(1) The curious habit the Assyrians had of bragging about being flayers and impalers

Ancient man lived in a constant nightmare. To screw up his courage he depicted himself as half-human half-beast and he worshipped wolves and sea-beasts, to which he traced his ancestry. A stratagem against terror is to look at it in the face and this may be why cave Chauvet contains jaw-dropping drawings of lions and horned beasts in combat. The begrimed, blood-splattered artists who created cave art, perhaps even using blood as a pigment, were achieving the sublime in lightless cathedrals where huge bears lurked.

Civilization changed little these basic facts of existence. The Maya murals at Bonampak depict tortures no Gestapo sadist improved on. Maya lords gaze upon the proceedings as if they were stern chefs inspecting the work of their assistants. There is a room in the Brugge museum in which hangs a painting by the Flemish master Gerard David. It is titled the "Judgement of Cambyses". According to Herodotus, the Greek founder of historiography, the Persian king Cambyses sentenced the bribe-taking judge Sisamnes to death. He had the skin removed from the corpse and sliced into strips with which he had a "seat of justice" made, presumably like a Cordovan chair, as a reminder to the man who would have to sit in it, who happened to be the son of its previous occupant. Like his predecessor Jan van Eyck, David was a master of detail much appreciated for his paintings of lovely, solicitous madonnas. One of the striking features of his portrayal of Cambyses' stern decree is the grimacing face of the miscreant judge, whom David represented in the process of being flayed. Alive. [1]

The Assyrians paraded the emissaries of their vassal states through magnificant hallways panelled with stone bas-reliefs representing in pell-mell abundance the sieges of walled cities. In them, captives are shown being impaled and flayed. No nightmare at that time could be worse than the thought of a naked Assyrian warrior pushing himself up from a river bank, his braided beard and long hair dripping, a sharp iron-blade gripped between his teeth. The Assyrians were not the only civilized people in Antiquity to use terror as a tactic of war. The Egyptians, not renowned for being especially blood-thirsty, hung the mutilated corpses of Hurrian princes from the ramparts of Kadesh and Thebes. The Assyrians created a large empire in the Near East which was the culmination of a long historical process that had begun over two thousand years before.

Sumer, the original civilization, was but a tiny flicker in the general darkness. Palaeolinguistics and archaeology allow us to reconstruct a world in which there were tiny oases of cultivation surrounded everywhere by bands of roamers for some of whom cannibalism wasn't necessarily the feeding alternative of last resort. Pacific islanders practiced cannibalism, as did the Caribs of America, who lent their name to that custom before they were exterminated by Europeans. Until recent times, New Guinean highlanders were head-hunters. The Indo-Iranians, who were the last of the Indo-Europeans to settle down and had the steppes of central Asia to themselves for many centuries, were also addicted to that habit, a tradition that Turkic-speakers carried on after them. [2] Celts propitiated their gods by burning living human beings. It is said that their priests, the Druids, pretended to divine the future from the spams of dying victims. Hittites and Phoenicians offered child sacrifices, a ritual they carried over from pre-history.

Fittingly in the midst of primitive savagery, Sumerian was what linguists call an isolate, a language with no known relatives. Yet even in civilized Sumeria kingly burials in Ur, fully one millennium after civilization began, contain evidence of hecatombs, the practice of killing retainers and interring them with their masters, who were obviously terrified of going into the other world by themselves. Though fancifully--even the historicity of the central character is doubtful--E. Delacroix dramatized a hecatomb in his painting "The Death of Sardanapalus". It is much too disorganized to be the way hecatombs were "arranged", but it does transmit the general idea of the massacres that preceded them.

A shocking glimpse of what hecatombs and other forms of primitive savagery at its worst were really like is provided by some archaeological digs along the coast of Perú north of Lima, in the coastal valleys that were the geographical home of the Moche people or Mochica. The Moche have left the artistic legacy of a representational style in clay pottery that has no parallel in pre-history. Moche images are so life-like that they seem to have been shaped not millennia ago but in the present (and some in fact may have been but as pseudo-antiques for the unwary). But the Moche had other traits which can only be said to have been throwbacks to the mentality prevalent in the world before humans became sedentarized, when it was truly, in Hobbes' classic expression, homo homini lupi. In a place called Huaco Viejo, there have been found burial pits and ritual buildings in which the macabre borders on the unimaginable. Prisoners, probably Moche from other valleys, were herded into a courtyard where they were mistreated in such a way that there could be no doubt in their minds as to what was ahead for them in the next few hours of their lives. From the courtyards they were taken tied by the neck up a staircase next to a wall on which were unambiguously depicted the diverse forms of torture that awaited them. These included flaying alive, breaking and severing of limbs, eye-gouging, and any conceivable way to inflict pain without actually killing the person. The process culminated when the gold-masked and gold-bedecked high priest cut each prisoner's throat and part of the flow of blood was collected by assistant priestesses in golden goblets from which the priest drank it. The process continued with the corpses from which the flesh was methodically scraped from the bones and the whole gory lump was thrown into single or collective pits for the vulture to devour. Some archaeologists believe that Moche death rituals went beyond whatever religious significance they might have had to the deliberate desecration of the victims. The Mochica might have been admirable artists, but they were psychologically closer to the Chauvet painters than to the high culture which they had achieved. 

