What If Assyria Didn't Survive Bronze Age Collapse?

The Bronze Age Collapse is generally considered the greatest catastrophic event of the ancient world, greater than the Fall of Rome, greater than any war or plague. The international diplomatic system that connected Egypt, the Hittites, Mycenaean Greece, Crete, Ugarit, the Mitanni, Babylon, and Elam fell into shambles, and every one of the aforementioned polities/cultures collapsed into chaos. Egypt held off longer than most, but still fell apart into an Inter-Dynastic Period. The only nation-state to survive the Bronze Age Collapse was the Middle Assyrian Kingdom. Retreating to their natural borders, Assyria was able to maintain a stable monarchy and field the most powerful army of its day (largely made possible by its political stability). When the outlying regions began to settle, the mass migrations halted, and populations began to rebound, the Assyrians took advantage of their strength and spread like wild-fire, building the Neo-Assyrian Empire which spread from Egypt to Elam, Judah to Armenia.

So, what would happen if Assyria did not survive the Collapse?

I suppose this would occur if the Assyrian king didn't have the wisdom to retreat to their homeland and stretched out their armies trying to maintain their vast territories. Without a concentrated force, the Assyrians fall to marauding migrants like the Phrygians, proto-Armenians, Aramaeans, or Gutians pressured west from migrating Iranian tribes.

How does this affect the coming centuries? Who will fill the vacuum of power in the coming Iron Age? How does this affect the survival of other groups who the Assyrians would come to destroy, displace, or defeat?
 
the problem here is, what caused the collapse. if it was drought/ volcanic eruption etc then it is difficult to change.

without these event thing would be very very different because droughts and eruption change on such a massive scale.
very much unpredictable i would say about what happens.and the assyrians also not surviving would mean the natural events would have been even harsher, even more unpredictable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age_collapse
 
the problem here is, what caused the collapse. if it was drought/ volcanic eruption etc then it is difficult to change.

without these event thing would be very very different because droughts and eruption change on such a massive scale.
very much unpredictable i would say about what happens.and the assyrians also not surviving would mean the natural events would have been even harsher, even more unpredictable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age_collapse

Babylon, located even further away from the Mediterranean, collapsed as well after invasions from several Semitic groups.
 
Wait.
Babylon and Elam did not collapse, at least, not as heavily and, critically, not at the same time the Levant polities did.
The Miceneans, the Hittites and their Syrian vassals like Ugarit, the Egyptian empire in the Levant, and other minor polities, all fell in a very short span of time following the Sea Peoples invasion combined with a mounting pressure of desert (Aramean and others) groups. We know less about Phrygians and other groups in Anatolia, but they seem to fit the same pattern.
This happens in a relatively short timespan around 1200 BC and largely does not affect Assyria, Babylon and Elam. The latter two collapse about two centuries later (while the Iron Age was already in full swing further West) for related reasons (Arameans, Chaldaeans, Iranians invading, new techs coming) but their collapse was not as severe, even if it came after centuries of steady decline.
It is true that Assyria emerged from the whole mess as the stronger player, and there was a moment where, arguably, it could have not saved.
But the two moments should be kept separate.
I'd say that, failing a re-emergence of Assyria, abylon was the most likely emerging force one the dust settles, although it would probably be a VERY different Babylon.
 
the problem here is, what caused the collapse. if it was drought/ volcanic eruption etc then it is difficult to change.
Not necessarily, the question after all isnt how to avoid the bronze age collapse, but how to make it worse. So we dont need to change the drought/volcanic eruption, just make Assyria react badly to it.

I prefer the middle eastern viking aliens theory myself though.
 
Wait.
Babylon and Elam did not collapse, at least, not as heavily and, critically, not at the same time the Levant polities did.
The Miceneans, the Hittites and their Syrian vassals like Ugarit, the Egyptian empire in the Levant, and other minor polities, all fell in a very short span of time following the Sea Peoples invasion combined with a mounting pressure of desert (Aramean and others) groups. We know less about Phrygians and other groups in Anatolia, but they seem to fit the same pattern.
This happens in a relatively short timespan around 1200 BC and largely does not affect Assyria, Babylon and Elam. The latter two collapse about two centuries later (while the Iron Age was already in full swing further West) for related reasons (Arameans, Chaldaeans, Iranians invading, new techs coming) but their collapse was not as severe, even if it came after centuries of steady decline.
It is true that Assyria emerged from the whole mess as the stronger player, and there was a moment where, arguably, it could have not saved.
But the two moments should be kept separate.
I'd say that, failing a re-emergence of Assyria, abylon was the most likely emerging force one the dust settles, although it would probably be a VERY different Babylon.
I feel like a caution should be noted-the Hittites probably didn't fall because of the Sea Peoples or at least not only because of them. Most of the evidence found in the last two or three decades has suggested that the Hitties had serious internal problems in the reigns of Hattusili III and Tudhaliya IV, and the sack of Hattusa may not have been a sack since only the public buildings show evidence of fire and they had already been emptied of valuables and the most important state documents, so there's been a push to suggest that the Hittites fell to internal disintegration rather than external invasions. Which suggests to me that we would need to find ways for the Assyrians to have more serious structural defects or at least for them to weaken internally.
 
