Episode 6. From Trading Outpost to Power Hub: Assur's Rise in Mesopotamia

Prepare to journey through the ancient sands of Mesopotamia as we uncover the rise of the city-state of Assur. The episode unfurls the grand and stirring tale of Assur's transformation under King Shamshi-Adad I, from a tiny trading outpost to a power hub in the heart of Mesopotamia. Are you ready to explore the king's triumphant reign, ambitious construction projects, and the financial innovations that facilitated an explosive expansion in long-distance trade? 

We'll also meet Ahana, a shrewd and dynamic woman who brilliantly unraveled a case of potential financial fraud. Moving outside the city walls, we delve into the unexpected independence and influence of women in the Assyrian business world. From producing prized exports to managing business ventures and real estate, Assyrian women defied the gender norms of their time, offering an intriguing perspective of the societal dynamics of the ancient Near East. 

Lastly, we'll navigate the highs and lows of the mighty Assyrian Empire. The episode explores the implications of the lack of historical records, the rise of rivals such as the Mitanni Kingdom, and the city's subsequent abandonment. As the Hittites ascended to power and the Near East transformed into a bustling economic hub, the fate of this ancient empire offers a potent reminder of the power of resources, technology, and the indomitable spirit of human civilization. Tune in for a thrilling tour through time and the shifting sands of ancient empires.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

物지 저 protector. You might recall that in the previous episode, the Amorites had moved into Mesopotamia in and around the area of Akkad. These people were often described as barbarians invading their territory because they had different cultural norms and different customs from the local Cadiens. Well, these Amorites had also moved into northern Mesopotamia in and around Asher and, just like in Babylon, they assimilated there as well. In fact, while the Amorite grain merchants gradually increased their power within the town they had inhabited, and, just like in Babylon, they were able to rise up to positions of leadership and eventually became a king. So by this time, asher had continually changed and evolved, and it appears to me that this trade and wealth that was generated between Asher and Anatolia and even other locations in the old Assyrian period really put Asher on the map and it allowed it to grow into a powerful city state. More importantly, this wealth was used to improve and expand the city itself. They were able to build higher and more secure walls and then expand outward. So in a way, it reminds me a lot of the early city of Rome. Once it had grown its wealth, it was able to expand outward. Shamshi Adad I was an Amorite king who strengthened the city even further. The city walls were enlarged and made stronger, but he also built the first great royal palace, and the temple of Asher was extended and improved. The improvements included the addition of a large ziggurat, which is a step pyramid, and it would be just like those that were built in Uruk and Ur about a thousand years prior. But, more importantly, asher was able to increase the size of the empire itself by moving into places like Nineveh, which at the time was relatively a small, unknown trading town. Shamshi Adad I also awarded himself the title of King of All, a title formally used by Sargon the Great, also Shamshi Adad I, or the King of All. He also allowed people he conquered to retain their own religious practices, and he even took things a bit further by enhancing some of the conquered temples. A seriologist found tablets in which Shamshi Adad I was complaining to one of his sons that the other son was out there winning battles while he was down there lying amongst women. Another letter scolds are you a child, not a man? Are you no beard on your chin when Shamshi Adad I died in 1776 BCE, which has someone from the United States, that's a pretty interesting time.

Speaker 1: 3:32

But they weren't declaring themselves independent of the British. Instead, they were appointing a new king to run the empire, and this king would be Ishmael Dagon I and many of his enemies took this as an opportunity to turn against the empire, but that should never really surprise you, because whenever one powerful king dies and the sun takes over, it's almost certain that someone within the empire in some far off place is going to revolt or at least take this as an opportunity to regain some independence. As such, the king of Ashuna launched an attack that took back much of the land taken by Shamshi Adad I, and he even captured cities closer to Ashur. So, essentially, what happened is, when there was the succession plan put in place, the empire actually would have shrunk, and this really should not come too surprised, because you're going to see this over and over again Before the succession happened, approximately about 100 years prior.

