The Rise and Fall of the Assyrian Empire

Summary

Podcast Summary: Dan Snow's History Hit

Episode Title: The Rise and Fall of the Assyrian Empire
Release Date: June 1, 2025
Host: History Hit (Dan Snow)
Guest: Professor Eckhart Frahm, John M. Musser Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University

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Introduction to the Assyrian Empire

In this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit, historian Dan Snow delves into the complex history of the Assyrian Empire, exploring its meteoric rise, expansive dominance, and abrupt fall. Joining him is Professor Eckhart Frahm, an expert on Assyrian and Babylonian civilizations, whose insights provide a comprehensive understanding of what made Assyria the world's first true empire.

Dan Snow begins by setting the stage: "They called themselves kings of the world. In fact, they called themselves rulers of the universe. They were the lords of Assyria." [00:37] He introduces Assyria as an empire that spanned over a million square miles at its peak, stretching from modern-day Iran to Egypt. This transformation from a modest city-state to a vast empire involved monumental buildings, a sophisticated bureaucracy, and formidable armies.

Origins and Early Development

Professor Frahm explains the early days of Assyria, highlighting its origins around 1700 BCE with the establishment of a new royal dynasty that ushered in a thousand years of hereditary monarchy. "The city state grew. From the 880s BC it expanded dramatically through a series of stunning conquests," he states. [06:01] Initially a peaceful trade-oriented city-state, Assyria saw a significant transformation in the second half of the second millennium BCE, shifting from commerce to conquest as a means of accumulating wealth and power.

Expansion into an Empire

The pivotal moment came in the mid-8th century BCE when Assyria crossed the threshold into empire status. Professor Frahm outlines the criteria that define an empire: extensive territorial control, a centralized bureaucracy siphoning wealth from diverse provinces, and managing a multitude of different peoples and cultures. "Assyria, during the later 8th and 7th century, ruled from southern Turkey to the Persian Gulf and from western Iran to the Levant to Phoenicia and the southern Levant," he explains. [12:12]

Dan Snow probes further into this transformation: "Why does this reasonably sounds rather nice, pacific harmless city state morph into this mighty military autocracy, become the first empire. How does it do that?" [12:27] Professor Frahm likens Assyria's shift to a defensive response against crises, such as plagues, which led to intensified military campaigns under rulers like King Tiglath-Pileser III. This strategic shift was crucial in establishing Assyria's dominance in the region.

Administration and Governance

A significant factor in Assyria's ability to govern such a vast empire was its sophisticated administrative system. Professor Frahm highlights the importance of infrastructure, particularly the road systems that facilitated rapid communication and troop movements. "These roads are the arteries through which information runs," he notes. [29:41] The use of mounted emissaries and relay stations ensured that messages could traverse the empire swiftly, maintaining cohesion and efficient governance.

Assyria's bureaucratic prowess was further enhanced by the loyalty of its provincial governors, many of whom were eunuchs appointed by the king to prevent the accumulation of personal power and ensure allegiance to the central authority. "Eunuchs, of course, by not having any offspring of their own, tend to be loyal to those who give them their prestige and their wealth," Professor Frahm explains. [30:04]

Cultural Aspects and Legacy

While Assyria maintained political and administrative uniformity, it exhibited cultural flexibility. Conquered peoples were allowed to retain their languages and religions, provided they paid tribute and followed imperial directives. "The Aramaic language spoken by these Arameans becomes the predominant language in Assyrian administration," Professor Frahm states, illustrating Assyria's pragmatic approach to governance. [35:43]

Assyria's legacy is profound, influencing subsequent empires such as the Neo-Babylonian and Persian Empires. Professor Frahm draws parallels between Assyria and later powers, noting, "The Assyrian DNA stays with later empires." [52:27] The administrative innovations, military strategies, and architectural advancements pioneered by Assyria became foundational elements for future imperial states.

The Sudden Fall of Assyria

Contrary to the protracted decline witnessed in empires like Rome, Assyria experienced a rapid and decisive collapse. Professor Frahm describes the fall as a "sudden one" between 626 and 609 BCE, orchestrated by a coalition of renegade Babylonians, led by Nabopolassar, and the newly united Medes. "The city of Nineveh is destroyed in 612 BCE," he recounts, emphasizing the swift and catastrophic nature of the empire's end. [40:06]

The collapse was marked by internal weaknesses, including leadership failure and possible overextension of resources. The prolonged and inward-focused reign of King Ashurbanipal, portrayed negatively in later Greek sources, contributed to diminished royal authority. "Ashurbanipal is portrayed as a weak king, essentially sitting with his harem of women inside his palaces," Professor Frahm remarks, highlighting how internal decadence undermined the empire's strength. [40:14]

Aftermath and Historical Impact

Following the fall, Assyria ceased to exist as a political entity, though cultural and religious practices persisted in some regions. The destruction of Assyrian libraries and the cessation of cuneiform writing marked an end to the empire's administrative sophistication. Professor Frahm points out, "Cuneiform writing ends, and it's a problem for us that it's a little bit of a black box," underscoring the challenges historians face in understanding the post-assyrian period. [45:14]

Despite its abrupt end, Assyria's influence endured through its successors. The Neo-Babylonian and Persian Empires adopted many of Assyria's imperial structures and cultural elements, ensuring that Assyria's legacy lived on through subsequent civilizations. "The Assyrian model is important with the Persians, who in 539 take over," Professor Frahm states, linking Assyria's foundational role to the broader narrative of world history. [49:37]

Conclusion

Dan Snow concludes the episode by reinforcing the significance of the Assyrian Empire in shaping subsequent historical developments. "Subsequent history owes an enormous amount to Assyria," he affirms, encapsulating the episode's exploration of Assyria's rise, governance, cultural policies, and eventual fall.

