History of the World Chapter 5: The Jews and The Destruction of the Old World (Patreon)

The Bronze Age collapse left the Greater Middle East a primitive husk of what it once was. The edges of civilization, Anatolia, Greece, India, Syria and even the Levant had collapsed into anarchic barbarism. Civilization had retreated to its original heartland, the river valleys of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates. However, even these old civilizational heartlands, there simply was not the psychological force to regain their old position. Similarly to Europe after the World Wars, the societies that had seen millennia of effort go to waste were unwilling to start from square one again. Egypt would never again own a colonial empire and Babylon’s fields still lay covered in salt. In its Phoenix like state, civilization, like it always has, has been able to revive itself and spread beyond the bounds of the lands that used to constrain it. With the disruption created by the fall, new players would come and take the lead of Near Eastern power. The eventually most important of these would have gravely surprised the world of that era. Size is not always indicative of importance and sometimes the physical world can be brought to heel to the mental and spiritual.

The Jews are brought onto a Stage they will never leave

The years after the Bronze Age collapse were chaos throughout the whole region. The only equivalent that we can imagine that would even come close to what they experienced would be a nuclear war. The world inhabited by those generations after 1170 BC must have been similar to post-apocalyptic films of our era like “Planet of the Apes” or “Mad Max”. The barbarians actively destroyed the cities of the region, which due to the palace nature of the societies, in which the urban elites predominated meant that societies returned to the barbarian level. Iron had a great democratizing effect but in a society of half-barbaric peasants, democracy didn’t mean progress. The only remaining urban centers of civilization remained along the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile, with a few Syrian cities surviving as well. Even inside Mesopotamia, the Assyrians had to pull back to their homeland, leaving North-Western Mesopotamia in the hands of Syrian tribes.

South of the Syrian states, after the Collapse, the Egyptians pulled out of Canaan. After centuries of foreign dominance, the Canaanites finally gained independence once again. They could not keep their homeland to themselves, the Sea Peoples, spurned from Egypt, settled as close as they could on the coast of modern day southern Israel. They formed a series of wealthy trading states there and came to be known as the Philistines. Canaan also faced an invasion from the eastern desert as well, the cradle of all the Semitic invasions. They eventually, through one way or another, came to conquer the whole region and became the dominant ruling culture. Strangely enough for history, in which peoples and empires come and now its impunity, this people are still here today, more than 3,000 years later, with the same identity. They were the Jews.

The first thing to consider about this era of history is that we in fact know very little. Considering this was a Dark Age 3,000 years ago, that is no way surprising. However, due to the cultural, political and religious importance of the issues involved, the different positions are debated and fought with a contention not found in any other region of the world up to this point in history besides perhaps with the Egyptians. To understand this era, we will frequently turn to the Bible due to there being so few sources to work from at all.

According to the Jewish traditions, they were originally descended from the patriarch Abraham, who came from Ur in Sumer and migrated into the Arabian desert around 3,000 BC to escape the abominable religious practices of the native Sumerians. Genetics of the supposed descendants of Abraham demonstrate that there is a shared Y chromosome male ancestor in this region during the Bronze Age, which lends the story a certain Creedence. Much to the chagrin of devout Jews, this Y chromosome is also quite common among Muslims in the region.

There is practically no evidence for the Arabian origin of the Jews. On the other hand there is none against it and a huge historical precedent for it. As we have seen, Semitic tribes continually poured out of the Arabian peninsula into the neighboring more fertile regions. The Chaldeans, Akkadians, Hyksos and in later years, the Muslims of Muhammad’s time all did the same thing. If there is any one lesson in this book, it’s that there always is yet another barbarian invasion. In Jewish myth, the Jews came into Egypt to flee starvation at the invitation of Joseph, a Jew who had become the chief minister of Egypt. For an insular and conservative society, Egypt was surpassing welcoming to sharing its fertility with immigrants. Unluckily for them, according to the Hebrew Bible, the Egyptians then came to enslave them.

