Paul Cooper
speaker
254 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 5 Jun
Paul Cooper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Absolutely.
The Assyrian Empire flourishes mostly in the first half of the last millennium of the BC period.
It conquers its neighbours with extreme violence, piling pyramids of heads outside cities, flaying people alive, you name it.
Assyrian kings have done it.
And people who rebel against the empire are slaughtered, executed in displays of public brutality.
Often entire populations are uprooted and sent to a different part of the empire where they don't know the land, don't know the territory, disconnected from their ability to exploit their knowledge of the land to resist empire.
But in this kind of ruthless, remorseless approach, the Assyrian Empire becomes absolutely despised around the region.
In the end, as the 7th century BC wears on, and the last great king of Assyria, Ashurbanipal, dies, you get a succession of weak kings, followed by a rebellion in Babylon.
Suddenly, a horse-rearing people called the Medes, who live in the Zagros mountains of Iran, join in to invade Assyria.
You get rebellions in Egypt and suddenly revolts happening all around the empire as outside enemies are uniting against it.
The Babylonians and Medes sign a pact in the ruins of an Assyrian city called Ashur.
And in the next years, really only a period of about three years, the Assyrian empire, what was the most powerful empire in the world, is completely dismantled.
Many of its cities never recover as centres of population.
Yeah, I think I wouldn't describe it as excessive taxation so much as an entrenched sense of inequality, which you see in places like China, obviously, you know, built on labouring peasants.
You see in Rome, you know, built on a slave class, a vast slave class.
Ancient Greek cities.
In Athens, you might have a slave population about equal to the free population.
But in Sparta, the slave population is 10 times the size of the free population.
made up of entire conquered ethnicities who are forced to work in the fields.
And the entirety of the agricultural sector of this city is propped up by people who hate and despise the people they're feeding.
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