Speaker 1: 4:42

I want to take a step back and discuss something that I found to be pretty fascinating. The thing is, trade had continued to grow and evolve during this time period, and fortunes were made by many people. You can almost certainly expect that when people make money, some shenanigans would occur. Around 1870 BCE, a woman named Ahana who may have uncovered a case of financial fraud. Apparently, ahana was an investor in a long-distance trade between Ashur and Kinesh. She and other investors had created a pooled investment vehicle, whereas they would use silver to purchase tin and textiles and send them via donkey caravan to Kinesh and then, upon arrival in Kinesh, the goods which were often, like I said, tin and textiles would be sold in exchange for silver and the exchange ultimately would have resulted in a nice little profit for the investors. Now, this business or trade, however you want to look at it, really has a modern feel to it if you think about it, just like when I discussed the UR trade in my previous episodes, the Assyrians also created complex financial instruments that help facilitate this trade, and they would have been called the necrome, which means a bag. Basically, what this bag was, it was a joint stock company in which the Assyrian investors pooled their silver and other assets to fund merchant-led caravans. Over many years has happened Also, like the modern traders, they developed certain terms like watered stock, but instead what the Assyrian merchants used was a term called the tabulate is dead, which basically means that the debt had been paid and the clay tablet contract recording it was therefore canceled.

Speaker 1: 6:43

They had another term called hungry silver, which was their dry powder of the day, as it was referred to, silver that was not being invested. It would have been idly sitting around instead of generating some kind of profit. So you can see how people back then really looked at investing in what we would call a more modern sense. The idea of dry powder is a pretty interesting thing because that's a very common thing that would be used in the modern private equity or the hedge funds that use this. Hey, we have the money sitting on the side and we're going to wait to invest it. Or, in this case, maybe there wasn't any investable opportunities or businesses at the time.

Speaker 1: 7:30

Anyway, getting back to aha, her share of the prophets seemed to have gone missing or maybe came up short, so it was possible that it was stolen or skimmed by one of her own brothers. So, being an educated person, she scribed a letter on a clay tablet in cuneiform to another brother asking for help, and I think it's important to note that this is females that were scribed. So there was a very progressive kind of feel where women could actually be educated just like the men. You might think that, hey, this is ancient times and people still had the caveman mentality where women were not allowed to read and write, but in the Assyrian old Assyrian empire, they were actually given the opportunity to be educated, just like the men. And ultimately, the tablet that was sent to one of her brothers stated I have nothing out of part from these funds. Take care to act so that I will not be ruined. She instructed her brother for help to recover her silver and update her quickly. Let a detailed letter from you come to me by the very next caravan, saying if you do not pay the silver. She wrote in another tablet now is the time to do me a favor and save me from financial stress. Honestly, this sounds like something that would have been written last week by somebody, but this was we're talking 4,000 years ago. That's pretty interesting, but what I really like about this letter is it shows just how well women were being actively involved in the trade in one way or another.

Speaker 1: 9:15

It wouldn't be uncommon for a husband to be on the road while the wife was back home looking after the business. Therefore, one could only imagine that women would have quickly adapted and understood possibly better than their husband about managing the business from ashore, because, like I said prior, the husband could have been up in Kanash and the wife could have been home managing the business from ashore. As such, women would have grown their own wealth and power in their own personal lives, which, on aggregate, would mean that women in general would have been empowered, Because ultimately, wealth empowers people. Women in ashore and Kanash would have become much more independent than women in other societies, like you would see, in the Levant. In the Levant, things were very tough on women. They didn't have the freedoms that women in Assyria had, which I find interesting because, like I said prior, when I used to think of Assyria, I thought of this cruel army that would destroy people and skin people alive. But in reality, assyria at this time was much different than what people come to think of when they think of Assyria.

