Hello,
I’m reading a book by Dan Carlin called The End is Always Near and there is a chapter discussing the ancient Assyrians. In this chapter we get direct quotes in cuneiform of all kinds of mean ways revolts were punished. This includes walling people into pillars, desecrating the tombs of their rivals, and executing 2000 children as punishment for a revolt. This kind of behavior just doesn’t seem right. Like the expression goes “if you beat a dog enough, it will bite back.” If I was an Assyrian king I would try my best to curry favor with those who were against me, not just outright make an example of them.
So did the Assyrians ALWAYS have a reputation of being extremely harsh to those that pissed them off? Was there an event that caused the Assyrians to be so inhumane to those they ruled over?
Pretty much everyone in ancient history has a "a reputation of being extremely harsh to those that pissed them off"
Even the Athenians, who aspire to something better, end up pretty nasty as the Peloponnesian War drags on.
I would not take denunciations of the Assyrians to mean much more than "they were the big dog on the street at this period of history" -- and as the big dog they did what big dogs do. Between Etruscans, Egyptians Carthaginians, Romans, Persians, none are recorded as "nice guys".
The Sumerians give us one of our earliest pictures of "what happens to folks who defy us" in the Stele of the Vultures, from approximately 2500 BCE . . . this gets its name from the eponymous vultures who're carrying off the severed heads of the enemies of Lagash. It's interesting that this epithet, about feeding one's enemies to the vultures persists.
Similarly the Egyptians-- the celebrated Merneptah Stele of roughly 1200 BCE, cheerfully recounts how the Pharaoh obliterated his enemies, including Canaan, Libya and Israel.
The "Assyrians" generally refer to the neo-Assyrian Empire, roughly 900 to 600 BCE, later Mesopotamians who have the good fortune for historians to have been abundantly written about, but don't seem terribly different in their capacity to put the boot in.
So defeated parties at the end of the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age didn't get any Geneva Conventions . . . the brutal fate of Midian in the Old Testament is unsurprising, and probably reasonably accurate for at least some city conquests. Murder or sacrifice of children is talked about more than occasionally, and probably was done more than occasionally.
See:
Law, Helen H. “Atrocities in Greek Warfare.” The Classical Journal, vol. 15, no. 3, 1919, pp. 132–147.
Lanni, Adriaan. “The Laws of War in Ancient Greece.” Law and History Review, vol. 26, no. 3, 2008, pp. 469–489.
PROSE, FRANCINE. “Genocide Without Apology: Parsing the Book of Exodus.” The American Scholar, vol. 72, no. 2, 2003, pp. 39–43.