THE SUPERPOWER CRASH: WHY ASSYRIA TERRIFIED WORLD AND THEN VANISHED

In 401 BCE a Greek mercenary named Xenophon marched his exhausted army past an enormous ruined city on the Tigris. He asked who had built it. Nobody could tell him. He guessed the Medes, wrote it down, and kept walking. The city was Nineveh, and two centuries earlier it had been the capital of the most powerful state on earth. For three hundred years Assyria terrified everyone within reach and quite a few people beyond it. Its army was the best in the world. Its couriers could carry a message four hundred miles in under five days, a speed nobody in the region would match again until the telegraph arrived in 1865. Its kings had themselves carved into stone doing appalling things to their enemies, and made sure the pictures were seen. Then, in the space of a single lifetime, the whole thing came apart - and came apart so thoroughly that the ruins lost their own name. This book asks what actually crashed. Not the usual answer about decadence and overstretch, which explains nothing and comforts everyone. The real story involves a civil war between two brothers, sixty years of failed rain in the imperial heartland, an alliance between the empire's two most experienced victims, and a system of intimidation that worked beautifully right up to the moment it needed to work twice. Along the way: a king who built a capital city and died before moving in; an imperial bureaucracy that sent formal written questions to the sun god and expected answers; an official procedure for installing a substitute king so that a bad omen would kill the understudy instead; the largest library of the ancient world, assembled by a monarch who could read and could not, in the end, hand over the shop; and a severed head hanging in a garden for the benefit of guests who were already loyal. And a final question that turns out to be the most interesting one in the book. If Assyria vanished, why does every empire that came afterward look so much like it? Peter Kriger writes about complex systems and the ways they fail. He is very good company on the subject of catastrophe. Keywords: Assyria, Nineveh, ancient Mesopotamia, empire collapse, Neo-Assyrian Empire, ancient warfare, climate and history