Speaker 1: 10:39

And if you look at women's role in Assyria, you will note that they were initially responsible for producing the highly coveted textiles for export. More importantly, they were excellent accountants and truly understood the profit and loss process, as they had developed a keen understanding of what they should get back in exchange for those textiles. And when they earned this money from the sale of the textiles, they were the ones that went out and controlled the home they paid for the food, for the house and they did the daily life, the chores around the house. They also were the ones that were investing their profits from the textile business itself, but since they were often left home to manage the business, they ended up becoming experts at issuing loans to merchants and they were involved in real estate by buying and selling houses. And they were frequent investors in the Nakram schemes the ones I said earlier about the bag, about the investment scheme, which was essentially a joint stock company. Their skills as weavers allowed them to earn their own silver, independent of the men, and that's how this all started. They were often referred to as the early fashionistas of the day, as they were the ones that were keen to know the certain foreign fashion and market trends that were happening. But this is interesting to me because I just can't imagine 4,000 years ago that there was essentially a fashion industry.

Speaker 1: 12:19

Like I said, a lot of things of Assyria are almost completely opposite of what you would have thought by this time. Assyria was very much a business oriented society, not a war like society by any means, and in reality women were the forefront of this. They were put into positions that were unusual for women in other societies in the Near East, since they were functioning as the husband's trustees and business partner. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that their society benefited greatly from having literate and numerate women who could help with the day to day business as well as making good decisions in emergencies. A seriologist recovered a tablet in which one Assyrian merchant wrote to his wife Urgent Clear your outstanding merchandise, collect the gold of the son of Lema Shahr and send it back to me. Please put all my tablets in safekeeping. Others would ask their wives to pick specific tablets from the household's private archives to find financial information or settle a business matter.

Speaker 1: 13:31

Since any women remained back in Assyria, they were often the custodians of the archives and the contracts. Many of these contracts represented a lot of money, and also women were not passive at all from sending their husbands or brothers instructions, and they were not afraid to dress down their male contemporaries. For example, a letter read what is this? That you do not even send me a tablet two fingers wide with good news from you? She complained about a dispute involving a debt and lost merchandise and urges the men to resolve it. Closing with a brisk Send me the price of the textiles. Cheer me up. Another chided her brother over missing a payment. Don't be so greedy that you ruin me.

Speaker 1: 14:18

In fact, a number of women added clauses to the marriage contracts that banned the men from taking second wives or even traveling by themselves. A marriage contract that was discovered noticed that the married daughter of one of the locals was obligated to go with her husband and he was not to marry another woman in Kinesh. So this woman had a clause said hey, when you go to Kinesh on business, I am to go with you and you are not to marry another woman in Kinesh. So that kind of leads me to believe that it wouldn't have been uncommon for a man in ashore to travel to Kinesh and stay there for months or even a year at a time and get hitched up with another woman over there. So that could have been something that was happening quite a bit. I didn't read anything else, but by reading this that would make me think that that was a somewhat common occurrence. But anyway, these women's independence was almost 180 degrees different from women in other city states in the Near East. In ashore and Kinesh both the wife and the husband could ask for divorce and they would be treated in the same in the court proceedings, but at the same time in Babylonia the wife couldn't ask for divorce, but she dared to ask she'd be put to death.

Speaker 1: 15:51

And with roughly half the tablets in Kinesh still unread, there are surely many great more letters between men and women that might be even more interesting than Ahaha's letters that are amongst the 23,000 clay tablets that have been excavated over the past decades from the ruins of merchants' homes in Kinesh. As I said prior, these letters belonged to the Issyrian expats who had settled in Kinesh and kept up a lively correspondence with their families back in Ashore. They had no choice because they had to basically let everybody know what was going on in Kinesh and the people back in Ashore had to let them know what was going on with the business. So there was constant communication back and forth. In a way it kind of reminds me a lot of the Medici family that we will see thousands years later in the Italian city-states. The biggest difference is women didn't have the rights in Italy that they had in Assyria. A few thousand years, three thousand years prior to this. It's quite unbelievable to me.

