Okay students, hi there. Today we're going to do a lecture on Iron Age Mesopotamia. We're actually going to do two consecutive lectures on Iron Age Mesopotamia. So today the one we'll do today will focus on sort of the first half of the Iron Age, basically like the year 1100 to about the year 600 or so, and then the next lecture will be 600 to about 300. Now this can be a little confusing because, you know, in the previous lectures on the Greeks that you guys have already watched, right? So the Greek lectures, we were farther ahead in time.
So we're actually moving backwards in time. That's because we're moving to a different world region, again, Mesopotamia. So Iron Age Mesopotamia. Today we're going to talk about three different societies that have a lot of interaction with one another. The one of those societies is the Hebrews.
The Hebrews are the society that will go on to invent the language of Judaism, and today we're... still exist in the form of the Jews as a people group who speak Hebrew. And the other two societies we'll look at today are the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires who will emerge in Iron Age Mesopotamia as well.
And then in the next lecture we'll focus very heavily on the Persians who will come to dominate completely all of Mesopotamia and a lot more territory besides that. So that's sort of the program here. So again, Judaism, Exile and Return is the title, but we're looking at early Iron Age Mesopotamia in general. So let's look at the origins of Judaism first. The Israelites or the Hebrews, you can call them either one.
I typically prefer Hebrews, but they're both technically correct. So the Hebrews were an Iron Age society in ancient Canaan. I've mentioned Canaan before, right, in the context of ancient Egypt.
We're talking about the Hyksos. Remember the Hyksos who take over Egypt in the second intermediate period? They were Canaanites, right, from Canaan.
And again, today the land of Canaan is like the southern part of what we would call the Levant. And those countries are Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine, right? So that's where the Hebrews emerge as an Iron Age society. Now, for most of their early history, they were not at all different from their neighbors, right? So basically, the people who lived in the Levant in the early Iron Age all lived very similarly.
They had their own language, but they basically shared a material culture, again, meaning they sort of ate the same things and grew the same things and had the same kind of furniture and that sort of thing. And so all of these various tribes would have their own. Language begins, shared a material culture, and there's not really anything to distinguish any other group from another group, right? They're all, as a historian, looking at it now, right? From 3,000 years in the future, looking back at these, you know, various Levantine people, right?
Levantine people meaning people from the Levant. These various Levantine people in the early Iron Age, they all kind of look the same in terms of their historical role. This begins to change when the Hebrews develop a monotheistic religion surrounding their god, who they call Yahweh.
And monotheistic religion is a fairly new invention. In fact, as far as we can tell, the Hebrews are the first society to have a monotheistic religion. Now, they probably weren't actually the first.
There are probably other groups who also have had monotheistic religions prior to the Hebrews. But those groups, you know, there's no record of them. So in terms of peoples or societies of which we have records, the Hebrews are the first to develop a monotheistic religion. And again, monotheistic means one single god, right?
Polytheistic would mean multiple gods. For instance, the Greeks who we've been discussing in past lectures, the Greeks are very much polytheistic in religion. So say we're the Egyptians, remember we even mentioned some of the Egyptian gods. So this is what makes the Hebrews distinct, right?
So they kind of emerge from this morass of sameness of all these other sort of small, poor, 11-teen tribes, because Canaan at the time was quite poor. And these tribes, by the way, we call them Semitic tribes because all of their languages are related. They're called the Semitic languages, much like today, like we speak English, right?
English is our Germanic language, right? So English is related to other Germanic languages like Dutch or Swedish or obviously German. And then like Spanish, right?
Spanish is a romance language, right? It's related to other romance languages like French or Portuguese or Italian. So the language that the Hebrews spoke, which is Hebrew, that's where their name comes from, it comes from the language they spoke.
Hebrew was a Semitic language, and so all these other Levantine tribes who, again, live in the Levant, they were also Semitic tribes. Because they spoke other Semitic languages that weren't Hebrew but were related to Hebrew, much like English is related to Dutch or French is related to Spanish. As their cult of Yahweh, because we will...
It's not Judaism yet, right? This monotheistic religion of the god Yahweh, it's just a Yahweh cult. Cult, that's what historians call it for a while.
We'll eventually call it Judaism. But as this Yahweh cult grows, the Hebrews were able to convert some of their neighboring Semitic tribes to their monotheistic religion. Other tribes didn't really like Jewish, proto-Jewish, didn't like Hebrew efforts to try to convert them. And so the Hebrews also fought wars with several other Semitic tribe neighbors because, again, those Semitic tribes didn't like this idea of converting to a monotheistic cult of the god Yahweh.
Eventually, like over the course of a couple centuries, this very unique religious system, again, monotheistic cult of the god Yahweh, makes the Hebrews separate from their neighbors. And They sort of become their own ethnic identity, right? They sort of emerge as their own people.
Again, they weren't distinct at all, right? Just in the Levant, there were all these Semitic tribes who were all very similar. Over time, that's no longer true. By, say, the year 1000 BCE or so, the Hebrews are distinct, and the Hebrews are these Yahweh cultists. This is not...
precisely the history that's told in the Jewish foundation myths of the Hebrew Bible, particularly in the book of Genesis. In the book of Genesis, we get Abraham. Abraham is in communication with God. And then Abraham has a son called Isaac, and Isaac has a son called Jacob. And then Jacob has 12 sons who become the 12 tribes of Israel.
That's how Judaism is created. The historical record... does not reflect that reality, right?
So there have been literally hundreds of archaeological attempts to confirm that foundation myth, Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Israel, to the 12 tribes of Israel. And again, there's no archaeological record of that having happened. But I mean, the story I told fits in there, right? So We've got this one tribe creates this monotheistic religion. They convert other tribes.
