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Assyria was the first true empire in human history. A state that invented cavalry and siege towers, conquered Egypt, created provinces, state highways, a professional standing army, and built the first library ever known to exist without which we would know nothing about the Sumerianss, nothing about Gilgamesh, nothing about the mathematics of ancient Mesopotamia, everything we think of as empire from Persia and Rome to the American melting pot was built from the Assyrian blueprint. And this nation was hated so deeply that after its fall, the victors leveled every Assyrian city to the ground, demolished its temples, looted its royal tombs, and scrubbed its very name from human
memory. For 2500 years, local people walked over the hills that buried these palaces and had no idea what lay beneath their feet until one day an English lawyer named Leard stuck a shovel into one of those hills and uncovered two royal palaces. Today we are going to tell you the remarkable story of how three small cities in northern Iraq built a machine that everyone would copy. From Nebuchadnezzar to Alexander the Great, why was the most influential civilization of the ancient world erased from history so thoroughly that it was forgotten for 25 centuries? And how did a king who kept captive rulers chained in cages simultaneously save 4,000 years of human knowledge?
Assyria did not appear out of nowhere. 5,000 years ago, while the Sumerianss were building their first cities in southern Mesopotamia, people already lived in the north in the upper reaches of the Tigris. Three cities, Asher, Nineveh, and Urbil formed a small triangle where two great trade routes crossed. One running from Iran to Lebanon, the other from Anatolia south toward the fertile plains. Assyria sat at that crossroads, and in the beginning, it was a trading hub above all else. Specific families crafted their trade techniques to outco compete the locals, passing on their fortune and knowledge over generations. Assyrian merchants established outposts deep in what is now Turkey, a family enterprise stretching across hundreds of miles. But
the north had a problem that would define everything that followed. The land here was nowhere near as fertile as the south, where sumeare had once risen. Down south, you could harvest four crops a year on rich aluvial soil fed by river floods in a climate with practically no winter. The north depended on that southern abundance. And that meant one thing. Sooner or later, the Assyrians would have to take the south by force simply to feed their growing country. Assyria was already gaining strength in the second millennium BC. But then came a catastrophe that hit everyone. Around 1,200 BC, the Bronze Age collapse began.
200 years of chaos during which nearly every major civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean was destroyed. Myini fell. The Hittite Empire vanished. Egypt lost all its colonies. In some regions, even writing simply ceased to exist. Assyria suffered too. It lost all its territories and shrank back to that same small triangle, Asher, Ninevea, Herbiel. But it survived, possibly because of the very toughness that would later become its calling card. And when the darkness began to lift around the 10th century BC, the Assyrians found a completely transformed world around them. The region had filled with new peoples. From the south, the Calaldanss had arrived and settled across Babylonian territory.
Between Syria and Mesopotamia, the Arameans had spread out dozens of small aggressive kingdoms. In the land of Canaan, the ancestors of the Israelites had established Israel and Judah. To the north, Uratu had grown powerful. The old order had collapsed. But the Assyrians had something no one else did. Clay tablets bearing treaties 300 years old and an absolute conviction that those treaties were still in force. A thousand years before, it was trade that had helped them flourish. Now it would be war making. How exactly did the Assyrians turn ancient clay tablets into the right to conquer the known world?
The Assyrians would arrive at the walls of a foreign city, pull out their tablets, and declare, "300 years ago, you swore allegiance to our king." You know that words written in clay are a language the gods themselves can read. Your oath was not just a promise. It was a sacred covenant. For 300 years, you have not paid tribute. You did not merely break a treaty. You committed blasphemy. To an outside observer, this looked absurd. Three centuries had passed. Generations had turned over. The people living on these lands were already half different, and no one remembered any oaths. But for the Assyrians, this was deadly serious because behind this logic stood their religion. The god Asher, the supreme
deity of Assyria, was not a god of war. Even though the Assyrians waged war without pause, Asher was a god of order and justice. He had created the world, established its structure, and any violation of that structure was an insult to the divine plan. Asher did not merely stand above other gods. He held the title god of gods. Not father of gods as in Sumerian tradition, but god of gods. A claim of an entirely different magnitude. And here is the key. Asher was linked to the sun. The sun casts light. Light reveals truth. Truth demands justice. Justice demands punishment for those who break the order. a logical chain that turned every military campaign into a sacred duty.
