In the early 20th century German archaeologists transported the original Ishtar Gate from Babylon, Iraq, to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. In the 1980s the Saddam Hussein regime reconstructed this two-thirds size replica at the entrance to the site. David Stanley, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
On the evening of 9 November 1989, a mid-ranking East German border officer named Harald Jäger made a decision that changed the world.
Jäger had no authority to open the Berlin border. No one in the East German leadership intended it. But when thousands of citizens pressed against the Bornholmer Straße checkpoint, demanding to cross into West Berlin after a muddled government announcement, he found himself trapped between orders from above and a volatile crowd below. His superiors refused to take responsibility. The situation grew dangerous. And so, under immense psychological pressure, he did the unthinkable: he ordered the gates open.
Historians often explain the fall of the Berlin Wall by pointing to long-term structural forces: economic decline, political paralysis, popular dissatisfaction, the bankruptcy of the state. Yet in the end, the decisive moment came down to one man, at one gate, making one choice. And like all of us, Jäger acted according to his worldview: his sense of authority, safety, duty, human dignity, and the limits of obedience.
Macro-history meets micro-history in moments like this.
BCHP 6 (Ruin of Esagila Chronicle), Obverse. Source: Livius.org
When I look back on my university days at VU Amsterdam, one of the figures who left a lasting impression on me was my professor Bert van der Spek. Anyone who studied the Ancient Near East under him will recall his unshakable conviction that Hellenistic Babylonia — so often treated as a footnote between Alexander the Great and the Parthian Empire — was an extraordinary period in its own right. As students, we regularly heard about the massive project he was working on: the edition of the Hellenistic chronographic texts from Babylonia, those fragmentary but invaluable cuneiform accounts that offer a uniquely Babylonian view of the Seleucid and early Parthian world.
At the time, however, this enthusiasm did not quite reach me. I was more interested in what I thought of as “real” Mesopotamia: the world of Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, Nebuchadnezzar II. The world before Hellenism complicated matters, before the “purity” of ancient Mesopotamia was — so I believed — “polluted” with imported Greekness. I was frustrated with classicists who ignored Near East influences of Graeco-Roman civilization, but ironically blind to the richness of the very period that brought these worlds even closer together. It has taken me a decade and a great deal of reading to realize just how naïve this was. The Hellenistic period in Babylonia was anything but a watered-down afterthought. It was a moment of profound cultural transformation. And now, with the publication of Babylonian Chronographic Texts from the Hellenistic Period, the results of many decades of work have finally seen the light of day. Tomorrow, Van der Spek will present his work at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden.
Or maybe it was, but it took me a decade to realise it.
My fascination with the Ancient Near East and the dynamics of political power goes back to my youth, but it deepened during my BA in Ancient History and MA in Ancient Studies at VU Amsterdam. Even then, I found myself drawn to the bigger questions: how states interact, why empires emerge, and how smaller powers navigate their surroundings. When I graduated in 2014, I knew I wanted to contribute to these academic conversations. What I lacked was a feasible research angle that genuinely added something new.
That gap held me back for a long time. I hesitated to approach potential supervisors. Partly out of insecurity, partly out of a misplaced sense that I needed to figure everything out on my own first. So instead, I focused on what I could do: writing blogs and articles, giving lectures, and slowly working out what kinds of questions felt worth pursuing.
In 2024/2025, I applied for a PhD in Humanities Research Grant under the supervision of Bas ter Haar Romeny and Shana Zaia. The application was rejected. Yet rather than discouraging me, the process clarified something I had been circling around for years: this field is where I want to be. The work itself still excites me. And I’m ready to commit to it fully, whatever the conditions.
To borrow Walter White’s line — stripped of all its dramatic context — it came down to something simple:
King Jehu of Israel bows before king Shalmaneser III of Assyria, Black Obelisk, British Museum. GFDL, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Long before Assyria annexed vast stretches of the Near East, its kings shaped the region through contracts. A network of oath-bound rulers formed the backbone of Assyria’s early imperial power. What later became one of history’s most formidable territorial empires began, surprisingly, as a diplomatic one, held together by agreements rather than governors.
In the ninth century BCE, Assyrian expansion moved outward from the Tigris Valley not through the wholesale takeover of foreign lands, but through a web of treaties. When an Assyrian king campaigned beyond his borders, he often chose not to dismantle local governments, but to bind their rulers through a sacred agreement. The local king would remain on his throne, keep his palace officials, and preserve internal autonomy. The state continued to function under its own laws and traditions.
What changed was its foreign policy. The ruler now recognized the Assyrian king as his superior and aligned himself with Assyria’s interests. The result was a form of imperial influence built not on direct rule but on managed sovereignty: kings ruled their own kingdoms, but in matters of diplomacy and war they were tethered to Assyria. The effect was a hegemonic order that allowed Assyria to expand its influence quickly and with remarkable efficiency.
Medes and Persians at the eastern stairs of the Apadana in Persepolis. Photo credits: Michiel Bontenbal
For the last few weeks I’ve been writing extensively about the Assyrian Empire: the first state to dominate the entire Near East, the military colossus whose armies once conquered all lands between Egypt and Iran. We know its kings, its campaigns, its bureaucracy, and its monumental architecture. The stones of Nineveh and Nimrud still bear their names. And yet the man who destroyed Assyria — the one who besieged Assur, helped pull down Nineveh, and ended three centuries of imperial rule — remains almost invisible in the historical record. His name was Cyaxares.
Bust from statue of a 26th dynasty pharaoh (probably Psamtik I), Metropolitan Museum of Art.
