Month: May 2026

In my previous post, I explored an alternate timeline in which Assyria and Babylonia remained allies rather than descending into centuries of rivalry. I also speculated that, in the long run, Assyria might eventually come to be ruled by an Iranian dynasty, while Babylonia could fall under Arab rule. At first glance, such a scenario may sound implausible. Why would an empire hand power to outsiders? Why would foreign peoples become the military and political elite of states they once served? Yet history shows that this kind of thing happens surprisingly often.

Perhaps the best-known example is the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt, where Turkic slave soldiers overthrew the ruling Ayyubids and founded a dynasty of their own. Similarly, in the late Roman Empire, Germanic generals evolved from imperial servants into kingmakers, and eventually rulers in their own right. In the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Medes first appeared as suppliers of horses, later as military auxiliaries, and eventually even as royal bodyguards. During Assyria’s final struggle for survival, the peoples of the Zagros played a crucial role: Mannaean contingents still fought alongside the Assyrians, while the Medes ultimately turned against their former masters. And centuries earlier, the Mitanni kingdom seems to have been dominated by an Indo-Aryan military aristocracy ruling over a predominantly Hurrian population.

These examples differ enormously in scale and context, yet they reveal a recurring historical pattern. Again and again, empires elevated foreign warrior groups into positions of military importance, only for those groups to gradually evolve into political elites, and sometimes even inherit the empire itself.

Continue reading “How empires create their own successors”

_{Map of an alternate Near East in 645 BCE, marking the 100th year anniversary of the Assyro-Babylonian alliance.
Assyria is shown in red, with allied and vassal states in light red.
Babylonia is shown in blue, with allied and vassal states in light blue.
Egypt is shown in yellow, with allied and vassal states in light yellow.
Author: Daan Nijssen ©}

In my previous post, I argued that the collapse of the Neo-Assyrian Empire was not caused by a single weakness, but by a long chain of interconnected crises. After revisiting that argument, however, I increasingly came to suspect that many of those problems revolved around one central issue: Assyria’s attempts to dominate Babylonia.

Assyrian kings repeatedly intervened in Babylonian politics, either ruling Babylonia directly or installing unpopular puppet rulers. The result was a cycle of revolts, civil wars, and destructive campaigns that drained Assyrian resources for generations. Elam supported Babylonian rebels in order to create a buffer state against Assyria, dynastic struggles erupted within the Assyrian royal house, and entire reigns were consumed by conflicts in the south.

The most infamous example was Sennacherib’s destruction of Babylon in 689 BCE, which severely damaged Assyria’s legitimacy. Later, the revolt of Šamaš-šum-ukin, Ashurbanipal’s older brother who ruled as king of Babylon, devastated the empire further, until Nabopolassar finally restored Babylonian independence and contributed to Assyria’s destruction.

But what if Assyria had never become trapped in this cycle? What if Tiglath-pileser III had maintained a stable alliance with Babylonia instead of trying to dominate it directly?

Continue reading “What if the Assyro-Babylonian alliance had persisted?”

The flames must have been visible for miles. In 612 BCE, after a long siege, a coalition of Babylonians and Medes stormed the Assyrian capital of Nineveh. Temples burned. Palaces were looted. Statues were smashed or buried beneath rubble. The great imperial city that Assyrian kings had called “the city without equal” was transformed into ruins.

For more than two centuries, the Neo-Assyrian Empire had dominated the Near East. Its armies had marched from the Zagros Mountains to the Mediterranean Sea, from Anatolia to Egypt. Kings such as Ashurbanipal and Sargon II had presented themselves as rulers of the world itself, chosen by the gods to impose order upon all lands. And yet, within a few years, this seemingly invincible empire disappeared almost entirely.

Continue reading “When did the Assyrian Empire start to collapse?”

In the previous post, I argued that Mesopotamian literature of the late second millennium BCE shows signs of an “inward turn”. Characters gradually become more than just pawns: they begin to reflect, doubt, and speak in ways that reveal a rich inner life. This development has been framed as part of a shift in human self-consciousness. Julian Jaynes famously pushed this idea to its extreme, arguing that humans only started developing self-consciousness by the late second millennium BCE.

The fact that, in Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions from the first millennium BCE, kings continuously boast, emphasize their own achievements, and present themselves as decisive actors, seems to confirm this hypothesis. At times, Neo-Assyrian kings sound almost modern. It is tempting to see this as the political counterpart to the literary inward turn: the emergence of something like an “ego” and a growing awareness of the self as an autonomous agent.

And yet, that interpretation is too simple. What changes in the first millennium BCE is not the sudden birth of the self, but the way agency is expressed and recorded.

Continue reading “When kings found their voice”