Appearance
4.7 — Assyria, Babylon and Persia
The Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II left an inscription describing what he did to a city that resisted him. It says, in the first person, that he flayed the nobles and draped their skins over the city wall, impaled others on stakes around the city, burned the young men and women, and cut off the hands and noses of the survivors.
The important thing is that he had it carved on a public monument. This was not a confession. It was advertising, and it was the central instrument of Assyrian policy: make resistance so obviously catastrophic that the next city surrenders on demand.
Two hundred years later, a Persian king took Babylon and had a clay cylinder inscribed announcing that he had restored the city's temples, returned deported peoples and their gods to their homelands, and ruled with the consent of the god Marduk.
Both were building empires. They chose opposite methods, and this chapter is about what each method cost and how long each lasted.
Assyria: the terror empire
Assyria was a northern Mesopotamian kingdom that had existed for a thousand years before it became dangerous. From around 911 BCE it expanded relentlessly, and by the seventh century BCE it controlled Mesopotamia, the Levant, much of Anatolia and, briefly, Egypt — the largest empire the world had yet seen.
Its military innovations were real and they mattered.
A standing professional army, paid and permanent, rather than a seasonal levy of farmers. This is a large administrative achievement, because it requires a tax system able to feed soldiers all year.
Iron weapons at scale (Chapter 3.12), which Assyria adopted early and thoroughly.
Siege engineering. Battering rams on wheeled protected frames, siege towers, sapping and tunnelling, and ramps. Before this, a walled city could usually outlast an attacker. Assyria made walls beatable, which is the single most important military change of the period.
Cavalry. Assyria transitioned from chariots to mounted archers and lancers, who are far more flexible over rough ground.
And an imperial road and messenger system, with relay stations, which is how a court hundreds of kilometres away could learn about a rebellion in time to respond.
Deportation was the political instrument. Assyria moved conquered populations wholesale — perhaps four and a half million people over three centuries, on the best available estimates — resettling them far from home among strangers. The logic is cold and effective: a population with no local roots, no kin network and no ancestral land has nobody to rebel with. It is also the origin of one of the most consequential events in religious history, because the deportation of the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE removed those populations from history, while the later Babylonian deportation of Judah produced something different, discussed below.
Assyria also built the first systematic library. Ashurbanipal, in the seventh century BCE, sent agents throughout Mesopotamia to collect and copy texts, assembling around 30,000 tablets at Nineveh. It burned when Nineveh fell, and the fire baked the clay tablets hard, which is why they survived. Most of what we know of Mesopotamian literature, including the fullest text of Gilgamesh, comes from that library.
And then it fell, very fast. In 612 BCE a coalition of Babylonians and Medes took Nineveh, and within a few years the Assyrian empire was gone entirely. The speed is the lesson. An empire held together purely by fear has no reservoir of loyalty to draw on. The moment the army was beaten, every subject people joined the winners, and there was no constituency anywhere that wanted Assyria to survive. Nineveh was so thoroughly destroyed that when Greek soldiers marched past the mounds two centuries later, they did not know what city had been there.
Babylon, briefly
The Neo-Babylonian empire that replaced Assyria lasted less than a century, from 626 to 539 BCE, and is remembered mainly for Nebuchadnezzar II, who rebuilt Babylon on a spectacular scale — the Ishtar Gate, faced with glazed blue brick and moulded animals, is in a Berlin museum — and who in 587 BCE destroyed the temple in Jerusalem and deported the Judaean elite to Babylon.
That deportation had an effect nobody intended, and it is one of the most consequential accidents in history.
The usual outcome of deportation was assimilation and disappearance, which is what happened to the northern Israelite tribes. The Judaeans in Babylon did the opposite. Cut off from their temple, their land and their sacrificial cult, they had to work out what their religion was without those things — and what emerged was a religion centred on a written text, on law and on exclusive monotheism, portable and independent of any place.
Much of the Hebrew Bible was compiled, edited and given its final shape in and after the exile. The synagogue, as an institution for reading and study rather than sacrifice, has its roots here. Judaism as we know it is a product of the exile, and Christianity and Islam both descend from it. Chapter 5.8 and Chapter 7.1 pick that up.
Babylon fell in 539 BCE to Cyrus the Great of Persia, apparently with little fighting, the priesthood of Marduk having been alienated by the last Babylonian king's religious policy.
Persia: the other model
The Achaemenid Persian empire, founded by Cyrus around 550 BCE, was on any reasonable estimate the largest empire the world had seen — from the Indus to the Aegean and into Egypt and Libya, holding perhaps 40 percent of the world's population, an unmatched share.
And it was run on the opposite principle to Assyria's.
Compare that relief with the Assyrian one above. Assyrian art shows conquered peoples impaled, flayed and led in chains. Persian art shows them walking in with gifts. Both are propaganda; the difference between the two propagandas is the difference between the two systems.
