WI Neo-Assyrian Empire Empire Survives (a little longer) (2.0)

[Gordius]

You are very correct on this. This tends to be a trend among a minority of states throughout pre-modern history. The Neo-Assyrians, Aztecs, Early Mongol Empire, etc... are examples of this trend.

This fact, that you have enunciated well, should be realized as this discussion continues.

It seems to be a repeated tactic in early civilisations. The Aztecs tried to strike fear and awe into the Spaniards with tales of how many people they sacrificed. They claimed to have sacrificed 80,000 in one religious festival. Grisly artwork depicted the fates of those who stood against the Aztecs and their gods. At the foot of the Twin pyramids of the Sun and Moon in Tenochtitlan was an immense carved stone effigy of the dismembered remains of the Goddess of the Moon after her brother Huitzilopocthi cast her remains down the steps of the temple of his birth.

At the temple of Tlaloc they kept jars filled with the tears of sacrificed children (really).

The Qin were a severe nation that dominated China due to their militarist mindset and severe laws. Once in a dominant position they ordered that anyone who owned books that were not mandated by the government would be executed and their books burned. Especially the histories of China before their unification. Chinese philosophers were buried alive in their tens of thousands.

Shang Yangs Law was far too stifling. Art, music, education, merchantilism and many other things were banned. Shang Yang believed that the stupid do not ask questions, they follow orders. He also believed even the dukes should be subject to his Law which eventually got him the Nine Familial Exterminations (his entire family line was murdered, down to 2nd cousins and then he was killed last). Within a few years of Qin Shi Huang Di's death the Qin dynasty was destroyed by an immense rebellion.

Ultimately nations that rule through abject terror require an undisturbed line of highly competent rulers. A weak link in the chain and they would be annihilated like the Assyrians, who were destroyed by simultaneous rebellion and invasion so completely they never rose again, due to a palace coup of a weak successor to Ashurbanipal.

The Aztecs capital of Tenochtitlan was destroyed mainly by the Conquistadors allies, due to their seething hatred of their tyrannical Aztec overlords.

Rule through fear alone is unwise and very risky, though we have the benefit of hindsight to help us make this assessment.

I think the Neo-Assyrians are far too wedded to their brutality to mellow and have no real contemporary examples to learn from. Each king requires a military campaign to cement their rule through terror and the first great defeat will bring the whole thing crashing down. It is always going to end violently for them. If you live by the Sword, you will die by the Sword.

 

[Roger II]

That's sort of the point though isn't it? The idea of the Assyrians as this exceptional case and not say part of a pattern in specific types of state or imperial societies, or for that matter imperial presentation.

 

[John7755 يوحنا]

It seems to be a repeated tactic in early civilisations. The Aztecs tried to strike fear and awe into the Spaniards with tales of how many people they sacrificed. They claimed to have sacrificed 80,000 in one religious festival. Grisly artwork depicted the fates of those who stood against the Aztecs and their gods. At the foot of the Twin pyramids of the Sun and Moon in Tenochtitlan was an immense carved stone effigy of the dismembered remains of the Goddess of the Moon after her brother Huitzilopocthi cast her remains down the steps of the temple of his birth.

At the temple of Tlaloc they kept jars filled with the tears of sacrificed children (really).

The Qin were a severe nation that dominated China due to their militarist mindset and severe laws. Once in a dominant position they ordered that anyone who owned books that were not mandated by the government would be executed and their books burned. Especially the histories of China before their unification. Chinese philosophers were buried alive in their tens of thousands.

Shang Yangs Law was far too stifling. Art, music, education, merchantilism and many other things were banned. Shang Yang believed that the stupid do not ask questions, they follow orders. He also believed even the dukes should be subject to his Law which eventually got him the Nine Familial Exterminations (his entire family line was murdered, down to 2nd cousins and then he was killed last). Within a few years of Qin Shi Huang Di's death the Qin dynasty was destroyed by an immense rebellion.

Ultimately nations that rule through abject terror require an undisturbed line of highly competent rulers. A weak link in the chain and they would be annihilated like the Assyrians, who were destroyed by simultaneous rebellion and invasion so completely they never rose again, due to a palace coup of a weak successor to Ashurbanipal.

The Aztecs capital of Tenochtitlan was destroyed mainly by the Conquistadors allies, due to their seething hatred of their tyrannical Aztec overlords.

