Can You Dig It? Archeology and Assyria

We look at archeology from the fictional Indiana Jones to the real Walter Andrae and what it means for historians through the lens of learning about the ancient Assyrians.  

Transcript

Can you Dig It? Archeology and Assyria  

June 2023

“Every archaeologist knows in his heart why he digs. He digs, in pity and humility, that the dead may live again, that what is past may not be forever lost, that something may be salvaged from the wreck of ages.”

 Geoffrey Bibby, The Testimony of the Spade

“Archaeology holds all the keys to understanding who we are and where we come from.”

Sarah Parcak

“All your life has been spent in pursuit of archaeological relics. Inside the Ark are treasures beyond your wildest aspirations. You want to see it opened as well as I. Indiana; we are simply passing through history. This, this is history.”

Rene Belloq, the mercenary archeologist villain in Raiders of the Lost Ark

“That Belongs in a museum!”

Young and adult Indiana Jones from The Last Crusade

I love the Indiana Jones movies. Though I will probably be disappointed by the latest one, Destiny of Dial, as I have been by the latest Star Wars, Star Trek, and Lord of the Rings productions, I still have those first three movies (I omit Crystal Skull). Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, and The Last Crusade were exciting, adventurous, and funny. One of my favorite moments. When his long lost love, Marion Ravenswood, says to Indy, “Your not the man I knew ten years ago.” And Indy responds, “It’s not the years; it’s the mileage.” There are days I know precisely how Indy felt.

But Indy himself was about as much of an archeologist as Lara Croft or Rick O’Connell from the Mummy series. Tomb raiding and treasure hunting look like great fun in the movies, but real archeology is real work. Often hot, cold, tedious, backbreaking, and thankless work.  

I have been on actual archeological digs. At my school, Professor Ronald J Mason was a good teacher and an even better man. I cannot forget that he had a sign on his office door saying, “My wife is an archeologist too; she really digs me.” Even as a callow 19-year-old, I was a sucker for that sort of cringe joke that underlay genuine affection for one’s mate. But unlike Jones or Croft, Mason was the real thing, as I can attest. One of the digs I went to was an Oneida Native American site in Northern Wisconsin. These sites resulted from forced removal from eastern locations, including New York, around the early 1800s. Later we will see the pioneers in forced displacement, but this was an American version for me.  

The Oneida dig yielded no secret passages, booby traps, or solid gold totems sitting on a dais guarded by primitives armed with spears and blow guns. Nor were the pottery and building foundations protected by some 600-year-old Knight who would speak modern English. My nit with The Last Crusade was the Knight guarding the holy grail should have spoken either Latin or English nearer to Chaucer than Boris Johnson.   

No, my dig was a lot of brushing. Every six months, I turn myself over to a dental hygienist who lectures me about flossing. But with Professor Mason, I brushed enough to clean the teeth of a fair-sized Chicago suburb. 

And did all of this brushing yield an Ark that I might use to gain worldly domination over my fellow humans, only to have my face melted for my hubris by the wrath of god? Not quite. My time there yielded about 16 pottery shards comprising parts of three vases. No, it was not some jade diamond as in the Mummy movies, and fortunately, I did not inadvertently release some ancient Oneida wendigo that would yield doom to the world. But what I did find was exciting in its own right.  

These vases showed us so many things. What was these people’s technological prowess? How did they manage water and food? What was the writing on the pottery? Where were the shards? Find enough, and you can discern the size of the populations and how far they ranged. But the painstaking nature of the work was not for me. Enough days with a tiny brush, kneeling all day in the dirt in hot summers or the snow in freezing winters, was not my life’s ambition. Instead, I would take the extraordinary work of those like Professor Mason, write the findings into the record, and use them to tell a piece of the story of humanity.

National Geographic describes archeology as studying the human past using material remains. These remains can be any objects people created, modified, or used. The archaeological record includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.

In thinking of this definition against history, I like this interpretation from the Oklahoma Historical Society, “How are history and archaeology related? History and archaeology both study historical people and things. Specifically, historians study older documents and artifacts and create an interpretation of the past for the public. Archaeologists excavate artifacts that both archaeologists and historians study. Archaeologists also look at historical documents but typically use them for background information on a site. History and archaeology study very similar things but do so from different viewpoints.”

How are history and archaeology different?

Archaeologists are more concerned with physical evidence (artifacts); historians rely more on documentary evidence to support their work. When we look at the Assyrians, we have thousands of documents, including everything from lists of wares in a trading caravan to the names of their rulers. With translations, I can study these documents. But since they were buried for thousands of years, I need the archeologists to find the documents before I can do my work.  

