The World

Kushite prince and Assyrian king met at Eltekeh near Ashdod; the Kushites were defeated and pursued back to Egypt. Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem but then, paid off with Temple gold, he withdrew, returning laden with booty to pay for the embellishment of his capital, Nineveh, sacred to the goddess of love and war, Ishtar. Building massive walls, with eighteen gates, decorated with winged apotropaic bulls, and a new palace, Sennacherib was surprisingly green-fingered for a blood-soaked conqueror: he prided himself on the city’s gardens, irrigated by fifty-five miles of viaducts and canals to bring water from the mountains; his own in his palace contained rare plants, while he promised every Ninevite an allotment garden. Supernatural protection was essential at all times in a world threatened by evil spirits. Like the city gates, his palaces were magically protected by pairs of human-headed winged bulls – lamassus – weighing thirty tons – ‘a wonder to behold’, said Sennacherib. Sennacherib’s city, with its 120,000 inhabitants, was so big it is only partly covered by modern Mosul.

Blessed with at least seven children, he placed his eldest on the Babylonian throne, but a Babylonian faction arrested the boy and sold him to the king of Elam, who hated the Assyrians and executed him. Now it was personal: ‘I put on my coat of mail … my helmet,’ Sennacherib recorded. ‘I hurriedly mounted my great battle chariot’ and ‘stopped their advance, decimated them with arrow and spear. I slashed their throats, cut off their precious lives as one cuts a string.’ In 689, he destroyed Babylon. ‘Like the waters of a storm, I made the contents of their gullets and entrails slither along the earth,’ he wrote with macabre Assyrian glee. ‘My prancing steeds plunged into their blood. The wheels of my chariot … were spattered with blood … Their testicles I cut off; I ripped out their genitals like seeds of summer cucumbers.’

Sennacherib was supreme: yet it is one of the ironies of power that kings of the world struggle to cope with their own children.

DEPRESSION OF A WORLD KING: ESARHADDON AND TAHARQO

Sennacherib first favoured one of his surviving sons, Ardamullisi, then changed his mind and appointed the younger Esarhaddon: ‘This is the son who shall succeed me.’ But ‘Jealousy overcame my brothers,’ recorded Esarhaddon, ‘plotting evil.’

Ardamullisi decided to assassinate his father and brother. Oblivious, Sennacherib was praying at a Nineveh temple, kneeling, when his eldest son hacked him to death. But Esarhaddon exterminated his brothers and their entire families, though by the standards of House Tiglath-Pileser he was a milksop: the stress took its toll. He suffered fevers, loss of appetite, blisters and paranoia – what we would call depression. ‘Is one day not enough for the king to mope and eat nothing?’ wrote his doctors. ‘This is already the third day!’

In Nineveh, he trained his youngest son, the remarkable Ashurbanipal, who now moved into the heir’s residence, the House of Succession. ‘I cantered on thoroughbreds, rode stallions raring to go,’ recalled Ashurbanipal. ‘I held a bow … I threw quivering lances; I took the reins of a chariot and made the wheels spin.’ But he also studied. Even the most brutish dynasties become cultivated in the end. ‘I learned … the hidden and secret lore of all the scribal arts. I’m able to recognize celestial and terrestrial omens and can discuss them with an assembly of scholars.’ Ashurbanipal was also trained in vigilance and security by his grandmother, Naqia. Now he watched his father’s back, as Esarhaddon marched against Egypt. Pharaoh Taharqo, son of Piye, was preparing to restore Egyptian power over Judah.

Just as this Nubian ruled the cradle of civilization, migrations were starting that would change the continent. Most of Africa had long been the domain of Khoesan hunter-foragers, but in the west – today’s Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon – Bantu-speaking peoples farmed beans, sorghum and millet, herded cattle and sheep, forged weapons from iron ore and traded with the north. Now, for reasons we may never know, the Bantu started to migrate slowly southwards, settling the best land, killing, conquering and marrying into the Khoesan, whom they slowly drove into more marginal regions. Their warlords probably conquered kingdoms, but since they left no pyramids or inscriptions to equal Kush, we can track them only by the march of their Bantu language.

To their north, Taharqo trained his army Assyrian-style: on a sixty-mile all-night run, ‘the king himself was on horseback to see his army running when he exercised with them in the desert behind Memphis in the ninth hour of the night. They reached the Great Lake at sunrise.’ Then he led them into Judah and Phoenicia, agreeing treaties with Jerusalem and Tyre, both of them keen to escape the Assyrian yoke.