Professor Frahm agrees, emphasizing the empire's lasting impact on imperial institutions and administrative practices across history. "Assyria looms large at the very beginning in this chain of empires," he remarks, solidifying the episode's theme of Assyria as the progenitor of imperial civilization. [52:27]

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Notable Quotes:

• Dan Snow: "They called themselves kings of the world. In fact, they called themselves rulers of the universe. They were the lords of Assyria." [00:37]

• Professor Eckhart Frahm: "Assyria, during the later 8th and 7th century, ruled from southern Turkey to the Persian Gulf and from western Iran to the Levant to Phoenicia and the southern Levant." [12:12]

• Professor Eckhart Frahm: "Eunuchs, of course, by not having any offspring of their own, tend to be loyal to those who give them their prestige and their wealth." [30:04]

• Professor Eckhart Frahm: "The Assyrian DNA stays with later empires." [52:27]

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This episode offers an in-depth examination of the Assyrian Empire, providing listeners with a nuanced understanding of its complexities and enduring legacy. Whether you are a history enthusiast or new to the subject, Dan Snow and Professor Frahm guide you through the fascinating story of the world's first true empire.

Transcript

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[Dan Snow]

They called themselves kings of the world. In fact, they called themselves rulers of the universe. They were the lords of Assyria. You're listening to Dan Snow's History and and this is the story of the first empire. An empire of enormous geographical extent. An empire of provinces, of bureaucracy, of monumental buildings, massive armies. The origins of the Assyrian Empire are a little bit complicated. It began with a city, as you'll hear, but that city morphed and changed, partly through internal pressure, partly because of disasters and external catastrophes and opportunities. But around about 1700 BC or so, a new royal dynasty seized control, and it was the start of a remarkable run of hereditary monarchy. I'm not saying it always went father to son, but rule was parceled out from one generation to the next within that ruling family for a thousand years. The city state grew. From the 880s BC it expanded dramatically through a series of stunning conquests. It became the Assyrian Empire, over a million square miles that its very peak stretched from modern Iran Right up to and including much of modern Egypt. It had been quite the journey from the harmless little city state to what historians now describe as the world's first empire. They conquered the famous city of Babylon, for example, and remodeled it extensively. They built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. They built Nineveh, which at the time was another wonder of the world. At a wall 12 km long surrounding it, they built the best road system in history to that date. You could pass along the so called Kings Road. It's a distance of around 450 miles in about five days. One of the best things about this empire, one of the reasons historians particularly love it is we have the archives, we have the libraries, not all of them of course, but significant portions preserved as you'll hear at the moment of their destruction by their enemies. We have thousands, tens of thousands of tablets on which were written the day to day business of running this vast empire because after its period of hegemony from the 880s BC in 609 BC or thereabouts, there was a dramatic and shocking collapse. None this gradual decline and fall. Discussions around continuity and change you get with the Roman Empire. This was the sudden and dramatic end. A coalition of enemies crushed the Assyrian empire and yet it left a legacy that later empires from Babylon to Persia to Rome would all embrace. You have to understand Assyria if you want to get a sense of those civilizations, those empires that followed that we all recognize as foundational. And this folks, will whet your appetite. This will give you a bit of an understanding of that. We're going to talk about that empire. We're going to also talk about how really only 60 years or so after it reached its peak, Assyria had ceased to exist. And so joining me to give us an extraordinary insight into this dramatic and important rise and fall is Professor Eckhart Frahm. Eckhart Fromm is the John M. Muser professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. He's a specialist on the Assyrian and Babylonian empires and their wonderful cuneiform texts. His most recent book is the Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire. So he's definitely the man to talk to about the first empire and how it was toppled in what some scholars like to call the real First World War. This, friends, is Assyria. Enjoy.

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[Professor Eckhart Frahm]

God save the king. No black white unity till there is first some black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off and the shuttle has cleared the tower.

[Dan Snow]

Eckhart, thank you so Much for coming on the podcast.

[Professor Eckhart Frahm]

Well, thank you. I'm grateful that you're having me.

[Dan Snow]

Where are we at the moment when this empire starts to take its form? Give us the geography.

[Professor Eckhart Frahm]

So the geography is marked by a triangle of three cities located in what is now the northern part of the Republic of Iraq. That's the city of Nineveh, opposite of modern Mosul, on the eastern bank of the Tigris River. The that's the city of Ashur, from which Syria actually gets its name. Some 100 km downstream from Mosul and from Nineveh, and in the east of the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, near the Iraqi Iranian border, the city of Arbela, modern Arbiil. This is where the kingdom of Assyria emerges an empire. It becomes only later one can debate when exactly it crosses the threshold towards being an empire. In my view, this is only in the mid 8th century. Some have argued that it's a little earlier in the first half the 9th century. It is an empire in my view, from roughly 745onwards up to, let's say, 640, 630 or so. During the last decades of the seventh century, it experienced a major crisis that results eventually in its very dramatic fall. But it is known actually as a political entity much longer. And that is one reason why it's so interesting. Our first written documentation, extensive written documentation telling us something about the ancient Assyrians actually comes from the first centuries of the second millennium, from roughly between 2000 and 1700 BCE. At this point, there isn't yet really a kingdom of Assyria. There's just a city state of Ashur. But it already has a broad horizon because the people in Ashura engage in long distance trade. And this trade, well, essentially leads them thousand kilometers away from their hometown, so that these wide geographic horizons are already there from a very early period onwards.

[Dan Snow]

So we've got Egypt bubbling away. The pyramids are built a thousand years before that period you mentioned what makes an empire. Why do we suddenly start talking about this empire arising at that time at that place?

