In October 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great conquered the Babylonian Empire in one swift campaign. He defeated the Babylonian army at the Battle of Opis, captured the last Babylonian king Nabonidus, and took the city of Babylon without a battle. The Babylonian Empire thus became part of the rapidly expanding Persian Empire. At least, that is how we usually tell the story. I have often wondered how an empire as powerful and prestigious as Babylonia could fall so easily to a foreign conqueror. But perhaps we have been asking the wrong question.

We know surprisingly little about what actually happened. Our most important contemporary narrative source, the Nabonidus Chronicle, reduces the decisive events to a handful of brief paragraphs. Later Babylonian texts like the Cyrus Cylinder tell us how Cyrus’s new regime wanted his accession to be understood. And Greek authors like Herodotus and Xenophon provide elaborate yet unreliable stories written long after the event. But none of them gives us access to the political calculations taking place behind the scenes.

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Op donderdag 3 september 2026 presenteerde ik in het Rijksmuseum van Oudheden mijn nieuwe boek, Een jaar in Babylon. In dat boek neem ik de lezer mee naar Babylon in 539 voor Christus: het jaar waarin de Perzische koning Cyrus de Grote de stad innam en een einde maakte aan het Babylonische Rijk.

Tijdens de boekpresentatie stond ik stil bij een van de merkwaardigste aspecten van die gebeurtenis. In de beroemde Cyruscilinder wordt Cyrus namelijk niet voorgesteld als de buitenlandse veroveraar die hij was, maar als een bevrijder die met instemming van de oppergod Marduk naar Babylon kwam en door de bevolking feestelijk werd onthaald. Waarom beschreven de Babyloniërs hun eigen veroveraar op die manier?

Hieronder lees je de tekst van mijn toespraak tijdens de boekpresentatie, waarin ik die vraag probeer te beantwoorden. Daarbij gaat het uiteindelijk niet alleen om Cyrus, maar vooral om de Babyloniërs zelf: om hun beeld van hun stad, hun goden en hun verleden, en om het verhaal waarmee zij probeerden te begrijpen dat hun wereld in 539 voor Christus voorgoed was veranderd.

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Around 1250 BCE, the Hittite Empire was one of the great powers of the ancient Near East. From their capital at Hattusa in central Anatolia, its “Great Kings” ruled most of Anatolia and Syria. They corresponded with the rulers of Egypt and Assyria as equals, fought Egypt for control of the Levant, and repeatedly intervened in affairs along the Aegean coast. The kingdom of Wilusa, commonly identified with Bronze Age Troy, belonged to their diplomatic sphere.

Only a few centuries later, however, this empire had almost completely disappeared from historical memory. Assyrian kings still knew a land called Hatti, but by then the name referred primarily to Syria, not to the former empire ruled from central Anatolia. The Hebrew Bible also mentions Hittites, or Bĕnê Ḥēt, but presents them mostly as one of the peoples of Canaan. Nothing suggests that its authors knew of a great kingdom once ruled from Hattusa.

The absence is equally striking in Greek tradition. The Homeric epics preserve a story about a war fought at Troy, yet they contain no recognizable memory of the powerful kingdom that had once dominated the lands immediately to its east and regarded Wilusa as part of its political world.

The name of Hatti had survived, as had scattered cultural traditions. But the empire itself — its capital, rulers and place in the international order — had apparently been forgotten. How could one of the greatest powers of the Late Bronze Age disappear so completely from memory?

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During the tenth and ninth centuries BCE, kings such as Aššur-dān II (r. 934–912 BCE), Adad-nārārī II (r. 911–891 BCE), Tukultī-Ninurta II (r. 890–884 BCE), and Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859 BCE) restored Assyrian rule over much of northern Mesopotamia, laying the foundations of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Their inscriptions suggest that they were well aware of following in the footsteps of earlier conquerors. They repeatedly invoked rulers from the Middle Assyrian period, such as Adad-nārārī I (r. 1295–1264 BCE), Shalmaneser I (r. 1263–1234 BCE), Tukultī-Ninurta I (r. 1233–1197 BCE) and Tiglath-pileser I (r. 1114–1076 BCE), who had extended Assyrian power across northern Mesopotamia centuries earlier.

The early Neo-Assyrian kings recalled lands conquered by their predecessors, cities that had once belonged to Assyria and peoples that had subsequently stopped paying tribute, using these precedents to justify their claims. The Assyrian scribes could apparently connect particular kings with particular places and events.

Such references are often taken to show that the early Neo-Assyrian kings knew the full territorial extent of the Middle Assyrian Kingdom and consciously sought to restore it. There is some truth in this interpretation. Their knowledge of earlier Assyrian rule undoubtedly shaped how they presented their campaigns. But knowing that a predecessor conquered a certain land is not the same as understanding the historical circumstances of that conquest. The Assyrians remembered facts about their past. But did they also understand the world in which those events had occurred?

