The first empire

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, archaeology, antiquities, paleography, surveys, biblical connections

It takes a while to read through a 450-page book, even one as interesting and well written as Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire by Eckart Frahm. While Assyria may not be a hot topic to most people, it is familiar to anyone who reads the Old Testament, where Assyria and the Assyrians are mentioned 141 times, and all the Assyrian kings that could be called emperors are named: Tiglath-Pileser, Shalmaneser, Sargon, Sennacherib, Ashurbanipal (called Asnapper in Hebrew), and Esarhaddon. These six "great kings", who collectively reigned from 744 BCE to 631 BCE encompass nearly the entire time span that Assyria can be reasonably called an empire. By 631 the empire had begun to fall apart, by about 620 it was moribund, and by 609 it was no more.

When I saw the designation, "first empire" I thought, "Wasn't Akkadia an empire before Assyria? And could the Sumerians, during their expansion era, be considered an empire?" The author discusses just these things in Chapter 5 – The Great Expansion, which begins the section denoted Empire. He describes a change in style, not just size, that differentiates Assyrian hegemony from the earlier expansionist kingdoms. It is one thing to subdue a number of external polities for the sake of tribute, and quite another to rule them administratively. Having chosen to draw the line there, the author can fairly claim Assyria as the first true empire. In a later chapter he points out that Babylonian, Persian and later empires, right up to modern times, learned administrative and political lessons from the Assyrian example.

I was quite taken by a somewhat side point, that the Assyrian language was, in early and middle times, written in cuneiform on tablets, such as this one from about 1900 BCE. It is housed at The Met.

Clay tablets are durable, so there are tens of thousands of them, in Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and both early and late Assyrian languages. This is a letter about buying textiles.

"Cuneiform" means "wedge writing". The stylus has a triangular profile, and a scribe could write just by tapping. It was faster than you might expect (my brother and I tried to learn to do it, but it takes tons of practice to tap with both speed and accuracy).

Assyrian in particular was to be read from left to right, in lines down the page, like most modern writing systems. The earliest Sumerian tablets, however, were in columns from top to bottom and the first column was on the right, like classical Chinese.

By 2200 BCE, when this tablet was written, Sumerian was also being written from left to right. The content of this tablet, the oldest one in the collection of Cambridge University, is about commercial transactions. Note the difference in scribal style. In particular, this tablet has deliberately inscribed lines between rows of text, while the Assyrian tablet has the glyphs "hanging" from horizontal top lines produced as each glyph is written, much like Sanskrit.

The huge number of tablets that have been found throughout Mesopotamia enable a rich view into the people who wrote them. Monumental inscriptions, also in cuneiform, concern kingly affairs and stories of conquests in war. However, many tablets are from merchants writing to merchants and other people writing of mundane matters.

A note on dates. In daily life I am like most people, using "BC" and "AD" (which mean "Before Christ" and "Anno Domine", meaning "After the Lord") to refer to historical dates. However, it is well known that Jesus was not born in the year just before 1 AD, which we would call 1 BC; there is no Year Zero. The "AD" era was determined when less was known about the death of Herod the Great, the king who attempted to have the baby Jesus killed shortly before his own death (from a few months to a year, most probably). Based on his interview with the Magi, Herod ordered babies in Bethlehem to be killed "up to age two", because of the time the "star of Bethlehem" first appeared. In Matthew, when the Magi found Joseph and Mary and Jesus, they were in a house, while in Luke, when the shepherds found the family, they were still in the stable where Jesus was born. It is implied, but not clearly stated, that the star appeared when Jesus was born. If so, he was two years old when the Magi visited (so Crèches are anachronistic). The gifts of the Magi funded the flight of Joseph and his family to Egypt until Herod died. Even now it is not certain which year Herod died. There was an eclipse at that time, but it may have been either in 1 BC or 4 BC. So Jesus was born some time between 2 BC and 7 BC. By the way, we know the crucifixion was in April of 32 AD, and the story in Luke implies that He was born in the springtime, so the age that Jesus attained was between 33 and 38. The common Christian meme that He died at the age of 33½ is certainly wrong by at least half a year, and possibly by 4½ years. Now to the point. In Assyria the author uses the archaeological convention of "CE" instead of "AD" and "BCE" rather than "BC", where "CE" refers to "Christian Era". That removes the theological element from archaeological calculations. Herein, I follow the same convention.

