"Within the confines of the land of [Assyria], he imposed an ordinance, lest any secret go out."

Tukulti-Ninurta Epic

The narrative of Assyria is that it is the model for an evil empire, because it formed the matrix for such stories for the Judaic Kingdoms, and influenced the Greeks. In the present the Iraqi Christians use the reverse narrative – peddling apologia for the Assyrians as a way of asserting their foundational myth against Islamic culture.

These are important aspects to examine, because they fill in our present cultural imperatives.

[Part I is here]

Those who see Israel as the fulcrum of US policy, or who are ideologically hard Zionist, used the narratives of the evil empire, rooted deeply in Neo-Assyria, to justify attacking Saddam. Those who adopted a stance rooted in the humanist traditions were far less strident. Saddam himself clearly modeled his reign on the imperial powers of the past, and his attempts to conquer both the river valley and project power outwards were part of imperatives for the river basin power from time immemorial.

However, it is also important to think about the lessons of Neo-Assyria from the context of their own time and place. Judah was a minor speed bump on their road to Egypt, Greek a distant trading hinterland of no consequence, and Christianity and Islam were in the unimaginable future a millennium and more away. In their own context they had their own problems. But these problems are generally misunderstood, because their moment in history is only recently emerging in outline for what it was: the end of a "Dark Age".

The Problem of Neo-Antiquity

We are all familiar with the "Dark Ages" after the fall of the Roman Empire. Across the Eurasian world, waves of invaders pressured existing states, toppling the Roman Empire in the East, and ushering in an age of instability, decay and change. States across Eurasia came to a remarkably similar idea – the decentralized defensive system which we have come to call "feudalism". From centralized empires, to decentralized micro-states, and then a period of rapid conquest in the form of the Islamic empire and Charlemagne, followed by renewed fragmentation. The division between antiquity and medieval is clear enough across the Eurasian world that it remains in place. However, the Post-Antiquity Dark Age is not the only period of collapse of trade and civilization, there were several before, and one could argue mini-dark ages afterward.

In the ancient world, one of these ran roughly from 1100BC through 750 BC. It was seen in Greece, with the Dorian invasion and the loss of writing in Linear A. It corresponds to the "Third Intermediate Period" of Egypt beginning with the split of the nation into two parts, in the 21st dynasty, through the 24th dynasty, running roughly from 1070BC through 715BC. The Hittite Empire collapsed at the same time – roughly around 1160BC.

A similar moment occurs in the history of Babylon, then under the Kassite dynasties, when Babylon was invaded and sacked by Assyria in 1225 BC. The Kassite dynasty – which had restored literate administration, unified north and south Babylon and created a centralized administration, began to descend into decentralized tribalism. By the early 12th century, the Kassites were driven from power by another ancient people – the Elamites. But by 1100BC the short-lived, as it is often described, Elamite empire was over.

History of this period beginning in 1100BC is often listed as "fragmentary" or incomplete, and dominated by the collapse of trade. There have been several theories advanced, from the "Sea Peoples" to environmental factors. But explanations as to why this Dark Age began are less interesting than the proximate result: a dramatic shift in power and and structure of the ancient world In fact, it is appropriate I feel to call this division within antiquity almost as large as the later age that would divide ancient from Modern worlds. This period created a gap in history which later peoples would see as being a veil across the continuity of history. The Greeks, having collapsed into post-literacy, felt this the most strongly, but in separate fields the appellation "neo-" shows up across enough sources to mark a point where there is a general change in the texture of civilization. It extends beyond this area: one can argue that the Zhou overthrow of the Shang, and then the division of the Zhou represents a not directly related, but similar moment in Chinese history.

In short, this dark age separates meso-antiquity of the great river empires and a trading system in the Mediterranean and Meso-Eurasian area, from a neo-antiquity which would spawn the great empires such as Persia, Rome and the beginning of Imperial China. This shift is the problem of neo-antiquity.

The Light of Dark Ages

Study of Dark Ages is problematic. On one hand they are defined, very directly, as the collapse of centralized administration, the reduction in sources, the withering of trade and the end of long chains of continuity. On the other hand, the are often periods of intense vibrancy intellectually and present a diversity of state models. This dark age is no exception – Judea and Israel, Phoenicia and the Elamite Empire are all states that came to power because of the weakening of old central sources. The Greek city states developed their particular culture in the vacuum of Hittite power.

