In 734 BCE, King Ahaz of Judah faced an immediate crisis. King Rezin of Damascus and King Pekah of Israel had joined forces and invaded his kingdom. According to Isaiah 7, they even intended to depose him and replace him with another ruler. Ahaz responded by appealing to King Tiglath-pileser III of Assyria, saying: “I am your servant and vassal. Come up and save me from the kings of Damascus and Israel.” He sent silver and gold from the temple and palace, and Assyria intervened.

From the perspective of international-relations theory, Ahaz’s decision raises a deceptively simple question: was he “bandwagoning” or “balancing”? In traditional balance-of-power theory, balancing means opposing a stronger power, either by strengthening oneself or by joining forces with others, whereas bandwagoning means aligning with the stronger side rather than resisting it. The distinction seems straightforward: weaker states can either combine against power or accommodate it.

At first sight, Ahaz appears to have bandwagoned. Assyria was by far the strongest power in the Near East. Damascus, Israel and Judah were comparatively small kingdoms operating under the shadow of a rapidly expanding empire. Rather than joining Rezin and Pekah in resisting Tiglath-pileser, Ahaz aligned himself with the strongest actor in the system. In the most straightforward sense, he chose the stronger side. But this interpretation depends on what exactly states are supposed to balance against.

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When studying Assyrian imperialism, one encounters a striking paradox: the phenomenon is unusually well documented, yet unusually difficult to view from any other perspective than an Assyrian one. Royal inscriptions describe military campaigns and diplomatic exchanges in considerable detail, but they do so through the highly ideological voice of the Assyrian king. Sources produced by the kingdoms confronted with Assyrian imperial ambitions, by contrast, are far scarcer. This makes the biblical book of 2 Kings exceptionally valuable: it preserves something we rarely possess for the Neo-Assyrian period: a sustained account of how smaller states actually dealt with Assyrian power.

Its value lies especially in the practical details. The text shows rulers paying tribute, building alliances, invoking external support, and choosing between resistance or accommodation, as well as the domestic political struggles that could shape those decisions. These are precisely the kinds of processes that Assyrian royal inscriptions tend to reduce to formulaic categories such as loyalty, submission and rebellion.

Read alongside the Assyrian evidence and through an international-relations lens, 2 Kings therefore offers a rare opportunity to examine imperialism as an interactive political process: not simply as the advance of an overwhelmingly powerful empire imposing its will, but as the product of repeated encounters between Assyria and local actors pursuing their own strategies of survival and autonomy.

Continue reading “How Israel navigated Assyrian power”

At the end of my previous post, I suggested that members of the Babylonian elite may already have been in contact with Cyrus before he invaded Babylonia in 539 BCE. Hedging their bets, they may have concluded that accepting the victorious warlord as their new king was preferable to risking a prolonged and destructive war. But this raises a more fundamental question. From our perspective, Babylonians deliberately helping Cyrus replace Nabonidus looks like collaboration with a foreign conqueror taking over their country. Yet that perspective is shaped by hindsight: we know what Cyrus’s victory eventually led to.

Open a historical atlas and compare the Near East before and after 539 BCE. On the first map, Mesopotamia, the Levant and much of northern Arabia are parts of the Babylonian Empire. To the east and north lies the rapidly expanding dominion of Cyrus. Turn the page and the Babylonian Empire has disappeared. Almost everything is now part of the Persian or Achaemenid Empire.

Maps make the transition wonderfully clear. Perhaps too clear. Nobody living in Babylon in October 539 BCE knew that the colour of their empire had just changed. Nor did they know that historians would divide Near Eastern history into a Neo-Babylonian period ending in 539 BCE and an Achaemenid period beginning immediately afterwards. They experienced a sequence of events: Nabonidus was defeated in battle, upon which Cyrus entered Babylon and became king. Whether this amounted to the destruction of one empire and its incorporation into another is already an interpretation.

Continue reading “Was Babylon conquered at all?”

