Show 56 - Kings of Kings
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December 7th, 1941. A date which will live in infamy. The events. That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. The destruction of the Jewish race against the Romans.

The figure is so tall. I take pride in the words, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

It's hardcore history. The dictionary defines the word hardcore

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 lacedaemonians

otherwise known as Spartans. Laconic speech is Spartan speech. That's the way they're supposed to have talked. Imagine, you know, the love child of Clint Eastwood and Batman, and that's the way they spoke, you know? Man's gotta 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 more.

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 incident.

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, whose 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 this 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 and Star Wars, and they're beleaguered, and, you know, 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, you know, 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 isn't. The evil empire will snuff it all out and make slaves of everyone. So who are you going to side with, right? 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. Theirs would 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 Halicarnassus, 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 it 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 there.

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. As 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 alone.

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. There are 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 rivers 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'd be worth the price of admission, right? With his

tall, sinewy guy, not a big muscle-bound guy doing body weight exercises, you know, calisthenics, push-ups, sit-ups, gymnastics. That's how they, you know, 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 handled the story from there, writing 2,500 years ago, quote,

Xerxes listened but could not understand. That the Lacedaemonians 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 Demeritos, son of Ariston, who was in the camp. And when Demeritos arrived, Xerxes questioned him about everything he had been told, trying to understand the meaning behind what the Lacedaemonians were doing.

Demeritos answered, "You heard what I said about these men before, when we were just setting out against the Greeks, and you made me a laughing stock 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 Demeritos 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 dealmaker. 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, "Moulin lavé," 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 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 and cheer 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 sort of 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, teckle, you farson.

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, teckle, you farson. 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 meanie meanie tackle you farson 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 freaking wonderful is they're 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 Belshazzar 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 Belshazzar grabbed the guy and brought him in and it was Daniel.

who was indeed a deportee. And Belshazzar 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 teckle you farson 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 hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it. Thou art weighed in the 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 Belshazzar. 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 anyone's 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 during the time of the Babylonians, how do they go from that to the evil, the Greek sea, you know, 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? Well, 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. So 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 up 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. But 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 than

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 to be 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 aloud 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 with somebody 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 or the Epic of 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. 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 Briand's book From Cyrus to Alexander. Briand 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 1,200 pages. It's an enormous, comprehensive book.

And the very first lines in it are as part of the 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 1,200-page book that is exhaustive as all get-out, the very first line from the historian is, quote,

yeah it may not be true but you have to believe it anyway it's 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 tumbling 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. Never even got practically to Cleopatra. It was all dominoes before then.

herodotus starts with the earliest thing he knows about 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 Croesus? 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.

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. While 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 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 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 Thermopylae is happening. Now imagine something from 2,500 years before that. 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 II, our 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 BCE, 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 reigns 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

Other peoples, he writes, knew this flood and told of monarchs, Nanakis 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 end quote

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 archaeological 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 archaeological excavation that happened in the late 1800s, early 1900s in modern-day Iran in a city through much of the historical period that was called Susa.

Susa 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, a people called the Elamites resided in Susa, and it was in a strata where the Elamite period was that these archaeologists 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 stele. Take your pick of Hammurabi, something that is huge. I mean, it's a giant seven 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,

Archaeologists then find something that's a good deal older than that. It's called the Victory Steel of Naram-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 Naram-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 oaken bucket, the apple cup, the steel of Hammurabi. You know, that kind of thing.

And by the way, it wasn't just, you know, cultural artifacts that were taken in 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 release when they're 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's 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 big rebuilding 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 peoples that just not a lot is known. What you can say for sure is that they are the great longstanding 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 Babylonians and the Assyrians and the Egypts. There's usually a power in the north to north of Assyria, but that changes over

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 skyrocketing 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, you know, 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-syrian 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 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 700s, when the 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 Uman-Manda in Assyrian annals. The Uman-Manda, by the way, an old Akkadian 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 Uman Manda without the use of translators.