Such periods often produce new ideas, or new ways of applying old ones. What we think of today as currency developed a key focus on portability in this period – in fact, the Chinese character for money is based on a depiction of the cowrie shell that they used for money. It is the development of coinage – starting in a number of places circa 800BC - that helps mark the end the period, with the ability to have a widely useable medium of exchange.

The Assyrians, while brutal even by standards of the time, were the creators, not just of individual pieces of a tool kit, but of an entire complex of culture and organization. In the early part of this dark age they were to be a center of organization which thrust outward, they would be, in a sense, the first model empire for those that followed, having many of the key features which would later be associated in more developed and elaborated form with the Roman and Qin/Han Empire – two of the pinnacle states of that epoch.

One of the most important of these was the development of a war empire, and the bureaucracy to support it. It is this cultural complex – not merely its constituent parts, that made the Assyrians both successful enough to project power all over the Eastern Mediterranean and meso-Eurasian world, but also assured that their rule would be unstable and chaotic.

The beginning of this story can be found in the Tukulti-Ninurta Epic – which is about the conflict between an Assyrian monach in the 13th century BC and the king of Babylon. The epic, its sources of conflict, and its meanings are important to what follows, because it comes in at the beginning of the Assyrian cultural matrix.

First is the basis of the conflict, Babylon at this time is under the rule of the Kassite dynasties, which had held sway over it for four hundred years. The Kassites were not Babylonian to begin with, but had been incorporated into Babylon's culture. A large part of this is in the nature of local divinity religious systems. In some times and places, there are certain localities which are far more productive than all others, there are often particular skills and exact techniques to exploiting that locality – and often these are codified in the form of religious wisdom. Local divinities, those who oversee the particular place, often change name, are subsumed into other cults and sects, and have varying aspects. This is different from concept gods such as the Indo-European sky god known to the Greeks as Zeus, and who still lives on in our word "theology". The concept god, being a construction of language, retains his or her name strongly. The place god, loaded with the wisdom of a locality is more flexible.

The Assyrian epic stands on the cusp between the local god idea and the concept god idea. We are accustomed to thinking of conceptual aspects of divinity as being more sophisticated, and more advanced. But this is merely our perspective: the early herders had concept gods, gods which represented portable skill sets which could work over a wide region of movement. The city states of Sumer, Ur, Babylon – and Ashur and Nineveh – represented more localized deities, but their culture and religion was worlds more sophisticated than the concept gods of the tribes that surrounded them.

The local divinity also served to do important cultural work. In a place economics, invaders seeking the advantages of that place must come to terms with the local magic. Thus, while they may change god names – and often do – the invaders must sill come to terms with the local magic, and with the means it is stored, transmitted and maintained. This means learning the language of the priest-priestess caste, it means coming to a modus vivendi with even relatively small local cults, including the subsuming of those cults. This is a powerful force for assimilating invaders, even ones which are culturally quite different. Often the process involves accepting the concept god as pantheon chief, and then populating the cast of local divinities around him. In many cases it means having the local goddess become an important part of a resurrection myth involving the sky god.

The problem with the epic, aside from the fact that it simply isn't very good as poetry, is that the Assyrians have a problem. While on one hand they want to make a claim of legitimacy over Babylon against the Kassite dynasty, on the other hand, they had no real basis to assert their own claim. The reason can be found in the structure of local divinity systems. The Assyrians controlled Ashur and Ninuwa, as well as numerous other important holy cities, in many cases we do not actually know when the worship in these cities began, since it predates written records. While the Assyrian poet, and in the case of this epic I must use the term loosely, knew that the Kassites being outsiders was enough to disqualify them from being legitimate, there was nothing within the complex of local divinity that gave him the power to assert a strong claim.

This is why the poem recites to the god over and over again the perfidity of the Kassites, and creates around its key god a structure of oaths. The logic of the poet runs that the Kassites are evil, because they have warred with Assyria – even though Assyria wanted the poem to justify going to war with Babylon under the Kassites.

That the poem's matrix is on a collision course with itself can be seen from how the Assyrians actually dealt with Babylon – they destroyed it utterly. The power of local divinity can only be broken by the destruction of the holy site itself. The modern apologists for the Assyrians have, with no more competence than any band of fanatics, of course find the rhetorical out – but this is because they have the benefit of living in an era where the answer is obvious. That answer is to create a compelling covenant between the God and his people, one that requires that the people act, not as the protectors of local knowledge, but as the defenders of a cultural concept.

