Month: January 2026

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.

Continue reading “When balance failed (4): Elam and the politics of containment”

In the previous installments, we saw how the Late Bronze Age balance of power collapsed, and why Urartu — despite its proximity and military competence — could never become a true counterweight to Assyria. In this episode, we turn to a very different kind of rival. If Urartu threatened Assyria from the outside, Babylonia challenged it from within.

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.

Continue reading “When balance failed (3): Babylonia as the rival within”

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.

Continue reading “When balance failed (2): Urartu and the limits of reactive power”

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.

Continue reading “When balance failed (1): Assyria’s rise to hegemony”