How would 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 ever

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 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 arrayed 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, Naram-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. Sennacherib 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 may be 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 lopped off is just, you know, if you go to a Syria, 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 Ashurbanipal 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 and

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 Ashurbanipal'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, you know, bodiless 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 a Syrian violence, I should point out that, you know, focusing so much on geopolitics and a Syrian 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 you know 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

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 we're talking about here, and as a wonderful way to sort of contradict the earlier way this story was told, which was focusing on people's 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 people's 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 you know 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 and i mean 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.

End quote.

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 Starr 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. And he writes, 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-Pileser 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, they

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

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 vassals

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 it's sometimes 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? I mean, 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, you know, 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 the 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 bazillions 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 Egypts, the Babylons and Assyria, at first you can see that they that they don't know how to deal with the animal. I mean, there are wonderful little figurines and whatnot 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...

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. Right?

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 steppe, 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 steppe. And it's crazy because...

You know, when you look at history, you become very accustomed to watching these 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 steppe 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 steppe people are famously some of the best ever made. But there would have been other things that the 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 steppes, 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 steppe 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 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 2,000 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 kind of a laboratory experiment too. If you put people on 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, is 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 steppe 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 steppe people that resembles Assyria.

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 Camarians and the Scythians 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 uh the scythians 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 steppe 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? Right.

at the same time you know these people are 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 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. I mean 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 is 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 step-troops, Khmerians or Scythians. 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'll 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 for a few weeks. And you can still look at the mummy today and see, oh, wow, they didn't get to him for a while.

Saga on the second will never be found. I've often thought it's not a coincidence his son Sennacherib never actually led a force in person when he was king. He'd left that to the generals. There's very important things in Nineveh that need taking care of, as we all understand. Anyone who could do that to an Assyrian army at the height of Assyria's 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. Why shouldn't this region get hit too? The first will be delivered by these steppe people, these tribes of Camarians and Scythians 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 Scythians and the Camarians attacked and broke into and assaulted

the medes in a giant invasion there's even a year associated with it 653 bce which if you think about it's like 50 years after sargon the second dies you know up into ball right about 55 60 years since these horse people first appeared and they're still managing to totally disrupt you know 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 Medeans 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 stuff.

historians today and you know i'm not one i just read the best um 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 scythians and camarians coming into their area this could be much more like a tribal relationship what do 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, we might be picturing something else entirely.

Herodotus says that the domination of the Medes lasts 28 years. And an interesting little 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 Uman-Manda.

and Risa Sargami 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 Scythian 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. Yeah.

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, right?

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 you know 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 scythians is a mead named xiaxeres

Herodotus credits him with totally reorganizing the military of the Medes. He says that Xerxes becomes the first Asian leader to separate an army into component parts, 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 Medean 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 a series 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 to

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 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 you know he's writing these woe is me tales what did i do to have the gods turn against me everything sucks you know but i'll die soon at least kinds of um you know writings assyria will go from the height of its fortunes to

1945 Berlin fall of 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 Scythians and Cimmerians from the Eurasian steppe, or whether they're an obscure tribal people known as the Medes, 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 immense.

arguably mortal. We already mentioned a scene from the aftermath of this Elamite final solution when Ashurbanipal's lying on his couch with that woman there and then the severed head, you know, up on the pillar of the wall. That's

you know 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 quote 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, prefects, governors, knights, artisans, as many as there were, inhabitants, male and female, big and little, horses, mules, asses, flocks and herds more numerous than a swarm of locusts. I carried them off as booty to Assyria. The dust of Susa, of Madak,

to of halter mash 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 laying 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 John F. Kennedy's 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 going to be a cable one for sure. I mean, the story Olmsted tells of the parade, is that a good word? When Ashurbanipal and his army arrived back home in Nineveh,

displaying the loot and the prisoners and meeting out punishment, by the way, to all and 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 chains supposedly and then the various generals are brought out and punished and there's a psychological twist to assyrian 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 going to try my best at some of the pronunciations of these mesopotamian names they are wonderful he writes quote

Ashurbanipal was about to leave Arbella for Nineveh, and the severed head of the Elamite ruler was entrusted to, his general, Danunu's neck for transport. As the musicians led the ghastly procession into Nineveh, the terrible sight crazed Hamundara and Nabu Damik, the ambassadors who had received their commissions from the dead monarch. One tore his beard, the other thrust his girdle sword into his bosom. Ashurbanipal,

"'Aplia, son of Nabu-Ushalam and grandson of the famous Merodach-Baladan, was extradited from Elam. Manu-Kiahi, Danunu, and Nabu-Ushalam, 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 brothers Samgunu and Aplia were slain and their flesh distributed among the surrounding lands.

