also had an incredibly rich awareness of their own ancient history and the cultural roots of their society. Since the invention of writing by the Sumerians around the year 3200 BC, humans had been passing their knowledge down from generation to generation, and it's hard to overstate just how powerful this was. The Assyrians held onto the memory of several of the great kings of the Sumerian

13:16Age, revering them as semi-mythical heroes. Among these was the legendary hero Gilgamesh, who slayed monsters and went on a quest to find the secret of eternal life. And they still told stories about the Akkadian king Sargon the Great, who, for the later Assyrians, had lived nearly two millennia in the past. For them, Sargon was about as distant in the past as Julius Caesar is for us. But his name was still on their

13:52lips. They still told stories about him, wrote about him, and drew inspiration from him, as this middle Assyrian text, called Sargon the King of Battle, demonstrates. While Sargon dwelt in the land, his heroes with him, twelve he chose. He brought his army across the fir-tree land. He conquered the Cedar Mountain. He took for his weapon the lightning bolt of his god.

14:24Like the Sumerians before them, the Assyrians saw the ruins of ancient cities scattering their landscape, and developed stories to explain how they got there. They believed that a great flood had once washed over the world, and that these ruined heaps of stone and brick were a remnant of this destructive ancient event. So, I think it's worth reminding ourselves right at the outset that the Assyrians

14:55did not think of themselves as we might think of them, as an early culture at the dawn of human history, but as a people on the cutting edge of human progress, the product of a long and ancient line, and the culmination of all that humanity was capable of. Since the fall of the Sumerian Empire, the language of Akkadian had become the region's most common

15:29tongue, replacing the old Sumerian language. The cities that had once formed part of the Sumerian empires had broken away. They were now a loose constellation of independent city-states, dotted up and down the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Each city had their own king, their own army, and their own god. As we saw in episode 8, for much of the region's early history, the Akkadians had been something of a

16:04junior partner to their Sumerian cousins. But now, with the collapse of Sumer, the Akkadian cities of the north were finally free, and they set out on their own journeys. One of these cities was the city of Ashur. Ashur was occupied from at least the year 2500 BC. It was founded at the height of Sumerian rule,

16:40on a bank of the river Tigris in northern Iraq, about halfway between the modern cities of Tikrit and Mosul.

City of Ashur

16:48Ashur was probably an early trading city. It would have been a town of tents and houses built from river clay, thatched with reeds. The smells of cattle and wood smoke would have drifted through its muddy streets. The sounds of people and the fluttering of the leaves of date palms, perhaps already the first canals being dug to water its fields. In its early days, it would have been a very humble place,

17:23and it would be hard to imagine the glorious legacy that its people would one day construct.

17:30Throughout the Sumerian period, the town of Ashur did well, and some of this was down to its natural advantages. It was nestled on a bend of the river Tigris that sheltered it on its north and east side, and its builders improved its natural defenses with a system of strong buttressed walls that made it a strong fortress. The rivers of Mesopotamia were the land's lifeblood. They brought water for drinking

18:02and to irrigate the fields, but in the rough landscape, they also acted as the highways along which trade could move on barges and ships. Carvings of the time show long boats powered with oars, forging over the brown waters of the rivers, carrying wheat and barley, copper and tin, as well as fine woods and stone from the north. As a crucial stop along one of these rivers, Ashur soon grew to be a

18:34wealthy place. Excavations of its houses show that by the second millennium, many of them were spacious mansions. It became common for wealthy families to keep vaults beneath their floors to hide their many valuables, jewelry made of gold and polished brass inlaid with semi-precious stones like carnelian, agate, and the brilliant blue lapis lazuli. Excavations have even uncovered dozens of libraries and

19:08archives in the city where texts written in cuneiform on clay tablets were stored, a clear indicator of a city overflowing with wealth.

19:25The wealthy families of Ashur were also able to donate handsomely to religious organizations, and the city would become home to no fewer than 34 temples to the various gods worshipped by all the people of Mesopotamia, gods like the sun god Shamash and the moon god Sin, the storm god Adad, Ishtar, the goddess of love and war, and of course, the king of the gods, Enlil.

19:58We can imagine walking through the city streets at this time and hearing the incantations washing out of the temple doors and overlapping in the hot air, the priests of the different gods competing for attention in the crowded city, the ringing of bells and the banging of drums, the singing of hymns. Funeral processions may have floated past, chanting poetry such as this surviving devotional hymn to the

20:28Babylonian god Marduk. The man who is departing in glory, may his soul shine radiant as brass. To that man may the sun give life, and Marduk, eldest son of heaven, grant him an abode of happiness.

20:51The temples also performed services for the sick. If you visited the temple of Ishtar with an ailment, it's likely you would have heard something like this prayer being said over you by one of its priests.

21:07Bind the sick man to heaven, for from the earth he is being torn away. Of the brave man, who was so strong, his strength has departed. In his bodily frame he lies dangerously ill. But Ishtar, who in her dwelling is grieved for him, descends from her mountain, unvisited of men, to the door of the sick man she comes. And soon, like most cities of this time, the city of Ashur developed a god of its own.

21:42In fact, the city virtually became a god. In the religious systems of Mesopotamia, gods and cities had an intimate and interwoven relationship. The gods of this time performed many of the duties that they do for us today. They could be called for in times of need or given sacrifices to ward off evil. But at this time, each city also had a god in the same way that every sports team has a mascot.

22:18The god was believed to quite literally live in the highest chamber of the city's temple, often in a statue dedicated to them. If you visited another city on business, it was considered sensible to give an offering to the city's god while you were there. And if two cities went to war, it was thought that their gods were battling it out in the heavens, just as their armies were fighting down on earth. And the more a city succeeded, the more power its god was presumed to have.

22:54As the city of Ashur grew in importance, its people named the city's god after the city itself, and so the god Ashur was born. Grand temples were thrown up to this new deity. And as the city went from strength to strength, worship of Ashur rose to become the highest form of religion for its people. This god rapidly took on new symbols and iconography. He became thought of as a robed man

23:29wearing a crown and holding a bow, often appearing in carvings at the center of a winged disc, looking down on the world and the golden city over which he presided. As the confidence of the cult of Ashur grew, eventually the position of Enlil as the king of the gods, a position he had held for a thousand years, was in jeopardy. Over the next centuries, the god Ashur even took over Enlil's wife, the goddess Ninlil, and his sons Ninurta and Zababa.

24:08Ashur, and not Enlil, was now the supreme god for this city's people. The people of the city of Ashur would soon become known as Ashuraya, but today we call them Assyrians.

