Past Lives: Nanaya'ila'i and the Bleeding Edge of the Assyrian Empire

Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Tides of History ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible ad. Nanai Elai jolted from sleep. Burning pain in her hands and lower back greeted her, as they usually did. The sacks of grain she and her daughter used and shared as a bed were softer than the packed dirt of the floor, but not by much. Every morning was like this. Nanai Elai could no longer tell whether it was the uncomfortable sleeping arrangements or the endless labor of her waking hours that left her joints aching.

Morning light streamed in under the thin wool blanket that covered the entry to the storage room. The rays cleared her grogginess, and as she woke, Nanai Elai remembered what she'd been dreaming about. The same thing she had dreamt about almost every night for the past two years, since the day Assyrian soldiers came to Elam with iron and fire. She'd been bathing her daughter with water from a tall clay jar when the hue and cry rang out through the streets of Susa. The Assyrians had arrived, the walls had fallen, and death was coming. Only fragments of what happened next stayed with Nanai Elai in her dreams.

Images and feelings that her waking mind tried its very best to forget. She thanked the old gods of Elam, in Shushinak, the lord of the dead, and Uhuater and Hishmitik, who had been with her when she gave birth to her daughter, for the holes in her memory. What she recalled was wretched enough. The omnipresent stench of smoke. The screams coming from inside a burning house. The blood-soaked soldier clutching a severed head by the hair. The unbreakable grip of the Assyrian dragging her toward the makeshift slave pen, while her daughter followed behind them, wailing. Nanai Elai wasn't her name, not really.

But who she'd been before that terrible day was becoming more and more a stranger, remote and unfamiliar, as the months of enslavement elapsed at a terrible crawl. She would never return to Elam, that much was certain. That part of her life was over, as shattered as the statues of the Elamite gods in the streets of Susa. Nanai Elai was as good a name as any of these people might force on her. Still, she couldn't help but smile when she looked at her daughter, who recently had her seventh birthday. The little girl's hair was tousled, her eyes screwed shut in sleep.

Her little hand gripped a doll made from straw and wool. Whatever else had happened, whatever else would happen, as long as she had her daughter, Nanai Elai had a reason to keep going. I'm Patrick Wyman. Welcome to Past Lives. It's been a little over 4,000 years since the first known empire, that of the Akkadian king Sargon, first rose in Mesopotamia. In the 40 centuries since then, quite literally billions of people have lived out their lives under the rule of an emperor of one kind or another. A Roman Caesar, a Chinese son of heaven, a Persian great king, a Mongol Khan.

Empires have manifested so frequently and lasted for so long that we tend to assume they are inevitable, even inescapable. It turns out that large territorial units, anchored by extremely powerful rulers, are, in fact, a pretty durable form of political organization. Over time, however, and with equal inevitability, empires eventually collapse. When they do, a few apologists are always waiting in the wings to lament the glories that have been lost, to pine for a return to the good old days. For their beneficiaries, their rulers, of course, but also aristocrats, administrators, soldiers, even some of the common folk, empires are worth lamenting.

At their core, empires function as a way of extracting resources from a large region and from the people who live there, then redistributing those resources to the empire's preferred groups. That's why empires tend to have big, opulent palaces, fancy royal tombs, and extraordinary works of art housed in their population and cultural centers. An empire pulls materials, money, and labor together and then expends those resources on projects that could never be built in a single locale. Well, the Parthenon, the most enduring symbol of ancient Athens, was funded by tribute from Athens' naval protection racket in the Aegean.

The Colosseum was built, at least in part, by enslaved prisoners of war from Judea. Big Ben wouldn't exist if not for the money rolling in from all over the British Empire in the mid-19th century. Empires have a tendency to glorify their accomplishments. They offer safety, laws, infrastructure, military power, and, above all, a sense of belonging under the competent, caring, and distant gaze of a forceful, single ruler. If that comes at the expense of ungrateful rebels or those living outside the empire's boundaries, well, that's just the cost of doing business. And don't those lovely buildings make it all worthwhile anyway?

