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Tiffany Earley-Spadoni, "Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East" (UP of Colorado, 2025)
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Dr. Tiffany Early Spadoni
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Tiffany early Spadoni about her book titled Landscapes of Warfare, Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle east, published by the University Press of Colorado in 2025, which takes us very far back in time to where today we would look at this landscape and call some of it Turkey, some of it Armenia, some of it Iran. But we're going back to the early first millennium bce, which helps us go to early ideas of what power looked like, what imperial power looked like. Because quite often I think we focus on this in terms of neo Syria and sort of big urban centers. And it turns out that is not at all the only thing that was going on. So, Tiffany, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast to help us better understand going pretty far back in time.
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Dr. Tiffany Early Spadoni
Thank you Miranda for having me. I'm really looking forward to this chat.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I am too. And introductions is a logical place to start, but I'm, I admit, especially excited for you to introduce yourself a little bit because I'm also going to ask you to briefly introduce Urartu to our listeners because you call it in the book, quote unquote, the most important empire that you've never heard of, which is a very intriguing start. So can you introduce yourself and this place, please?
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Dr. Tiffany Early Spadoni
Sure. My name is Dr. Tiffany Early Spadoni. I'm an archaeologist and historian. I work at the University of Central Florida where I direct the Kurd Cobberstan project in northern Iraq. Generally speaking, I study war and society and political organization in the ancient Middle east, now pivoting to Urartu. Most people haven't heard of it, but in the early millennium BCE it was one of the major powers of the Middle east, locked in a century long struggle with the much more famous Assyrian Empire. And what makes Irartu special among the world's first empires is that it was non urban. While Assyria built massive capitals like Nineveh and northern Iraq, Arartu filled the mountains of eastern Turkey, Armenia and northwest Iran with fortresses. Massive stone strongholds perched on cliffs and ridges which were guarding valleys and passes. Arartu matters historically because they and Assyria weren't just rivals. They were part of a large twin imperial system. And you really can't understand one without understanding the other. As by way of metaphor, Arartu was the Carthage to Assyria's Rome. It's not a perfect analogy, but it captures the dynamic. Two great powers locked in rivalry, each shaping the other's history. So when we look at Erar 2, we're not just rescuing a forgotten neighbor of Assyria. We're seeing the other half of the story we thought we knew.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
See, this is why I was so very willing to go a bit outside of my usual comfort zone as a historian to learn from this book. Because that's exactly the sort of thing that's always so intriguing of the history we think we know. And going, hang on, there's a whole extra dimension to it. So that in and of itself seems like quite a good reason to write a book. But is there anything further you want to tell us about the origins of this particular project and the aspects of Ruartu that you're focusing on within it and how you decided on this?
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Dr. Tiffany Early Spadoni
That's a really great question because I always really enjoy hearing other researchers sort of intellectual journey of how they got to the idea for a book. And one thing that I've learned is that inspiration for a book rarely hits.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
You all at once.
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Dr. Tiffany Early Spadoni
It tends to hit you in degrees. And for me, it started with an unexpected finding from my doctoral work at Johns Hopkins, which looked at Erarty and fortresses. But for that original study, I was looking at this principle of visibility. What a person could see from a particular fortress, which fortresses could be seen within a landscape and where. And also the fortresses and forts, whether they could see one another, the inner visibility. And so I was using vshed analysis, which is a kind of geographical information systems or fancy computer way of analyzing visibility in ancient and modern landscapes using computational modeling. At the time, the prevailing interpretation in the field Was that EAR2 arriving in these places to take them over the Arartian conquest was highly disruptive, and that it involved a complete reordering of the territory. But what I saw in my data sets was completely different. And so I really spent a lot of time attempting to account for it. In many cases, when Arartu annexed these vast territories, they left local patterns more intact than everyone thought they would. Sometimes their conquest was even archaeologically invisible. That is to say, if it weren't for historical sources and inscriptions that were made within the landscape, we would even question if there had been any sort of disruption if we only explored that, archaeologically speaking. So the. The eastern expansion of Erartu usually didn't mean a total upheaval, particularly in the 9th through 8th centuries, the. The beginning of this expansion. And that was the puzzle. If conquest wasn't always radically transformative, then what was happening? Why did Erartu generally revise or build upon the systems of forts and fortresses that were already there, rather than this dramatic restructuring the landscape? So answering that question, implied by my original dissertation, meant broadening the scope of the study. So I had to look beyond Erar 2 alone and beyond the narrow time frame that I was. I was originally exploring. And like most historians, I started to look earlier because that's. That tends to be where we find all of our answers. Realizing that there were examples of these kinds of fortified landscapes centuries before Arartu, as well as Assyria, began adopting this kind of territorial fortification to make their imperial landscapes. So the question became, where did it start? How did it develop, and why was it so enthusiastically adopted by both of these empires? And incidentally, why was this way of fortifying the landscape then adopted subsequently for millennia afterwards? So in the process, I began to see a pattern, a system that may have begun for defense of frontiers. And that's these networks, these systems of forts and fortresses, as well as watchtowers and other kinds of landscape fortification, they became a way of holding down entire provinces after conquest. So fortified landscapes were supposed to be about protection, but in the hands of Erartu and Assyria, they became about violence, as well as tools of imperial extraction. So there were ways to hold down these new territories and, to a certain extent, enforce compliance among subjects. And that's the sense in which I wrote this book. Erartu is the star. Assyria to a certain extent is a foil, letting us see what a more typical empire looked like at that time. But the bigger story is how landscapes themselves preserve the imprints of warfare, ideology and trauma.