Nabu Naid and Bel Atir, 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...

Well, that just seemed 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 on

There were not a lot of tears cried for what was gone. In fact, 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 that

of the United States over the next five or so years somehow, you know, with jaw-dropping, astonishing events, fell apart or imploded, 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 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, five to fifteen 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 five 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 forever.

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 639 bce ominously and mysteriously all of a sudden what the heck's going on i love the different ways the historians try to describe this too one one historian says it was unclear what was happening

Author Mark Healy explained the importance, though, of this period's 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. Ashurbanipal'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 Scythian 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 Medes 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 warlike, could have been diplomatic marriage, but it's making both civilizations stronger. And Ashurbanipal 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 it's 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, Ciaxeres, 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 median army they can do whatever they want so they go sack a nearby city that's not as well defended it just happens to be asher one of the great you know once upon a time assyrian capitals vital connected to their religion and their god and and morale 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 that

A horde of Scythians 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 plains, 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, you know, Assyrian yoke. The records say, quote, I slaughtered the land of Subarum. I turned the hostile land into heaps and ruins. The Assyrian who since distant days had ruled over all the peoples and with his heavy yoke brought injury to the people of the land, his feet from Akkad I turned back. His yoke I threw off, end 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. Someday 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

The conquerors set out to destroy the cities of Assyria, taking revenge for the humiliations they had suffered at Assyria's hands. On wall reliefs of kings Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, for example, they identified the representations of the kings with the help of the inscriptions accompanying them and ritually destroyed them by cutting out the ears and eyes.

These were not random acts of mutilation. In the detailed depiction of Ashurbanipal's defeat of the Elamites, 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 Izar-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 prophesying 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, is 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. It 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, you know, what the battle is like after prophesying that you're going to get it for a long time. He says, quote,

He that shatters in pieces has come up against thee. Guard the wall, guard the way, gird thy loins, make thy strength the utmost. The shield of his heroes is red, his warriors are clad in scarlet. They prepare the chariots today, the chariot horses are eager. The chariots rage in the field, they rush to and fro in the plazas. Their appearance is like that of torches, they dart about like lightnings.

He reads out the list of his nobles. In their eagerness, they stumble. They hasten to reach the walls. The battering ram is made ready. End quote. Then Nahum describes the unleashing of the rivers. I guess the dams were broken or rerouted 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.

And the prophet Nahum says, quote,

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, End quote.

Then he does a little trash talk gloating, you know, where he says, where are the 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.

Anahim says, 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.

End quote.

Well, listen, they may not have a ton of dramatic stuff from the Near East during this time period, but that's awesome. I mean, all history aside, that's awesome stuff. And it does give you a feel for the emotion of the time period. We may think, you know, 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 your 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, as 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 and

but whose destruction was so massive and so sustained and so total that they seemed like they did. You will hear Assyrians trying to tell the world still today, we're still here, and try to fight that idea that every last one of them was killed in their version of a holocaust, you know, 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 you know top of their era cities and fortresses were almost unrecognizable in a famous passage the greek general xenophon with his ten thousand 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, you know, 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 100 feet high on top of that.

and that the circumference of the fortifications is 18 miles. He says there are some people sort of, you know, 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 time Xenophon's there, only a couple hundred years later. And when Assyria falls...

