The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

by Dan Carlin

Assyrian kings provided cuneiform text narration of their atrocities, too. When one reads what they wrote about their feats, one feels as though the Assyrians didn’t have just one bad Hitler-esque ruler, but rather that they were all like that. The artistic “court style” of Assyria’s royal reliefs is genocidal. Take, for example, Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859 BCE), one of the most brutal of the Assyrian kings. He had this to say about how he handled a rebellion: “I built a pillar over the city gate, and I flayed all the chiefs who had revolted, and I covered the pillar with their skin. Some of them I walled up in the pillar, some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes. Others I bound to stakes around the pillar. And I cut the limbs off the royal officers who had rebelled.” Ashurnasirpal II goes on to describe burning captives with fire; cutting off their noses, ears, and fingers; and putting out their eyes. The tens of thousands of warriors who weren’t burned or walled up or beheaded or mutilated were driven into the scorching desert like cattle and left to die of thirst.

😱