Rule through fear alone is unwise and very risky, though we have the benefit of hindsight to help us make this assessment.

I think the Neo-Assyrians are far too wedded to their brutality to mellow and have no real contemporary examples to learn from. Each king requires a military campaign to cement their rule through terror and the first great defeat will bring the whole thing crashing down. It is always going to end violently for them. If you live by the Sword, you will die by the Sword.

True enough. Though, a certain level of terror and repression can be a net gain for a power. It is all within how and when it is employed that decides who survives. Once the externalities are stripped from geo-political posturing, it becomes apparent that; Victory is but luck, it is the one who seizes the decisive moment that grasps the day or as it is said, victory is within the shadow of the sword (to quote some typical sayings of the medieval Arab world).

 

[phil03]

Its an interesting premisse but I need to side with the naysayers here. Even with the very partial sources we have on the period the sheer savage joy that many peoples all accross middle-east felt at the news of the impending doom of the assyrians is a very eloquent testimony of the level of hatred the subjects of the assyrians had for them. Some are litterally talking about dancing in the streets!

At the end the second, and far less know, part of Machiaveli comment on the politics of fear was correct. While usefull fear as its limits, it can only grow so much. Hate on the other hand can grow to almost infinite levels and at some point it outshadow fear completely. The Assyrians had reached that point and then some, revolts where bound to succeed revolts until one eventually succeed. That's where you get when you manage to put peoples in a state of mind where they want to destroy so much that the risks became meaningless.

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

Funny to think the first thread had people imaging the Assyrian Empire lasting another two or three centuries -- as I said then, having both Ashurbanipal's son and grandson being effective rulers in his mold is a lucky enough break without having the empire last another couple of centuries; the empire falling circa 530 BC (instead of 626-600 BC) is lucky enough.

 

[Achaemenid Rome]

That's sort of the point though isn't it? The idea of the Assyrians as this exceptional case and not say part of a pattern in specific types of state or imperial societies, or for that matter imperial presentation.

Well empires are usually a balance between the diplomatic "carrot" and the violent "stick" to keep territories in line, but in Neo-Assyrian Empire's case, there were very few rewards offered and an abundance of violent coercion. It was rather rare for them to offer concessions or rewards to anyone, so they were basically in a constant 3-4 front war.

Other empires also used excessive brutality, but they used it as one tactic of many, while for Assyria it was the first option in almost all cases.

With a notable exception. The one nation that the Neo-Assyrian Empire did treat somewhat fairly (Egypt) became a legitimate ally in Assyria's last hour and tried to fight off the Babylonians.

 

[Roger II]

Fair enough, I'd just seen some pushback on the issue. Is that the case?

 

[Samm]

Fair enough, I'd just seen some pushback on the issue. Is that the case?

In history there will be a little push-back on any issue. I really think that in the case of the Assyrians it is un-called for. They really do seem to have been uniquely hated.

Its an interesting premisse but I need to side with the naysayers here. Even with the very partial sources we have on the period the sheer savage joy that many peoples all accross middle-east felt at the news of the impending doom of the assyrians is a very eloquent testimony of the level of hatred the subjects of the assyrians had for them. Some are litterally talking about dancing in the streets!