The Assyrians did not revel in cruelty in their chronicles. They described flayed skin, pierced nostrils, and shattered bones in a cold, bureaucratic tone. This is how it must be. This is fair punishment for blasphemy. We would prefer not to do this, but the divine order of things leaves us no choice. And if you look at the image of Asher, a winged figure inside a solar disc, and then look at the symbol of Ahura Mazda, the supreme god of Zoroastrianism, you will see virtually the same thing. When the Persians, a sun worshiing Aryan tribe, arrived on these lands centuries later, the Assyrian Asher fit perfectly into their worldview. Even the name Ahura Mazda carries an echo of Asher.
The religion the Assyrians built around their god of order outlived Assyria itself and transformed into one of the greatest faiths of the ancient world. But in the 9th century BC, the Persians were still far off. The Assyrians had a more pressing problem to solve. How do you dominate a region when you have a small country and many enemies? They found the answer in two animals that changed the rules of war. During the dark centuries of the Bronze Age collapse, two quiet revolutions took place in the region. The first was the domestication of the two humped camel. And in fact, the English word camel itself traces back to the Assyrian
Gamaloo. The camel was useless in battle, but it was a true ship of the desert. Its carrying capacity and ability to cross rough terrain dramatically extended the range of army supply lines. Before the camel, everything was hauled on donkeys, small horses, and mules. And the radius of military campaigns was limited by how far you could stretch a food caravan. The camel removed that limit. That is why the Assyrians suddenly began launching campaigns over distances unthinkable in earlier eras. Into Iran, into Uratu, all the way to the Lebanese coast, and down to the Persian Gulf. The second revolution was the horse. Until this period, horses had been too small for combat use. Donkeys were sturdier and it was donkeys people rode into
battle. But during the Assyrian era, breeders began producing larger, stronger horses, and the Assyrians became the first to turn cavalry into a serious branch of the military. The evolution happened in stages. In the 10th and 9th centuries, cavalry functioned like draons. Riders would approach a position, dismount, and fire their bows on foot, while every fourth man in the unit did not fight at all. His job was to hold the horses so they would not bolt. In the 8th and 7th centuries, archers began shooting from horseback without saddles, without stirrups, gripping the hor's sides with their legs. That is when, by the way,
the Assyrians invented pants. Because galloping on a horse in a traditional Mesopotamian skirt turned out to be impractical. And at the very end in the 7th century, heavy shock cavalry appeared. Mounted warriors with spears striking downward-like hoplights only from horseback. Not yet the lance charges of medieval knights, but already a genuine fighting cavalry. On top of this came siege engines, battering rams, siege towers, dedicated engineering units. The Assyrians created the first professional army recruited not from peasants pulled off their fields, but from trained soldiers. At its peak, the empire maintained roughly 200,000 men, a figure confirmed by the sources. Not all
in one place, of course. These were garrisons spread across the empire, border forces, the royal guard. But for comparison, most medieval European armies did not come anywhere close to those numbers. Feeding this machine required staggering resources. A single border arsenal and there were several consumed roughly 93,000 lb of barley and 77,000 of fodder per day. about £170,000 of food every single day for one military base. This army subdued the Aramian kingdoms, crushed Uratu and seized the Phoenician cities on the coast. But the greatest achievement of the Assyrian kings was not on the battlefield. It was what they did with conquered territory. And it was here that Assyria took a step that would
change the concept of statehood forever. So what exactly did they come up with? Under Tiglath Plesa III, starting around 744 BC, Assyria stopped being merely a powerful state that defeated its neighbors. It became something fundamentally new, a system for managing space. All conquered territories were divided into three categories. If a city was loyal and had not been caught violating treaties, the Assyrians left local government in place. If there had been a king, the king stayed. If there had been a council, the council stayed. The only conditions, follow Assyrian law, feed the Assyrian garrison, pay tribute, a light touch. If loyalty was in question, the Assyrians removed the