24:28Like many of the powerful cities of this region, for the next millennium or so, the Assyrians of the city of Ashur would make several attempts to found their own kingdom, and a number of times they succeeded. One great king named Shamshiadad ruled at the end of the 19th century BC, and he conquered large areas outside of Ashur, bringing back great wealth to the city.

25:00Under his reign, the people of Ashur built a grand royal palace, and the temple to the god Ashur was furnished with a ziggurat, an enormous stepped tower that in the Bronze Age was a statement of a city's membership to an elite and powerful club. But this early flourishing of Assyrian power was stamped out by the rival power of Babylon, a powerful city in the south that established its

25:31own empire under the famous king Hammurabi.

25:39This was the fate of the people of Ashur for much of the second millennium BC. They were able to rise a little bit before being swallowed up by a bigger fish. They were folded into the empires of Babylon, the Mitanni, and the Hittites, and would usually spend a century or so as a possession before throwing off their rulers, and once more going it alone. But throughout this time,

26:09there was also a flourishing of Assyrian culture. One epic poem, known today as the Tukulti-Ninurta epic, has survived from this time. It glorifies Assyrian military conquests in the south, and sets out a model for how the ideal Assyrian king should behave. It also contains a vision of the fierce, warlike spirit of the Assyrian people.

26:40They charged forward furiously to the fray, without any armor. They had stripped off their breastplates, discarded their clothing. They tied up their hair and polished their weapons. The fierce, heroic men danced with sharpened weapons. They blasted at one another like struggling lions, with eyes flashing. Particles drawn in a whirlwind swirled around in combat. Death, as if on a day of thirsting, slakes itself at the sight of the warrior.

27:19But as the second millennium BC drew to a close, around the years 1200 to 1150 BC, the Assyrians would face a challenge of astonishing magnitude.

27:46The period that followed has gone down in history with the name, the Bronze Age collapse. As we saw in our second episode, for reasons we still don't entirely understand, a wave of destruction would soon wash over this region. Hordes of a mysterious force known as the Sea Peoples would land on its shores. Famine would spread from city to city. This destruction

28:17would sweep whole civilizations off the map, and leave virtually no inhabited cities left in the eastern Mediterranean region. Only two great societies emerged on the other side of this destruction. One was Egypt. As we saw in our second episode, the Egyptians managed to stop the Sea Peoples in a daring ambush on the waters of the Nile Delta, and just about held their society together.

28:52And the other was Assyria. It survived by withdrawing from its recent conquests, and holding on to only those territories that were essential to keeping its trade routes open. It withdrew back to its heartland, and survived in a diminished form.

29:14But, as the wave of destruction ended, the challenges that Assyria faced were enormous, as the historian Georges Roux recounts.

Bronze Age Collapse

29:28Towards the end of the 10th century BC, Assyria was at her lowest ebb. Economic collapse was impending, she had lost all her possessions west of the Tigris, and her vital arteries, the great trade routes that ran through the mountain passes, were in foreign lands. Hostile highlanders occupied not only the heights of the Zagros, but the foothills down to the edge of the Tigris Valley, while Aramean

29:58pitched their tents almost at the gates of Assyria.

30:05At this time, Assyria's territory consisted of little more than a strip of land along the river Tigris, surrounded on all sides by determined enemies. But, there were also things to be thankful for. For one thing, Assyria's enemies seemed incapable of uniting. For much of this history, they hated each other as much as they hated the Assyrians, and this would prove crucial for Assyrian

30:38survival. In the flat plains of Iraq, Assyria had no natural boundaries or defenses. For its survival, it relied on the fact that its enemies could be dealt with one by one. The powerful Assyrian army could march one way, then the other, smashing each enemy in turn, and subsequent kings would do everything they could to ensure that this continued to be the case. The main cities of Assyria were also

31:11virtually untouched by the disaster of the Bronze Age collapse, and they continued their economic output throughout the crisis. Assyria still had chariots and horses and weapons. It had access to iron, the new metal that had been used for ceremonial and decorative objects for centuries, but was only just beginning to be used to forge weapons and armor. The introduction of iron meant that Assyria was no

31:42longer dependent on the fragile supply of copper that came to them from across the mountains, in the faraway mines of Afghanistan. Iron occurs ten times more commonly in the earth's crust than copper, and could be found just about anywhere. The warriors of Assyria had been trained by years of constant fighting, and were now among the best in the world. And perhaps most importantly, the line of royal succession

32:14had supposedly not been broken for more than 200 years, meaning that the kings of Assyria claimed to draw on an ancient and unchallenged legitimacy among their people. In this region at the time, no other state could say the same. And to at least one Assyrian king, it must have seemed clear that if Assyria could only seize its opportunity, it could become a power unlike any that had been seen before. That man's name

32:48was Tiglath-Pileser I. Tiglath-Pileser ascended to the throne in the year 1114 BC. He was the son of a harsh ruler named Ashur-Reshia I. His father had been remorseless in his campaigns, giving himself

33:21the title the Avenger of Assyria and Merciless Hero of Battle. One surviving edict by his father declares that the penalty for fraternizing with palace women was to be thrown into an oven, and it's clear that Tiglath-Pileser inherited at least some of his father's harsh reputation. A series of laws was written during his reign called the Middle Assyrian Law Code, and they included incredibly harsh punishments

33:55against women. In one, a married woman who has an affair is decreed to be killed. But he was an energetic ruler and a skillful campaigner. One of his royal inscriptions describes him in the following manner.

34:17Unrivaled king of the universe, king of the four kingdoms, king of all princes, lord of lords, whose weapons the god Assyria has sharpened, and whose name he has pronounced eternally for control of the four quarters. Splendid flame which covers the hostile land like a rainstorm.

34:39This kind of overflowing self-praise is quite typical of how all Assyrian kings described themselves, but in the case of Tiglath-Pileser, it's clear that the challenges he faced were indeed formidable. He had inherited an Assyria that was threatened on multiple fronts. In the north, climate shifts had been driving nomadic horsemen into the northern plains. The Mushku people of Syria

35:10had occupied certain Assyrian districts in the upper Euphrates Valley. The Hittite people had also snatched some of its territory, and the powerful rival of Babylon still lay to the south. But Tiglath-Pileser didn't waste any time. He attacked the Mushku first and conquered them, and then drove out the Hittites and Arameans. Everywhere he went, he placed a record of his victories.

35:41In one of the strong fortresses he built along his border, he engraved the following message on a series of copper plates in the base of the walls.

