Eckart Frahm joins host Rebecca Burgess to discuss the ancient Middle East and his recent book, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire. Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. Rebecca Burgess: “When time was young and world in infancy, man did not strive proudly for sovereignty. But each one thought his petty rule was high if of his house he held the monarchy. This was the golden age. But after came the boisterous son of Chus, grandchild to Ham, that mighty hunter, who in his strong toils, both beasts and men, subjected to his spoils. The strong foundation of proud Babel laid Erech, Accad, and Culneh also made. These were his first, all stood in Shinar land. From thence, he went Assyria to command. And mighty Nineveh, he there begun, not finished till he his race had run.” Those are the opening lines from Anne Bradstreet's lengthy first of four poems on the earliest great empires called The Four Monarchies. She was no respecter for word economy. Her title runs The Assyrian being the first beginning under Nimrod, 131 years after the flood. A mouthful. Bradstreet was the first woman to be recognized as an accomplished New World poet. She emigrated to Salem from England in 1630, one of a group of Puritan pilgrims, just as she arguably introduced Assyria to the New World. So today, we'll be steeped both in novelties and in the ancientness of things, also via Assyria, the world's first empire, being our main topic of conversation. And with that, welcome to a new episode of Liberty Law Talk. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I'm a contributing editor for Law & Liberty, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women's Forum. Joining me today is Eckart Frahm, a professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. Previously, Frahm was a research assistant and assistant professor of Assyriology at Heidelberg. He has also worked on cuneiform tablets in the British Museum in London and in the Iraq Museum of Baghdad, among many other museums and other collections. Professor Frahm, so many welcomes. It's truly splendid to have you join us today. Eckart Frahm: Yeah, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure and an honor. Rebecca Burgess: This spring you released a new book, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire published by Basic Books. In an instance, I think of the Amazon algorithms getting things right. I chanced upon your book because, for my own research on empire, I'd been ordering probably a library's worth of books on Persia, Greece, and Rome. Also on Egypt by German Egyptologist, Jan Assmann. And thankfully or coincidentally, you begin your account of the rise and fall of Assyria with a very dramatic story of a bloody encounter between Assyria and Egypt during the reign of Esarhaddon that results in the capture of the Egyptian crown prince, much of the royal harem, and with enormous amounts of booty being taken back to Nineveh, then Assyria's capital on the Tigris River in Northeastern Iraq. Before me, cities, behind me, ruins is the inscription that encapsulates this classic imperialist behavior, rather reminds me of the Front Toward the Enemy warning on Claymore mines. But from that story, you weave a very richly textured account of Assyria as the world's first empire whose legacy in fact is the idea and form of empire, however protean you reveal that form historically to be. And it seems to me that in putting archeological artifacts, cuneiform text, and historical scholarship in conversation with Persian, Greek, Roman, and importantly biblical texts and attitudes, you set out to do at least three things with your book. Feel free to tell me where I'm wrong later. The first is to brush away the cobwebs of history from the picture of who and what Assyria was. The second to create an audience for the centuries-long silent voices of Assyrians themselves, who we can now hear in their own words. I thought that was a very lovely image that you opened with of these long silent voices suddenly being able to speak again. And third, to reveal precisely that Assyrian legacy to the world of empire and the surprising modernity, if you will, of what's been called the first half test of the history and the relevance of that age to our own pandemic, great power competition age. As you weave in so much of this cultural history, I hope our conversation can touch on, not just the politics, but the deep cultural echoes that have concealed as much as revealed Assyria throughout history, from Herodotus to Shakespeare, Rossini, and Lord Byron, to perhaps the particular staging of Adolf Hitler's suicide with his wife and dog. And to Saddam's very kitschy, anonymously published 2000 romance novels inspired by Assyrian warriors and queens. And with that, the ...
