Assyrians. So what we have to realize is there is some level of continuum that life does continue,
Neo-Assyrians are now taking what they need rather than trading for it. And this is when we also begin to see the rise and fall of civilizations. I mean in Hamilton, it talks about oceans, rise,
capital city of Assyria has has been very arrogant and thinks it's the center of the universe just the way people some
Nineveh the capital of Assyria deserve compassion and these are people who are now part of the same Empire as Israel so
This was where the Assyrians were.
And the Assyrians were being beaten up by the people of Urartu who lived in that area.
about the Assyrians and the Babylonians over in Mesopotamia? They're still there. They're now called the Neo-Assyrians and the Neo-Babylonians, the new ones, but they have survived the collapse,
the Neo-Assyrians take over pretty much the entire ancient Near East. Basically all the areas they had been trading with and had commercial and diplomatic and marital ties back in the
that the Assyrians and the Babylonians were able to maintain their government and their religion and their writing systems and all of that might've been just luck of the draw. That they were so far
greater tormentor of israel in assyria before the exile that's why we hear from that Zephaniah that god will destroy
monarchy under King David and Solomon and Assyrians and Persians and Greeks.
cuneiform writing code of the Assyrians.
so now the fact that the Assyrians have done bad things is attributable to their moral confusion and they are therefore
we have written texts from the Assyrians that do talk about period of drought. They are Hitt.
Nineveh, which was the Assyrian capital, there was a great king, king of the world, called Ashurbanipal, and he had a fantastic library and he promoted it. He impounded tablets,
their worldview Zephaniah does the same thing with the Assyrians when he
David says the stars came and fought against the Assyrians you know we know that that's poetry then there are some places like Genesis 1 chapter 1 uh like
and he once he went he says he wants God to destroy Assyria and he says specifically he says that Nineveh the
you know I've often been asked about uh why I went to Assyria and I really went to ass Syria uh to Syria for two reasons first I have a neighbor who's Syrian my
Egyptians and the Hittites, but then Assyrians and Babylonians. So of those four, Egyptians,
rise under the burden of foreign kings and princes and indeed Israel was a small country there were great powers like Assyria and Egypt so it was also it
moabite and how wonderful she is and how she's welcomed into the family of israel assyria now now there was probably no
modern day Iraq, basically, you had Assyria and Babylonia.
broke down into different arrangements of triangular shapes. And it's most clear on the Assyrian reliefs, where the writing is very big and you can easily
thing that came out of America in all its history, is the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, which is this long. There's only one
- Yeah. Well, we know it best from this Assyrian library set of tablets. There are 12 of them. It's a 12-tablet work, so it's quite
I think of civilizations like those in ancient Mesopotamia, so the Assyrians.
fairly well-known scholars, a seriologist have said that that is why the Neo-Assyrians and the Neo-Babylonians held on for about a hundred years before everybody else, before they were impacted
But what’s interesting: as the story begins, the Assyrians were the worst neighbors.
They had a pincer movement, and they beat Assyria , they conquered Assyria .
Around 200 BC, there was a public city called Tok'alum, which was an economic center in what is now known as Co-Assyria .
So I will say now that you could put Egypt up in category two with Assyria and Babylon, and I'd still be able
And so this man Jonah is told go and bless Nineveh, and Nineveh was the capital of Assyria .
- Yeah. So, in the 19th century, about 1840, 1850, they started to find these things on excavations in Iraq, the big Assyrian cities and sometimes further south,
the library. But they wouldn't destroy the library because it was the giant brain from which the Assyrians ran a world empire, and it had all the
And we have detailed accounts of how they fought, and how they support-- had fought against the Assyrians mainly.
But every now and again, when they dig up something so massive, like this 7th century BC Assyrian statue, of course that's
would obey, the day angels, drunk and muddled, stumbled from the bars and all the bells of London were sounded, the day animals spoke to us in Assyrian,
in direct or indirect contact with each other on almost daily basis. The thing is, if they're not in direct contact with somebody, like Mycenaeans and Assyrians, who are quite far apart, they will
or maybe less than three hops, like two hops for the Mycenaeans to the Hittites to the Assyrians, that's a small world network. And in the time period that we're talking about, that's what
would have been enough to bring down the whole thing. But interestingly, the rest of them, the Assyrians going down, the Babylonians going down, whatever, none of that would have been enough to
build everything back up. In other places, the huge empires that had been around, the Hittites, the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, some of them go away and are replaced by kind of a
pretty much intact. They didn't do as well as the Phoenicians and the Cypriots who I would give a gold star rating to, number one, in my book, but I would give the Assyrians and
'cause they're not there, there's no big Hittite king. Instead, what the Neo-Assyrians do after it
late Bronze Age, they've now just conquered. It's now part of the Neo-Assyrian Empire that stretches all the way to the Mediterranean Sea and down to Egypt in fact at one point.
empires, fall, that's basically what we've got here because yes, the Neo-Assyrians rise up and they're dominant for a while, but then they go down and collapse and the Neo-Babylonians take
better than anybody else. So I put them up in my top category. The Assyrians and the Babylonians, they adapt, but they don't really transform that much because they don't need to. They
also might have just been the luck of the draw. It might have been geographical luck. So I think that's where water comes into play because the Assyrians and the Babylonians are in my category
the one or the two societies that do seem to have had the right people at the right place at the right time are the Assyrians and the Babylonians. The Neo-Assyrian rulers and the Neo-Babylonian
circumstances, like the Mycenaeans on mainland Greece, on the Minoans on Crete. Others disappear entirely like the Hittites. But, Cypriots do okay, Phoenicians do okay, Assyrians and Babylonians do