35:55Altogether, I conquered 42 lands and their rulers, from the other side of the lower Zab in distant mountainous regions to the other side of the Euphrates, people of Hattie, and the upper sea in the west. The king at Tiglath-Pileser also loved to hunt, and he delighted in bringing back live specimens of animals from the faraway lands that he campaigned in.

36:28I killed ten strong bull elephants in the land Haran and the region of the river Habor, and four live elephants I captured. I brought the hides and tusks, of the dead elephants, along with the live elephants, back to my city of Ashur. It's hard to know how the average Assyrian citizen of the time would have felt about all of this, since their accounts were not recorded. We can imagine that at the very least,

36:59a great deal of wealth would now be flowing into the city of Ashur. Teams of construction workers would have been working day and night to build new palaces and gardens in the city. Exotic, never-before-seen animals might now be seen on the streets, while access to new trade routes may have meant that new spices and fabrics would have begun to appear in the city markets. Tiglath-Pileser swept his Assyrian armies west, and when he conquered the Hittite town of Pitru,

37:41he gained control of the highway to the Mediterranean Sea, a distant body of water that, for the Assyrians, constituted one edge of the entire world. Assyria at this time was the only great power in this region with no access to a coastline, and we can see something of the wonder in the King Tiglath-Pileser's words when he boasts about going on board a ship for the first time. The Assyrian chronicles even

38:14record that he hunted and killed some kind of sea creature known as a Nahiru. We don't know what this animal was. Many believe it may have been a dolphin or a whale, while others say it was likely a hippopotamus. But it shows what a novelty it was for the king of the landlocked

38:45kingdom of Assyria to finally reach the water. Tiglath-Pileser died in the year 1076 BC, and on his deathbed, he must have looked back on a life of staggering success. During his violent rule, Assyria recovered much of the territory that it had lost over the period of the Bronze Age collapse. He had grown his kingdom into an empire that was all but unmatched in the region, and he must have looked ahead to the

39:21dawning of a golden age for Assyria. But the fortunes of Assyria would soon change for good with the reign of a king named Adad-Nirari II. Adad-Nirari was crowned in the year 910 BC, nearly 3,000 years ago, and it's worth mentioning that his reign is perhaps the first event in the entirety of Near Eastern history

39:56that can be dated to an exact year with 100% confidence. The Assyrians, like the peoples before them, didn't keep track of years with numbers like we do. Instead, they gave each year a name, sometimes named after a particular person as a kind of honor, or named after a significant event that had taken place, like a great battle or an eclipse of the sun. Assyrian scribes kept long,

40:28meticulous lists of these year names, along with brief notes about important events that had taken place, as the following example shows, corresponding to three years at the end of the 8th century BC. The year of Chamberlain Tabsharasur, the city of Dua-Sharukhin, was founded. The year of Shamash-Upahir, governor of Haburi. Kumuhi was conquered and a governor was appointed. The year of Shah-Asur-Dabu,

41:03governor of Tushan. The king returned from Babylon, the vizier and nobles. The loot of Dua-Sharukhin was destroyed. On the 22nd of Tushrit, the gods of Dua-Sharukhin entered the temples. This system worked well enough for people of the time, but it means that if a modern historian wants to work out the date of a particular event, they need to have an unbroken list of year names, and for that list, to include a known historical event, or an astronomical event that can be clearly

41:37dated like a solar eclipse. Luckily for us, the Assyrians were obsessed with eclipses, believing them to be important omens from the gods, and they kept incredibly careful note of any that occurred. The reign of Adad-Nirari is the beginning of the earliest one of these lists. He was an ambitious king, and he soon began to expand in all directions into what is today Turkey, Iran, and the Mediterranean

42:10coast, drawing on the strength of the formidable Assyrian army.

42:18The life of an Assyrian soldier was a tough one. Adad-Nirari's armies were made up primarily of men drawn from the fields. They would spend much of their year working on farmsteads with their families, digging canals and turning the dusty earth with plows and hand tools, growing beans and pulses, wheat and barley, raising livestock like sheep, pigs, and cattle. And then, when the spring came,

42:50the rains stopped, and the winter mud hardened across the land. They would be gathered up, given a spear and a shield made of woven reeds, and marched up into the rocky hills or out into the barren desert to fight for the empire. Sometimes, they would fight other settled societies who lived in walled towns. Other times, their opponents would be nomadic tribesmen, or even other Assyrians who had

43:21rebelled. It must have been a confusing and frightening experience for these men, and no doubt many despised being forced into this service. But perhaps there were also those who enjoyed it. Without these annual excursions, many of them may never have seen a mountain, or an ocean, or anything of the world outside their town or village. And since the Assyrian army tended to win more than it lost,

43:53there must have been a certain sense of pride in their shared accomplishments.

44:01This rhythm of a season of harvest in the autumn and a season of war in the spring formed the heartbeat of the Assyrian empire. It was a drumbeat of expansion and conquest that was continued by the king who came to the throne in the year 883 BC, and who would carry the Assyrian empire to new and unprecedented heights. His name was Ashur-Nazipal II.

44:32Ashur-Nazipal II was a remorseless and ruthless warrior, and many of the things we associate today with the kings of Assyria, their cruelty and harsh treatment of enemies, reached a climax under his rule. Much like many rulers of this time around the world, it's clear that he used terror tactics and tortuous methods of execution to drive fear into the hearts of his enemies.

45:09But his inscriptions, out of all those of the kings of Assyria, do stand out for the delight they seem to take in the details of these terror tactics. After crushing one rebellion to his rule, Ashur-Nazipal commissioned this inscription, describing what happened next.

45:33I burnt many captives from them. I captured many troops alive. From some, I cut off their arms and hands. From others, I cut off their noses, ears, and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living, and one of heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city. I burnt their adolescent boys and girls. I raised, destroyed, burnt, and consumed the city.

