Dan Carlin's Hardcore History - Show 56 - Kings of Kings
Episode Date: October 29, 2015Often relegated to the role of slavish cannon fodder for Sparta's spears, the Achaemenid Persian empire had a glorious heritage. Under a single king they created the greatest empire the world had ever... seen.
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December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy.
The events.
One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
The figure has so far gone.
From this time and place.
I take pride in the words, Ish Bin Aang Bialina.
Mr. Gorbachev, the drama, teared down this world.
Eight-six to one-half, urgent.
Marine six.
Now a two has had a major explosion
and would appear to be a complete collapse
surrounding the entire area.
I welcome this kind of examination,
because people have got to know
whether or not their presence is a crux.
Well, I'm not a crux.
If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine,
and remember that we are not descended from fearful men.
It's hardcore history.
The dictionary defines the word laconic as a form of speech
that is blunt or pithy, that uses an economy of words
to make a point.
And sometimes the point is particularly biting
or on target or maybe mysterious.
And I love the word, because the word refers
to a way of speaking that was popular amongst
a particular group of people in ancient Greece.
People known as Lacodemonians.
Otherwise known as Spartans.
Laconic speech is Spartan speech.
That's the way they're supposed to have talked.
Imagine, you know, the loved child of Clint Eastwood
and Batman, and that's the way they spoke, you know?
Man's got to know his limitations.
Man's got to know his limitations.
Spartans are the kings of the one-liners
in ancient Greek history.
And they are cinematic in character.
I mean, there's not a movie maker out there
that wouldn't want Clint Eastwood during his various movie years
playing various forms of Spartans.
You know, from his spaghetti Western era in his 20s,
he could play your average Spartan warrior.
Then he gets into the Dirty Harry films, you know,
72, 73, 1974, and he begins to age a little bit more,
but he plays one of those older Spartan warriors.
And then you get him, you know, after the Dirty Harrys are over
and he's an older man, and now he's the king.
And he talks like he talks in all his other movies
combined with Batman.
And you have, you know, the way the Spartans
are supposed to have spoken, laconically.
How cool is it that 25 centuries after those people
were at the height of their fame and power,
we still know the way they talked.
It's famous, and it's famous because people wrote about it.
People whose works we still have.
Telling you the way a certain people spoke that long ago,
describing some of the things that they said,
all these sorts of little details help bring color to the story.
They help us all relate to these people a little bit more.
These are human touches that flesh out these historical figures.
When you begin to get this sort of stuff,
the sorts of details that you were likely to hear
in an oral tradition anywhere in the world before this time period,
but when you begin to get these stories that have come down to us,
you begin to see truly cinematic type creations.
Stories that you could take with very little changes
and updating and make movies out of them today
and have them be popular.
And it's not just the character development either.
The themes can be epic in these stories.
Take, for example, the most famous story involving Sparta.
At all, the famous incident in 480 BCE,
at the pass of Thermopylae, the so-called Hot Gates.
This may be because of the movies
and because of the books that have been written forever.
This may be the earliest confirmable historical event
most Americans know about.
The defense of 300 Spartans against a million or so Persians.
A battle that some have described over the eras
for the existence of Western civilization.
By the way, if those are the stakes, who side are you rooting for?
What was it the Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi supposedly said
when someone asked him what he thought of Western civilization?
Didn't he say something like, I think it would be a good idea?
Nonetheless, the way the story is framed from the get-go
is designed to have you affiliate with one side over the other.
One side is like the plucky little republic
with Luke Skywalker in Star Wars and they're beleaguered
and they're good and they're under pressure
and they're trying to survive against Darth Vader
and the empire that will snuff out all freedom
and hope and happiness and all those kinds of things.
That's the way the ancient story is handled
of what are called the Greek and Persian Wars.
A moment that has sometimes been portrayed in apocalyptic like terms
for what has sometimes been called the West
once upon a time Christendom.
So already many in the West are going to feel like
it's a sporting event and we're the home team, right?
We're all homers when it comes to the Greek and Persian Wars
unless of course you're more like the people
who were portrayed as the Persians back then.
Remember this is not just an ethnic thing,
this is a values thing and in the narrative
sometimes called the grand narrative by some,
Greece is fighting for things like liberty and freedom
and democracy and artistic.
I mean everything that the evil empire is
and the evil empire will snuff it all out
and make slaves of everyone.
The story of Thermopylae is one of those
that is absolutely dramatic beyond anything
you get in earlier history and it's because
you have a master storyteller imparting the story to you.
When I started in news reporting an editor said to me
your job is to relate the facts of the story,
the true information and do so in the most compelling way you can.
If you imagine the battle of Thermopylae as written by say
the scribes of Babylonia, it might sound like this.
In the fourteenth year the king of lands
by the will of Marduk overcame the Spartan army
at a place called the Hot Gates.
297 of the enemy were counted.
The Spartan king went to his destiny.
The Babylonians had been riding that way forever.
They were great record keepers.
Things were a little dry though.
Now, north of them were the Assyrians,
a culture that existed sort of alongside the Babylonians,
a lot more aggressive and big on the propaganda front
and didn't mind shoving people's nose in their defeats
and they like to maintain shall we call a muscular foreign policy.
There's what sound a little bit more like
Darth Vader's PR firm issuing a press release.
They would have described the battle of Thermopylae like this.
Like a storm I overthrew them, all I slew.
Their king I crucified, their land I devastated.
Now you may notice that there's not a lot of character development there
unless making the king of Assyria frightfully terrifying
is the development you're after.
Nonetheless, as I said in this story,
Darth Vader's really the only character on the other side
that gets fleshed out very much.
Compare the sample Babylonian and Assyrian approaches to this story
to something like the description you get from people
like Herodotus of Halakarnassus,
sometimes called the father of histories,
occasionally called the father of lies,
writing his history a generation after the events at Thermopylae.
He talks about, you know, the Spartans blocking this road.
And there's a tale that has developed over the hundreds of years afterwards
of an event that people have been adding a few screenwriting touches to
since the very beginning.
As the story is often told,
there's a bunch of Greeks trying to block the army of the Persians
from coming into southern Greece.
Xerxes, the crack of doom named Persian king,
the only truly free person in his whole society,
the story would have you believe,
rules all of Asia and so many other lands
that he is entitled a king of kings.
All his people are the equivalent of slaves who could live or die on his whim,
and when he orders them to fight the Spartans in this past,
they obey and are whipped by overseers onto the spears of the Spartans.
The last stand as it's called at Thermopylae,
the greatest last stand probably in all human history,
was not supposed to be the kind of last stand it turned out to be.
There were thousands of Greek soldiers at Thermopylae initially,
but eventually became apparent that it was going to be a death trap.
And so the Spartan king, a guy named Leonidas,
supposedly sent the other Greeks away
and kept a sort of rear guard,
if you want to stick with the narrative,
a rear guard for Greek and Western freedom
behind to hold off the Persians.
There were other Greeks who were involved
in the so-called last stand at Thermopylae,
but it's the Spartans who get the most attention, about 300 of them.
And again, you can understand why.
The characters, they were fascinating in their own time.
The Spartans are a kind of a cultural experiment.
A better way to put it is,
when you think about all human history together,
there's enough law of averages stuff working
where you can see all kinds of little human experiments
going on in various communities.
In Sparta, it's whether or not the culture can infuse
a certain fighting quality to its human beings
if they grow up a certain way,
pressured by the culture in certain facets
that just make them more likely to be extremely nasty in combat.
Spartan warriors, Spartiates do nothing but fighting.
There is no other job for them.
The entire culture seems to be designed
from much of what we know now to reinforce this,
including a code of laws and behavior
that tended to make these Spartans enough alike
so that laconic became a term that described,
you know, most of them,
they're not a lot of chatty Spartans in history.
The culture didn't encourage that.
Listen to the color, though, that's come down from this story.
The great king Xerxes, with his army reported to be
a million men so large that it drinks the river's dry
that it passes through, comes to this road
with this pass that has to be crossed
and these small group of Greek hoplites guarding it,
and Xerxes, according to Herodotus, doesn't know what to do.
Can't quite believe what he's seeing.
Look at the color in this story.
According to Herodotus, Xerxes sends a spy
to go up to the Spartan lines and try to figure out
what's going on and not get caught.
Not only does he not get caught, but according to Herodotus,
he reports back to Xerxes and says that the Spartan warriors
couldn't have cared less that he was there.
They were fine with him looking around. They didn't care.
He said they were doing exercises and combing their hair.
Again, you have to imagine Clint Eastwood
with long hair and a beard.
Right there, that would be worth the price of admission
with his tall, sinewy guy, not a big muscle bound guy
doing body weight exercises, calisthenics, push-ups, sit-ups,
gymnastics, that's how they prepped.
And the combing the long hair was a Spartan thing.
Xerxes could not get his mind around.
Herodotus basically says the idea that these people,
a couple hundred of them, were going to try to take on
his reportedly million man army.
So he calls in an advisor that he has.
He's got a Spartan king with him, a guy who fell out of favor
and he hooked up with the Persians,
thinking that if they conquer all of Greece,
it might be good for him.
He's been the advisor to the great king of kings up till now.
He had told the king earlier about these people
and they'd made fun of him, so now Xerxes called him back
to report on what the spy had said these Spartans were doing.
I'll let Herodotus, this ancient screenwriter,
handle the story from there,
writing 2,500 years ago, quote,
Xerxes listened but could not understand
that the Lachodemonians were really preparing to kill
or be killed?
To fight as much as was in their power seemed to him
to be the height of folly, the action of fools.
So he sent for Demeritus, son of Eraston, who was in the camp.
And when Demeritus arrived, Xerxes questioned him
about everything he had been told,
trying to understand the meaning behind
what the Lachodemonians were doing.
Demeritus answered,
you heard what I said about these men before,
when we were just setting out against the Greeks,
and you made me a laughingstock
when you heard my view of how these matters would turn out.
But it is my greatest goal to tell the truth in your presence.
So hear me now once again.
These men have come to fight us for control of the road,
and that is really what they are preparing to do.
For it is their tradition that they groom their hair
whenever they are about to put their lives in danger.
Now know this.
If you subjugate these men,
and those who have remained behind in Sparta,
there is no other race of human beings
that will be left to raise their hands against you,
for you are now attacking the most noble kingdom
of all the Greeks, and the best of men.
What Demeritus said,
Herodotus writes,
seemed quite incredible to Xerxes,
and he asked for a second time
how they could possibly intend to fight his whole army,
since there were so few of them.
Demeritus replied,
Sire, if things do not turn out just as I claim they will,
treat me like a liar.
End quote.
To lie to the great king of kings,
of the Achaemenid Persian Empire,
was a capital crime.
He was basically saying,
if this doesn't turn out exactly like I told you it will,
you can kill me.
That's pretty darn colorful right there.
But it gets even better.
The great king of the Persians
was supposed to have sent a messenger
to the Spartan lines,
to King Leonidas and say,
basically join us.
We'll make you the overlords of Greece.
You'll have more than you ever had before.
A lot of nations had done that.
Joining the Persian Empire was not a bad idea sometimes.
He's basically saying we can make a deal here.
It'll be worth your while.
His father Darius was a great deal maker.
And the Xerxes was coming from a position of negotiation here,
and the Spartans basically
dressed him down morally.
Saying something to the effect of,
you know, you have all this land already,
but you need to bother us.
We'd rather die for Greece than own anything.
It was one of those wonderful Spartan moralistic put-downs.
Again, spoken with as few words as possible.
And then famously,
as recorded by Plutarch
600 years after the event,
Xerxes sends another messenger
to the Spartan lines, supposedly.
Another message for the king of the Spartans.
And says to all the men who can hear him,
you can all go home.
All will be forgiven.
Just put down your arms.
And then you get the wonderful phrase,
Boulang Pave.
Translated many different ways,
but it just is good, pretty much any of them.
Come and take them.
Lay down your arms.
Come and take them.
Come and get them.
Having come, take.
You can take them when we're all alone.
You can take them when we're all dead.
A lot of the different ways.
The difficult to translate
Greek is used.
It's still, by the way, the motto of the
Greek First Army Corps.
It's been used for many causes
all throughout history,
because it's such a great, dramatic, colorful
spit-in-the-face-of-death line, isn't it?
It's a Clint Eastwood line.
Do you feel lucky, punk?
Come and take them.
How do you not stand up in the theater
when that moment hits?
That's every screenwriter's dream,
to have a scenario like that, and if it can be true,
how wonderful is that?
The Greek chroniclers
who wrote about this stuff
did not skimp on the drama,
and it makes it colorful, it makes it real,
it makes it compelling even 2,500 years later,
and you'd give your right arm
to have this kind of stuff
right out of the mouths of the oral historians
from all these places that didn't have them.
And look black and white
because of it.
The Persian story must be magical also.
We don't have that story.
And traditionally
it's difficult for us to imagine
that we'd like to hear
from a pro-perspective the story
of Darth Vader and the Empire,
but throughout history they weren't always Darth Vader,
and some of the
greatest chroniclers of all time
have gone to great lengths
to show, in fact,
that they may have been on God's
side, if you will.
If that turns out to be the case,
whose side are you rooting for then?
Of course, in this time period,
the Iron Age, ancient world,
and in this area, the Mediterranean
and the Near East, you'd have to be
a heck of a lot more specific
when you start talking about deities
than to just say God,
the likely response during that era might have been
which God?
It was a wild and crazy
time for religion in that part of the world,
and they had a lot of different ones,
and they ran the gamut from things you might
understand today to wild and crazy
and everything in between.
Most of these religious beliefs
had a pantheon of gods, a bunch of them,
some of them had
a dominant lead god, but
having multiple gods
was normal. There were groups
especially one known
for only having one god,
and they were the ones that
put together with divine
or without divine help, take your pick,
a tome,
a combination
of catalog of events
and stories
and accounts and perspectives
and
admonitions and hymns
and it's hard to describe
exactly what the Old Hebrew Bible is.
It's also hard to know
when it was written, are the accounts
from the period around the time
the Persians first appeared on the scene
legitimate from that period?
Most biblical experts think they were written
later. Nonetheless,
we use Plutarch
500 years after the fact, and so does everyone else,
so when the
Old Hebrew Bible
in multiple places talks about
the Persians, we should probably
at least note the attitude
and the attitude that the writers
whomever they may have been of those
works had toward the Persians, especially
early on, wasn't just positive,
it was divine.
Meanie,
meanie, tekel, you farsen.
Number,
number, weight,
divisions.
That's my favorite part of the Bible,
the Old Hebrew Bible,
which is so full of wonderful stuff,
you know, the Greeks don't have the market
totally cornered on color, there's just
not a ton of stuff from the parts of the world
during the time period represented
by the Bible, but remember, there's a
lot of discussion over when various pieces
of the Bible were written.
A lot of this good stuff might have been written
well into the prose period, so we've
entered into the color era, because there's
so much color. The Book of Daniel
has this scary story, spooky story,
it's not like a horror movie, but it's
a spooky movie, and
today you'd have to have a little CGI
help to make it work, but it's my favorite scene,
it's out of the Book of Daniel, and it involves
a ghostly hand
writing words on a wall,
meanie, meanie, tekel,
eupharsen.
And you have to back up a little bit in the story
to set the scene, but the King of Babylon,
who the Bible calls
Belshazzar, is having
a party, he and his buddies
and some concubines, that's the way
the Bible puts it, probably have to imagine
some loud music,
you know, and there's booze,
I mean, they're drinking, and at a certain point
the King of Babylon wants the really
nice, you know, silverware
brought in, and the big cups
of gold and silver, the ones they took
from Jerusalem when they sacked
the capital of Judah not that
long ago, because that's what the Babylonians had done.
Scattered
a bunch of Jews everywhere,
forced a lot of the premier families
and craftsmen and artisans
to deport all the way back to Babylon
and destroyed Solomon's
temple.
When it comes to PR, this Belshazzar guy
and the Babylonians are not getting
a ton of it positive from the Bible.
And while he's drinking
out of his big, you know, looted
cup, hanging out with the concubines,
all of a sudden a ghostly
hand with a finger
appears right under the lamp
and it starts
writing on a wall,
meany, meany, tackle, you farsan
and everybody freaks out.
My King James version
of the Bible makes it sound
like he essentially couldn't control
his bowels, he was so scared.
My later, more colloquial
version just sticks to the knees
shaking version.
Nonetheless, he couldn't
figure out what it meant.
So the Bible says this
Babylonian leader called
in all his sorcerers and necromancers
and astrologers,
all these people, you know, the wizards
that advised, you know, the high
Babylonian king.
And part of what makes Babylonians so frickin wonderful
is their a combination of like
rational, logical, hard, observational
science and mathematics and all these
kinds of things with divination.
You have to imagine
a Stephen Hawking type character
but a Ouija board is
an integral part of how he goes about
his business. It's fascinating.
But none of these people the Bible says can explain
to Belchazar what the writing means.
And then someone reminds him
that his father used this guy,
this deportee
from Judah after the Babylonians
had destroyed Jerusalem there. And he was
here in Babylon and we could bring him in
and see if he knows what the ghostly writing means.
And Belchazar grabbed the guy and brought
him in and it was Daniel
who was indeed a deportee.
And Belchazar gives him the same
offer he gave to his soothsayers. Listen, you
tell me what this means and, you know, gold chains
and you'll rule a third of the kingdom
and all this kind of stuff. And Daniel says,
you know, keep your gifts or give them
to somebody else. I'll tell you what the
writing means.
And I have a lot of different versions of the Bible, the Torah
all these things in front of me.
And all the versions are good, but the King James
Bible with its, you know,
wrath of God style,
you know, sums it up perfectly.
Daniel looks at the
meanie, meanie, tekel you farsen
and describes the words as meaning
number, number, weight divisions
and then defines
that as meaning this from the King James
version quote.
This is the interpretation of the
thing. God have numbered
thy kingdom and finished it.
Thou art weighed into balances and art found
wanting. Thy kingdom is
divided and given to the Medes and the
Persians. End quote.
That's pretty colorful
stuff, isn't it?
And in that version, the
King of the Persians, a guy named Darius
conquers Babylon that night and kills
the Belches are.
Well, none of that's true, but that's how the Bible
story goes.
Nonetheless, it's clear from
that perspective
that the Persians in this story are not going to be
the bad guys, they're going to be the instrument
of God that rectifies things.
If God is on
any one side in that story,
he's on the side of the Medes and the Persians.
Who the heck are these
Medes and Persians?
And if they're so good in this story
with the Babylonians, how do they go from
that
to the evil the Greeks see
two or three rulers later?
Well, let's remember, Darth Vader
wasn't always evil.
And in fact
the guy who will kick off
the
Persians first real appearance on the
world stage
will be a guy that is so
beloved by at least the Hebrew God
he will be the only non-Jew
ever
proclaimed a Messiah.
The person who will get this
honor is known in your history
books by the name Cyrus the Second
or Cyrus the Great.
If you wanted to make it sound a little
bit more like it probably sounded in Persian
you would say Kourosh.
He's probably the greatest
conqueror in world history up until
the time of Alexander.
He's got some of the best historical
press anybody's likely
to get. Nobody has a bad word
to say about the guy.
Even the Greeks like him.