(2) After exterminating the Hatti, the Nesites became the Hittites

Sumer or Sumeria emerged in lower Near Eastern Mesopotamia, which is a large fertile plain between the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers without formidable natural defenses in any direction. [3] All elevations on its expanse, known as tells, are human built and indicate where to dig for archaeological remains. It bordered to the south on the Persian Gulf. It had a desert to the west as far as Amurru, home of the Amorites (future Canaan and Palestine), which is small as deserts in the Middle East go. To the far north, Mesopotamia ended in the dangerous Anatolian foothills. To the east Elam was formed on a patch of dry Iranian flatland and the Elamites, though not tribal savages, were always parasitical on Mesopotamian civilization. Towards the east too lay the Zagros mountains, which did constitute a natural barrier. It was not the sort of land Mesopotamians in their own loamy homeland would appreciate, so the Zagros were the domain of semi-sedentary tribes who did covet Mesopotamia. In sum, the Sumerian cities and the successor Mesopotamian states were open to invasions on all sides, except Arabia because it was so arid it was very lightly peopled.

Despite being so open to invaders, Sumeria never united for self-defence, but, like other nascent civilizations, it was mostly occupied in fighting within itself. The first war of which there is notice was between Uruk and Kish. Agga, the king of Kish, had to contend with no one less than the first known epic hero, Gilgamesh, who had the advantage of being in contact with gods and goddesses. Lagash , the first Sumerian city-state for which there can be established a coherent dynastic line, apparently spent itself in centuries of war with Umma, which finally overthrew it, but was itself so weakened it didn't follow up its triumph in any significant political or military way.

The Sumerians invented writing in a script called cuneiform from the wedgy (Latin cuneus for wedge) syllabary that scribes made with their styluses on humid clay tablets. Cuneiform was adaptable to other polysyllabic languages and was used for Semitic languages, such as Akkadian; for Elamite, another probably isolate; and for the Indo-European language of the Hittites. Cuneiform writing spread from Mesopotamia to the Semitic-speaking city of Mari west of the Euphrates in eastern Syria. From there it reached Ebla (south of modern Aleppo), which became a significant independent city state. As a spoken every-day tongue, Sumerian was on the way to extinction when Akkad founded the first Mesopotamian empire , but because of the general use of cuneiform in Mesopotamia and because of cultural myths that became part of a common Mesopotamian tradition, Sumerian survived as the learned language of Assyrians and Babylonians, in the way that Greek and especially Latin were for centuries the languages of higher culture in western civilization.

Although no one knows where the Sumerians came from or whether they were authoctonous (a people who had "always" been "there"), they certainly inhabited Mesopotamia before the  Akkadians, who were the first Semitic intruders in the region, not so much as invaders as gradual infiltrators, for Sumeria, perhaps because of its own infighting, never extended much beyond its original homeland. Even though it proclaimed to rule from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, the Akkadian empire--its core territory later became the heartland of Babylonia--was such that each of its successive rulers had to subject the cities and lands that the previous one claimed to have conquered. The Semites in Mesopotamia, no less than the Sumerians, were also given to constant intestine warfare.

Then there were the real invaders from outside Mesopotamia. Elam was engaged in major warfare with different Mesopotamian states on at least eleven durable occasions, not counting numberless adventitious raids and attacks, and it is likely that Elamites controlled Lagash for a period of two centuries. Before this happened, Lagash had a resurgence, perhaps the last political fling of the Sumerians. The reverent, life-size, in-the-round sculpture of its greatest king, Gudea, is one of the most accomplished masterpieces of Antiquity. Its sereness belies the turmoil that raged around him, for Akkad had fallen to Gutians, tribesmen from from the Zagros, and Gudea's Lagash itself fell to Ur, which in turn was destroyed by Elamites. Despite their crippling of Akkadia the Gutians today are just a name printed vaguely in historical atlases over the Zagros region. Like China during much of its history, Mesopotamia had a civilizing influence on its assailants. Babylon , destined to future glory, was founded by Amorites in Akkadia.

