Sounds on the whole like a crueler, more brutal world...
The Achaemenids brought a decent lot of very much needed peace, integration and security to a depleted, violence-torn Western Asia. Cyrus policies were on the kind side. His successors were on average less gentle, but still usually kept an enourmous empire reasonably peaceful without much bloodshed, and tendeded to refrain from such things as genocide, mass deportation and the like.
The Assyrians were a nastier bunch. Bloodthirsty imperialists whose emperors made a point of terrorizing subjects and enemies alike with accurate reportages of how their military campaigns used to turn into extermination wars and mass-enslavement enterprise. They exaggerated to scare them, of course, but their still showed an unambiguous pride in mass murder.
Their wars of conquest had depopulated large parts of Syria and Mesopotamia and their tributes had almost starved what was left. Of course, if they had remained in charge for a century, the battlegrounds would have moved elsewhere, probably in western Iran, Egypt and Asia Minor, so that Syria and other areas may have recovered.