Speaker 1: 16:59

Yet and I keep on going back to this we think of Assyria as this warmonger kind of society Around 1800, 1700 BCE. It very much was not. It was a very progressive society and it was during the Old Kingdom which this is the time period I'm talking about here, which would have been roughly from 2000 BCE to 1800 BCE that trade was flourishing, but the concept of money really hadn't been deformed yet as such. The old Assyrian merchants used gold for wholesale trade and silver for retail trade. Typically, that's how they did it, and at the time of the Old Assyrian Empire gold was eight times more valuable than silver. But, like I said, this was not a universal money. Either side of the coin there was still a lot of trade that would have been happened in kind. So it was still common for things such as barley to be traded for, say, tin, for example. Like I said, money was not a fully developed concept yet and even though Assyria was expanding and growing wealthier, it still also faced a threat from the south, from the Amorite Babylonians, especially since the time of Hammurabi when he took the throne in 1792 BCE, and by 1755 BCE the Babylonians under Hammurabi had conquered most of Mesopotamia.

Speaker 1: 18:33

And in reality, what this did is this kind of triggered a I guess you could call it an Assyrian dark age. This would have been a period from the 18th century BCE, to say the 14th century BCE. So we're talking approximately 400 years. And it's interesting because when you go back far enough you think, oh, that was only 400 years, but then you realize the United States hasn't even been around for 400 years. So these little blips, as you can say, in the time period can actually be quite a few years. So I know I personally have to kind of remind myself all the time that 400 years is still 400 years.

Speaker 1: 19:12

Now, this Assyrian dark age may have been brought on by the fact that Assyria was basing pressures from the south and the north, but either way, there is not a lot of information that would have been known during this time period. And when I do say the word dark age, sometimes I wince a little bit because that kind of assumed society was taking steps backwards. It might be the fact that we just haven't recovered the correct documents to show what was really going on during this time period. So ultimately, it is possible that in a few years from now the idea of this mini dark age will be totally different. Maybe they'll find documents to show that now this wasn't actually a dark age. We recovered certain documents and we show that this was going on or that was going on. Business was booming, trade was happening. It's quite possible that that was all going on, but we just haven't recovered the documents that can really show what was going on.

Speaker 1: 20:21

And I also wanted to discuss this because I haven't really brought it up yet, but it was during this time period that the Mitanni Kingdom had really started to take over Asur. Like I said, they were experiencing pressures from the north, the north being the Mitanni's and because of that that would have disrupted a lot of the trade that would have been flowing up north into the Karams and, in particular, kinesh. The Mitanni's themselves would have been located between the Hittites, which would have been north of them, and the Assyrians, to the south of them, so they would have been kind of in the middle between the two. But Assyria was basically gone and was nothing more than just a small city state of Asur and maybe a couple of small vassal towns, including Nineveh. But by this time period the Assyria that we know was pretty much evaporated and it was just a shell of itself and, as you might recall from the previous episode, the Hittites had carried out raids on Babylon at the beginning of the 16th century BCE that would have ended the rule of Hammurabi's dynasty At some point.

Speaker 1: 21:38

For reasons that are somewhat unclear, trade between Ashore and Kinesh declined. Can we really say it's unclear? I mean, we do know that the kingdoms to the north were gaining more steam, getting more powerful, and the fact of the matter is they weren't going to let the Assyrians walk all over them anymore. So eventually Kinesh was deserted. Other cities and communities took over as the engines of commerce, creativity and cultural exchange.

Speaker 1: 22:10

But Kinesh may have been abandoned by the time the Hittites rose to power and it would have made sense right Prior. The Assyrians would come in, they would control a local warlord or a local king and they would kick back certain kind of taxes or whatever you want to make to the king, and the king would look the other way. But when a kingdom rises up, it's just not going to happen anymore. They're going to want to take control of the trade themselves. They're not going to let a foreigner come into their land and exploit them. So that would be my ultimate guess as to why Kinesh had basically went away. It was probably a case that the local king or warlord was no longer going to let them dictate what is going to be traded in another city. But in the end, as the Hittite kingdom rose to power and their political ambitions were expanded, they conquered and burned the city of Ashtur in 1740 BCE and ultimately the rise of the Hittite kingdom ended the network of Assyrian trade colonies that would have taken place up in Anatolia by around 1500 BCE.

