Eckart Frahm (1) (1967–)

Eckart has really done a pretty good job with this book on the Assyrians. What immediately became obvious to me was the benefit of having access to whole libraries of cuniform texts. And I contrast this with a similar attempt to write a book on the Scythians (by Barry Cunliffe) which I think was much less successful because he had to rely pretty much on whatever was left in tombs and had survived to derive the history. Anyway, the story begins "around 2000 BCE, after spending several show more centuries under the heel of the powerful kingdoms of southern Mesopotamia, Ashur became politically independent………. A period of decline starting around 1700 BCE brought the Old Assyrian city-state and many of its institutions to an end, but the journey was not over. When Ashur got back on its feet in the fourteenth century BCE, it assumed a very different role: serving as capital of a territorial state eager to expand its borders through military means.
…..A number of energetic and ruthless Assyrian rulers of the Neo-Assyrian period (ca. 934–612 BCE) took advantage of the weakness of their political rivals, embarking on a systematic campaign of subjugation, destruction, and annexation.
On several occasions—even in the otherwise glorious year of 671—internal and external revolts threatened Assyria’s hegemony. …….But by the late eighth century, the Assyrians had managed to create a state that transcended all its predecessors in power, size, and organizational complexity. ......But, only half a century after Esarhaddon’s reign, the Assyrian state suffered a dramatic collapse, culminating in the conquest and destruction of Nineveh in 612 BCE. Thoug, for more than one hundred years, from about 730 to 620 BCE, it had been a political body so large and so powerful that it can rightly be called the world’s first empire. ......And the bureaucracies, communication networks, and modes of domination created by the Assyrian elites more than 2,700 years ago served as blueprints for many of the political institutions of subsequent great powers, first directly and then indirectly, up until the present day.
That, in a nutshell, is what the book is about but there are some fascinating details and lessons to learn from the experience of the Assyrians. Earlier readings about them had reinforced my impressions of them as being an incredibly cruel and ruthless power that survived and prospered on military conquest, pillage and enslavement...and when they ran out of lands to pillage they collapsed. Though, it seems that the truth is rather more nuanced......"Rather than reannexing this land, Ashur-dan, whose twenty-two-year reign began in 934 BCE, plundered it and turned it into a vassal state forced to pay a regular tribute and provide troops. This approach exemplifies the “Grand Strategy” .......Making sure that local dignitaries in newly conquered areas remained loyal under such circumstances required a high threat level. ……The kingdom’s deposed ruler, Kundibhalê, was taken to Arbela, where he was flayed and executed. ……This grim record of terror and torture has strongly influenced the modern perception of Assyrian civilization. ……… but…..they also rebuilt cities and towns and enhanced the agricultural base of newly reconquered territories. "
Clearly there were power struggles between Ashur and Babylon and Babylon was seen by many as being the "cultured centre" and even when brought low it managed to rise again or the ideas of the sages of Babylon were transferred to Assyria. This passage describes some of this transformation: "Ridiculing Babylon’s festivals and cults would not be enough to overcome the profound psychological reverberations of Assyria’s attack on the city. The void left by the events of 689 was simply too great. …….In a brazen act of “cultural cannibalism.” Key elements of Babylon’s religious infrastructure were transferred to Assyria and repurposed for the greater glory of the Assyrian Empire. ........In 655 BCE, Sennacherib’s grandson Ashurbanipal returned the bed and the throne to Babylon, where they were again to serve Marduk. This “Babylonianization” of Assyrian religion also took place on a much larger scale. During the 680s, the whole cultic infrastructure of Ashur was transformed after the model of Babylon. "
Another lesson that emerges from the study of Assyria was the difficulties of dynastic rule....the constant competition between siblings for power and the strong ruler having a weak son etc. Clearly not a great recipe for management of an empire...though they seemed to make it work over a long period. ......."Based on what is now known, there was indeed a good deal of dynastic continuity in ancient Assyria. For more than a thousand years, it seems that practically all Assyrian rulers were descendants of a certain Adasi, who had lived in the second half of the eighteenth century …….Remarkably enough, even though a series of hereditary rulers are known to have held office during the Old Assyrian period, these leaders did not yet bear the title used elsewhere all over ancient Mesopotamia to designate kings: šarrum. Instead, they called themselves rubā’um, “Prince,” as well as iššiakkum, “Steward (of the god Ashur),” and waklum, “Overseer.” ......One of the strengths of their system seemed to be that the god Assure was always supreme and the king was subordinate to the god. They seem to be able to avoid the situation where the king also became their god.
I also found it fascinating that the Assyrian empire emerged from a bunch of long distance traders who had seen enough of the world to know what lay beyond their immediate neighbourhood and who, presumably, also spoke multiple languages. This clearly gave them an advantage;.....they knew the territory beforehand.
"In their striving to better control the vast territorial expanses they ruled, the Assyrian kings commissioned new roads, way stations, and a postal system that facilitated communication between the center, the provincial capitals, and the kingdom’s periphery. Spies stationed in frontier zones would report on a regular basis on political developments and military movements that occurred in enemy territories and among Assyrian vassals.
How could an empire as powerful and large as Assyria collapse so utterly and completely within just about a decade? .....Evidence exists that prolonged drought conditions during the last century of the Assyrian Empire did indeed contribute to slowly decreasing harvests.
Sennacherib decries, moreover, in an early testimony of ecological consciousness, that his royal predecessors had decimated the forests in order to get hold of enough timber for their ambitious building projects.
This book argues that, paradoxically enough, these phenomena, along with various epidemics that ravaged Assyria around 760 BCE, may have contributed more to the emergence than to the demise of the Assyrian Empire. .......Assyria’s fall may have been above all the result of leadership failures and autocratic delusions of grandeur—phenomena by no means alien to modern times either.
Assyria produced many features that, for better or worse, are still to be found in the modern world: from long-distance trade, sophisticated communication networks, and the state-sponsored promotion of literature, science, and the arts to mass deportations, the practice of engaging in extreme violence in enemy countries, and the widespread use of political surveillance at home.
Rather than at Nieveh, the origins of the Assyrian civilisation are to be found at Qal’at Sherqat, the site of the aforementioned ancient city of Ashur, which would eventually give the land of Assyria its name. ………it linked the southern alluvial plain with resource-rich territories in the north, and the fertile agricultural lands east of the Tigris with the steppe regions crisscrossed by herdsmen farther west.
They bespeak the strong influence that the culturally more advanced south exerted on Ashur from early on. This influence extended to the political sphere.
The powerful southern dynasty Akkad, founded around 2350 BCE by a king named Sargon and soon in command of large parts of Western Asia, also ruled over Ashur. Around 2100 BCE, under the so-called Third Dynasty of Ur, another powerful kingdom emerged in Babylonia. Before long Ashur found itself again subjected to southern rule, this time as an outlying military province of the Ur III state.
It is likely that Ahur gained it's independence not much later than 2025 BCE. ……Asher’s hereditary leaders were, in the political and economic arena, primi inter pares (first among equals) at best—

