According to the Greek historian Herodotus (Histories 1.107–130), Astyages, king of the Medes, was haunted by a unsettling prophecy. He had dreamed that his daughter Mandane would give birth to a child who would overthrow him and take his throne. Determined to prevent this, he ordered his trusted servant Harpagus to kill the baby, named Cyrus. Harpagus, however, could not bring himself to kill the child and instead handed him over to a shepherd, who raised him as his own son.

Years later, Astyages discovered that Cyrus was still alive. Furious that Harpagus had disobeyed him, he came up with a terrible punishment. He invited Harpagus to a feast, secretly served him the flesh of his own son, and revealed the awful truth only after the meal. Harpagus hid his anger but never forgot what Astyages had done. When Cyrus eventually rebelled against his grandfather, Astyages put Harpagus in command of the Median army. Harpagus took the opportunity to get his revenge, turning against his former master and helping Cyrus win the war. In the end, the very prophecy that Astyages had tried so hard to prevent came true, largely because of his own actions.

Herodotus presents Astyages as a cruel and paranoid ruler who brought about his own downfall. Yet this well-known story tells us surprisingly little about the historical Astyages. Herodotus also tells us that Astyages succeeded his father Cyaxares, ruled for 35 years, and was connected to the Lydian royal family through marriage. But apart from these details, almost everything he tells us about Astyages concerns how he lost his throne.

Continue reading “Astyages: the king behind the villain”

Those familiar with the history of the ancient Near East will have heard of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Empires. They may also have encountered the debate over the existence of a Median Empire. But was there ever a Scythian Empire? According to the Greek historian Herodotus, there was. In Histories 1.103–106, he describes a Scythian king named Madyes, son of Protothyes, who allegedly ruled over ‘Asia’ for 28 years and led his warriors as far south as Palestine, where the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik I persuaded him to turn back.

Madyes is also said to have driven back the Median king Cyaxares during his first attempt to besiege Nineveh, the Assyrian capital. The Scythians subsequently subjugated the Medes, imposing tribute while at the same time plundering their territories. After having suffered 28 years of humiliations, Cyaxares invited the Scythian leaders to a banquet, got them drunk, and murdered them, thereby restoring Median supremacy, before fulfilling his original ambition of taking Nineveh.

It is a compelling story, but one that is difficult to reconcile with what we know about this period. Neither Assyrian royal inscriptions and correspondence, Babylonian chronicles, nor the Old Testament mention a Scythian Interregnum, or even widespread Scythian raids across the region, during the latter half of the seventh century BCE.

Continue reading “The Scythian Empire and the limits of speculation”

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.

Continue reading “Was Ahaz of Judah bandwagoning or balancing?”

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?

Continue reading “Did the Babylonians invite Cyrus?”

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.

Continue reading “Why was Babylon so easy to conquer?”

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.

Continue reading “Waarom verwelkomde Babylon zijn eigen veroveraar?”

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?

Continue reading “The empire that disappeared from memory”

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?”