Oldest Stories

How did ancient Assyria use divination, astrology, and animal livers to make decisions of war, government, and royal policy? Under King Esarhaddon, the Neo-Assyrian Empire developed one of the ancient world’s most sophisticated systems of omen interpretation, combining centuries of recorded observations with extispicy, celestial omens, ritual expertise, and consultation with the gods.

This episode examines the intellectual world of Assyrian divination and the system of experts who advised the royal court. Mesopotamian scholars collected and analyzed omens over generations, searching for correlations between unusual events, astronomical phenomena, medical symptoms, animal behavior, and subsequent historical outcomes. Their methods could involve careful empirical observation, elaborate textual traditions, linguistic interpretation, and an underlying theological assumption that the gods were ultimately responsible for events in the natural and political world.

At the center of the episode is Esarhaddon, king of Assyria from 681–669 BCE, whose surviving correspondence preserves an extraordinary record of royal consultation with scholars and diviners. We examine letters from court intellectuals, the formulation of oracle questions, the use of sacrificial sheep in extispicy, and the interpretation of the liver and other internal organs as signs of divine intention.

The episode also explores the specialized scholarly professions surrounding the Assyrian court: the ṭupšarru or learned scribe and celestial observer, the bārû or diviner and haruspex, the āšipu or ritual and magical specialist, the kalû or lamentation priest and chanter, and the asû or physician. Together these experts formed a complex advisory system through which observations were gathered, questions formulated, divine answers interpreted, and practical, ritual, or religious responses carried out.

More broadly, the episode asks how closely Mesopotamian omen scholarship resembles science. Assyrian and Babylonian scholars relied heavily on accumulated observation, classification, written records, specialized training, and the testing of inherited traditions against experience. At the same time, their investigations remained embedded within a theological model in which the gods were the direct causes of events and deliberately made their intentions visible through signs.

Topics include Neo-Assyrian religion, Mesopotamian divination, extispicy and hepatoscopy, Assyrian astrology, the State Archives of Assyria, Esarhaddon, ancient science, omen literature, cuneiform scholarship, the Tablet of Destinies, Enūma Anu Enlil, Šumma Ālu, Šumma Izbu, royal prophecy, ritual magic, and the intellectual culture of the ancient Near East.

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The Cimmerians were among the first great horse nomad powers to crash into the civilizations of the ancient Near East. Emerging from the Scytho-Siberian world north of the Caucasus, they struck Urartu, devastated Phrygia and Lydia, raided deep into the Near East, and became legendary in Greek memory as one of the great barbarian terrors of antiquity.

But how dangerous were they really?

In this episode, we look beyond the later legends to reconstruct the Cimmerians and their Scythian cousins as actual people: their pastoral economy, horses, clothing, settlements, weapons, trade, and political organization. We examine what made mounted nomads so difficult for settled kingdoms to fight, why mobility mattered more than any supposedly unstoppable horse-archer tactic, and why the mighty Assyrian army was surprisingly well suited to defeating them.

We also confront one of the strangest mysteries of Cimmerian warfare: if lightly equipped horse nomads struggled against an Assyrian battle line, how did they repeatedly overcome some of the greatest fortified cities of Anatolia?

From Conan the Barbarian to Herodotus, from the Caucasus to Sardis, this is the story of the Cimmerians, the early Scythians, and the arrival of the horse nomad as a major force in Near Eastern history.

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Esarhaddon inherited the Neo-Assyrian Empire at the height of its power—but his kingship looked very different from that of the warrior-kings who came before him. Plagued by questions of legitimacy, surrounded by prophets and diviners, and often absent from his own military campaigns, Esarhaddon nevertheless presided over an extraordinarily aggressive and successful Assyrian state.

This episode follows the first half of Esarhaddon’s reign: the rebuilding of Babylon, the rise of prophecy as a political force, wars against Chaldeans and Arabs, the arrival of the Cimmerians, the destruction of Sidon, the treaty with Baal of Tyre, and the strange expedition to Bazu. Along the way, we look at how Assyrian kingship was changing, how religion and factional politics shaped the court, and how an empire built for conquest could continue functioning even when its king was no longer personally leading every army.

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The ancient story of Ahiqar follows a legendary wise man and royal adviser at the court of the Assyrian king Sennacherib. After adopting his nephew Nadan and teaching him a long collection of proverbs, Ahiqar is betrayed, falsely accused of treason, condemned to death, and forced to hide beneath his own house. His eventual return leads to a strange contest of riddles with the Pharaoh of Egypt and a final confrontation with the student who rejected his wisdom.

Preserved in an ancient Aramaic papyrus from Elephantine and in later Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Slavonic, and Ethiopic versions, the Tale of Ahiqar may be the oldest Mesopotamian story to survive beyond the disappearance of cuneiform culture. This episode explores the story’s Assyrian background, its relationship to ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature, its memorable proverbs and insults, and the way traditional stories were used to form memory, judgment, and moral character.

Topics include Ahiqar, Nadan, Sennacherib, ancient Assyria, Nineveh, Elephantine, Aramaic literature, Syriac literature, Mesopotamian wisdom, ancient proverbs, the Tale of Ahiqar, the Thousand and One Nights, ancient Egypt, Pharaoh, Assyrian court culture, and ancient Near Eastern storytelling.

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In the final years of Sennacherib’s reign, the Neo-Assyrian Empire entered a strange period of peace. After decades of war, conquest, rebellion, and the destruction of Babylon, the greatest military power of the ancient Near East suddenly stopped expanding.

Was Sennacherib simply more interested in building Nineveh than campaigning abroad? Had Assyria reached the natural limits of profitable conquest? Or were omens and divination beginning to restrain the king’s decisions?

The question became far more dangerous when Sennacherib unexpectedly removed his established crown prince and elevated a younger son: Assur-ahu-iddina, better known as Esarhaddon. Sickly, deeply religious, and apparently favored by prophets and diviners, Esarhaddon was proclaimed the heir during a period of intense religious activity surrounding the restoration of the Akitu festival.

His older brothers did not accept the decision.

This episode follows the final years of Sennacherib, the religious and political logic behind Esarhaddon’s elevation, the rivalry among the Assyrian princes, the assassination of Sennacherib by his own sons, and the brief civil war that brought Esarhaddon to the throne.

Along the way, we examine how omens actually influenced Assyrian policy, why sacred oaths may have mattered more than modern historians assume, and how royal propaganda transformed a violent succession crisis into proof that the gods themselves had chosen the new king.

Topics include Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, Urdu-Mullissu, Naqia, the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Assyrian divination, the Akitu festival, the destruction of Babylon, Assyrian succession, ancient prophecy, royal assassination, and the religion of ancient Mesopotamia.