Egyptian civilization, nearly coetaneous with Sumeria, was less exposed to invaders. It occupied a narrow river basin surrounded by desert wastelands. It had a defensible northern frontier with Sinai. Primitive savages to the south could not swarm over its territory as invaders did in Mesopotamia . It was only after its barbarian southern neighbors were Egyptianized that they became a threat to Egypt. Perhaps also because of its geography, Egyptian civilization, unlike most others, was begotten simultaneously with political unity. The history of ancient Egypt consists of 31 dynasties with an average duration of 83 years. In that huge lapse of time, Egypt was more often than not an united kingdom. [4] Yet before the third millennium was over, at the time the Amorites were settling in central Mesopotamia , Egypt had to fortify its Sinai frontier. This did not prevent the Hyksos five hundred years later from driving their chariots from the Levant and across into Egypt. Their suzerainty over the Nile valley lasted over a century. 

Anatolia (roughly modern Asian Turkey) is a mountainous and difficult land. In the south it is flatland which extends down to most of Syria . The Hurrians were inhabiting these lands as well as eastern Anatolia when Babylonia established its first empire. North and west of the Hurrians there were always wild tribes and Anatolia was not fully brought under the sway of civilization until the Greeks colonized its coast and the Persians conquered the rest of it. One of the ancient Anatolian tribes were the Hatti. The Nesites were speakers of an Indo-European language who invaded Anatolia from the Balkans, subjected or exterminated the Hatti, but ironically either were given or adopted their name and became known in history as Hittites. In eastern Anatolia precisely the reverse occurred: a branch of the Indo-Aryans, future invaders of the Indian subcontinent, encountered the Hurrians, adopted their language, but formed a kingdom which bears the Indo-Aryan name of Mitanni.

Before the fall of their fragile empire, Akkadians founded Assur in northern Mesopotamia, perhaps as a Semitic outpost against Anatolian invaders. The Hittites had their hands full defending their kingdom against the hostile tribes surrounding it. Bogazkoy, the name of a village near Hattusas, the Hittite capital, lies in western Anatolia. The hilly country north to the Black sea was occupied by Kaskians, a tribe the Hittites never could subject.

The first empire of Babylonia was established by Hammurabi, the sixth in a list of Amorite kings. Hammurabi conquered Assur and united Mesopotamia. He also broke Elamite power in Sumer. The Elamites retrenched to their own land, but they did not do so permanently, for the only complete version of the code of Hammurabi was actually found in Elam, obviously filched. It was a Hittite expedition that brought down the Babylonian empire. As could be expected, the fall of Babylonia was politically de-stabilizing. The Mitanni conquered northern Mesopotamia, including Assur, and kept it subjugated during various centuries, and the Kassites, another people from the Zagros, occupied Babylon , where they became a long-lasting ruling aristocracy whose fortunes fell and rose depending of the conditions in the whole of Mesopotamia. The Kassites, like the Mitanni, were assimilated by their subjects but retained some of their original cultural identity.

The political instability in Mesopotamia was paralleled by conflictive events in the eastern Mediterranean . The Minoans were an ancient people of unknown linguistic lineage who founded a civilization centered in Crete but with important offshoots in the islands of the Aegean sea . As these states were not contiguous it is likely that they did not experience the same political situation of perpetual warfare that harried Mesopotamia. The Mycenaeans, who probably spoke an antecessor of the language of the Greeks, had created in mainland Greece a civilization of their own, where the warring city-states norm was prevalent. Whether the terrifying eruption at Thera had some political repercussions in Crete itself, it is difficult to say, but it was about that time that the Mycenaeans inflicted on the Minoans the humdrum terrors of invasion, war, and devastation, although Crete was probably conquered in stages. [5]   Knossos, the Minoan capital, was eventually taken. Its splendid palace, adorned with polychrome gessoes, was turned into a warehouse. The Mycenaeans, who probably enslaved the Minoans, succumbed to worse terrors than those they visited on the Minoans. But this time they were not the only victims of catastrophic destruction.