In actual history, when the Hyksos came down into Egypt from the Levantine deserts, they brought a related tribe known to the Egyptians as the Hibiru, possibly the ancestors of the Jews and the origin of the word Hebrews. Living a similar nomadic lifestyle to the Hyksos and likely being a related tribe gave them the position of tax collectors in the barbarian controlled Egypt. This, however, had the result of when the Hyksos lost power it made the Hibiru completely despised by the native population. However, Egypt was not a slave based state in the same way the later Greek and Roman states were. The Jews may have been a subjugated buffer state on the Eastern fringes of Egypt, forced to pay high tributes to the central government. This may have been exaggerated by later Hebrew storytellers to dramatize the tale and thus turned into the slave narrative.

As Egyptian power went into a brief lull, likely around 60 years before the Bronze Age Collapse, it allowed the Jews to leave into for deserts of the Sinai and Arabia, living in the way that their ancestors originally had before they had come to Egypt. In Jewish myth, they were led by the mythical patriarch Moses, who led them for 40 years, from slavery in Egypt to the verge of Canaan. Although we cannot trust the Bible as a direct source, there is the possibility to divining some sense from it. The plagues that struck Egypt that allowed the Jews to leave can actually be attributed to the eruption of mount Thera mentioned two chapters ago, down to the plague of frogs, who would flee the ash choked rivers. Disease often follows natural disasters due to the chaos and hunger that inevitably follows. The escape across the Red Sea can be attributed to a small corner of the Red Sea where the tide is great enough to move an army in and out in a day and then be inaccessible the next. The 40 years in the desert is likely representative of the generation lived in the desert to replenish numbers before the next wave of young men made an invasion practicable. Also, in the polygamous society that was Old Testament Israel the pressures for young men to find a wife would have been higher.

Canaan was inhabited by many disparate city states, the most easterly, Jericho, renowned for its’ great walls. At the time Jericho was already one of the longest lasting cities ever at 7,000 years old. The Jews laid waste to Jericho and moved into the fertile (at least by their standards) land. The archaeological records demonstrate a destruction of the cities of the interior of Canaan around roughly the same time as the Bronze Age Collapse. Th Sea Peoples hugged the coast, thus, it seems plausible it was the Jews who did it. Under the leadership of the mythical leadership of Joshua, they defeated the Canaanites in numerous battles. According to the Jews themselves, they killed a huge number of the native population, especially the men, while marrying the women. This is a very common historical pattern, one we would later see with the Conquistadors in Latin America and the Anglo-Saxons in England. It seems that the Canaanites remained a large portion of the population, being a majority in large sections of the countryside.

At least, that seems like the most likely option. We really don’t know what happened. There is a large school of people who believe that the Jews were endemic to the region and never migrated in. This is of course possible, but strikes me a bit as part of the anti-migration and anti-conquest school of archaeology that has been popular in academia since World War in which the onus of proof always must be definite for invasions and migrations, processes which are very plentiful inside the historic record. If this population is claiming to have invaded the region from outside, while cities are burning and a new culture appears in the region, the onus of proof seems to be on the argument against conquest.

After the conquest of Canaan, the Jews discovered a new rival in the form of the Philistines. So hated and decried in modern western civilization, they have become a synonym for someone with no respect for art or culture The greatest irony is that with advanced trade, iron weapons and chariots, they were more advanced than the Jews and thus it is strange that they are the ones viewed as barbarians. In fact, the level of artistic skill among the Philistines was far above that of the Jews. Interestingly enough, the name Palestine derives from them. Due to the predominance of Greeks in the later stages of the Sea People’s migrations, there culture was Greek for all practical purposes. If he existed, Goliath probably had a grandfather who fought at Troy. Due to these military advantages, they were initially the dominant in the region, leaving the Jews to the relatively unimportant interior.

Around 1,000 BC, David, known famously as the slayer of the giant Goliath, united the disparate Jewish tribes into a confederacy and fought the Philistines. Like the myth, where the sling wielding boy David defeats the armored giant Goliath, the poorly armed Jews defeated the Philistines using clever tactics. The Philistines were not destroyed, merely forced back onto their coastal cities, while the Jews controlled the hinterland. He went to war and conquered the surrounding Semitic and Aramaic states like Moab or Edom. When he was finished a veritable Jewish kingdom was carved out in the Southern Levant. He made Jerusalem, an old Canaanite city, into the capital of the state. David then descended into tyranny over his new population, ending with the most heinous sin of all, according to the Old Testament at least, creating a census to number his population. This would be the first step towards developing a tax system. For a recently nomadic people who had very little concept of national cohesion, this was too much and David died unpopular among the Jewish people.