It's like that moment we spoke about earlier. What would happen if the United States disappeared in five or 15 years? What's the world then look like without that, you know, 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 lived 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. We're 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

you know 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, you know, under Syrian domination like everyone else, they start moving towards the modern day area around, you know, 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 that

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 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 West? And then if you screw up, all kinds of bad things can happen. That's exactly what happened to poor Judah and

that was sacked by the babylonian king during this era for continually you know 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 Medean 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 and Alfred Hitchcock side to him sometimes, or maybe just the people he talks to happen to because during this little period, which were 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 Medean king, that guy, Ciaxeres, right?

and normally they'd bring back food. But one time they show up, Herodotus says, empty-handed in front of Ciaxeres, who supposedly, Herodotus says, has this awful temper, freaks out and starts abusing, including some 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 that they went and in their anger killed one of the boys, probably from the royal court, that the Medean 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 Medean king. Showed up, gave him the food, watched him eat it. Ha, ha, ha. 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 Medean 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 them 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 medes and the lydians are gone for like five years herodotus says and we'll end with and you know 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 pulled 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 Medes 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. You know, 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 Medes and the Lydians stopped fighting. In the heat of the fighting, they stopped fighting. We're talking about tens of 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 Colicians involved. Maybe you would call them a mid-sized power in that region, a 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 whatnot 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 blood sucking 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's known as the Battle of the Hales 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, you know, such a seafaring people around that region had, you know, colonized that whole area a very long time ago. And they had relationships with the Greeks, you know, 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 uh the greeks uh 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? Right?

That's how this analogy works when we start trying to realize that somehow this people called 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 where 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 ii 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's best is one of the ones 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 really thrust into the detective role, trying to figure out what it is is going on.

i like the way historian pierre brant 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 Medean 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 was something like rot, 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 can 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 Medes 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. Astyages, who succeeded his father Xerxes, 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 comparisoned 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 Marlborough men compared to these people from the East that were at best sort of metrosexuals. 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 Astyages, the last king of the Medes, 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 Medes sort of slouching towards Gomorrah or what have you. Most of the modern stuff I read today looks at that 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 Medes 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 Gamora. 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 and 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 2,500-year-old, basically alien mind. A one-way conversation with a 2,500-year-old guy.

And when you read Herodotus, 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 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 world view so that you know we don't get as non-biased a view now as we might want but what herodotus does in this story is kind of say that because astyages 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's sure. Maybe a combination of some cities with some pastoral people that were allied 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 Medean Empire getting a change in management.

with maybe some Medean nobles helping to rebel against this Astyages person. And modern historians have some interesting, understandable sort of common sense reasons why they might want to. The theory is that this Astyages guy is trying to convert the Medes into more

of a typical centralized Mesopotamian government where the king is more autocratic, 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 II 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, right?

without having any real way of knowing other than these people he's talking to. 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 in an earlier story, you know, those Scythians, you know, killed a boy and served it to the Medean 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

Um, but let me set this up. What happens in the story is it concerns this Osteages guy, the son of Seaxeres 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 got to 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, you got to love the ancient history. And he asked the Magi to interpret it. And they say, hmm, not very good. This daughter is going to give birth to something or she's the seed of something that's maybe going to overthrow you. And so to play it safe, Herodotus says he marries her off to some Persian woman.

um you know maybe a great persian guy but this is the median empire and and no son of a persian is going to 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 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 Astyages, 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. Astyages calls in a general, a guy named Harpagus, who seems to be a historical figure, and tells Harpagus to get rid of the baby.

Now, Harpagus, 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, Harpagus doesn't want to get rid of the baby, doesn't want to kill a 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 Grimm's fairy tales at this point? So, as you might imagine, they take the stillborn child, wrap it in the royal clothes, keep the live when they were supposed to kill and give the stillborn child back to Harpagus 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, Astyages, 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 Astyages,

But Osteoges can tell that this boy is a king. It's like in your DNA. You can tell the difference between bluebloods and non-bluebloods by the way they just handle situations. And it's inbred. Besides that, Osteoges notices that the kid looks like him. And after all, he is his grandfather. He calls in Harpagus. Then he calls in the shepherd. He does a little investigation. Figures the whole story out. And pretends he's not mad.

tells Harpagus he's often felt, I'm paraphrasing here from Herodotus, but tells Harpagus 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 celebrate.