Xenophon will write a whole book
essentially romanticizing Cyrus as
the greatest perfect world leader and wouldn't you like
to be like him and here's how you could emulate
what he did and that kind of thing.
Cyrus becomes part of a
Greek motif that western tradition
will continue for a long time
that portrays the East
as decadent and soft
and corrupt.
But then how do you explain how some of these
great empires got started?
The way the Greeks do it is Cyrus is fantastic
and he builds up this
entire thing and bequeaths it to the Persians
who proceed to become soft and rich
and lazy and decadent and ruin
what the great Cyrus gave them.
Even the Greeks portray Cyrus as this great figure
and yet we know so little
about the guy.
If you contrast what we know about him
and the guy who probably takes the crown
from him as greatest conqueror in the world
to that point, Alexander the Great,
it's night and day.
Alexander the Great exists in a fully colorized
historical world.
A post-herodotus world, a world where
Alexander will bring his own
publicists with him
from place to place so they can record
his latest deeds and sayings and doings.
Cyrus the Great
founds the last great empire
in maybe what you could call
the black and white era
in the Near East.
An era where we know the majority
about the people back then
because of things like monoliths
and statues and reliefs
and carvings and
tomb paintings and architecture
and ruins.
When you do have writing you get business
records and proclamations
and transactions.
Some of the best stuff you get from this
era are the correspondences, the letters
between diplomats and governors
and rulers.
What none of those people are doing
is writing to amuse
or entertain anybody.
All of the writing from the black and white
period of human history
is colder.
They all have a purpose beyond
being entertaining.
It might be a religious purpose, a business
purpose, a governmental purpose
or even two important officials
writing each other about, you know, matters
of state and a few personal things creep in.
That's very different than writing something
performed in front of a live audience
for their entertainment and enjoyment.
I read something historian Michael Grant
had written about Herodotus, suggesting
that the reason Herodotus has the
interesting structure that he does to his
histories is because it was not meant
to be read as much as it was meant to be
performed live, read allowed
by Herodotus himself.
And that the digressions and the tangents
in the work represent things that would
have worked much better in a live situation
that would be broadcasting, if you will,
an orator,
as opposed to somebody writing something
to be read by somebody else
remotely.
If that's the case, then you don't really have
the first written prose history with Herodotus.
You have the script for Herodotus's
live show, if you will,
which would explain a lot considering that
if you want to get drama and color and stories
before the period of Herodotus,
you're looking at things like the Iliad
by Homer
Gilgamesh from Mesopotamian history,
both of which are believed, by the way,
to have been stories told for hundreds of
years that were finally compiled and written
down. Same thing with like a Beowulf
in Scandinavian history.
Maybe Herodotus is more like the ancient
storytellers than first meets the eye.
To give him some credit,
Herodotus was trying to be a chronicler
at the same time, though he was trying to do
the same thing I was told to do in news reporting,
to relate the facts as best
as he understood them in the most compelling
way he could.
So, what you have here
in this ancient story is not so much myth.
That wouldn't be fair, not just
to people like Herodotus, but all of the great
historians over time who have found all these
records and put together, you know, like a
jigsaw puzzle, a
viewing of the past that is always being
redone and improved, but wouldn't have even
existed there if a ton of different pieces
of the puzzle hadn't been brought together.
But at the same time, while it's not myth,
it's not exactly truth either.
There
are historians who've spent their whole lives
trying to separate the truth from the
fiction in works like Herodotus.
I actually laughed out loud
when I read Pierre Brion's book
from Cyrus to Alexander.
Brion is one of the great historians of ancient
Persia, and this book is like the Encyclopedia.
I mean, it's very detailed,
very specific. It's 1200 pages.
It's an enormous,
comprehensive book,
and the very first lines in it
are as part of the,
you know, opening page where he quotes an artist
who says, quote,
and even if it is not true,
you need to believe in ancient
history, end quote.
Does anything
better set up the dichotomy
here, and how wonderful that
in a 1200 page book
that is exhaustive as all get out,
the very first line from the historian is
yeah, it might not be true, but you have to
believe it anyway. It's wonderful, and it
sums up the problem with ancient history,
and that is that you have the feeling
that most of what you're reading here is the truth,
and these events did happen, but there's a lot
of fiction mixed in, and it's difficult
to know what's what, and it's difficult
to separate one from the other.
It's also difficult to know where
to begin the story. This is a classic
problem anybody has trying to explain something, right?
How do you begin a story of Cyrus II
and the Persians? When does that start?
All history is connected, as we know,
right? It's all a bunch of
ruling dominoes, and one event
and series of events leads up to other ones
and sets it all up. Where's the logical starting point?
I'm terrible at this, by the way.
I did a whole series on the decline
and fall of the Roman Republic, hours and hours
and hours, because I was trying to find the logical
place to start a story about Cleopatra.
I never even got practically to Cleopatra.
It was all dominoes before then.
Herodotus starts
with the earliest thing he knows
about it, and it's a miracle he knows about
it at all. He begins
by talking about the Assyrians.
He also talks
about having multiple versions of this
story, so Herodotus being Herodotus,
he says, listen, I've heard a lot of different things.
Here are my sources.
The story begins, boom, and here's what
he writes. Quote,
From here, our story demands
that we inquire further about Cyrus
and the Persians. Who was this
man who destroyed the Empire of Cresus?
And how did the Persians become the leaders
of Asia? I shall write this account
using as my sources certain Persians
who do not intend to magnify
the deeds of Cyrus, but rather to tell
what really happened, although I know
of three other ways in which the story of Cyrus
is told. End quote.
And then he begins the story using a phrase
that should probably be preceded
by a line like, once upon
a time, quote,
The Assyrians ruled
inland Asia for 520 years
and the Medes were the first
to revolt from them. It would seem
that they proved themselves to be truly courageous
men by fighting the Assyrians
for the cause of freedom, and they succeeded
in casting off slavery and were liberated.
Afterwards, the other
ethnic groups freed themselves as the Medes
had done. End quote.
Well, the Medes
need a little explaining.
Just like at the biblical story of
Belshazzar's Feast when he said that the Empire
was going to be divided between the Medes and the Persians.
The Medes and the Persians
are a related people. The Greeks
used the terms interchangeably.
They were, you know, practically like
brothers in the eyes of the Greeks. When I
was growing up, they were just starting to change
from the brothers' sort of interpretation
to maybe saying, ah, maybe they were more like first cousins.
Some of the more
recent histories I've been reading, maybe you could say
would downgrade the relationship even a step
further to something like second cousins
who fought sometimes.
Historians differ on when
these related peoples arrived
in the area where they can
now play a role in the history of this
you know, enclosed sort of
geopolitical world with Egypt and Babylon
and Assyria and all these places.
There's even a few historians who think they may have
always been there. You just didn't hear about them.
Nevertheless, the
world upon which they have
intruded is
so old it's hard for modern people
to get our minds around because it's hard
for us to imagine something 2,500
years ago, you know, when
a monopoly is happening. Now imagine
something from
2,500 years before that.
And that's how old this world is.
I love the way in the 1940s
historian A.T. Olmsted
tried to give the reader a sense
of how old this world was and how
the people who lived in it knew it was
old.
He starts by talking about Cyrus the
second, or Cyrus the great person
after he takes over Babylon, trying to
describe how old the world is that
Babylon represents, and he says quote.
When Cyrus entered Babylon
in 539 B.C.E.,
the world was old.
More significant, the world knew
its antiquity. Its scholars had
compiled long dynastic lists
and simple addition appeared to
prove that kings whose monuments
were still visible had ruled
more than four millenniums before.
Yet earlier were other monarchs,
sons of gods, and so
themselves demigods, whose
remains covered several generations of
present-day short-lived men.
Even these were preceded, the Egyptians
believed, by the gods themselves
who held sway through long eons.
Before the universal
flood, the Babylonians
placed ten kings, the
least of whom ruled 18,600 years,
the greatest
43,200 years.
Other peoples, he writes, knew this
flood and told of monarchs,
nanochists of Icodium, for example,
who reigned in pre-Diluvian
times, meaning, you know, the times before
the biblical flood. He continues,
the sacred history of the Jews
extended through 4,000 years,
modest as were their
figures when compared with those of Babylon
or Egypt, they recorded
that one pre-Diluvian patriarch
almost reached the millennium mark
before his death. Greek poets
chanted a legendary history
which was counted backward to the time
when the genealogies of the heroes
ascended to the god.
Each people and nation,
each former city-state, boasted
of its own creation story
with its own local god as creator.
He then goes on to diagram
that in the 600s and 700s BCE
there were quite a few rulers
in quite a few of these old countries
that became archeological buffs
where they would go back and pay for the
excavation of earlier rulers
that ruled 1,000-1,500 years
before them.
And in Egypt may have dressed similarly.
That's the continuity
of the Egyptian fashion look.
My favorite story
that really gives you an idea of the
antiquity of things and how the peoples
of this region understood it and knew it
in a way that you don't normally think
about has to do with an archeological
excavation that happened in late
1800s, early 1900s
in modern day Iran, in a city
through much of the historical period
that was called Sousa.
Sousa is a very old city, ancient city.
It will be important
in the Persian period. It will be important
after that period for a very long time
of people called the Elamites
resided in
Sousa and it was in a strata
where the Elamite period
was that these archeologists began
to uncover some of the greatest treasures
and antiquities
in Near Eastern history
and they didn't belong there.
They found, for example, the famous
steel or steely. Take your
pick of Hammurabi.
Something that is huge.
I mean, it's a giant 7 foot
tall or something heavy big thing
and they find it
there. What's it doing there?
That should be in Babylon.
Now
if you think the steel of Hammurabi
is old,
circa 1700s
BCE or something like that,
archeologists then
find something that's a good deal older
than that. It's called the victory
steel of Narum Sin.
He was an Akkadian king
from the 2200s BCE.
So by the
time they were making the steel of
Hammurabi, the victory steel
of Narum Sin was half a millennia
old.
There were other antiquities that they found too,
all of them from elsewhere.
They were the spoils,
the loot,
the stuff that the Elamites
took back with them
when they sacked Babylon.
And in fact, you could tell
because somehow all this stuff
was on display
and below the original
inscriptions in the original language
explaining what this was
was an Elamite inscription
explaining when it was taken from
the Babylonians as loot
and spoils and as a piece
of memorabilia commemorating
a great victory.
I keep imagining a bunch of trophies
in like a college or university
or school trophy case.
You know, commemorating the victories over
the eras over your school rivals,
the Okan bucket,
the apple cup, the steel
of Hammurabi.
You know, that kind of thing.
And by the way, it wasn't just
cultural artifacts that were taken
from the famous Elamite invasion
that happened in the 1100s.
They took the god of Babylon with them.
They took Marduk with them.
The statue that represented the god.
And this is one of my favorite things
about ancient history is this idea sometimes
that these statues that represented
the gods were somehow connected
to the god, him or herself.
And sometimes were.
I mean, there were some beliefs that they were the gods
and so you'll see for example the Assyrians
in a lot of their stone reliefs
showing the conquest of some civilization
or city, they've got the god
that their soldiers are carrying away
along with all of the loot.
And it's kind of symbolic when you think
about it. It's a sign, our god
stronger than your god, after all,
we've got your god.
And in a lot of these Near Eastern civilizations
the historians wrote that you can't reestablish
some of these cities until
the god is returned.
So in other words, when Babylon gets sacked
and the god is taken away, they can't do
a building thing until the god is brought back.
We got your god.
I mean, talk about rubbing your nose
in a defeat there.
I mean, I was trying to think about
what the equivalent would be in the modern world.
Certainly if somebody took over the United States
if the Elamites had done it
they would have the Statue of Liberty
in their little museum there with a little notation
underneath.
Taken from New York City after we crushed the Americans.
I love the Elamites
and would love to know more about them.
They're one of those people that just not a lot is known.
What you can say for sure
is that they are the great
long-standing urban power
in what's now modern
day Iran for thousands of years.
The big contemporaries and the big
power from that region
that rival the Babylon's and the Assyrias
and the Egypt's. There's usually a power
in the north to north of Assyria, but that
changes. It could be
Mitanni, it could be the Hittites, it could be
Urartu. Nonetheless, you have
a relatively stable
geopolitical balance going on
for a long time, even through the ups
and downs. And then
that world begins
to be consciously
destroyed.
And that opens up the door
to an instability
where, you know, anything
can happen. And shocking
things did.
It starts with the
absolute sky rocketing
by historical
standards of the military
dominance of the Assyrians.
Now you may be thinking
we were just talking about the Medes a minute ago
and now we've shifted over to the Assyrians and what does one
have to do with the other?
But it's their paths crossing
that sort of set up the
stage for the next period
in western Asian history.
The Medes will turn out to be one of a couple
of Davids in this story who will take
down Goliath in order
to understand what a big deal that is.
You need to understand
how big of a deal Goliath
was in this story. The Assyrians
are Goliath. And they were
transformed in the 700s BCE
from one of the great
powers, sometimes the greatest of the great
powers, sometimes not, into
the regional superpower.
And as far as these people were concerned,
the region was the entire
world.
And this quickly growing
absolutely devastating
new empire in terms of its
military abilities
would have been the ones fighting the Greeks
and the Spartans at
Thermopylae had the
Medes and their allies not
been able to take down this Goliath. And I got
news for you. I don't think
the Neo Assyrian armies
at their height would have beaten
Alexander the Great and his Macedonians.
I'm not sure, but I don't think.
But I think they'd crush
the ancient Greeks of Athens and Sparta.
And so
maybe if the past at Thermopylae
and the Greco-Persian Wars really was
a war for western civilization,
we should be thankful that there were people
like the Medes to take down
the people who I think would
have been the odds on favorite in any
Vegas betting pool to take down
the ancient Greeks in 480 BCE.
They weren't around in 480 BCE
in part because of these people,
the Medes, who in the
hundreds when this story really heats up
and gets strange, were a people
on the periphery of the known
universe at the time.
To the Assyrians, the Medes
are sort of the eastern edge
of the known galaxy.
And beyond those Medean tribes
with all their petty little kinglets
are groups of half
human, half monsters
called the Umen-Manda
in Assyrian annals.
The Umen-Manda, by the way, an old
Cadian term that means
the horde from who knows where.
And it's believed
that this refers
to the nomadic peoples of the
steppe, the cultural
forebears of the Huns and the Turks
and the Mongols and all those people.
In fact, the Medes and the Persians
were supposed to be able to speak
to the Umen-Manda
without the use of translators.
How'd you like to be related enough
to a people known as the
horde from who knows where
to be able to understand their
language without anybody helping?
Nonetheless,
it's in this period right around
750 BCE
where you get a sort of an
unusual happening in ancient history
where a lot seems to happen
in a relatively short period of time.
Because in ancient history you get
these long stretches where it seems like very little
changes. In 745 BCE
with
the arrival of a new Assyrian king,
a guy named Tiglath Pileser III
Assyria begins
to go on this sprint
maybe you could call it a historical
sprint that will last
until about 615-612 BCE
and will be like
maybe you could say the last
burst of rocket fuel
of that historical
era, of that ancient world
about to give way to the era of the Greeks
and classical antiquity and all that kind of stuff
and rockets it to the heights
where the Assyrian army for example
in say
700 BCE
are the equivalent of like the Roman
Empire's armies at their
height for their era.
The Assyrians will
systematically smash
the other great powers
in that area and it's
difficult by the way, they're powerful, they're
sophisticated, they have a lot of money
in some of these places.
The Assyrians often have to face
not single states, but
coalitions of states,
big allies that allied simply
to deal with the Assyrians and they lose
most of the time anyway.
I'll try not to geek out on the army too much
but it's the gold standard for the era.
Richard Gabriel
and Karen Metz in their book from Sumer to Rome
sort of describe it
in a nutshell in terms of just giving you
a mental picture of the capabilities
of an army from this era.
You know the so called Biblical era
when I was growing up they write quote.
The Assyrian army of the 8th century
BCE was comprised
of at least 150,000 to
200,000 men and was
the largest standing military force that
the Middle East had witnessed to this time.
An Assyrian combat field army
numbered approximately 50,000
men with various mixes of
infantry, chariots and cavalry.
In modern times the size of an Assyrian
field army was equal to
five modern heavy American divisions
or almost eight Soviet
field divisions. When a raid
for battle the army took up an area of
2,500 yards across
and 100 yards deep.
The Assyrian army was also the first army
to be entirely equipped with iron weapons.
End quote.
Boy doesn't that Soviet reference
date me. Nonetheless
you get an idea that we're talking about armies
that were exponentially larger
than in the recent past.
In the Bronze
age you know Narum Sin was putting
like 6,000 guys into the field
and thinking he had a lot of men.
The Assyrians have multiple divisions
of 50,000 each.
They will smash the
power of the mountain state
of Urartu at one point during this
period. That's where modern Armenia
is. They will several
times have to deal with Babylon.
Another one of their great kings
Snakarib takes care of that
and then they just have to do it again
and again. Babylon is the thorn in the
side perpetually of Assyria.
And the Elamites always get in trouble
with the Assyrians because they always support
the Babylonians because after all
all of them would like to see the Assyrians
cut down to size.
Eventually the Assyrians will cut
the Elamites down to size too.
One of the most
horrifying of all the Assyrian
reliefs
and you know there's a lot of them and historians
don't always know how to classify them.
You can't tell if
you want to say that these are real
scenes that they're showing when you see these
carvings which were probably painted at one time
and were often displayed in the waiting
room before you got to see the king.
What are you looking at while you're cooling your heels
waiting to see the Assyrian king? The things
he did to the people like you
who maybe turned against him.
Sometimes historians think
that they're taking a sadistic
sort of cruel love in this.
Sometimes it's meant to be terrifying and they enjoy
that Saddam Hussein style.
Sometimes they think of it as a convention.
In the same way the Egyptians always
seem to show them you know wearing certain
kinds of clothing whether or not they did anymore
it was an artistic convention.
Showing people getting their heads locked off is just
you know if you go to Assyria
you expect to see the Assyrian things.
That kind of deal. That's who we are.
It's a staple.
Nonetheless one of my favorite Assyrian relief
shows the aftermath
of the era where the Assyrians finally decided
to deal with the ongoing
Elamite problem.