Could there be 12 tribes of Israel there? Yeah, maybe. And so archaeological attempts, though, again, and there have been many, many, many archaeological attempts to prove the foundation myth of the Hebrew Bible, and none of them so far have succeeded.
But again, by 1000 BCE, we can sort of firmly say that there's these Yahweh cultists who speak Hebrew. who are different enough from their neighbors that we can begin speaking of them as their own society. So let's talk about Iron Age Hebrew society. As I've already alluded to, the early Yahweh cultists lived in the Levant.
Specifically, they lived in the Levantine Highlands. Today represented by things like Mount Lebanon, but the Levantine Highlands are approximately here. And these mountains are quite tall and quite rugged.
Like today, you can snowboard in Lebanon. And when you think it's in the Middle East, when you think of the Middle East, you're probably thinking hot desert. But you can go snowboarding in Lebanon.
So these are big mountains. And the early Yahweh cultists were typically goat and sheep farmers. And they were pastoralists. We've discussed pastoralists before. It's one of your vocabulary flashcards on Quizlet.
But pastoralists were typically... a society who followed herds of domestic animals across the landscape, right? Because for various reasons they couldn't plant seed crops, right?
Because maybe the soil's bad, or the weather's bad, or they don't want to, or it's too dry, or various reasons, right? And so the early Yahweh cultists were roaming pastoralists, again with sheep and goats, in the Levantine highlands. Again, by 1000 BCE or so, they've really emerged as, again, their own society, and they have begun building small cities.
Basically, they've gotten better land, and they're able to produce a bit of excess food. Again, when you get a bit of excess food, your population goes up, which leads to cities. The next thing that comes after cities, of course, is a state, right? And so the early Hebrews create a state, right, the kingdom of Israel.
It's established in 950 BCE, around the same time as the kingdom of Judah is established. Now, according to the biblical account from the Hebrew Bible, Israel and Judah, upon being founded, were united. It was one single kingdom called the kingdom of Israel.
Again, archaeological or historical attempts to confirm that are fuzzy. Historians don't really know. maybe Israel and Judah were united and then the two split, or maybe they weren't united ever, right?
And they were always split. We don't actually know. Again, if you want to follow the biblical account, and that's fine.
In the biblical account, they were originally united and then split over time. And you can see there's lots of other little kingdoms in this early Iron Age Mesopotamia. So here's the Neo-Assyrians up here. We've got these other little kingdoms. The Phoenician states, these would be city states.
The Philistine states, these would be city states. But over time, that will fade away. Beginning in the 8th century BCE, so the kingdom of Israel, the northern half of the Hebrew domain, because these are both Hebrew, both kingdoms. The northern half of the Hebrew kingdoms were conquered by the Neo-Assyrians, who we'll talk about on the next slide, in the year 720. CE 720. At the same time, the southern half, the kingdom of Judah, became an Assyrian vassal.
Now, we've discussed vassals before, and again, they're one of your vocabulary flashcards. I'm going to discuss them one more time, and then every time after this, when I say vassal, I'm just going to assume you know what I mean, and hopefully that's correct. So basically, a vassal is a weaker side that's been conquered by a more powerful side. In this case, the vassal is the kingdom of Judah, and they were conquered by the Neo-Assyrians.
Now, so that means in war, the kingdom of Judah either lost a war or they, instead of fighting, just surrendered. Often the case, a vassal never fought to begin with. They just surrendered straight away.
Don't even bother attacking us. We surrender. We give in.
We'll do whatever you want. Please just don't attack us. So that's often how the vassal partnership is made, right? So Israel resisted and they were conquered.
Judah did not resist and they were vassalized. That's typically the pattern. So once made a vassal, the weaker partner has all kinds of duties to the stronger partner.
They would pay a yearly tribute or, you know, once every five years tribute, right? But they would pay money basically to the stronger side for not conquering them. Another thing they would do is they'd let the stronger side use their lands to move troops. So if Neo-Assyria wants to move troops down here, the Kingdom of Judah will let them move troops through.
Yeah, sure, whatever you want, sir. Yes, please. And they wouldn't just let them move troops through. They would almost host the troops.
They would throw banquets and kind of feed the troops as they went through and make sure the troops had a good time as they were passing through the Kingdom of Judah. You want to keep your vassal overlord. Assyria here would be the overlord.
A vassal wants to keep its overlord quite happy. A third thing that the vassal will do is it would provide troops to the overlord, particularly in a defensive war. So if someone invades Neo-Assyria, Judah would send troops. But also, any time Assyria asks. So if Assyria wants to go to war with Egypt over here, they might ask the king of Judah, Hey, give us a thousand troops.
And when I say ask, I mean demand. So any time Assyria demands troops, Judah would give them. And there are other examples of vassal duties.
These are described in the vocabulary flashcard, and I might mention those at later points. But those are the basic vassal duties, right? Troop passage rights or troop stations rights, providing troops when asked, and then paying a yearly tribute or a yearly tax.
So the Kingdom of Judah then is a Neo-Assyrian vassal from 720. and then they would eventually be conquered by the Neo-Babylonians in 596. So now let's talk about these Neo-Assyrians and these Neo-Babylonians. First, the Neo-Assyrians, because they come first. So remember, all of this Iron Age, Mesopotamian society, it's all coming in the wake of the Bronze Age collapse, right? So those Hebrew Yahweh cultists, right, with their goat herds, right, they're surviving the Bronze Age collapse, right? They fled to the Levantine highlands.
That's why they're way up there. in those mountains where they can't even grow crops because the climate's so bad right they're choosing to live basically in voluntary poverty with just goat herds because if they you know went down to richer land the bronze age collapse and all the violence and chaos of that is still happening so that's sort of where the hebrews emerge right and remember it ravages all of mesopotamia so it wipes out all of the existing empires remember there had been a thing called the assyrian empire right not the neos here in the assyrian that we talked about way back when we discussed Mesopotamia for the first time in the third lecture of the semester. So everyone gets affected, and everyone gets affected really terribly, but Assyria just happened to be in, much like the Hebrews, right, they happened to be in more of a geographically remote area, right, sort of an area that was harder to get to with large armies.