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That is a great introduction. Thank you very much. That gives us a whole bunch of things to now talk about in more detail. So starting off with a bit of this sort of foil comparison aspect as well as, as you said, of course, sort of broadening the scope, as you correctly mentioned. Historians always do when trying to figure out these questions of how and why. Can you zoom out a little bit for us and help us better understand what was happening in Urartu, around Urartu in this period that made warfare so important, that kind of made, that gave the incentives for all of this to happen in these landscapes. And how does this compare to what was happening in the Neo Assyrian Empire?
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Dr. Tiffany Early Spadoni
Right, so if we start in the ancient Middle east and we back up even a thousand or fifteen hundred years before the events in question, and that is the early first millennium bce we see a landscape of places, these small city states, which appear to be at constant war. So the fact that warfare was this transformative process has by no means unique to the early first millennium bce. However, what is unique is the, the scale, scope and regularity of this practice. By the early first millennium, the Assyrians were systematically going to war. So what that means is every single summer they would go on military campaign. It seems that an important part, part of their economy was extractive. So it was an extractive empire in which in order to fill the coffers of this imperial system, they essentially had to go on campaign. So they developed a lot of ideologies that supported this very warlike approach to the world. So fast forwarding Then to the 9th to the 7th centuries BCE we are in an age that we might call the age of mega empires. This is the beginning of these truly large imperial states that begins with the Neo Assyrian Empire as well as its large neighbor to the north, Arartu. Assyria was expanding aggressively out of Mesopotamia. That's going to be in northern Iraq today. And Erartu rose in the mountains, one might argue, partly to resist that expansion. That was the original impetus that allowed these mountain people to unite against what they might have perceived as a threat, and rightly so. Assyria was urban, bureaucratic and centralized, and Hratu was the opposite. Non urban, decentralized, organized around fortress networks. That contrast City based Empire vs Highland Fortress Empire is what makes their rivalry so fascinating? And Assyria was relentless. Each year the king led a campaign. The ideology of the state demanded expansion to the entire known world. This is, this is. These were their marching orders. Every king was expected to spread his dominion over the entire known world. And their artwork makes this clear. Ladders against walls, battering rams smashing gates, cities burning. It's psychological warfare carved in stone. And this is for the Neo Assyrian Empire. Orartu, meanwhile, coalesced under that pressure, but quickly developed ambitions of their own. Arartian kings celebrated military victories in their inscriptions as well. And they too spoke of ruling the entire universe. So we had two kings of the entire universe in close proximity, which is to a certain extent an entertaining thing to think about. But for the Erartians, warfare was not just about resisting Assyria, it was about competing with them. Geography also mattered for both of these empires. Arartu's mountain passes were open only a short period during the year, essentially June through October. They were open seasonally because they're high alpine passes. And that meant that Assyrian armies could only attack in summer. But during the summer, Arartu had to be constantly prepared. Fortresses were built to guard those passes as well as the, the lake shores of the large lakes that typify the landscape as well. And this, this mountainous terrain itself funneled movement. So war and defense were inseparable from geography. And there was an economic logic to this as well, because both empires quickly began to rely on tribute and forced labor. Conquered lands were emptied and then resettled with deportees. And we know this from both of their historical sources. War wasn't just about victory. It was about transforming landscapes into sources of revenue and control. But the difference between these two empires is really important to appreciate. Assyria's power was concentrated in massive fortified capital cities like Nineveh and Kalhu, whereas Urartu's power was distributed, distributed among hundreds of forts and fortresses. It was a non urban empire tied together by these networks. And that's the sense in which Erartu was unique. It shared a series ambitions and ideologies, but it realized them through a very different landscape and, and building in, in a particular way. And once you see it this way, you realize that there wasn't just one model of empire in the ancient Middle east, that there were competing ways of organizing power. And Urartu offers us a strikingly different one.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, this is really, really interesting to understand, I think, especially given how much the Assyrian model is the kind of one that we think of as like the origin of empire. And that's what they look like going forward. It's like, hang on a second. This is very interesting. A lot more nuance in it. But before we go further, I realize we've both been sort of talking about landscape and fortified landscape, and we should maybe clarify exactly what that means in this context. So can you define forest landscape and how you're figuring this out?
