When reading ancient Mesopotamian literature, one is struck by a remarkable feature: the gods are not merely distant or hypothetical beings, they constantly appear to humans and speak to them directly. Mesopotamian texts abound with accounts of gods commanding kings to go on campaign, warning of impending disasters, prescribing in detail how temples should be built, dictating laws, or appearing in dreams. Likewise, when kings reflect on their achievements, they do not attribute them to their own judgment or skill, but to the will of a deity who guided them. To act “of one’s own design,” without consulting the gods, is not portrayed as admirable independence, but as a dangerous deviation.

Modern readers tend to treat such passages as rhetorical. Of course the king did not literally hear a god, he merely expressed his decision in religious language. Yet the consistency and seriousness of these accounts raise a more unsettling possibility: what if this was not just a way of speaking, but a way of experiencing? More specifically, what if the thoughts behind these decisions were not experienced as belonging to the individual in the way we assume our own thoughts belong to us?

Continue reading “When the gods spoke to us”

It is by now almost a cliché to say that climate change is one of the defining challenges of our time. Rising sea levels threaten coastal communities, increasingly frequent heatwaves place pressure on public health systems, prolonged droughts devastate agricultural output, melting glaciers destabilize mountain ecosystems, coral bleaching undermines marine biodiversity, shifting weather patterns disrupt global supply chains, wildfires consume forests at unprecedented rates, permafrost thaw releases methane into the atmosphere, vector-borne diseases expand into new regions, and even the humble European beech tree now finds itself under existential stress in soils that are just slightly too dry, just slightly too warm, and just slightly too unpredictable to sustain its centuries-old rhythms.

And yet — if one may be permitted a moment of deeply irresponsible optimism — climate change has at least one unexpected advantage: as rivers dry up, they occasionally give back what they have hidden for millennia. Such is the case with the Euphrates. Over the past months, an unusually severe drop in water levels has exposed large stretches of the riverbed in southern Iraq. While this in itself is alarming for both ecological and humanitarian reasons, it has also allowed archaeologists to access areas that have long been considered unreachable. And it is here — beneath layers of silt, clay, and the slow accumulation of time — that a discovery has been made which, if confirmed, may fundamentally reshape our understanding of Mesopotamian history. A tomb. Not just any tomb, but one that archaeologists are now cautiously — but increasingly confidently — attributing to the semi-legendary king of Uruk: Gilgamesh.

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A case study in early Neo-Assyrian frontier governance

On Tuesday 24 March 2026, I presented a paper at the Oxford Postgraduate Conference in Assyriology as part of my PhD research. The paper examines the case of king Ammi-Baʾal of Bīt-Zamāni, who emerged as an important ally of the Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta II (r. 890–884 BCE). His violent demise early in the reign of Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859 BCE) would have far-reaching consequences for the region.

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In the second half of the ninth century BCE, the political landscape of the Near East was dominated by a single rising power: Assyria. Under kings such as Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859 BCE) and Shalmaneser III (r. 858–824 BCE), Assyria had re-established firm control over northern Mesopotamia. The lands east of the Euphrates were effectively under Assyrian authority, either as provinces or as closely supervised client states. From this secure base, Assyrian armies regularly crossed the Euphrates, campaigning across the Levant.

These western regions were politically fragmented. Instead of large territorial kingdoms, the landscape was dotted with small states: Neo-Hittite principalities such as Carchemish, Hamath, and Patina, alongside Aramaean kingdoms like Damascus and Bit-Agusi. Some resisted Assyrian expansion, others chose accommodation, many shifted between the two. Tributary relationships with Assyria became an increasingly common feature of the political order. It was within this environment that the small state of Bit-Gabbari, also known as Ya’diya, centred on the city of Samʾal (modern Zincirli in southern Turkey), emerged as a minor but interesting player.

Continue reading “Kilamuwa of Bit-Gabbari, the king who hired Assyria”

If you had travelled through northern Mesopotamia in the tenth century BCE, one thing would have stood out immediately: there was no central authority. The region was a political mosaic of small kingdoms, tribal confederations, and local strongmen controlling scattered territories along rivers and steppe margins. None was strong enough to dominate the others for long.

This fragmented landscape emerged in the aftermath of the Late Bronze Age collapse. Until the reign of Tiglath-Pileser I (r. 1114–1076 BCE), these lands had belonged to the Middle Assyrian kingdom. After his death, however, the structures that had once held northern Mesopotamia together gradually unraveled. Fortresses and farming settlements were abandoned, long-distance trade routes became less secure, and Aramaean tribal groups spread across much of the countryside.