[Professor Eckhart Frahm]

Yeah, it's interesting. Look at the political development that Syria undergoes over these roughly 1400 years that are documented in our written sources. It starts off, as I said, from roughly 2000 onwards as a city state that is actually not an empire at all. It's almost the opposite of an empire. It's a small place which engages in this long distance trade but has no territorial ambitions. It's very peaceful. Actually. The people, people and leaders of Ashur during this time are not particularly Belligerent. It's also not marked by autocracy. On the contrary, you have in place what one could describe with the Roman historian Polybius as a mixed constitution. So you have hereditary dynasties of political leaders, but they are not even allowed to use the title king. And they share power with an institution known as the city hall that deals with taxes and weights and measures and things like that, and a popular assembly, but is also quite powerful. So you have essentially monocratic, aristocratic and democratic elements in place. It changes so in the second half of the second millennium, when Asher morphs into Assyria and becomes a territorial state and also becomes a kingdom. So at this point, actually, you have autocratic rulers who are kings, but the geographic horizon is still limited. And then in the first millennium, as I mentioned, suddenly there's this massive expansion and Ashura. Assyria becomes the predominant state of the ancient world, much larger than any other state had ever been before. And this is what I would argue. Assyria crosses the threshold, this imperial threshold. What makes an empire? There are a number of criteria. They include that a state rules territories far outside its original territory. That's clearly the case because Assyria, during the later 8th and 7th century ruled rules from southern Turkey to the Persian Gulf and from western Iran to the Levant to Phoenicia and the southern Levant for a while, even actually rules over Egypt. So it's very, very large, about 1 million square kilometers. It's characterized by a kind of osmotic imbalance between center and periphery, with the center siphoning off the wealth of the periphery. It's also characterized by a great deal of diversity, ethnic, religious, linguistic, many, many different peoples living in the empire, speaking different languages, worshipping different gods, and is characterized by, well, using different types of political power, direct rule within Assyria itself, an area organized into fairly small provinces, some 70 provinces in the 7th century, and an outer area of client kingdoms where Assyrian rulers dominate the particular scene indirectly, but where formally local rulers are still in place. These, I would say, are criteria that can be used to describe this political entity, Assyria as an empire. Of course, it's always a question, how big does the state have to be? How diverse does it have to be in order to qualify as an empire? There will never be a full consensus. So there will be others who would say that, let's say, new king Egypt is an empire, or even the Akkad state of the time of roughly 2300, 2200 BCE Invasibilania. In one respect, though, I think one can say that Assyria really is the first empire in the world. And that is in later memory and tradition because there with the Greek and Roman historians, and then throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, it is Assyria that is considered the world's first empire. So authors like Herodotus or the Roman historian Poplius Taurus or the Christian historian Orosius and later on Dante in the Middle Ages in his Demonarchia, they describe Assyria as the first empire in a long chain of empires that follow it. And that sort of sets all these other empires on their path. And, and in this regard, of course, Assyria really is also important in world history because it provides a blueprint for all these many, many later empires. And as we all know, even though today modern states don't like to call each other empires, we still have imperial political traditions in place even today.

[Dan Snow]

We certainly do. We certainly do. Why, Eckhart, why does this reasonably sounds rather nice, pacific harmless city state morph into this mighty military autoxy, become the first empire. How does it do that?

[Professor Eckhart Frahm]

Yeah, that's of course say the $1,000 question. And again, you won't have answers that will satisfy everyone. So first you have the transformation of the city state, this peaceful, commercially oriented city state into a kingdom that already is pretty aggressive. So in the second half of the second millennium that already expands, even though not to such an extent that it can be called an empire that's a so called Middle Eastern period, from roughly 1315, 50 BCE to 1000 BCE. During this time we see that the Assyrians essentially replace trade with conquest. And I would say that probably the trade in which they were engaged beforehand and that this trade network that collapses around 1700 BCE or so under pressure from outside people, the Hittites and others, et cetera, that memory of this trade network played a role here. And well, the ability of the Assyrians, of course also logistically to travel far away. And this idea that you want to be acquisitive, you want to acquire things, they found out at this point in the wake of this crisis that they experienced after 1700, that besides trade, there is another way of becoming wealthy and that is actually conquest. And they engaged in this conquest more intensely, I would say, than many of the other states of the ancient east, even though of course conquest was not alien to other states as well. It sounds a little bit perhaps like a story that Lenin tells of capitalism turning into imperialism. That's certainly not rule as Len makes it, one that has to apply everywhere. But the story is a bit like that. I would say it's a little bit Perhaps also like the East India Company and the situation with Britain in India. First the commercial enterprise, later on becomes a political enterprise. And once Assyria is established as this kingdom, it experienced a number of other crises, first around 1100, 1000 or so, and then again in the mid 8th century. And it emerges from each of these crises stronger because it's faster than other places in the region that also probably underwent some crises during this time to recover. The last crisis is characterized by a set of plagues. So there's a plague in Assyria and probably also in surrounding areas, first in 765 and again 759. And I would argue that probably the loss of labor, the loss of wealth that occurred at this time prompted a very important Assyrian king, King Tilapileeza iii, who is also mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, to make up for this loss of wealth and labor by intensifying the conquest activities. Because it is during this of the Pileser III, who rules from 745 to 727 BCE, that is Syria's territory more than doubles in size and he creates many, many new provinces. So he reacts to this crisis that may have been prompted by plague through this massive expansion, which of course means the crisis cannot have been as massive that almost all the population of Assyria was wiped out, but probably some parts of the population were wiped out. There was economic crisis. Tiglap Eleser reacts to that with intensified conquest. This leads to this stepping over the threshold of empire, in my view. And then for 120 years or so, Assyria really is an empire under great kings such as Sagrim II Sennacherib, Asarhaddon, Ashurbanipal, or perhaps to some extent known to some of your listeners. That's the height of the empire.

[Dan Snow]

We'll get onto the height of the empire in a second. But let's just quickly. We talked about the plagues and you talked about various crises that seem to affect everyone in the region. I mean, this is, it's no accident. This sees the end of the new kingdom in Egypt. We enter what people refer to as the ancient Greek Dark Ages. People will be familiar with the term Bronze Age collapse.