Speaker 1: 23:30

There would have been four regional superpowers that controlled most of the Near East. They would have been Egypt, to the south, the Hittites and the Mataani, and then Babylon. If you remember in my previous episodes, babylon was in control by the Babylonians. Babylon was controlled by the Cassites, who were handed control of Babylon by the Hittites. Assyria was a very small independent kingdom, but it was still a wealthy trading center. So it hadn't gone away. It just was regrouping, I guess you could say. All in all, the only thing that the Assyrians had to worry about was paying tribute to their Mataani overlords in the mid 1500s BCE.

Speaker 1: 24:23

By then the Assyrian kings were smart enough to keep their tiny empire together through various alliances and intermarriage to ensure their independence without a need to go to war with its neighbors. But they still would have had to pay tribute. So they weren't independent, but they weren't independent to do what they wanted to do. Therefore, assyria was able to ensure that the cities of Asur and Nineveh continued to be very wealthy and secure cities. They were able to continue the trade and able to keep the peace and not have foreign enemies march on and destroy the city again.

Speaker 1: 25:07

Also, bear in mind that during this 300 years or so, between 1500 and 1200 BCE, the Near East itself had developed into a fully integrated economic and trade center. This region was quite large. If you think about it, you had Anatolia to the north, and to the south you would have had Egypt and even into Nubia, and if you went to the east you would have got into the Indus Valley and to the west you would have seen trade happen with people in the GNC. So, in reality, saying this was an Assyrian dark age seems to go against the idea of vast international trade. Another thing is, in reality, the Assyrians were vassals of the Mitanni for much of this period.

Speaker 1: 25:58

So it wasn't until the Mitanni had issues with succession, which led to military success of the Hittites that weakened the Mitanni, which allowed the Assyrians to regain their independence and a measure of control over Upper Mesopotamia. And this should not be a surprise, because what I've said over and over is when you have succession, oftentimes it doesn't go smoothly. And when it doesn't go smoothly your enemies will strike and people will rebel. And this is a time when you can get yourself under the boot of another foreign power. And now you don't have to pay tribute to a king because their kingdom may have been diminished or even wiped out, and this is the case with the Hittites had done to the Mitanni. Ultimately, the complete independence from the Mitanni would have led to what Assyriologists called the Middle Assyrian period, which would have been from 1400 to 1100 BCE. That really marks the beginnings of the imperial history of Assyria.

Speaker 1: 27:15

This is now we're getting to the period when people think of Assyria. This is kind of what they're thinking about. They weren't thinking about the old Assyrian period, where it was all about trade and generating wealth. Now we start getting into a little bit more of the military side of things. They were still great traders. They weren't the Neo-Assyrian yet, but it was kind of a hybrid, if you want to look at it that way. And this would have started with Ariba Adad I of Assyria, who took advantage of the Mitanni's instability and he was able to basically get on in the inside by installing a pro-Assyrian faction in the Mitanni core, which would have increased the Assyrian influence over the Mitanni Empire. In 1365 BCE, assyria would feel confident enough to take on the Mitanni Empire head on. In addition, the Assyrians also inflicted major military defeats on the Hittites, leaving the Assyrians as a dominant power in the northern Mesopotamia region, along with the Cassite Babylonians as the other major power in the area. This would build the foundations of what would become the Assyrian Empire that people are more familiar with.

Speaker 1: 28:42

This was also the period where the Assyrians and the Babylonians had pretty good relations. It's interesting because it almost feels like there's some ebb and flows. The Babylonians would be the power, and then the Assyrians, and then the Babylonians and then the Assyrians. They get along great and then they don't, and then they get along great. So it's always kind of going back and forth. But this particular time is we see a lot of peace and a lot of exchange between the two. This also cemented by the Cassite king of Babylon, who married the Assyrian king's daughter, which, like I said, that was a common thing. You marry off your daughter and you can merge the two empires.