And so while the Bronze Age collapse is bad in Assyria, it's worse in most other places. And so Assyria does better than its neighbors during the Bronze Age collapse. So I'm trying to think of an example. Let's say it's a silly example. Let's just say you and your friend are in a car accident, right?
You break your arm and your friend breaks both of his arms and both of his legs. So it's not that you did not suffer in the car accident. You broke your arm.
That's bad. It'll take you six weeks to recover, and it's going to hurt a lot, and so on. But you did much better than your friend who broke both of his arms and both of his legs. That's Assyria during the Bronze Age collapse, right?
They broke their arm, but their neighbors were breaking their legs, right? And so it's not that Assyria does not suffer during the Bronze Age collapse. They just suffer less than most of their neighbors. And so when the Bronze Age collapse kind of ends, Assyria is stronger than their neighbors because their neighbors suffered worse.
What this means then is that Assyria, if they want to, can begin conquering. And that's precisely what they do do. In the year 911 BCE, they begin conquering their weaker, more suffering neighbors and recreate their empire.
And because it's sort of a new empire, we call it the Neo-Assyrian Empire, just to avoid confusion with the old Assyrian Empire. Neo just means new, the Neo-Assyrian Empire. So it begins in 911 BCE once the Bronze Age collapse is over, and we're firmly in the Iron Age in Mesopotamia.
So the Neo-Assyrian Empire then becomes the dominant power in the early Iron Age of Mesopotamia. Their capital city is Nineveh, a very famous city if you read the Hebrew Bible. and also basically anything else from Mesopotamia in this time period. Nineveh was one of the biggest, grandest cities in the world.
It's on the same site as modern Mosul, Iraq, sort of in northern Iraq in the Kurdish region. The Neo-Syrians were very famous for their cruelty and their brutality, particularly to groups who rebelled against them. For instance, if you were their vassal and then you defied their wishes, it was going to be really, really bad for you.
So the kingdom of Judah, of course, is a Neo-Assyrian vassal, and it's basically very, very important that Judah does what the Neo-Assyrians say. Otherwise, the Neo-Assyrians will descend on them in their full brutality. And again, they can be quite vicious.
The Neo-Assyrians are often credited for creating the world's first professional army. This is a really controversial idea. There's lots of historians give lots of different societies credit for creating the first professional army.
I tend to side with the historians who say it's the Neo-Syrians, but other historians say it's the Chinese or it's the Acadians or it's this other group or that group. It doesn't really matter. Again, for me, I think the Neo-Syrians are the first professional army, but the historical record is quite fuzzy.
And what exactly is a professional army? It can be very hard to define. The Neo-Assyrians were also administrative innovators.
They came up with new ways to govern large bits of territory. Remember, governing large pieces of territory in the ancient period is quite difficult, particularly in a place like Mesopotamia. Remember, it's easy in Egypt.
That's sort of the advantage the Egyptians have, but it's hard. It's very hard in Mesopotamia. It's very hard in Greece, for instance.
And so the Neo-Assyrians are trying to find solutions to the difficulty of widespread administration. So one of the things they found works really well is they exile the elites of defeated enemies. So when the Neo-Assyrians would defeat a city, they would also take away all the elites of that city and make them go to Nineveh. So they would exile the elites of defeated cities.
So all the scribes, all the religious leaders, all the political leaders, the wealthiest merchants. Again, just the most important, the most influential, and the most talented members of conquered societies. And then it made it much harder for that society to rebel because all their great leaders, all their great military thinkers, all their great inventors, all their writers, they're all gone.
So there's not really anyone there to sort of raise a rebellion. It worked really well. Another thing the Assyrians do is they disempower provinces and governors, right?
So they basically decentralize, right? So decentralization is one really common way of governing large bits of territory. And so they don't even really worry about governing most things.
They just take away the elites. So basically all that's left are poor people. and farmers, right? And then they just, the Neo-Assyrians just leave the poor people and farmers alone, right?
Poor people and farmers aren't going to rebel, right? They're going to feed themselves and leave you alone. And so that's what the Neo-Assyrians did.
They didn't even bother governing most regions. They just, again, took away all the elites who might come up with, you know, rebellious ideas and then left the other people, the poor, the farmers alone. And it worked really well.
The Neo-Assyrians were, you know, they didn't. They conquer an enormous empire, the largest empire ever created up until that point, and they governed it quite stably. So I've already mentioned they conquer far and wide. They exile their enemies.
They also use a lot of conquered people for infantry, right? Basically, there's no cannons. It's the ancient period, but the ancient version of cannon fodder, right? So when I said they would leave the poor people and the farmers alone, they left most of the poor people and farmers alone. They would take 10,000 or 12,000 of the poor people or farmers and make them join the army.
And again, the Neo-Assyrians are an enormous professional army. Again, at this point in world history, say the year 700 BCE, the Neo-Assyrian Empire is the biggest empire ever, and Nineveh was the biggest city in the world. The Neo-Syrians aren't just violent, war-making brutes.
They were mostly violent, war-making brutes. But they also had some art and culture about them. In particular, their last emperor, who will come up again on a subsequent slide, a guy called Ashurbanipal.
Ashurbanipal created the world's first library, right? And he was a very bookish man, very intellectual. And he wanted to read all the books ever written, and at that point there weren't that many, so maybe he even succeeded. The Neo-Assyrians were constantly, even in spite of their great administrative innovations and their enormous terrifying army, and their notorious brutality against rebels, they were still constantly fighting raiders and rebels.