Re languages:……".the language that eventually prevailed—and would be spoken by nearly every Assyrian citizen—was not Assyrian. …….the idiom that became the lingua franca in the Assyrian Empire—and survived its fall—was Aramaic, a humble tongue that carried, at least initially, little cultural prestige……….it would remain the “common language” of the Middle East for nearly one and a half millennia, until the seventh and eighth centuries CE, when Arabic slowly replaced it".
there is an interesting commentary of the development of the idea of Satan in Christian theology. Viz:"The death of Sargon troubled Assyrian rulers, priests, and scholars for decades. Outside Assyria, reactions were understandably quite different. The people who had suffered from Assyria’s aggressive expansionism had little reason to mourn their chief tormentor. .....For Isaiah, the fall of the enemy ruler is a reason not for sadness but for jubilation:……….. one section of Isaiah’s indictment of royal hubris deserves particular attention. ….. “How you are fallen from heaven, Bright one, Son of Dawn .........Several Christian interpreters of Isaiah 14, however, were unwilling to consider this metaphor as a mere trope—they took it literally. The most important of them was the early Christian scholar Origen of Alexandria (ca. 184–ca. 253 CE). He read the whole passage through the lens of a famous verse in the gospel of Luke (10: 18), which refers to “Satan falling from heaven like a flash of lightning.”……….. thus became one of the archetypes of a new, highly influential Christian reconceptualization of the forces of evil, in which Satan, a minor nuisance in ancient Israel, was promoted to the status of a fallen angel of enormous power. ........This image of Satan has been planted in the minds of Christians ever since.
The impact of the Assyrians on the text of the bible is interesting, viz:"As new evidence accumulated, the Hebrew Bible came to be interrogated more and more as a historical rather than a holy text. Initially, Assyrian and Babylonian records were used to confirm the reliability of the sacred history outlined in the biblical books as well as to illustrate it. …….newly deciphered cuneiform tablets seemed to suggest that biblical narratives of central importance, such as the story of the great flood, derived from much earlier Mesopotamian texts……..by virtue of being “opposition literature,” the Bible provides crucial information on how disenfranchised subjects,
especially in the beleaguered or conquered imperial periphery, perceived the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Empires.
The images of Assyria found in the Bible and the classical sources are of course often heavily distorted,
When Tiglath-pileser III (r. 744–727 BCE) began to annex large swaths of land in the west, the rulers of the Kingdom of Israel decided to fight the Assyrian conquerors, with catastrophic results. In just a few years Israel was reduced to a rump state, which ceased to exist altogether after Shalmaneser V conquered its capital, Samaria, in 722 BCE. Many Israelites were deported to central Assyria and other regions of the Assyrian Empire, while others found refuge in the Kingdom of Judah.
…..the biblical texts are remarkably ambivalent in their judgment of how the kings of Israel and Judah should face the threat posed by Assyria. There are not only tales of heroic resistance but also pleas by prophets for a “realpolitik” aimed at self-preservation………Although the Book of Nahum is styled as an oracle, professing to refer to events in the future, scholars almost unanimously agree that it was written after Nineveh’s destruction in 612 BCE. ……The clearest example of how God adopted features of the Assyrian monarch can be found in the biblical Book of Deuteronomy, portions of which seem to be modeled on the loyalty oaths contained in Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaty, which the Assyrian king imposed on his subjects
Hebrew priests reapplied the stipulations of the treaty to their own god and claimed that he—and not the Assyrian king—deserved unconditional loyalty and obedience. …….In his Succession Treaty, Esarhaddon requires his subjects “to love Ashurbanipal, the great crown prince, son of Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, your lord, like yourself.” The Deuteronomic Code asks that the people of Israel “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.” …….loyalty to the king is replaced in Deuteronomy by loyalty to God. …….it is likely that the writings reportedly “found” by Hilkiah were nothing but an early version of Deuteronomy itself—and that this version, rather than being an age-old text, had actually been composed not that long before its alleged discovery.
When in the 1950s manuscripts of Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaty were excavated—written only a few decades prior to Josiah’s reign—and the parallels of the treaty with Deuteronomy were observed, this theory became even more plausible. 14 The parallels with Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaty not only help us better understand the origins of biblical views of the divine, but make us see Deuteronomy and other central parts of the Bible in a completely new light.
Deuteronomic laws like the one about the need to kill one’s own brothers, sisters, and wives if they worshipped other gods can seem at first glance oppressive and inhumane—and they were, in fact, eventually put to nefarious uses, especially after Christianity and Islam, with their more universal ambitions, adopted central tenets of ancient Judaism. Once it becomes clear, though, that such stipulations were originally meant to counter the repressive claims of Assyrian kings, they can also be read as the anti-imperial musings of a group of revolutionary thinkers
Biblical narratives like the two creation stories, the story of the great flood, and the birth story of Moses seem to have a background in ancient Mesopotamia as well, and the idea that they, too, go back to Assyrian times cannot be ruled out. As there is no evidence for the presence of cuneiform libraries in the southern Levant during Neo-Assyrian times, it may be more likely, however, that the biblical authors of these stories came across their Mesopotamian models during the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE, when members of the Judean elite, including King Jehoiachin, lived in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace in Babylon."
Clearly, Eckart has produced an interesting and scholarly work and I learned a lot from it. Happy to give it five stars. show less

