Yo! We have maps now! Not the most accurate, but as best as I can pin down the location of places, I am going to start building this up. Map courtesy of Inkarnate, I have no actual artistic skills, but it is the right balance of something I can work with going forward while still being attractive and low effort. So expect basically the same map with slight edits every episode. Also, if you are watching on Youtube or Spotify, you might be able to tell that I am starting to play with video editing. Not always successfully, and not as intensively as my videos from the summer about Pharaoh: Total War, but it is a fun little addition for me, and hopefully it will boost my ad revenue a bit. All images aside from the maps are either wikimedia, AI generated, or a few meme stuff pulled off the google images, but hopefully of stuff that won’t be copyright problems. Assyria is starting to go hard, this is going to take more and more of my time, but the story is 100% worth it. I have all sorts of ideas for special episodes, but want to get us through Shalmanaeser III before taking a pause.
Episode Notes:
Today we see Adad-Nirari bring huge quantities of Arameans into the Assyrian empire. This will change the linguistic fabric of the entire near east in time, but as we will see, at the time it just seemed like a set of good decisions, or at least imperialistic decisions. We also discuss what it is to be an Assyrian, and why no one was overly concerned about the sort of ethnic conflicts that seem to dominate nowadays. The main feature today is the Temannu war, which spanned perhaps 6 to 8 years and shows Adad-Nirari’s strategic flexibility, as well as the full range from brutality to generosity in victory.
The vast majority of the conquest narrative is just me reading and contextualizing Adad-Nirari’s royal chronicle inscriptions, which is going to be the bulk of the narrative going forward, various Assyrian Chronicles in larger context and with maps. It will be fun.
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