Cyrus's actual policy, as recorded on his own cylinder and corroborated elsewhere: he restored temples the Babylonians had disrupted, returned deported peoples and their cult objects to their homelands, and presented himself in each region in that region's own religious idiom — as chosen by Marduk in Babylon, as pharaoh in Egypt. He permitted the Judaeans to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple, which is why the Hebrew Bible calls a Persian king mashiach, anointed — the only foreign ruler given that title.
The Cyrus Cylinder is often called the first charter of human rights, which overstates it considerably; it is a Mesopotamian-style royal declaration of the kind previous kings had also issued, in a well-established genre. What it is, accurately, is evidence of a deliberate imperial strategy of religious tolerance and local restoration, and that strategy is real and is documented from several sides.
The administrative machinery under Darius I was the real achievement.
Satrapies. About twenty provinces, each under a satrap, with a separate military commander and a separate royal secretary reporting independently to the king — a deliberate separation of powers so that no provincial governor could combine civil, military and reporting authority. Roving royal inspectors, called the King's Eyes, checked on them.
The Royal Road, running about 2,700 kilometres from Susa to Sardis, with posting stations at intervals of a day's ride and fresh horses at each. A royal message covered it in about a week, where an ordinary traveller took three months. Herodotus's description of the couriers — that neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness stops them — is the origin of the motto on the New York City post office building.
A standard coinage, the gold daric, which made taxation and payment across the empire straightforward.
Standard weights, a legal system that respected local law, and religious tolerance as policy rather than indifference — the empire funded local temples, including the rebuilding in Jerusalem.
Zoroastrianism, the Persian religion, deserves a note because of its influence. Attributed to the prophet Zarathustra, of disputed date, it presents the world as a struggle between a wise good creator, Ahura Mazda, and a destructive force, with human beings obliged to choose sides through good thoughts, words and deeds. It carries a final judgement, a resurrection, a cosmic end, and a strong ethical dualism — and elements resembling all of these appear in Judaism after the Persian period, and from there in Christianity and Islam. The direction and extent of that influence is argued by specialists and this book will not overstate it, but the chronology and the contact are real. Zoroastrians who later migrated to India became the Parsis, whose role in Indian industry Chapter 6.29 records.
Why the Persian model held, and where it failed
It held for about two centuries, which is long for an empire of that size, and it held because it made local elites into stakeholders rather than victims. A local ruler who kept his position, his temple and most of his revenue in exchange for tribute and troops had no reason to rebel and much to lose.
It failed in the places where it did not follow its own policy. Egypt rebelled repeatedly, and the Ionian Greek cities of Anatolia revolted in 499 BCE — which drew Persia into the Greek wars of Chapter 5.1, and eventually brought Alexander.
And the structural weakness of every large empire applies: succession. Persian royal successions were repeatedly contested, and the civil wars weakened the centre. Alexander destroyed the empire in three battles between 334 and 331 BCE, and it is worth noting that he then adopted a great deal of its administration wholesale, because it worked.
The two models, stated plainly
This is a genuine choice that every empire in the rest of this volume has to make, and it recurs constantly — with Rome, with the Mongols, with the Mughals, with the British.
Rule by terror is cheap, fast, and effective at suppressing immediate resistance. It creates no loyalty, so it must be maintained forever, and it collapses completely at the first serious defeat because everyone defects at once.
Rule by co-option is slower and requires giving up revenue and local control. It buys durability, because subject elites acquire a stake in the system's survival.
Most successful empires used both, and the ratio is the interesting variable. Chapter 6.11 and 6.12 examine exactly this ratio in the Mughal empire — Akbar's co-option versus Aurangzeb's coercion — and argue that the change in ratio explains a great deal about what happened to it. Chapter 5.4 makes the same argument about Rome's grant of citizenship.
Where this shows up in your life
The postal service, the province, the provincial governor, the standard coin and the separation of civil from military authority all trace to this Persian machinery, some directly and some by repeated reinvention.
And for Indian readers there is a direct line. The Achaemenid empire's easternmost satrapies included Gandhara and the Indus region, and Persian administrative practice, the Aramaic script, and coinage all entered India through that contact. The Kharosthi script used in the northwest, including in some of Ashoka's inscriptions, derives from Aramaic, which came with the Persian administration. Ashoka's use of rock and pillar edicts as royal proclamations closely resembles Achaemenid practice, and Chapter 6.4 notes the resemblance. The word for a province in several Indian languages, and the very idea of the satrap, arrive here.
What the next page covers
Between roughly 800 and 200 BCE — with no contact between most of them — the Buddha and Mahavira in India, Confucius and Laozi in China, Zoroaster in Persia, the Hebrew prophets in the Levant, and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Greece all appeared, and all asked a question nobody had asked before. Chapter 4.8 is about that coincidence: what the new question actually was, why several unconnected civilisations arrived at it in the same few centuries, and how the answers each gave still shape how a third of humanity thinks.