So rebels mean people who were conquered who rose up against the Neo-Assyrians. Raiders is a little harder to come by. Raiders are people from the Eurasian steppe. They're steppe nomads who are coming off the steppe and raiding Neo-Assyria. There are two reasons that steppe nomads would carry out raids.
The first is to acquire better weapons. Steppe nomads don't really have iron working, so they can't make iron weapons, but they can steal them. Steppe nomads would come off the Eurasian steppe. and raid into the Neo-Assyrian Empire to steal iron to make weapons with. And the second reason steppe nomads would raid is to get food.
Remember, steppe nomads can't sow seeds, right? The Eurasian steppe can't really be farmed with ancient technology. You can't plow, you can't sow seeds.
And so if they want any kind of bread or grain or vegetable food, they basically either have to gather it growing wild or they have to steal it. And we talked about how there are other steppe nomads throughout time, right? As I mentioned, I introduced steppe nomads a few lectures ago, right?
Another example of steppe nomads from the Eurasian steppe, right? Sorry, so we have steppe nomads from the Eurasian steppe, but if you wanted to broaden from outside Eurasia and look at other steppe nomads, you could look at something like the Plains Indians, right? And what is today Kansas and Oklahoma and Texas, right?
Groups like the Comanche. The Comanche were very much like steppe nomads, where they followed the buffalo for their food source. They did not sow food. They didn't plant seeds.
They didn't harvest vegetable crops and eat them. They didn't live in set locations. They roamed the plains following the buffalo. But they would often raid. people who did farm, right?
And when the Comanche would raid, it was to steal weapons, right? In this case, not iron, right? But to steal guns and to steal food. So, you know, it's a very old story, right? Steppe nomads raiding settlements to get things they can't get on the steppe.
But so that's the raiders. And again, the rebels are groups that would rebel against the Neo-Assyrians. And again, rebelling against Neo-Assyrians is typically unpleasant.
And I mentioned that the Neo-Assyrians exiled their enemies. The Neo-Assyrians also had this really, I guess for historians today, it's a colorful habit. I imagine for the people in the ancient time, it was probably their absolutely worst feature, right?
It was the worst thing about the Neo-Assyrians. But again, for historians today, it's more amusing than bad. The Neo-Assyrians would also steal the gods of their defeated enemies.
Most of these Mesopotamian ancient religions, the Neo-Assyrians, or localized, right? So every tribe or every society would have their own religion, as is very seen with the Hebrews, right? The Hebrews have their own religion, right?
They're Yahweh cultists, right? So most other societies would also have their own sort of local religion that they practiced. And almost all of these religions used graven images or idols, right, that represented their gods, and they would pray to those idols or, you know, perform various religious rituals in the presence of... or on behalf of those idols. But again, idols are actual physical objects that exist in the world.
And so when the Neo-Assyrians would conquer someone, not only would they take all their elites away, they would also take their gods. And so outside of Nineveh, on the outskirts of Nineveh, there's a big, basically just like a big open-air museum of all of the defeated gods of all of all of the stolen gods of all of the peoples that the neo-assyrians had defeated um and uh again to soren's day again it's kind of a colorful uh sort of anecdote but again at the time i'm sure it was considered absolutely terrifying to have your gods taken away the neo-assyrians don't just pick on little people right the kingdom of israel is very weak right but the neo-assyrians don't just pick on weak little kingdoms like the kingdom of syria they go after the big boys too They'll conquer what will come to be called Neo-Babylon, right? They'll conquer Babylon.
They conquer Egypt, as I already alluded to when we talked about the ancient Egyptians. And they conquer Cush. Remember, Cush is basically Sudan, right?
It's that gold-rich region just south of Egypt. They conquer Egypt and Cush in 671 BCE. And this was particularly shocking to basically the rest of Mesopotamia. Like, wow, they even got Egypt.
Because Egypt sort of had this reputation, right? This is... powerful, rich, prosperous kind of place, and the Neo-Assyrians just take them out, no problem.
The specific king of Neo-Assyria who conquered the kingdom of Israel is a guy called Sargon II, and in the Neo-Assyrian way, he exiled their leaders. They don't have an idol to steal, so he does not steal the Israelites'god, because Yahweh forbids idols. This exile of Jews out of their Levantine homeland is what begins the Jewish diaspora. A diaspora is just removing people from what they view as their homeland or people voluntarily leaving their homeland. Today, for instance, we have an Armenian diaspora.
It's people who have left Armenia either because they were forced out through violence or they left voluntarily to find a better life. Or there could be an Afghan. diaspora right of people leaving afghanistan again fleeing violence or pursuing a better life or both right so it's people who sort of have left what they identify as their homeland the most famous diaspora the longest running diaspora in our world today is the jewish diaspora that began in 671 bce when sargon ii exiled the leaders of the kingdom of israel and the jewish diaspora continues today right so a jew who lives in the united states today could identify him or herself as being a member of the Jewish diaspora because the Jewish homeland is not New York or Louisville, Kentucky or Houston, Texas or something.
Another thing the Neo-Assyrians are famous for is they erected what are called stele around their empire with walls and decrees. This is basically the ancient version of a billboard. That's what a stele is. or Celius plural a Stella is called a Stella. It's the singular Stella the plural Stella and again these are just like signal stones right just these big stones with imperial decrees right.
The Neo-Assyrian Sargon II declares, you know, X, Y, and Z, right? And they carve it on a big stone and they just put it on the roadways around the Neo-Assyrian Empire. And so any literate person who came across it knew what the emperor said, right?
And that's how laws and decrees were sort of broadcast to the rest of the population, right? It's not as simple as today where you can just get on Twitter or put it on CNN or something, right? And then they make Stella or they make a Stella or multiple Stella.
Other Mesopotamian societies will do the same thing. The Persians in particular have a few very famous stele. The Neo-Assyrians will fall, and they will fall shockingly and precipitously. And their fall begins with the death of their last emperor, Ashurbanipal.