In this environment, power rested largely on kinship and local loyalties. Instead of large territorial states, the region was dominated by smaller dynastic polities centred on ruling families and their followers. One of these was Bīt-Baḫiāni, an Aramaean kingdom along the Ḫābūr River whose capital was Guzana (modern Tell Halaf).

Continue reading “Bīt-Baḫiāni, the kingdom that thrived by aligning with Assyria”

Op donderdag 3 september verschijnt bij Uitgeverij Omniboek mijn nieuwe boek Een jaar in Babylon: portret van een eeuwenoude beschaving. Tijdens de presentatie van de zomeraanbieding op dinsdag 3 maart kreeg ik alvast de gelegenheid om iets over het boek te vertellen. Het gesprek vond plaats in de vorm van een Q&A. De uitgeverij had een aantal vragen voorbereid, die werden aangevuld met vragen van de verkopers die het boek straks bij de boekhandels onder de aandacht brengen.

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In the spring of 894 BCE, the Assyrian king Adad-Nerari II (r. 911-891 BCE) marched west into the land of Hanigalbat (present-day Northeast Syria). City after city opened its gates. Rulers handed over tribute. Camps were pitched along the banks of the Ḫābūr River. The king crossed frontiers, entered capitals, and received chariots, horses, silver, and gold.

What is striking is not what happened, but what did not happen. There were no major sieges. No pitched battles. No dramatic massacres. Instead, the royal inscription (r. 97-119) presents a long procession of acknowledgments, negotiations, and submissions. For a tradition famous for celebrating violent conquest, this campaign reads almost like a diplomatic tour.

Why did so many rulers accept Assyrian authority without fighting? And what does this reveal about the nature of power in the early Neo-Assyrian period? To understand this unusual moment, we need to step back from the language of imperial inevitability and look at the political landscape through a slightly different lens: one inspired by International Relations (IR) theory.

Continue reading “The king goes on tour (894 BCE)”

At the start of this series, I asked a deceptively simple question: why did no balance of power emerge in the Iron Age Near East, even though so many strong states existed alongside Assyria? The Late Bronze Age had produced something resembling a diplomatic equilibrium among great powers. The Iron Age, by contrast, seems dominated by a single hegemon that faced rivals one after another, but never all at once.

Over the past installments, we have examined those rivals individually: Urartu, Babylonia, Elam, Phrygia, and Egypt. Each possessed the potential to restrain Assyrian expansion. Each came close, in its own way. None succeeded in producing a stable multipolar order. The answer lies not in the failure of any one state, but in the historical circumstances that defined the Iron Age system itself.

Continue reading “When balance failed (7): A world out of sync”

In the Late Bronze Age (1600-1200 BCE), Egypt had been the single most powerful actor in the Near East. Its wealth, manpower, and administrative reach made it a natural hegemon, and the famous Late Bronze Age balance of power can be read, at least in part, as a mechanism designed to prevent Egypt from expanding permanently beyond the Levant. Great powers such as Hatti, Mitanni, Babylonia, and Assyria negotiated, intermarried, and threatened one another in a system that implicitly acknowledged Egypt’s strength while limiting its freedom of action.

That system collapsed around 1200 BCE. Egypt survived, but it emerged diminished, inward-looking, and divided. When Assyria rose to dominance in the eighth century BCE, Egypt was no longer the stabilizing pole it had once been. Its eventual return to Near Eastern politics would come too late and under very different conditions.

Continue reading “When balance failed (6): Egypt and the return that came too late”

In the previous installments of this series, we examined rivals that clearly shaped Assyria’s rise: Urartu on Assyria’s northern frontier, Babylonia at its ideological and political core, and Elam as a persistent eastern menace. Phrygia is a more ambiguous case. It is rarely treated as a serious rival to Assyria, and even within this series its inclusion is not self-evident. I hesitated to include it.

And yet Phrygia deserves a place here precisely because of its ambiguity. It was an independent regional power that maintained diplomatic relations with Assyria without becoming a vassal. For a time, it shared a frontier with Assyria in the Taurus Mountains. Its rulers chose alliance rather than resistance. And it was the only Anatolian polity that came close to replacing the Hittite Empire. Its disappearance was not the result of Assyrian conquest, but of an external shock. Phrygia did not fail to balance Assyria. I t never had the time to become a balancer at all.

Continue reading “When balance failed (5): Phrygia, the rival that never materialized”