In my previous post, I asked a deceptively simple question: why did Cyrus invade Babylonia in 539 BCE? With hindsight, the answer seems obvious. Cyrus the Great was building the Persian Empire, Babylonia was the next great prize, and after defeating the Babylonian army at the Battle of Opis he simply continued his victorious march. Sippar surrendered without battle, Nabonidus was captured, Babylon itself was occupied without a siege, and Cyrus became its king.

But Cyrus did not have the benefit of hindsight. When he embarked on the campaign, he could not know that one battle would be enough. A prolonged war against the wealthy cities of Babylonia, culminating in a siege of Babylon itself, was entirely conceivable. Yet that war never happened.

I ended the previous post with another possibility. Perhaps the military campaign recorded in the Nabonidus Chronicle was only the visible half of the story. Perhaps Cyrus had reason to expect that once he defeated Nabonidus in the field, influential Babylonians would accept him. What if he had already been negotiating with them?

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In October 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great conquered the Babylonian Empire in one swift campaign. He defeated the Babylonian army at the Battle of Opis, captured the last Babylonian king Nabonidus, and took the city of Babylon without a battle. The Babylonian Empire thus became part of the rapidly expanding Persian Empire. At least, that is how we usually tell the story. I have often wondered how an empire as powerful and prestigious as Babylonia could fall so easily to a foreign conqueror. But perhaps we have been asking the wrong question.

We know surprisingly little about what actually happened. Our most important contemporary narrative source, the Nabonidus Chronicle, reduces the decisive events to a handful of brief paragraphs. Later Babylonian texts like the Cyrus Cylinder tell us how Cyrus’s new regime wanted his accession to be understood. And Greek authors like Herodotus and Xenophon provide elaborate yet unreliable stories written long after the event. But none of them gives us access to the political calculations taking place behind the scenes.

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Op donderdag 3 september 2026 presenteerde ik in het Rijksmuseum van Oudheden mijn nieuwe boek, Een jaar in Babylon. In dat boek neem ik de lezer mee naar Babylon in 539 voor Christus: het jaar waarin de Perzische koning Cyrus de Grote de stad innam en een einde maakte aan het Babylonische Rijk.

Tijdens de boekpresentatie stond ik stil bij een van de merkwaardigste aspecten van die gebeurtenis. In de beroemde Cyruscilinder wordt Cyrus namelijk niet voorgesteld als de buitenlandse veroveraar die hij was, maar als een bevrijder die met instemming van de oppergod Marduk naar Babylon kwam en door de bevolking feestelijk werd onthaald. Waarom beschreven de Babyloniërs hun eigen veroveraar op die manier?

Hieronder lees je de tekst van mijn toespraak tijdens de boekpresentatie, waarin ik die vraag probeer te beantwoorden. Daarbij gaat het uiteindelijk niet alleen om Cyrus, maar vooral om de Babyloniërs zelf: om hun beeld van hun stad, hun goden en hun verleden, en om het verhaal waarmee zij probeerden te begrijpen dat hun wereld in 539 voor Christus voorgoed was veranderd.

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Around 1250 BCE, the Hittite Empire was one of the great powers of the ancient Near East. From their capital at Hattusa in central Anatolia, its “Great Kings” ruled most of Anatolia and Syria. They corresponded with the rulers of Egypt and Assyria as equals, fought Egypt for control of the Levant, and repeatedly intervened in affairs along the Aegean coast. The kingdom of Wilusa, commonly identified with Bronze Age Troy, belonged to their diplomatic sphere.

Only a few centuries later, however, this empire had almost completely disappeared from historical memory. Assyrian kings still knew a land called Hatti, but by then the name referred primarily to Syria, not to the former empire ruled from central Anatolia. The Hebrew Bible also mentions Hittites, or Bĕnê Ḥēt, but presents them mostly as one of the peoples of Canaan. Nothing suggests that its authors knew of a great kingdom once ruled from Hattusa.

The absence is equally striking in Greek tradition. The Homeric epics preserve a story about a war fought at Troy, yet they contain no recognizable memory of the powerful kingdom that had once dominated the lands immediately to its east and regarded Wilusa as part of its political world.

