Assyria by Eckart Frahm
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Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire
By Eckart Frahm
Basic Books 2023
It’s been exactly a century since Albert Olmstead published his History of Assyria, and as Yale Professor of Assyriology Eckhart Frahm points out in his new book, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire, the study of this ancient civilization is an ever-changing thing: “To be sure, new discoveries and fresh analyses of the available evidence will undoubtedly require future reassessments.” Readers not willing to crawl through his book’s 50 pages of End Notes will to some extent have to take his word for this, since Assyria inexcusably has no Bibliography (“This book cannot document every source on which the story it tells is based,” he writes, to which the reader’s response should be “the Hell it can’t”).
But even so: Frahm’s book is wonderfully engaging and seems to be in complete command of its sprawling subject, from circa 2000 BC when the Old Assyrian period kicked off to the destruction of the Assyrian stronghold of Nineveh in 612 BC – an ending that happened, as Frahm points out, long before the better-known empires of the ancient world, be it the Persian, Indian, or Chinese. World history, Frahm claims, “does not begin with the Greeks or the Romans — it begins with Assyria.”
The story Frahm unfolds in these pages is both exotic and fascinating (for an Assyriologist, our author is a perhaps surprisingly good storyteller), full of virtually every colorful detail that can be gleaned from the large array of sources, from the enormous palace party to which Ashurnasirpal II sent out invitations (as Frahm drolly mentions, “Being summoned to the Assyrian court was normally not a reason for much rejoicing”) to the doomed military campaign of Sargon II, Ashurnasirpal’s great-grandfather, against the rowdy people of Tabal in his sixth decade (he lost, died, and was left unburied – facts passed over in silence by Assyrian inscriptions).
Frahm alludes to the slow morphing of the Assyrian kingdom into an empire entirely devoted to and defined by war, but readers aren’t likely to see much slow about it; the Assyrians seem to have been spoiling for a fight right from their earliest recorded appearances. Certainly in very little time war and the threat of war had become the core of everything, refining into a version of the Mafia equipped with chariots and phalanxes of archers. “It was usually enough for the Assyrian armies to just pass by to make local rulers pay,” Frahm writes. “Only places that failed to comply were attacked.”
It’s probably this characterization as much as anything that ultimately gave rise to what is easily the most influential view of Assyria: the one in the Bible. “Woe to Assyria, the rod of my anger,” thunders Isaiah, “the staff in their hands is my fury!” As Frahm notes, the Bible mentions Assyria around 150 times, and the name of Nineveh, Assyria’s last capital, appears seventeen times, alongside mentions of a dozen Assyrian rulers from Tiglath-pileser III to Sargon II to Sennacherib, to Esharhaddon.
Esharhaddon, in fact, virtually haunts the book, cropping up everywhere to embody both the exuberant and the alarming aspects of this ancient empire as a whole. He ruled over a vast territory reaching from the Eastern Mediterranean to Western Iran, but readers will quickly come to consider him the King of Inscriptions. “Before me, cities, behind me, ruins,” he has chiseled into one such sloganeering piece of stone. “I achieve victory over the rulers of the four quarters of the world,” yells another, “and sprinkled the venom of death over all my enemies.” Hilariously, the bragging even continues posthumously, with a funerary inscription claiming, “The ditches wail, the canals respond, all trees and fruit-bearing plants are mourning.” In any given chapter, readers will find themselves hoping he makes a surprise appearance, bloodthirsty maniac that he was.
The situation on the ground in northern Iraq has recently improved for archeologists seeking to further Assyrian studies, as Frahm notes; ISIS militants no longer roam at will, destroying sites and running off researchers. If a modicum of stability remains, more valuable research will continue. And in the meantime, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire is very likely to serve general-interest readers every bit as ably as that earlier monument did a century ago.
Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.