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 Harpagus 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 Halicarnassus, takes the story over and

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' story has the 13-year-old son of Harpagus going to the palace as requested and then picks up the story and says, this is from my De Selenkor translation, by the way,

When Harpagus's son arrived at the palace, Astyages had him butchered, cut up into joints and cooked.

cooked, roasting some, boiling the rest, and having the whole properly prepared for the table. Dinner-time came, and the guests assembled, with Harpagus among them. Dishes of mutton were placed in front of Astyages and of everyone else, except Harpagus. To Harpagus 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

When Harpagus thought he had eaten as much as he wanted, Astyages asked him if he'd enjoyed his dinner. He answered that he had enjoyed it very much indeed, whereupon those whose business it was to do so brought in the boy's head, hands, and feet in the covered dish, stood by Harpagus's chair, and told him to lift the lid and take what he fancied.

Harpagus 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, Astyages asked him if he knew what animal it was whose flesh he had just eaten. I know, my lord, was Harpagus's reply, and for my part may the king's 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 Harpagus was punished, end quote.

If that had been an Assyrian 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, you know, 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 Astyages 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' 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, right?

And that that general was involved in a battlefield betrayal, maybe you could say. In a key battle, Astyages 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

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's 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 Briand, reads, quote, Astyages mobilized his army, and he marched against Cyrus, king of Anshan, to conquer. The army rebelled against Astyages, and he was taken prisoner. They handed him over to Cyrus. Cyrus marched towards Ecbatana, the royal city. End quote. By 550 BCE or thereabouts, Cyrus and the Persians were

were basically in control of the old Elamite territories and now had inherited control of the Medean 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, you know, 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 Croesus. And there's a saying about him you may have heard, rich as Croesus. 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 croesus 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 uh because of them taking money to keep operating from people increases was 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, a 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 no.

If the Green Bay Packers play in the Super Bowl, they will add to a great legacy. Do you bet? Croesus was told by the Oracle at Delphi that if Croesus 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 legacy.

championship legacy too it's just the Dallas Cowboys championship legacy when Croesus 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 I

you know the Achaemenid 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, you know, really what the army was doing. In one of these big battles against Croesus, you know, the Persians, we're 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 anything.

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 Croesus and Cyrus after this big battle that starts off the campaign and it's bloody and inconclusive and winter's coming. So Croesus 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,

you know, in four months show up here and we'll deal with this emerging Persian threat. His allies, by the way, included, you know, 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 he we're told pursued the lydians right on their heels this is bold strategy and he forced another battle and we're told it was after creases 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 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 in a 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 may be like Darth Vader to the Greeks, but they have something. And, you know, you don't know if you want to call this propaganda or

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, Diodorus Siculus 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 Machiavellian thinking with a sort of Gandhi-like ethic. That's going too far, but I love the connection there.

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 troublesome 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 flaying of live captives. And you don't get the 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 rassam cylinder it's called and it's asher bonnie paul 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

"'Out of hunger, the flesh of their sons and daughters they ate. "'Afterwards I ripped out the tongue of those officers "'whose mouths had blasphemed against Asher, my master, "'and then slaughtered them. "'Any soldiers found still alive were flogged "'in front of the winged bulls built by Sennacherib, my grandfather.'

I whipped them on Sennacherib's tomb and then tossed their quivering flesh for the jackals, the birds, and the fish to eat. In this way, I placated the wrath of the gods who had become incensed by their ignominious deeds. And then Sargami picks up the narrative, saying, quote,

This grisly 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 with 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 paying tribute to Croesus and the Lydians, and Cyrus had gone to them before the war with Croesus and the Lydians and said, listen,

how about you revolt against creases and they said no and some of them fought on creases aside so after cyrus wins 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 i'm glad you're victorious and uh 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 him, we're told. 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 those Greeks went back home, 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 Croesus, and put the word out for help.

and they sent word to the Spartans. Now, the Spartans had also promised help to Croesus 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, you know, 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 a troublesome 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.