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Dr. Tiffany Early Spadoni
Yes, that's a really great question. So when I'm talking about landscapes, or when archaeologists in general speak of landscape, they don't just mean scenery. We're not talking about a placid Hudson River Valley painting full of mountains and rivers. Instead, we mean the way in which people lived in those spaces, the way in which they reshaped these landscapes, and the way in which people give them meaning. They attach meanings to different kinds of places. And as a more concrete example of what I mean by this, take a mountain pass in Erartu. On its own, it's geographical. It's a gap in the ridge. But once a fortress is built there, the pass is transformed. It becomes a controlled space. Movement is watched, restricted, sometimes taxed. Geography becomes politics. So if you scale that up and you see how war reorganized, you can see how war reorganized whole regions. Fortresses were connected by sight lines. Roads passed between these strategic zones in the plains, through valleys, passes were blocked or defended. These weren't isolated sites. They were part of a connected landscape of warfare. To study this sort of phenomenon, archaeologists combine excavation and mapping with digital tools. One of the tools that I mentioned earlier, which is gis, or Geographical Information Systems, allows us to run inter visibility analyses, essentially asking the computer which fortresses could see each other. Around Lake Savan, 15 Erartyan sites form 39 lines of sight, and most of them could see three or more others. This sort of patterning is too consistent to be accidental. It suggests communication was built into the terrain itself. One of the interesting things about the fortresses and their patterning is that there was a lot of redundancy in the network, which is something that we also see in telecommunications networks today. If one fortress can't see, or if one fortress is not available to communicate a message, the message can still be passed. But landscapes were more than just military. They were, for example, sacred too. In Erartu, mountains were not just features. They were thought to be literal, substantiated. Gods, kings sacrificed hundreds of animals on their slopes in elaborate ceremonies. So when fortresses crowned various ridges, they weren't just defenses. They fused military control with divine presence. That's the sense in which I use landscape. It's physical terrain and human construction. But you also have these. These deeper meanings and relationship that are infused with the landscape and woven together. And once you see it this way, you realize that war didn't just happen on the land, it also changed how the land itself was understood and experienced.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a much more expansive and interesting meaning. So thank you for explaining that term to us. Let's get into, then, more details about these Urartu fortresses. I mean, you've told us a little bit about where they are, but maybe there's probably more to discuss in terms of location. When we talk about an Urartu fortress, is that kind of one thing that looks the same in every place, or is there variation between them? Tell us more about these fortresses.