It shows the Assyrian king Asher
Bonipal reclining on one of those
wonderful oriental near eastern
you know kinds of things that they used to lay down
on like a couch where they would
have somebody feed you grapes or something
and he's sitting there drinking wine or eating food
in a luxurially
relaxing sort of pace in a garden
with little palm trees if I recall it correctly
and there's a woman there with him
and you get the feeling like he and that woman are together
and then right over nearby
up on the side of a wall
or a post or a pillar
is a head
the head
of the Elamite king
pickled
or otherwise
and that woman who you think maybe is
Assyria Bonipal's wife or maybe a royal concubine
some historians think
is the wife of that Elamite
she having to be there
with the person who killed him
and have him looking on
in a body list the whole time
the Assyrians just had this wonderful
historical reputation for something that once again
is cinematic
now it's not color it's not like Herodotus
and all that we don't have it in color
but it's a really scary black and white
horror film
if you're on the receiving end
of Assyrian violence
I should point out that you know focusing so much
on geopolitics and Assyrian foreign policy
may you know sort of color
the picture in a very negative way
because to live in an Assyrian city during this
time period might have been awesome
might have been the height of civilization
you know it was a society
that was in some respects one of the most literate
at all time periods it was wealthy
it was cultured
might have been great to live in Assyria you just
didn't want to be on the wrong end of Assyrian
foreign policy
and from about 745 BCE
to about the
early 600s a lot of people were
and very few people
came away doing very well after that
they systematically battered
down the structures of this region
now battering down the structures
of the region were very important if you wanted
to kind of make it
amenable to being incorporated
into a single political entity like
an empire everybody's
individualistic nature had to be curtailed
somewhat the problem will come
when the unifying force
that did this disappears
to get an idea
by the way of how many peoples were talking about here
and as a wonderful way to sort of
contradict the earlier way the story
was told which was focusing
on peoples ethnicity a lot
and to say you know the Assyrians were
Semitic and the
Iranian peoples the Medes and the Persians were
Indo-European and all that
is to realize when you deal
with a place that is so
filled with different ethnic groups
intermarrying living together
that it doesn't take very long for peoples languages
to change which used to be the way
we judged who was whom
it also means that the job
of any unifying force that wants to
turn all these different
freedom loving groups into
a single political entity is huge
historian Will Durant
tries to lay the foundation
and basically says you know just so you know
look at how many peoples there are
in this part of the world and they're all interacting
all the time and they're intermarrying
it's an ethnic melting pot
he says quote
to a distant and yet discerning eye
the near east in the days of Nebuchadrezzar
would have seemed like an ocean
in which vast swarms
of human beings moved about in turmoil
forming and dissolving
groups enslaving or being
enslaved eating or being
eaten killing or getting killed
endlessly behind and around
the great empires
Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria
and Persia flowered this medley
of half nomad half
settled tribes
Khmerians, Kalikians, Cappadocians
Bephinians, Ashkanians
Messenians, Mionians
Kerrians, Likeians
Pamphlians, Pisidians
Lakenians, Philistines, Amorites
Canaanites, Edomites
Ammonites, Moabites and a hundred
other peoples each of which felt itself the center
of geography and history
and would have marveled at the ignorant
prejudice of a historian who would reduce
them to a paragraph
end quote.
Now I've got a bunch of historians who talk about how
difficult the task is to meld all these
individualistic different peoples
into a single political entity
Chester Star writing in the middle 1960s
put it this way as he tries
to sort of counterbalance
this ruthless image the Assyrians
have with the job they're trying to do
quote. This ruthless spirit
perhaps proves not so much that the
Assyrians were inhuman monsters
as it shows the sternness
required to break and harness the near
east. The Assyrian period was
in reality one of the greatest turning points
in the civilized history of the area
and in this fact must be sought the
justification for the booty
and the tribute of empire. If empire
needs justification.
Politically such kings as Tiglath
Pylissier III took decisive
steps towards uniting the Fertile Crescent
the next great empire
the Persian reaped the benefit
and so could afford to exercise its
sway in a more lenient style
end quote.
This is actually key to one of the things we've been talking
about. The fact that even though
the Greeks portrayed you know the Persians
as sort of Darth Vader and the empire
history outside
the Greeks knew them as a
comparatively tolerant empire
comparatively lenient
who were they being compared to
the Assyrians
but it may have taken
what the Assyrians did
to make an empire that was docile
enough for the Persians
to treat them that way and have it all work out
I should also point out that there are
quite a few historians that would suggest
that the Assyrians have
another legacy that we should
potentially credit them with
a much more noble sounding
one by the way despite the
horrific marketing
and the frightful branding of the Assyrians
perhaps you might look
at them during this time period depending
on your viewpoint in more of a Captain
America style role
fending off the hordes
of barbarism from swamping
the civilized world
with their you know
murder and robbery
because in the last
years of the 700s BCE
the Uman Manda
breakthrough
and when they do
it will take the
greatest military of that age
to be able
to resist and go up against
what is a revolutionary
military challenge
the first peoples in history
probably who had to
try to figure out how you defeat an army
where everyone in the army
is mounted on horseback
now
our modern era is so different
than how the dynamics
of warfare worked for most
of human history that sometimes
we have to reintroduce the more obvious
things to sort of click
a light bulb on in your head and remind you
oh yeah we're talking about something this basic
for example and I love
these military revolution periods
can you imagine what it must have been
like when the first chariots
attacked the first
you know settled civilizations out there
in the first time an army
that was composed
entirely of people walking
had to deal with something moving
at the speed of a horse
and by the way the way that they usually functioned
was that the person inside the chariot
had a very powerful bow
and shot arrows at people
and never really tried to
contact them at all until they were broken
and running away so you couldn't catch them and they move faster
than you did and it changed warfare
and sometimes it's funny by the way
to read some of the records
that have been kept that you have from some of these
very early chariot societies
and you realize how little they know about horses
because people who knew anything about horses
are these really high paid
important individuals and they have this hidden
knowledge about you know here's how you take care
of the feet of a horse and here's what you do
if they get bloat I mean things that today
zillions of people know back then
this was like privileged information how do you care for these things
right
and the horse in
the settled societies
the Egypt's the Babylon's and the Syria
at first you can see that they
don't know how to deal with the animal
I mean there are wonderful little figurines
and what not showing you know the Egyptian
maybe it's like an Egyptian scout during
maybe the first 200 years or something
that the Egyptians were really trying to use
horses and he's sitting way back over the tail
of the horse like he hasn't even figured out
that that's not the right spot to sit in
but we take it for granted
that this is an obvious thing
it might not have been
about 1000 BCE
cavalry first appears
and it generally appears
you know in a
way that once again makes you think that these
people are not very comfortable
riding and remember there are no saddles
there are no spurs there are no stirrups
I mean there's a lot
of knack to knowing
what you're doing here and remember also
that riding horses can be
injurious and fatal
if you're not used to it right
and none of these people are growing up
doing a whole lot of horse riding
and about 900 BCE
you can see carvings showing
Assyrian cavalry which is probably
if you think about it you know cutting edge
for the time period for the settled civilizations
and they send the cavalry
riders out in pairs
because one guy has to hold
the reins for the other guy's horse
when the other guy decides he's going to shoot
or anything in other words
they don't even feel comfortable enough to
shoot and ride you know
independently you got to have someone there
to hold the horse when you do it in other words
you can watch the evolution right
it's different when the armies
from the Middle East the Ancient Near East
first run into the step troops
that will make up one of the
dominant important tribal
areas in world history
for almost ever I mean
it's only the last couple hundred years
that the Eurasian step
part of which you would refer
to as Central Asia today
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan
those kind of places it's only in the last couple hundred years
those places have not been massively
relevant to you know what's going on
I was reading a book not that long ago
that was going into all of the things that
China and Russia
of the 1700s
CE so only a couple hundred years ago
all the things that they had to do to deal with
the tribes on the step
it's crazy because
you know when you look at history you become
very accustomed to watching
the so called civilized societies
just rolling over
tribal peoples you know to a certain point
in history once the momentum gets going
and you have like Julius Caesar
and Roman armies just rolling over
Celtic society you're already
prepared to get to the part where the colonial
Europeans you know show up on these
distant shores and run into people with
wooden clubs and bows and arrows when you've got guns
I mean it's a foregone conclusion right
but you look at the step and you see the
one place in history where
for a number of different reasons the odds
are much more equal between
settled and tribal peoples
first of all it's likely
that the odds in terms of fighting power
in terms of manpower was probably
pretty close the settled societies
had a lot more people but a lot of them
weren't fighters the tribal
societies usually had most of their
male people as fighters
and some females by the way
the weapons technology
was probably comparable
the bows used by the
step people are famously some of the best
ever made but there would have been other
things that the settled so called settled societies
had in their favor so probably a wash
there but imagine the native
Americans with a rough
parody in fighting men
and a rough parody
in weapons technology what would the
native Americans have done to the settlers
then who knows
but at least it's a fair fight add to
that the geographic
conditions and the distance right this is a harsh
environment the step sometimes if you're not
adapted to it and it's a long way
from point A to point B no matter where you're
going and you had a part of the
world that was protected by step
peoples for millennia
where they maintained
their way of life and were
shall we say relevant relevant is a good
non bias in any direction we're relevant
to the societies and world
powers around them and we've known them forever
right we've seen wave after
wave of these people come forward from
the Magyars to the Turks to the Huns to the
Mongols this is the
first period in recorded history where these
people break through and and someone's there
to record it
there's always been a historical
school of thought that chariot
invasions from central Asia long before
this period represent earlier
versions of these kinds of invasions
but this is the first one recorded
where you get to see
you know the kinds of step armies you will
expect for the next
2000 years mounted
on horseback with people
who are you know as we said about
the Spartans that they were sort of a laboratory
experiment to see if a culture could create
a super soldier the step societies are
are a kind of a laboratory experiment
to if you put people
on a horseback from the time when they're
toddlers and put a bow in
their hand from not much later
and have them ride all the time
and do everything on horseback and use those
bows continually and develop
tactics where they never really come into contact
with people they don't want to come in I mean
what do you end up with
and the answer is as you
end up with a weapon system
that was so effective
that even after
guns were developed modern societies were having
a tough time
pardon the pun corralling these people
even up until relatively modern
times
now when you think about how long
that is people trying to contend
with the step people
think about how much admiration we should have
with the first people who had to try
with no track record or experience
the Assyrians
would develop a kind of a broad
policy of dealing with these tribal
step people that resembles
what very sophisticated people
who dealt with them for a very long time came up
with the Chinese and the Byzantines for example
would use a mix of diplomacy
intermarriage warfare
and
you know keeping the tribes divided
and fighting amongst themselves and the Assyrians
did all this stuff too they'd use some of these people
as allies sometimes they'd have
mercenaries who were you know people from
these tribes the tribes like the Khmerians
and the Skithians and the various Sakha tribes
and the Masajidi they have all these wonderful
tribal confederations
and one is scarier than the next
and if you're one of those settled society people
barbarians in air quotes
always scared you I mean there was just
something scary to settle people about
you know people like the Celts for example
the Skithians are no different
the various step peoples are no different
their headhunters for example famously
will drink from
the skulls of their dead enemies
make cups out of them
and if you want to see how the
wonderful continuity of step culture
sometimes go they were doing this in ancient
times and they were doing this up until
relatively you know Mongol type history
the drinking cup skull thing was a
perennial favorite but
that's just a cultural thing right I mean
the Assyrians are hanging enemies heads
on walls so that they can watch their
you know wife have relations
with the Assyrian king who killed them I mean everybody's
got their thing right
at the same time you know
these people are scary
they're effective
they are entirely mounted
which means they have amazing challenges
to the militaries of the day because remember you move at the
speed of your slowest
person if you have an entire army mounted
the entire army moves at the speed of a horse
these are huge challenges and the Assyrians
managed to ward off the
worst of the attacks and in a sense
you know you could make a case that they protected
this entire area
of civilization from
marauding and scary peoples
who were not going to leave it intact
and you know this because there were several
invasions that did break through
there's a horde
of Scythians that will
rape and pillage all the way down to Egypt
before the Egyptians either buy them off
or militarily turn them back and they go
bouncing around the region like a snooker ball
the fact that
in a lot of these step armies
every single person was mounted
was also revolutionary and
huge
the armies of the day
if you were lucky had 15 or 20%
of their force mounted sometimes
quite a bit less you still
move at the speed of your slowest troops though
if you don't if you break
the cavalry off so you can operate independently
you'll have a nice small group
of cavalry that gets overwhelmed by an entirely
mounted force so nonetheless
an army with infantry moves at the speed
of infantry these armies that the settled
societies in this geopolitical realm
and China are trying to deal with
move at the speed of a horse
strategically on the map
that's a devastating thing to try
to counter the fact that the Assyrians could
as a testimony to how great
the greatest military the world had ever seen was
and how well led
nonetheless you could see
how big the challenge was
in 705 BCE
Sargon II arguably the greatest
king Assyria ever had
will as an elderly man
lead the Assyrian army
in person
up to modern
southeastern Turkey near the border
a Neo-Hittite area
called Tabal
and probably fighting in conjunction
with some of these
Neo-Hittite cities
Eurasian steppe troops
Khmerians or Skithians
and Sargon II
will disappear
with the army
the body will never be recovered
that is a very rare event
when the body is not recovered
the assumption is that nobody got out
because one of the last things you will do
is grab the king's body
and spirit it away
it's like saving the flag
times 10
there will be an Egyptian king too
famously whose bones
will stay on the battlefield
and they end up getting it later
and mummifying a body that's been
mutilated on the battlefield
you can still look at the mummy today
and see oh wow
they didn't get to him for a while
Sargon II will never be found
I've often thought it's not a coincidence
his son Sinakarib never
actually led a force in person
when he was king he left that to the generals
there's very important things in Nineveh that need taken care of
as we all understand
anyone who could do that
to an Assyrian army at the height
of Assyrian power
is formidable indeed
now even though Assyria could protect some of this region
they couldn't protect all of it
and some of these tribes filtered down into the area
where the people we're ostensibly talking about
here are the Medes
the Persians, the Elamites
the Zagros Mountains, Iran
the peoples in this region are about
to go through
a one-two punch that will
change them forever
the second of these punches will be delivered
by the Assyrians
surprise surprise they're throwing punches everywhere
shouldn't this region get hit too
the first will be delivered by these steppe people
these tribes of
Khmerians and Skithians
who will at a certain point
I said filtered I thought that was a nice ambiguous way
when you don't really know
what happened but the traditional idea
is that the Skithians and the Khmerians
attacked and broke into
and assaulted the Medes
in a giant invasion
there's even a year associated with it
653 BCE
about it's like 50 years after
Sargon II dies
up into Baal
about 55-60 years
since these horse people
first appeared
and they're still managing to totally disrupt
huge areas of this
geopolitical ecosystem
I'm going to use that word from now on we all know what I mean
right
filtered is a good word though because
it also allows room for a theory
where warfare sort of doesn't
dominate the reasoning behind
why all of a sudden all these Central Asian tribes
moved into this part of Iran
one of the things that's
really changed since I first started studying this story
is the concept that historians have
about who these Medians were
and what kind of state they had
when I was growing up the histories all made it sound like
the Medes were like the Babylonians
and the Assyrians by this time
a centralized state with cities
and governance and bureaucracies and all that
historians today and you know I'm not one
I just read the best
they make it sound much more like
the current state of theory
is that these Medes are much more tribal
than we had previously assumed
and if so might not be
that much different than these Schittians
and Khmerians coming into their area
this could be much more like
a tribal relationship
what did we say the Medes and the Persians were
second cousins who fought sometimes
these step peoples are like third cousins who fight a lot
remember they could
allegedly speak to each other
without the use of a translator
when you're that close to another people
what appears to be a conquest
from outside might be much more like
dynastic marriage
or someone having to change
their alliance status
or becoming a vassal of someone else
or having to pay tribute
Herodotus might see all of that stuff
as a version of slavery
but when he calls it slavery
he might be picturing something else entirely
Herodotus says that the
domination of the Medes
last 28 years
and an interesting little
you know tidbit
that might confirm what he says is
during that time period the Assyrians and the Babylonians
who keep records and who know and mention
the Medes from time to time
start calling everyone who lives
in that whole region
the Umen Manda
and Risesargami among others suggest
that this might mean that
the entire area has just been sort of
overwhelmed
and that you can't tell one tribe from another
without a scorecard
Herodotus if you want to go with this
tells one of his really fun stories
you know if you're like me
about how the Medes eventually
threw off
the nomadic yoke you know that was
oppressing them and he tells a story about how
they invited the Skithian
leaders to a banquet
and then got them all drunk
and then when they were all so inebriated
they could hardly stand they went in and killed them all
I guess you could call that
you know decapitating
the enemy leadership literally
or maybe the tactic is
drunken mass homicide whatever
you want to call it it seems like
a motif another one of these recurring
sorts of things you see all throughout history
and the writing and one of those
aspects of the story
that oftentimes professional historians will discount
because after all we see this
all the time this sounds just like blah blah blah
and they're almost always right
here's the weird part though
this is something that you actually see
in history confirmably
the relationship
between using alcohol
as some sort of a trap
to ensnare other people who then become
vulnerable I mean we've seen this
in recorded history like not that long
ago
Native American tribes had this treatment done
to them sometimes multiple times
in other words what might
look in this case like a recurring motif
might actually be a recurring
historical occurrence
how would you tell the difference
in any
case it'll happen again in this
story which once again makes you say
okay is this just a recurring motif
or is this a tactic that worked
last time so we're trying it again
nonetheless somehow
the Medes regain
freedom of action from these people
who are then thrown out leaving behind
another wonderful
ethnic strain of the Central Asian bloodline
that will run through Iran over
the ages and that will be added to
with new blood sometimes
tragically from time to time
the guy who is
supposedly the king of the Medes
during this period of domination
by the Skithians
is a mead named
Ksiaksaris
Herodotus credits him with
totally reorganizing
the military of the Medes
he says that Ksiaksaris becomes
the first Asian leader
to you know
separate an army into
component parts you know archers
and spearmen and cavalry he says before that
they all fought together in a chaotic mass
which is not true at all
but some historians think he's preserving
some sort of a memory of this important
Median ruler
who reorganized the military
and made it much more powerful and considering
what he was about to do with it
there seems to be some historical evidence
for the Medes all of a sudden becoming
very formidable indeed
right about the same time
when the great traditionally
great power in that region
gets mortally wounded
by Assyria
and we alluded to this earlier
part of Assyria's laying
waste to all these
you know competitors for their superpower status
right there's not going to be anybody that even gets to
put up a little resistance
the Elamites once again
get on the hit list for doing the same thing
they always do
Babylon revolts against Assyria
Elam helps Babylon
as soon as the Assyrians take care of Babylon
they come for the Elamites
and this happens under the last
of the great Assyrian rulers
Ashurbanipal
Ashurbanipal
who's a very long
ruling guy and at the start of his reign
the empire could not be
at a higher place
by the end of his reign
he's writing these woe is me tales
what did I do to have the gods turn against me
everything sucks
but I'll die soon at least
kinds of writings
Assyria will go
out of its fortunes to
1945
Berlin follow the Third Reich
devastation never to rise again
in a very short
period of time
and some have argued
that part of the reason why
is because of what they did to the people around them
they destroyed
the other powers
who might have acted as barriers against new rising ones
whether the new rising ones are
skithians and chimerians from the Eurasian steppe
or whether they're
an obscure tribal
people known as the Meads
who all of a sudden are really getting powerful and well led
who otherwise would have been dealing
with the Elamites
but the Elamites get smashed by
Ashurbanipal in 646 BCE
and the devastation
is
arguably mortal
we already mentioned
a scene from the aftermath
of the Elamite final solution
when Ashurbanipal is lying on his
couch with that woman there