local government and installed a puppet. but a clever puppet, usually someone from the local opposition. The nephew, who had been waiting for years for his uncle, the king, to die, would receive the throne from Assyrian hands and owe them for the rest of his life. To the city, he was one of their own. To Assyria, he was under control. And if a city rebelled, they sent in a unic, a specially trained crisis manager who could not have children and therefore could never found his own dynasty. The unuk ruled with absolute authority and reported directly to the royal court. Assyria had an entire training center for these administrators. In effect, the first school of colonial governance in
history. The country was divided into more than 20 provinces. And here is a detail that shows the level of political thinking involved. If a province contained a large, trouble-prone city, the provincial capital was not that city, but a purpose-built new administrative center. Small, insignificant, populated only by officials. The goal was to pull power away from the dangerous hub and anchor it in a controlled location. Across the empire stretched a network of state roads with checkpoints, relay stations, and stables. Provinces were required to maintain the roads. Neglect was punished by death. Along the roads stood royal granaries to supply the armies. Reports from the provinces flowed continuously to the capital. But the most
revolutionary step was the deportations. Deportations existed before Assyria. People were resettled as far back as Hammurabi's time. But the old deportations were a blunt instrument. Drive out the locals. Move your own people onto the good land. The Assyrians thought in completely different terms. For them, deportation was a way to mix everyone with everyone. People from Siden were resettled in Mesopotamia. People from Mesopotamia were sent elsewhere. People from Iran were moved to the coast. And here is a formula that survived in a report from one Assyrian governor. I resettled the Arameans here and counted them all as Assyrians. Think
about the ideological magnitude of that step. Assyria refused to divide people into conquerors and conquered. It aimed to absorb everyone, assimilate them, forge them into a single nation. During resettlement, people were given new Assyrian names, issued tools and livestock from royal arsenals, and crucially had all their debts erased. A person trapped in debt slavery received freedom and a fresh start. Think of citizen of the French Republic. Think of the Soviet concept of the Soviet man. Think of the American melting pot. All of it traces back to the Assyrian blueprint, 3,000 years old. Assyria was the first to declare that an empire is not just territory you have conquered.
An empire is a new identity you create. But this machine had one architect without whom we would know nothing about it or about anything that came before it. How could one person keep captive kings in cages and simultaneously preserve 4,000 years of knowledge? Asher Banipal, who ruled from 668 to 631 BC, was strikingly different from every Assyrian king before him. He did not enjoy leading armies personally. He delegated that to his generals. He stayed in Nineveh, performed rituals, hunted lions, conversed with scholars, and read. He'd been taught to read and write from childhood. His tutor was his father's court astrologer, and he was fiercely proud of it. In one inscription he boasts, "I can read cleverly written
texts in obscure Sumerian and in Acadian which is difficult to master. I have carefully studied inscriptions on stones from before the flood." And here is what he did. He issued an imperial decree ordering that clay tablets be sought across the entire territory of the state and delivered to Nineveh for study. Valuable texts were purchased. Scribes copied the originals and stamped every tablet with a royal bookplate, the first in history. The inscription read, "Whoever dares to carry off these tablets, may Asher and Belit strike him with their wrath, and may his name and his heirs be cast into oblivion." This is how the library of Asher Baranipal was born. The first systematic collection of texts in history. Roughly
30,000 tablets, historical chronicles, geographic references, medical treatises, mathematical problems, Sumerian dictionaries, legal codes, astronomical observations, predictions based on the endrails of sacrificial sheep, and literature, including the epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving work of literature in the world, inscribed on 12 tablets in tiny Cooney form, a thousand years older. than Homer's Iliad. Clay turned out to be the perfect storage medium. Papyrus rots, parchment burns. But a clay tablet baked in a fire, even the fire that destroyed the palace where it was stored turns into terra cotta and can survive underground for thousands of years.
