I hope it's not considered inappropriate to mention the Fall of Civilizations podcast ep about Assyria here. I'm not affiliated. I just love history and this podcast is deeply researched and highly entertaining to a history nerd.
https://soundcloud.com/fallofcivilizations/13-the-assyrians-...
Link to that episode on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpAphcaVJIs
It's an incredible podcast. A great combination of research, history, and nostalgia. The versions with accompanying video on YouTube are good too.
They are thought to be more than 2,300 years old, likely from the Hellenistic period, when Iraq was under the rule of the Seleucid empire.
So similar territory and genetic people but well after the Assyrians.
(rough dates from wikipedia)Assyrian city-state: 2100 - 1400 BC Assyrian empire: 1400 - 700 BC (thru the Bronze age collapse circa 1200 BC) Seleucid empire: 312 - 63 BCexpanded into an empire from the 14th century BC to the 7th century BC
The ancient timelines are sometimes so mind boggling. A 700 year empire must have seemed like a permanent state of the world. Yet here we are, little remains, and at the same time puts our current times in perspective. Ozymandias is very fitting.
Tangentially but somewhat interestingly, I was reading the other day that the field of "Assyriology" goes all the way up to the Islamic conquest, about a thousand years after the end of the Neo-Assyrian Empire mentioned above.
Yes, it seems like there was or is a region considered the "Assyrian homeland" [0] of the people for whom the empire was named (Assyria being named for the home city of Assur). Wikipedia's map makes it look the same as the Kurdish territory and when I look up differences between them, Reddit threads describing contemporary accounts are front and center. [1]
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_homeland
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Assyria/comments/u8c324/relationshi...
> Assyria being named for the home city of Assur
Well, sort of. "Assyria" would be a rendering of the Greek idea of the name. The Greeks couldn't pronounce it.
In English the city (and god) is usually called "Ashur"; in Akkadian it's Ashshur. It's never called "Assur".
There is an amazing bit in the fall of civs podcast of a Greek military leader’s account who over 2000 years ago is retreating from battle in Iraq and comes across an entire ancient city. He doesn’t know it but the ruins for him are already over a 1000 years old.
Was that Xenophon’s anabasis? I didn’t remember that part but I love the book.
Xenophon, like Plato, was a student of Socrates and wrote philosophical dialogues involving him. Unlike Plato, Xenophon became a mercenary soldier who led 10,000 Greek soldiers to fight their way out of Iraq. It’s very well written — hope they make a movie at some point.
In addition to archeology, ancient Greeks (and undoubtably others) also did paleontology:
https://classics.stanford.edu/publications/first-fossil-hunt...Like their modern counterparts, the ancient fossil hunters collected and measured impressive petrified remains and displayed them in temples and museums; they attempted to reconstruct the appearance of these prehistoric creatures and to explain their extinction. Long thought to be fantasy, the remarkably detailed and perceptive Greek and Roman accounts of giant bone finds were actually based on solid paleontological facts. By reading these neglected narratives for the first time in the light of modern scientific discoveries, Adrienne Mayor illuminates a lost world of ancient paleontology.
It might be inappropriate to advertise it without explaining why it's relevant to the subject..
The Assyrians were an ancient civilization in the area about the same time...
2000 years earlier
Only about 300.
Amazing old part of the world. I liked how this guy got taken to a place a few thousand years old and its just sitting there in the desert no signs or any protection.
I sketched and photographed older rock art in high school 50 years past:
~ https://therangeskarratha.com.au/explore/rock-artThe rock art has been dated back to before the ice age ended and is approx. over 40,000 years old and there is up to 1 million rock art images scattered across the entire Burrup Peninsula and Dampier Archipelago.Now under threat from natural gas North West Shelf Project https://theconversation.com/green-light-for-gas-north-west-s...
One thing that seems to link many past great civilisations is their discovery of forces or powers that eventually consume them.
The challenge seems to be how to wield the fire without yourself getting burned. Some would say this is an impossible task given the relative nature of our definitition of what is considered "new", as once again we extend our hand to the flame.
What past lessons may we bring to this experience which can allow us deeper insights, and the hope of a less destructive outcome?
Was this site known before the Mosul dam was built? It's only been about 40 years.
It seems they knew there were hundreds of sites to be inundated and there was an effort to investigate as many as they could before the damn was built https://www.jstor.org/stable/25182504
It's very common that both historical artifacts and natural wonders have been consumed by reservoirs, I suspect it would be almost impossible to avoid this.
Related:
How the restoration of ancient Babylon is drawing tourists back to Iraq
Skimmed that thread but saw no mention of why the site is in such a bad shape.
It's because the usians made a tank and helicopter parking lot out of it when they arrived, angering scholars and enthusiasts all over the world, and then the polish built a military base there, at which point the anger had mostly turned into exhaustion.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jan/15/iraq.arts1
https://www.npr.org/2018/11/24/669272204/in-iraq-a-race-to-p...