Sarah Helen Parcak is as close as you will get to a famous archeologist. She has pioneered using satellite imagery to identify potential archaeological sites in Egypt, other sites in the former Roman Empire, and Central America. She became so famous with this technique that she was featured on talk shows like Stephen Colbert when he was not busy interviewing actors or sycophantically providing platforms to liberal politicians. Parcak is a professor of Anthropology and director of the Laboratory for Global Observation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In partnership with her husband, Greg Mumford, she directs survey and excavation projects in the Faiyum, Sinai, and Egypt’s East Delta. “When you think about archaeology, archaeology is the only field that allows us to tell the story of 99 percent of our history before 3,000 BCE and writing.”

I love how she works with her husband. Historians are often married to people with other vocations, but archeologists seem to be married to other archeologists. Thinking this has to do with the nature of the profession. However, as with many of these academicians, my evaluation of Parcak is not without mixed feelings. She is avowed liberal and has some detrimental things about Trump supporters and even Rush Limbaugh. This also explains her appearance on Colbert. The archeologist, who is an avowed conservative, no matter how significant their accomplishments, would not get a place that couch. Parcak epitomizes that even if one is excellent at one thing, one can be ignorant of others. But her foolish political actions do not deter from the value of bringing modern science and techniques to the field of archeology.  

Which brings me to the Assyrians.  

If one can’t get enough of Babylonian and Assyrian history, one could do much worse than one of the foremost scholars of this period, Yale Professor Eckart Frahm. In his Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire, the author tells the epic story of Assyria and its formative role in global history. Assyria’s wide-ranging conquests have long been known from the Hebrew Bible and later Greek accounts. But nearly two centuries of research now permit a rich picture of the Assyrians and their empire beyond the battlefield: their vast libraries and monumental sculptures, elaborate trade and information networks, and the crucial role of royal women. “The Assyrian Civilization we have come to know is one marked by a complex mix of continuity and change, as it wrestled – often more successfully than neighboring kingdoms – with major historical challenges, from attacks by foreign powers to changes in rainfall to major cultural shifts. Over some 1400 years until its rapid fall in the late seventh century BCE, the Assyrian State manages to preserve and cultivate a particular identity while simultaneously reinventing itself.” 

Frahm notes that Victorian-era archeologists from Britain, France, and Germany were more in the mold of Indiana Jones than Ronald Mason, with characters such as Paul Emile Botta, a treasure hunter and amateur archeologist who was a government official at the time that both the discovery of some Assyrian artifacts, coupled with a European desire to learn more about ancient peoples. One of the key breakthroughs was both a translation of Assyrian cuneiform and the discovery, not in Mesopotamia, but in Turkey, of thousands of documents that shed light on the origins of the Assyrian state. In fact, as Frahm shows, Assyria began not as an aggressive kingdom but as a trading oligarchy based in the city of Ashur. The location in Turkey was a trading post. It was only later, in the middle period from the 1300s to the 900s and the true imperial period, also called the Neo Assyrian, from 934 through 609 BCE, that Assyria taught (all too briefly) in school textbooks came into being.  

I do like the notation of the “First Empire,” and as an ex-marketer, I get it. Want to sell something entertaining, put in a “first” or a “last” in the title. When Marvel released the Captain America movie, they called it The First Avenger. 

The 2018 movie about Neil Armstrong was called First Man, and my favorite is Sylvester Stallone’s First Blood. The problem came with the sequel set in Vietnam when they called it Rambo: First Blood, Part II. Wait, shouldn’t it really have been titled Rambo: 2nd Blood? The corollary is the Last everything, like the Last Emperor, about the end of the Qing Dynasty. It could have been called Last Empire as a bookend to Frahm’s First Empire. Heck, there is even a Rambo: Last Blood. Well, until either studio or Stallone needs another check. Given the actor is now 76, they might call it Rambo: last blood - transfusion. But I digress.  

In discussing the Assyrian Empire as a prototype for later states, Frahm’s contention is highly plausible, “Apart from occupying a prominent place in the cultural memory of later civilizations, the Assyrian state also served, first directly and then mediated through more remote successor states, as a model eagerly emulated by the subsequent imperial powers of Western Asia, from the Babylonian and Persian Empires to the Abbasid and Ottoman Caliphates of the Islamic Period and Beyond.

