Elam The Ancient Empire That Refused to Die and Defeated Assyria

Elim was the most unbreakable empire of the ancient world. For 2,000 years, it was burned, plundered, and dragged off into captivity, and it would not die. And then one day, someone decided not merely to defeat it, but to erase it. Assyria, the most terrifying war machine of that age, in the year 646 BC, came down on Elilum with all its might. King Asher Banipal raised Susa to the ground, desecrated the graves, carried off the bones of their kings, and sewed their fields with salt. In his chronicles, he exalted, "Elilim is no more." And he died without ever learning how cruy he had miscalculated. Not two decades had passed after his death, and the warriors of Elum stood over a burning Nineveh, the capital of Assyria.

The very Assyria that had supposedly struck the Elummites out of history vanished forever, while Elilum helped burn its capital. Let us sweep over 2,000 years of the history of Elum, a people robbed of everything, even their very name, and try to understand how the one who lost every battle in the end won history itself. First, who the Elummites were. And here right away we need a caveat without which everything that follows falls apart. The Elummites were not Persians. Not at all. The Persians would come to this land thousands of years later and they would be an Indo-Uropean people. Distant kin to the Greeks, the Indians, and the Slavs. But the Elummites spoke a language that resembles nothing at all.

It has no relatives. Not among the Seammites, not among the Indo-Uropeans, not among anyone else on Earth. Scholars still argue about where this people even came from. They called themselves the Halty and their Sumerian neighbors called them by a word that meant simply the tall ones, the Highlanders, a people from nowhere with no clear lineage who did not even preserve a myth of their own origin. They simply were and had, it seems, always been. Their strength was hidden in geography. Elim stood at the meeting point of two worlds. Below lay the fertile plains of the Karun and the Kirka rivers where people early learned to plow, raise livestock, and mold elegant painted pottery with lions,

rams, and goats. And up above in the Zagros mountains was hidden what made Elum an indispensable player. Copper, tin, silver, building stone, and precious lapis lazuli. And the Elummites handled this wealth skillfully. As early as 5,000 years BC, they were forging copper here. And not only arrowheads and axes, but fine ornaments as well. War maces they sometimes cast in the shape of the heads of bulls and leopards. Weapons that did not merely strike, but also frightened. A people to whom Sumer condescendingly ascribed savagery was in fact working metal at a time when half the future great powers had simply not yet been born. To understand why this matters so much, look at their chief neighbor, Great Sumere, the very

cradle of civilization had nothing beneath its foot but clay and reeds. No metal, no stone, no timber. Everything an empire is built from, weapons, tools, ornaments. Sumer had to either buy from the Highlanders of Elim or seize by force. The wealth of humanity's cradle depended directly on a country its descendants would later forget. And one more detail that says a great deal about this people. The Elummites invented their own writing by themselves, peeking at no one. Historians call it protoylum, and it was deciphered only in our own day. Then the Elummites abandoned it and switched to Mesopotamian form. Then as if out of stubbornness, they threw form away too and invented yet another system of their own, linear

elumite. And then with a wave of the hand, they returned to puniform once more. In this single restlessness, you can see the whole character of a people that always kept close to its great neighbors, borrowed everything from them, and yet stubbornly remained itself. And this people had oddities to spare. Power in Elim was often passed not from father to son, but from a king to the son of his sister through the female line, which for the ancient world was a real rarity. And to keep from diluting the royal blood, the rulers sometimes married their own sisters. But behind the custom lay a cold calculation from far more ancient pre-state times. When men perished in endless wars, a line was most reliably continued through the women

whom war spared. The Elummites carried within them the memory of a world so old that beside it even Sumer seemed young. And so Elilum stood from the very first pages of history, the shadow twin of Mesopotamia, a rival without which the cradle of civilization could not have lived a single day. Its chief city would be Susa, a name we will hear more than once, but a shadow twin in whose mountains all the wealth of the world is hidden has only one fate. Sooner or later, someone will come for it. The only question is who will come first and with what they will leave. The answer to that question stretched over 2,000 years and it always sounded the same. They came to Elilum for its

riches, preferably for free. This is the main story line of its entire history. Below in the valley, one great kingdom after another rose up. And each one needed Elilumite metal, Elumite stone, Elilumite Lapis Lazuli. And Elilum, sensing an eternal threat from the plain, answered in kind, with raids, with plunder, with the carrying off of foreign dynasties up into its mountains. Blow forblow, century after century. Sometimes these raids looked almost routine. One of the clay tablets reports dryly how a band of Elummites, 600 men, burst into a Sumerian city, gathered up loot, and dashed back into the mountains, only to be overtaken and severely punished. At other times, the blow came from Mesopotamia instead, and

then the Elumite king would be led away into captivity together with all his kin. And so these scales swung century after century, letting neither side win once and for all. The Sumerians look down on the Highlanders. Their proverbs have come down to us, vivid and biting. When an Elomite falls ill, his teeth checker with fear. Even a whole house is too cramped for an Elumite to live in. This is all a joke. Of course, for the people of Mesopotamia, Elum was a land of vandals, sorcerers, and evil spirits.