46:06Whether because of these tactics or despite them, in the short term, Ashur-Nazipal was an effective conqueror. New conquests were turned into client states and ordered to pay tribute to the Assyrian Empire. Enormous wealth began to flow once again into the imperial center, and Ashur-Nazipal celebrated his victories with the construction of even more grand palaces. I founded a palace of cedar, cypress, juniper, boxwood, terebinth, and tamarisk as my royal

46:46residence, and for my lordly leisure, for eternity. I made sculptures of beasts of the mountains and the seas, in white limestone and alabaster, and placed them at its doors. I decorated it in a splendid fashion. I hung doors of cedar and cypress in its doorways, and put therein silver, gold, tin, bronze, and iron, treasure from the lands I conquered. I took people which I had conquered from the lands over which I had gained domination, and settled them there. This policy of resettling conquered

47:25people in Assyria wasn't new, but Ashur-Nazipal seems to have employed it far more frequently than his predecessors. The Assyrians understood a very simple calculation in the ancient world that population size meant power, and they quite happily filled their cities with people from all corners of their empire. They created what must have been some of the most cosmopolitan urban environments

47:56before the modern age, and we can only imagine what it must have been like for these conquered peoples to be uprooted from their villages and deposited unceremoniously in the vast metropolitan cities of the Assyrian heartland, larger than any town they had ever seen, and where hundreds of languages would have been heard on the streets. But the Assyrians also used deportations and

48:26relocations in a much more punitive way, and this policy also reached its height under Ashur-Nazipal. Deportation may sound like something of a light punishment when compared to the fates of some of those who stood in the way of the kings of Assyria, but it was a brutally effective tactic for crushing resistance to the empire. Human beings during this time, and throughout history, are so connected to

48:58our landscape that this kind of uprooting had a devastating psychological impact on the peoples it was done to. This technique of mass deportations was so effective that it has been employed by modern dictators. Joseph Stalin famously deported at least six million people in the 20th century from more than 20 ethnic minority groups considered to be troublemakers. And in the early days of the American colonies,

49:29when indigenous people were taken as slaves, they were always transported to another region to break their relationship with the land and reduce their chance of escaping. Whether despite this cruelty or because of it, King Ashur-Nazipal did manage to keep the empire together and dramatically expanded it. But he was followed by his son, a man named Shalmaneser III, who would not be so capable.

50:02Shalmaneser enthusiastically continued his father's policies of aggressive expansion and mass deportation, but in the final years of his reign, the people of Assyria had had enough. An enormous rebellion led by his son broke out across the entire empire. 27 cities, including the city of Ashur, rose up in rebellion. And this long and bitter civil war allowed virtually all of the people that Ashur-Nazipal had

50:35conquered to shake off Assyrian rule. Assyria's heavy-handed military domination of the region had made them hated, and it was clear that if they hoped to ever build a lasting empire, something would have to change. One king named Tiglath-Pileser III thought he knew what that thing was, and it was not a softer and more diplomatic approach. He decided in characteristic Assyrian fashion that what the empire needed was a much

51:12more powerful army.

51:19Up until the middle of the 8th century BC, the Assyrian army was much the same as any other force in the region, only a good deal larger, and the numbers really are staggering for the time. Shalmaneser III, the son of Ashur-Nazipal, once boasted a force of 120,000 men at a time when the world population has been estimated at only 50 million. If his inscriptions are to be believed,

51:54then at that time, around 0.25%, or one in every 400 of the world's entire population, was at that time serving in the Assyrian army. But it was still a force made up of virtually untrained peasants. The only professional soldiers were bodyguards that protected the king and other nobles, but these were mostly deployed in the cities and palaces and rarely saw battle. The vast

52:26bulk of the Assyrian army was made up of farmers, who, as we've seen, were plucked from their lands whenever the need arose, following the heartbeat of the seasons. Although the empire could summon a vast horde of soldiers, it was an ineffective force. When the autumn came around and the barley grew golden in the fields, these armies of farmers had to march right back home and bring in the crops. Otherwise, the people of the empire would go hungry. Gathering this huge army from the fields

53:03was an immensely time-consuming and difficult task. Rebellions could break out at any time of year, but if one occurred in some far corner of the empire, the Assyrians had to wait until summer for their campaign to begin. It would take months to gather all the soldiers required, and then another month or two to march across the region to face it. By the time they arrived, it would be nearly time for the annual harvest, and the men would have to march all the way back home. If they were clever, a rebellious

53:39city could simply lock its gates and wait behind their walls for the armies of Assyria to go away, and in many cases, this is exactly what they did.

53:53But in the year 745 BC, the king Tiglath-Pileser came to the throne. He chose his royal name after the king who had brought Assyria to such greatness more than three centuries before, who had forged a path to the Mediterranean and killed that sea creature known as a Nahiru. And this new king, Tiglath-Pileser, engaged in a radical program of reforming the Assyrian military into perhaps the first truly modern army.

54:29He reformed the core of the military into a body of elite armored troops, cavalry, and chariots, and he demanded that conquered territories on the edges of the empire supplied all of the army's light infantry, who were considered expendable and often bore the brunt of the casualties. The Assyrian army also pioneered the use of a large engineering component to its fighting force. Assyrian soldiers could build bridges and dig tunnels, construct fortifications and siege engines,

55:07as well as maintain the supply lines needed to keep an army going. This combined fighting force of soldiers and engineers was similar to the formula that would make the Roman military so formidable seven centuries in the future. Assyrian carvings show remarkably detailed scenes of the army crossing one of the land's great rivers, something they must have had to do multiple times a year.

55:38We see Assyrian men blowing into tied-up sheepskins to inflate them and use as buoyancy aids. Chariots dismantled and turned into boats, rafts constructed to transport supplies and equipment. Army engineers could even cut paths through the treacherous mountains, as this inscription, written by the late Assyrian king Sargon II, seems particularly proud of.

56:09Mount Cimmeria is a great mountain peak that points upward like the blade of a spear. Its summit touches the sky above, and its roots are made to reach down below into the netherworld. It is not fit for the ascent of chariotry or for allowing horses, and its access is very difficult for even the passage of foot soldiers. I had my vanguard carry strong copper axes. They cut through the high mountain crags as if they were limestone, and thereby improved the path. I took the lead of my

56:39army and made the chariotry, cavalry, and battle troops fly over the mountain as if they were brave eagles. I had the common soldiers and light infantry follow behind them. The camels and donkeys bearing the baggage leapt up its peaks like the ibexes native to the mountains. I had the numerous troops of the god Assyr ascend its difficult slopes in a good order, and then I set up camp on top of that mountain. Tiglath-Pileser also increased production of iron in the empire. It was a small-scale

57:14industrial revolution. Assyrian cities of this time must have become increasingly smoke-filled, the furnaces belching charcoal smoke, the sound of billows and clanging hammers echoing off the buildings. The use of iron allowed the Assyrians to enter the era of true mass production. Assyrians could now use iron to make arrowheads, knives, pins, and chains, while Assyrian soldiers now marched with

57:45iron swords, iron spear blades, iron helmets, and iron scales sewn into their tunics. The effect was immediate. In the year 743 BC, only two years after coming to the throne, King Tiglath-Pileser marched north against the kingdom of Uratu and conquered it easily. Two years later, he marched west into Syria against the kingdom of Arpad.

