Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire
3.0 Stars
11-05-2025

I had a potted-history of Assyria in my head, and I wanted to be able to open up and share that potted-history, but I wasn't all that confident in the freshness and accuracy of my information. Hence this book, so that I could educate myself and be a little more confident that I would look a little less of a fool if I spoke about the time period. I shouldn't have worried though.

The book itself, pretty basic. The empire itself, pretty basic. Assyria was a sort of ur-conservative society, with all power concentrated in a king, brutal hierarchies, mass violence and aggression and repression. Predictably it all collapsed in a welter of blood and ruin. Some of the various causes; being hated by all their neighbors, a bad king or two, and the steady decline of the rainfall which was necessary for the system of agriculture used by the Assyrian core. We managed to recover a relatively large amount of the Assyria's writing, since they commonly wrote on baked clay tablets, which don't rot or burn and so can survive basically forever. Impressively, the Assyrians managed to go 2300 years without writing anything interesting. What we do know about them of course is very fragmentary, and we're only guessing about many periods of their history. In the bad times in particular little was written/survived, and so there is just silence about much of it. As with other books on ancient history, it is impressive that we can tell anything at all about a society that existed 4000 years ago, but also much of what we think we know about them is based on the thinnest of reeds.

Edit: OK, to be fair, the Assyrians did help give us any number of mythological monsters. I.e. I'm listening to this history book and they are talking about Nergal, while in the same week I am deeply enjoying my Nurgle play through of Total Warhammer 3.