Wild neighbors from the mountains who nonetheless had everything you yourself lacked. In the very first great text of humanity in the epic of Gilgamesh, the hero sets out on a distant march to kill a monster named Humbaba, the guardian of the cedar forest. And one of the early kings of Elilum, who reigned at roughly the same time, was named Humbanha. Many researchers believe that it was this Elilumite ruler who became the prototype of the legendary monster. Think about that. This people entered world literature thousands of years before it entered the school textbooks, except that it entered in the role of a monster the hero is bound to kill. Then in the valley rose Akad, the first empire in history. Its founder, Sargon, captured

the Sumerian cities one by one and reached out his hand toward Elilum, making the Elilumite king his vassel. But the most important thing happened under his grandson, Naram Sin. Between Akad and Elilum, a treaty was concluded and it is the first international treaty known to world history. The Elumite king pledged to coordinate his foreign policy with Akad while keeping full power within his own kingdom. And this alliance was sealed with words that even today sound strikingly familiar. The enemy of Naramsin is my enemy. The friend of Naramsin is my friend. The oldest diplomatic formula on the planet was recorded with the participation of Elim. That very country everyone is used to considering a wild backwater.

And it was recorded in the Elilumite language, but in Mesopotamian Cuni form, the very script the Highlanders kept throwing away and taking up again. And so the centuries went by. Akad rose and collapsed under the onslaught of the Gutian Mountain Tribes. Sumer raised its head one last time under the third dynasty of Ur and was finished off. And the final blow was struck by an Elumite coalition which took by storm and led its king away into the mountains. Cities passed from hand to hand. Empires replaced one another. And Elilum survived all of it, absorbed all of it, and remained standing. It suffered defeats, paid tribute, bowed, retreated into the mountains, but it never vanished. And one day came the day when

the Shadow Twin decided it had enough of paying other people's bills. What will happen when Elum finally comes to collect its own debts? The day of reckoning came in the 12th century BC and it came in the guise of a man named Shutuk Nakunte. By this time, Elilum had ceased to be merely a rival in the mountains. It had taken shape as a true empire, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the outskirts of what is now Hamadan. And this empire came into Mesopotamia no longer for Lapis Lazuli. It came for revenge. Shut Nakunte invaded Babylonia, crushed its ancient cities, Cypar, Kish, Opus, and did the thing that turned him into a

nightmare for all of Mesopotamia. He carried the chief holy relics of Mesopotamia out of the temples and took them home to Susa as spoils of war. What exactly did he take? the statue of Marduk, the supreme god of Babylon, the very heart of its faith, and the stale with the laws of Hammurabi, that same black stone pillar with the most ancient code of laws studied in every school history lesson. Picture that scene. The greatest treasures of the cradle of civilization now stood not in Babylon, but in the Elumite capital, like loot on display in the victor's museum. Among the trophies was also the stale of the victories of Naramsin. That very Aadian king who had once bound Elum with a

treaty of friendship. Now the monument to his glory stood in Susa in the hands of a former vassel. The wheel had turned all the way around. And here is a detail that sends a chill down the spine. The Staley of Hammurabi was found by archaeologists in our own time. And it was found not in Babylon where it was carved, but precisely in Susa, where Chutuk Nakunta had dragged it 3,000 years ago. The Elumite trophy lay in the earth for 30 centuries and surfaced from the place where this forgotten power had hidden it. History sometimes leaves signatures like that. This was the peak, 200 years of Elilumite greatness. It was in that era that not far from Susa, Choa Zanbil rose. a giant temple complex with a ziggurat

at its very heart. Its base is more than 300 ft wide. Its height about 130 ft, taller than a 10-story building. It was raised from millions of bricks in honor of the gods worshiped all across Elim. And here is what astonishes most of all. It still stands. 3,000 years later, having outlived all the empires that came after, the Elumite ziggurat still rises above the plane, a silent witness to a power everyone has forgotten. Today, it is one of the best preserved ziggurats on earth, and the finest of all that have survived anywhere beyond Mesopotamia. It seemed such a power could not be broken. It had outlived Sumer, outlived Akad, held Babylon in fear, and kept its gods as trophies. It stood longer than anyone in this region had any right to