God enters the play

David had a son, Solomon. Solomon’s reign has reached likely undeserved fame for being the ruler of a small kingdom in the 10th century BC. He maintained the Jewish state in its brief heyday, when it was nearly an empire. He used religion as a tool in many different ways to unify the Jews in a way that his father failed to do. We mustn’t forget that the Jewish state, even in its hinterland, was a very diverse state. The Jews had supposedly 12 tribes among them and as was shown in his father’s reign, a contentious and freedom loving people. The Jews likely weren’t even a majority inside their own homeland, with the native Canaanites still likely forming a majority. I’ve even heard the interesting theory that the Old Testament emphasis on female subservience in marriage was so the Hebrews could breed as much as possible so that they wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the Canaanites. Besides these, the Israelites had to share their kingdom with other Semitic and Aramaic peoples, Phoenicians, Philistines and Neo-Hittites (surprisingly enough, the Hittites actually had settlers in this region that survived past the collapse of the Hittite empire and formed ethnic Hittite cities). To unify these peoples into a centralized community, he tried to unify and classify the Jewish religion.

This was a polytheistic age. Gods existed for every purpose or thing. The Jews were polytheistic but were less rich in diversity than the other surrounding cultures. With a few other gods, especially a powerful fertility goddess named Asherah, the Jewish pantheon was dominated by Yahweh. Often cruel and vengeful, he is a very different image from that Christians and Muslims follow today. He shares more in common with the cruel and vindictive Mesopotamian or Greek gods than with the loving God of the New Testament. Yahweh was a powerful masculine God that was more like a tiger that had to be continually fed so not to destroy humanity than a loving father. Once the Jews arrived in the Canaan, there was a preexisting native god named El. El was likely combined with Yahweh to produce the God of later Jewish history.

The unified Jewish kingdom made a centralization of the religion. Solomon built a large and quite expensive temple that broke the back of the country. He maintained large population levies to raise the manpower for the project and actually taxed the people. In fact, the cost of creating the temple bankrupted the nation and left the finances in a poor place upon his death. He was widely hated upon his passing, but the endless resources he doted on the clergy created positive impression for the rest of history since the priests were the ones keeping the records. Thus he is remembered as the wisest king in history and given undue representation for being a king of a minor realm around 1,000 BC.

The religion became based out the centralized temple complex in Jerusalem. Like most other ancient peoples, the Jews had a priest class that performed the necessary complex rituals that kept the rain falling. Interestingly enough, this priest class, or the Cohens, have a still identifiable Y chromosome today. This resulted in the centralization and thus creation of a single Jewish belief system. This structure was suspicious of the native Canaanite belief structures. The nature based Baal spirits likely appealed to the country-folk. Also, if we’re being brutally fair, the rites for Canaanite worship included orgies and public prostitution while Judaism involved adhering to a complex and strict legal and moral code. This resulted in the Abrahamic abhorrence of worshipping other gods, which did it a world of good in later history. The Jewish identity became to be formed around the religion, with it becoming the central facet. If Solomon had never created this religious structure, the Jewish ethnicity would have fallen apart 2,500 years ago.

After his death, Solomon was lionized by the rest of Jewish history. This wasn’t helped by this being the last good era the Jews would have for a very long time. After Solomon’s death the Jewish state divided into two, with Israel in the north and Judea in the South. The North was significantly better led, under the leadership of king Rehoboam, but the writers of the Bible were from Judea and thus his name has been erased from Jewish history.

You may be wondering why I’ve just devoted 7 pages to a minor kingdom in a backwater 3,000 years ago. The answer is you’ll find out. In a very long time (blame reality, not mine).

Around Africa, to Britain and India

The collapse of strong central empires didn’t just allow the Jews to found a kingdom, it also allowed the Phoenicians to exist. They were culturally very similar to the Canaanites and were a Semitic people likely native to the region. They were an extension of Mesopotamian civilization, with a similar religious structure. They lived in modern Lebanon, a small sliver of land of fertile land squeezed between the mountains of Syria and the Mediterranean sea. It’s little wonder that they chose the latter option, taking to the sea.