Continue reading “Did Neo-Assyrian kings remember the Bronze Age?”

When I tell people I specialise in the ancient Near East, they often assume that my fascination must have something to do with the modern Middle East. It is an understandable assumption. I grew up in the shadow of 9/11 and the War on Terror, with Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Syria and Iran rarely far from the headlines. Then, somewhere along the way, I developed a fascination with Assyrians and Babylonians and eventually decided to devote a considerable part of my life to studying them. Surely there must be a connection.

For a long time, I resisted that idea. Whenever someone suggested that studying the ancient Near East must help me understand the modern Middle East, I felt an instinctive urge to point out how different the two are. There are roughly two and a half millennia between the fall of Babylon and the world we see on the evening news. Languages, religions, political institutions and entire peoples have appeared and disappeared in the meantime. You will not understand Saddam Hussein by studying Nebuchadnezzar, nor will an Assyrian royal inscription explain Islamic State.

More importantly, the suggestion seemed to contain an assumption that bothered me: that my interest somehow needed a modern justification. I do not study Babylon because it is useful. I study it because Babylon interests me. Nobody needs to explain why Imperial Rome is worth knowing about by demonstrating its usefulness for understanding today’s Italy. Yet with the ancient Near East, I sometimes feel expected to explain what this rather obscure subject can teach us about the world we live in. “It helps us understand the Middle East today” would provide a convenient answer, but I have never wanted to give it.

And yet I have gradually come to suspect that I was objecting to the wrong thing. There is a difference between studying the past in order to understand the present and acknowledging that the present influences the questions we ask of the past. I may have no interest in turning Assyria into an allegory for American foreign policy, but I am still a child of my time.

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When watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, I noticed something interesting. Nolan seems to place Odysseus and the other returning heroes of the Trojan War firmly within the world of the Sea Peoples: the mysterious seaborne warriors who swept across the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BC and even challenged the mighty Egyptian Empire.

It’s an attractive idea. The Trojan War is traditionally dated to roughly the same period as the Bronze Age Collapse, and some of the peoples mentioned in Egyptian inscriptions have even been linked to the Greeks who fought at Troy. Perhaps Odysseus and his crew were themselves among the Sea Peoples. As it turns out, Nolan is far from the first to make that connection.

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Ask someone about the ancient history of Palestine and they will probably mention the Israelites. Ask about the Philistines and most people know only one story: David and Goliath. And some would probably mention Samson as well.

Yet for centuries the Philistines were among the most powerful peoples of the southern Levant. Their cities controlled international trade, negotiated with Assyrian kings and dominated the Mediterranean coast. Long before Jerusalem became famous, Gaza, Ashkelon and Ashdod ranked among the region’s most important urban centres.

Their civilization eventually disappeared. But although the Philistines themselves vanished, they left behind something unexpected: the geographical name by which much of the region would later become known.

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David is one of the most noteworthy figures in the Bible. He is remembered as the shepherd boy who slew Goliath, the gifted musician who soothed King Saul’s troubled mind, the adulterer whose affair with Bathsheba brought tragedy upon his household, and the pious king traditionally credited with composing many of the Psalms. In both Judaism and Christianity, he occupies an even greater place as the founder of the royal dynasty from which the Messiah was expected to descend.

Yet before he ruled from Jerusalem, David spent years doing something very different. He recruited a private army, forged alliances, protected settlements, raided his enemies and even sought refuge with a Philistine king. Whether these stories preserve historical events has long been debated. But the question of what “really happened” often obscures a more revealing one: what kind of political figure was the historical David? Viewed against the geopolitical realities of the tenth century BCE, he emerges not simply as a legendary king, but as a remarkably successful military entrepreneur who transformed a personal following into one of the ancient Near East’s most enduring dynasties.

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Governors, Local Rulers and the Classification of Neo-Assyrian Rule

On Thursday 9 July 2026, I presented a paper at the conference Order Out of Chaos: Classification and Categories in the Ancient Near East at University College London as part of my PhD research. The paper explores the often blurry boundary between provinces and vassal kingdoms in the Neo-Assyrian Empire and argues for a new interpretation of the role of governors in Assyrian imperial rule.

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For many readers familiar with the Bible, Ahab (r. 874–853 BCE) is remembered primarily as the wicked king who opposed the prophet Elijah and allowed the worship of Ba’al in Israel. Yet this image reflects the concerns of later biblical authors rather than the geopolitical realities of the ninth century BCE.

Viewed through the lens of contemporary Near Eastern politics, Ahab appears as a remarkably capable ruler. During his reign, Israel became one of the strongest kingdoms in the Levant, capable of challenging Damascus, projecting power over its neighbours, and contributing one of the largest contingents to the coalition that confronted Assyria at the Battle of Qarqar.

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