Remember, Ashurbanipal created a library. Ashurbanipal ruled for a long time. The last time we discussed secession crises, I told you they often come when an emperor lives a long time. So Ashurbanipal lived so long that all of his male heirs died.
So he has no living sons. He has a lot of living grandsons. But that's also a problem. Which grandson gets to inherit?
Is it the oldest grandson? Is it the favored grandson? Is it the richest grandson?
Is it the last grandson standing after all the grandsons trying to murder each other? ding ding ding it's that one right all the grandsons basically try to murder each other and it creates a civil war right so the secession crisis is the ashrae bonaparte outlived his sons and and no one knows who's going to come next and the civil war results as all the grandsons basically fight each other for the throne while neo-syria is weak neo-syria's many many many many enemies take advantage Remember, everyone hates the Neo-Assyrians. They steal their gods, they exile their people, they conquer them, they demand high taxes. The Neo-Assyrians are very cruel, right? The Neo-Assyrians are not friends with their neighbors.
So when Neo-Assyria collapses into civil war, that makes them weak. That provides an opportunity for Neo-Assyria's neighbors to take advantage of Neo-Assyria's weakness. And so various groups who had been conquered by the Neo-Assyrians rise up in rebellion, and then various groups outside Neo-Assyria invade, right, because again, Neo-Assyria is weak because of the civil war. All of this rebellion and invasion plus the civil war really cripples the empire, right.
For instance, Egypt rebels and declares its independence. Egypt, though, does not attack the Neo-Assyrians. The Babylonians do, right, so the Babylonians also rebel.
Egypt and Babylon have been conquered. So they're rising up in rebellion against their conqueror. So the Babylonians revolt in the south, and they do attack.
So the Babylonians are fighting the Assyrians in the south. The Assyrians are fighting each other. The Scythians and Cimmerians, these are steppe nomads. And the Scythians, we'll talk about again in the next lecture on the Persians. They're quite famous when it comes to the Persians.
But the Scythians and Cimmerians are steppe nomads who come in, and they loot and pillage everywhere. Because again... What they used to do is they'd come in and they'd do like a lightning raid, right? Like they'd come in and attack for like a week, steal a bunch of iron, get a little bit of wheat, and then leave.
Because the Neo-Assyrian army would be chasing them. Now there's no Neo-Assyrian army to chase them, right? The Neo-Assyrian army is fighting another part of the Neo-Assyrian army, or is fighting the Babylonians.
So the Scythians and Camarians can kind of loot and pillage everywhere. More invaders come, a group called the Medes from Persia. A northern modern-day Iran invade in 615 BCE.
They're led by their one great king, a guy called Xerxes, which is definitely the best name of anyone we'll have all semester. No one has a better name than Xerxes. Just try saying it.
It's very fun to say. I'll pause for a second while you say it. Yeah, Xerxes.
It just feels good coming out of your mouth. So he's the Median king who leads the invasion of Neo-Assyria. So the Neo-Assyrians are fighting each other.
They're fighting the Babylonians. They're fighting the Scythians. They're fighting the Chimerians. And they are fighting the Medes.
And the Medes are having a lot of success. Even still, with all of those enemies, with all of the odds stacked against them, the Neo-Assyrians are so powerful. Their army is so well trained. It's so large. The Neo-Assyrian reputation is so...
fearsome that even still in 613 BCE, the Neo-Assyrians who have ended their civil war now begin to push back and defeat the Medes and the Scythians and the Cimmerians and the Babylonians. And now Egypt has basically bargained with the Neo-Assyrians, hey Neo-Assyria, if we help you put down these other rebellions, if we help you with all these people, can we have our independence? And Neo-Assyria says, sure. So Egypt is now marching into Mesopotamia to help Neo-Assyria defeat the Babylonians and the Scythians and the Cimmerians and the Medes.
So then the Babylonians, Medes, and Scythians all team up, right? Why not? If the Neo-Assyrians are going to get help from Egypt, why can't we get help from each other? So that's precisely what happens, right? The Babylonians, the Medes, and the Scythians team up.
Together they're able to besiege and capture the Neo-Assyrian capital of Nineveh in 612 BCE. Again, the largest, richest, greatest city in the world at that precise moment. And it took him another three years to sort of finish off the remaining Neo-Assyrian forces.
But by 609 BCE, the Neo-Assyrian Empire is gone. When I say gone, I mean gone, gone. 300 years after this, Alexander the Great will take over all of this territory.
As he pursues a singular quest to be the king of Asia, which is a stupid term that we'll talk about when we get to Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great just rampages right through Mesopotamia and takes it all. Remember, Alexander the Great, as we talked about in the last lecture on Greece, he's tutored by Aristotle, the smartest man in the world, basically, at that time. So Alexander the Great is a person of great knowledge.
He knows a lot about history. He's marching through the Assyrian lands, and he has no idea who these people were. He sees the ruins of Nineveh. He sees the ruins of these other Neo-Assyrian cities. And he goes, boy, those are big buildings.
I wonder what people lived here. So when I say the Neo-Assyrians are wiped out, I mean they are wiped out. They're not even in the historical record.
300 years later, people don't even know they existed. They are obliterated. Because, again, people hate them.
So you don't want to preserve the memory of someone you just absolutely despise. So what comes next is... a couple of empires.
So in this lecture we're going to focus on the Neo-Babylonian empire. The Neo-Babylonians will take over most of Mesopotamia. The Medes, so basically the Medes and the Neo-Babylonians split Neo-Assyria.
So Neo-Babylon takes about half of Neo-Assyria and the Medes take the other half of Neo-Assyria. The Scythians just got a whole bunch of iron and food because again the Scythians don't want territory, they're nomads. And then they go back to the steppe.