[Professor Eckhart Frahm]

Exactly.

[Dan Snow]

It's going on for what, a couple of hundred years at the end of that second millennium B.C. so everyone's experiencing this kind of multi dimensional crisis, these headwinds. But you just think Assyria is just able to roll with the punches, see the opportunity in this chaos and emerge stronger.

[Professor Eckhart Frahm]

Yes, it is. Of course, it's not easy to account for that. But I think what we can see is that first this Late Bronze Age collapse affects Syriapus a little later than other political entities in the region, and a little less intensely as well. So unlike some places on the Mediterranean city of Uvarid, which are essentially completely wiped out, or the Hittite empire, or let's say kingdom in central Anatolia that is destroyed in the course of this Late Bronze Age collapse, Syria suffers from the consequences of this event only later, when groups of semi nomadic Arameans actually infiltrated and on the long term also really reshaped the cultural and linguistic landscape of Assyria. And this is especially in the 11th and early 10th century when Assyria is at a kind of low point and it emerges again faster than everyone else, perhaps because it manages to keep the memory of the conquest period of the Middle Assyrian period alive and to instill in its military and elites this belligerent spirit that enables it to reconquer, enacting a kind of reconquest, a reconquista period that leads to the recovery of the lost territories. You can see this memory in the names that are chosen by the kings of the first millennium. They all hark back to great kings of the Middle Easy period, to the great conqueror kings like Adad Narari or the Kulti Ninurta. And this is not by chance. They deliberately put themselves into this tradition and their dynasty. And that's also important. The dynasty, the Assyrian royal dynasty, is never interrupted. So there's more continuity in Assyria than in other places, such as Babylon, certainly. You mentioned Egypt. Such as Egypt. So Syria then, even though affected by these events of the late Bronze Age collapse, emerges from them faster and profits from the chaos elsewhere. Because of course, in this situation where large parts of Syria and the Levant are essentially completely broken up in very, very small political entities, it's actually fairly easy to conquer. And that's what they do. That's when they really eventually emerge as this empire.

[Dan Snow]

How interesting. You mentioned that the royal dynasties remain coherent, intact for generations. And that's something, of course, the Roman Empire suffers terribly from. The father son succession is actually quite a rare event across the history of Rome. It's amazing it lasts as long as it did. And if you look at medieval France, you get the Capetian miracle where you just get a long line of successful transfer of power in the male line of one family. So do you think that's important here as well? And if so, how do the Assyrians manage that? Do they succeed in building up a culture or religion around the importance of Transmitting power from one generation to the next.

[Professor Eckhart Frahm]

Certainly the role of the king from some point onwards, once kingship is established in this area, is very strong. It has various reasons. In fact, it's a 1000 year span of time that the same family is in power. It's not always sons, it's sometimes also nephews or so. But it really seems that we have no evidence that ever anyone from another family manages to usurp power. So that's really quite unique. And of course a sign of stability throughout all this change that is Syria experiences. And again, I mean, they're very good in keeping up certain traditions, but also adapting. That's one of their great strengths. They're not at all worried of when they see that, let's say the Samarians in Israel have a great cavalry. They integrate that cavalry once they have conquered Samaria into their own military. They adopt the artistic language of the Neo Hittite kingdoms of northern Syria. This is the origins of traditional of classical Assyrian Ara, the great beliefs and bull colossi that maybe some people know, at least those who have ever been in the Belgian museum, so they can do that. That's one of the reasons why they manage to be flexible while at the same time also sticking to certain continuities. The Assyrian king is very closely associated with the God Ashur. So that provides ideological support. Originally, the king of Ashur is actually this very God. I mentioned that the first centuries of the second millennium, the Assyrian herald dynasties are not yet allowed to call themselves king. Only the God is king. Later on they are calling themselves king. And they are very close to the Assyrian state God Ashur, who is very closely associated with the city of Ashur. This is a very compact ideological concept where indeed the king is the linchpin of the whole system. That is to some extent, it seems really accepted by the elites who may try to get rid of specific kings. And we can see that there are actually very exciting moments of rebellion and internal str. But it really is within the same family. So this is Shakespearean, like royal dramas where one king is killed and one of his sons tries to defeat another royal prince to take over the crown. But it's not outsiders to do that. It's actually insiders from the royal family.

[Dan Snow]

There's me thinking it was all the Plantagenets and the Mughals who had the dysfunctional families, but clearly the Assyrians, they.

[Professor Eckhart Frahm]

Are clearly dysfunctional in some regards, but also very functional.

[Dan Snow]

Very functional, yeah. That there's a resilience to the system. Okay, so we're around 750 BC. Slightly later, we got Tiglath Pilessa III, you mentioned. After these terrible pandemics, he emerges, he extends the empire enormously. Then you get Sargon ii. I love that name. One of the great names of antiquity. He rules towards the end of that 8th century B.C. so 722 to almost 700. And we have fascinating color and detail about Sargon's reign, don't we? I mean, we know how they live, what they wrote down in terms of governmentally, but also culturally. Looking at all that wonderful richness of information, to what do you credit the strength of this empire? How was it held together?