In Anatolia, the Hittites and the Mitanni were bound to collide and when they did the Assyrians, who had been smarting from Mitanni imposition, were there to lend a hand. Attacked from two flanks the Mitanni were defeated but not annihilated. This did not satisfy the Assyrians who attacked once more. To make sure that the Mitanni would not ever again become a military threat, Assyrian king Shalmaneser ordered that all Mitanni able-bodied men be blinded in one eye. The reason for such "clemency" could have been that, like the Mycenaeans with the Minoans, the Assyrians could round them up to be used as slaves when needed. The Hittites were surrounded by vassal or by enemy kingdoms, not to mention the tribes they could not subdue. The chariot was an important instrument of warfare during these centuries (late Bronze Age), but it is hard to conceive how it could have been effective without the support of foot soldiery. It is possible that the Hittites placed too much reliance on the power of chariotry, which could explain their military shortcomings in other areas, and this, together with the political antagonisms that surrounded them, provided the opportunity that explains the collapse of the Hittite Empire amidst hellish circumstances of carnage and destruction. Mycenae and other mainland Greek sites (though not all) suffered the same horrific fate at about the same time or not much later. Greece like Anatolia is a land crisscrossed by mountain ranges extending far into the Balkans, hence ideal terrain for recalcitrant tribes and the tactics against which chariots were impotent. Another tendency that became manifest around this time was an exponential increase in piracy to which can be attributed the destruction of Ugarit, an important Hurrian port city, and various sites in Philistia and Canaan .

These upheavals are evident in what archaeologically is known as an "event horizon", in this case a layer of ashes at approximately the same position in sequences from different sites. They are often referred to as the Catastrophe and are used as a convenient marker for the end of the Bronze Age. Until not long ago, they were almost unanimously attributed to Pelasgians or Sea-peoples. As precise relative dates for these events are impossible to obtain, there is no way to establish an accurate historical sequence. However, there are datable records from Egypt of frustrated attacks from Libya, from the Levant, and from the sea between ca1208 and ca1176. The destruction of Hattusas and of Mycenae is sandwiched between these dates. But the evidence for Pelasgians is scant and it is not likely that all these upheavals were related. Most specialists today are more inclined to believe that the "Catastrophe", which did not reach Mesopotamia and was selective in its impact, was the result of localized causes. Egyptian power in the Levant waned and the Sinai was later abandoned. [6]

[1] J.M. Chauvet et al , La Grotte Chauvet (1995); Herodotus, The Histories (1992); Hall's Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (1987)

[2] The denomination Indo-European derives from the hypothesis that European languages might well have derived from a language closer to Sanskrit that to Greek or Latin. It is confusing because in fact European languages evolved independently of Indic languages. The originary Indo-Europeans separated into three branches: the Indo-Aryan, the Indo-Iranian, and the Indo-European proper. The Indo-European branch, which begat most of the languages of Europe and two minor extinct languages in the Tarim Basin, probably separated first, perhaps ca4000, mostly in the direction of the west but also, a smaller group, towards the east. The main groups of the Indo-European branch (in terms of survival, speakers, and influence) are: Greek, Slavic, Baltic, Germanic, and Italic. Other surviving groups are Armenian, Celtic, and Illyrian (modern Albanian). Indo-European groups and individual languages that have not survived are: Thracian, Phrygian, Anatolian (Hittite and Luwian languages, more properly Nesite), Venetic, and Messapic.

[3] The primary source for the history of ancient Mesopotamia is a Babylonian priest who wrote in Greek and lived in the 3rd century BCE. His work is lost but he is quoted by other historians.

[4] The Egyptian dynastic record, which goes from Cleopatra back to the first pharaoh is mostly the work of a Greco-Egyptian historian called Manetho, contemporary of Berossus, and although it is often not accurate in the detail and contains various gaps it has proved generally reliable, correlating well with archaeological datings. For both Mesopotamia and Egypt, there are high and low chronologies. The high chronology makes the regnal periods too long but the lower chronology leaves blanks at the beginnings. It is the lower chronologies that are usually used.

[5] When Thera exploded is not known with precision, nor its magnitude, nor the exact dates when the Mycenaeans started the process of subjecting the Minoans. Some theories place the Thera eruption over a century before the Mycenaean invasions. Others argue that whenever it occurred its magnitude could not but have enervated permanently Minoan Civilization. 

[6] "On the basis of the circumstantial evidence we may therefore conclude that chariot warfare ended in the Catastrophe, the raiders and city-sackers having found a way to defeat the greatest chariot armies of the time. But of course there is also direct evidence that this is what the Catastrophe was about. The reliefs at Medinet Habu show clearly enough that the aggressors against Ramesses III--the Libyans, the Philistines and Tjekker , and the northerners who joined in the attack--were infantrymen, supported by very few chariots. They also show that Ramesses was able to win his victories over marauders by assembling a great number of footsoldiers, drawn both from barbaria and from Egypt itself. That the aggressors were infantrymen has generally gone unremarked because it has been assumed that ancient land battles had always been fought primarily by footsoldiers. Only when one recognizes that in the Late Bronze Age that was not the case can one appreciate the significance of what is shown in the Medinet Habu reliefs." R. Drews, The End of the Bronze Age (1993)