And we'll focus on this lecture again on the Neo-Babylonians because they will take over most of what's Mesopotamia. The Medes take over mostly. The Medes take over a little bit of Mesopotamia, but the Medes mostly take over the region that's called Persia. And so in the next lecture, when we talk about the Persians, we'll talk about the Medes then.
So again, most of Mesopotamia comes under the control of Babylon. When we say Babylon, we call them the Neo-Babylonian Empire so that we don't confuse them with the Babylon of Hammurabi. So it's still a related society.
So these Babylonians would have the same language as Hammurabi and they would claim Hammurabi as their ancestor. But we sort of say Neo-Babylonian just like we say Neo-Syrian, just separate, basically saying Neo-Babylon means after the Bronze Age collapse, means Iron Age Babylon. Just like Neo-Assyria means Iron Age Syria. The great king who accomplishes all this is a guy called Nabopolassar, who's crowned in 626, and he's the one who oversaw the victory against Assyria.
He dies quickly, or shortly after the war is over, right after a more than 20-year reign, which would be a long reign. And he's replaced by his son, Nebuchadnezzar II, who would rule for 40 years. And a 40-year reign is usually pretty good because it means there's a lot of stability, right?
There's a lot of time where we're not worrying about politics, right? We can worry about the economy, we can worry about society. And that's precisely what Nebuchadnezzar does. He undertakes these massive building projects, just big buildings everywhere, temples of various kinds, pleasure centers, you know, like leisure centers, places for people to go to spend leisure time, is what I mean, roads, forts, that sort of thing.
The most famous building that Nebuchadnezzar II builds is the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It was considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, right up there with the pyramids and stuff like that. The problem with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon is they probably didn't exist.
So the only people who ever mention the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are the Greeks. Right, Greeks traveled to Babylon, and they talk about these things called the hanging gardens, and they just gush about them, right? And then another Greek who read that Greek, he gushes about them.
And then another Greek who read that Greek who read that Greek, right? And then sort of like, it almost becomes like this rumor, you know, like, and we still have these today, right? Like my uncle's, my uncle's cousin's boyfriend told me. that there was a, you know, that, you know, X and Y happened, right? And so the Hanging Gardens of Babylon kind of pass on that way, right? It's a sort of word-of-mouth rumor that one Greek supposedly saw, and then they get written down in the Greek historical record.
People like Thucydides mentions them, but there's no other record of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon anywhere, right? The Hebrews don't mention them, and Hebrews will be in Babylon, right? No other group that passes through Babylon mentions them, and then archaeologists have... than excavation projects in Babylon, they also don't find any sign of something that could have been the Hanging Gardens.
So they probably were a figment of the imagination. But whether they existed or not, they are indicative of this great building spree initiated by Nebuchadnezzar. And again, a great building spree would be indicative that life is pretty good, at least for the Babylonians in the Neo-Babylonian Empire. So this is an artistic representation of what the Hanging Gardens look like if you read Greek accounts. You see here in the background another mythical building, right, the Tower of Babel, which also there seems to be no record of it existing either, but who knows.
So there's the Hanging Gardens, there's the Tower of Babel, and then we get this impression of Babylon, the city of Babylon. There's this grand architectural wonder. this enormous city in Mesopotamia, these incredible buildings and whatnot. Again, these buildings probably didn't exist, but Babylon was a massive city with massive buildings.
Let's finally return then to the Israelites or the Hebrews and talk about them under foreign rules. So the last time we left them, it was 720 BCE. The kingdom of Israel had just been defeated by...
The Neo-Assyrians, their leaders, have been carried away to exile. The kingdom of Judah has been rendered into a vassal of Neo-Assyria. So what happens now? The Hebrews kind of leave the historical record.
Now, they tell us in the Hebrew Bible all the things they were doing for the next 140 years. But for the next 140 years, outside of the Hebrew Bible, we don't hear much from the Israelites or the Hebrews. the kingdom of Judah in particular.
But in 609 BCE, the kingdom of Judah sort of joins the rebels. Remember, the rebels fighting against Neo-Assyria, led by Neo-Babylon and the Medes. And so the kingdom of Judah rebels against their overlord.
And the way they do this is they're trying to stop the Egyptian troops who are coming to help. the Neo-Assyrians. Remember, Egypt is going to help Neo-Assyria defeat the Babylonians and the Medes, and then in return, Neo-Assyria will allow Egypt to be independent.
So the Egyptians are trying to get from Egypt to basically Nineveh, right, where they'll fight the Babylonians. If you're going from Egypt to Nineveh, you go right through the kingdom of Judah. So when the Egyptians enter Judah, the Hebrews in Judah decide that they will stop them. We're going to stop these Egyptians from helping out the Neo-Assyrians because we want Babylon to win. That's basically what they do.
And so the Hebrews throw themselves in front of the Egyptian invasion force. They fight the Battle of Megiddo, and Egypt wins the battle. So King Nojudah loses this battle.
Once the Neo-Babylonians come to power, they want to assert their authority throughout Mesopotamia. So the Neo-Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar II decide that they need to ensure that the kingdom of Judah will remain a vassal. So the kingdom of Judah was a Neo-Assyrian vassal, and Neo-Babylon wants them to be a Neo-Babylonian vassal too. And so the way you do that is through military force, so Nebuchadnezzar II. puts the capital of the kingdom of Judah under siege, right?
The capital is Jerusalem. So in 605 BCE, Jerusalem is under siege, and the Israelites surrender and promise, look, we're your vassal. We'll give a tribute payment. We're your vassal. We'll do whatever you say.
Please don't burn down Jerusalem. And Nebuchadnezzar II goes, that's exactly what I wanted to hear. And he turns around and goes back to Babylon. This is all normal.
This is fine. The kingdom of Judah should be able to survive this. Except...