that this may be the first time they ever encounter one another. It seems illogical considering all the trading and whatnot 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 an Alexander the Great like figure on the rise. Must have been a pretty good looking guy because we're told that the Persian 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 who's just about to put the hammer down on the Greeks of Asia. Herodotus says, quote,

And when they arrived at Phakia, they sent the most distinguished man with them, named Lacrinis, to Sardis, to declare to Cyrus in the name of the Lacedaemonians that he must not inflict reckless damage on any of the Greek territory since the Lacedaemonians would not tolerate it. Remember, Lacedaemonian is 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, They say that when the herald had delivered this message, Cyrus questioned the Greeks who were with him, asking them, Who were these Lacedaemonians 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, Lacedaemonians 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 marketplaces, 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 he would have known this 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, 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 Persian 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 religious

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 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 Medes 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 theory,

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 Harpagus 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 to...

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 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, nowheresville, to a point where they've conquered half of the great nation states in their little ecosystem that exists, you know, after the fall of Assyria. And he's

And he's outside the gates of number three of four 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, who's 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, 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 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, albeit 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 the 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 Nabonidus, and by the time all of this is going down, Nabonidus is about 70, 70 years old in a world, you know, where the lifespan is so much shorter. How many 70-year-old people are there? He's like a wizard, you know, to the population in terms of this is a guy who,

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, you know, sealing the deal? This Nabonidus 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's 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, you know, 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 in Back to the Future and have him be Nabonidus 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 or a pharaoh.

and that's the priesthood and the religion because the power that 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 uh 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 all sorts of 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's not even there. His son Belshazzar is ruling as a regent, and he's not popular either. So the king is part of it. But Babylon is going through tough economic times, too, and that's putting the squeeze on people. They're having problems with disease, and that's causing unrest.

archaeologist dr joan oates describes you know the down and dirty parts of of day-to-day suffering and let's remember something babylon's banking system and financial system was developed enough so they had great banking houses there that were very powerful and lived on long after this period and and 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 king's not even showing up to shake the god's hand every New Year's, 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 a bunch of other things. And Dr. Oates writes, quote, Clearly, Nabonidus' 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 dissent.

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 troubles 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 uh 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, you know, 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, right?

over enemy military lines that 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 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 Briand, 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's Assyrian 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 restorer and recreator of order, right?

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 Nabonidus flees, and he's eventually captured and supposedly treated well by Cyrus, just like all the other kings were.

So Herodotus, of course, has to give us a stratagem story of how it happened. This time it involves, you know, 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, you know, revelry going on attached to a religious cult and the city so big anyway. I mean, modern excavations put the city size at a

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, you know, Greek stereotypes and whatnot. But it should be pointed out, one, that oftentimes in these ancient religions, there was an awful lot of decadent or fun, or depends on your point of view, I guess, stuff that was part of

You know, the religious rights 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 this stride and militancy and all that. Right.

but you might be commanded to party it's a party for god and if 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's 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 him 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, Navanidus' 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. Osteages of the Medes, Croesus of the Lydians, now Nabonidus 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, odds are he 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. I mean, you could figure out all these real logical reasons why a guy might do this. Sometimes people who are doing things for mystic reasons are

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 person.

you know ruler is concerned and babylon is one of the number one pieces of evidence you know that gets trotted out in defense of this idea that this isn't just some sort of policy of tolerance for expediency's sake that this is how cyrus really believes you can govern and it should be pointed out that 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, Rhesus Argami 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 statues and the representations of their gods and takes them 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. Risa Sargami, though, has an interesting take on this.

in his book discovering cyrus he does a great job reminding us of the interesting belief systems of the people who have these gods and then how maybe you could see what nabonitis 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' 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." 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 Briand says, Cyrus is portraying himself as the restorer of order, of things as they should be. He's beginning to tie himself up

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, you know, everything from deeply urban environments in places like Babylon to Phoenician cities to tribes that existed off in the edges of the Eurasian steppe 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 cultural style, convert everybody to your religion, make good Assyrians of these conquered people, the Persians used a much lighter touch. 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 who 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 right highlight number one you know conquest of media 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 2,500-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? Well, 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, 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 and 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 Briand's book, From Cyrus to Alexander, but it's the translation from the Bible that he uses. In the same way that the Cyrus Cylinder says the Babylonian god Marduk took Cyrus' 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 Briand 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 conquests. According to the Bible and Pierre Briand's description of it, this is from Ezra, by the way,

Out of the royal archives of Ecbatana, the order said, quote,

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 Belshazzar was drinking out of that made Yahweh 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 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 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 as 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 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 and Iranians, there's a chance 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 dynamic 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 Briand'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, you know, so hard to believe. You know, 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, quote,

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 hows, the whys. How can you not know how this guy dies?

