The World

In 674, Esarhaddon invaded Egypt. Taharqo defeated him, but three years later Esarhaddon, after destroying Tyre, swooped across Sinai and besieged Memphis. Taharqo retreated to Kush, leaving his treasury and his women behind. Yet he returned. If he thought Esarhaddon’s death had saved him, he was wrong. In 667, the young scholar-king Ashurbanipal finally woke the Kush empire: ‘I made Egypt and Nubia feel my weapons bitterly.’^*

ASHURBANIPAL AND GRANDMOTHER: A POWER PARTNERSHIP

The security chief and top adviser of Ashurbanipal was his grandmother, Naqia. It was she who backed his succession and orchestrated the oaths of allegiance across the empire. This history has a cast of female potentates but few equal Naqia, who ordered, ‘Whether plotters are bearded or half-men [eunuchs] or royal princes, kill them and bring them to Zakutu [Naqia] and Ashurbanipal King of Assyria your lord.’

Ashurbanipal was a scholar who proudly wore a pen as well as a sword, but the Assyrian empire was surprisingly bureaucratic: scribes were constantly present with their hinged writing boards to record taxes, booty, royal orders. Some 32,000 cuneiform tablets survive. But Ashurbanipal was also the first collector of literature, creating a library of scholarly texts, oracular requests and reports and buying other collections from Babylon, the home of high culture, and he was contemptuous of his coarse forefathers who knew nothing of books. Yet, however fastidious he was, warfare was an essential part of being a world king. Lions were hunted^* – and so were people.

Ashurbanipal turned eastwards to strike Elam, whose king, Teumman, was shot with an arrow in the back and beheaded, the head brought back to Nineveh. Ashurbanipal poured libations from his trophy as prisoners paraded around the city wearing decapitated heads around their necks. In the royal pleasure park, the king and chief queen Libbali-sharrat, sitting on thrones facing each other, relaxed at parties and played board games, as servants fanned them and served pomegranates and grapes, eunuchs officiated, lyres and harpists played and tame lions were walked. This inscription presents a scene of serene splendour, yet there is a very Assyrian touch: the head of King Teumman hangs upside down in a tree next to the picnic like a gruesome fruit.

Ashurbanipal’s victories did not alleviate the tensions within his own family. He was a control freak who interfered in his brother’s subordinate kingdom: ‘My faithless brother Shamashshumukin, whom I treated well and established as king of Babylon, forgot this kindness – and planned evil,’ assembling a coalition of Babylonians, Elamites, Arabs and Aramaeans. After four years of war, his brother threw himself into the flames of his palace. Ashurbanipal ordered tongues to be slit or ripped out, prisoners were flayed, and in the temple ‘between the colossi where they had cut down Sennacherib, my grandfather, I cut them down as an offering to his soul. Their dismembered bodies I fed to dogs, swine, fish of the deep …’ Elam was sacked, yet the family war weakened Assyria, and the constant campaigns in Iran failed to declaw the dynamic peoples of the steppe who regarded Ashurbanipal’s empire as prey.

Just after these victories, Ashurbanipal got a nasty shock: an army of sheepskin-clad nomadic horsemen, Medes and Persians, led by a Mede khan Dia-oku, rode into Assyria right up to the walls of Nineveh. These Parsa (Persians) and Mada (Medes), the most successful of the Aryan peoples of the Iranian plateau, rode tough little Nisean horses, lived in portable ger, tents, and tended their herds of horses – 160,000 of them – enjoying themselves raiding, feasting, gambling, storytelling and horseracing.^*

To defeat these barbarians he hired other barbarians, the Scythians, Aryan horsemen who ranged across the steppes of central Asia. The Mede khan’s son was killed. The son of one Persian khan – who also called himself king of Anshan – Kurosh, sent his son to Ashurbanipal’s court as a hostage. The other Persian khan was Haxamanis (Achaemenes). As these shaggy horsemen galloped ignominiously back to their herds, who would have believed that these two khans were the progenitors of the world-conquering Persian greats, Cyrus and Darius?

Ashurbanipal was exhausted. ‘Let the king apply this lotion and perhaps the fever will abate,’ advised his doctor. ‘I’m sending ointment.’ But when, after forty-two years of war and refinement, Ashurbanipal died at the age of sixty, it looked as if Assyria would rule for ever.

Yet, just fifteen years later, Nineveh would fall and out of a story of cannibalism, burning cities and vines growing out of royal vaginas rose the family that would rule an empire on three continents.