The kingdom of Judah is run by idiots. At the time, this is all recounted in great detail in the Hebrew Bible, particularly in the book of Jeremiah, where Jeremiah is advising the king to do what the Babylonians say, and the king goes, No, I don't think so. I think the Lord says I should team up with Egypt.
So basically, the kingdom of Judah decides that they'll team up with Egypt. Egypt promises they will help the kingdom of Judah fight Babylon. And so Jerusalem doesn't, or the kingdom of Judah, does not make their vassal payment to the Neo-Babylonians.
And as overlords do to their vassals when their vassals are being recalcitrant, right, the Neo-Babylonians return with a huge army and say, make the tribute payment or else. And Jerusalem says, no, our Egyptian friends will come and help. And the Egyptian friends don't come and help, and the Neo-Babylonians absolutely destroy the kingdom of Judah.
They ravaged the kingdom of Judah. They completely annihilate the city of Jerusalem. So they break the walls of Jerusalem.
They destroy the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. And they begin deporting the Hebrews. I must be my posture makes me yawn here.
And the Babylonians begin deporting the Israelites or the Hebrews right back to Babylon, right? Neo-Babylon rules exactly like Neo-Assyria. They exiled the elites.
And this period in Jewish history is called the Babylonian captivity. So the most important Hebrews were deported in 597, and then a second wave in 587, and then a third wave of the final sort of important people in 582. Again, the city of Jerusalem completely destroyed the Jewish temple where they worshipped, right? Yahweh's temple. also completely destroyed.
I'm going to break away from the PowerPoint here and read you a poetic account of the destruction of Jerusalem because it's a really cool one here. Share screen so you guys are seeing this. Great. Here we go.
So this is the Hebrew Bible book of Lamentations chapter one, the first 16 verses. Lamentations is written by the prophet Jeremiah, the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, after the Babylonians have destroyed the city. It's between the first and second wave of exiles because Jeremiah himself will be exiled. And he's walking through the streets of Jerusalem and he's mourning what's been lost. And so it's just a really great poem of sort of loss and exile and tragedy.
and I try to share art and culture with you in our class as much as I can, because our class is very much a political and economic history. So here it is, Lamentations 1 through Lamentations 116. How deserted lies the city, once so full of people. How like a widow is she, who once was great among the nations. She who was queen among the provinces has now become a slave.
Bitterly she weeps at night, tears are upon her cheeks. Among all her lovers, there is none to comfort her. All her friends have betrayed her. They have become her enemies. That would be Egypt.
After affliction and harsh labor, Judah has gone into exile. She dwells among the nations. She finds no resting place. All who pursue her have overtaken her in the midst of her distress. The roads to Zion mourn, for no one comes to her appointed feast.
All her gateways are desolate. groan, her maidens grieve, and she is in bitter anguish. Her foes have become her masters, her enemies are at ease.
The Lord, and that's how Yahweh is always written, Yahweh has brought her grief because of her many sins. Her children have gone into exile, captive before the foal. All the splendor has departed from the daughter of Zion.
Her princes are like deer that find no pasture. In weakness they have fled before the pursuer. In the days of her affliction and wandering, Jerusalem remembers all the treasures that were hers in days of old.
When her people fell into enemy hands, there was no one to help her. Her enemies looked at her and laughed at her destruction. Jerusalem has sinned greatly, and so has become unclean. All who honored her despise her, for they have seen her nakedness.
She herself groans and turns away. Her filthiness clung to her skirts. She did not consider her future.
Her fall was astounding. There was none to comfort her. Look, O Lord, on my affliction, for the enemy has triumphed.
The enemy laid hands on all her treasures. She saw pagan nations enter her sanctuary, those you had forbidden to enter your assembly. All her people groan as they search for bread.
They barter their treasures for food to keep themselves alive. Look, O Lord, and consider, for I am despised. Is it nothing to you, all who pass by? Look around and see. Is any suffering like my suffering, that was inflicted on me, that the Lord brought on me in the day of his fierce anger?
So this is Jeremiah basically saying that the Hebrews have gotten what they got. Because they deserved it, because they violated a pact with the Babylonians, and the Lord, Yahweh, would not have wanted that. This is God's divine punishment on the Hebrews for basically a political mistake.
From on high he sent fire, sent it down to my bones. He spread a net from my feet and turned me back. He made me desolate, faint all the day long.
My sins have been bound into a yoke. By his hands they were woven together. They have come upon my neck, and the Lord has set my strength. He has handed me over to those I cannot withstand. The Lord has rejected all the warriors in my midst.
He has summoned an army against me to crush my young men. In his winepress the Lord has trampled the virgin daughter of Judah. This is why I weep, and my eyes overflow with tears. No one is near to comfort me, no one to restore my spirit.
My children are destitute because the enemy has prevailed. Again, it's a very stark story of loss and exile and suffering. So I know as I'm discussing these empires clashing on battlefields and people getting carried off to exile, and it's all very depersonalized, and it's kind of hard to visualize what it was like.
And so the Book of Lamentations, again written by the prophet Jeremiah as he... walks through the ruins of Jerusalem, it really helps to put a human face on the suffering and can really understand what the people may have been going through. It's a horrifying event to have happened. And again, it happens in Jerusalem in 597, but it was happening all over Mesopotamia during the Iron Age, in the time of Neo-Assyria and Neo-Babylon.
These were horrifying political events with enormous human suffering. Again, when the Neo-Assyrians get completely wiped out of the historical record, right, and the city of Nineveh gets, you know, taken by the Neo-Babylonians, imagine what life was like, right, after that for the people of Nineveh. Because again, everyone hates them. No one hates the Jews here, right? The Hebrews aren't the hated people, right?
They were just victims of political events, right? But when the Neo-Babylonians and the Medes break into Nineveh and capture the city, they hate... the people of Nineveh. So imagine how much more they're suffering. Again, just to put a human face on these sort of big stories of armies clashing and whatnot.