and then the severed head
up on the pillar of the wall
that's part of the aftermath
of dealing with the Elamites this way
Ashurbanipal leads
the great Assyrian army
all the way it's a long way again
to Susa
devastates Elam as his scribe
writing for himself
recounts
for a distance of one month
and 25 days march
I devastated the districts of Elam
I spread salt and thorn bush
there to injure the soil
sons of the kings
sisters of the kings
members of Elam's royal family
young and old, prefix
governors, knights, artisans
as many as there were
inhabitants, male and female
big and little, horses, mules
asses, flocks and herds
and a swarm of locusts
I carried them off as booty to Assyria
the dust of Susa
of Madaktu, of Haltermash
and of the other cities I carried it off
to Assyria
in a month of days I subdued Elam
in its whole extent
the voice of man
the steps of flocks and herds
the happy shouts of mirth
I put an end to them in its fields
which I left for the asses, the gazelles
and all manner of wild beasts
to people
end quote
the Assyrians were
thorough
they even removed
the bones of the old
going back to ancient times
Elamite rulers from their
tombs and took them
back to Assyria with the loot
historian A.T. Olmsted says
they put them in particularly
awful spots so that they would
get no rest ever again
in a foreign land
and paying an eternal price
for their enmity to Assyria
that may have happened in the deep
misty eras of the past
I mean we said to you earlier
that if the Elamites conquered
the United States they'd take the Statue of Liberty
back as a prize of war to be displayed
well the Assyrians wouldn't stop
at the Statue of Liberty
they'd steal our constitution
they'd take the Washington Monument
they'd snuff out the flame at
these grave and take the bones
with them
the Assyrians were sort of
setting the bar for this region
people like the Babylonians who come afterwards
will be just as brutal like they're trying to imitate
whatever the standard of the day is
but the standard of the day
is even today
I mean try making
a movie out of it it's gonna be
a cable one for sure
I mean the story Olmsted tells of the parade
is that a good word
Ashurbanipal and his army arrive
back home in Nineveh
displaying the loot
and the prisoners and meeting out
punishment by the way to all in Sundry
is
frightful
first of all the head of that Elamite ruler
that will be sitting up on
Ashurbanipal's wall or what have you
was transported from
Susa on foot
around the neck of the Elamite general
imagine how freaky that
would have been to live through
who did the walk in
chain supposedly
and then the
various generals are brought out and punished
and there's a psychological twist
to a Syrian punishment by the way
that is part of kind of what the
Persians will sort of do away with
here's what
A.T. Olmsted writes and I'm gonna try
my best at some of the pronunciations
of these Mesopotamian names they are wonderful
he writes quote
Aplia son of Nabu Ushalom
and grandson of the famous Meridoc
Baladan was extradited
from Elam Manu Kiyahi
Danunu and Nabu Ushalom
the Gambulu chieftains
had spoken blasphemy against the
Assyrian gods and for this crime
they had their tongues pulled out by the roots
and were skinned alive
the horrible scene is represented on one of the
reliefs although strangely
enough Olmsted writes
the names have never been filled in the blanks
left for the purpose Danunu was
placed on the rack and slaughtered like a lamb
his brother Samgunu and Aplia
were slain and their flesh
distributed among the surrounding lands
Nabu Naid and Belatyr
sons of Nabu Shumarish
were forced to crush the bones
of their father and the head of the
Elamite king found its final resting
place over the gate which led to Asher
end quote Asher
being a primary Assyrian city
the forcing the sons
to crush the bones of the father
is one of those really psychologically
horrible things
and you'll see this in other occasions
the Babylonian king for example
who supposedly once
he took Jerusalem took the ruler
the king and forced him
to watch the slaughtering of his two
young sons in front of his eyes
and then had his eyes put out
so that the last thing he saw was that
I mean those are the extra little cruelties
that just seem
calculated to
subdue somebody's will
to resist but you could easily see
how it might have the opposite effect
you could see how
a people coming after this time
might be able to make
all sorts of political hay
selling themselves
as the alternative to this kind
of cruelty
and you can also see why
when Assyria
fell
there were not a lot of tears
cried for what was gone
in fact you know even the biblical
prophets are rejoicing
as I was trying to come up
with some sort of analogy
to try to define the stakes
here with what's about to
happen all I could think of
in my uncreative mind
was the idea
of the United States over the next five or so
years somehow
you know with jaw dropping
astonishing
events fell apart
or imploded
and broke into some kind of a civil war
ended up getting involved in maybe a
foreign war at the same time I mean
you never know how these things are going to turn
remember how you felt if you were old enough to remember
what the 9-11 attacks
looked like on live television while you watched them
there's almost nothing positive that comes out
of something like that but one of the few things
that was in my mind
was as you watched it
you were reminded
that the most astonishing things
not only can happen but will
happen they're like earthquakes you know there's
going to be a big one you just don't know when
you know there's going to be some
massive jaw dropping historical event
in the future you just don't know
the date ahead of time like a 9-11
but when you watch that happening
that astonishment is how mankind has felt
over and over and over again
as you look back on it
there's about to be an astonishing moment
in this story it's not really a moment
5-15 years
it just appears astonishing now
but it's akin to the United States
imploding
really I think it's more than the Soviet Union
falling but a little less than the modern
United States going away
nonetheless if the United States did go away
in the next 5 years
what does the international situation look like
then
I mean what world instantly
springs up to replace such an important
cog and how does that go
this is actually
the world that is going
to exist
as soon as this story that must be
you know one of the great events in all
human history but we don't know
because we don't have a Herodotus there
to give it even with a bunch of lies
and exaggerations and untruths that may have
filtered in over the hundreds of years we don't
have his version or anyone like him
to explain it to us
we lack the color
Herodotus by the way promised he was going to tell
this story in one part of his histories
and then never did
or it didn't come down to us or something
you have a few terse Babylonian sources
and that's it in fact the stuff you
thought you could count on like those wonderful
Assyrian you know pronouncements by
the king of kings
I went in there I planted thorn bushes I killed everybody
that ends in like
89 BCE ominously and mysteriously
all of a sudden
what the heck's going on
I love the different ways that historians
try to describe this to one
one historian says it was unclear what was happening
author Markeely
explained the importance though
of this period silence because he says
quote and it is in the silence
of those years that is written the fate
of the Assyrian Empire
end quote
so the important stuff is happening we just don't
know much of what it is
open to interpretation is how another
historian put it
but here's what basically goes on
Asher Bonapal's reign
at the end you start to see
things fraying you begin to
see places that were under Assyria's
control on the margins break
free a lot of historians
think that it's rather telling that all
of a sudden you can have these schitian tribes
riding roughshod now in areas
where the Assyrians used to keep them out it must
mean that they can't
while no one is really paying a lot of attention
the Meads are beginning to
fuse sort of and
it's unclear how they did this with the Elamite
civilization could have been peaceful
could have been war like could have been
diplomatic marriage but it's making
both civilizations
stronger
and Asher Bonapal dies
and his sons
go to war with each other
now this is
not uncommon
in Assyrian royal succession
but this is coming at a particularly
bad time
because all of a sudden the Babylonians
are resurgent again
they've got a new dynasty
they've got an army that is modeled
it's a not as effective copy
of the Assyrians the Assyrians
copy the Babylonian civilization
not quite as well as the Babylonian original
and the Babylonians copy the Assyrian
military though it's not quite up to
the original standards either
but when you've been fighting
one half of your army against the other
which is what the Assyrians were doing in a civil war
that's why they're so ruinous
you know you have outside powers starting to
loom over you and what do you do with your army
you divide it in half and fight it against each other
worst possible thing that could happen
and then the Babylonians
starting in about 616
start sending out an army
taking some of these border cities
between Assyria
and Babylon
and then the war heats up a little bit and they're fighting back and forth
and the Assyrian army seems to be a shadow
of its former self but you could see how strong
it still is because they're
holding their own against these Babylonians
pushing them back sometimes chasing them back
sometimes but it's all they
can handle and then
in like 615 BCE
the Medes jump in
from the east
and the north
they start taking cities in the east
the next year
the Medes come forward
under their king Caxires
and advances on
you know one of the capitals
Nineveh
they can't take it because Nineveh is this massively fortified
probably the most fortified city
west of China
in this whole human history up to this point
I mean just
an incredible feat, a human marvel
and it pushes these Medes
sideways they just can't deal with it right now
but unfortunately for the Assyrians
if you can't go out there
and defeat that Medean army
they can do whatever they want
so they go sack in the air by city that's not as well defended
it just happens to be Asher
one of the great
once upon a time Assyrian capitals
vital connected to their religion
and their god and moral
and everything else
it's a big deal
at the last minute the Babylonians run up
to be a part of it this is a famous event
they don't want to allow
the Medes to take this important city by themselves
be left out of the spoils
the reputation everything
but they arrive too late with their army
the Medes have already sacked the place
maybe rushing the attempt
so that they'd beat the Babylonians there
they treat it the way the Assyrians would have treated it
and it's a horrific event
the Babylonian
king and the
Medean king
pledged their friendship to each other as
Asher burns
in the background and the
killing continues and the slaves are being
dragged off and all of a sudden
a week into Syria
has Babylon
and the Medes
working together
and advancing on Nineveh
in 612 BCE
if this wasn't bad enough
at the last
minutes allegedly not everybody says this
but the standard belief is at the last minute
a horde of
skithians
rides in the wild northern
horsemen and joins both the
Medes and the Babylonians
in this last assault upon
this greatest of
West Asian military
fortresses
and together they take it down
they had to fight three battles on the
planes supposedly before they even got a chance
to get near the walls with this last
old aging damaged lion
of Assyria swatting them away
and fighting well
as long as they could
the Babylonian king
in the terse style
that those people wrote in
described what he did to
what he calls the land of Subarum
which is their word for Assyria
and by the way notice how
he's couching this in terms of
liberation from the
Assyrian yoke the records say
quote
and you have a basic problem when
discussing events of the past like this
if we're discussing something
from recent history say the
end of the third Reich at the Second World War
all that emotion is still
felt right you get a real
feel for the kinds of things historians don't
want to touch once you get back
a certain distance some day they're
not going to look at the Nazis
as the kind of evil that we
do they're going to
somehow say well they were
on the far end of the spectrum
of what people did then
which is kind of what a lot of modern ones
would say about Assyria they're not
doing anything anybody else isn't
doing they just may be
at the far end of the spectrum of
you know conduct
it's all kind of relative right
but you could certainly see
the
anger and vengeance
in the people that goes beyond mere
you know the taking of loot and slaves
and the things that have motivated soldiers
sometimes in the heat of battle at all times
this involved
some payback
historian Mark Vandy Maroup
explains that you can still
see that vengeance today
I mean there's an eternal bit of
payback that was done
he writes quote
for example only the face of a soldier
cutting off the head of the king of Elam
was similarly destroyed
probably by the Medes who saw the
Elamites as their ancestors
likewise the records of loyalty
oaths that king Isar Haddan
had forced Medean bodyguards to swear
and which had been stored at Calhoun
were smashed the palaces
were burnt down only after
the lengthy task of defacing
images and destroying symbols
of submission to Assyria had been completed
end quote
if you go to the British Museum
today and look at the Assyrian reliefs
you can see
you know the defacing done by some
angry vengeful
and probably rightfully so
soldier as they took down
Assyria piece by piece
but stunningly quickly by historical
standards
and while there may be no Herodotus
to give color to this story
there is one of the most
I guess for military history fans
one of the most colorful
sections of the Old Testament of the Bible
that deals with the fall
of Assyria and I'm sure
Assyrian descendants and people who are
big Assyrian fans think this is very
unfair sort of
propaganda again it's just
their bad luck to get bad PR
sometimes in the Bible and the Biblical prophet
Nahum was
prophesizing supposedly that you're going to get it
and then once they did get it
he was sort of saying see this is what you get
now what's kind of interesting about
Nahum unlike some of these other prophets
there's a decent chance he was a contemporary
a lot of this stuff was put together
in the Hellenistic period later
you know from earlier stories
or all kinds of things dealing with that era
but some of this goes back
and it's tough to know and historians argue
but it's possible that this prophet Nahum guy
was maybe even a
predecessor to some of these events
so who knows you know I won't get into something like that
I just found it interesting
because when he recounts what happens
first of all he gives you the color and tells you
a little bit about the story in a
religious sort of framework
still doesn't sound like Herodotus there's a religious
tone to it but at the same time it's
very colorful
so he describes for example
what the battle is like after prophesizing
that you're going to get it for a long time
quote
end quote
then Nahum describes
the unleashing of the rivers
I guess the dams were broken
or they reroute the course
of the rivers or what have you
to help undermine the walls
that's not that unusual a tactic
but with a big city like this
not a small engineering feat
prophet Nahum says quote
her handmaidens moan like doves
upon their breasts they are beating
Nineveh was a tank of water
from it they are now escaping
stand stand they cry
not one of them looks backward
and then he
basically tells everybody to take
back the stuff that Assyria took from them
and that they're housing in this
immensely wealthy city he says quote
take ye the spoil of silver
take ye the spoil of gold
there is no end to the store
an abundance of all goodly objects
she is empty and void
and waste hearts melt
knees shake there is pain
in all loins and pale have waxed
all the faces
end quote
then he does a little trash talk
gloating you know where he says
you know great lions now
and all the people who took all this stuff
and then like again
so many of the people during this era
this was seen to involve
you know a little proof that their
God was superior
or in the case of some of these people
by this point in history
the only God
and Nahum says quote
behold I am against thee
says Yahweh of hosts
thy lair I will burn with smoke
down the sword shall devour
I will cut off thy prey from the earth
no more be heard thy messenger's voices
and he continues
to rub it in
and basically blame this on
karma if you will
woe to the bloody city
full of lies and robbery
the crack of the whip and the thunder
of the rumbling wheel
the prancing horse and the bounding chariot
the horsemen mounting and the flash of sword
the gleam of spear and a mass
of slain a heap of corpses
there are no end to the dead bodies
for the many infidelities
of the well-favored harlot
the mistress of incantations
who sold states for her wicked deeds
and clans through her incantations
behold sayeth Yahweh of hosts
I am against thee
I will strip thee of thy clothing
and show thy shame to the nations
filth I will cast upon thee
and disgrace thee
I will set thee up as a warning
all who see thee shall flee
shall cry
desolate Nineveh
who shall bewail her
well listen
they may not have a ton of dramatic stuff
from the Near East
during this time period
but that's awesome
all history aside that's awesome stuff
and it does give you a feel
for the emotion of the time period
we may think
that it's all been drained but that's somebody
who is clearly thinking
that Assyria is reaping
what she sowed
again I pity the poor Assyrian people
who have to live with
one piece of horrible PR
making it down through the eras
the most widely read book in history
and near people get some negative PR in it
the last Assyrian king is rumored
it's a good way to put it
there's not enough information to know on this
is rumored to have
the enemy was closing in
pile all of his
worldly possessions that were in his palace
around him and the gold and the silver
and have family members killed and eunuchs
and concubines thrown on
the pile of stuff with him
and then have it all set alight
with him sitting in the middle of it
there's a scene like that in the Lord of the Rings too
apparently in this time period
it happened a few times probably
it was a motif they certainly referred back to
for a short time
an Assyrian successor
state maybe you could call it
maybe you could call it the last gasp
of resistance tried to make a stand
but by 605 that was destroyed
too and the Assyrians
will turn into a people
that never disappeared
but whose destruction was so massive
and so sustained
and so total that they seem like
they did
you will hear Assyrians trying
to tell the world still today
they're still here
and try to fight that idea that every last
one of them was killed in their version
of a holocaust at the end of that era
well it's not true
but you could certainly say that
within a very short period of time
those massive
top of their era
cities and fortresses
were almost unrecognizable
in a famous passage
the Greek general Xenophon
with his 10,000 Greeks
fleeing a Persian civil war
will get chased all the way
through what's now northern Iraq
he will come upon
these great
massive cities by their standards
of the day
simply rotting in the dust
deserted
but the walls
are so high
and the workmanship on the streets
and everything so modern
that he doesn't understand
where it came from
the locals don't know anything about Assyria
they think the Medes built it
in other words within 200 years
these cities are lying in ruins
they're still larger than almost anything
new being built at that time
and nobody even remembers
that they were Assyrian
the account
by Xenophon
of these ghost cities by the way
I've spoken about them before
it's the ultimate
statue of liberty in the sand
sort of historical moment
you know what I mean when I say that right
the end of the planet of the apes where Charlton Heston believes
he's been on a distant planet
the whole time in the very last scene in the movie
he looks and in the distance
you know with the surf crashing against it
he sees the statue of liberty
three quarters buried
in the sand
if you could take an Assyrian
individual from
three, four, five hundred
years before Xenophon lived
and bring him forward
or her forward in a time machine
so that she could hang out there
you know by the ruins of Nineveh
with Xenophon
what would run through her head
what would run through your head
if you could go forward in a time machine and see
our ghost cities
someday
and I marvel at the size
I mean 200 years later Xenophon says
and he can't really lie
there's a lot of people who know
you know what Xenophon's talking about here
and have seen it and could call him a liar
I mean he says the base of the fortification
he's camping by is 50 feet
broad and 50 feet high
and then has
a brick wall
50 feet broad
and another hundred feet high on top of that
and that the circumference
of the fortifications is 18 miles
he says there are some people sort of
little like refugees
and small villages and you know
semi-nomadic groups of people camping by
but that city used to have
hundreds of thousands
maybe a million people
living there
that's a ghost city
from a dead era
by the times Xenophon's there
only a couple hundred years later
and when a Syria falls
it's like that moment we spoke about earlier
what would happen if the United States disappeared
in 5 or 15 years
what's the world
then look like without that
center spoke of the wagon wheel anymore
it's hard even to think for people born
in the last 20-30 years
maybe
of any other sort of reality
maybe that's the case for the people who live through it
maybe they were blinking and just
waking up to a new day it really does have
sort of an end of the Second World War
sort of feel like everything's
been devastated and a whole bunch of people
who had allied together
for this common interest of taking down
the Assyrian Empire
were now staring over the rubble wondering
who gets what
and all of a sudden like in 1946
you know Europe
especially allies were turning into
potential adversaries very quickly
there were four
you know if we look at this as a
encapsulated little
micro world here geopolitically speaking
which is how I look at these stories
sorry for all you folks who'd like
a little bit more culture or religion
nonetheless in this geopolitical setup
we really have four great powers
now you go from one hegemonic power
Assyria
to Babylon
picking up a lot of Assyrian
territory in this whole deal by the way
you also have
the Medes obviously doing the same thing
you know moving into territory in the north
Assyria owned
you have Egypt always a great power
if they can be
but not that long ago
under Assyrian domination like everyone else
they start moving towards
the modern day area around
Israel and in there
and they are a player
and finally a fourth power
called Lydia
Lydia is the power that's
now in modern day Turkey for the most part
like everyone else
they benefited from the Assyrians going away
they were able to move and expand into other
areas
they are generally credited
with the ones inventing
metal money at least
in the western world
and you will begin to
see at least in the long
term view of things
all sorts of conflicts breaking out now
as all these new
powers sort of vie with each other
the Egyptians
and the Babylonians for example will go at it
you know several times trying to
figure out you know is anybody going to
conquer anybody where's the border going to be
and all that kind of stuff
and a lot of the littler states just get
totally screwed in this deal
it's a little like the cold war where some states
in the middle try to decide do I side with the
Soviets or do I side with the western
and then if you screw up all kinds of
bad things can happen that's exactly what
happened to poor Judah
that was sacked by the Babylonian king
during this era
for continually
swaying sort of between the two powers
that were vying for them
Babylon on one side and Egypt on the other
and finally exasperating
the Babylonian king you know to the
breaking point
there are Jews
in Iraq today whose
ancestors were a part
of the Babylonian king
you know taking them out of the city of Judah
that he was just destroying
that's where by the way
Solomon's temple was destroyed
by the Babylonians again earning them
bad PR
in one of the most important PR
books of all time
the Medes will
scare the Babylonians to the point
where the Babylonians will build something called the
Median wall
to hopefully slow them down
and Xenophon saw that too
about 150 years later
it was a wall that supposedly
ran across the narrowest
part of the division between the
Tigris and Euphrates river so you'd have
the river on two sides and then this wall
in the middle and Xenophon says that
200 years later it was
quote made of burnt bricks
laid in bitumen
it was 20 feet thick
100 feet high and said to be
60 miles long it is quite close
to Babylon end quote
again if he's lying
about that there's a lot of people who would know that
he was he'd have a reputation
for that that would follow him unto
our own time now
the Medes
will famously go to war
with the Lydians
and this is when some of
