My brother recommended a podcast to me that I've been enjoying immensely. Dan Carlin actually has two podcasts, Hard Core History and Common Sense. I listened to his 12/14/07 Hard Core History podcast called Judgment at Nineveh.
The subject was the ancient Assyrians. I remember them briefly during History classes in High School. They were treated as background information. "...before the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans were the Assyrians, Hittites, and Summerians".
So it was an unexpected pleasure to find a whole block of history I was completely unaware of. New discoveries are so cool.
What Dan revealed was Brutality.
Here was an advanced civilization with massive cities, written archives, relief sculptures, big buildings, a far flung territory, and massive armies. The lasted about 1500 years and preyed upon and terrorized everyone around them. Some people that opposed them were wiped out completely. Whenever anyone tried to rise up against them, they put down the uprising with a ferocity and brutality designed to dissuade anyone from trying to go against the king again. They tortured and mutilated the vanquished in ways that the world has not seen since.
When they finally were overthrown, their rivals destroyed their works, their people, and most of the records they left behind. 200 years afterwards, when Alexander the Great swept through the area, he found the ruins of huge cities that no one could tell him anything about. The Assyrians were not only defeated, but wiped out of existence. This may be part of why I never heard of them before.
One of the devices Dan used in his podcast to describe what happened to the Assyrians, was that scene at the end of the movie Planet of the Apes when Charleton Hesston finds the ruin of the Statue of Liberty on the beach and realizes that he is not on some other planet where apes rule, but on a future Earth where man works were wiped out. The take away message was that this is what happened to the Assyrians, and that could happen to us again.
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