What are a few unimportant human lives next to everlasting monuments and names that will be whispered with respect, even awe, for millennia to come? Just shy of 3,000 years ago, in what's now Iraq, a new empire was rising. The Assyrians had been powerful before, in the waning days of the 13th and 12th centuries BC. But their state had shrunk amid the chaos of the late Bronze Age until it encompassed little more than a tiny chunk of land along the Tigris River. As the Iron Age dawned, however, the Assyrians returned with a vengeance.

Powerful armies equipped with iron weaponry and backed by a sophisticated administrative system quickly made the Assyrians the new masters of a vast territory. At its peak in the 660s BC, the Neo-Assyrian Empire, as it's usually known, stretched from southern Egypt to the Caucasus Mountains and the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. They built the First World Empire. But while we don't hear too much about the Neo-Assyrians today, they did lay down an easy-to-follow template for every Near Eastern and Mediterranean empire that came after. First came the Neo-Babylonians, who conquered the Assyrians and adopted their methods wholesale.

Then came the Persians, who picked up the pieces a few decades later. Then the Hellenistic Greeks and later the Romans. They simply expanded on what the Persians had done. If we want to understand how and why empires were so durable over space and time during this period, well, then we have to start with the Assyrians. Because they constructed the foundations of power that every subsequent empire in the region built on. If you've heard of the Assyrians, it's probably because they appear in the Hebrew Bible as the destroyers of the early state of Israel and the overlords of Judah.

When tribute wasn't forthcoming, the Assyrian king invaded, destroyed the kingdom, and deported tens of thousands of people to other parts of Assyrian-controlled territory hundreds of miles away. This is where the legends of the Lost Tribes of Israel come from. This was part of a policy of deliberate terror that went on for centuries. If anyone crossed the Assyrians, they not only carried out a terrible revenge, They boasted about those deportations and mass killings and royal inscriptions. They showed acts of unspeakable cruelty in the decorative art within the king's many palaces.

They made sure the severed heads and flayed skins of the rebels were made visible to the conquered as a grim lesson. When Assyria fell to a rival coalition of Babylonians and Medes in 612 BC, the empire's old victims turned those same tools of violence and oppression that had been used against them on the Assyrians themselves. After all, the Assyrians had written the rules of the imperial game forevermore. Now, they too could suffer the consequences. Around the year 646 BC, just a few decades before their precipitous fall, the Assyrians launched their last major campaigns as a ruling power.

Assyrian armies marched south along the Tigris and Euphrates into Babylonia, and then east into what's now the southwestern corner of Iran, a place known at the time as Elan. There, amid a brutal campaign of conquest, Assyrian soldiers ripped thousands of people away from their homes, just as they'd done to the Israelites a century earlier. Among them were a woman we know as Naniya Elai and her daughter, whose name has unfortunately been lost to time.

We know Naniya Elai and her daughter existed because they appear in a single document that was found in the city of Ashur, the spiritual home and one-time capital of the Assyrian Empire. Sometime between 646 and 620 BC, a man named Manuki Ashur paid one mina of silver, it's about 500 grams worth of silver, to a consortium of 10 sellers, who jointly owned Naniya Elai and her daughter. We're told that the two were Elamites, that they had been taken as spoils of war in a campaign near Susa, and that the Assyrian king had given Naniya Elai and her daughter to the city of Ashur.

That is all the document says. Assyrian sale contracts weren't particularly verbose, and very little of what we'd like to know about the people involved in this incident is written down. Still, without it, we would never even have known that Naniya Elai and her daughter existed at all. As sparse as this document is, it's enough of a starting point for us to build out the world around Naniya Elai. Given the time period and the general context, we can infer a few more essential details. For example, they were likely taken around 646 BC during the Assyrian assault on Susa.

Because she isn't named separately, we can assume that Naniya Elai's daughter was young enough to still be dependent on her mother. We also know that she wasn't an infant or a toddler, because then the contract would have included a specific term like of the milk, of the breast, or weaned, which were essential information for a sale contract to record. In fact, the conquerors probably would have killed a child that young or left her to die instead of bringing her along. All told, those details placed the sale of Naniya Elai and her daughter fairly close in time to their capture.