58:19The people of the city of Arpad had fought the Assyrians before, and they knew what to do. They would simply close their gates and hold tight. The Assyrian army may have looked fearsome, but they knew that when the summer came to an end, they would have to go home and harvest their fields, just as they always had. But as autumn came, the people of Arpad must have realized that something was wrong. The Assyrians showed no sign of going home. In fact, it looked like they were

58:56settling in for a long stay. Tiglath-Pileser lay siege to the city of Arpad for three years, something that would have been impossible with the old seasonal armies. When the city finally fell, the Assyrian king ordered Arpad ordered Arpad to be destroyed and its inhabitants slaughtered. It was a clear message to all those who stood in the empire's way that a new age was dawning.

59:32Much like superpowers today, the Assyrian empire treated the areas outside its boundaries as zones of extraction, where life was cheap, and all that mattered was the empire's continued access to their resources. Assyria would grow rich from the vast wealth it extracted from these areas. One text written during the reign of that cruel king Ashurnazipal II lists all the wealth drawn

1:00:07from a single campaign of terror against the region of Bitsamani.

1:00:13I received harnessed chariots, equipment for troops and horses, 460 harnessed trained horses, two talents of silver, two talents of gold, 100 talents of tin, 100 talents of bronze, 300 talents of iron, 3,000 bronze receptacles, bronze bowls, bronze containers, 1,000 linen garments with multi-coloured trim, dishes, chests, couches of ivory and decorated with gold,

1:00:46the treasure of his palace, also 2,000 oxen, 5,000 sheep, his sister with her rich dowry, and the daughters of his nobles. On top of this, 15,000 slaves were rounded up and brought back to Assyria to labor in manual jobs and provide a workforce for the empire. In campaign after campaign, Tiglath-Pileser conquered lands in Syria and marched all the way down the Mediterranean coast,

1:01:21taking coastal cities all the way to Egypt. He invaded the northern kingdom of Israel, destroyed their army, installed a puppet king, and deported large numbers of Hebrew tribes back to lands in Assyria. And Tiglath-Pileser also added one more remarkable new possession to the list of Assyrian conquests. That was the mighty and ancient capital of the south, the great city of Babylon.

1:02:01The city of Babylon had been the political and religious heart of southern Mesopotamia for more than a thousand years. It was perhaps the most ancient and revered great city in the region, and at this time it ruled over an area known today as Babylonia. This is a landscape of marshes, covering much of the south of what is today Iraq, on the coast of the Persian Gulf. This was once the

1:02:34largest wetland in the Middle East, home to countless rare species of bird, and the reeds often grow so high that you can't see over them. Mesopotamia had once been divided between the Sumerians in the south and the Akkadians in the north, but this had now evolved to become Babylonians in the south and Assyrians in the north. And it's a cultural division that still exists today. In modern times, the distribution

1:03:07of the Sunni and Shia regions of modern Iraq roughly follow this same geographical divide.

1:03:17Babylon was the largest city in the world at several points in history, and it was perhaps the first city to ever reach a population above 200,000. Today, its awe-inspiring ruins sit about 85 kilometers south of Baghdad, a sprawling mass of crumbling walls. Its famous Ishtar Gate, with its ornate blue-glazed tiles, its depictions of oxen, lions, and dragons, were at this time still several centuries in the future.

1:03:53But Babylon would have still been a resplendent city, glittering in the sun. And Tiglath-Pileser's conquest of Babylon shifted the balance of power in Mesopotamia. By the year 736 BC, the empire encompassed almost the whole of the region known as the Fertile Crescent. It now formed an unbroken corridor from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, linking up the trade routes of the Indian Ocean

1:04:26with those of North Africa and Europe. Its roads would have been thick with caravans of donkeys and camels, its rivers full of barges, carrying spices and precious stones, wheat, barley, and fruit, gold, and silver, and brass. It was this empire, and the formidable army it now commanded, that the king Tiglath-Pileser III would pass down to his younger son, who had found the greatest dynasty

1:04:59of the Assyrian age. His name was Sargon II, named after that great ancient Sumerian hero. His dynasty would be known as the Sargonid Kings. They would rule for three generations that would form the highest point of the empire's achievements in war, art, and literature. But they would also be the twilight of its age. And when these three generations ended, the empire would finally collapse

1:05:33in ash and flame.

Life in Assyria

1:05:45At this point, I think it's worth pausing and asking, what was life like for the average citizen of the Assyrian Empire? Due to their officious record-keeping, we actually have a great deal of detail about how the people of ancient Mesopotamia lived. Like the Sumerians, the Assyrians wrote on clay tablets, which is lucky for us since it has made their texts incredibly durable. An enormous number

1:06:16of these pieces of writing have been recovered, so many that an estimated 90% have still never been looked at by a trained expert and far less translated. The experience of reading these tablets is like hearing the babbling of countless voices speaking up to us from the impossibly distant past about a remarkable array of everyday matters. Just one out of countless examples is this letter from a child away at school, complaining to his mother

1:06:54her mother that the other children have nicer clothes than he does.

1:06:59Tell the lady Zinu, her son, Idinsin, sends the following message. From year to year, the clothes of the young gentleman here become better, but you let my clothes get worse from year to year. The son of a dad, Idinam, whose father is only an assistant of my father, has two new sets of clothes, while you fuss even about a single set for me. In spite of the fact that you gave birth to me and his mother only adopted him, his mother loves him, while you,

1:07:35you do not love me.

1:07:39As a result of this rich collection of texts, we can paint a remarkably clear picture of what life was like for these very ancient people. Walking the streets of a great Assyrian city during this time would have engaged every one of your senses. One such city was Nineveh, which would soon become the capital of the empire, the same city that the Greek writer Xenophon would one day pass by while fleeing from the Persian army pursuing him. Nineveh was an enormous city for the time.

1:08:16Its city walls were 12 kilometers long, built of a stone foundation surmounted by mud bricks, and enclosing an area of seven and a half square kilometers. The wall was broken by 15 gates, many of them named after gods, such as the Adad Gate, named after the god of storms, or the Shamash Gate, after the god of the sun, while others carried more descriptive names, like the Desert Gate or the Gate of the Water Carriers.

1:08:49The city was surrounded by a moat filled with water from the river Tigris. The city would have been a kaleidoscope of rooftops, built in a largely unplanned manner, and its alleyways would have been covered with mats and reed awnings to keep off the heat, much as they still are in Iraq today. In the courtyards of houses, skins of wine and jars of water hang from the rafters to cool. We can imagine a joint of meat boiling in a clay pot on a fireplace, the smells of baking bread

1:09:25wafting from a clay charcoal oven nearby. The following recipe for lamb stew, translated from a clay tablet, shows the kinds of smells that would have been wafting through the city streets in the afternoon.