The Babylonian captivity that began in 597 ends in 538 BCE. Cyrus the Great of Persia, again, we'll talk about that in the next lecture, but Cyrus the Great of Persia will conquer Babylon. And Cyrus the Great is not going to imitate Neo-Assyria or the Neo-Babylonians. He has his own way of ruling, his own way of administering a great big territory.
It's less cruel. Again, it's much kinder, basically, or just much more respectful of people as people, people's basic human dignity. Today we'd call it human rights.
We'll talk about that when we get to Cyrus the Great. No one called it human rights at the time. But basically, again, Cyrus the Great is just... more humane than the Babylonians. And so when he conquers, he does not exile.
And in fact, when he conquers Babylon, he sends all of the exiles there home, right? So all of the exiles from all over Mesopotamia gets sent home in the year 538 BCE. This includes the Hebrews, right? So the Hebrews or the Jews, it's probably sufficient to call them Jews now, right?
Judaism as a religion probably officially exists by like 600 BCE. So Hebrews, Jews, Israelites, they all mean the same thing, begin to return in 538, and they begin to rebuild the city of Jerusalem. Just for sheer numbers here, there were 40,000 Jews in Babylon who returned to Jerusalem. Not only did the Persians allow the Jews to return, the Persians actually gave the Jews money to rebuild their temple.
So the first Jews who returned to Jerusalem, their first task was to rebuild the wall around the city so that The city could be defended. That's recounted in the Hebrew book of Nehemiah. And then the Persians also paid the Jews after they complete the wall. The Persians pay for the Jews to rebuild their temple.
And that's in the Hebrew Bible book of Ezra. And the temple was completed and consecrated on 516 BCE. And so this initiates what in Jewish history is called the Second Temple Period, which would last until the year 70 CE.
So through the year zero. So the Second Temple period then lasts 586 years. This is the temple today, what's left of it. This is called the Wailing Wall or the Western Wall of the Second Temple.
That's all that remains. And this is what the temple would have looked like in its heyday. This is the temple the Persians paid the Jews to rebuild.
Again, just out of goodness and administrative common sense. As we'll see, it worked very well for the Persians to treat their subjects so well. So this is an artistic, obviously computer-generated portrait of what the temple must have looked like. And again, this is just one wall here, this wall here.
So very briefly, the Second Temple period of Judaism. Israel was a peaceful part of the Achenid Persian Empire. It was a province called Yehud Medinata, and it flourished for several centuries. When Alexander the Great steamrolls through Mesopotamia, he conquered the region in 333 BCE. He basically changed all the official cultural elements from Persian to Hellenic.
Remember, Hellenic is Greek culture. So basically he changed the language from Persian to Greek and a few other things. Otherwise he left the Jews alone, so the Jews are allowed to just continue being a peaceful part of Alexander the Great's empire.
And for the next 200 years, then Hellenism, again, which is basically Greek culture, exerted more and more influence on the Jewish people. Over time, this came to worry more traditional Hebrews. They began to worry that the Hebrews and the Jews were losing their way.
They were losing their unique culture. They were losing their religion, most importantly. They were losing this Yahweh cult.
They weren't Jews anymore. They were becoming more and more like the Greeks. They were losing the Hebrew language. They were losing their Jewish religion.
And so we get the rise of the Maccabees. And the Maccabees are a faction within Judaism who were basically Jewish revivalists who rebelled against Greek rule. and worked to suppress Hellenism in order to re-energize Judaism and sort of the Hebrew elements of Hebrew culture.
In other words, the Hebrews were assimilating into the Greeks. We see this in the world today, right? When one country conquers another, right?
For instance, when the British conquer India, right? The Indians begin to assimilate into British culture. So Indian people begin eating French fries and speaking English.
A lot of them convert to Christianity. They're assimilating to British culture. And the Maccabees thought this was bad. The Jews should not assimilate too much into Hellenism because then they would lose their religion and they would lose their own unique culture and they needed to preserve that.
So the Maccabees, again, fight against Greek rule. This creates, it's basically a war, right? It lasts for a few years. It's called the Maccabean Revolt. and establishes a Jewish kingdom called the Hasmonean dynasty, a Jewish kingdom within a broader Hellenic empire.
And the Hasmonean dynasty lasted for 140 years from 167 to 37 BCE. Again, originally created as a Jewish kingdom within a Hellenic empire. In 110 BCE, however, it gets its full independence.
And so the Hasmonean dynasty is an independent Jewish kingdom. And then in 63 BCE, the Roman general Pompey took over. And so the Hasmonean dynasty was allowed to continue for one more generation, but they were no longer independent.
So the Romans under Pompey, who we'll talk about when we get to the Romans, take over Jerusalem and the Jewish people in general. And he also sacked the city of Jerusalem. The temple would remain, though, for another 130 years.
But there was a great Jewish revolt in the year 70 CE, another event that we'll discuss when we get to the Romans. There was this great Jewish revolt, and during that Jewish revolt, the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans. Everything but the Western Wall, everything but this, destroyed by the Romans after the revolt of 70 CE. Again, we'll talk about that later.
I should mention that in this lecture, just to sort of finish up, to close the book on the Second Temple period. So again, the second temple period lasts from the time the Persians helped the Jews rebuild their temple until the time that the Romans destroyed that same temple. That's all I have for you on Mesopotamia.
Again, the second lecture, or the next lecture coming up, is also on Mesopotamia, right? But it's sort of the next couple hundred years, right? So we basically did Mesopotamia from 1000 to, oh, about 550. And then we'll go from about 550 to about 350. in the next lecture. And then the lecture after that will go from 350 to 320, because that's the time of Alexander the Great.
All right, so that's what's coming next. Again, I will see you then.