The Phoenicians were natural traders. They started out by trading an expensive purple dye made from oyster shells that came from the waters near their home. After the collapse of Mycenaean Mediterranean power, it left the sea open to Phoenician dominance. Their main cities home cities, like Tyre and Biblos, became enormous centers of trade and wealth. In fact our word for Bible comes from Biblos because it was a such a large scroll manufacturer. During the Bronze Age collapse, the only region in this part of the world that didn’t see its cities wiped out, for one reason or another, was Phoenicia, which gave them an enormous advantage. Like all good businessman, the Phoenicians tried to not let war get in the way of money and so never united or waged offensive wars of conquest in the attempt to become an empire.

Due to being the first truly navigator people, the Phoenicians were the first people to break out of the greater Near-Eastern box that had been civilization for thousands of years. They smashed through the box totally, settling on the far side of the Mediterranean, predominantly in Carthage in modern Tunisia. From there they created colonies across North Africa, all the major islands of the Western Mediterranean and Spain. They started out as trading centers with the native population. If some local tribes had iron, the Phoenicians would build some shacks next to the coast to buy it. These shacks quickly became bustling cities, with such large population and economic power that they were able to dominate the region economically. They would hire the native population as mercenaries and include their kings into Phoenician alliances. It was actually quite similar to the later American Empire, which used its economic might and generous vassalage terms to dominate the world.

In sheer amount of distance they covered, the Phoenicians truly blow the mind. Based out of their colonies in North Africa and Spain, they sailed as far as Britain in Europe, trading for tin on Scilly isles off Cornwall. Under Hanno, they sailed down the African coast all the way to modern day Liberia. Using Jewish ports on the Red Sea, they reached India in the East. The final tour de force was under the pay of pharaoh Necho of Egypt, around 200 BC, they circumnavigated Africa, 1700 years before the Portuguese did the same! It took them 3 years and they actually sowed crops along the way to feed their voyage, but it was done. From some eery artifacts, coins, and inscriptions found in America and Brazil, many think that the Phoenicians actually reached America. The only thing I have to say is that if anyone could have done it before Columbus, with the exception of the Vikings, it was the Phoenicians.

The Phoenicians made a major advance for civilization, the improvement of writing. In the days before, all the writing systems of the world were cumbersome affairs, all pictographically based with hundreds or thousands of different symbols to be memorized. This meant that in the civilizations of the time, writing was mainly limited to those who could spend their youth devoted to their study. This resulted in writing mainly being the skill of priests and bureaucrats. The Phoenicians, however, being practical merchants who needed to be able to keep accurate records, developed a whole new system. All sounds were split into 24 characters, which were combined to create different sounds instead of a single character for each concept. This greatly simplified writing, thus allowing a much larger percentage of society to learn it. The Phoenician alphabet evolved into the Latin, Hindic and Islamic alphabets that dominate most of the world today. The Chinese are practically the only ones that stick to a pictographic system of writing.

The Jews become “civilized”

As the Phoenicians wandered the far reaches of the world, Jewish society continued to mutate after the rule of Solomon. As they marched towards civilization from nomadic barbarism, the very civilize disease of inequality started to take over. The descendants of the subject peoples were of course subjugated, but wealthy Jew also oppressed poor Jew. Poor farmers, without the security net of wealth often became indebted to the wealthy and unable to pay off their debts became slaves in turn. From the fairly equally poor nomadic culture came a society with rich and poor, with a landed aristocracy and priest class coming to power. As is almost always the case, the priests were in bed with the wealthy, supporting the rights of property with the beams of God.

This did not pass over well and the outrage of the people was heard in a list of self righteously angry figures called the prophets. Their names are Elijah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Amos, among others. They are among the figures known more to modern Christians for the names they’ve given Bible chapters than for what they actually said. They extolled the rich for treating the poor more like cattle than men. They were embittered to a law that allowed this to happen and sided with there rich. They wanted to “Bring the Jubilee”, reviving an archaic social practice in which property ownership would return to its previous owner every 60 years. They raved the most however at the priests that supported the wealthy over the poor. They likely had the effect of keeping the religion strong among the poor while those of the other main civilizations around them degenerated into mental games for the priests and superstitions for the peasants. This is the first example in history I know of of popular involvement in religion rather than treating it as a divine insurance plan. They predicted that living in a manner so discordant with God would result in the Jewish state being crushed in the near future.

Of all things one could say about the Jewish prophets, being wrong about the future is not one of them. The Jewish state was crushed, not to return for 3,000 years, but instead of fire and brimstone, man destroyed it.