1:09:41Stew of lamb. Meat is used. You prepare water. You add fat. You add fine-grained salt, dried barley cakes, onion, shallot, and milk. You crush together and add leek and garlic.

1:09:58Like the Sumerians before them, the Assyrians loved to drink beer. They drank it in groups, sipping it from large urns through hollow reed straws. Beer held a prominent place in Assyrian culture, and this inscription by the late king Ashurbanipal shows that even in the highest royal circles, it was considered among life's greatest pleasures. In my reign there is prosperity. In my years there is abundance. My kingship is good as the choicest oil.

1:10:33Good beer I have placed in my palace. Nineveh sat on the river Tigris and had a bustling dock and waterfront beside the gate known as the Dock Gate. This would have been a vibrant place, full of the smells of dried and fresh fish, stagnant water and mud, the babbling of the crowd, people arguing over prices and shouting greetings in dozens of languages. Merchants would sail downstream on barges or ships woven from reeds,

1:11:09perhaps traveling south to Ashur or Babylon, with clay urns full of beer or wine. The following letter contains instructions from a wine merchant to a friend. Tell Ahuni, Balanam sends the following message. May the god Shemash keep you in good health. Make ready for me the myrtle and the sweet-smelling reeds I spoke to you about, as well as a boat for transporting wine. Buy and bring along with you ten silver shackels worth of wine, and join me here

1:11:45in Babylon sometime tomorrow. But the Tigris was a fast-flowing river, much faster than the Euphrates, and sailing back upstream was very difficult. So, traders would often make the journey back by road, accompanied by caravans of donkeys. The road system was now much improved since the time of the Sumerians, and a sophisticated highway network now joined all of Assyria's major cities,

1:12:17with milestones at regular intervals, telling travelers how much further they had to go. But the roads were often dangerous, and although soldiers would patrol them, banditry was extremely common. One letter from a local governor shows his frustration with the lack of response to the bandit problem.

1:12:40Tell Sin Idinam, Sili sends the following message. I have written to you repeatedly to bring here the criminal and all the robbers, but you have not brought them. And so fires started by the robbers are still raging and ravaging the countryside. I am holding you responsible for the crimes which are committed in the country. In the cities, a great deal of life took place on the roofs of houses. During the day, women would gather on these roofs to perform the duties of maintaining their homes.

1:13:13They would pound grains into flour and knead the dough to make bread, prepare food, wash linen, and hang it out to dry. We can imagine them talking with their neighbors from roof to roof as they worked, and the sounds of their laughter drifting overhead. During the hottest hours of the day, with the Iraqi sun often reaching more than 40 degrees Celsius or 104 degrees Fahrenheit, the heat would drive everyone indoors. The finer houses of the city often had a kind of cool room

1:13:52with a floor made of polished alabaster or marble, and the walls painted with plaster. During the hottest parts of the day, the floor and walls would be splashed with water to cool the air inside. The city's poor would sleep on reed mats, while the rich had wooden bed frames with mattresses and coverings. The richest of the citizens had beds made of ivory and fine carved woods.

1:14:22And it's not just people that were thought to live in this city. The Assyrians believed that the world was populated by countless demons and spirits who could not be seen or heard, but whose influence could constantly be felt, and who often manifested as bad smells. These demons were responsible for illnesses and disease, and they required the constant attention of exorcists to expel them. The following letter recounts the procedure for one exorcism for a person suffering from epilepsy.

1:14:58As soon as something has afflicted him, the exorcist rises and hangs a mouse and a shoot of thornbush on the vault of the patient's door. The exorcist dresses in a red garment and puts on a red cloak. He holds a raven on his right arm, a falcon on his left, and recites the incantation, Truly, you are evil. After he has finished, he makes another exorcist go around the bed of the patient,

1:15:30followed by incense and a torch, and recites the incantation, Be gone, evil Hutupu. Until the demon is driven out, he does this every morning and evening. Talismans were often used to ward off these evil spirits, often small statues in bronze or clay, sometimes precious stones like jasper. They were often frightening images of demons, with the wings and heads of goats and dogs and the tails of scorpions. And these would be kept in

1:16:07every corner of the house to ward off evil. As you walked the city, you would see these small talismans hanging from the rooftops. For many Assyrians, one crucial everyday object was what's called a cylinder seal. These were a small cylinder of stone, some no larger than a battery, which had complicated designs and symbols carved into them. The idea was that someone could prove

1:16:38their identity using this seal, and they could be used to sign contracts just like a signature. People would wear them around their necks on a string, and when a contract was written on clay, they would roll the cylinder over it so that their unique image was left printed on it. You could even seal a chest, an urn, or a door using clay or wax, and then print it with an official seal so that everyone knew the last person to open it. The following letter of instruction to a member

1:17:15of the king's household shows the importance that these seals held in all manners of official business. Tell Manaya that Sikialani will be coming to you carrying the cylinder seals to reseal the entrance of the warehouse, and also the cylinder showing a Lamu monster for resealing the chests. Get everyone together, open the storehouse, and take as many as you can carry of the garments which are in the chests under my seal. Put your cylinder seal on whatever has been returned, and send me back the seal cylinders.

1:17:51But these cylinders were expensive, and they signified that their holder was an important person of high class. Regular people had to get by without one, and to sign a contract, they would simply press their fingernails into the clay, meaning that the marks of these ancient people's hands are still left on some of these documents.

1:18:24The people who lived these countless lives in the streets of the great Assyrian cities were probably largely unaware of what was going on in the vast, grand palaces that loomed over their cities. They would have likely followed the comings and goings of kings with some interest, the way we might pay attention to celebrity gossip. But to them, the inner workings of the royal palace would have been as inaccessible and mysterious as the center of the earth. But what happened in those inner chambers

1:19:01would have an enormous effect on their lives? And as that final great dynasty of Assyria, the Sargonid kings, took to the throne, the dramas of the royal court would soon have deadly consequences consequences for all those who called Assyria their home.

1:19:24The drama of the Sargonid kings truly begins with the son of Sargon, a man named Sennacherib.

1:19:35He came to the throne in the year 705 BC, and he would begin one of the most remarkable family dramas to come down to us from the ancient world, and he would be the father and the grandfather of the last two great kings of Assyria, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal.