Local Divinity and the Neo-Antiquity Problem

The basic assertion of these essays is that the United States has acted like Neo-Assyria in the Iraq War, and that the problems of the cultural matrix of Assyria are duplicated today. The problem of the Tukulti-Ninurta Epic is that on one hand it argues for a "Mandate of Heavan" historical consciousness, which asserts that the gods want history to go in a particular way, and that there is a destiny which is perverted by those who thwart this will. While divine kingship is older than the pyramids, and the assertion of divine favor present in the earliest records that can be called prose or poetry as opposed to book keeping, this historical consciousness stands distinct from local divinity worship.

Local divinity worship presupposes only two historical epochs – the "before", that time when there was no differentiation, that is no local difference, or that people were undifferentiated, and the "after" where there is a knowledge of place. This simple two part division can be elaborated to have an apocalyptic end with the gods fall, but does not need to. This stands in marked contrast to the sense of destiny portrayed in the epic. The problem is the poet cannot turn the corner from place worship, to the concept worship. He has the idea of oath taking and oath breaking as essential, but what oath can he use? It isn't as if the Assyrians were noted for keeping their word.

Coming as it does, at the beginning of the Assyrian imperial expansion, the poem proposes a sense of national destiny on one hand, but cannot get out of the worship of place on the other hand. This is why the Assyrians were forced to develop ethnic cleansing, and impale populations, or drive them out. Without place, what they are left with is a sense of racial superiority.

It is worth comparing this narrative with the edenic narrative in the Old Testament. Here the "before" of Adam and Eve is to be in paradise – without need for local knowledge. The eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and are driven out by their concept God. The story represents a religion that had acquired a sense of concept, and historical destiny, and married them to a sense of place. A concept God of wanderers had acquired a place in Jerusalem, but remained demanding that there be no localization of his cult. In fact, the story is almost a rejection of the fundamental tenet of local divinity.

The Assyrian poet cannot come up with a sophisticated covenant narrative which holds together the Isrealites in the bible – suffering, followed by a promised land. Babylon is the promised land for the Assyrians, but the cannot control it since it resists their cult of worship. The Assyrians knew early that control of trade was essential to their state ambitions. The poem mentions controlling trade and traders, and implies that the monarch took control of trade by force. The Assyrian empire was an attempt to create an end to end trading system, a project made ever more urgent by the progressive slide into decentralized semi-anarchy which was to occur around them as this ancient era Dark Age took hold.

It is from this that we see the genius of dark ages – that they are thrown onto the need to elaborate the cultural tool box. The later empires of neo-antiquity, while they drew froms and norms going far back, had developed a series of innovations which interlocked together. The first was a system of pantheons centered around concepts, rather than around localities. While divinities often had specific places which were their favored places, the god or goddess was where ever their roll was. This worked within another important change – the means by which bureaucracy, as we now call it, could be used to administer a standardized trading empire. Instead of trade between hotspots, which were culturally, politically and ethnically distinct, the empires of Neo-Antiquity to unity of heaven and unity on earth to be the same thing. The person of the emperor was not only divine, as had been true, but the will of expansion and historical narrative were as well. This was then the umbrella to implement a more specific body of technologies and ideas which allowed disparate parts of an empire to interface with each other – law, coinage, citizenship, standardization – all would be used to create a larger civic space. But this kind of empire was one that required particular cultural steps which would transform proto-concept gods of life style – as herding sky gods were, and place gods, and more often goddesses into a web that could encompass localization within a standardized universe.

The Assyrian epic is vaguely aware of this fact – oaths and trade live side by side. A god that could oversee oaths wants to be a god of a trading empire. The growth of the Assyrian power was a parallel push along the East-West axis of trade, the North-West South-East access of legitimacy, and along the North-South unification of the major centers of Hatti and Egyptian spheres. At the same time that the Assyrians are trying to build a trading empire based on the expansion by force, the Hebrews, Phoenecians and Hellenes were creating a different cultural matrix, one which was based on the expression, in writing, of a universe which could be apprehended through principles.

The Assyrians understood the importance of administration, and of adjudication – but these innovations were only the gate way to the creation of a standardized military. They created a military boot which was, as far as we know, unique to them. This allowed their armies to march farther, and, in some limited sense, use the technique of interior lines that Fredrick the Great would use millennia later. They had, for the time a very high "teeth to tail" – with as much of a third of their military being frontline combat troops. They had a standardized kit, and a staff organization which allowed them to move with great rapidity to frontiers of power. The Assyrian mobility would be equal in their time and place to the mobility of the Qin state, and only exceded by the Roman, Carthaginian and Greek city states which had combined naval operations. They would hold sway over what was, for their time, a vast territory.