Herodotus is really
Herodotus has a little bit of a
horror story
an Alfred Hitchcock side to him sometimes
or maybe just the people
he talks to happen to
because during this little period
which would really only last like 40-45 years
between the fall of the Assyrians
and the rise of the Persians
there's going to be incidents that are
eerily similar and you start to wonder
whether the guy telling you about them
or the people existing in this era
have a certain weakness
for that sort of incident in this case
Herodotus says this is how the war with the Medes
and the Lydians started
there were some
Scythians who were hunters
for the Median king
that guy Syaxarys right
and normally they'd bring back
food but one time they show up
Herodotus says
empty-handed in front of Syaxarys
who supposedly
Herodotus says has this awful temper
freaks out and starts abusing including
so physical abuse one must imagine him
kicking maybe these
Scythian archers now the
Scythians were never known to have
particularly non
excitable temperaments
shall we put it that way is that fair
and Herodotus says
he went and in their anger
killed one of the boys
probably from the royal court
that the Median king had sent
to learn archery from these same Scythians
wow they're great archers let's send
some of the royal boys out there and they can learn
how to shoot bows like an ancient
Eurasian step archer
and they killed one of these boys
Herodotus says and cut him up like the
game that they normally give to the
Median king showed up
gave him the food watched him eat it
haha it's like putting urine
in someone's beer before you give it to
them the king finds out
you know goes after them they run
to Lydia
and then the Median king says
I want those Scythians who cut
up that boy and made me eat him
and Herodotus says that the king of Lydia said
no can't have him
boom war now
we'll run into Herodotus telling a similar
story with an even greater
psychological twist very soon after
this nonetheless
this war with the Medians and the Lydians are going
for like five years Herodotus says
and we'll
end with and
we have a fact here we can play with something that's real
we don't have to say he says she says this
historian claims we've heard from Herodotus
there is a solar
eclipse
that happens on May 28th
585 BCE
and at the time
that solar eclipse
happened which by the way
Herodotus says a Greek
predicted claiming it was the first
time that had ever been done
I'm sure the Babylonians probably
hold off a few of those correctly who knows
modern astronomers of course
have no problem going back
and with precision calculating
the date of that past astronomical
event which is why we have a rare
confirmable fact at this
point in the story
but when that eclipse happened
the Medians and the Lydians happened to be fighting
a battle
and Herodotus says as it was warming
up as the battle was getting hot
there goes the sun
now if you
are an ancient person
with the religious
beliefs you must imagine
many of these ancient people had
there are few atheists
in the ancient world
and sometimes it can be very superstitious
indeed as you might imagine
now you're involved in a battle
man killing man
both sides have almost certainly had
sacrifices and the omens
examined and they're looking at the liver
and saying is this a good day to attack
and all these kinds of things and then in the middle of the battle
the sun goes out
what are you going to think
well as you might imagine
the Medians and the Lydians
stopped fighting
in the heat of the fighting they stopped fighting
we're talking about
thousands of people on each side
and everybody just stops
that's the way it's
portrayed anyway but think about it this way
if an eclipse is really going
to stop a battle
it's going to happen fast because the eclipse doesn't last
that long
the peace was brokered we are told
by another of the great powers
Babylon and also
the calichians involved maybe you would call them
a mid-sized power in that region
regional power in that part of the world
and the deal
sealed we are told
in the traditional way although the Greeks
did it a little differently we're not told how
both rulers slit
their skin and sucked blood
from each other
also you know gave
daughters and what not in marriage
that's the part I left out too of the deal
when the Babylonians and the Medes
you know signed that agreement
probably the same way a little
vampiric bloodsucking to go along
with it outside of Asher as they destroy that
Assyrian city they also married
off daughters to each other
and I mean it was one of these things where all of a sudden the families
are related as though
that's really going to stop anything
given the history nonetheless they did the exact same deal
here got a few daughters
we can spread around got some blood
we can suck and
forever friends
that battle is known as the battle of the
Haley's river or the battle
of the eclipse sometimes
now one thing
that it's worth pointing out
from this period because it's
going to matter
in the northwest
and very west
parts of modern day Turkey
Anatolia as it was called earlier
are
settlements and villages and cities
of Greeks
they're called Ionian
Greeks but Greeks of one
kind or another being
such as seafaring people around that region
had
colonized that whole area a very long
time ago and they had
relationships with the Greeks
on the mainland where places like Athens
are for example
you got to imagine trade routes back and forth
people going back and forth in fact
the part of the Greek world
that was located in modern day Turkey
at this time was the more sophisticated
the more cultured the more learned
the Greeks
in Athens and Sparta might say the more effeminate
the more corrupted the more lazy
the more opulent you know connected to all
that eastern opulence as they were
see how that motif works
nonetheless those
Greeks in Anatolia
will become a big part of
you know the problem because
they are the part that
links Asia back to the Greek mainland
and the Greek mainland
has an interest in how their
shall we call them cousins
second cousins
how they're doing
at the time the battle of the eclipse
figures out what's going on between
the Lydians and the Medes
those Greeks are for the most part
subject to the Lydian king
that's going to change
that's going to change for everybody
what's about to happen in this region
that will affect the Greeks and everyone else
is every bit as
shocking
and unexpected as the fall of Assyria was
and it's interesting that they will happen
within a reasonably historically
speaking short period of time from each other
you have to imagine that
analogy we had of the United States disappearing
in 5 to 15 years and what would
the world look like after that
well what if I told you that within
you know another 20 or 30
years after that one country
that you'd never you know some out of the way
place had taken over
the entire planet
that's how this analogy works when we start trying to
realize that somehow this people call the Persians
will first get
their control over the Medes
and how that even happens
I mean Risa Sargami the author has a great line
when he points out that you know between the fall
of the last great Assyrian monarch
and the rise of Cyrus the Great
there's no mention of these Persian
people in any text in any
politically significant way
they are virtual nobodies
and within a generation
they're running the show for everyone
in this part of the world
how did that happen
judging from the
overwhelming
number of historians from
ancient times all the way to the
you know the latest often contrarian
writings
the lion's share of the
answer seems to have something to do with
this incredible leader
Cyrus the second
also called as we said earlier
Cyrus the Great
there are lots of stories
by the way and some of them are fantastic
one of Herodotus is best
is one of the ones you know he tells about the
rise of Cyrus but you have to remember
something this
person Cyrus the Great is
to Persian and Iranian
history sort of what George Washington
is to American history what King
Arthur is to British
legend I mean this is a legendary
figure and because there's
so little that talks about him
during his rise to power historians
are you know really thrust into the
detective role trying to figure out what it
is you know is going on
I like the way historian Pierre
Brandt kind of tries to explain
what sort of assumptions you should maybe build
into this and I'm not a historian so he was
writing as a historian trying to explain to a
lay person like yours truly let's hope the lay
person understood but he kind of said
listen if something appears to happen
out of nowhere but it's
unlikely that it could you should assume
that there was stuff bubbling up under the
surface you know a foundation
taking place but that's hidden
from our eyes through the historical veil
right so when a
Cyrus the Great all of a sudden takes over the
Median Empire and it looks like a lightning bolt strikes
it's probably safe to assume
things had been leading up to this somehow
for a while
for a long time one of the things historians
like to suggest was percolating
you know beneath the scene
that you couldn't see it was something like
that I guess you could say maybe moral
rot this is something
that is you know part of earlier
histories and because it's impossible
to quantify I mean we could even ask
these questions today is there any truth to the idea
and we have by the way
that the older generations in tougher times
are tougher than we are today
if there is any truth to that could that have been
true in the past how would a historian even measure
that so they don't
anymore writing in
1935 and I love him
but it was written in 1935
historian Will Durant tries
to tie you know the downfall
of the Meads to their moral
degeneration and the fact
that they were sort of Nouveau Riche
he writes quote
their degeneration was even more
rapid than their rise
osteages who succeeded his father
xiaxeries proved
again that monarchy is a gamble
in whose royal succession great
wits and madness are nearly
allied he inherited a kingdom
with equanimity and settled down
to enjoy it under his example
the nation forgot its stern
morals and stoic ways
wealth had come too suddenly to be wisely
used the upper classes
became the slaves of fashion and luxury
the men wore embroidered
trousers the women covered
themselves with cosmetics and jewelry
the very horses were often
comparison in gold these once
simple and pastoral people
who had been glad to be carried in rude wagons
with wheels cut roughly out of the
trunks of trees now rode
in expensive chariots from feast
to feast end quote
the truth is though that what
Durant writes there in 1935
isn't a whole lot different from
what the ancient Greeks saw the ancient
Greeks sort of saw themselves as
Marlboro men compared
to these people from the east that were
at best sort of metro
sexuals the Greeks like to point
out the use of makeup as part
of their idea that these easterners
were effeminate writing hundreds of years
later by the way Xenophon talks about
osteologies the last king
of the Meads and his guy
liner I guess you would call it today his
stenciled eyes the rouge on his face
and Xenophon who would have no
way of knowing says
a wig of fake hair
now here's the thing though
in the east
these kinds of things were cultural norms
it wasn't a sign of effeminacy the
pharaohs and the Egyptians had been using
the dark coal around the eyes
forever just a different
cultural thing but the Greeks saw it as just
another sign of these oriental
effeminate
opulent
weak clever sneaky
you know fill in the blank
easterners
I will leave it to the
credible historians to decide
someday whether there's any truth
to this motif about the
Meads sort of slouching
towards Gomorrah or what have you
most of the modern stuff I read today looks at that
as a as a terribly old
fashioned way to view the situation but
as I said how do you quantify something like that
anyway but if you follow
that narrative the way a guy like Herodotus
is taking it or a guy like Will Durant
writing in 1935 is taking it
there's an almost opportunity
created by the decadence of the
Meads and the cruelty of their ruler
right and that can be exploited
by somebody who has the opposite values
from the people that are busy
slouching towards Gomorrah in other words
people that were less corrupted by luxury
who were not as decadent who were more
shall we say
possessors of the old time
virtues if you will
and this gets us back to a secondary value
that a guy like Herodotus has for us remember
like I said he's like the color era the
first real screenwriter you know
showrunner and you learn two
things from a guy writing the way
he writes in the way a lot of people after him write
one you learn about these events he's
trying to relate to you which may or may
not be true and are probably a combination
of the two right we learn about
you know the rise of Cyrus at least the
story that this guy heard but at the same
time you're having
like a Vulcan mind meld
with a
2500 year old basically
alien mind
a one way conversation
with a
2500 year old guy
and when you read
Herodotus I this you know I
really wish I could speak
the ancient Greek and read it
and understand the little nuances so I
could really hear this guy in his own
words as he meant every specific word
but you're getting
a chance to see you know
what this guy from a completely
different time period likes
and dislikes
his worldview
what he thinks is good and what he thinks is bad
you know his view sort of
on the supernatural and the gods
his biases and his prejudices
you're learning
about he and his
world when you read his stuff
it's part of why you have to filter it so carefully
because just like all of us his world
pollutes his worldview so that
you know we don't get as
non biased of you now
as we might want but what
Herodotus does in this story
is kind of say that because
osteogies was the way he
was a Cyrus
arises on the scene
modern day historians
can't decide or
argue over whether or not there was some war
fought between the Medes and the Persians
remember these are for the most
part semi-tribal
peoples probably at this time
they used to think they were more like states now
no one sure maybe a combination
of some cities with some pastoral
people that were lied to it it's an
interesting sort of hybrid and there might
have been a lot of these kinds of societies around
back then when they're transitioning from
you know an old tribal world
to something more along the lines of a centralized
bureaucratic state when you're in sort of
a tweener zone if you will
so either a war between these
Medes and these Persians or the tribes that
they controlled
or sort of like as one historian
describes it the Median
empire getting a change
in management
with maybe some
Median nobles
helping to rebel against this
osteagies person and modern historians have some
interesting understandable sort of common sense
reasons why they might want to
the theory is that this
osteagies guy is trying to convert
the Medes into more
of a typical centralized
Mesopotamian government
where the king is more
bureaucratic and has a lot more authority it sounds like
maybe he has to share a lot of
authority with these different tribal rulers
and as you might imagine
it's almost like a law of nature
they're unlikely to like that
this may have led some modern historians
think to sort of an uprising
an internal coup if you will
and this Cyrus the second guy
might be the person
who gets to lead this now
as the greatest
early screenwriter
Herodotus has his own view
of sort of what turns the tables on this
now it's one of these stories that
again maybe tells us more about
Herodotus and the audience he's
trying to please but he must
have heard this story somewhere
this is a typical tale by the way of
oriental cruelty but he's
setting up something that actually
seems to have happened in the story and trying
to give you a reason why it happened
without having any real way of knowing
other than these people he's talking to
and he tells one of the most horrific stories
in his writings but he tells
it like Alfred Hitchcock
or Wes Craven
or someone like that
we alluded to it earlier when we said
an earlier story you know those Skithians
you know killed a boy and served it to
the Median king and he didn't like that
well in this story
it's that same thing but with an extra twist
I have several different versions
of Herodotus
but let me set this up
what happens in the story
is it concerns this Osteagi's guy
the son of
Seaxerys and nowhere near
his father in terms of greatness and kind
of a jerk and that's the way he's portrayed
and he has a dream
and these dreams
you gotta love ancient history because they're always
so wild Herodotus relates it by the way
the dream has something to do with his
daughter urinating over
the whole world or something
as I said gotta love the ancient history
and he asked the Magi to interpret it
and they say
not very good this daughter's gonna give birth
to something or she's the seed of something
that's maybe gonna overthrow you and so
to play it safe Herodotus
says he marries her off to some Persian
you know maybe a great
Persian guy but this is the Median Empire
and no son of a Persian
is gonna be ruling the Median Empire
so that's been taken care of but then about a year later
Herodotus says he has another dream
about his daughter who's about
to give birth to her first child and in this
dream he sees
I think it's like vines coming
out of her womb and then encompassing
the whole earth or something again
akin to that and the Magi come
in and interpret that and as you might imagine
it's not good and it scares
Ostiajis who thinks that she
his daughter is going to give birth to a person
who takes his throne so in
a story that you see in other
tales in other words it's
a pretty common motif with different
twists Ostiajis
calls in a general
a guy named Harpigus who
seems to be a historical figure
and tells Harpigus
to get rid of the baby
now Harpigus Herodotus
says doesn't want to get rid of the baby
just let me stop for a second
in this story Herodotus is
lovingly telling this story he knows
what the colorful pieces are
and he says Harpigus
doesn't want to get rid of the baby
he doesn't want to kill the baby
so he gives the job to a shepherd
and gives the shepherd the baby
and says get rid of the baby
expose it you know out into the open
and let it die
and the shepherd doesn't want to get rid of the baby
and it just so happens his wife is pregnant
and she gives birth at just this time
to a stillborn child
doesn't this sound like a bunch of old
Grims fairy tales at this point
so as you might imagine
they take the stillborn child wrap it in the royal
keep the live when they were supposed to kill
and give the stillborn child back to Harpigus
to give to his boss the king and say see
it was done
fast forward like 13 years later
or something like that
and a boy is brought before
this is the Herodotus story, Astiages
because he's been whipping you know boys
higher on the social standing scale than he
after a bunch of questioning
it is determined and again this is the wonderfulness
of the ancient mind meld you're having with Herodotus
that basically
Astiages can tell that this boy is a king
it's like in your DNA
you can tell the difference between
blue bloods and non blue bloods by the way
they just handle situations and it's inbred
besides that Astiages
notices that the kid looks
like him and after all he is his grandfather
he calls in Harpigus
then he calls in the shepherd he does a little investigation
figures the whole story out
and pretends he's
not mad
tells Harpigus he's often felt
I'm paraphrasing here from Herodotus
but tells Harpigus he's often felt bad
about the whole thing afterwards so he's secretly
relieved that the whole thing went the way it did
why don't you go home
tell your wife we're going to have a banquet
to celebrate all this and you can come over
and we'll
highlight you at the banquet send your son over
your 13 year old son so he can keep the new boy
you know my grandson company
and you know we'll have a party tonight
and Herodotus says that Harpigus goes back
home and he's relieved because he knows
he could have gotten in big trouble and the wife is happy
and they go to this banquet and this is where
Alfred Hitchcock
Herodotus of Hala Karnassus
takes the story over
and again I keep telling myself I don't think
Herodotus is making this stuff up
somebody told him this
story this is what somebody
somewhere believed
now listen to this and try to imagine a
story like this from
the Assyrians or the
Babylonians or the ancient
Mesopotamians they just didn't write this way
Herodotus's story
has the 13 year old son
of Harpigus going to the palace as requested
and then picks up the
story and says this is
from my discellant core translation
by the way
quote when Harpigus's son
arrived at the palace Asdiagis had
him butchered cut up into joints
and cooked roasting some
boiling the rest
and having the whole properly prepared for the
table dinner time came
and the guests assembled with Harpigus
among them dishes of mutton
were placed in front of Asdiagis and of everyone
else except Harpigus
to Harpigus was served the flesh of his son
all of it except for
the head the hands and feet
which had been put separately on a platter
covered with a lid when Harpigus
thought he had eaten as much as he wanted
Asdiagis asked him if he'd enjoyed
his dinner he answered that he had enjoyed
it very much indeed where
upon those whose business it was to do so
brought in the boy's head
hands and feet in the covered dish
stood by Harpigus's chair
and told him to lift the lid
and take what he fancied
Harpigus removed the cover and saw the
fragments of his son's body
as he kept control of himself and did not
lose his head at the dreadful sight
Asdiagis asked him if he knew what animal
it was whose flesh he had just eaten
I know my lord was Harpigus's reply
and for my part
may the kings will be done
he said no other word but took up
what remained of the flesh and went home
intending I suppose to bury all of it
together and that was how Harpigus
was punished
If that had been
in a Syrian record it would have said
something like
his son I divided the pieces I fed to him
I mean it would be a straightforward sort of thing
you wouldn't have anybody setting up
the suspense of
having him eat and not know what it is
and then having the platter brought in
having the king ask the question do you know what you ate
did you like it and then the platters lifted up
I mean those moments where you set up
the tension and the drama
it's a movie
you could do that
movie and change
nothing
it's living color
What's more
Herodotus is clearly setting up
these moments for his audience
to do the equivalent of what we would do in a movie theater
when some great scene
on the screen happens that we're all really glad to see
and you clap or something
he's got these moments because when you make
Astiagis out to be such a jerk
when he gets what's coming to him in the story
it's a crowd pleaser
and in this story of course he does
and while it's tempting to think
that the entire thing is just a great
tale somebody's great tale maybe not
Herodotus's initially there are definite
facts mixed in and you can see
Herodotus trying to explain
the reasons behind the facts
today maybe a screenwriter would call it
dramatic license
because Babylonian records indicate
that there was
a general who corresponds
to this Harpagus guy
and that that general
was involved in a battlefield
betrayal
maybe you could say
in a key battle
Astiagis had
a large part of his army
desert him on the battlefield
and go to the other side
it very well may have been
this Harpagus person
who led them to do that
and Herodotus wants you to think
that see
he was a jerk
and now this is what he gets and who would think
that you could trust a man
whose son you had served to him for dinner
with the entire army in the first place
but nonetheless
the moment when Harpagus and the Medes
cross over to Cyrus' side of the battlefield
must have been a crowd-pleasing and satisfying moment
for the audience right
the jerk got what he deserved
in the Babylonian records
it's much more stark as you might imagine
one of the texts
from Babylon as quoted by Pierre Briond
reads
quote
Astiagis mobilized his army
and he marched against Cyrus
King of Anshan to conquer
the army rebelled against Astiagis
they handed him over to Cyrus
Cyrus marched towards Ekbatina
the royal city
end quote
by 550 BCE
or thereabouts
Cyrus and the Persians
were basically in control
of the old Elamite territories
and now had inherited
control of the Median empire
which was already
one of the great empires
in this particular world stage
it's
kind of possible that
the Lydian king for example
that in three years
Cyrus will be at war with
doesn't even really have a key idea
who the Persians are
I'm not sure but I mean judging from the sources
this is quite the turnaround
and as I said
in 547
Cyrus and the new Persian empire
is fighting those same people
the Medes were fighting when that eclipse
caused everyone to think
that maybe they shouldn't be fighting
and it's a great story because the guy who runs
the Lydian empire
now at this time is a guy named Cresus
and there's a saying about him you may have heard
rich as Cresus
and that's the stereotype of the Lydians at this time
as I said
they're known as people who invented
metal coinage
don't know if that's really true or not but that's their reputation
and it's attached to them because