Woe to the bloody city, completely full of lies and pillage;
Her prey never departs.
The noise of the whip,
The noise of the rattling of the wheel,
Galloping horses
And bounding chariots!
Horsemen charging,
Swords flashing, spears gleaming,
Many slain, a mass of corpses,
And countless dead bodies-
They stumble over the dead bodies!
All because of the many harlotries of the harlot,
The charming one, the mistress of sorceries,
Who sells nations by her harlotries
And families by her sorceries.
"Behold, I am against you," declares the Lord of hosts;
"And I will lift up your skirts over your face,
And show to the nations your nakedness
And to the kingdoms your disgrace.
"I will throw filth on you
And make you vile,
And set you up as a spectacle.
"And it will come about that all who see you
Will shrink from you and say,
'Nineveh is devastated!
Who will grieve for her?'
Where will I seek comforters for you?"
Are you better than No-amon,
Which was situated by the waters of the Nile,
With water surrounding her,
Whose rampart was the sea,
Whose wall consisted of the sea?
Ethiopia was her might,
And Egypt too, without limits.
Put and Lubim were among her helpers.
Yet she became an exile,
She went into captivity;
Also her small children were dashed to pieces
At the head of every street;
They cast lots for her honorable men,
And all her great men were bound with fetters.
You too will become drunk,
You will be hidden.
You too will search for a refuge from the enemy.
All your fortifications are fig trees with ripe fruit-
When shaken, they fall into the eater's mouth.
Behold, your people are women in your midst!
The gates of your land are opened wide to your enemies;
Fire consumes your gate bars.
Draw for yourself water for the siege!
Strengthen your fortifications!
Go into the clay and tread the mortar!
Take hold of the brick mold!
There fire will consume you,
The sword will cut you down;
It will consume you as the locust does.
Multiply yourself like the creeping locust,
Multiply yourself like the swarming locust.
You have increased your traders more than the stars of heaven-
The creeping locust strips and flies away.
Your guardsmen are like the swarming locust.
Your marshals are like hordes of grasshoppers
Settling in the stone walls on a cold day.
The sun rises and they flee,
And the place where they are is not known.
Your shepherds are sleeping, O king of Assyria;
Your nobles are lying down.
Your people are scattered on the mountains
And there is no one to regather them.
There is no relief for your breakdown,
Your wound is incurable.
All who hear about you
Will clap their hands over you,
For on whom has not your evil passed continually?

Not exactly the most friendly of passages to the Assyrians. It is possible that this particular passage is overly influencing me but I doubt it is entirely untypical. Still it does mention the friendship with Egypt that was mentioned earlier which is interesting. I wonder why Egypt seems to have been so much less hated and more humane than the Assyrians seeing as they existed at the same time.

 

[phil03]

Not exactly the most friendly of passages to the Assyrians. It is possible that this particular passage is overly influencing me but I doubt it is entirely untypical. Still it does mention the friendship with Egypt that was mentioned earlier which is interesting. I wonder why Egypt seems to have been so much less hated and more humane than the Assyrians seeing as they existed at the same time.

It is very much typical, from what I know of it of course.

As for Egypt, it isn't so much that it was particularly humane as an empire but that the assyrians where particularly nasty in every remarks.

Egypt was an hegemonic empire, like most others during the time period. Sure, if you resisted them or revolted you got sacked but when that was over you get to rebuild and restart your lives if you are still free and of this world. Your king will pay tribute to Thebes and provide troops to the egyptian but usually the amount of both tended to be reasonable. The fact that a state paid less on defense and that the egyptian empire created trade routes tended to compensate for that aniway. In any case, they didn't go out of their way to be nasty as a basic political strategy.

Assyria, on the other hand, burned your city to the ground, tortured your peoples in ways that where completely out of line even for the period of the days. They turned the religious beliefs of the defeated state in ridicule and forced the defeated to commit the worst blasphemy they could imagine and/or kidnaped the idols of the defeated folks to put them in Niniveh. Once all that had been done they practiced forced deportation on a massive scale and forced you to rebuild.

As had already been said, according to their own believes their supreme god Assur, god of war (the fact that their supreme god and they're god of war was one and the same really show something unealthy for a society) had given them dominion over the world and that anyone who dared defy such a state of things puted reality itself in peril, therefore that terryfying punitions where not only acceptable but warranted.

 

[Gordius]

After the reign of Ashurbanipal, the kingdom of Elam had been completely destroyed. While this cemented Ashurbanipals rule and ensured he was secure in Mesopotamia the action would lead to the destruction of the Empire as this left a power vacuum in the East that the rising state, that became Achaemenid Persia, could fill.

The immediate threat to Assyria lies on the north east flank with the powerful Median Empire, centred in Ecbatana in Atropatene, that brought down Assyria ITT with the help of the Babylonian rebellion.

The Babylonians were prideful and wary of any chance of independence. Any military campaign conducted by the Assyrians would not push too far away from the region for fear of letting any one of these threats destroy them. Any one of them achieving a minor success would encourage others to act against their hated foe.

A single lion, no matter how strong and proud, cannot fight off a pack of hyenas by itself.

The Assyrians, however, know paths through the mountains to reach Anatolia. Assyria was once a nation of merchants that had trade stations in Anatolia. Likely there were still instructions among the cuneiform tablets about the quickest route for traders. Though at this point the area is plagued by Cimmerians and the corpse of the Phrygian Kingdom. It does not look like a good prospect for invasion. Esharradon and Ashurbanipal had beat back several Cimmerian incursions.