[Professor Eckhart Frahm]

Yeah, as the first you mentioned the sources, and I think it might be of interest briefly at least, to mention that indeed our sources for the imperial period of Syria are extremely rich. Most of this is of course owed to archaeological excavations. But the story is also mentioned in the Bible and in classical sources. But the really important discoveries were made from the middle of the 19th century onwards, first by British and French, and later also by other teams, archaeological teams, including Iraqi ones, in the capitals of Syria, such as Nineveh, Ashur and Calah Nimrod, located between Nineveh and Ashur. And what is particularly important is that many, many texts were found. Those include, on one hand, royal inscriptions, some of them very long. So ashurbanipal's inscriptions are 1000 or so lines long. That's much longer, for instance, than the famous Monumentum Ancuranum, one of the longest leader inscriptions from the Rome world, both the Emperor Augustus. But we also have numerous letters, state letters. We have what has been recovered at Nineveh and at Nimrud, parts of the state archives of Assyria. The reason for this recovery is the fact that the Assyrians, like all people in ancient Mesopotamia, beginning in roughly 3400 BCE, wrote not on parchment or on papyrus, but on clay. And clay is essentially, when used as a medium of writing, is nearly indestructible. So these tablets may break and modern scholars like me, have to put them together again, which is kind of difficult, but also fun. But they are not lost. And while the royal inscriptions describe what the kings wanted to read about themselves, geared towards the gods and later generations and also the contemporaries, it was essentially propagandistic, if you want, even though the term has its problems. The letters written by spies and provincial governors and royal agents from far away from various provinces, but also from scholars within the capitals of Assyria to the Assyrian kings, those letters actually describe what goes wrong. You write a letter when things are not going well. And so we have this very, very extensive documentation. We also, of course, then, from the seventh century, have Ashurbanipad's libraries, which includes numerous thousands actually, of religious and literary texts. We know about Assyrian culture very much actually indebted to Babylonian culture, like Ro culture was adapted to Greek culture. We know about that as well. And this enormous richness, of course, enables us really to paint a pretty detailed picture of some of these rulers, including Sargon, where we can see that he was, in fact, despite his protestations to the opposite, not very much beloved. At the beginning of his reign, he was probably kind of an usurper again. He was a member of the royal family, but not a direct son of the previous king, came from a side branch of the royal family. And he, for instance, had to deport 6,300 Assyrians to the periphery at some point early in his reign, who had apparently opposed. And nonetheless. So what he also did was quite remarkable, that he created a new capital. So this is what some of these Assyrian kings during the imperial era do. They create new, massive capitals. These are big, big cities. Nineveh, eventually created by Sennacherib, is surrounded by a wall 12km long. That's very extensive. And the palaces built by Sargon, by Sennacherib and later kings, are enormously large. So we can see that Sargon does that as well. He also conquers, though he continues the previous expansion under Ticlopilius and Char fifth. But he takes a very sad end because when he's roughly 65 years old or so and 705, he goes on the last campaign, which seems like a routine thing almost, to a pretty nondescript place. Cabal in central Anatolia. The Assyrian army is outed, the camp is conquered, and Sargon is actually killed and his body cannot be recovered, which is a major crisis for the Assyrian crown, because this is, of course important that you're able to bury your dad. And a powerful king like Sargon, if he's not buried, might lurk around as a dangerous ghost. So there's a lot of information on that. His death is probably even described in the Bible, even though in a context that doesn't mention his name. In Isaiah 14, the mocking dirge on the king of Babel. That's probably Sargon, who also was king of Babylonia at the time, because for the Israelites and the Judeans, of course, the death of that king was a reason to be happy. It was a triumph. They were not fond of this ruler.

[Dan Snow]

You listen to Dan Snow's history. Hit more on Assyria coming up after this.

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[Dan Snow]

Is the death of Sargon in battle? Is this a decisive moment? Is this a death blow for the empire? Or does it go on? Does it flourish?

[Professor Eckhart Frahm]

No, it goes on. But it is clearly a crisis and we can see that the Assyrian elites made attempts to elaborate on what actually had happened, what had prompted the death of Sargon. They engaged in liver divination in order to figure that out and were Looking for a sin that Sargon had committed. And what they came up with, in my view, the text is a little bit broken. Here is Sargon had worshiped the Babylonian gods too much over the Assyrian gods. I mentioned that he had conquered Babylonia. He was very fond of Babylonian culture. His successor, Sennacherib, not so much. Eventually he will actually completely destroy the city of Babylon. And so he establishes that Sargon's worship of these Babylonian gods had been excessive. So there's this ideological discourse about what had actually prompted his death. But Assyria continues. This is not the final moment of the empire. Nearly 100 years longer, the Assyrian empire prevails. And in fact, in the seventh century, under Assad, Hadon and Ashurbanipal, between 680 and 631 reaches its greatest expansion when Babylonia is again conquered. Elam, in the southeast in modern southwestern Iran, is conquered in even Egypt under Asarhadon and later on again under Ashurbanipal. Becomes for a while, not very long, but for a while, part of the Assyrian empire.

[Dan Snow]

Just absolutely vast. So Egypt to Iran, again, no state, no king has ever governed an entity this large in recorded history. Are all these sources Is the archive. In fact, the clue was the pen mightier than the sword. Was it about messengers and roads and instructions and communication allowing troops to move fast and nip problems in the bud. How is this empire governed?

[Professor Eckhart Frahm]

Clearly, the roads actually is a good point, are strength of Assyria. So this is also an information empire. Information is being carried along those roads very fast. So there are road stations every 20 km or so, the Beit Maldeti, as they're called in the certain sources. And you have sort of relays with horses and onagers that are being used by mounted emissaries, messengers who carry messages from one place to the next. And that goes very, very fast. And that's, of course important in order to keep up the empire because you need to be informed about crises in regions far away. And the Assyrians, by building roads, the royal road actually is not, as is often assumed, an invention of the Persians, a Persian empire. But it already exists under the Assyrians. Those roads are the arteries through which disinformation runs. So this is very important. Obviously, the discipline with which the provincial governors follow the king, with which the elites, the Assyrian elites that of course run in actual fact the various provinces and are in charge of political and economic administration. The discipline with which they too follow orders by the king. This is quite crucial. One reason why that works may be that the Assyrian kings use a lot of eunuchs for very high ranking positions, for instance those of provincial governors. And eunuchs, of course by not having any offspring of their own, tend to be loyal to those who give them their prestige and their wealth. That would have been in the case of the Syria, the Assyrian king. So this too may have helped. Then there is the implementation of loyalty oaths to those very elites, but essentially to everyone in the empire, including even vassal rulers and their subjects. We have a number of those treaties, very long and elaborate that require loyalty to the king and his chosen successor. They had to be sworn by all these different subjects of the king. And to some extent that seems to have worked. Then there's also a network of informers. I mentioned the informers so far away. But there are also informers within the the Assyrian capitalists themselves. So inside Assyria who informed the king. Essentially the eyes and ears of the king. Again term better attested for the Persian rulers of later times used by Greek authors. But that can be applied to those Syrian spies as well. They really look out at everyone who may seem to be somehow disloyal. And whenever someone says something critical of the king, they report to the king. And this is required of them through the loyalty oaths. And we know that they do this because we have many, many letters that actually include such denunciations. It's not very nice, it has a certain Stalinistic ring to it if you wish. But for a while at least this works quite well. And a number of rebellions and insurgencies we know were actually quelled in this way. And under Asarhaddon for instance, quite a large number of Assyrian members of the Assyrian elite were killed because they were apparently involved in one of these rebellions against the king.