Not quite everything you ever wanted to know about the Assyrians, but didn't know where to start, Frahm's virtue is that where our existing knowledge is thin, he is forthright about saying so. What really concerns him is the subtitle, as he works on building up his argument that the Assyrian state was the first empire, and an inspiration to those that followed. Where Frahm might be weak is when it comes to military history, as while the Assyrians very much intended to make war pay, and were show more ultimately brought down by military action, Frahm does remarkably little to integrate this aspect into his story. Even if the nuts and bolts of army organization and military strategy are not a matter that Frahm is comfortable with, I would have liked to have seen his critique of our existing understanding of what made the Assyrian military special, as they get great credit for creating cavalry units and for their skill at conducting siege warfare. Be that as it may, after the collapse of the Assyrian state, Frahm spends a significant amount of time musing on the long twilight of Assyrian culture and the Assyrian people, and what that means today. show less

Eckart Frahm (Yale University) is one of the great experts when it comes to the history of ancient Mesopotamia, and Assyria in particular. And that is also very clear from this book: it is an almost exhaustive overview of 1400 years of Assyrian history, with an emphasis on Neo-Assyrian history (ca 925-610 bce). Frahm does not limit himself to the incessant series of military campaigns and conquests of the Assyrians, but also pays attention to the broader context (the wider show more Syriac-Mesopotamian space), to economy and daily life. And he is an honest historian: when we are not sure of our knowledge, or can only rely on the one-sided Assyrian (propaganda) sources, he clearly indicates it. The book is also very up-to-date (very recent archaeological finds are included), and easy to follow, thanks to maps, a chronology and many illustrations. The only – incomprehensible – downside is that title: “Rise and Fall”, I thought we had long passed that stage of cyclic history. More in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6973734247. show less

This appears to be a comprehensive history of the Assyrian Empire" its growth, changes and destruction. I would have wished for more information about everyday life--the legal code, daily routines, economic levels and effects on health, illness and its treatment, marriage and family law and so forth. Divorce is mentioned, but with no details. Could either party initiate a divorce? Could women inherit, own and manage property. In short, this book adheres in large part to the old-fashioned show more list of kings and battles model. The epilogue did include an interesting analysis of the way that the archeological monuments and recovered art were used in the shaping of secular nation states such as Iraq caused ISIS to regard the destruction of these remains as an important step in their vision of an international Islamic empire. show less