The threat of the Kingdom of Urartu had receded with their subjugation, so there was no immediate threat to the north.

The west had the client states of Phoenicia and Judah (the Assyrians had wiped out Israel) did not seem inclined to do anything but pay their tribute. The King of Assyria was given free reign to "Boil the Seas with his presence" as long as he left them alone.

The Assyrians had conquered Egypt, but had driven out the Kushite Pharaohs (the 25th dynasty and the source of much of the Sub-Saharan Pharaoh art) who had taken control of Egypt when the nation had descended into chaos. The Egyptians had rebelled against the Assyrians, but rather oddly, when they were (inevitably) defeated, the Pharaoh was taken to Ninevah and just told not to do it again.

This relative lenience possibly explains the Egyptians moving to support the faltering Assyrian Empire in its last days (geo-politically they may also have wanted a buffer against the Babylonians and Medes).

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

@Gordius Ashurbanipal's alt successor is certainly going to have a hard time of it, and he, as well as any other more competent sucessor(s), is/are only going to be delaying the inevitable. I don't think anyone disputes that.

What is intersting to think about is how a combination of more luck and competence extends this unchecked cruelty for a little longer, and how those extra decades could change the face of the Middle East for centuries to come -- I've already mentioned the Phonecians and Judeans possibly being finished off; but there's also the matter of how they fare against Cyaxeres, who OTL built the Median Empire (an important precedent for Cyrus); and the general affect besides of a empire maintaining power by way of pure terror for longer, and how that can affect the evolution of affected civilizations down the line.

 

[Gordius]

Phoenicians are difficult to destroy as cities like Tyre are incredibly hard to breach and harder still to blockade given their skill at seamanship. Destroying Phoenicia also would be rather like shooting yourself in the foot. All those workshops making Purple dye and selling it abroad themselves on their established trade routes would be gone. All those opportunities for valuable tribute being thrown away would be like killing the goose that laid the golden egg. The Assyrians were cruel but they weren't stupid, as long as you left the Phoenicians alone they would make you money. Besides they did not prefer to get involved in Imperial squabbles inland. If you throw money at the problem and it goes away then they will carry on as usual.

The Judeans would likely just flee into the craggy hills and wait. Many of their towns and cities were built in out of the way places in rather harsh terrain. Their veneration of the herdsmen and shepherds (they are all over the Old Testament) speaks of folk that idealise the simple life away from the large cities that dot Mesopotamia. They survived many other Empires charging through their lands, the Assyrians were just another to be waited out.

 

[Achaemenid Rome]

After the reign of Ashurbanipal, the kingdom of Elam had been completely destroyed.

The destruction of Elam was overstated by ancient Assyrian propaganda of the time. Elam survived as a kingdom, though it was weakened. Eventually, Elam was partitioned by Babylon and the Medes.

Phoenicians are difficult to destroy as cities like Tyre are incredibly hard to breach and harder still to blockade given their skill at seamanship. Destroying Phoenicia also would be rather like shooting yourself in the foot. All those workshops making Purple dye and selling it abroad themselves on their established trade routes would be gone. All those opportunities for valuable tribute being thrown away would be like killing the goose that laid the golden egg. The Assyrians were cruel but they weren't stupid, as long as you left the Phoenicians alone they would make you money. Besides they did not prefer to get involved in Imperial squabbles inland. If you throw money at the problem and it goes away then they will carry on as usual.

I believe the Phoenician language was already dying, or perhaps already dead, by the time the Assyrians collapsed. I've been looking for when the original Phoenician language, rather than Punic, went extinct, and unfortunately haven't been able to find it. However, it would stand to reason that, since there was no empire after the Assyrians that enforced the use of Aramaic on local populations (Babylonians preferred Akkadian for cultural reasons, while Achaemenids used Aramaic as an imperial lingua franca while tolerating local languages), that most of the expansion of that language must have occurred during the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which is when Aramaization of Mesopotamia occurred, anyway. Phoenicia was completely Aramaic speaking by Hellenistic times. So if Phoenician was still alive by the fall of Assyria, it was very weak.

Of course, that didn't preclude coastal cities from feeling they had a Phoenician identity, even if they had lost the language. Any excuse to rebel against the Assyrians, was used.