Outside of a Puny Part of the Levant

When the smoke cleared from the Bronze Age collapse, the only state that was in a position to revive as powerful empire was Assyria. Babylon had lost any sense of martial virtue and half their land was salt, Egypt had grown disillusioned from empire and those were the only important nations left. The Assyrian empire had a few rocky starts. It was able to reconquer Northern Syria, giving them a puny coast with the Mediterranean, but after that began to stall. The first 250 or so years, those between 1000 and 750 BC were spent trying to hold onto these lands and were rife with succession crisis. Whenever the court would fall into one of these, the Aramaean Syrians would just rebel, thus forcing the Assyrians to reconquer them when the civil war would end. Plus, the Assyrians really didn’t have any strong military advantage over any of their enemies.

If the Phoenicians knew how to trade, the Assyrians knew how to wage war. They made a series of military innovations that made them unparalleled in the world for the next few hundred years. The Assyrians were the first civilized nation to realize what the Iron Age meant militarily. The Iron Age meant that large armies of well armored medium quality troops came to dominate the battlefield. At the time, most developed militaries were leftovers of the Age of the Chariot, with a small cadre of noble charioteers and a vast mass of conscripted peasant spearmen. The Egyptians moved away from this a little, with large amounts of hired foreign mercenaries, but the Assyrians migrated onto a completely new continent. The Assyrians developed the first standing, professional, military in history. The entire army were professionals, their work was literally to kill. The bulk of the military force finally mattered rather than a small cadre. The aristocratic armies of the Bronze Age were replaced by ranks of iron clad spearman and swordsman. The Assyrians were the first civilized nation in the region to arms their entire forces in iron weapons and armor. This conferred massive advantages upon them. The nobility in Assyria were never again able to attain the rank they did before the Bronze Age Collapse, but they ruled over much more land. This was also compounded with a highly advanced supply network, the best of their age. Rank in the Assyrian army was based off talent, not birth, something that would have been unimaginable in the Age of the Chariot, thus meaning Assyrian leadership was often very good.

Over thousands of years, horses had been bred to the point at which they were large enough to be ridden, instead of merely pulling chariots. This made cavalry a more important arm than the chariot, with greater mobility and ability to traverse rough terrain, while being much cheaper. The Assyrians learned this lesson, initially having a chariot force, but slowly increasing the number of horseman until the chariots themselves were gone. The chariot, which had been the single most important tool in warfare for a thousand years had been shoved into the ash heap of history.

The Assyrians became masters of breaking sieges. Ever since the Sumerians had first built walls, people had had great troubles breaking them down. One of the reasons in the Bronze Age wars were mainly fought in the borderlands and not hinterlands was that the technology for walls was simply so much more advanced than that to knock them down. It was easier and more economical to fight in the field than to get involved in a protracted campaign of conquest. The Assyrians mastered this, with their advanced supply systems, they could outlast the defenders. They perfected battering rams and siege towers. They even had cadres of men who would try to hack walls apart with axes!

An Endless list of Bloody and Futile Conquests

These advantages united with a string of military geniuses for kings, their names Tiglath Pileser, Ashurbanipal, Sargon 2 (who actually conquered more than his namesake) and Essarhaddon, meant that the Assyrians conquered the entire Near East. Babylon was subjugated, the Phoenician states conquered and a host of other small states that are forgotten by history like Samarra and Edom. The kingdom of Babylon was abolished, with the king of Assyria replacing the royalty. The Assyrians conquered the northern Jewish kingdom, Israel with fair ease. They deported 27,000 Jews to Mesopotamia so to break the spirit of the people so they would not rebel again. They then pushed south towards the other Jewish kingdom, Judea. They laid siege of Jerusalem, but their army was cut down by plague and pulled back to defend another part of their empire. On the second try, they were able to conquer the city and Judea and the Jewish people came under the heel of the invader, thus fulfilling the prophet’s prophecies. The Assyrians then pushed pushed south, conquering Lower Egypt. Egypt for centuries had been ruled by a Nubian dynasty that had maintained Egyptian civilization and gradually assimilated. The conquest of Egypt was crippling for the Assyrian supply chain and resulted in an Imperial overstretch. Which resulted in the next and much more difficult part of Assyrian history, failing to maintain the conquests they had gained through their wonderful military by a bad civilian policy.