This fits with the identities of the ten men who sold Naniya Elai and her daughter to Manuki Ashur. Among them were a baker, a weaver, a cook, a shepherd, an ironsmith, and a goldsmith. These were solid, upstanding members of the free populace of the city of Ashur. Some of them even worked for a local temple. As to how those ten men came to own Naniya Elai and her daughter, the most likely explanation is that they formed a Kisru, or NOT, the ten-man unit the Assyrian state used to assign service duties to its subjects.

They served as part-time soldiers on the campaign against the Elamites in Susa, and as payment for their service, they received a pair of captives. Since dividing the labor of two people, only one of them an adult, among ten men, wasn't particularly efficient, the Kisru sold Naniya Elai and her daughter for cash and then split the proceeds among themselves. We don't know what Naniya Elai's name was in her native Elamite language. Naniya Elai was almost certainly given to her by her captors.

In the Assyrians' dialect of Akkadian, it means, The goddess Naniya is my deity, and this is a direct reference to one of the Assyrians' core justifications for attacking Elam in 646 BC, to return a looted statue of the goddess Naniya from Elam, where it had been taken, to its original home in the Mesopotamian city of Uruk. When we talk about enslavement as social death, that is, cutting off the victim from their previous life, renaming is a fundamental part of that process. It's essential to understand here that violence can and does take many forms.

Naniya Elai and her daughter certainly experienced physical brutality at the literal hands of the Assyrians, but Naniya Elai being forcibly robbed of the name given to her is another. Now her name served as a perpetual reminder of the circumstances of her enslavement, a kind of violence in and of itself. Every time her new owner, Manuki Ashur, called out to her, the destruction of Elam and life as she had known it would return in all its pain and horror. Before their capture, Naniya Elai and her daughter lived in a place called Elam.

Unless you're a real Bronze and Iron Age enthusiast, you probably haven't heard of Elam before. Elamites show up in the textual record for about 2,500 years, almost the span of time that separates us from Naniya Elai and her daughter, from around 3,000 BC until after the Persian conquest. At different times in that span, Elamite kingdoms clustered around the city of Susa and what is now southwestern Iran were important players in regional politics. They both fought against and allied with Babylonians, Assyrians, Medes, and every other group trying to make its mark in Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau.

Sadly, despite that extraordinarily long time frame, we don't know nearly as much as we'd like about the Elamites themselves. Their language, now extinct for thousands of years, was completely unrelated to anything else spoken in the region, whether we're talking about Sumerian, Semitic languages like Akkadian or Hebrew, or Indo-European tongues like the Persian that eventually replaced it.

While Elamite texts can be dated from the dawn of the Bronze Age to the rise of Alexander the Great, we have very few of them from any specific window in that span, which makes it really hard to get a detailed sense of what was happening in a particular time and place. How the Elamite kingdoms we hear about in those texts functioned, for example, is a mystery. Even where they were exactly located is unclear. The identities of the kings we see in king lists are almost impossible to parse, as is the relationship of one king to another.

The single document that tells us about the exchange in Ashur of Nana'i'i's life and freedom for profit sheds very little light on that broader Elamite world. But it does say enough that we can locate her and build out the world she knew. She was captured somewhere in the vicinity of Susa, the Elamite heartland, and the text refers to her as an Elamite, which we can treat more or less concretely as an ethnic or linguistic description. That Nana'i'i was captured during the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal's campaign against the Elamites in 646 BC is roundly considered fact, so let's use that as our starting point.

Here's how a text written in Ashurbanipal's name in the first person describes the campaign. Quote, A frieze from the Assyrian royal palace at Nineveh shows Ashurbanipal seated in a tranquil, idyllic garden. The severed head of the Elamite king hangs from a nearby tree. This was how the Assyrians advertised their brutality to their subjects and rivals. Texts like the one I quoted just now would have been read out to cheering crowds of Assyrians while prisoners of war were marched through the streets on their way to be sold or executed.