Highlight number four in his life, as portrayed by Herodotus, is Herodotus' story of how he dies. And I love the fact that Herodotus goes to 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, nope, you know, 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 asked 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 in 530 BCE, Cyrus the Great died somewhere out in this steppe 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 at 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 of historians that think he didn't die the way Herodotus says. And in part, you can understand why you'd be a little skeptical. It's just too darn interesting the way Herodotus does it. You can see...

You know, the admonition that I got when I was starting in journalism, the one that said, you know, 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 and

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, right?

But you have to think of like an Amazonian queen. This isn't some woman who's walking around in velvet on a throne being fanned. 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 ever seen that says that they found anything that proves this queen, whose name, by the way, I used to call her Tamiris when I was growing up, but I've seen Timorous, Tomorous, 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 Massagetae or the Massagetae, a dangerous, powerful, numerous tribal coalition that was

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 Scythian 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, a little bit of the Viking ethos and a little sword worshipping 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 that they're 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 you know alongside their tent to let them 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, from the territory of 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 avenging karma here, right?

in teaching cyrus a lesson so her voice and the words that herodotus puts in her mouth from a screenwriter showrunner's 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 decelincore translation of herodotus by the way quote

King of the Medes, I advise you to abandon this enterprise, for you cannot know if in the end it will do you any good. Rule your own people, and try to bear the sight of me ruling mine.'

But of course you will refuse my advice, as the last thing you wish for is to live in peace. Listen then, if you are so bent upon trying your strength against the Massacatai, give up the laborious task of building that bridge, and let my army withdraw three days' march from the river, and then you come over yourself. Or if you prefer it, retire the same distance yourselves, and let us meet you on your side of the river."

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 pro-feminist, 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 you know generals and whatnot 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 go over to her side that advisor is our old friend the king of lydia croesus who instead of being killed herodotus has you know going in the story sort of acting as advisor to cyrus all the way through

And Croesus' 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 essentially 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 Decelincore translation has Croesus telling Cyrus to do it this way, quote,

Here then is my advice. Cross the river, advance to the limit of the enemy's 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

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

He says, Let us march back to the river, leaving only a detachment of inferior troops behind. Unless I'm 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're told that the a third of the army shows up kills the inferior troops sees all the food and the wine proceeds to get you know 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 who also happens 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's 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 Tamyris 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 in battle. Well then, I urge you to follow this advice. Return my son to me, and despite the damage you have cunningly wreaked upon a third part of the army of the Massacatai, you may leave this land unharmed. If you do not do this, I swear by the son, the lord of the Massacatai, that I will satisfy your thirst for blood, insatiable as you are."

So what's 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 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 Decelincourt 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 judge 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 Massacatai 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." 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 wineskin with human blood and searched for the corpse of Cyrus amongst the Persian dead. When she found him, she thrust his head into the wineskin, 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 guile. 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 overreachers, I'm sure Herodotus' 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 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 and maybe eclipse this person will visit his tomb. Alexander the Great, along with some influential colleagues, will go to the spot in 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 and

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, but I have this feeling that if the queen of the Masajidi or the Masagatai 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 airs 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-y, Greek-ish 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 manage to you know 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

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 580s, you know, like 595, 585, what's going on during that era? Normally, it's sort of just a transition point between, you know, 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? What are the odds of getting two 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, Cambyses, 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 to that Battle of Thermopylae movie scene where the Spartans say, come and take them. And then we'll deal with the guy who

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 in the next episode of Kings of Kings.

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