As noted, I love Frahm’s book, but not confident it was the first empire. Let us define the imperial concept as “an extensive group of states or countries under a single supreme authority.” As much as progressives or Marxists like to say, America is not an Empire. Though we certainly boast of diversity, we are not separate nations welded together under monarchial authority. And as much as divisive elements on the left would have us believe, we feature one flag, and as Americans, we are one people. When a group of Romans would conquer Spain, Africa, or Greece and install a governor over them, that was Empire. When the Moguls, originally from Afghanistan, conquered India, that too was an Empire. And though we would not officially use that term today, China, with a single ruler, Xi Jinping, and having conquered from Tibet to Xinjiang, is really an Empire. 

So under this definition, I give you one of my favorite historical figures if only for his super cool name, Sargon, the Akkadian. Joshua Mark, writing for World History Encyclopedia, notes, “Sargon’s relatively speedy conquest of the entire Mesopotamian plain is startling, given the inability of Sumerian kings to control any area much more significant than two or three cities [but the Sumerians] were suffering from an increased gap between elite leadership and poor laborers. [The rich] used their combined religious and secular power to claim as much as three-quarters of the land in any given city for themselves and talk about inequity. Sargon’s relatively easy conquest of the area (not to mention his constant carping on his own non-aristocratic background) may reveal a successful appeal to the downtrodden members of Sumerian society to come over to his side.

By presenting himself as a ‘man of the people,’ he was able to garner support for his cause and took Sumer with relative ease. Once the south of Mesopotamia was under his control, he then went on to create the first multinational empire in history.”  

The issue with Frahm’s claim is Sargon predated the middle Assyrian period and their first conquests by about 900 years. And even before then, we have Hammurabi. The Babylonian kings who came before Hammurabi founded a relatively minor city-state in 1894 BCE, which controlled little territory outside the city itself. But In just a few years, Hammurabi (yes, the law code guy and the subject of a previous podcast by yours truly) succeeded in uniting all of Mesopotamia under his rule. It sounds like another Empire, which was about 600 years before the Assyrian imperial state.

Returning to archeology, Frahm introduces us to a German named Walter Andrae, who pursued digs at the beginning of the 20th century, before World War I. “Whereas the focus at other sites had been on excavating royal palaces, Andrae and his team directed most of their efforts to study private houses and temples, including that of the Assyrian state god Ashur, the namesake of the founding city. Andrae’s excavation techniques were highly innovative: he recorded find spots of individual objects, devised new methods to trace walls made of mud brick, and carefully analyzed the archeological layers that had accumulated over time to make sense of the site’s complex stratigraphy. Archeology thus slowly transcended its previous incarnation as a hunt for ancient treasure.” I like to think of an evolution from the Indy like Botta to Andrae, to my own Mason, to Parcak, who uses the latest science to learn where the sites exist. One of the differentiations that Frahm notes is that Egypt built with stone, whereas the Mesopotamians from Sargon to the Assyrians to the Nebuchadnezzar version of Babylonians who succeeded them built with mud brick. 

I would add that despite conquests from Arabs in the 600s and the British in the 19th century, Egypt did not experience the same constant tramp of armies trudging along the shores of the Tigris and Euphrates.  

One of the more interesting aspects of Assyrian imperial rule was the mass deportation of populations from one province to another, including for work products in the major cities, especially during the Neo-Assyrian period, to the city of Nineveh. A modern-day, fictional example might be the Hunger Games Panem, where all the provinces existed to serve the capital. When we think of the conflict over Israel, the Palestinians contend that they were there first, and Israel is the conquering oppressor. Of course, Israel pre-dated Palestine, but the deportation of Jews culminated in the horrible Jewish diaspora following the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem in 70 CE. The first Jewish exile was the Assyrian exile, the expulsion from the Kingdom of Israel (Samaria) begun by Tiglath-Pileser III of Assyria in 733 BCE. This process was completed by Sargon II with the destruction of the kingdom in 722 BCE, concluding a three-year siege of Samaria begun by Shalmaneser V.

Frahm ends his introduction with a declaration of why so many of here the whisper of the muse Clio in our ears. “This ancient civilization has actually much more in common with us than one might think. Assyria produced many features that, for better or worse, are still to be found in the modern world: from long-distance trade, sophisticated communications networks, and the state-sponsored promotion of literature, science, and the arts to mass deportation, extreme violence in enemy countries, and the widespread use of political surveillance at home. Assyria, in other words, has much to teach us.”