The End is Always Near

Legend has it that the last Assyrian king gathered all his precious goods and artifacts around him and set them on fire with him in the middle, burning to death as the allied armies were breaking down the walls of Nineveh.

It’s easy to attribute altruistic or heroic motives to a “preserver of civilization,” but in truth the Assyrians may simply have been trying to preserve their conquests and booty from being purloined by another.

The magnificent army that the Assyrians created wasn’t just a tool for the protection of their state but also for the furthering of their interests.

Babylon, much closer to home, was a different sort of problem, one that they never managed to completely solve

. The Assyrians had always treated Babylon better than they’d treated most of their other adversaries because the city was the cultural center of the very, very old world—the Paris of its day.

This regard and admiration had saved Babylon from the fate so many other cities and states had suffered at the hand of the Assyrians.

The historian Gwynne Dyer has said that Sennacherib destroyed Babylon as thoroughly as a nuclear bomb would have.

In waging all these wars, the Assyrians ended up beating down some of the most ferocious and powerful tribes in the Middle East.

Tracing the reason great states decline or fall is always difficult.

The Assyrians bucked this trend.