The Assyrian Empire: The Militaristic Society That Built the World’s First Great Empire — Sleep Podcast

There is a plain in the far north of what is now Iraq where the upper Tigris moves slow and deep, and on its bank stood, for more than a thousand years, a trading town with a god’s name — Ashur. From that small, practical place grew the largest military machine the ancient world had ever known: an empire that stretched from the sands of Egypt to the highlands of Persia, and filled whole libraries of clay with terror and triumph. A slow, bedtime retelling of the people who built the world’s first great empire on tin, silver, iron and fire — and of a library the fire made immortal.

One hour and a bit, in the voice of the show: a deep, warm storyteller at the edge of sleep. We walk the upper Tigris at dusk; we go up into the mountains with the donkey caravans of Kaneš, and read the complaints of a four-thousand-year-old travelling salesman; we meet a king who was only the steward of the true king; we sit through the long dark, and the iron flood that broke the chariot age; we stand in the war machine and the standing army, in the ledgers that ran the world, in the palace at Nimrud, and before the terror of it — with the honest question of what it was; we watch the god’s cities fall, one by one, the long way down; and we come, at the end, to the grassy mound, and the man from Baghdad who found the queen’s citadel beneath it.

A slow, unhurried reading, for the edge of sleep. About an hour and ten minutes. Written to be heard, not read; a low, steady bed of wind over open ground suits the opening, and no music is required.

Sources (a selection): Maul, The God Ashur in Assyrian Mythology (2017); Valk, “The Deification of the Assyrian State” (2018); Van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East (2004); Chavalas, ed., The Ancient Near East: Historical Sources in Translation (2006) — the Käneš tablets and the Mari letters; Düngel, Assyrische Handelstätigkeit; Moran, The Amarna Letters; Grayson, Assyrian Rulers; the annals of Ashurbanipal (K.8538+); Parpola, The Correspondence of Ashurbanipal; Radner, “The Cuneiform Tablet and the Commercial Letter”; the Nimrud ivories and reliefs (British Museum); Layard, Nineveh and its Remains (1849); World History Encyclopedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica entries consulted for dates and place names.