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=> Re: The Great Assyrians

Re: The Great Assyrians
Posted by parhad (Guest) - Saturday, June 12 2004, 15:30:38 (CEST)
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You have to put that in context. In those days, if there had been no empires, civilization could not have progressed beyond the point it was stuck at. There could have been no trade, no merchants...no cross fertilization...in those days the only way you knew anything existed over a mountain was to walk over it.

The need for Sargon and Hammurabi to build their empires wasn`t ego-driven monomania...there were practical reasons. The city-states warred against each other constantly..so plenty of blood was being spilled..with no end in sight. Merchants weren`t safe on the roads so communities couldn`t benefit from what they couldn`t produce but could trade for. Also laws were different in each city...a travelling merchant..hardly anyone else besides soldiers travelled in those days...coming into towns along his route wouldn`t know which laws applied on which days...and things could change between visits.

Civilization could only have progressed so far. As I said, it wasn`t like there was peace and good-will between different cultures before the days of empire..it was just a useless cycle of periodic violence and set-backs no one could escape.

Sure there were wars...but the atrocious acts laid at the feet of the Assyrians were merely propaganda moves..not that they didn`t do them..but mostly they wanted subject people to know what to expect if they rebelled..for rebellions took the greatest toll and were in ways the most damaging and also unnecessary, therefore wastefull.

People will resent being conquered...but the common people often benefitted..it was the few who`d lost power who did the scheming and contriving and led and encouraged rebellion..and they were made to pay the price...but the common people were spared as far as it was honestly within reason. It was the Hebrews, who never had an empire, who killed every man woman and child and animal when they beat someone. The Assyrians didn`t do that..they wanted those people to continue living and inventing and building and paying taxes too...they had a goal, purpose and a vision...for which they needed stability. The Hebrews just wanted to kill for yahwe...they say so themselves.

That library of Ashurbanipal`s, if we are to believe his own words..wasn`t stolen. There are letters extant from the great king directing his officers to seek out all books anywhere in the empire and copy them...not steal them. I have no doubt many were stolen...but those things happened between cities anyway...at least with an empire and centralized government, copies were made and originals stored in ONE place...and as we can see..it is primarily this one library that did indeed act as a safe storage place for the majority of tablets come from royal libraries that were probably better housed and guarded than nay private ones.

I think, in sum, that humanity benefitted from certain empires and then only in the beginning when people needed protection so they could have the security and leisure to invent civilization...and developing agriculture was a big step in that direction..and creating the abundance necessary to fuel civilization needed a centralized state...but I think Assyrian rule was benign compared to British rule or American rule..or even that of the Greeks and certainly more so than the Romans.

Later empires seem to have been more about exploiting humanity and robbing them of their own resources and destroying their civilizations..whereas the earliest ones did the opposite. Even the Romans spread some good...so did Napoleon, for all the people he murdered across the face of Europe.

Those early empires though..as much as we may think of them as being built for their own sake..were really a necessary step in human development..for the barbarian was ever at the gate ready to steal from the settled communities...while today the barbarian is INSIDE the gate, directing the dismantling of human civilization, his own first of all, merely to benefit his bottom line for his own lifetime.

The earliest empires BUILT...these of today feed off of and destroy. That`s a big difference.



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