1:20:03This great drama got off to a remarkably rocky start. Sennacherib's father, Sargon, had been a respected and feared king. But it's clear that something about Sennacherib meant that he didn't quite hold the same level of command. After only two years of his rule, several Assyrian vassals in the foothills to the east, in Syria and along the Mediterranean coast, all suddenly stopped paying their tribute to the

1:20:36empire. The Egyptians, always happy to throw sand in the eyes of the Assyrians, moved to back the rebels' fight for independence, and the young Sennacherib quickly found himself plunged into a fight for the empire's survival. The young king quickly gathered the full force of the imperial army and dealt with the rebel kings in the usual Assyrian fashion, taking them on one by one. He first marched east and

1:21:09crushed the peoples of the Iranian lowlands. Then he marched north and around the fertile crescent to the Mediterranean coast, and reconquered the rebellious kingdoms there, as he recalls in the following inscription.

1:21:26With the weapons of the god Assyrian, my lord, and my fierce battle array, I turned them back and made them retreat. I quickly slaughtered and defeated the king of the land of Elam, together with his magnates, who wore gold jewelry like fattened bulls restrained with chains. I slit their throats like sheep and cut off their precious lives like thread. Like a flood after a rainstorm, I made their blood flow over the broad earth. The swift horses, harnessed to my chariot, pulled into floods of

1:21:57their blood. The wheels of my war chariot, which lays criminals and villains low, were bathed in blood and gore. I filled the plain with the corpses of their warriors like grass. I cut off their lips, I cut off their hands, like the stems of cucumbers in season. One of these campaigns is remarkable because we have accounts of it written by both the winners and the losers, in a level of detail almost unprecedented anywhere else in the 8th century BC.

1:22:32This is because its records have survived not just in the chronicles of Assyria, but also in the Bible. This was Sennacherib's campaign against the kingdom of Judah.

1:22:49The kingdom of Judah was one of the region's two major Hebrew kingdoms, and it centered on the powerful city of Jerusalem. It had once been part of a united kingdom of Israel, but in the face of Assyrian aggression, the kingdom had been broken up. It was now divided into the kingdom of Israel in the north, ruled by a puppet king, and Judah in the south. The Judean king at the time was a man

1:23:21named Hezekiah. He was an energetic ruler and seems to have been driven by religious fervor. The religion of the ancient Israelites was something of an oddity in this region at the time because it disallowed the worship of any god but the Hebrew god Yahweh. As we've seen, worship in places like Assyria was a much more eclectic affair. You might make offerings to Marduk while you were visiting

1:23:55Babylon on business and make an offering to Ashur when you got home. You might make an offering to Ea if your son was going on a long voyage by boat, or to Gula if someone you knew was sick. In the Assyrian worldview, the gods of other cities were often seen as hostile and were thought to be subordinate to the great god Ashur, but they were still thought to very much exist. In fact, the Assyrians had a habit of kidnapping the gods of their conquered enemies. Sometimes, when they captured a new city,

1:24:31they would take the statues of its gods back to the Assyrian capital as a way of harnessing their power for themselves. But the religion of the Hebrews was different. It held that there was only one god. If you worshipped any other deity, it was believed that you were at best talking to the air, and at worst, communing with evil spirits. And King Hezekiah was one of the most strident religious rulers of ancient Judah. He enacted

1:25:04sweeping religious reforms, including strict instructions to worship only the Jewish god Yahweh. He removed all other statues and icons from the temple of Jerusalem, as the Book of Kings, chapter 2, 18, in the Hebrew Bible recalls.

1:25:29Now it came to pass, in the third year of Hoshea, son of Ella, king of Israel, that Hezekiah, the son of Ahaz, king of Judah, began to reign. And he did that, which was right in the eyes of the Lord, according to all that David, his father, had done. He removed the high places and broke the pillars, and he broke in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made. Perhaps it was Hezekiah's religious devotion that led him to make the enormous gamble of defying the Assyrian Empire.

1:26:17Or perhaps the recent rebellions in Assyria had emboldened him, and he believed that it might be on the brink of collapse. Whatever his calculation, it backfired completely.

1:26:33He soon heard news that the Assyrian king Sennacherib was marching out to punish the kingdom of Judah with the full might of the Assyrian army. The news coming from the north would have been terrifying.

1:26:50Sennacherib first conquered the rebels of Ekron, and then swung his armies south to march on Jerusalem. On the road, he came across the fortified Judean city of Lachish. Lachish was the second most important of the cities of Judah. It was built on a hill about 40 kilometers to the southwest of Jerusalem, and had a strong wall running all the way around it.

1:27:20The hill was steeper on the north side, and for defensive purposes, this is where its gate had been built. We can imagine the sight that the citizens of Lachish would have seen one day in the year 701 BC. From the north, a great cloud of dust would have begun to gather on the horizon, looking like some great natural disaster on its way. As the dust grew closer and thicker,

1:27:51you would have been able to hear the vibrations through the earth. If you've ever been inside a large sports stadium at full capacity, try to imagine what three or four times as many people would sound like, all marching together in their heavy armor, along with their horses and the clattering of chariot wheels and harnesses. Finally, the enormous force would have come into view, like a shadow on the land. In the center of their formations, the main body of infantry would have massed,

1:28:27organized into tight, compact units, their spear points glittering in the sun. Even more terrifying would be the trundling wheels of enormous siege engines come to tear down the walls of the city. The Judean military was insignificant in comparison. They were made up of militias and mercenaries, huddled behind the walls of Lachish, that must have suddenly seemed like a pitiful defense.

1:28:59What happened next is depicted on a remarkable series of carvings, etched in meticulous detail in gypsum, designed to decorate the walls of Sennacherib's southwest palace in Nineveh. In their day, these carvings would have been colored, their details picked out with dyes of green, blue, red, and yellow. The Lachish Relief is an incredible piece of art, although the events it depicts are horrific.

1:29:32It's a perfect snapshot of a moment in history that would otherwise be completely lost, capturing the clothes and the faces of the soldiers, and the frenzied action of the battle. The Assyrians first built a camp and began to settle in for a long siege of the city, and it's here that their expertise at engineering came into play. As the weeks dragged by, they slowly built a ramp of stone and earth leading up to the city's walls.

1:30:04It would have been a round-the-clock effort. Assyrian workers toiled to form the mud bricks that made up the ramp, baking them in the sun, while soldiers shielded the workers as they built it, the occasional arrow or slingstone whistling down from the defenders on the walls. The desperation of the city's defenders can be clearly seen in the archaeological record at the site of Lachish.