Assyrian culture developed over a millennium and a half, centered initially on the city of Ashur, which was also the name of their god. The town lay on the Tigris River, now in northern Iraq, east of northern Syria. The first "king" of Ashur, more of a mayor I would say, was in the 23d Century BCE, or 2250 plus or minus 50 years. About 2000 BCE the king of Ashur began expanding his realm, and incorporated Nineveh, which had already been an occupied place for 4,000 years. This began the Old Assyrian Period. The author places the beginning of a transition period in about 1735 BCE, and its end about 1400 BCE, when the Middle Assyrian Period began. In the following century Calah, the third major Assyrian city, was founded. Archaeological dates are more reliable beginning about 1114 BCE, with the accession of Tiglath-Pileser I (the one named in the Bible, in 2 Kings and the two Chronicles, was Tiglath-Pileser III). After Tiglath-Pileser II died and was replaced by Ashur-Dan II in 934 BCE, a more definite expansion of territory began, called the Neo-Assyrian Period, leading up to the the founding of the empire under Tiglath-Pileser III, who reigned from 744-727. The empire fell in about a decade, attacked by Babylonians, Medes, and a coalition of others including Elamites, all former provinces or tributaries of Assyria. It was all over by 609 BCE.

I found it fascinating that the mocking dirge over "the king of Babylon" in Isaiah 14 refers to the just-murdered Sargon II. Babylon at the time was a province of Assyria, and Sargon lived there. Although the author denigrates the theological understanding of Isaiah's lament, that verses 12-15 look through history to the fall of Satan, here called "day star" (Lucifer), this is to be expected of someone who takes the Bible as a literary work only. Christians believe that God uses the exclamations of His prophets to enlighten His people about matters such as this, without stating them directly. As Jesus stated, He used parables because "to you it has been given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of the heavens, but to them it has not been given." Jesus spoke in such a way that one had to ask Him a question to learn the interpretation. A similar reference to Satan in prehistory is found in Ezekiel 28:12-16.

While we are at it, the author also disparages the statement in Isaiah 37:37 that an angel killed 185,000 Assyrian soldiers, which prompted Sennacherib to return to Assyria. Perhaps it was the plague, he says, or some other sudden epidemic. He even considers that the same illness struck Hezekiah the Judean king. No Assyrian source mentions the destruction of about 2/3 of the Assyrian army. But none would! The kings only commissioned inscriptions lauding their successes. This goes for all the ancient kingdoms and empires. The author does mention that Sennacherib, who lived another 20 years until his sons murdered him (as the Bible notes), didn't send the army out for several years after returning from Judea. It's easy to conclude that he needed a couple of years to rebuild the army.

Whatever happened to the Assyrian army in 701 BCE is unrecorded by any source besides the Bible. We must recognize a principle of the miracles of God. If the Bible is true, and God created the Universe (whether 13+ billion years ago or something much more recent, as some believe, it makes no difference), then God is not a part of the Universe. What He does is not subject to the scientific laws that we have deduced over the centuries. Miracles have no "natural" explanation. People have for centuries tried to attribute things like the plagues in Egypt recorded in Exodus to sundry natural causes; some such as Immanuel Velikovsky posited fantastic scenarios such as Venus sideswiping the Earth before settling into its orbit (a process that would take billions of years, if it could occur at all). No such explanations are needed.

For such reasons, some Christians may be uncomfortable reading this book. It is best to take the phlegmatic attitude that Dr Frahm is a renowned scholar who happens to be a nonbeliever. His science is good. We can take his conclusions with a grain of salt, knowing he does not believe as we do. I am not threatened if he believes that one story or another is fictional. He has to believe that, really. I choose to believe the Bible. Assyria sheds light on things the Bible didn't mention, but not on the Bible itself. I enjoyed reading it a great deal, and I learned much from it.