The story of the Assyrian empire was that of unceasing war against the entirety of the surrounding world and on every frontier. It was almost as if the nature of the universe was to crush Assyria and only the leadership and cruelty of the Assyrian kings and stalwart bravery and skill of their troops prevented this. As we will see, this would be a very flattering view for the Assyrians and ignore their culpability in creating an environment in which rebellion would be so rampant. To put these wars in chronological order would be a likely futile effort that wouldn’t convey the age well. The endless list would be quickly forgotten and so instead I will chronicle them geographically.

Babylon and Egypt never made good subjects. They had histories and culture dating back to when Assyria was a collection of huts on the frontier. Several times a generation, these provinces would rebel against the central authority and try to regain independence. However their military skill was so much worse than the Assyrians that they were continually crushed every time they tried. The Assyrians were cruel rulers, but they were even more cruel avengers. Whenever a city would rebel, they would either butcher the population or deport its population to some far corner of the empire. Their cruelty made them infamous, all the way down to the present. If a single adjective is attributed to the Assyrian empire today, it is cruel. They even took pride in it, with the commemorative stellae in the Assyrian capital bragging about their various atrocities. Imagine if Hitler or Stalin, instead of trying to hide their atrocities, made enormous memories to commemorate them. The kings of Assur, like the later Mongols, viewed it is as a deliberate tactic, one that kept the native population too scared to rebel again. It in reality had to opposite effect, embittering the native population. They would remember their oppression and try again when the next leader would tempt rebellion. In both Babylon and Egypt, the same singular individuals lead three separate rebellions since the hate for the Assyrians was so great. The Assyrians never destroyed the native leadership, meaning there was always someone to lead the rebels.

The apex of the Assyrian cruelty was the destruction of Babylon in revenge for a revolt. Babylon was the apex of culture and had always been there. The Babylonians were of the same basic culture as the Assyrians, the same monuments that mattered to the Assyrians mattered to the Babylonians. This was why the torching of Babylon was the famed evil atrocity it was at the time. The modern equivalent would be the Americans nuking Paris or Rome. It was so terrible that the next Assyrian king afterwards immediately started the process of rebuilding the city, which was happily able to recover.

It’s easy to judge the Assyrians purely by their cruelty. This isn’t by most of the records of their existence coming from their opponents. However, the Assyrian Empire was also a remarkably clean kingdom, with aqueducts quenching their well maintained and large cities. The library of Nineveh was the largest on earth. If rules were followed and cities remained loyal, the Assyrian Empire was a remarkably peaceful and stable place to live. However, we must trust the evidence given to us by the actions of its subjects and come to the conclusion that when all was said and done, all these benefits, added with the fear of Assyrian retribution were sill overruled by the hate the Assyrians provoked inside their empire.

Having conquered the entire lowlands of the Fertile Crescent, the kings of Assur were faced with the mountains to the North and East. To the East lay the kingdom of Elam, an ancient realm that dated at least as far back as Sumer, but is still shrouded in mystery. The Elamites helped Babylon in one of its rebellions, thus provoking an Assyrian invasion. After a series of very long and bloody wars, the Assyrians conquered Elam. They committed what practically amounted to genocide, wiping out the population. This left the hills bare of population. Thus came to be destroyed a people as old as history. The Assyrians, unable to control the wasteland they had made, left the land uninhabited. The Persians, an Indo-European horse tribe from the East used this opportunity to settle the hills, becoming loosely an Assyrian client state. They would eventually be the ones to end this whole struggle for Mesopotamian civilization.

To the north of Assyria lay the powerful mountain kingdom of Urartu, Hurrians, relatives of the Kassite rulers of the Mittanni. It was in the high Caucasus, astride the Caspian and Black Seas. They had united the warlike mountain tribes into a centralized nations. Being a competitor, the Assyrians incessantly invaded them. The Urartans fought heroically, using their massive fortress network and natural defenses to bleed the Assyrians dry in bloody invasion after bloody invasion. The Assyrian’s tactics worked poorly in the mountains and the valley dwellers were continually outfought by the mountain men. The Assyrians then mustered an enormous army and drove on the Urartans. Through a Pyrrhic victory, they were able to crush the main Urartan army in the mountains and destroy the greatest temple alongside the impressive fortress network. They reached the Caspian Sea in modern Azerbaijan like a half dead men with frostbitten toes, the soles of his shoes worn out, an eye gone and 3 arrows sticking out of his back. The Assyrians returned to their homeland with only a skeleton of the force they went into the mountains due to a combination of the fierce tenacity of the defenders and winter snows. Urartu as a whole remained unconquered. Conquering and subduing every hill fort of that vast land would have required a force the Assyrians simply couldn’t muster. Although Assyria’s martial vigor and military capabilities were drained in countless wars, if one had to be chosen to be especially crippling, it would be in Urartu.