I feel like a caution should be noted-the Hittites probably didn't fall because of the Sea Peoples or at least not only because of them. Most of the evidence found in the last two or three decades has suggested that the Hitties had serious internal problems in the reigns of Hattusili III and Tudhaliya IV, and the sack of Hattusa may not have been a sack since only the public buildings show evidence of fire and they had already been emptied of valuables and the most important state documents, so there's been a push to suggest that the Hittites fell to internal disintegration rather than external invasions. Which suggests to me that we would need to find ways for the Assyrians to have more serious structural defects or at least for them to weaken internally.

Right, I was generalizing.
 
Wait.
Babylon and Elam did not collapse, at least, not as heavily and, critically, not at the same time the Levant polities did.
The Miceneans, the Hittites and their Syrian vassals like Ugarit, the Egyptian empire in the Levant, and other minor polities, all fell in a very short span of time following the Sea Peoples invasion combined with a mounting pressure of desert (Aramean and others) groups. We know less about Phrygians and other groups in Anatolia, but they seem to fit the same pattern.
This happens in a relatively short timespan around 1200 BC and largely does not affect Assyria, Babylon and Elam. The latter two collapse about two centuries later (while the Iron Age was already in full swing further West) for related reasons (Arameans, Chaldaeans, Iranians invading, new techs coming) but their collapse was not as severe, even if it came after centuries of steady decline.
It is true that Assyria emerged from the whole mess as the stronger player, and there was a moment where, arguably, it could have not saved.
But the two moments should be kept separate.
I'd say that, failing a re-emergence of Assyria, Babylon was the most likely emerging force one the dust settles, although it would probably be a VERY different Babylon.

Elam was invaded by Kassites during this time, but hung on until 1100 BC when it was invaded by Babylonians.

Babylon technically did not collapse, but declined as its wars with Elam and Assyria continued, Semitic peoples conquered huge swaths of land from the west, and their Kassite rulers were overthrown by native Akkadian-Babylonians which is itself a result of the Bronze Age Collapse.

Perhaps I was wrong in including them with the "collapsed" list, but they certainly were damaged goods.
 
Right, I was generalizing.
Fair enough; I guess I'd rather just be cautious because we don't really know enough about the Sea Peoples to gauge what effects they actually had beyond "piggybacking off broader political issues" and IIRC we know of at least one case where ancient claims about the Sea Peoples don't actually stack up(Rameses claimed that they destroyed Carchemish, but that city actually survived into the Iron Age in reasonable shape). Also IIRC the tech-based explanations for the political changes between the Bronze and Iron ages or the rise of various states have steadily fallen by the wayside but I won't be able to look into that until tomorrow.
EDIT: To stay on-topic I think the easiest way to have Assyria collapse early would be to curb the power of scribes and eununchs, actually-my suspicion is that part of the reason the empire was so long-lived was that it had a very powerful and dedicated civil service that could keep the machinery of government running at least in the Assyrian heartland even in times when there were weak or mediocre kings.
 
Last edited:
Fair enough; I guess I'd rather just be cautious because we don't really know enough about the Sea Peoples to gauge what effects they actually had beyond "piggybacking off broader political issues" and IIRC we know of at least one case where ancient claims about the Sea Peoples don't actually stack up(Rameses claimed that they destroyed Carchemish, but that city actually survived into the Iron Age in reasonable shape). Also IIRC the tech-based explanations for the political changes between the Bronze and Iron ages or the rise of various states have steadily fallen by the wayside but I won't be able to look into that until tomorrow.
EDIT: To stay on-topic I think the easiest way to have Assyria collapse early would be to curb the power of scribes and eununchs, actually-my suspicion is that part of the reason the empire was so long-lived was that it had a very powerful and dedicated civil service that could keep the machinery of government running at least in the Assyrian heartland even in times when there were weak or mediocre kings.

I won't claim expertise, but this seems reasonable enough.
About the Sea Peoples, I gather that they gave the final push to collapse to already fairly rotten structures.
However, the Mesopotamian powers, although seriously damaged, were not devastated by them (the Arameans were fairly obnoxious though) and limped on.
 
Top