Foreign envoys visiting Nineveh would have seen friezes of flayed human skin and severed heads hanging from city walls. It's an open question as to whether the Assyrians were actually any more brutal than their contemporaries. There were no nice rulers in the Iron Age. But there's no doubt that Ashurbanipal and other Assyrian kings deliberately used terror as a weapon and a means of control. After all, death placed so flagrantly on display does have a way of discouraging rebellion and resistance. An invading Assyrian army was an extraordinarily thorough instrument of destruction. Soldiers stripped all available wealth from the conquered territory.

When Ashurbanipal conquered Egypt in 663 BC, for example, just a couple of decades before the campaign to Susa, he listed his spoils. Those spoils included precious metals, horses, fine cloth, specialized laborers, two entire obelisks made of electrum, a gold and silver alloy, and even gilded temple doors. Susa, by all accounts, received an even more brutal dose of Assyrian revenge than Egypt had. Nanaya Ilai and her daughter experienced the reality of that brutality. They were there in the vicinity of Susa when Ashurbanipal's armies arrived.

It's unlikely that they were aware of the broader dimensions of the conflict that would soon shape their lives, this ongoing war between Assyria and Babylonia, or the extraordinarily bloody siege of Babylon that concluded shortly before the invasion. This wasn't the first time Assyrian armies had ravaged Ilam in the recent past either. Nanaya Ilai would have lived through the most recent one as an adolescent or young adult. This is how Ashurbanipal described that past campaign. Like the onset of a terrible hurricane, I overwhelmed Ilam in its entirety. I cut off the head of Teyuman, their king, the haughty one who plotted evil.

Countless of his warriors I slew. Alive with my hands I seized his fighters. With their corpses I filled the plain about Susa as with Baltu and Ashurbanipal, those are two kinds of shrubs. Their blood I let run down the Ulai, it's a river in Susa. It's water I dyed red like wool. We might question how thorough this destruction was if so much remained to be ground down to dust less than ten years later. Apparently, Ashurbanipal hadn't made it into Susa itself. Whether Nanaya Ilai lived in the countryside or the city itself, we can't say for sure.

Whether she and her daughter witnessed the destruction of Susa's old temples and royal tombs firsthand, we'll never know. But we can't imagine the horror they experienced. For every royal tomb that rampaging soldiers pried open, a hundred humble commoners' houses were ransacked. For every rich find of gold and silver in a treasury, dozens of ordinary folks were robbed of every scrap of wealth they'd accumulated in their lives. For every statue of a god that was pulled down from its place of honor in a temple, countless actual people were torn away from their families, Nanaya Ilai and her daughter among them.

That was what it actually meant to face the business end of an empire. For the rest of her life, however long it lasted, Nanaya Ilai must have remembered flashes of that terrible trauma. If Susa's fall was anything like that of Babylon just a few years ago, it would have been an orgy of wanton bloodshed. Ashurbanipal says about that event, quote, There's no real reason to think he was exaggerating. So, when a building accidentally caught fire and the smell of burning timber hung in the air, did Nanaya Ilai recall the horrific destruction of Susa?

When she heard someone cry out in pain, did the screams of Susa's conquered residents ring in her ears? When she prayed to the gods, did she see the broken statues of her native deities desecrated and destroyed in the dirt? Whenever she passed the butcher's shop, did the smell remind her of the stink of spilled blood, the corpses of butchered civilians, the mutilated bodies of children too young to be sold? But Nanaya Ilai's ordeal didn't end with the sack of Susa. Afterward, as we know from the sale document, she and her daughter were taken to Ashur. That's a journey of about 800 kilometers or 500 miles.

They might have been transported by boat up the Euphrates and then the Tigris, but much of the journey would have been on foot. Nanaya Ilai would have seen the ruined landscape around Babylon, the legacy of another sack just like the one she had already experienced. Burnt groves of date palms, plundered villages, irrigation canals that had grown sluggish with silt after the people who maintained them were driven away or killed. The knocked down city walls of Babylon itself, the large chunk of that extraordinary city that was still cinders.

When Nanaya Ilai and her daughter arrived in Ashur, they were probably forced to participate in a triumphal parade for the victors, assaulted by the unintelligible cheers and jeers of the people of the city. They probably witnessed the public torture and execution of any Elamite notables who had survived the march. Then, at last, they were sold to Manuki Ashur, and their lives as they knew them ended. This is where the documentary record stops, but we can say a little bit more. One well-excavated house from this period in Ashur is about 150 square meters, or 1,600 square feet.