Speaker 1: 29:25

This led people in Babylon to be concerned, though, that Assyria was holding undue influence over Babylon. This led to a small group of people to assassinate the Babylonian king, and they replaced him with basically their own person. This infuriated Assyria and, in particular, the Assyrian king, who was Hubulete I, who took his army into southern Mesopotamia and attacked Babylon, and they were quickly and completely defeated, and the plotters were executed. Assyria Abulute I then installed a new king on the throne of Babylon. All the while, to the north, the once powerful Metani Empire had become a vassal state to the Hittites. Now, this is important because the Assyrians thought it would be a good idea to attack the Metani, and, since the Metani reported back to the Hittites, this angered the Hittite king, and this caused a war to break out between the Hittites and the Assyrians. However, nothing really came of this, as both sides pretty much fought to a stalemate, and they eventually returned to an uneasy peace.

Speaker 1: 30:49

It wasn't long until Assyria Abulute I died and was succeeded by his son, but the Babylonians took this as an opportunity to attack Assyria, even though the king of Babylon was installed by the Assyria king. Assyria Abulute I, apparently the Babylonian king, was furious over the Assyrian's close ties to Egypt, and they even thought the Assyrians were a vassal state to the Egyptians. Now, when I read things like that, it kind of reminds me that, yeah, this is still antiquity. We have a lot of progress, women are developing more equal rights, trade is booming, people are getting wealthy. But then you read this and yeah, well, it's still antiquity.

Speaker 1: 31:45

Things remained a bit uneasy in the region, but it wasn't until Tukotinonorta I, who came to the throne in 1244 BCE, really solidified things for Assyria and ruled for 30 years. It was during his reign that he completely conquered Babylon and, to give you an idea of his importance, it is believed that Nimrod in the Bible was based on him. In the end, he was murdered by his son. I'd like to really know if anyone has ever created a list that contains all the kings who have been murdered by their son or their nephews or some close family member, but I would imagine this list would be quite long. You can even create a list of all the brothers that killed another brother to gain control of a kingdom another long one and, of course, when someone is assassinated, that's going to cause instability and it's going to give the people that you control an opportunity to rebel, and for the Babylonians this was an opportunity for them to gain some sort of independence. But in the grand scheme of things, despite the murder, nothing really changed that much at all, and it wasn't until Tiglath Blaster I came to the throne in 1155 BCE that the middle Assyrian Empire would really thrive and achieve its greatest successes to that date. He was basically able to conquer lands from the Neo-Hittai Empire, the Aramaeans in northern and central Syria, and even take the Canaanite Phoenician cities, which gave the Assyrians access to their Mediterranean. The Assyrian Empire was in great shape, but within 15 years after his death, a usurper would try to take the throne of Assyria and create a civil war. This led Assyria to shrinking in size, as it had basically lost the previous conquered lands from which the Canaanites slash Phoenicians, as well as the Aramaean territory in Syria. It is also around this time that we are clearly moving into the Iron Age.

Speaker 1: 34:17

The Assyrian metalwork was probably the best, or near the best, in the Near East, and therefore their iron weapons and armor were just better than their rivals. And what really made them so good was the fact that they were able to establish economies of scale in their metalworking and therefore they were able to make weapons and armor much cheaper and easier than their neighbors. The Assyrians were able to equip their infantry and cavalry with advanced iron weapons and shields, while facing adversaries who only supplied metal armor to their aristocrats, not the common soldier. This, right here, would make an absolutely huge difference on the battlefield and thus allow Assyria to have a very big advantage, and this resulted in very few losses on the battlefield. And you know, I also tend to think that when we think of ancient armies or actually even modern armies, for that matter we often think of their tactics, their great generals, how well they can assemble the people. But in a grand scheme of things, sometimes the better army is not led by better generals. Sometimes a better army just has better resources and better technology. And in this case, because Assyria had a legacy of great business skills and developing an economy, they were able to basically build a iron weapons making facilities that could get the scale to get their weapons and armor to virtually all their soldiers. This was a huge advantage and this is what really allowed Assyria to become a powerful empire. In addition, the Assyrians are actually able to take this a bit further, as they were one of the first armies that were able to create a corps of engineers who had the ability to design and produce siege craft such as battering ram towers and other weapons that could be used to attack a walled city.