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Dr. Tiffany Early Spadoni
Right, so that is actually a central question that I didn't realize was going to be a central question of my dissertation. When I first started studying this, what is now 15 years ago, the prevailing scholarly opinion at that time was that Erartyan fortresses, as well as Erartyan material culture, that these were very uniform, that there was an unrelenting sameness to this. However, when I began to systematically study all of these plans, I realized that there was a process of historical development that had been ignored. Orartian fortresses. Just to back up a little bit, I want to tell you a little bit about what these places were like in terms of shared traits. They were dramatic places. So imagine a rocky hilltop, a cliff's edge, some sort of promontory, where you have these expansive views of the landscape. And then now you're going to add terracing carved into the slope. So into these massive stone escarpments, you have these fortress builders carving these. These footings for the large stone blocks to sit. And the stone blocks that made up these fortifications were truly massive. Some of them were a meter wide. And so the. The scope of the work that would would have taken to build these places is really monumental to think about. They weren't just defensive works, they were monuments. They were proof that Iraqi kings could mobilize whole communities to quarry stone, haul mud brick, and literally reshape the mountain itself. The reason why I mentioned mud brick here is that the foundations of erarty and fortresses tended to be carved into stone and constructed of stone. But as he went up the. The walls of an Eratian fortress, those tended to be built in mud brick, which is a much easier material to work with. So once you go inside of an Urartian fortress, there's another thing that you might consistently find, and those are Susi temples. And Susie temples are really interesting in that they were small. They had a simple square plan, usually less than 10 meters by 10 meters on a side, with very thick walls. And what they look like is almost like a miniature fortress itself. So you have this miniature fortress inside of the fortress that is actually the temple. And these Susi temples were dedicated to the Suzanne, chief God of the arm pantheon, whose name is Haldi. So even in the most imposing citadel, you had this intimate sacred core where this very intimate practice of worship would have happened. Remember, these structures are really small, so it wouldn't have allowed for large group communion with the divine. So where were the fortresses built? Always in commanding places. So around Lake Vaughan in eastern Turkey, for example, they are perched on sheer rock outcrops dramatically around the hauntingly beautiful shores of Lake Vaughan. And as the kingdom expanded out of this area in eastern Turkey, fortresses began to appear around Lake Savan in the Ararat plain of Armenia, and around Lake Urmia in Iran. Almost always, they sat on ridges or promontories above valleys and main routes. And from there, they can monitor travel, control trade, and signal one another with fire beacons flashing across the mountains. But here's the key. They weren't uniform. In the 9th and 8th centuries BCE, Arartu was decentralized. Many fortresses were modest, often reusing earlier iron age strongholds. And in Armenia especially, you see regional variety. At Harum, you have local pottery traditions that continue, and you also have a very local presentation. Even though this, we know that this fortress is erartian, it is carved into the topography. It doesn't have a uniform rectilinear plan. So, you know, for many years, it. It actually kept scholars from recognizing it as being a rotian because it didn't fit this idea that they had in their head of, of a uniform model. You also have at Eraboni, the fortress walls bent to fit a triangular hill. But in the 7th century, something completely different happens, and it is these really special 7th century fortresses that cause all of the confusion about what Arartu was and what Arartu looked like. So in the 7th century, under King Rusa, who was the son of Argishti, previously known as Rusa ii, Arartu launched a new wave of fortresses. And some of these include Ionis, Bostam and Karmir Blur. They were built entirely from scratch. These new fortresses, with carefully cut stone blocks, rectilinear plans, and regular buttressing and niching, they look highly Standardized, almost an imperial style. And for the first time we also see lower towns begin to develop. But excavations at Ionis have shown that even though these lower towns had begun to develop in the 7th century, we still don't have a lot of the, the classic traits of urbanism. We don't have rectilinear plans, we don't have any civic buildings. These lower towns appear to have been a matter either of, they appear to have been a practical matter. They appear hastily constructed. When you look at some of the, the walls of the houses at Ionis, it's, it's actually very funny because the people who built these houses look bad at building houses because the, the angles don't even come together at 90 degrees. And so another really interesting thing about these late fortresses only is that they ended violently. Ionis, Bostam, Carmir, blur, they were all destroyed by fire in the seventh century. It may be enemies, it may be revolt, either way, their monumentality was really short lived. And that's the sense in which Eratim fortresses must be understood. For most of Rartu's history, they were smaller, varied, they adapted to terrain, particularly as you get farther and farther away from the center of the empire. They have really variable forms. And only in the final century of Erartu do we see this standardized monumental style. It's impressive, but brief. It appears to have lasted only the reign of that one particular king. And once you see it this way, once you understand it that way, you realize that fortresses weren't static. They were evolving instruments of power, sometimes the result of taking over and annexing a territory. And a lot of these decisions appear to have been pragmatic and very regional and very dependent upon the time and the historical moment in which they happened.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm, that's very interesting indeed to understand those details. But talking about the monumentality of it and the houses, are we talking about cities here? Were these fortresses also cities? Where did Urartu have cities? Somewhere else? Are, are there urban centers in any of this?