they're thought to be extremely wealthy
and
Cresus is supposed to have gone
to one of the famous oracles
maybe the most famous oracle
in the entire Greek world
the oracle at Delphi
which he may have been giving
money to influence
there was a whole big problem during this period where some questioned
the reliability of these oracles
can you imagine
because of them taking money to keep operating
from people and Cresus was a rich and he gave money to everybody
he's a little Donald Trumpish maybe you might say
and
asked the oracle
you know now
what would happen if I went to war
with the Persian Empire
now
little sidetrack here maybe only worthwhile
for the betting people amongst you
but if you went to
an advisor
in Las Vegas who gave you betting advice
and you said
will the Green Bay Packers win the Super Bowl
and the answer was
if the Green Bay Packers
play in the Super Bowl
they will add to a great legacy
do you bet
Cresus was told by the oracle
at Delphi
that if Cresus attacks the Persians
he will destroy a great empire
you could take that
a number of different ways couldn't you
you could say hey
the Green Bay Packers are going to win
or you could say listen if the Dallas Cowboys
beat the Green Bay Packers
they have added to a great championship
legacy too
it's just the Dallas Cowboys championship
legacy
when Cresus and the Lydians fight
Cyrus and the Persians
he loses
he destroys a great empire
the one that invented metal coinage
I would love
to get into the kind of army that
Cyrus had and what he used
to accomplish this victory over the Lydians
but you know the
military system is not
well understood anyway
and it was only in the 1980s that they started
putting together realistic reconstructions
of the army in the days
that are much better known than this period
I mean during the Greek and Persian wars or after
against Alexander in this period
it's all conjecture what the heck
Cyrus was using I mean you can say
well he probably used this and it's logical to assume that
but nobody knows
when you read Herodotus
he's always got some
little stratagem in play
that keeps you from having to know
really what the army was doing and one of these big battles against
Cresus you know the Persians were told
will take their baggage camels
and take the baggage off of them and put them
in front of the army so that when the Lydian horses
who've never seen camels
ride up to the front they'll be scared off by the camels
I mean you know you get a victory in a battle just with that
doesn't really help you know
much about an army that must have been really
really good to do all these things Cyrus
was doing with it
he does look like a very bold commander
from the sources
I mean one of the things Herodotus talks about
is this shall we call it a misunderstanding
between Cresus and Cyrus
after this big battle that
starts off the campaign and it's bloody
and inconclusive and winter's coming
so Cresus does what any
ancient commander would have done during that period
he went home
went to the capital at Sardis this giant fortified city
and dismissed his mercenaries
and let most of the army go home
and told his allies
in four months show up here and we'll deal with this
emerging Persian threat
his allies by the way included
the great powers Babylonia
and Egypt so maybe Cyrus was starting
to be seen as
the destabilizing force in that little
geopolitical ecosystem
in that part of the world
nonetheless Cyrus didn't
disband the army
he didn't go home for winter
we're told pursued the Lydians right on their heels
this is bald strategy
and he forced another battle
and we're told it was after Cresus had already
basically sent most of the people home
the Persians win that battle
I think that's the camel battle
and then they face this monstrous fortification
at Sardis the capital of Lydia
that could easily hold out until all those
allies show up in four months you would think
we're told it holds out for like 14 days
and again we have another Herodotus story
about a back path
to the
Citadel being found by a Persian
who spies one of the guards
hats falling off, helmets falling off
and the guard retrieving it down some
path again
you wouldn't know about what amazing
siege engines maybe Cyrus had
because we always have some little story
that accounts for how one of the great
fortified cities in this part of the world
gets taken in 14 days
nonetheless we also get
some accounts now of something
we've spoken about about how the Persians
took Darth Vader to the Greeks
but they have something and you know
you don't know if you want to call this
propaganda
or a sincere
and clever and common sense
and realistic approach to things
you could sort of take either way
but shall we call it the tolerance
bomb
we're told Deodorosiculus
especially mentions that Cyrus gave a deal
to the Lydians before this whole thing started
he said listen submit to me
and I'll leave you in charge of this whole area
it's basically the same deal
Xerxes offered the Spartans
at Thermopylae come on let's make a deal
put down those weapons and not only
will you get to go home
I'll put you in charge of all these people you'll benefit
submit and profit
maybe you could call
this combination of
sort of Machiavelli
in thinking
with a sort of Gandhi like ethic
that's going too far but I love the
connection
a realistic hard headed
knife in the back sort of diplomacy
with tolerance
and mercy and leniency as your
weapon
I'm going to knife you with leniency
and
you know you would have to suggest perhaps
that there were two ways this lenient
idea could go
either not work at all
and then you see why the Assyrians had to be as harsh
as they were or because the Assyrians
were as harsh as they were
and the Babylonians who followed after them
the area was ripe
for somebody who would
offer I mean if everybody was going to be under
somebody's control wouldn't you want to go with the
tolerant guy and remember
we are grading on a curve here
when we talk about tolerance
the Persians could be every bit
as atrocious as any other
ancient people on occasion
it just seemed like once they took over
there were a lot fewer of those occasions
maybe the historians
or some of them that I grew up with would say something like
well that's because the Assyrians already broke
all the troubles and people to the yoke of empire
seems a bit far-fetched
certainly you can say though
that the whole sort of mood
and attitude was altered and you don't
get any more of those
really intimidating reliefs
showing things like you know
heads of your enemies staring up at you
or horrible violence or the flying
of live captives
and you don't get the writings
where there's a boasting
and a propaganda value where you're saying
this is what will happen to you
if you rebel against us
Risa Sargami quotes
the Rasam cylinder it's called
and it's Ashurbanipal the last great king
of Assyria boasting of what he did
to Babylon after his brother
who he put on the throne of Babylon
rebelled against him
in 649 BCE
first he besieged the people
until they were cannibalistic
and then picks up the narrative saying
quote
in this way I placated the wrath of the gods
who had become incensed by their ignominious deeds
then Sargami picks up
the narrative saying quote
this grizzly passage
related to events that transpired in Babylon
precedes a brief description
of the restorative work that
Ashurbanipal undertook in that city
that the Assyrian king was
unabashed about intertwining
the account of his brutality
and that of his clemency
indicates that Mesopotamian royalty
did not frown upon the infliction
of vicious reprisals against conquered populations
this attitude enabled
the Assyrian and Babylonian kings
to base their policies largely on terror
during the two centuries
preceding Cyrus's rise to power
the Assyrians and Babylonians
had sacked nearly every major
near eastern capital
and their preferred practices of population
deportation and kidnapping sacred images
had deeply traumatized
the people of the ancient Near East
end quote
in other words
if you had ever wanted to find a
winning military strategy
this might be the time
where mercy, tolerance, and being
the cool conquerors
really worked in your favor
Cyrus is the one who initiates this idea
that
we're not going to impale everybody
and we're not going to flay them
and we're not going to force them to convert
to our religion
you join us, pay your taxes
I may have some representatives
in a garrison in your city
but life will be good
this Persian deal was very seductive
now here's where the story begins
to dovetail with what we've already
talked about earlier
the peoples that we spoke about
these Greeks
who were in Anatolia
some of them spoke a language
that was called Ionian
so they're often called Ionians
but there were other types of Greeks there too
Asiatic Greeks is a term that's sometimes used
these people had been pang-tribute
to Cresus and the Lydians
and Cyrus had gone to them
before the war with Cresus and the Lydians
and said listen, how about you revolt
against Cresus
and they said no
and some of them fought on Cresus' side
and the Lydians, all the people in the region
are coming to him to kind of say
hey boss, I always wanted you to win
I'm glad you're victorious
in the case of these Greeks
they went to him and said
can we have the same deal we had with the Lydians
and Cyrus gets mad at them
he basically says you could have had that deal
if you joined me and didn't fight against me
now you want a special deal
over all the other people in this region
who didn't fight against me
and got mad
and some had a big meeting amongst each other
started rebuilding the walls of their cities
which they had knocked down
as part of their deal with Cresus
and put the word out for help
and they sent word to the Spartans
now
the Spartans had also promised
help to Cresus when he was
in trouble
supposedly they were just getting in the boats
getting ready to go help
when in 14 days the Lydian capital falls
didn't give him enough time to get there
now they get
in a very short period of time
a second call for help
and this time from Greeks
it's about the Persians
just like that last call
these Persians must be in troubles and people
the Spartans were a little busy
when the message came
but they sent an emissary
to talk to this Persian
now every historian I'm reading is assuming
that these Persians and these Spartans
do not know each other
for the first time
they ever encounter one another
it seems illogical considering all the trading
and what not going on
but let's understand
best case scenario it's unusual
and these people don't really know each other
and a Spartan diplomat
shows up in front of Cyrus we're told
and we have one of these wonderful periods
we can imagine
our
Clint Eastwood type figure
showing up in front of this
King on the Rise
again I try to imagine in Alexander the Great
like figure on the Rise
must have been a pretty good looking
guy because we're told that the Persians
standards of beauty were modeled on him
ever afterwards
this is the way
Herodotus
from my Purvis translation
describes the
diplomat talking to
the King of the Persians
who's just conquered Lydia
and he's about to put the hammer down
on the Greeks of Asia
Herodotus is quote
and when they arrived at Fakia
they sent the most distinguished man with them
named Lacrenes to Sardis
to declare to Cyrus in the name of the Lacodemonians
that he must not inflict
reckless damage on any of the Greek territory
since the Lacodemonians
would not tolerate it
remember Lacodemonian there's another name for Spartans
now
this people that Cyrus has never heard of
has just told him not to mess
with any of these people he just conquered
and he basically turns
to the Greek advisor next to him and says
who are these people
and how many of them are there
Herodotus says quote
they say that when the Herald had delivered
this message Cyrus
questioned the Greeks who were with him
asking them who were these Lacodemonians
who would send such a command
to him and how many of them were there
when he heard their response
Herodotus says he said to the Spartan
Herald quote
I have never yet feared any men
who have a place in the center of the city
set aside for meeting together
swearing false oaths
and cheating one another and if I live long enough
Lacodemonians will have
troubles of their own about which to converse
rather than those of the Ionians
Herodotus then says
quote
Cyrus thus insulted the Greeks
because of their custom of setting up
agoras which are market places
in their cities for the purpose of buying
and selling which is unknown
among the Persians who do not use markets
and indeed have no such place
as an agora in any of their cities
end quote
this is worth a little
digression for a second just from an interest
standpoint first of all
Herodotus would have probably known
what Persian cities were like
he himself was an Ionian Greek
or lived in an Ionian Greek city
and that's fascinating when you consider
that you think of the Middle East now
and you think of the bazaars and the marketplaces
and all that but the Persians
had this really interesting
cultural
carrot and stick thing going themselves
you know we've talked about this human laboratory experiment
a few times in this program like the Spartans for example
the Persians had a different
one going and it's fascinating to me
everything you read about
them says that you know of the top three
things that that society
places import on one of them
is the truth
and the funny thing is in our world today
we think oh yeah sure everybody should tell the truth
but what if you made this like a
commandment that people
took ultra seriously we told you
earlier that when the Spartan told
Xerxes about the Persians he said if I'm lying
you know treat me like a liar
and I told you that that's a death penalty
the Persians took lying really seriously
we're told that the education of
male youth was to learn
to ride to learn to shoot the bow
and to learn not to lie
to tell the truth
isn't it fascinating to
imagine a society where this was both
a state and legal
requirement perhaps and certainly
a heavily
you know encouraged and incentivized
cultural norm
thou shalt not lie it almost
becomes like the plot to one of those movies
you know where the main character drinks
some potion and all of a sudden
you know is forced to tell the truth all the time
what if you had a society like that
what what Cyrus is saying to
the Spartans is I can't respect any people
who have these places in their cities
set up where people can specifically
go to lie to one another
and by the way without going too deeply into it
there's a lot of connection to
Persian religious beliefs during this time
period and how that plays
into the question of lying
the Persians were
worshippers of Ahura Mazda
was a God's name and the old
Meads used to worship a God named Mithra
and there's connections between good and evil
that some religious experts tie to Christianity
and ancient Judaism and who the
heck knows all you know is that it's not just
a cultural and legal question
it's a religious one too
it's interesting to speculate
how much people still lied
in a society with that many
things favoring the truth it's interesting
to think about another
human laboratory experiment
if you will the truthful society
and how realistic is that
nonetheless
we have now set the stage
for
problems between the Greeks
and the Persians
from this point on if you want to call it a clash
of civilizations you who have
marketplaces and lie and we who don't
it's about to happen
lucky for the Spartans they'll get to stay out of it
for a while because Cyrus isn't done conquering yet
not by a long shot
historians still
discuss whether or not
Cyrus should be seen
as an intentional you know a conscious
conqueror a la Alexander
the Great or Napoleon you know somebody who
sat down and said I'm going to recreate
the old Assyrian Empire
or somebody that got involved in a bunch
of conflicts each for their own reason
and you know when you win you take over
their territory and kind of
tripped into empire I mean obviously
that's a little simplistic but
I think it's indicative of
how in certain really key
motivational areas
this guy is still a bit of a mystery
he will disappear
behind the veil
of our historical site I guess you could say
for several years
after his
taking over of Lydia he will leave a general
who may be this historical Harpigus guy
and an army behind
in western Turkey
what's now modern day western Turkey
to reduce these Asiatic
Greek cities and he will
go it's assumed
to the eastern part of his
realm and the northern part of his realm
and conquer further
and also shore up
his defenses against the many
powerful tribes that sort of ring
his territory probably
a combination of fighting
some of them showing the flag to some
of them
intermarrying and making diplomatic agreements
with some of them accepting
vassalage from others I mean it was years
of work so this guy
is doing the you know Yeoman's
work the hard slogging
of creating a stable state
and it requires years of constant
effort he disappears from the historical record
while he's doing this
and then in 539
BCE
he reappears again at the head of an army
heading toward Babylon
now what Cyrus is going to do
to Babylon is probably
his crowning achievement in his career
and I have to remind myself that his career
is already incredible
this is a guy who by 539 BCE
has been a king for about 20
years and in 20 years
he's taken his people from a virtual
you know backwater nowhere
isville to a point where they've
conquered half of the great nation
states in their little ecosystem
that exist you know after the fall of
Assyria and he's outside
the gates of number 3
of 4 with an army that's pretty awesome
right there for a king of
Anshan who will
very soon be referring to himself
as part of his official royal
titles as the king of the universe
when you go from Anshan
to king of the universe that's quite a jump
and he's kind of a self-made conqueror
you compare him to someone like Alexander the Great
and of course awesome
but Alexander reminds you of
sort of a historical rich kid
who inherits his father's already thriving
corporation with tons of ready cash
and does great things with it
no offense to Alexander
it's awesome
but Cyrus never had any of those advantages
and look where he is only 20 years into his reign
now let me just
voice my own opinion that what
Cyrus is about to do to Babylon
is strange
you can't tell with the sources
what's really going on and the different histories
have different approaches to it and it's been argued
about and the views have changed
and updated over time there's just
not enough hard sources though for anyone to
really know for anyone to
conclusively win I'm certainly
not going to take a position on it but I am going to explain
sort of the weirdness of it
the first thing you have to ask
is whether or not Cyrus arriving
outside Babylon when he
did was a coincidence because the timing
is awesome if you're hoping to take over
Babylon is that just
because he gets lucky or is that
just because as the Babylonian propaganda would
say later the hand of Marduk
had seized him and brought him to Babylon
to get rid of the horrible king of Babylon
and restore things
just lucky
or did Cyrus and the Persians
have advanced information that things
suck in Babylon right now you come
now and half the population
will be ready to welcome you with open arms was
that maybe part of the reason he showed up when he
did or as some
have argued for years could you make a case
that the reason that people were so
disaffected in Babylon was in part
due to Persian propaganda
that undermined it
you know the entire will to resist
and I have to be honest
I did not understand that part
of the story for years growing up but
something has changed in the way historians view it so
it now makes more sense to me when I was growing
up the attitude was that in 539 BCE
this is when Cyrus arrived
so something happens and occurs
and Babylon falls and Cyrus takes it over and there you go
so this idea that he had this propaganda
undermining Babylon
made you think about when
when was that going to happen
I mean just everything happened so quickly
the modern way of viewing this amongst a lot of historians
is that maybe the Persians
and the Babylonians had been fighting battles for a couple
of years and that in 539
when Cyrus and his army show up
outside of Babylon
that's like the end of the Second World War
when the Russians show up outside of Berlin
and you're having your last climactic battle
you know in a multi-battle long war
again the sources are just not there
to confirm any of this
you know categorically
but it would make a heck of a lot more sense
if you were saying that Cyrus and the Persians
were undermining the Babylonians with propaganda
if you had years to do it right
now understanding
what Cyrus might have been doing requires
talking about Babylon itself a little bit
like the Assyrian city of Nineveh
this is a great urban center
and it's large enough
and complex enough so that you see
a lot of the same sorts of dynamics going on
you know I'll be it through
an ancient lens that you would see
in any modern large city today
there are fissures
there are divisions
there are tensions
there are disagreements
there are all sorts of things that if someone wanted to come in
they could widen
disagreements and slowly but surely
increase the level of
anger and discontent
there's a number of things
to be exploited too
start with the fact
that the king is unpopular
the king of
Babylon during this time period
almost certainly suffers from
bad historical publicity
his name is Nabonitis and by the time
all of this is going down
Nabonitis is about 70
70 years old
in a world
where the lifespan is so much shorter
how many 70 year old people are there
he's like a wizard
to the population
in terms of this is a guy
whose memory goes back to events
most people can't get anywhere near memory wise
he may have been the general
who helped seal the deal
between those two sides at the battle
of the eclipse remember when they suck each other's blood
as part of
sealing the deal this Nabonitis guy
when he was much younger and more vigorous
may have been one of the generals on site
now he's old
and it's really hard
to get your mind around what this guy was really like
he sort of
portrayed
as a kind of a doting
antiquarian by some historians
some people consider him
the first official archaeologist
I think that's got to be crazy because there were lots of
earlier kings who were into digging up
earlier versions of their civilization
but this guy is portrayed
as somebody who almost prefers it to being a king
he'd rather be out there
Indiana Jonesing
some old Babylonian stuff from the previous kings
than dealing with the day to day government
he also looks like a guy who doesn't mind
getting out of Babylon
I have this image for the movie of some
I want to use like the guy who played
the scientist
the doctor and back to the future and have him be
Nabonitis and just have him
sort of finding the hustle and bustle
of Babylon too much and those young kids
and their loud music and all that stuff
so he and
the priesthood of Babylon
especially the main
important god of Marduk
begin to have these disagreements
now understand something
in the world before modern times
there is really only one reliable
counterbalance to the power
of a king or an emperor
a pharaoh
and that's the priesthood and the religion
because the power
that they have stems from the same
source right you're a king by divine
right it's the gods who want you to be a king
but who has a special relationship
with the gods and who helps you know
placate the gods and who does the work of the gods
and who knows what the god really wants well the priesthood
and the religion right so the only other source
of legitimate
power in these societies
before modern times are often
you know the priests and the priests of Marduk
don't like this Nabonidus guy and part of the reason
why is he seems to be kind of
well favoring
another god over theirs
this is what I mean by it's hard
to get your mind around Nabonidus because
he may be like
an Akhenaten type character you know the
Egyptian pharaoh that may have been a monotheist
and may have tried to change Egypt's
religion another similar story
right where you have the autocratic ruler
opposed by a powerful priesthood
and after Akhenaten died
things returned back to normal and they kind of were
carving his face off of all of the old things
trying to forget he ever lived
Nabonidus may have been one of these guys too
that wanted to change the religion
his mother was supposedly a priestess
of a religion devoted
to a god named Sin a moon god
and so Nabonidus
right before this time period gives the ultimate
middle finger to the priesthood
of Marduk by leaving
Babylon and going
to some Arabian oasis
now
historians in modern times have found
also it's a really good logical
patriotic reasons why the king might
do that in past times it was
much more portrayed like this guy is a mystic
either a mystic
or an old man or a combination of the two
and he just wants to get away
from his unworthy people and he appreciates
it more in these Arabian
oasis it's probably what modern historians
think he's probably there doing
important work for the country but he's missing
important work at the same time
the Babylonians required their
king to be there once a year for
a New Year's festival it was important
he had to physically grasp the hand
of the god in front of the population
once a year to ensure success
