What do you think are some of the lasting achievements of the Assyrian Empire? What I see for the lasting achievement of the ancient Assyrian, Neo-Assyrian Empire is that they established essentially a series of social changes whether directly as part of their policies, or perhaps accidentally, or even indirectly, a series of social changes that have profoundly affected not only the ancient Assyrians, but also our modern day societies. Whether we look at our ancient religions, our social structures, our trade patterns, our languages, artistic kinds of reflections and other kinds of material culture, a lot of these begin to change from the time of the Neo-Assyrians until later. I feel like the Neo-Assyrian empire really instigated a series of social changes that essentially influence our own worlds, whether it's through the economy, or through religion, or language. All these things we can see some repercussions of the ancient Assyrians somewhere in there. Well, clearly, the Assyrian empire's political structure had a substantial impact on later states. The Babylonian empire that followed in translatio imperii was the first one to emulate, especially in its bureaucracy, structures the Assyrians had been the first implement, including the provincial structure. It had a core area with the Assyrian king in charge and then numerous provinces where you had provincial governors who were responsible to the Assyrian kings, a pretty clearly defined chain of command, very elaborate road systems and so on and so forth. Later empires essentially followed this model as well. The Assyrians have shaped the concept, the very concept of Empire. They built an empire, a large empire, the largest empire which existed up to date and it existed for many, many generations. So it was an important milestone in human history. So the lasting achievements of the Assyrian empire I will classify them in two categories. The first one would be the idea of how to run an empire, how to create an empire, how to rule it. That was an important Assyrian innovation that was transmitted through the Babylonians through the Persians. On the other hand, they had a very important role as transmitters of the literary tradition of Mesopotamia that they collected and transmitted to the later periods. Keeping up Babylonian and Sumerian culture, copying all these texts and providing these enormous libraries which were then known, copied and transmitted later. Furthering the sciences, furthering the study of man, economics. So the 7th century in particular the Assyrians were certainly an empire which was ready to make a leap. Unfortunately, it made a leap into nothing because it was destroyed, but it was not followed by a similar empire, a similarly cultured empire in the near east. It would take a long time for another empire to accumulate so much culture and knowledge as the Assyrians did. I regard the collection of knowledge as evidenced in the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal and infrastructural innovations such as super-regional communication networks as lasting achievements of Assyria. Obviously the postal service. Without the Assyrian empire we wouldn't have mail and who can imagine a world without letters and postmen? I would say the democratisation of the wine consumption because more people were drinking wines than the previous period, probably, during this period. Yes, for me that would be the best achievement. Well, I mean the Assyrian empire was the largest empire the world had seen up until that point, covered a large area, ruled large numbers of people and collected a lot of wealth and so it left us great art, fabulous documents. I mean, the largest and best collection of scholarly literary documents comes from the Assyrian capital of Nineveh. It's left us an awful lot of information about the history, the culture, the religion of the ancient world. Simply writing it down, preserving it, leaving it for us, I think is its greatest achievement. Well, I think on many levels the Assyrians were the heirs of earlier Mesopotamian states. Much that has to do with writing, and bureaucracy, and literature, and religion is not necessarily new or unique to Assyria. It's given an Assyrian twist if you will, but it's not necessarily absolutely original because it's part of what Assyriologists often referred to as the stream of tradition. But I think when it comes to the arts which decorated - the wall reliefs which decorated Assyrian palaces, metres and metres and metres of graphic representations of campaigns, of religious rituals, of the countryside that they controlled in varying degrees, but usually very realistic, varying degrees of realism but usually very realistic, very well sculpted. I think and these are really a lasting achievement in the sense that since they've, examples of these were excavated in the 1840s and subsequently some have gone, in that early date, some were taken away, taken out of Assyria and are now in museums around the world. And so people really can see the kind of wall reliefs and the kind of imagery that Assyrian kings and the court and foreign ambassadors and dignitaries would have seen. It's a great contribution I think to world art in a broad sense. The creation of powerful images with a tendency towards naturalistic realism. The greatest single achievement is Assyrian art, both the magnificent winged-headed bulls and the amazing sculpted reliefs. The Assyrians are also great canal builders. For example, there's a canal northwest of Nineveh which brought water from the hills above Nineveh to the city itself, an amazing achievement that we don't know how it was built. Finally there's one thing I'd like to mention which is in effect I hesitate to call an achievement of the Assyrians and that's the result of their policy of deportations. Moving people, transplanting them across the empire, creating disruptions and uprootings which have left reverberations across the Middle East to this day. Oh, my initial thoughts are always towards the Mesopotamian intellectual heritage such as astronomy, but that really is a lasting achievement of the Babylonians rather than the Assyrians. The Assyrians are really well known for their battle techniques and their battle equipment. They really were the masters of war, especially the siege. So I would say their ability to devise complex and cunning battle strategies. Of course, making or creating an empire is not something that comes without a cost especially to those, the governed. As Walter Benjamin famously said, there is no such thing as a document of civilisation that isn't at the same time also a document of some kind of barbarian thing, and that applies to Assyria as well. The Assyrians were, of course, are still are famous for being particularly violent in their approach. And while it is true that this applies to others as well, both in the Ancient Near East, Egypt and Greece and Rome and all over the place, it must be said that there are a few ancient civilisations that relish so much in promoting their violence through various means of propaganda, whether it's the text the Assyrians produced or the images they left on the walls of their palaces. So the creation of this empire came at a cost. I'm honestly very skeptical about using the word achievement in the context in any empire. Actually something that I really like and value about studying the Assyrian empire is I think in contrast to other empires like for instance the British empire or the Roman empire, there isn't this very emotional sort of attachment or feeling of heritage really when it comes to the Assyrian empire. I think that because of that it's far easier to study it as what I personally think of an empire as which is an attempt by a very few people to make lots of money and to benefit from the exploitation of others.