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Dr. Tiffany Early Spadoni
There is nothing that has been excavated from a Rartu that I would understand as urban in that sense. One thing that we see in the settlement pattern from Iran, which is very different than what we see in Armenia and to a lesser extent Turkey, are these extensive webs, however, a very small settlement. So in northwest Iran we get a lot of small settlements. But as you head north into Armenia, one really interesting thing is we struggle to find settlements at all in Armenia associated with Erarty and forts and fortresses. The footprint of these Forts and fortresses is really small, you know, a couple of hectares, three or four hectares at most. So none of them are what you would call urban, strictly speaking. And it's only in these late 7th century times that you start to see the development of lower towns. And the lower towns, even then, even when they do develop outside of these special fortresses of Rusa son of Argishti, they're still not urban. They appear to be these fortress lower towns. A big building here, a small building there, there, there appear appears to be no systematic planning whatsoever, which is something that we often will associate with cities. Another trait of non cities that it shares is extreme sparse settlement. So even though you might have a distribution of structures across a few hectares or more, there is no density within this. So there was no sort of economic use of space that would promote urban traits. And this is very different to the situation in Assyria where we have these massive imperial cities, truly massive, hundreds of hectares in size, with palaces, temples and dense populations. Urban in every sense. But one of the things that likely made Aartu so resilient to any possible attacks by Assyria was their, in fact, failure to build cities. Because if you don't have a large city to sack, there is very little incentive for you to go there. And in this way, their wealth as well as their power was distributed among hundreds of smaller centers. And this made it a very low yield, low reward sort of activity to go campaigning. If you're the Assyrian Empire in Urartu.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is really interesting because it goes back right to what you were saying at the beginning around kind of our assumptions about what empire looks like and what territorial control, how territorial control happens. So can we talk a little bit more about that now that we have a better understanding of kind of what is and isn't there in what's been found. Without cities, how did the governance and maintenance of control of people in territory work?
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Dr. Tiffany Early Spadoni
Right. That's a really interesting question. And I'll give you another metaphor by which you might understand the important differences between Assyria and Erar2. So if you are a fan of the Lord of the Rings universe as I am, you might think of Assyria as being a place like Gondor, a kingdom of monumental walled cities, whereas Urartu was closer to Rohan. You have horse people in these mountain lairs. You have strongholds scattered across the highlands. They are suspicious of city folk, but still a formidable state. And OR two's answer to maintaining sovereignty or maintaining control in these alpine environments was networks of fortresses. And as I've mentioned before, not just a few, but hundreds stretched across the highlands, and each one was carefully placed to command strategic places. So command a valley, a pass, a lakeshore. And from the strategic vantage point, they could monitor movement, guard borders, and signal to one another, probably in the form of fire beacons flashing from ridge to ridge. And we know, in fact, that Arartu used fire beacons because we have this elaborate Assyrian text which carefully describes their use of fire beacons. So in addition to the evidence for intervisibility, we also see it in the historical sources. We know that the Irartian fortresses weren't just military. You also find storage rooms, administrative spaces, temples. And these were the nodes of power. Military authority, economic oversight, religious devotion, all under one roof. Erartyan kings didn't Erarty, and kings boasted building fortresses. And that gives us a really good window into what makes a good Erarty and king. And what about the people? One. One question that, you know, we often struggle with about Armenia in particular, is where people lived and why their settlements are so invisible. So that remains an open question. However, what emerges is a very different picture of empire. We have Assyria concentrated in a few monumental cities. We have Erartu dispersed across the countryside, and that's how Arartu held its world together, not with city walls and marketplaces, but with fortresses linked into networks. You realize Erartu wasn't a failed version of Assyria. It was instead something distinct and very powerful, a highland empire built out of strong stone mountain layers and networks of power woven into the rugged terrain.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so that's useful to understand. We're really not talking about, as you said, a failure of, you haven't done what Assyria has. It's like, no, no, they're doing something different. If we're talking, though, about networks across difficult terrain, and, of course, the idea of Rohan with the horses. And to what extent is Urartu, then similar to. If we throw another comparison in there, the more familiar, the obviously much later Mongol Empire?