Standardization of the military and its ability to project force, coupled with the understanding of the need for a trading based empire to support such a military, and a god complex which allowed both and enforced both, was the Neo-Assyrian cultural kit which they would build two successive empires upon.

America as Neo-Assyria

America in the present has the same problem as the Assyrians. Our status as a great power rests on a trading empire and the ability to standardize, but our religious cultural matrix has increasingly become one of place. It does not take much to elaborate this argument. Concept driven societies do not create "The Department of Homeland Security" because home is not a land. More over, the political science of support for reactionary politics and the localization of evangelical place cults is iron clad. In essence, the people of particular places, worship those places, and that is the God of the Republican Party, with its two "right poles" of dense support in the western edge of the great plains and in Appalachia.

The same conflict which tormented the Assyrians – how to claim the south with a local divinity cult – bedevils our own efforts to establish a stability in Iraq, these problems go back farther than the present.

As the military northern power, and as the power that represents the creation of a larger trade network by military force and standardization, the United States, no to put to fine a point on it, needs to represent a conceptually sophisticated universalist version of civic religion. In Iraq it has come face to face with two versions of Islam which are deeply emeshed in localization, and in the understanding of locality which allows them to exist in their place. The conceptual Allah still holds sway, but there are a host of local cults to the matyrs and saints of the Shia history which dominate practical politics. This is a common pattern for monotheism to backhandedly reinvent polytheism in the form of having local heros which represent the local knowledge.

Assyria, with its Ashur cult, attempted to do something similar to this, but ran into the problem that the Babylonians of their time were also attempting to find a way forward to neo-antiquity, and had hit upon a similar solution – the elevation of a god, in their case Marduk, to a powerful place in the pantheon. Thus equipped with a pantheon that had found a pyramid form of organization, the Babylonian state, in whatever hands, was able to push back, even to the point of dividing Assyrian brother against brother.

America's cult of locality is tied to evangelical and fundamentalist sects of Christianity here. It is dangerous to over flatten them, but the ability of immigration as an issue that is able to divide the ruling party shows that locality is an increasingly powerful factor in a religious and cultural complex. This complex dominates the thinking of the US military, its officer and enlisted corps, and as importantly, it is demonstrably capable of warping the thinking of the military in a variety of ways. By thinking about subjugation of Iraq as a matter of "my god is bigger than your god" it engages in the same behaviors – ethnic cleansing, destruction of central cities as holy sites, an obsessive focus on the creation of a temple city in Baghdad and – controversially, the opening to other locality cults – such as the Likud interpretations of Zionism, and the referenced but not thoroughly explored Assyrian apologists of today.

This last strand, as support for Iraqi Christians, and for the narrative that the Assyrian empire was "defending" a basin culture against mountain invaders, has not been often enough understood as part of the backdrop of pressure into Iraq, as a group that represents both an interest, and a form of zealotry which will support Iraq as a mission.

That we have moved from the construction of Iraq as part of the international order – which was referenced, however dishonestly, in the form of WMD in the apocalyptic context, and in the form of oil to run the globalized trade network that the US relies upon – to a localized view that the US must stay in the place called Iraq, and must have its own set of holy sites around which the US cult will be built. From building Democracy, to building temples to America.

The example of history does not bode well for this project, the Assyrians leveled Babylon, and when defeated, had Ninuwa leveled in return. They could never establish Ashur worship as predominant, they could not hold their empire because while they could invade and overthrow kingdoms such as Egypt and could pressure the Medes and repeatedly over run Babylon, without a cultural matrix that would incorporate, embrace and then overwhelm local cultural matrixes, they had to keep doing so.

The Assyrians and Americans both possessed the premier invasion forces of their eras, but without a conceptual religious and cultural framework, were forced to, over and over again, invade and subjugate, in order to support those military machines and their economic costs. The similarities of these machines – in terms of staff, cavalry – which the Assyrians used in large squadrons as shock waves – and the standardize infantry kit who was heavily armored against more lightly armored opponents – bears examination, thus the third part of this essay will look at the armies of Ashur, and the American sun king George Bush Jr.