[Dan Snow]

You talk about the invasion and conquest of Egypt. This might not be familiar to people. So this is obviously after Ramesses the Great, after the new kingd the Assyrians manage to conquer, they become one of the Pharaonic dynasties.

[Professor Eckhart Frahm]

They are at least for a while really the rulers of Egypt up to the city of Thebes. So there is an unsuccessful attempt by Asarhaddon in 674 BCE to conquer Egypt. It doesn't succeed, but then there's a successful one three years later in 671. And at this time the Assyrians managed to take Thebes. Egypt at this time is kind of divided up into smaller kingdoms in the north in particular with the 25th Dynasty, the so called Kushite dynasty, the ruling from Nubia in the south and perhaps the Assyrians are able to conquer the north also because the northern small sort of traditional rulers of Egypt who kind of buy into the Pharaonic ideology, consider those kushites also kind of aliens. Not so clear. But the Assyrians clearly try to present themselves as liberators if you wish. And that works for a while, but not for that long. Ashurbanipas, Asadon's successor, has two go back to Egypt twice. This is when the Assyrians actually seize the city of Thebes and among other things, take with them a gigantic obelisk apparently made of electron. Must have been enormously valuable. Take it to Nineveh and many, many other things they take as well. And during this time they call themselves rulers of Pataresi, that's the southern land. That would be Egypt. This is an Egyptian world. So we find these titles in Assyrian sources. We have no hieroglyphic inscriptions in which the Assyrian kings actually feature as pharaohs. That may be because in later Egyptian tradition this phase of Assyrian conquest was considered an abomination. The Egyptians were not fond of it, so they essentially struck it from the official record. The Assyrian kings also don't appear in the Egyptian king lists of Manisa also, but they do appear quite interestingly in a number of popular tales, mostly known from pretty late times. The so called Inaros cycle recorded in Demotic, the latest stage of the Egyptian writing system and language. And there we have reference to kings like Sennacherib and Asahaddon, et cetera. And they are mentioned as conquerors of Egypt there.

[Dan Snow]

Amazing. Where does this empire sit on the sliding scale of the amount of control that was exerted? Well, the amount of uniformity that they tried to create over religious ideas, weights and measures, language. Was this a live and let live empire? Were cities and statelets allowed to have a degree of autonomy as long as they paid lip service and sent the odd bit of tribute to the imperial center? Or were they trying to make the world Assyria? Were they building colonies, architectural styles, langu culture on all of their conquered territory?

[Professor Eckhart Frahm]

It's a very good and important question, of course, and the answer is quite clear. The Assyrians, unlike, let's say the Romans, certainly unlike some modern empires, had no interest at all to for instance, transfer religion, their own religion to other places. On the contrary, they would have probably been quite annoyed if anyone somewhere in the periphery had suddenly started to build a temple for the God Ashur. The God Ashur was to be worshipped in Assyria, in Ashur, nowhere else. It would not have been okay if anyone had done this, that said, yes, there is uniformity on some levels, especially through the provincial system. They established a provincial system. Again, I mentioned, I think that in the end, in the 7th century, Assyria comprises some 70 provinces ranging from the Zagros Mountains in western Iran to the southern Levant. And these provinces are kind of mini centers modeled upon the royal palace and its surrounding territory. So you have a palace in which the provincial governor, as the deputy of this Syrian king resides. He's kind of the mini king within this province and he's in charge, for instance, of collecting taxes and making sure that conscription activities occur. That is, people have to work for the crown and they have to pay taxes, especially on farming. That's the basic area from which wealth is being produced. And that is of course implemented strictly. So these deliveries of taxes and the requirement of work, these are things that the Assyrian kings require and they require political obedience. So the people in these various regions that are eventually conquered by Assyrians can continue to speak their own languages, they can continue to worship their own gods. There is no Assyrianization in the kind of way that you can talk of a Romanization on the wrong land. It doesn't happen kind of. On the contrary, it's quite interesting. As I mentioned, the Aramaic language spoken by these other nondescript Arameans who enter the the world stage in the late second millennium of semi nomadic people. This very language, Aramaic, becomes the predominant language in Assyrian administration and probably is spoken eventually throughout much of the empire. It's not Assyrian. So this is really interesting. Again, you can see the Assyrians are not interested in implementing their own culture and language somewhere else. But they want uniformity in terms of political order. They're very interested in order for them. Of course, that also means peace for the people there. You can say that sometimes the peace of the graveyard, for instance, when an enemy city has been destroyed. But from a Niceyian point of view, this is what they actually have to offer. They have to offer peace and protection to those who fall into line politically. And whoever falls into line can essentially do what they want in terms of their daily lives as long as they are paying taxes and, and as long as they provide troops and workmen for building projects, et cetera. Of course, this isn't freedom in any way as we would consider it. These people are not free in that sense, but they're also not slaves if you wish. They have areas in which they are autonomous.