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Dr. Tiffany Early Spadoni
That's a really interesting question, and it's actually one that I am frequently asked anytime I talk about Urartu. If I don't mention the Mongol Empire, there will invariably be a member of the audience who will raise their hand and will ask this very question, because people see these really strong similarities in how the Mongol Empire was so special and unique, and they had never realized that there was this, let's call it precursor or very interesting empire that had certain things in common with this more, I guess, contemporary or better Known, unusual empire. At first glance, the comparison seems unlikely because they were in fact separated geographically by quite an expanse, as well as temporally by 2000 years. But one way that they are alike is that they both challenge our standard idea of empire. We usually think of empires as consisting of city building. So Assyria with Nineveh, Rome with its monumental capitals, and Arartu and the Mongols went a different way. But both are also what we might arguably call anti urban. For much of its history, Arartu was aggressively non urban. And by that what I mean is non urban by choice. They chose to spread their authority centers across these mountains fortresses and not concentrate them in great cities. And the Mongols were the same. Their empires rose in a steppe environment where cities didn't usually form naturally. And in fact, both cultures may have carried a deep suspicion of city life. For the Mongols, urban living was associated with softness or corruption. And for Rartu it may have been much of a similar thing, a cultural ethos that was bound to highland fortresses and rural life. You have these horse people traveling among these mountain lairs and not city folk in marketplaces. And it's exactly that non urban character that shaped how they governed. So the Mongols also set up chains of fortresses, walled enclosures, as well as monasteries that acted as administrative anchors across Eurasia. And in its own way, Rartu did something at a similar using similar methods. They're both using fortified regional networks, hundreds of forts and fortresses tied together with valleys, passes, lakeshores, that sort of thing. And mobility was another important point of contact. You mentioned the horses. So we, we know that the Mongol elite lived in mobile camps, moving with their herds and armies, rarely settling into cities. Arartu too had a strong mobile element. We actually see in the Assyrian sources constant reports of the movements of the king, which seems to suggest, rather than staying constantly in the Von river valley, that the Iraqian king was constantly on the move within Arartu. And the Mongols, much like the Arartians, also adapted their empire to the ecology that was local to them. So the Mongols adapted their state to the ecology of the steppe pastoralism, wide open landscapes, the need for speed and mobility. Whereas Arartu adapted to the mountains, the the mountains were rugged, defensible, broken up by valleys and passes, and not an easy place at all for lowland armies like Assyria to invade. I mentioned that long Assyrian text where they describe a military campaign into Urartu. And one of the most vivid passages is how they're using metal tools to open up a mountain pass. So that the Assyrians can pass through with their huge, slow army, as well as all of their siege equipment. And what is this. What is this comparison between the Mongol Empire and anarchy tell us anyway? Well, it shows us that empires don't have to be urban, that you can build a vast state without capitals by leaning more heavily on networks of other structures. And so we learned that sometimes empires don't look the way they're supposed to look. And that's really interesting.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that is absolutely, really interesting. And I want us to talk in more detail about what this empire does actually look like, or I guess what it was like, what it felt like, what it smelled like. You know, I don't know. But what was this like on a human level if you weren't one of these kings sort of saying, build me a fortress over there? What was the sort of human side, the human cost of these landscapes of warfare?
- [40:25]
Dr. Tiffany Early Spadoni
That's a really wonderful question, and I'm so glad that you asked it, because one thing I wanted to be really careful to do, or more importantly, not do, is write this book in a way in which the, let's call them, accomplishments of Urartu and Assyria were celebrated as a kind of human progress. As, you know, the larger that states become, the happier that the historians are, that sort of thing. I think there's a dubious scholarly tradition that equates imperial systems with accomplishment, but it is, in fact, important to question how these empires were experienced by people of various different statuses within the empire. And we can actually reconstruct more than you would think about these ancient places, about the lived experiences of people, mostly through archeology. So sometimes archeology preserves really beautiful, vivid moments that are also tragic, snapshots that show us exactly what war meant for the people who live through it. And one of these clearest examples comes from the fortress of Hassanlu, which is in northwestern Iran. Around 800 BCE, its citadel was destroyed in a sudden catastrophic attack, most likely by erarty and invaders. When archaeological, when archaeologists excavated it, they found more than 100 victims. People cut down in doorways and stairwells, men, women and children, even looters caught in the act of looting. One man, still clutching a gold bowl when the building apparently collapsed on him and around him in storerooms, jars of grapes and figs were charred in the fire, which suggests that this military operation happened in late summer, which is exactly what we might expect. It was a community preparing for the harvest. They were trapped, as it were, in the middle of an average day. And so this is a Community that. That