and good things and all these kinds of deals
and he stayed away for like a decade
and the Babylonian records
will say every year the king was not here
for the ceremony or what have you and
they're getting pissed
then he's putting more money into creating
more of these temples for the other religion
denying some money that the people of Marduk
expect and you can just see
it boiling over right and then the king
is not even there his son Belchazar
is ruling as a region
and he's not popular either
so the king is part of it
but Babylon is going through
you know tough economic
times too and that's putting the squeeze on
people they're having problems with disease
and that's causing unrest
the biologist Dr. Joan Oates
describes you know the down
and dirty parts of day to day
suffering and let's remember something
Babylon's banking system and financial
system was developed enough so that they had
great banking houses there
that were very powerful and lived on long
after this period and that's
just another one of those dynamics that
makes us think about modern times
these are powerful interests that have
you know some authority in the state
what happens when things seem to be
falling apart and people are losing money
and times are bad and you start
getting Persian propaganda about this king
who sounds like things are going
his way which remember during this time
period might have caused a lot of people to
figure the gods are smiling on that guy
and our kings not even showing up
to shake the gods hand every new years right
here's the way Dr. Joan Oates
describes the situation in Babylon
considering also remember
that this king looks like a guy who's trying
to change religious traditions trying to change
other things and Dr. Oates writes quote
clearly Nabonitis
religious and administrative reforms
provoked great resentment
while the wars and extensive building
programs of his predecessors
had proved a severe burden on the country's
resources large numbers of
economic texts reveal severe inflation
a situation now made
worse by the spread of plague
between 560 BCE
and 550 BCE
prices rose by up to 50%
and from 560 to 485 BCE
the total increase amounted to some
200% end quote
not just that
but again you know take this
with a grain of salt it's argued about but
there are people inside Babylon
who might be
considered shall we say
vulnerable to propaganda
that created descent
there are a lot of people
in Babylon
who are there because they were forcibly taken
once upon a time
from where they came from
and some of the propaganda
afterwards certainly
the post propaganda but maybe some of the
pre propaganda too from Cyrus
told these people
that if the Persians were to take over
they'd get to go home
start with
the deportees from Judah
Jewish people today
there are still
I'm sure still you know even with all the
Jews in that part of the world today
that are descendants of people
who were forcibly removed after the
Babylonians sacked Jerusalem
what if Cyrus was telling those people
if I get
if I get in power you can go home
and what if he was telling all the other deportees
the same thing
now when historians refer to Cyrus
and the Persians propaganda
the first idea that comes to mind is like
negative propaganda like the Nazi stuff
designed to lie to people and get you to
believe things that aren't true
but you could make a case that
since we know that
Cyrus and the Persians will eventually
actually do what they're saying here
right that they will for example
allow the Jews to go back
to Judah and reestablish their religion
and even eventually
pay for some of the rebuilding of the Second Temple
what will be the Second Temple
with royal funds
when you know that they're actually going to do that
maybe you could say that this propaganda is a lot more
like dropping leaflets
over enemy military lines
let's say something like you know surrender to us
we don't hurt prisoners and we'll give you a hot
meal and you know a few bucks in your
pocket and some cigarettes what would they have done in the old days
maybe this
is like telling the people inside
Babylon do not fear
I may be coming but I'm going to send you home
now real experts
on this like Pierre Breand caution us
against thinking about this the way
that I just described to you
that this is a conscious
policy of toleration he says the way
the marketing really is
is a lot more like Cyrus is a Syrian
and Babylonian predecessors
where he's essentially promising
continuity
and because continuity
means allowing these people to do things
the way that they're accustomed to do it
it seems like tolerance
and he points out that it's normal
for conquerors in this region
even before this time period to come in and promise
to restore everything that's wrong
the gods are upset
I will fix that the economy is bad
I will fix that you are kept
away from your home and your gods are just
you know I will fix that the restore
and recreator of order
so whatever
you want to call this
in 539
Cyrus and the Babylonian
army meet
and in a battle where there seems to have been
a really maybe nasty massacre at the end
the Babylonian army
is defeated
the rest of the troops sort of run back to the
very formidable
defenses of the city
and within two days
somehow the gates of the city
are opened and Cyrus's general is marching
through the streets in triumph and Babylon falls
and Nabanitis
flees and he's eventually captured
and supposedly treated well by Cyrus
just like all the other kings were
Herodotus of course has to give us
a stratagem story of how it happened
this time it involves
waiting until they can get the river down
that flows through the city to a certain length
or to a point where the troops can go
through the marshes or what have you
and capture the city and I think he's
one of the ones that say that the city
didn't even know it was being captured because
there was some revelry going on
attached to a religious
cult and the city so big anyway
I mean modern excavations
put the city size at
over 2,000 acres
and the wall circumference
at about 11 miles
so it's possible that in one part of the city
they were partying it up and the Persians
got in
the natural thing to do would be to throw out a story
like that and blame it on typical
Greek stereotypes and what not
but it should be pointed out one
that oftentimes in these ancient religions
there was an awful lot of
decadent or fun
it depends on your point of view I guess
stuff that was part of you know the religious
rites and you'll see this in Greece and
Rome and a ton of other religions the world
over especially in the ancient period and
these people are immensely religious
the Babylonians especially it's a holy city
of Mesopotamia right these are very religious
people so imagine people with the commitment
of like a Taliban
right the seriousness with which they take
this and the strident militancy and all that
but you might be commanded
to party it's a party for God
you're not there the ramifications
could be huge right
I'm inclined to think
that it's a Greek stereotype of course
but there's a part of me that wants to believe
it's the latter
now the one thing this conquest
if that's even the right word of Babylon
is known for
is the fact that it's generally
considered to be bloodless
and forget that battle we talked about
with the nasty potential massacre at the end
when the city of Babylon
is taken it's taken
essentially voluntarily I mean it's like the Babylonians
open up the door and Cyrus as general comes in
and 17 or so days later
Cyrus himself comes in and we're told that the population
you know gets in front of his chariot
and lays down palm fronds
and stuff which some historians in the old days
used to be sure was a sign
of how much people wanted in there
more modern day historians point out
that that's generally how you get treated
when you come into a city that's trying to show
that they're no threat at all and please don't hurt us
that's perhaps what
the Persian takeover of
Babylon is most known for
Cyrus didn't hurt anybody
and as I said earlier
Novenitis his life is spared
which supposedly
is the same fate
that Cyrus has meted out to all the kings
he's faced which by the way
is not only unusual
but it's not even maybe true who knows
there are always little hints somewhere that maybe Cyrus killed these kings
and the propaganda covered it up
nonetheless historically and traditionally
he's supposed to have spared
and given good lives to all these other kings
he defeated, Osteogies of the Meads
Cresces of the Lydians
Novenitis of the Babylonians
what is the message
Cyrus is trying to send here
I mean that's what I find interesting
you want to know a little bit about the guy himself
and maybe what he was trying to do
what's the message when he does that
because the Assyrian king who last conquered
Babylon brags about how he tied
the king of Babylon up like a pig
and displayed him in the center
of Nineveh
so this is not standard operating procedure
it's one of the things by the way that fascinates me about Cyrus
because the Occam's
razor approach to history which is
the right way to go I mean what else are you going to do
is to assume the most logical things
right you don't assume illogical things
so the assumption always is
that someone like Cyrus is playing a
hardcore cynical
propaganda game and again
it probably is most people would be
but occasionally you're going to get
some different kind of human being
because we see them they exist
it's just if you're using the Occam's
razor approach to try to determine
you know what a Gandhi was really like
a thousand years from now
you might be looking at listen Gandhi was really
you know this was a cynical attempt
to figure out a way to gain power and you could figure out
all these real logical reasons why a guy might do this
sometimes people who are doing
things for mystic reasons
or morality reasons or humanistic
reasons or any of these things sometimes
those people slip through the cracks because it's just
so easy to assume they had
a more real world terra firma reason
for doing things is it possible
that Cyrus
was kind of a humanist
maybe you know this
is how he's portrayed by the way by his real
fans and a lot of people back in Iran
I mean as the guy who invented
human rights sort of
at least as a
ruler is concerned and Babylon
is one of the number one pieces of evidence
that gets trotted out in defense of this
idea that this isn't just
some sort of policy
of tolerance for expediency
sake that this is how
Cyrus really believes
you can govern
and it should be pointed out that
not only has Babylon kind of surrendered
without a fight there's another Babylonian city
or two that kind of opens their doors
to Cyrus
and it's interesting because you know
Riza Sargami has an interesting take
on something that the Babylonian king did
as part of the fighting with Cyrus
for Babylon
supposedly and this is a way to look at
Nabonidus showing that maybe he was this
really responsible king after all
before Cyrus gets to Babylon
Nabonidus goes around to all the surrounding towns
and takes their gods
takes all their little the statues
and the representations of their gods
to Babylon
and traditionally this is considered to be
an act of safekeeping right
you know you don't want your Statue of Liberty
falling into the hands of the Elamites
and ending up in their trophy case right
so you take all these village gods back
to Babylon for safekeeping
Riza Sargami though has an interesting take
on this
and his book Discovering Cyrus
he does a great job reminding us of the
interesting belief systems of the people
who have these gods
you could see what Nabonidus is doing
is the equivalent of perhaps
kidnapping the gods of these towns
and holding them hostage
for good behavior right
stay loyal to Babylon
or your god gets it in the neck
something like that here's what Sargami writes
and remember this only makes sense
if Nabonidus is seriously
worried that some of these towns are just going to
go over to Cyrus because of the propaganda
or whatever he writes quote
faced with the very real
prospect that his cities would open up
their gates to the Conqueror
Nabonidus settled upon a drastic policy
he decided to hold
hostage the sacred idols of Babylonia's
outlying cities to ensure
the loyalty of their inhabitants
so when Cyrus and his army resumed
their march in the late summer of 539 BCE
a series of caravans
laden with divine
images and other religious artifacts
made its way to Babylon
living today we can hardly grasp
the full psychological
impact of Nabonidus's action
the idol was the centerpiece of the ancient
Mesopotamian cult
and the most important symbol of the community
the inanimate statues were treated
like royalty bathed
perfumed groomed
and even fed lavish meals by an entourage
of domestic servants priests
and personal attendants
ancient Mesopotamian cults were
geographically centralized and the gods
powers territorially limited
that is why Cyrus could not receive
the divine approval he desired
with the gods concentrated in Babylon
he then continues
but Nabonidus was playing a dangerous
game by emptying his cities of their
idols proximity to the cult
statue meant everything to the superstitious
masses who believed that the sacred
images of their gods could perform miracles
cure illness and most importantly
protect their settlements
cities lost divine protection
when their gods left
end quote
one of the first things that Cyrus
will brag about doing
when he takes over Babylon
is returning all those
gods to the outlying
communities and those people
freaking out at
you know having their gods back
once again as Pierre Brion says
Cyrus is portraying himself as the
restorer of order of things as
they should be
he's beginning to tie himself
to the ancient
Assyrian tradition
some historians suggest consciously
he'll talk about repairing something in the city
and coming across some proclamation
by Ashurbanipal the Assyrian king
he'll tie himself to Assyria
and this ancient
royal tradition
when he starts calling himself king of kings
and king of the universe these are
old Assyrian and even
Akkadian terms
but if Cyrus was starting
to use these ancient titles for himself
you can see why he thought
he might deserve it
because 80 or 90 years after
you know the ancient kingdom
of Assyria fell
Cyrus had put Humpty Dumpty
back together again
with sort of a different form
and different
marketing and different branding
but all of a sudden once again
just as had existed during
later Assyrian times
one power
had hegemony
in that part of the world now
trying to rule
immensely different people
people from
from deeply urban environments
in places like Babylon
to Phoenician cities
to tribes that existed
off in the edges of the Eurasian
step and incorporate all these
different people
into one empire
much is made of the different
strategies that the Persians used
over the Assyrians instead of trying to
shoo everybody into one
you know cultural style
convert everybody to your religion
make good Assyrians
of these conquered people
the Persians used a much lighter touch
that the idea of toleration really
was to allow local customs
to continue
the Assyrians wouldn't have tolerated that
the fact that the Persians didn't try to change
all that whether it was a question of religion
or language or anything else
in fact when the Persian Empire gets up and running
Persians will be put in all the most
important positions
but Persia will not be
the language of the empire there will always be
only a tiny minority of people actually speaking
Persian all of the official
you know proclamations will be multilingual
so the different people can read them
all the local gods
are respected and supported
now again is this some sort of
you know humanitarian gesture
on Cyrus's part
or is it a guy who is a humanitarian
and thinks listen I'm just telling you
this is the best way to treat people and it will work out
best in other words a guy who believes his own
humanitarian beliefs and morals dovetail
into good outcomes
or is it somebody who cynically looks at this
and just says listen I'm just telling you
if we do it this way we'll have less revolts
it'll be much better than the way the Assyrians did it
and he knows
it's tempting to think of Cyrus
as brilliant and visionary
regardless of which one of those things
is true
he organizes this empire
he starts creating things that are called satraps
and satrapies which are
administrative
units that will be built upon by his successors
and then the next major thing we hear about
Cyrus it's almost like you know when these people live
that far back you get the highlights of their lives
highlight number one
conquest of Medea
highlight number two conquest of Lydia
highlight number three conquest of Babylon
highlight number four
the expedition
against a queen
of one of the most powerful tribal
coalitions
in Central Asia
now the fact that there is
a queen involved in this story
should tip you off to the idea
that it's going to be a good one
and Herodotus by the way knows this
he's eager to get to this story
and he's going to spend a ton of time on it
he's been setting it up
he knows his audience is ready
he's got a little moral twist that may or may not have anything to do with reality
but you get a look at that
twenty five hundred year old mind
that you're mind melding with one way at this point in the story
but it becomes the time
where Herodotus is at his least reliable too
I mean he jumps from highlight number three
to highlight number four in Cyrus's life
in one second
if you look at the actual dates involved though
you'll see that there is like nine years
between highlight number three and highlight number four
and nine years when Cyrus is
well to use his own
marketing and branding king of the universe
what the heck was this guy doing for nine years
while he was putting out some propaganda
we know
something called the Cyrus cylinder
is famous
and it's this piece where first Cyrus has the Babylonian god
saying when I was with him the whole way
and then he introduces himself
as this good guy
again propaganda makes it easier to
rule a subject people if you make it
feel like it was your god that wanted me
here
I came because he took my hand
right so you're legitimizing your
rule and tying you into the
age old power structure basically saying that king
you defeated was the real weirdo
that the god didn't want
I am restoring you know the kingship
to the people that Marduk wants to have
it you can see that the same
is true in a lot of the other
you know religions that Cyrus is involved with
this is why a lot of people think his whole propaganda
tolerance thing was much more of a political move
because look at how
it helps him politically
in a way that by the way he could not
have foreseen it made him
immortal
this is from Pierre Brion's
book from Cyrus to Alexander
but it's a translation from the Bible
that he uses in the same
way that the Cyrus cylinder says the Babylonian
god Marduk took Cyrus's hand
and you know swept away all the opposition
this is what the Israeli god
Yahweh did according to the Bible quote
thus says Yahweh
to his appointed to Cyrus
whom he has taken by his right
hand to subdue nations before
him and strip the loins
of kings to force gateways
before him that their gates be closed no more
I will go before you
leveling the heights I will
shatter the bronze gateways
smash the iron bars I will give you
the hidden treasures the secret
hordes that you may know that I am Yahweh
end quote
so once again Cyrus
has these gods on his side why are they
on his side well he's always helping
isn't he he's always doing
what the priesthood of Marduk would like
and it's interesting how Marduk follows along
he likes if you treat his priests well
in the case of Yahweh
well according to the Bible again
and Pierre Breon is skeptical of the details
but says in the bigger picture
at least it was consistent with what
actually happened the Bible says that
in the reign of a king
two kings after two official kings
after Cyrus they found the
actual order that would have made
Yahweh pleased with investing
shall we say in the Cyrus
conquest according to the Bible
and Pierre Breon's description of it
this is from Ezra by the way
out of the royal archives
of Ekbatana
the order said quote
in the first year of Cyrus the king
King Cyrus decreed
temple of God in Jerusalem
the temple will be rebuilt
as a place at which sacrifices are offered
and by which offerings are brought to be burnt
its height is to be 60 cubits
its width 60 cubits
there are to be three thicknesses
of stone blocks and one of wood
the expenses to be met by the king's
household
furthermore the vessels of gold
and silver from the temple of God
which Nebuchadnezzar took from the sanctuary
in Jerusalem and brought to Babylon
are to be restored
so that everything may be restored to the
sanctuary in Jerusalem and put back
in the temple of God
end quote
that dovetails nicely with that story
of the ghostly hand doesn't it
because what that guy Belchazar
was drinking out of that made
the way so mad to begin with are all these sacred
vessels from the old temple in Jerusalem
Solomon's temple
now Cyrus was decreeing that you rebuild
Solomon's temple
and you pay for it out of the king's
treasury and you bring back
all these things that are still around
and restock the temple
with them and then you send the people
who have been deported here
back home
now here's the thing
this reconstituted
you know area
that will become a satrap by the way
does not have its political freedom
they're not going to be the way they were
you know when the Babylonians and Egyptians were arguing over them
but you got to see
that they're pretty darn far ahead
they went from a people that might have died
out religiously
in fact the book I have that places
Cyrus is one of the top most
100 influential people of all time says
that that's one of the things maybe you credit him with
the fact that if he doesn't do this
there's a chance Judaism
doesn't continue over the long haul
in this case he builds
what's known as the second temple
and if you want to see continuity
the wall that is still one of the holiest
if not the holiest sites
I guess the temple mount would be holier but it's part of the temple mount
is the famous
you know western wall
the western wall is a Roman
era addition
to the second temple
which Cyrus allegedly
according to the bible
paid for and authorized
it's so interesting isn't it
to consider how connected
the stories of the ancient Iranians
the ancient Persians are
to the ancient Jewish folks
especially considering the current
antagonism between them
you know as late as the 1970s
the Shah of Iran was touting
this ancient closeness between the peoples
and their relationship
if not for the ancient Persians
there wouldn't be Judaism today
and depending on when it died out
there's a very good chance you wouldn't have had the religions
that
sprouted off that branch
you wouldn't have had Christianity
you probably wouldn't have had Islam in other words
if Cyrus the great actually did do this
and he had never lived to do it
what would the world look like today
another thing it says in that
100 most influential people of all time that I thought was interesting
is that many of the people that get credited
as being very important
and Islamic and instrumental
human beings in terms of their effect on history
did something that would have been done anyway
might not have been done at that time
or that way
but a lot of this stuff would have happened
someone else would have discovered the light bulb probably
the author thought it likely
that if Cyrus the great had never lived
none of this stuff happens
he was a
unique individual
and even though you can't get your mind around the specifics of how he was a unique individual
you can sort of look at what built up
even if Pierre Brown's right
and you have to assume that there was a lot of foundation
bubbling up under the surface for Cyrus to work with
this is still a pretty incredible human being
I think you could probably say
with a decent chance of being right
that he is
in the 530s BCE
the greatest geopolitical figure
who's ever lived
which makes the next thing I'm going to say
it's so hard to believe
why should I say it
how about letting historian
A.T. Olmsted
in a book published in 1948
say it
and again
is there any more of a telling
example that these people live
at the very tail end of the black and white era
of recording of human history
because how can this guy be as big as he is
and yet this next line be true
Olmsted said
here we must leave
Cyrus for suddenly
and without warning our information comes
to an end
end quote
200 years after this period
we will know Alexander
the great's symptoms
to such a degree that doctors today
try to diagnose what he may have died of
and they still don't know I'm not saying everything's perfect
but you know where
when the how's the why's
how can you not know
how this guy dies
highlight number four
in his life as portrayed by Herodotus
is Herodotus's story
of how he dies and I love the fact that Herodotus goes to
you know the trouble to point out
that he's heard several different versions
of this story but the one he's going to give you
is the one he thinks is most likely
and maybe it's just a coincidence
that the story that Herodotus
thinks is most likely
is the one with the most
exotic, interesting
movie-like
elements to it you can imagine
I can't imagine he left a better version
on the table somewhere saying no
I just don't believe that
because the one he used is so awesome
now is it believable?