[Dan Snow]

You're listening to my podcast All About Syria. There is more coming up. Don't go away.

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[Dan Snow]

Was the end of this empire sudden? Was the decisive defeat collapse because of human or environmental causes, or was it a slow decline?

[Professor Eckhart Frahm]

Was a very sudden one. So I often really like to compare the Assyrian Empire to the Roman Empire. I think they have a lot in common. I mentioned their dependency cultural terms on another ancient civilization, in both cases the Greeks in the case of Rome, Babylonian in the case of Assyria, et cetera. But the Roman Empire's fall of course was a long process, really a process over centuries issue which no one knows when it really happened. What is really the moment when you can speak of the fall?

[Dan Snow]

Well, don't Eckhart, don't even some people say it didn't happen. I mean, come on, we can't even get into that. We haven't got time here.

[Professor Eckhart Frahm]

GP so in the case of Assyria, this is clearly not so. It's just within a decade or two that Assyria falls between 626 and 609. Basically what happens is quite clear in terms of the political and military events we have. A Babylonian chronicle describes this all in quite in detail. Essentially Assyria fights suddenly two major enemies. Babylonia had for a long time been dominated by assyria, but in626 manages to regain its independence under a ruler who comes from a family from the city of Uruk that actually worked for the Assyrians for a long time. That's Nabopolassa. So he knew how the Assyrians operated. He had inside knowledge of how military affairs were handled by the Assyrians, how the Assyrian administration worked. The other big power, and that was a newcomer on the Baltic scene were the Medes. So Media had for a long time. An area in western Iran had for a long time been divided up in very, very small entities, had not been particularly powerful because of the disrupted nature of these different tribes which it comprised. But at some point in the later 7th century, the Medes unite, and then the Medes and the Babylonians together form an alliance and start actually attacking Assyria and attacking Assyrian cities. And that eventually leads to the conquest of those cities and to the complete destruction of many of the major cities of Assyria. Begins with the city of Ashur, the religious center. This is a major blow. Assyria. In 614, the city is conquered and destroyed by the Medes. And it culminates in 612, two years later in the fall of Nineveh, which kind of ironically probably suffers strategically from the fact that under Sennacherib, it had been surrounded by a big, big wall with gigantic gate buildings, 18 altogether. Those gates were just too big. It was too easy to get through. Archaeologists actually have found civilian military, dead people lying inside the gate. So this is where some of the battling must have taken place. It must have been surprisingly easy for the attacking forces to get through there. So we can see what happens. We can see that Nineveh is destroyed, the palace is looted. Assyria, by the way, during these years, Richard's fights with Babylonia and the Medes is supported somewhat ironically, by Egypt. Apparently Egyptians realizing at this point they have regained their independence, that Babylonia is now going to be the next, next really dangerous opponent to them. So they side with the Assyrians. Other players engage in this as well. And so some have called this whole scenario the First World War. And while slightly hyperbolic, the term is not entirely inappropriate because it really involves all the major powers of this period. The whole thing ends really with the fall of the Assyrian royal dynasty, 1000 years old, as I mentioned. And since the royal family was so enormously important for the identity of Assyria, really embodied Assyria in such significant way. And since the civilian elites didn't really have an identity, let's say religious or civic or whatever, strong enough perhaps to continue Assyrian statehood in a different way, this really was the end of Assyrian statehood. There really never again was an Assyrian Assyrian state as it had existed before. After 612 or 609, there is some evidence for continued religious activities of Assyrian style. The city of Ashur remains settled by people apparently speaking Assyrian. In Ashur, we can trace the worship of Assyrian gods, Ashur and his wife Shuah, well into the common era. We have inscriptions in aramaic from the 2nd and 3rd century AD, where we can see that people there actually still worship the same deities they had worshiped in the imperial period during festival times that had been in place already during the Assyrian empire. So there is some continuity on the cultural level, but politically it really is all over. What also comes to an end and is also really striking is cuneiform writing. So once the Medes and the Babylonians have conquered many, essentially Assyrian writing ends. There are few tablets from places like Dokhadluma in Syria, where we still have some Assyrian texts, but very, very few, fundamentally, cuneiform writing comes down. And that also means that it's a problem for us that it's a little bit of a black box. We really know exactly what happens in the centuries after the fall of the empire in Assyria. But even though we may not see certain things, I think it's clear that it was no longer an Assyrian state.

[Dan Snow]

Wow. And so those tablets that we have, all the cuneiform, all the writing from the royal archives, we know exactly when the roof came down on that archive, on those libraries in Nineveh. I mean, that was the fall of Nineveh, that was the sack of Nineveh. And they remained under all that, you know, collapsed debris and then dust and sand and earth until they were dug up by 19th century explorers. So that wonderful archive dates from that. Well, the preservation, ironically, for that wonderful archive, dates from that exact moment of destruction.

[Professor Eckhart Frahm]