is stopped in time in that way. And one way we might think of this sort of a landscape is as a traumascape. A traumascape is a landscape that is scarred by violence, where destruction itself becomes a part of the cultural memory. And we see traumascapes by way of analogy in the modern world as well. For example, here in Orlando, Florida, where I live, the site of the 2016 mass shooting at the Pulse night club in Orlando, which is still the focus of vigils, memorials, mourning. We also have nine, 11 in New York. That's another sort of traumascape that people are certainly familiar with. And these places, both in the present as well as in the past, they're often described as being haunted, not just by lives lost, but by the cultural weight that lingers in the space, thanks to the meaning that people apply to these terrible places. And what's interesting is that ancient people felt this way too. And we know that, and not even just metaphorically. The Assyrians believe, for example, that ruined places were literally haunted by the ghosts of people who died there. Abandoned cities, burned palaces, shattered gates. They weren't just ruins. They were inhabited by restless spirits. So to step into a destroyed city was to walk among the dead. So when you look at places like Hassan Lu, we don't just see evidence of warfare. We also see these traumascapes that would have been experienced as haunted in every sense, physically by the ruins, spiritually by the ghosts, and culturally by the memories carried forward. And if we look far enough back, we can trace these human costs of war. 3,000 years ago, just as today, violence left scars on. On the land and these scars that people couldn't ignore because they felt them in their stories. They. They felt them in the cultural significance, significance of these places that were created.
- [45:03]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it's definitely worth expanding history beyond just King said this, so thank you for giving us those details.
- [45:11]
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- [45:31]
Dr. Tiffany Early Spadoni
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- [45:41]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And speaking of debates that happen in the wider history and the ways in which going back this far, can contribute to them. That's definitely one point. Is there anything further, though, we want to discuss about contributions the book is making to understandings of histories and ideologies of warfare?
- [45:58]
Dr. Tiffany Early Spadoni
I really. I really like that question because it gets to the heart of one of the more in question, more important questions that I wrestled with during the writing of this book. One thing that became clear to me is with all of these massive deportations of people, resettling them in these other places, these, the signs of violence that you see within these fortresses and forts, as well as in the imperial cities of Assyria when they are eventually destroyed, all of this violence creates this composite photo. And that is, how did these cycles of history originate? And why were these cycles from which these people could not presumably break free? And ultimately, the conclusion that I came to is that there were these ideological underpinnings that meant that these people were trapped within the system in which warfare was. Was glorified, in which it was valorized. And so warfare wasn't just about soldiers or tactics or weapons. It was also about ideas. And the first of these ideas is what we might call constructing the other. We. We know this very well. And I'll give you some concrete examples of what I mean by this. So states will often define themselves on the basis of hostile others, people who are different outside of their borders. These different people are even less human than the people that you live with in the state where you are. So these are the barbarians of the ancient world, as it were. And one of these groups of barbarians that we know from the second millennium BCE is this, this group, this group called the Amorites. And they were described in Mesopotamian texts of the Earth 3 period as barbarians who did not know barley. These are people living in the mountains who don't understand the trappings of civilization which typify Mesopotamian cities. Obviously, these generalizations about subhuman people who live either just on the border or just outside of the border or in territories that the empire wants to take over, this description of this hostile people against whom we have to protect ourselves allows states to mobilize a lot of military strength and power. So the second theme is something that we might call agonistic masculinity. In other words, manhood defined through violence. To be a king, you had to be a warrior. Assyrian kings, for example, didn't just send their generals on military campaign. They personally led campaigns. And in palace art, they're shown killing lions, the ultimate proof of courage and domination. In Urartu, we see the Exact same, same expectation, though sometimes in more revealing or subtly comic ways. One of the weaker kings of Arartu, without great victories to his name, ended up boasting in an inscription about how far his horse could jump, essentially saying, I have the horses, the very best horses, everyone says. So the humor of that line really underscores the pressure that these kings must have felt. And then the third is this idea of universal domination. As I mentioned earlier, Both Assyria and Erar2 used titles like King of the Four Quarters, which essentially means kings of the universe. They ruled the entire known world according to their own ideologies. And this is not just grandiose language, but it's an ideological commitment to. To endless expansion, which is a trait that all empires share, both ancient as well as modern. And so when you put these three ideas together and understand them as expectations that were so ingrained that people mostly believe them without question, you can see why by the early first millennium bc, warfare had become so relentless.