In another example of the Assyrians being better soldiers than statesmen, the defeat of a united Urartu resulted in a power vacuum that put Assyria in even greater danger. Bands of tribes from the Balkans crossed into Anatolia, founding the competing kingdom of Lydia. They continued into old Urartu, founding Armenia, a state that through many tribulations survives even today. North of the Caucasus, in the old Kurgan and Yamnaya homeland, another barbarian horde was preparing for conquest. The larger horses that allowed the Assyrian state to produce to its cavalry conferred upon the nomads an even more incredible advantage. Now their entire militaries could ride in the saddle, bow in hand and gain the same mobility that only the chariots of old used to have. This new combination of incredible mobility that range allowed the nomads to ride circles around their settled opponents, wearing them down with missile fire. The new Scythian tribes drove the Cimmerians off the steppe and southwards. With the strong nation of Urartu crushed, nothing stopped the Cimmerians from continuing their journey, reaching the boundaries of the Assyrian Empire. They crushed the Lydian kingdom in Anatolia, using it as a base for their further conquests. The king of Assyria, rallying his beleaguered nation to put forth yet another army. To understand how difficult this challenge was, the same nomadic tactics that the Cimmerians used were still defeating civilized armies in the 17th century after Christ, against armies that had gunpowder and drilled formations. Only the Assyrians, the greatest military the world had seen, could have pulled it off. For a brief time the great tyrant had turned into the shield of civilization, The Assyrians were finally able to defeat the Cimmerians, although it took all their strength. They met them at a battle in a pass in the Taurus mountains in modern day Southern Turkey and defeated them.

The ceaseless warfare had weakened the Assyrian state. The army was majority non-Assyrian at this point, meaning that the average soldier likely had more sympathy with who he was fighting rather than his masters. The terrible ill-will they had built up over time meant that once they lost the force to enforce their will, the Assyrian Empire was doomed by internal rebellion. This started when the third rebellion in Egypt in 15 years finally worked. The Egyptians, led by Necho, led a successful revolt against the Assyrians. They pushed north, moving into the Levant. At this point, the Assyrians, having to fight the Egyptian threat, lost Babylon to yet another revolt, losing the Assyrians the lower half of Mesopotamia.

The steppes are an endless faucet of tribes and likely caused by the implementation of horse-archers, yet another tribe replaced the place of the Cimmerians. These were the Medes, another Indo-European people, this time from Central Asia, who settled in the eastern lands of old Urartu, in modern day Western Iran. They were nomadic horseman who subdued the old kingdom of Urartu and the new Persians in old Elam. When they arrived on the scene, Assyria was fatally weakened, like crows feasting on a body, allied with the Babylonians and Egyptians to bring it down.

No final battles or heroic last stands brought honor to Assyria’s martial history when its end times came. The three armies came together and destroyed Assyria thoroughly. In 619 BC, Ninevah, its capital, burned for days and when the dust cleared, nothing remained. Archaeology shows that even glass melted in the conflagration. When Xenophon and his Greeks marched through the region in 400 BC and saw the ruins of Nineveh, he asked the locals who built them. They replied the Medes. Almost certainly their ancestors, the memories of even an Assyrian Empire had been forgotten by their descendants in less than two centuries. To remember that Assyria fell from world dominance to a pile of rubble in only 30 years is to learn a lesson in humility.

The Swan Song of the Land Between the Rivers

The world that came out of this chaos mainly favored the Babylonians. The entirety of the Asian empire fell into its control. The Medes contented themselves with a good portion of the treasure and returned to their mountains. Egypt was content with retreating to its heartland in Africa. This left the Babylonians the remnants of Mesopotamian civilization. For a matter of a few generations, they would rule the Near East in Peace, a surprisingly quiet final chapter for the age old Mesopotamian civilization.

