The Nazis of the Biblical Era: A Selection from Dan Carlin’s The End is Always Near (2019)
“Some two hundred years after Assyria’s fall, a Greek general named Xenophon recorded an encounter with what was left of Assyria’s grandeur when he saw cities—places that were larger and more formidable than anything he’d seen back in Greece—dissolved into ruins. Xenophon wrote the Anabasis—now considered a classic of Western literature—about his experience commanding Greek mercenaries in a Persian civil war. As Xenophon and ten thousand Greeks fought a running battle trying to escape from their pursuers after fighting on the losing side of that war, they stumbled upon enormous fortifications and cities decomposing in the sand in what’s now northern Iraq—the ruins of something greater than his own civilization had ever produced. . . .
These cities were gargantuan by Greek standards, and Xenophon asked the locals about them; they said the structures had been built by the Medes, because that’s who’d preceded the Persian Empire they were then living under. But in fact these weren’t Median cities, they were Assyrian. The one ‘near a city called Mespila’ is thought to have been Nineveh—Xenophon was marveling at its majestic remains two hundred years after its demise.
Xenophon was someone whom we today would think of as inhabiting the old world. Ancient Greece is, after all, a very early European civilization. But he was looking at something that was already ancient in his day—the equivalent of a Statue of Liberty in the sand from a Near Eastern empire that had been the superpower of its age a mere two centuries previously, and one that now seemed so thoroughly erased that the locals didn’t even know to whom it had belonged. . . .
The Assyrians were often cast, especially by their neighbors, as the equivalent of the Nazis in the biblical era. These were people who appeared to be proud of the terrible things they did. They created great carvings in stone of their armies at war and the punishments their kings meted out to those who had rebelled against them. In some cases, these reliefs are essentially advertisements publicizing what would amount in the modern day to crimes against humanity.
As if the grotesque illustrations weren’t enough, the Assyrian kings provided cuneiform text narration of their atrocities, too. When one reads what they wrote about their feats, one feels as though the Assyrians didn’t have just one bad Hitler-esque ruler, but rather that they were all like that. The artistic ‘court style’ of Assyria’s royal reliefs is genocidal.
Take, for example, Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859 BCE), one of the most brutal of the Assyrian kings. He had this to say about how he handled a rebellion: ‘I built a pillar over the city gate, and I flayed all the chiefs who had revolted, and I covered the pillar with their skin. Some of them I walled up in the pillar, some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes. Others I bound to stakes around the pillar. And I cut the limbs off the royal officers who had rebelled.’
Ashurnasirpal II goes on to describe burning captives with fire; cutting off their noses, ears, and fingers; and putting out their eyes. The tens of thousands of warriors who weren’t burned or walled up or beheaded or mutilated were driven into the scorching desert like cattle and left to die of thirst.”—Dan Carlin, The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses (2019)