stand. But everything that rises so high one day falls, and ruin would come to Elum, not at once, but much later, and from a wholly unexpected side, through loyalty to a single ally, a loyalty that would in the end turn into salt upon the ashes. Who was this ally, and why would devotion to it prove deadly? This ally was Babylon. Yes, that same Babylon whose cities Elilum had once smashed and whose gods it had dragged off to Susa as trophies. How did sworn enemies end up in the same harness? Time turned everything over. Between Elilum's flowering and its fall lay centuries. Elilum itself had overstrained at its peak. The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar I defeated it and took the statue of

Marduk back. And for almost 300 years, the Highlanders dropped out of the great history barely discernible in the Chronicles. And when Elum rose again, the world around it was unrecognizable. Because in the north, a new unprecedented force, had grown up. Assyria, the most merciless war machine of the ancient world. In the face of this predator, the old scores between Elilum and Babylon, suddenly lost all meaning. Simply surviving became far more important. And yesterday's enemies turned into allies. Again and again, the moment Babylon rose against Assyria, Elilum stood beside it shouldertosh shoulder. The logic was simple. A common enemy, a common border, a common fear. But this loyalty dragged Elum into someone else's war. A war with

no end. Babylon rebelled against Assyria. Elilum came to the rescue. Assyria took revenge and the blow fell on Elim. For a time, the Highlanders held on and held on stubbornly. In the year 720 BC, at the second battle by the fortress of Dair, the Elummites, in a most grueling engagement, dealt the Assyrians a real defeat. Again and again, the moment Babylon raised its head, the Elumite army came down from the mountains to help it, and the Assyrians had to start all over again. But with Assyria, such things never came free. It always came back and came back stronger than before. It all came to a head under a king named Asher Banipal, the most powerful and the most educated of all the Assyrian rulers. When Babylon

rose in revolt yet again, and this time it was led by the Assyrian king's own brother, and Elilum, faithful to its duty as an ally, once more came to the Babylonians aid. Asher Bonipal concentrated the whole might of his army on a single goal to wipe Elum off the face of the earth. In the year 639 BC, Susa fell. And what Asher Banipal did next was the demonstrative destruction of an entire people. The Assyrians raised the city to the ground. They opened and desecrated the tombs of the Elumite kings to rob even the dead of their peace. And the last word over a trampled Elilum belonged to Asher Banipal. He swed the land of Elum with salt so that nothing would ever grow on it again. Think about that gesture.

You can kill an enemy. You can burn his cities. But to sew his land with salt is to say, "I have not merely defeated you. I have struck you out of the future. Here there will be no bread, no life, not even memory ever." 2,000 years of history, its own writing, its own great cities, its own temples taller than 10story buildings, the gods of Babylon as trophies, and all of it broke off in salt upon the ashes and the ravaged graves of kings. This was the end. At least that is exactly how it looked that day to everyone who stood on the smoking ruins of Susa. But Assyria made one single mistake. It believed that Elilum was dead. And the dead, as would soon become clear, know how to wait. And they know how to return from the place no one

returns from. Only 15 years had passed since the death of Asher Bonipal. And the thing happened that on the day Susa fell, no one would have believed. Assyria, that very Assyria that had swn Elim with salt collapsed. And in the coalition of peoples who together finished it off and leveled its capital, Nineveh to the ground were the Elummites too. Shoulderto-shoulder with the Mes, the Persians, and the Babylonians. The country that had been struck out of the future was with its own hands burying its executioner. Revenge came from the grave and then the Persians came to this land and here history makes its main turn. The Persians did not destroy the heritage of Elilum. They absorbed it.

They made Susa one of the capitals of their vast empire. Its economic records were kept in the Elilumite language. Thousands of clay tablets of the Persian chancellery are written in the script of those very highlanders. They inherited the Elumite administrative tradition, its crafts, its images. The whole experience of governing vast lands accumulated over 2,000 years. The Elummites never became Persians by blood. But everything Elilum had built went into the very foundation of Persia. Here is the answer. Elilum lost almost all of its wars and yet won history. It was impossible to kill because there was no need to defeat it in battle at all. It simply dissolved into the victor and went on living

inside him. Assyria vanished without a trace. But Elilum through Persia reached all the way down to you and me. You could put it this way. Elilum did not die. It merely went on indefinite leave. From this very land, from these very cities, there will very soon rise a man named Cyrus who will build the first world empire in history. But that is a wholly different story and we will tell it in the next video.