That's small by our modern American standards, but it was respectable in a dense old city like Ashur. It's likely that Nanaya Ilai and her daughter would have lived in a similar dwelling, packed in among the many free and enslaved members of the household. Familiar Elamite words were rarely, if ever, heard. Instead, Nanaya Ilai would have conversed in the Assyrian dialect of Akkadian or the Aramaic that was the lingua franca of the Assyrian Empire. She also would have caught smatterings of Hebrew, Egyptian, and dozens of other tongues from all over the region.

She wore garments of simple sackcloth, which were synonymous with the lowest status in Assyrian society. Perhaps her daughter stayed with her. Family separation wasn't common, but it wasn't unprecedented either. Her owner, Manuki Ashur, may well have forced her to marry another enslaved member of the household in hopes of producing more enslaved children. Forced to do back-breaking labor every day, it's hard to say how long Nanaya Ilai might have survived. Being freed was essentially unheard of in the Neo-Assyrian Empire. We don't have a single example of a document recording manumission, and unlike their Babylonian neighbors, the Assyrians didn't even have a word for a freed person.

The Assyrian Empire enslaved Nanaya Ilai and her daughter, but it wasn't Ashurbanipal who truly benefited from their capture. It was the common soldiers of that ten-man Kisru. These two victims we know of, among uncounted and unnamed thousands, were spoils of war whom soldiers were no less diligent about collecting than ripped off temple doors or hordes of gold and silver. Those Assyrian soldiers directly benefited from the pain they inflicted on Nanaya Ilai and people like her. They sold her for a mina of silver, which works out to about 60 shekels per man.

That was between two and six months' wages for an average worker in Ashur, and that didn't count any other plunder they'd been awarded or taken for themselves. They might have been bakers, goldsmiths, weavers, and shepherds in their daily lives, but when the Assyrian state called on them, they became something entirely different. Think back to those incredibly vivid accounts Ashurbanipal wrote of the destruction his armies inflicted. It was actually men like the goldsmith and the weaver who wielded the flaying knives, decapitated prisoners, and ransacked royal tombs and venerable temples.

It was those men who used the prophets from their organized violence to build better lives for themselves and their families in Ashur. Did they ever tell their spouses and children what they'd done hundreds of miles away from home? Did they ever reflect on the ethics, let alone the morality, of what they'd done? Did they even learn the Naya-Elai's name before they changed it? The answer, sadly, is almost certainly not. Nobody in the Assyrian empire questioned the existence of slavery. It was simply a matter of who was enslaved and by whom. It was an equation that always came down to power, the haves and the have-nots.

Elamite armies did the same when they invaded Babylonia or Assyria. Babylonian armies would soon repay the favor just a few decades later in Ashur itself. It probably wouldn't have been any comfort to an elderly Naya-Elai, assuming she was still alive in 614 BC when the city fell to the Babylonians, but she may well have lived long enough to see her ten captors' descendants suffer the same fate they'd once meted out to her. When we think about empires, we tend to think of people like Ashurbanipal with their bellowing declarations of triumph and vivid images of conquest.

But empires were run by much humbler folk, like those ten regular men from Ashurbanipal, and they consumed tens of thousands of people like Naya-Elai. What makes her and her daughter special is that we know they existed. They allow us to put a human face to the cost of empire. But there were millions more like them, whose stories we'll never know. Next time on Past Lives, we'll leave Assyria behind and head for classical Athens at its golden age peak. There, we'll meet an enslaved Thracian man named Sosius, whose expertise in mining made him an extraordinarily valuable commodity to his masters. We'll see you next time.

We'll have a weekly discussion thread. The first one is about the best history books you've ever read. And if you're a patron, you'll get to vote on what we read for our monthly Past Lives book club. Past Lives is a 100% independent production, and your support is what allows us to make this show. So, thank you. Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. Sound design and music by Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Camburi. Thanks so much for joining me. Until next time, this has been Past Lives.

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