This was exactly what I wanted, exactly when I wanted it. For some reason, ancient Mesopotamia has been suddenly fascinating to me again, and this history scratched an itch. It was quite dry in some places, largely focusing on conquest and political squabbles, but it also offered some fabulous letters. My favourites include the one from a boy to his mother, complaining that a peer of his at school, the son of his father's servant, has better new clothes than he does, and ends with the heartless chastisement that the other boy's mother, who only adopted him, evidently loves her son, while the letter writer's mother, who actually bore the letter writer from her body, evidently does not love him. There's also a plaintive letter from someone begging for his job back, which makes reference to three previous letters, and which was found UNOPENED 2500 years later.

I was very struck by the treatment of Ashurbanipal, who I was already familiar wtih somewhat from that magnificent exhibition at the British Museum back in 2019 or so. I had known that he was famous for creating this huge library of cuneiform texts--and he did do that!--but he was also kind of a Trumpean asshole, according to Ekhart Frahm, who loved to be seem as a mighty warrior, but actually arranged for oracles to tell him that it was okay to stay home rather than lead the troops; who wanted to be seen as a great hunter, but actually had to stage lion hunts in controlled circumstances to minimize the actual danger to himself; who wanted the reputation of being a great scholar, but whose own handwriting was pretty bad, and whose correspondants had to explain the difficult words to him in their letters. He was belligerant and prickly and totally sucked as a ruler, and it's rather satisfying to imagine him seeing his treatment in Frahm's book. 'Yes, yes, thanks for the library--those are great texts--but remember, dear reader, Ashurbanipal was not at all that cool.'

Frahm also offers perspectives on biblican characters that he claims are heavily influenced by Assyrian kings. Properties of the Jewish conception of a monotheistic God are in places directly lifted (he claims) from Assyrian proclamations sent around the conquered lands of Israel and Judah; as if, rather than accept the dictates of a mortal, secular ruler, the early Jews instead decided to attribute them to a God, as a kind of opposition literature. Christians, too, are interpreted in this way. I was very struck by Frahm's account of how the name Lucifer arose as a consequence of how Sennacherib was treated by his contemporaries at his downfall. They called him the bringer of light, a name he used for himself in his proclamations, but mockingly, rejoicing to see him brought low. Because he was so reviled by the people he conquered, the association between a conquering evildoer and the name 'lightbringer' was eventually applied to Satan. I don't know how accurate this is, because Frahm also tries to claim an Assyrian origin for the Bible story of Jonah and the whale that was not at all convincing, so maybe Frahm is just super keen on arguing that Everything Is Assyrian Actually. But this is a perfectly acceptable perspective from an Assyriologist.

What I really, really wanted more of, and what the book didn't give me, was more description of the linguistic situation of Assyria. There are occasional comments about things like, 'this name a western Semitic name, so this person was probably not ethnically Assyrian'; and we learn that Aramaic was the lingua franca of the empire, rather than the language the Assyrians spoke, but I never actually learnt what language the ethnic Assyrians spoke actually was! I had to go to Wikipedia to discover that it was also a Semitic language, but a type of Akkadian. And this linguistic sloppiness applies to names, as well. Sometimes names are given with the conventional transliteration of cuneiform spelling--e.g., Ashur-uballit; sometimes they're given their biblical spellings (e.g., Sharrum-ken is called Sargon after the first mention); and sometimes I don't know what's going on. Like, Ashurbanipal is clearly beginning wiht the Ashur- prefix that is so common in these king names, but why is it not hyphenated? And it was very, very late in the book before Frahm told us that Ashurbanipal's father, Esarhaddon, was also called Ashur-aha-iddina--i.e., had the same Ashur-prefix as all the others! I guess we're getting the biblical spelling for that, too? I just wanted some linguistic consistency! Give us all the names in Assyrian and tell us their Biblical counterparts! The whole point of this book is to lay out the history as revealed through the Assyrian texts, so why is Frahm letting the bible tell us how these names were spelled? 

But those are small matters. I next have a book about the history of Babylon, and I can't wait to dig into that.