The name of Hatti had survived, as had scattered cultural traditions. But the empire itself — its capital, rulers and place in the international order — had apparently been forgotten. How could one of the greatest powers of the Late Bronze Age disappear so completely from memory?

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During the tenth and ninth centuries BCE, kings such as Aššur-dān II (r. 934–912 BCE), Adad-nārārī II (r. 911–891 BCE), Tukultī-Ninurta II (r. 890–884 BCE), and Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859 BCE) restored Assyrian rule over much of northern Mesopotamia, laying the foundations of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Their inscriptions suggest that they were well aware of following in the footsteps of earlier conquerors. They repeatedly invoked rulers from the Middle Assyrian period, such as Adad-nārārī I (r. 1295–1264 BCE), Shalmaneser I (r. 1263–1234 BCE), Tukultī-Ninurta I (r. 1233–1197 BCE) and Tiglath-pileser I (r. 1114–1076 BCE), who had extended Assyrian power across northern Mesopotamia centuries earlier.

The early Neo-Assyrian kings recalled lands conquered by their predecessors, cities that had once belonged to Assyria and peoples that had subsequently stopped paying tribute, using these precedents to justify their claims. The Assyrian scribes could apparently connect particular kings with particular places and events.

Such references are often taken to show that the early Neo-Assyrian kings knew the full territorial extent of the Middle Assyrian Kingdom and consciously sought to restore it. There is some truth in this interpretation. Their knowledge of earlier Assyrian rule undoubtedly shaped how they presented their campaigns. But knowing that a predecessor conquered a certain land is not the same as understanding the historical circumstances of that conquest. The Assyrians remembered facts about their past. But did they also understand the world in which those events had occurred?

Continue reading “Did Neo-Assyrian kings remember the Bronze Age?”

When I tell people I specialise in the ancient Near East, they often assume that my fascination must have something to do with the modern Middle East. It is an understandable assumption. I grew up in the shadow of 9/11 and the War on Terror, with Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Syria and Iran rarely far from the headlines. Then, somewhere along the way, I developed a fascination with Assyrians and Babylonians and eventually decided to devote a considerable part of my life to studying them. Surely there must be a connection.

For a long time, I resisted that idea. Whenever someone suggested that studying the ancient Near East must help me understand the modern Middle East, I felt an instinctive urge to point out how different the two are. There are roughly two and a half millennia between the fall of Babylon and the world we see on the evening news. Languages, religions, political institutions and entire peoples have appeared and disappeared in the meantime. You will not understand Saddam Hussein by studying Nebuchadnezzar, nor will an Assyrian royal inscription explain Islamic State.

More importantly, the suggestion seemed to contain an assumption that bothered me: that my interest somehow needed a modern justification. I do not study Babylon because it is useful. I study it because Babylon interests me. Nobody needs to explain why Imperial Rome is worth knowing about by demonstrating its usefulness for understanding today’s Italy. Yet with the ancient Near East, I sometimes feel expected to explain what this rather obscure subject can teach us about the world we live in. “It helps us understand the Middle East today” would provide a convenient answer, but I have never wanted to give it.

And yet I have gradually come to suspect that I was objecting to the wrong thing. There is a difference between studying the past in order to understand the present and acknowledging that the present influences the questions we ask of the past. I may have no interest in turning Assyria into an allegory for American foreign policy, but I am still a child of my time.

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When watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, I noticed something interesting. Nolan seems to place Odysseus and the other returning heroes of the Trojan War firmly within the world of the Sea Peoples: the mysterious seaborne warriors who swept across the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BC and even challenged the mighty Egyptian Empire.

It’s an attractive idea. The Trojan War is traditionally dated to roughly the same period as the Bronze Age Collapse, and some of the peoples mentioned in Egyptian inscriptions have even been linked to the Greeks who fought at Troy. Perhaps Odysseus and his crew were themselves among the Sea Peoples. As it turns out, Nolan is far from the first to make that connection.

Continue reading “Does the Odyssey contain memories of the Sea Peoples?”