Thanks to the obsession of one king librarian, we know about the Sumerianss, about Akad, about Babylon, about the flood, about Gilgamesh, about everything we covered in our previous episodes. Without Asher Baripol, 4,000 years of history would be a black hole. And yet this same man kept captive kings chained in cages at the gates of Nineveh where they were forced to grind the bones of their own ancestors in mortars. One of the reliefs from his palace preserves a scene that says more about Assyria than any textbook. The king reclines on cushions in a garden. Servants fan him with feathered fans. He sips wine. Birds sing in the trees. And hanging from a
branch nearby is the severed head of the king of Elam, suspended by a hook through his nostrils. Ashabanipol died in 631 BC. And barely 20 years after his death, the greatest empire of the ancient world would cease to exist. What could kill a machine that seemed invincible? The Assyrian chronicle breaks off in 631 BC. abruptly without explanation. After that, silence. Everything we know about Assyria's final years comes from its enemies. The problem was baked into the empire's very foundation. The same cruelty that allowed cities to be subdued without a fight. Flayed skin draped over city gates, pierced nostrils, columns of prisoners with their faces sewn shut generated a hatred that built up over centuries. As long as
Assyria was strong, that hatred stayed quiet. But the moment an alternative appeared, there was no stopping it. The alternative came from the east. The Mes and Iranian people from the Zagros mountains began attacking the empire's perimeter. And instantly, like clockwork, Babylon rose up. A city that had rebelled with every change of Assyrian king for 300 straight years. Babylon, which had always considered itself the cultural capital of the region, and look down on the Assyrians. Yes, you are stronger, but you are barbarians. You use our craftsmen. You decorate yourselves with our art. Babylon struck an alliance with the Mes. And the end began. In 612 BC, the combined forces of Babylonians and Mes
laid siege to Nineveh. The siege lasted 3 months. When the city fell, the victors did not simply loot it. They methodically destroyed everything. The temple of Asher, the supreme god around whom all of Assyrian ideology was built, was reduced to rubble. The royal tombs were looted and demolished. The core cities of Assyria, Asher, Nineveh, Nimrude were leveled. A final attempt at resistance, relocating the capital to Haron, collapsed in 609 BC. Assyria was not just defeated. It was erased. And it was done with the same methodical brutality the Assyrians themselves had been famous for. Three centuries of fear turned into three decades of vengeance. And then something remarkable happened.
On the ruins of Assyria, Babylon flourished. the new dazzling Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar II. And Nebuchadnezzar did exactly the same things the Assyrians had done. Deportations, provinces, uniform laws, the same blueprint. But people loved him for it. The very same deportations that were considered evil when Assyria carried them out were accepted as perfectly natural when Babylon did them. The Babylonian captivity of the Jews was an Assyrian practice carried out by yesterday's Assyrian officials following Assyrian procedures. When the Persian king Cyrus arrived later, he simply utilized the existing system of governance. The province system worked and was turned into the satropes system.
The roads existed. The granary stood. The Assyrian blueprint had outlived Assyria and kept running in someone else's hands. And Assyria itself had vanished so completely that 2500 years later, local people walked over the hills that buried its palaces and had no idea what lay beneath their feet. In 1839, a young English lawyer named Henry Leard was walking across scorching sand near Mosul. He had abandoned his legal career, enchanted by the East since childhood through the tales of 1,01 knights. He had prepared thoroughly, learned Persian, trained himself to use surveying instruments, studied tropical diseases. Near Mosul, he was drawn to a hill where, according to local legends,
mysterious blackstone figures lay hidden underground. But he had no money, and he returned to Constantinople empty-handed. A few years later, everything changed. A French archaeologist named Paul Emile B had found an Assyrian palace. It was a global sensation. The British could not let the French get ahead. The ambassador handed Leard £60, next to nothing, and sent him back. Leard returned, bought a rifle, told everyone he was going boar hunting, hired six Bedawins, and within 24 hours of digging, uncovered the walls of two Assyrian palaces. The local shake could not believe it. My father and my
father's father never heard of these palaces and you came and pointed your stick at the right spot. Then came the winged bulls, colossal sculptures called Shedu and Lamasu that had guarded the entrances to royal palaces. Then thousands of relief panels that had once blazed with every color imaginable, but reached us bleached white. Then those rooms ankled deep in broken tablets. The library of Asher Banipole. 30,000 clay books that overturned everything we thought we knew about ancient history. Leard shipped the finds to London on rafts made of inflated goat skins down the Tigris. Then 15,000 m around Africa because the Suez Canal did not yet exist. Today they stand in the British Museum.
The story of Assyria is a story about ideas outliving the people who created them and the people who tried to destroy them. The Assyrian kings for all their power turned out to be small compared to what they invented. Nebuchadnezzar copied their blueprint. Cyrus of Persia based his empire upon their system. Alexander the Great upon entering Babylon married his generals off to local women following the exact Assyrian formula for blending nations. Roman provinces, Persian satropies, the American melting pot. All of these are echoes of decisions made in a small triangle between Asher, Nineveh, and Urbil 3,000 years ago. And in 2015, ISIS fighters rigged Nimrude with explosives and blew it up. The city layered had
painstakingly excavated. Palaces that had survived 26 centuries. What the Mes and Babylonians could not fully destroy was destroyed by men in suicide vests. But 30,000 tablets still sit in the British Museum. And the blueprint still works because empires fall but ideas do not.