- [50:31]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that definitely paints a very intense picture. So thank you for helping us understand what it was like so long ago. I've obviously asked you to tell us rather a number of things about Urartu over the course of this conversation, but I was wondering if there's anything you came across in the research or writing of this book that surprised you, even if it's something that didn't end up making it into the final version.
- [50:54]
Dr. Tiffany Early Spadoni
So I'm going to go with something that always surprises people when I talk about this research. And this actually did make it into the book, but just a little bit. Although I think you could write quite a fascinating book about just this one thing alone, and that is that the Assyrians, during the Neo Assyrian period in the early first millennium BCE, basically had a CIA, or what you might call in the UK, MI6. And I don't mean that loosely. These were true intelligence gathering operations with real spies. The Crown Prince himself sat at the top of a tiered intelligence service. And we know this from all of the letters that are preserved from this elaborate spy enterprise. Below the Crown Prince, we have spy managers or spy middle managers, and below them, informants gathering information in towns, on roads across the empire. And here's the best part. These letters are incredibly informative. So much so that you can reconstruct the organization of this vast spy enterprise. Sometimes every. Every fort or official would send the same account of an Erartian defeat. But then sometimes you would see in particular historical episodes that the informants would give different accounts of what was happening. And it gives you this idea that there could have been duplicitous double agents who were crafting their own tales for their own reasons. One of these might be the king of this state called Shubria, which was a buffer state on the edge of Urartu. We have this king named Hu Teshub, who was sending reports to both the Assyrians and the Urartians and attempting to play them off one another. One thing that's really interesting in these historical sources from Assyria is that their obsession with Erartu didn't just stop with the spies. And by the way, in that set of letters you see this constant obsession with the empire of Erartu. But that isn't just the extent of it. The obsession with Erartu also extended into Assyrian religion. Priests were ordered to examine the entrails of sacrifice animals to try to predict what a Wartu might do next. So you had both an intelligence bureaucracy as well as a divinatory one. And they were all focused on the same enemy to the north. I think that's what really surprises people is that they don't expect this kind of granularity in dusty cuneiform tablets.
- [53:51]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Cuneiform tablets have some really fun things in them, to be honest. So I'm always pleased to ask historians who work with them for. For these sorts of details and exactly the sorts of things you've just told us. So thank you very much for that. And I think that's probably a good place to end our discussion about the book. But I would love to know what you might be working on now that this massive project is done. There's anything you have upcoming, whether or not it's a book that you want to give us a brief sneak preview of.
- [54:17]
Dr. Tiffany Early Spadoni
Well, I have pivoted somewhat. I'm now directing excavations at Kurd Khaberstan, which is a large Middle Bronze Age city in northern Iraq, about a thousand years earlier than Erar 2. At least at first I thought it was a pivot. The original project goals set out to ask very different questions about daily life in an ancient city and how authority was negotiated in a non imperial city state. And in At Kurd Kabrstan, we're excavating a palace and a residential district. At the palace we've uncovered something quite astonishing. These rooms were destroyed in antiquity, filled with rubble. And the a certain number of the dead were unceremoniously buried, some piled together, others lying where they seem to have fallen, men, women and children. None of these people intentionally buried. The pattern looks very much like siege warfare, which was common in this era and this tableau of death may be the aftermath of an attack. The thing that's really interesting is that nothing in the previous decade of research at Kurd Cobberstan suggested that we were going to find this evidence of warfare. We were in fact looking for evidence of neighborhood life and city state politics. But archaeology surprises you and the impacts of ancient warfare appear likely to remain a persistent through line in my research.
- [55:54]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that definitely sounds very intriguing. Already some surprises there. So best of luck to you and your team in continuing that work.
- [56:01]
Dr. Tiffany Early Spadoni
Thank you so much. I really enjoyed the opportunity to talk more about my book as well as what's coming next.
- [56:08]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, any listeners who want to know more about the book, we've been talking about a reminder. It's titled Landscapes of Urartu and Assyria and the Ancient Middle east published by the University Press of Colorado in 2025. Tiffany, thank you so much for joining us.
- [56:22]
Dr. Tiffany Early Spadoni
Thank you so.
- [56:35]
Commercial Narrator
Much.