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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ashurbanipal and his queen Libbali-sharrat depicted dining in Nineveh. The severed head of Elamite King Teumman is hanging in a tree to the left, and his hand holding a royal wand is fixed in the tree to the right. British Museum.
In the previous installments of this series, we saw how Urartu failed to restrain Assyria from the outside and how Babylonia — older, richer, and more prestigious — challenged it from within. In this episode, we turn eastward to a very different kind of rival. For over a century, Elam repeatedly intervened in Mesopotamian affairs, shaping the political order of the Near East. Yet unlike Assyria, it never sought to build an empire of its own.
In Mesopotamian sources, Elam often appears as a familiar villain: ruled by treacherous kings, threatening Mesopotamian kingdoms with sudden raids and inconvenient interventions. But this image obscures a deeper reality. Elam was not a marginal spoiler, but one of the oldest and most enduring great powers of the ancient Near East, with its own imperial traditions, strategic culture, and long experience in managing Mesopotamian politics. If Elam never produced balance, it was not because it lacked power. It was because it never sought hegemony — only security.
Babylonia was not a peripheral power. It was older than Assyria, culturally prestigious, economically vital, and ideologically indispensable. Its kingship carried a legitimacy Assyrian rulers could not simply override. Control of Babylon meant access to southern Mesopotamia’s wealth, but also submission to its religious and political traditions. For that reason, Babylonia would prove to be Assyria’s most formidable rival. Even, and especially, during periods when it was formally ruled by Assyrian kings.
In the previous installment of this series, we saw how the Late Bronze Age balance of power collapsed and why the Iron Age Near East proved unable to regenerate a comparable system of restraint. The central question was straightforward but unsettling: why did no new balance of power emerge in the eighth century BCE, even though Assyria faced multiple strong rivals?
Urartu is the obvious place to begin. Of all Assyria’s challengers, it was the most immediate, the most persistent, and — at moments — the most dangerous. Its armies operated close to the Assyrian heartland. Its kings openly challenged Assyrian claims to universal rule. And its rise coincided almost perfectly with Assyria’s renewed expansion in the ninth and early eighth centuries BCE.
And yet Urartu never became the nucleus of a counterbalancing system. It could hurt Assyria. It could destabilize Assyria’s periphery. But it could never replace Assyria, nor organize the wider Near Eastern world against it. The reasons lie not in a lack of ambition or competence, but in Urartu’s structural limits.
In the Late Bronze Age (1600-1200 BCE), the Near East was governed by something remarkably rare in world history: a stable balance of power. Egypt, Hatti, Babylonia, Mitanni, and Assyria recognized one another as peers. They fought wars, but cautiously. They married into each other’s dynasties, exchanged lavish gifts, and corresponded in a diplomatic language that assumed rough equality. No single power could impose its will on the others without provoking a collective response. The result was stability and a lasting peace.
This system not only limited violence, but also actively prevented the emergence of a world empire. The costs of domination were prohibitive. Any state that grew too strong risked isolation, coalition warfare, and eventual exhaustion. Power was acceptable only as long as it remained proportional.
By the eighth century BCE, however, this world was gone. In its place stood an Assyria that increasingly dominated the Near East, facing a range of rivals — Urartu, Babylonia, Elam, Phrygia, and Egypt — yet never encountering a stable counterweight comparable to the Late Bronze Age balance. The paradox is striking. Where the Late Bronze Age produced equilibrium, the Iron Age produced hegemony. Why?
To answer that question, we must begin with the collapse of the old order and with the rise of Assyria before it became the centralized imperial machine we often imagine.
Christ Pantokrator in the apse of the Cathedral of Cefalù, Sicily, Italy. Mosaic in Byzantine style. Gun Powder Ma, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Psalm 2 occupies a peculiar place in Jewish and Christian tradition. It is one of the classic Messianic psalms: in Judaism often read as a prophecy of the coming anointed king, and in Christianity reinterpreted as a vision of Christ’s ultimate victory at the Second Coming. Its language is confident, absolute, and unapologetically violent. Kings are smashed, rebels annihilated, and divine laughter rings out over futile resistance.
That tone sits uneasily with the image of Christ many modern readers prefer: gentle, pacifist, turning the other cheek. Psalm 2 offers no such comfort. It is triumphalist, confrontational, and steeped in the logic of domination. Precisely for that reason, it has often been spiritualized, allegorized, or pushed toward the edges of liturgical attention.
I first became acutely aware of this tension during my university years. I was sitting in the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, listening to Händel’s Messiah, while at the same time studying the ancient Near East and the ideology of kingship and empire. When the baritone began to sing “Why do the nations so furiously rage together?”, I was supposed to hear biblical prophecy set to magnificent music. Instead, something else leapt out at me immediately.
It sounded oddly Assyrian.
The impression was instant. As the music unfolded, the choir hurling out “Let us break their bonds asunder,” and later the tenor proclaiming “Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron”, I could not shake the feeling that Psalm 2 was not merely religious poetry. It was speaking the language of empire.
In what follows, I want to explain why Psalm 2 sounds so “Assyrian,” line by line, and to suggest — carefully, but deliberately — that it may have been composed as a theological response to Neo-Assyrian royal propaganda.