that's the problem here nobody knows what's believable
off the top of my head
if you ask me what percentage bought into
the general idea of Herodotus's story
I'd say it's like 80%
most of them don't believe any of the details
but the broad idea
that already BCE, Cyrus the Great
died somewhere out in this step
area as Herodotus said
details probably
unknown
about 20% I'd say of the historians though
think he died a completely different way
some think against different tribes than Herodotus says
in different areas, others that he didn't die that way
and all Xenophon writing a couple centuries
afterwards will say he died in bed
peacefully
so there are some historians who buy that too
in Iran it's generally I think a higher percentage
think he didn't die the way Herodotus says
and in part you could understand
why you'd be a little skeptical
it's just too drawn interesting the way
Herodotus does it
you can see the admonition
that I got when I was starting in journalism
the one that said tell what really
happened in the most interesting
way possible
what happens to an admonition like that
if there's no way you could possibly
know what really happened
but you have to tell it anyway
what are your standards then you're pretty much left
with the most interesting way
you can at that point right
well the story as Herodotus
tells it involves this little twist
you're going to end up leaving his theatrical
presentation with a deeper message
again the deeper
message may or may not be true
Herodotus couches this story now
into the idea of overreach
maybe the idea of absolute power
corrupting absolutely and before
we write this off as many historians
do right away because it's just such an obvious
moral message remember you could make that
case about Hitler
you know with the absolute power
turning you mad after a while with Alexander
you can make that case I mean I guess there are
historical figures
where this is both a motif because it's this
recurring theme you see all the time
but it also happens to be true
maybe after years
of being king of the universe
Cyrus got a little full of himself
who knows but that's the way this is portrayed right
there's going to be an object lesson here
and the person that is going to stick it
to Cyrus and teach him this lesson
is going to be a queen
you know but you have to think of like an Amazonian
queen this isn't some woman who's walking
around in velvet you know on a throne
being fan I mean this is a
person who probably once upon a time
was killing men
in hand-to-hand combat
now did this woman really exist
who the heck knows
there's no historical confirmation that I've
seen that says that they found anything that proves
this queen whose name by the way
I used to call her Tamaris when I was growing up
but I've seen Timorous, Tomerous
a number of different pronunciations
I think Shakespeare might have used her as a character
in one of his plays
nonetheless you can say a couple of things
one it wouldn't have been
outrageous to think of her as a female warrior
because these tribes actually had them
it may have been the actual root
of the idea of
amazons in sort of a mythology
so she could have actually
been a killer
warrior
and also the tribe she was supposed to
have led was real
all too real to some people they were
called the massacre tie or the message tie
a dangerous powerful
numerous tribal coalition
that
you know Herodotus in his writings
he has to set it up and tell you what he knows
which isn't much he says
I hear they're a Schithian people
which they kind of were
you have to think of
Mongol type culture
but with people who were probably
predominantly light skinned
and
ranging on the scale of looks
from like a Turkic kind of look
all the way up to people with blonde
and red hair
blue and green eyes tall
there's a little Viking side to them
the Viking ethos
sword worshiping and things like that
supposedly once a year these people
would have a scaffold erected
and they'd put a sword on top of the scaffold
and then they would march underneath the scaffold
one out of every 100 prisoners
that they'd captured over the year and execute them
as a sacrifice to the sky god
the sun god, Mithra I think it was
these are colorful scary people
just what you want in a story like this
Herodotus has already talked about their head hunting
the fact that they make
drinking cups out of skulls
and the really nasty warriors
are the ones with the most cups
he talks about their cannabis use
again this is the exotic barbarian
you want to hear what they do
he says they found this fruit that they can burn
and then they sit around the fire burning the fruit
and it gets them intoxicated like wine
gets Greeks intoxicated
so another little bit of that barbarian color
to throw in
he also points out according to him
it's very promiscuous
you might call them free love types
or swingers maybe
anybody can sleep with anybody else's wife
he just has to put his bow
alongside their tent to let him know
you're interested I guess
so weed smoking
head hunting
blood drinking wife sharing viking types
who would not want that in a good story
if you don't know anything and you're just trying to make the best story
make sure you include these people
Herodotus says that Cyrus leads
an army
up to this queen's territory
and then basically proposes marriage to her
so it would be like a diplomatic alliance
thing and Herodotus says that
she sees through this ruse immediately
saying that he just wants to conquer her people
by marrying her
so then when she says no
he begins to try
to set up what we would call today
an amphibious river crossing
there's a big river that divides the territory
he's coming from
these Central Asian horse nomads
up in places like you know
Kazakhstan and places like that today
and as
Cyrus and the Persians were told are building these boats
some of which have like towers
like fighting towers on them
she sends him a message
now remember she's going to be like the voice
of a venging karma here
in teaching Cyrus a lesson
so her voice
and the words that Herodotus puts in her mouth
from a screenwriter showrunners point of view
are designed to
you know set this idea up right
you should know but you don't
you know you're going to get what's coming to you
here's what Herodotus says
this is the DeSellencor translation of Herodotus by the way
quote
end quote
this barbarian
warrior queen
is basically saying
to a guy whose title includes king
of kings and king of the universe
to come and get it
or I'll come over and take it from you
that's a pretty
strong female character isn't it
and I was thinking
that it makes Herodotus at times
look a little profeminist right
like he's been looking
for a good strong female character
there's another reason maybe
that would play well
maybe some of the people in his audience
are women and it would be good to have
a character that they could both relate to
and cheer for
finally it might just be a dig
at the manliness of the Persians
right I mean here's the greatest
king that Asia has ever produced
and he's about to be beaten and killed
by a woman
nonetheless in the story
when she says you know do you want it over here
do you want it over there
Cyrus and his generals and what not
sit down and have a conference about this
what do we do which choice do we take
and all his advisors say let her come to our side of the river
one advisor though says no no no
go over to her side
that advisor is our old friend
the king of Lydia Cresus
who instead of being killed Herodotus has
so going in the story sort of acting as advisor
to Cyrus all the way through
increases his
advice is totally different
first of all he says you can't let her
come over here and give ground in front of her
it's a woman it would look terrible so
there's that other little dig
he says go over to her side
and then he says
and how about we do
a little trick
and he proceeds to tell
Cyrus that they should
really do the same thing
to these people that the Medes did
to either these people
or their cousins a generation before
in a story you may recall
get them all drunk
and kill them
my Desellencore translation
has Cresus telling Cyrus
to do it this way
here then is my advice cross the river advance to the limit of the enemies withdrawal and then get the better of them by a piece of strategy
I have heard that these people have no experience of such luxuries as the Persians enjoy
and know nothing about the pleasures of life
let us take advantage of this fact
and set out a banquet in our camp
on the most generous scale
with a great many sheep slaughtered
and dressed all sorts of other dishes
and bowls of strong wine
in liberal quantities
then when the banquet is all prepared
he says
let us march back to the river
leaving only a detachment of inferior troops behind
unless I am very much mistaken
when our enemies see all those good things
they will set to work upon them
and that will be our chance to distinguish ourselves
by a bold stroke
end quote
again is that a recurring motif
or is that just a tactic
that seems to work quite a bit
who knows
but in the story we are told
that a third of the army
shows up
kills the inferior troops
sees all the food and the wine
proceeds to get very full and very drunk
and then the Persians come in
kill a bunch of them and capture some others
about a third of the army
according to Herodotus
included amongst the prisoners
a general
to be this barbarian queen's son
so now in this scenario
Herodotus is playing with
his movies turned into a little bit of a thriller
with a little chess match
and all of a sudden Cyrus' side has captured a major piece
the son of the queen
and so she issues one of these
I'll let you go now
if you give me back my son
kinds of speeches
from the Purvis translation
Herodotus says quote
when Cyrus learned what had happened to her army
and her son
she sent a herald to Cyrus with this message
bloodthirsty Cyrus
do not gloat over what has happened here
you Persians indulge yourself
with the fruit of the vine to the point of madness
so that the wine descends into your bodies
ugly words
flow up and out of you
by such means you have tricked me
and you've taken my son prisoner
but not by supremacy and battle
well then I urge you to follow this advice
return my son to me
and despite the damage you have cunningly reeked
upon a third part of the army of the Masegatai
you may leave this land unharmed
if you do not do this
I swear by the son
the lord of the Masegatai
that I will satisfy your thirst for blood
insatiable as you are
end quote
so what Cyrus gonna do
with this interesting powerful
chess piece
he doesn't get the chance to decide
because we're told that as soon as
the queen's son sobers up
finds himself
you know hands tied or bound
he beseeches Cyrus to undo his hands
somehow Cyrus is convinced
and
I like the way my Rawlinson translation puts it
the minute his hands were free
Rawlinson's Herodotus says
he destroyed himself
so he committed suicide
now all of a sudden
Cyrus just lost his peace
and this is when
we're told the battle happens
this from
the DeSellencor translation quote
the queen
on hearing that Cyrus ignored her terms
engaged him in the field
with all the forces she possessed
the battle which followed I judged to have been more
violent than any other fought
between foreign nations
according to the information that I have
the engagement began with the two armies
coming to a halt within range of each other
and exchanging shots with bows and arrows
until their arrows were used up
after which there was a long period
of close fighting with spears
and daggers neither side being willing
to retreat finally however
the massacre tie got the upper hand
the greater part of the Persian army
was destroyed where it stood
and Cyrus himself was killed
he had been on the throne for 29 years
end quote
of course
that doesn't quite twist
the knife enough
and have you leaving the performance
really thinking about some of the
greater themes in life
so Herodotus from my
Purvis translation
adds a coda to the story
he writes quote
Queen Temerus then filled
a wine skin with human blood
and searched for the corpse of
Cyrus amongst the Persian dead
when she found him she thrust his head
into the wine skin and as she
thus abused the corpse she declared to it
I am alive
and have conquered you in battle
but you have ruined me by taking my son
through Gael well then
just as I threatened I will slake
your thirst for blood
end quote
so if as the
recurring Greek motif
will later show that the Persians are surreal
over-reachers
I'm sure Herodotus's attitude
here is that they should have learned their lesson
with Cyrus
by the time Cyrus exits
the scene though
he's built an empire
that stretches from
modern day Pakistan all the way to the
Mediterranean
up into Turkey down by the red sea
to the borders of Egypt and out
to the Central Asian steppe
and he's taken
you know efforts and
spent years organizing it
and putting it in a form
where it has a chance to live on
after he's gone
nonetheless you cannot lose
a person of that magnitude
you cannot lose an Alexander
you cannot lose a Napoleon
you cannot lose and have these people from
such lofty heights removed from the scene
without there being this huge vacuum
a couple hundred years
after this time period
one of the people
who will fill a vacuum
and play a similar role
maybe eclipse this person
who will visit his tomb
Alexander the Great
along with some influential
colleagues
will go to the spot and the building
that is assumed to be the tomb
of Cyrus the Great
that tomb is still
standing by the way in modern
day Iran if indeed it was the tomb
it's interesting to think
of Alexander climbing up there
in a fully
colorized historical era now
by the way bringing with him people
who will write about it afterwards we actually have
through another guy the writings of someone
who was with Alexander and kind of describes
what the tomb looked like
a lot of clothing a lot of souvenirs
a lot of things that just sort of helped the guy
into the afterlife sort of deal
and then a body
that was preserved in wax
we're told this was kind of a Persian
custom too
now this might just be me
feeling that if the queen of the
Masajidi or the Masa Gita
had taken his head or something
that's a
mutilation that they would have probably told
us about it's probable that the body looked
pretty darn good because no one talked about it looking
any other way
we're told that there was an inscription
on the tomb
now some historians think it must have been in
front of the tomb because it's missing but there were a couple
of different descriptions from people
who supposedly saw them some
are more flowery than others
one that I like that has a couple of different versions
says
quote
mortal I am Cyrus
son of Cambyses who founded
the Persian Empire and was king
of Asia grudge me not
then my monument
end quote
but there are other traditions
also from
eyewitness accounts originally
that record a very different
sort of epitaph
some of the historians I
like say it's much more traditionally
Iranian too it's much more pithy and right
to the point the Persians
when they were leading the empire could put on the
heirs as well as any Mesopotamian
dynasty ever did they could heap
on all the traditional titles
Queen Victoria
had the Empress of India the kings
of this area had king of the universe
king of the four corners
of the earth king of lands
and the Persians could do that
but sometimes when they were just recording
for eternity
which is what a tomb inscription
like this is
they adopted a different
style
and the tomb inscription supposedly
from an eyewitness that I like the most and I like to use
Cyrus's Persian
Greekish form of the name
Kourosh or Kourosh
it says
here I lie
Kourosh
king of kings
the Persians
grew up in the equivalent of a
tough neighborhood
the show you just heard involved
a lot of context didn't it
where we discussed the background where they
sprung from
because this does a bunch of things one it makes
their achievements all the more astounding
I mean
they arose in this world with all these
amazing competitors
and managed to
climb to the top of the heap anyway
it also helps us set a baseline
for comparison
when we say things like the Persians are
tolerant or lenient
you want to immediately say compared to what
the show you just heard gives us some idea
what they might be compared to
you
finally it's a fantastic
story this story that's usually
relegated to dead air between two other
stories right somewhere between
the fall of Assyria and the rise of
Persia is the
latter part of the 600s
and the high of 580s
like 595, 585
what's going on during that era
normally it's sort of just a transition
point between two chapters
in a book whereas all by itself it's
twisted and fascinating
and I love the idea of the great power
like the U.S. or the Soviet Union collapsing
and the rest of the world sort of looking
at each other over the you know smoke
and ruins trying to figure out who gets
what and what do things look like now
I love that
the key to this whole story at this point
is you know when it took
such a singular figure to put this
improbable you know event
together what happens when that figure
exits the scene
and the gods are getting too Cyrus the greats
in the same family one right after another
remember this is the largest empire
in world history the distance from one part
to another is daunting
then you have all these different people
peoples that are very independence minded
and fractious and who gave the Assyrians
fits all the time
so many different religions so many different languages
how is you know one
small minority
of people going to rule this giant entity
especially without the specially gifted
guy who built the whole thing
in the next episode we'll examine
how you know Cambysus
the son of Cyrus manages
all this
and there will be coups and there will potentially
be armies disappearing in sandstorms
there will be far too many
Greeks probably for what the story
really warrants but you have to understand
while we all know instinctively
there are important things going on
in the east and the north and the other parts
of the Persian empire that don't touch Greek lands
the only people writing about it
in any sort of extended colorful way
are the Greeks so just like everyone else
we'll talk about the Greek and Persian
wars we'll give some context
of that battle of Thermopylae
movies seen with the Spartans say come
and take them
and then we'll deal
with the guy
the next guy really
in this story whose personal talents
are such that he's a game changer
all by himself
the natural successor to
Cyrus the Great and the person who finally
puts the stake in the heart
of the black and white world
the son of Philip
of Macedonia
all that and more
than the next episode
of Kings of Kings
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