The Neo-Assyrian Empire

- In the video, Speaker A talks about the Neo Assyrians and how it all went wrong. The problem is that the philosophy of empire is to crush and destroy the identities of the peoples that they rule over.

So in this video, we're going to talk about the Neo Assyrians and how it all went wrong. Assyria is a section of northern Mesopotamia. The name comes from Asher, which is one of the great cities on the Tigris in the northern section of Mesopotamia. So you can see Ashur there, up the Tigris from where the Mesopotamia constricts above Babylon. Further to the north is Nineveh, which becomes the great capital city of the Assyrians. And in the Iron Age, in the beginning of the 9th century, but especially in the 8th and 7th centuries, the Assyrians go on a conquering rampage. They attempt to create this immense and powerful empire for themselves. And we refer to this as the Neo Assyrian Empire to emphasize that it is the, the Assyrians of the Iron Age. There had been an Assyrian Empire of the Bronze Age. And so, you know, when we refer to this iteration in the Iron Age, just for clarity, it's better to refer to it as the Neo Assyrian Empire. And so, as you can see, this is extremely successful. And so, you know, it might be somewhat surprising to have the, the subtitle for this section to be how not to Run an Empire. They are able to conquer all these territories. But as I've said, the problem with building an empire is not in the conquest. Conquest comes easy. As long as you have the economic power to put a large army into the field that is well equipped, a conquest is relatively straightforward. The real problem is dominion. The building of an empire comes in two parts, conquest and dominion. And dominion is the test. This is the test that the Neo Assyrians fail. The model for empire that the Neo Assyrians develop is one that does not work. And the lessons from it are learned by the great empires that come after the Persians and the Romans. The Neo Assyrians have a great deal of pride and majesty that they put forward in a great deal of decorative artwork and expression. Their own mythology, their own culture. And the thing about the Neo Assyrian Empire is that it does provide many of the benefits that come with empire. In other words, empires contain an inherent positive for the peoples that are conquered, which is that a large empire connects all sorts of different economies and provides access to a much wider range of goods, materials and resources than any independent local community would normally have. It also provides a wider range of access to ideas and people's manpower. It provides a greater protection because it's in the interests of an empire to protect and defend the lands that it has already conquered. Empires also often invest in infrastructure, particularly roads, bridges and aqueducts. And this, we find, is one of the things that is associated with the Neo Syrian Empire, the Neo Syrian empire does a great deal of investment in infrastructure that is of market benefits to the peoples of the empire, its subject peoples that the Neo Assyrians have conquered. The problem is that the Neo Assyrians philosophy of empire is to crush and destroy the identities of the peoples that they rule over so as to prevent their identity forming a basis for resistance and rebellion. And so the Neo Assyrian rulers practiced a brutal of dominion and oppression, without exception, all the places they ruled over. The effort was to press down the populace, to remove local customs, local tradition, local religion, to try to erode and break down local identity so that it can be replaced by loyalty to the Assyrians. And this simply does not work. What the Neo Assyrians find to their cost is that by the time of the height of the most famous of the Neo Syrian rulers, Ashurbanipal depicted here that this form of oppression only serves to reinforce local identity and to foment the very kind of resistance and rebellion that the. Through their, through their destruction, through their deportation, through their constant to crush rebels, the Neo Syrian philosophy of empire only serves to create more fertile ground for local identity to strengthen and resist their brutal Neo Assyrian overlords. And so we have this strange picture of the Neo Assyrians being this great advanced civilization that fosters all kinds of skilled labor, of engineering and scientific knowledge and the accumulation of wisdom. The library of Ashurbanipal is up to this time the greatest library on earth, or at least in this part of the world. And it contains information and books and knowledge taken from all the peoples that they've conquered, including the Epic of Gilgamesh. We have the Epic of Gilgamesh because the Ashurbanipal took the libraries of the Babylonians and with it all of the stories that they had absorbed from the Sumerians. But you know, the Assyrians, Ashurbanipal and his confederates see this as just another form of plunder. Their library is not important to Ashurbanipal because it is a repository of knowledge, but because it is a form of wealth, a form of booty that is taken from the peoples that they conquer and brought to Assyria as a hoard of wealth, like a pile of gold upon which a dragon lays. And so the Neo Assyrian empire creates the, the seeds of its own destruction. The subject peoples rise up against them over and over again. Eventually they start to work together and ultimately it's the Chaldeans of Babylon that are instrumental in bringing down the Neo Assyrians and their empire. At Nineveh collapses and shudders to the ground. And what replaces it is the influence of Babylon itself. The Babylonians create a dominance of the territories of the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia and Canaan and Syria that is based not on military repression, but on the cultural dominance of Babylon. And this is reinforced militarily only on rare occasions when the cultural dominance of Babylon is threatened. Babylon, in contrast to the Assyrians, who use their army to create this vast empire that is hated by all the peoples that it rules over, Babylon is like this magnetic center. It's this shining beacon that draws the, the learned and the intelligent and the scientific and the skilled. Babylon becomes the center of the world and the wonders that you can see there. This is the Ishtar Gate, which is a famous relic of ancient Babylon. The achievements of Babylon were among the greatest in the world. Babylon itself is in a not particularly fertile area. But at one point, the king of Babylon wanted to create this lush garden of delights for his queen. So he created this oasis of nature, the hanging gardens of Babylon. This expanse of vertical, wild sort of manufactured Eden within, within Babylon that was famous throughout the world. The hanging gardens was later considered to be one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. And the Babylonians were famous for attempting to create the greatest ziggurat of all time. Because the Jews who later were exiled to Babylon hated the Chaldean Babylonians, they turned the construction of this Tower of Babel into a parable of hubris, of arrogant pride, attempting to reach the heavens and to outstretch the human arm beyond the realm of mortals in their great pride in themselves. And you know, the Jewish God punishes them according to the story. But in point of fact, the Babylonians do indeed create the greatest ziggurat of the ancient world. The Etabenaki ziggurat is this massive structure that dominates the sight lines for miles and miles around. And because it's a ziggurat, it's the home to the Babylonian God Marduk, the patron God of Babylon. And so it reflects the Babylonian belief that Babylon is more blessed, more invested and beloved by the gods than any other city in the world. And so Babylon becomes the place in which the Jews are forced to be exiled, because the Jews uniquely are able to resist the preeminence of Babylonian culture. And so the Babylonians have to do something drastic in order to ensure that the Jews of Judah don't become a center of resistance to their cultural and economic power over the entirety of Canaan and Mesopotamia. And so as a result, they, they are forced to conquer and deport the people of Judah, just as the Israelites had been a century and a half before. And so the Jews find themselves in the cultural center of the world. And it's against this that they must forge a counter identity. It's against this that the Jews forged their identity as Jews and their unique relationship with God in order to distinguish themselves from what everybody understood to be the greatest civilization on earth, the civilization of Babylon that would remain the subject of story and song and legend for millennia to come. And we'll continue on with the story of what happens in that part of the world in future videos. That's. That's.