Stian’s Reviews > Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire > Status Update

How people in the Assyrian Empire cursed and swore can be gauged from a small tablet from Nineveh inscribed with invectives against a certain Bel-etir. "Bel-etir, you fucked hostage, doubly so, with runny eyes, doubly so, with bulging eyes, doubly so, son of Ibâ, that missed period, that shit bucket of a fart factory, of a vile family, lackey of a dead god, of a house whose star has vanished from the heavens,...

The eldest daughter of King Esarhaddon and sister of his successor Ashurbanipal, Sherua-etirat never suffered from a lack of self-confidence. Druing the period when Ashurbanipal was still crown prince, she wrote a bullying letter to Ashurbanipal's wife Libbali-sharrat, making it quite clear that, as a blood relation of the Assyrian royal family, she - Sherua-etirat - held a far higher rank than her sister-in-law.

The history of religious thought is full of strange turns, but few new ideas in this sphere have been as serendipitous as the emergence of the devil from a dubious interpretation of a cosmological metaphor used in the Hebrew Bible to characterize an unlucky Near Eastern king killed on the battlefield - a king who, in all likelihood, was none other than Sargon II.

In a letter from Babylonia from the time of the Assyrian trade colonies, a young man berates his mother in a tone that many a modern parent of moody, brand-conscious teenagers will know only too well:
'From year to year, the clothes of the young gentlemen here become better, but you let my clothes get worse. . . . At a time when in our house wool is used up like bread, you have made me poor clothes. The son of ...

And so Assyria matters. "World history" does not begin with the Greeks or the Romans—it begins with Assyria.