Speaker 1: 36:41

And also, as I discussed in previous episodes, it was around 1200 BCE that a widespread societal collapse happened around the Mediterranean Sea, in places like Anatolia, egypt and the Levant. The only two societies that were able to withstand the attacks from the Sea Peoples were the Egyptians and the Assyrians, and, like I said prior, we don't know much about the Sea Peoples, as they did not have a written language and therefore nobody is quite sure who they were or where they came from. But the people they attacked wrote about them. Therefore, the surviving societies had to rebuild and reconquer land that was lost to the Sea Peoples. The territory controlled by the kings of Assyria shrank, but the fact was they were so far inland that that probably helped them, as they basically just had to fall back and survive. I guess the modern equivalent might be think of the Russians how they were able to withstand. The French and then eventually the Germans and of course, the other kingdoms did not have this option. They were just too close to the sea.

Speaker 1: 37:59

The late Bronze Age collapse also coincided with less written records. So even from an Assyrian perspective, we are still lacking written materials and documenting what happened in the aftermath, as it appears that literacy rates kind of declined and written communication dropped quite a bit. Trade routes that were once lucrative and prospered suddenly stopped and collapsed, so ultimately this was as much an economics collapse as it was a military collapse. In the grand scheme of things, the Sea Peoples really put Assyria in a better long-term position to become a regional superpower, because essentially their enemies or potential enemies or other kingdoms closer to the Mediterranean would have been either destroyed or diminished greatly. And, as you have seen and will continue to see, once a society is weakened, whether it's an internal or external threat, other city states in the region will take the opportunity and attack the weakened state or, at the very least, rebel from their overlords. So the fact is the Sea Peoples really weakened their neighbors, who then became easy targets once Assyria was able to regroup and just kind of taking a step back as well.

Speaker 1: 39:34

It is not 100% known, but one thing that could have been a contributing factor to the Bronze Age collapse could have been severe climate change as well, which may have pushed the Sea Peoples into foreign lands. The eruption of volcano Heclaus III in Iceland may have been the ultimate contributing factor, as the massive eruption threw so much volcanic debris into the atmosphere that it would have caused a global cooling which could have lasted for up to 20 years, and this certainly could have caused a massive societal disruption, which could have resulted in widespread famines and drought, which ultimately would have forced people to move into other regions, which could have obviously caused conflict with the people that were currently inhabiting the particular region that they were moving into. But before Assyria's resurgence by 1000 BCE, the Assyrian Empire shrunk, but the Assyrians still controlled all the main trade routes, and these trade routes were still quite vast. They would have reached two places like Central Mesopotamia, northwestern Iran, eastern portions of Syria and even southeastern Anatolia. The control of these vital trade routes allowed the Empire to regroup, resupply and then regain their wealth and stability while the rivals were still dealing with the aftermath of the Sea Peoples. This would ultimately allow the Assyrians to move into the next great phase, the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

Speaker 1: 41:31

Now, this is the time frame that people think of when they think of the Assyrians. This is when the Assyrians were known for their cruelty and conquest of people in foreign lands. This will be the time period that will ultimately taint the Assyrian legacy, but we'll get into that next. I want to thank you for taking your time to listen to the second episode of the Assyrian Empire. I hope you found these episodes to be entertaining and I hope you're able to learn something new. Anyway, we will meet up again when we discuss the Neo-Assyrian Empire. If you like what you hear and want to donate to the show, you can visit us at patreoncomshryamoneybankingtrade. Also, you can help out the show a ton by leaving a 5-star review. Thank you very much. Talk to you soon.