1:30:35At some point, we can see that they ran out of iron, and in desperation began to carve new arrowheads out of bone. Finally, when the ramp was completed, the vast Assyrian siege engines would have rumbled into life. These siege engines were something like an Iron Age tank. They were made up of a large wooden frame like a mobile fortress on enormous wheels. They had a tower on top from which archers could rain fire on the defenders.

1:31:10At the front of the engine was a large heavy instrument, somewhere between a battering ram, a spear, and a hammer. This was used to break the mud-brick walls of enemy cities, jimmying between the gaps in the bricks and stones, and slowly wearing them down. Defenders would constantly try to set these engines on fire, and so they were covered in thick layers of wet animal hides. A constant stream of Assyrian workers would hurry up to the front lines

1:31:41carrying jars and skins of water, dousing the engine and putting out the fires. As well as these engines, the Assyrians would have laid countless ladders against the walls. The defenders rained down arrows and stones, but the result was inevitable. The defense collapsed, people fled the city in all directions,

1:32:11and the Assyrian army finally marched into Lachish. From here on, the carvings begin to look like a depiction of hell. As a punishment for resisting, the city of Lachish was utterly destroyed. The inhabitants of the city were rounded up and deported to faraway lands on the other side of the river Tigris. The carvings show them leaving the city in long columns, men and women riding bullock carts piled high with all their possessions,

1:32:46children sitting on the carts or cradled in their mother's arms. The carvings even show some prisoners being forced to play musical instruments as they march away from their home, an episode perhaps also recorded in the ancient lament of Psalm 137. By the rivers of Babylon,

1:33:16we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the poplars we hung our hearts, for there our captors asked us for songs. Our tormentors demanded songs of joy. They said, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?

1:33:42And it's in this psalm too that we get one of the first recorded warnings delivered to the empire of Assyria about the fate that might befall it in the future. A fate that its various enemies were increasingly beginning to long for.

1:34:07Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks. Next, the Assyrian army marched on Jerusalem and Hezekiah was ready for them.

1:34:33He'd built a new wall around the great city and dug an underground tunnel through solid stone that would bring fresh water directly into the city. But even so, the situation must have looked bleak. The Judean king decided that he would have to negotiate.

1:35:00Now in the 14th year of King Hezekiah did Sennacherib, king of Assyria, come up against all the fortified cities of Judah and took them. And Hezekiah, king of Judah, sent to the king of Assyria, to Lachish, saying, I have offended. Return from me that which thou puttest on me will I bear. And the king of Assyria appointed Hezekiah, king of Judah, 300 talents of silver and 30 talents of gold.

1:35:34In order to pay the bounty, he even stripped the gold from the great temple, something that must have been a heart-rending decision for this devout king. But this seems to have hardly appeased the Assyrian king, Sennacherib, who continued his siege. At one point, he sent his general, a man named Rab Shakeh,

1:36:04to approach the walls of Jerusalem and demand the surrender of its defenders. The Assyrian general Rab Shakeh reminded the Jewish holdouts of all the other lands that had fallen to the military might of the Assyrians. Hath any of the gods of the nations ever delivered his land out of the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and of Abhad?

1:36:37Where are the gods of Sephahim, of Hina? And if... Have they delivered Samaria out of my hand? It looked as though all was lost. But it's at this point that luck began to turn in Hezekiah's favor. The Hebrew Bible recalls him praying to his god, Yahweh, to deliver him from the Assyrian siege. And the Hebrew poet-historians

1:37:09who wrote the Book of Kings record this reply coming down to him from the heavens.

1:37:20Now have I brought it to pass, yea, it is done, that fortified cities should be laid waste into ruinous heaps. Their inhabitants were as the grass of the field and as the green herb and as the grass on the housetops and as corn blasted before it is grown up. Thus saith the Lord concerning the king of Assyria, He shall not come unto this city, nor shoot an arrow there,

1:37:50neither shall he come before it with shield, nor cast a mound against it. And it came to pass that night that the angel of the Lord went forth and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred fourscore and five thousand. And when men arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.

1:38:16We may never know the truth of what happened to bring an end to the siege of Jerusalem. The most likely explanation is probably an outbreak of plague among the army of Assyria. Plague was a constant threat to any campaigning army, and it wouldn't have been the first campaign to end in this way. One Egyptian account, repeated by the later historian Herodotus, recounts how the Assyrian army was turned back after an infestation of field mice

1:38:48swarmed their camp. The mice are said to have gnawed away at the Assyrian bowstrings and shield handles, making them unable to fight. And this is possibly another slightly fanciful description of a plague decimating an army. The Assyrian sources are understandably quiet about what must have been an embarrassing failure. The only source to mention this campaign focuses on the early victories

1:39:19won by the Assyrians and on the tribute that Hezekiah handed over. This campaign gives just one brief snapshot of what the Assyrian war machine was like and how it felt to be on the receiving end of its fury. Still, the campaign had ended in an embarrassment, and it was perhaps this defeat that led the city of Babylon in the south to desire its freedom. The question of

1:39:54what to do with Babylon was one of the constant pressing concerns of the Assyrian kings, and it had been a thorn in their side for centuries. Babylon was a proud and ancient city with a distinct culture, and it was so powerful that it was exceptionally difficult to keep it in the empire. Various Assyrian kings tried different approaches to this problem.

1:40:24Some simply allowed a native Babylonian to rule the city and its surrounding territories, which kept the Babylonian people happy. But this often led to the Babylonian king declaring independence whenever the central power of Assyria was distracted or deployed elsewhere. Others tried imposing an Assyrian governor on the Babylonians. This naturally enraged them, and these Assyrian kings of Babylon would often face

1:40:55plots and rebellions, and would quite often be toppled in favor of some Babylonian noble, who would then immediately declare independence. The third option was to keep the throne of Babylon in the family. This usually involved the king of Assyria crowning his brother or uncle as the king of Babylon, but this held another danger. If this brother was a little too ambitious, he might consider

1:41:25using the might of Babylon as a springboard to try and take the whole empire for himself. By the year 694 BC, this repeated cycle and seemingly impossible problem had become too much for King Sennacherib, and for him the conflict had become personal. Babylonian rebels were partly responsible for the death of one of his sons, and after crushing his enemies in the north,

1:41:57in the kingdom of Judah and along the Mediterranean coast, he swung around and set out on campaign to decisively beat the city of Babylon and solve the Babylonian problem for good.

1:42:17In the year 689 BC, the Assyrians laid siege to Babylon. The siege lasted for 15 months, and when the city finally fell, Sennacherib wrote this description of what happened next. I destroyed the city and its houses, from foundation to parapet. I devastated and burned them. I razed the brick