The Jews, with central authority collapsed, once again became independent. The Babylonians, like the Assyrians, conquered them once again. When they rebelled and were crushed, the Babylonians destroyed the temple upon which the Jews based their worship and deported their entire population to Babylon. The Babylonians were tired of the insubordination and constant struggle of keeping the Jews down and so simply tried to import them into Mesopotamia and assimilate them into Babylonian culture.

The Babylon the Jews saw was something that very few of them would have even imagined before. The massive city and advanced civilization would have boggled the almost entirely country Jewish bumpkins. The Babylonians built wonderfully, ranging from the mighty Ziggurat of Marduk to the gates of Ishtar. The prior likely inspired the story of the tower of Babel, when man tried to build a tower to reach the heavens and his hubris was so great that God created all the languages of the world so to confound him. When the king Nebuchadnezzar’s Medean wife missed the mountains of her homeland, he built the Hanging Gardens for her. These were enormous irrigated gardens in the shape of mountains of Medea placed in the Mesopotamian plain. However, what would shock them more was the state of Babylonian civilization, in complete decline.

It was a slow rot, one that was created by an unreformed Mesopotamian way of life stretching back thousands of years with little change. It has been commented many times here that the Babylonians had long since lost any military valor they had, however at this point they had stooped to complete decadence. Class division likely reached its ecumene in all history. Slaves had become the vast majority of the population, around three-fourths, not landed serfs, simple slaves with no stake in society. The “free class” did almost no work and contented themselves with leisure. Babylonian Epicureanism and decadence was legendary. Marriage completely collapsed, with men and women coupling and breeding freely. Religion had collapsed into stodgy orthodoxy combined with more superstition than actual belief. Living the pious life was based off paying enough priestly bribes to protect against “evil spirits” and looking sufficiently pious. A positive side effect of this was the advancement of astronomy due to astrology. Writing and education were tightly controlled by the priest class, which had prevented any artistic, intellectual or theological growth in thousands of years. There is a reason monotheism came about in Persia and Judea, not the priest controlled civilizational heartlands of Mesopotamia and Egypt. The priests had in fact gained far more control over the society than the kings. The priests managed the banks, the fortune of the common people, the law, art, the sanctity of law (for the king only ruled in the name of the patron gods), the educational system, the maintenance of the national culture, much of the land and finally and most ironically, religion. The kings meanwhile only raised taxes and fought wars. Babylon was the last remnant of a civilization that had gone on too long, one that deeply needed renewal.

It is no wonder that the Jews, upon seeing this with their pious and rustic worldviews called Babylon the whore of civilization and cursed it. With the loss of the temple in Israel, what was originally the center of the religion, the Jews based their religion off new things, namely the holy stories that they had always had. The Jews feared assimilation into the civilization that they despised, having their children grow up Babylonian. They were disgusted and worried by the multiplicity of cultures and nations they found, all so different from Israel. Thus, to maintain their traditions, the Jews wrote down the main tenets of their faith and the myths of their nation. This is how the Old Testament of the Bible came into creation. Dozens of synagogues became symbolic of the temple that used to exist in Jerusalem. The Jews grew even more stolid in their cultural heritage, making new Israels in Mesopotamia. Their monotheism became even more stodgy, to reject their other gods that reminded them of the Babylonian ones. They Babylonian captivity had the adverse effect of making Jewish culture even stronger and imposing unity. The Jewish faith and tribe became synonymous, the Jews were the only people in the world who worshipped their God and so came to have the sort of sheer survival power that other larger cultures can only dream of.

The inherent sickness of the Babylonian empire showed that it only lasted 100 years, or a matter of a few generations. It was a placeholder in history, existing for a time when there was little going on in the region due to the slowing of nomadic invasions and it could exist. This meant that they were easily conquered by the Persians led by Cyrus the Great. One of whom’s first edicts upon the conquests was to let the Jews go home to Israel. The last of the Mesopotamian civilizations went away into the pages of history, never to come again. Three thousand years after the initial civilization was to be founded along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, it was to die along those very banks. Who were these Persians, and how were they able to subdue this civilization? What would they bring history? What fate would come to the Jews next? That is another story, one they must share with another people, the Greeks.