When Psamtik I became ruler of Sais around 664 BCE, Egypt was a shadow of its former self. For half a century it had been ruled by the 25th Dynasty, kings from Kush who had briefly restored Egypt’s unity and power under rulers like Piye and Taharqa. Their expansion into the Levant, however, brought them into conflict with the rising empire of Assyria: a contest Egypt would ultimately lose.
Between 671 and 667 BCE, the Assyrian kings Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal invaded Egypt, captured Memphis, and forced Taharqa to retreat south. After their victory, the Assyrians withdrew most of their forces but left behind a network of loyal local princes to govern in their name. Among them was Necho I of Sais, the father of Psamtik.
Ancient Persia usually evokes images of the monumental palaces at Persepolis, the conquests of Cyrus the Great, and the legendary wars with Greece. The Achaemenid Empire is remembered as the world’s first superpower, a realm that stretched from Anatolia to India, commanding the cities along the Euphrates and the Tigris and the rich floodplains of the Nile.
It is mostly the western half of this empire that has captured the imagination of classical history. Yet beyond that well-lit world lay another half: vaster and far less known. At the eastern edge of the Iranian Plateau stretched an immense frontier where the empire bordered the steppes of Central Asia. Here lay the satrapies of Bactria, Margiana, and Sogdia: names that sound almost mythical today. To the Greeks they were remote and strange. To the Persians they were indispensable, though their voices barely echo in the surviving records.
The farther east we look, the closer we come to the origins of Iranian civilization. Long before Cyrus and Darius raised their palaces in the west, these frontier lands had already nurtured a vibrant civilization. One that may have forged the cultural and spiritual foundations of Iran itself. Archaeologists call it the Yaz culture.
Illustration for John Milton’s Paradise Lost by Gustave Doré (1866). The spiritual descent of Lucifer into Satan.
We all know the story. Or at least, we think we do. Once, the brightest of all the angels, Lucifer, grew proud. Unwilling to serve, he led a revolt in heaven, was cast down by God, and became Satan, ruler of hell. The proud light-bearer became the prince of darkness.
This story has echoed through the centuries as the archetype of hubris and humilitation. Its most famous telling is found in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), where Lucifer — or Satan — is portrayed as a tragic, defiant hero, declaring:
“Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.”
Milton’s poetry fixed the myth in the Western imagination: the angelic rebel who fell from heaven through pride. Yet for all its influence, the story of Lucifer’s fall is not found anywhere in the Bible. It is the product of centuries of reinterpretation: an intricate fusion of Near Eastern mythology, Hebrew poetry, and early Christian theology.
Isaiah as depicted in the Sistine Chapel, painted by Michelangelo
The prophet Isaiah is often remembered for his fiery pleas for social justice, urging his people to “learn to do right, seek justice, defend the oppressed, take up the cause of the fatherless, and plead the case of the widow.” Yet he was no hermit crying out from the wilderness. He belonged to the very establishment he condemned. Educated, well connected, and likely linked to the royal court, Isaiah moved among Judah’s intellectual elite, but his prophetic calling was to confront that same elite with their own corruption. Speaking from within the corridors of power, he became the voice of those who had none, denouncing judges, lawmakers, and priests who exploited the poor and twisted justice into oppression.
He warned that Yahweh’s wrath would soon fall upon Judah, yet he never lost faith that Jerusalem and the House of David would endure. Isaiah’s theology held these two truths together: divine judgment is real, but it exists within a covenant that cannot be broken. He was, in short, both a prophet of doom and a guardian of hope, a moral realist in a collapsing world.
A family on ox-cart leaving a captured Babylonian city. Detail from the wall decoration of Tiglat-pileser III’s Central Palace in Kalhu (modern Nimrud), later reused in Esarhaddon’s Southwest Palace. British Museum, ANE 118882; photo by Karen Radner.
Across the shores of the ancient Mediterranean, a quiet revolution once took place. From the ninth century BCE onward, the Phoenicians of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos began to establish new towns and trading enclaves far from home. They built their first stations on Cyprus, then along the coasts of North Africa, Sicily, and Spain. Each outpost — from Kition on Cyprus to Gadir (modern Cádiz) on the Atlantic — was both a port and a cultural bridgehead. Here, Phoenician merchants exchanged goods and ideas with local peoples. Over time, these settlements evolved into enduring centers of mixed identity, culminating in the rise of Carthage, itself the offspring of Tyre.
The Greeks soon followed. From the Aegean and Ionian coasts, settlers from cities such as Miletus, Corinth, and Megara founded colonies across the central and western Mediterranean, from Syracuse and Tarentum in Italy to Cyrene in Libya and Sinope on the Black Sea. These were purposefully founded communities: civic offshoots of their mother cities, tied to them by language and religion, yet politically independent. Each became an island of Hellenic life in a foreign landscape: a place where Greek temples rose beside indigenous shrines and where local artisans copied Greek styles as much as Greeks borrowed from them. Together, these settlements spread not only trade but also a shared visual language and worldview.
While these maritime peoples expanded westward, another power was transforming the lands between the Mediterranean and the Zagros Mountains. The Assyrian kings, ruling from cities like Kalhu (Nimrud), Dur-Šarrukin (Khorsabad), and Nineveh, were not seafarers but empire-builders on land. Through conquest and administration they linked the highlands of Iran with the plains of Syria and the shores of the Mediterranean. Yet their control depended not only on armies, but on settlements: enclaves established to channel goods, monitor borders, and assert imperial presence. The Assyrians called them karû, a word meaning “harbor” or “quay,” which came to designate trading quarters and frontier outposts under royal supervision.