Yes. So most of the tablets that were found probably really come from this destruction horizon. However, tablets were also found, for instance, in the fill of floors in the palace and of course also in private houses in various places in Assyria, in various cities. Which means we also, of course have tablets from much earlier times. But we have a lot of evidence from the very late period of Assyrian history. This is always the irony that destruction layers, of course, are very, very revealing for archaeologists. So where you have destruction, you can learn a lot about, about what was going on the same time. It must be said. Of course, our information is also a little bit limited with regard to the last decades of history because the Assyrian kings no longer felt a great need to write the oil inscriptions. There was much to brag about at this time. So we also rely on sources from other places, especially from Babylonia. So the so called Babylonian Chronicles, the cuneiform text that describes rather objectively, I would say, what's going on politically. A question I haven't answered, I should say very briefly, something about is, well, was it something like climate change change, or was it Migration, So bigger non political issues that actually played a role in the fall of the empire. So that military events are mere epiphenomena, if you wish. This has been argued recently, and it is indeed true that during the seventh century, we can see at the beginning or in the 8th century, a decrease in rainfall in Assyria and surrounding areas, which probably led to some kind of decrease in agricultural production. But I'm not so sure that this really is a major reason for the fall of the empire. First, because, as I mentioned, the decrease occurs much earlier. And then second, because the Assyrians again, adapt very well. This is one of their strengths, because they build massive canal systems in northern Iraq that they use to irrigate fields near their capitals, especially at Nineveh. So they actually managed to deal with this situation. The loss of Babylonia was probably a problem because Babylonia must have produced some of the grain that Assyria actually used for its people. But when I was excavating in Ashur with bet Amelius in 2001, in one palace, huge amounts of grain burned, of course, were found stored there, apparently in preparation for the median siege of 614. So it doesn't look like they were desperate in terms of not having enough to eat anymore. And I'm also not so sure about the idea that Scythian migrations, for instance, played a role, as the Greek historian Herodotus claims. I do think, though, that leadership failure is an issue here, especially the very long and culturally very glorious reign of King Ashurbanipal. You can see that the king very much is oriented inwards. He no longer goes on campaign. He doesn't seem to interact very much with his elites. You have royal cooks and singers suddenly assuming very high offices, such as the office of Epinom of the whom whom years are being named. Ashurbanipal is portrayed in later Greek tradition under the name Sardanapal, or Sardanapal as a weak king, essentially sitting with his harem of women inside his palaces and spinning wool and making love and otherwise not being interested in politics. This has often been presented or portrayed as orientalizing stereotyping, and it certainly is. It's not like this is how he was. Ashurbanyok did engage in hunting and things like that. So he clearly isn't exactly how he's portrayed here in these Greek sources. But I also think that this depiction isn't entirely highly wrong. And this probably did actually diminish the authority of the late Assyrian kings quite substantially. And as those kings were so important for the overall identity of Assyria. I think this had a major impact on the fall of Assyria as well.

[Dan Snow]

Given it was the first empire, did the Babylonians, did the Medes think, well, it's not empires we reject, it's just other people's empires? I mean, did the DNA, did the organizing principles of the Assyrian empire then get absorbed into, well, all future imperial states? I mean, we're entering an age of empires now.

[Professor Eckhart Frahm]

Yes, I think actually it is. It is very much this DNA that is passed on. And that's actually, of course, very exciting. And that's one of the reasons why Assyria is important. It's not only that Assyria is remembered in later traditions as having been the first empire. I mentioned the Bible, I mentioned the Greek and Roman sources. It really is also that the institutions the Assyrians create, the imperial institutions, the provincial systems, the bureaucracy, the artistic language of empire, these massive monumental buildings and monuments and other things, these things are actually the succeeding empires. They are actually adopted to a certain extent. The Neo Mablong Empire, beginning with Nabopolassa that follows the Assyrian, for instance, uses a bureaucracy whose leading officials bear titles that are very Assyrian. So clearly the Assyrian model is important with the persians, who in 539 take over. Over. That's when the last Babylonian king, Nabonidus, is defeated by the Persian king Cyrus, Cyrus the Great, as he's sometimes called. And the Persians create this much larger empire, much larger than the Neo Babylonian also, much larger than the Assyrian empire. The Persians quite emphatically actually endorse Assyrian art, not Neo Babylonian art. They start off with essentially building. And Persepolis is a recent find, very exciting. They start off with building a gate there that looks very much like the Ishtar Gate in Babylon, Babylon, Babylonian style. But then I give up on this kind of architecture with these glazed mosaics, et cetera, and instead in Persepolis, built these massive palaces out of stone with bas reliefs and bull colossae and all these things that look extremely Assyrian. They also adopt Babylonian and Egyptian and other elements, but they look very Assyrian. And the stories that a Greek historian, Theseus, for instance, hears when he spends some years as the physician of. Of King Artaxerxes at the Persian court are all about the Assyrians, not about the Babylonians. They are distorted already. They no longer really reflect that much the reality of the Assyrian empire, but they are about the Assyrians. It seems very much that Persians really quite deliberately imitated Assyria. I mean, already Cyrus, in his famous Cyrus cylinder, the one document in which he speaks extensively about himself found in Babylon, created shortly after the conquest of Babylon in 539, mentions King Ashurbanipal as an earlier builder of the walls of Babylon. And the inscription as such also has a certain Assyrian ring to it. The titles that Cyrus uses, king of the World, et cetera, are Assyrian titles. So yes, Assyria looms large at the very beginning in this chain of empires. And of course then it recedes at some point when eventually the Seleucids and then the Parthians, the Sasanians, and later on other empires take over. Of course, then there's no deliberate imitation of Isuria anymore. But you use this very nice metaphor of DNA. I think the Assyrian DNA stays with later empires.

[Dan Snow]

Well, Eckhart, thank you so much for telling us all about that. And I think people with a general interest in history will be able to spot so many parallels in the bits of history that they particularly enjoy and are familiar with. So subsequent history owes an enormous amount to Assyria. Thank you very much for coming on and telling us all about it.

[Professor Eckhart Frahm]

Yeah, thank you very much. It was a real pleasure.

[Dan Snow]

Thank you so much to you for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit. We could not make this podcast without you. That's actually true. So make sure if you want to keep it going, that is to hit follow in your podcast player right now. You'll get new episodes dropped into your podcast library automatically. By the power of tech, you can listen anywhere you get. Your pods, Apple, Spotify, even BBC. Sounds. Imagine a world. Just imagine where you never miss an episode of this podcast. I mean it's there. The technology makes that possible.

[Professor Eckhart Frahm]

Possible.

[Dan Snow]

That could be your reality right now. If you hit follow. See you next time.

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