World English Bible · Under Assyria
Jonah 3
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word came to the second time, saying, "Arise, go to , that great city, and preach to it the message that I give you." So arose, and went to , according to word. Now was an exceedingly great city, three days' journey across. began to enter into the city a day's journey, and he cried out, and said, "In forty days, will be overthrown!" The people of ; and they proclaimed a and put on , from their greatest even to their least. The news reached the king of , and he arose from his , took off his royal robe, covered himself with , and sat in . He made a proclamation and published through by the of the king and his nobles, saying, "Let neither man nor animal, herd nor flock, taste anything; let them not feed, nor drink water; but let them be covered with , both man and animal, and let them cry mightily to . Yes, let them turn everyone from his evil way and from the that is in his hands. Who knows whether will not turn and relent, and turn away from his , so that we might not ?" saw their works, that they turned from their evil way. relented of the disaster which he said he would do to them, and he didn't do it.
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The world at this moment · Under Assyria, 745 BC to 612 BC ›
Assyria at full stretch, deporting whole populations as policy. The northern kingdom is destroyed in 722 BC and Judah survives as a tribute-paying vassal.
- Assyria
- The first empire to run mass deportation as ordinary administration: move the leadership somewhere else, settle strangers in their place, and the province stops being a nation. It worked. Samaria fell in 722 BC and the northern tribes did not come back. Assyria also advertised its cruelty deliberately, carving flayings and impalements on palace walls where envoys would see them, because terror is cheaper than garrisons.
- Judah
- Survives by paying. Hezekiah rebels, Sennacherib takes forty-six Judean towns and besieges Jerusalem in 701 BC, and the city holds. The Assyrian account boasts of shutting Hezekiah up like a bird in a cage and pointedly does not claim to have taken the city, which is one of the more interesting silences in ancient records.
- Egypt
- The splintered reed of a staff that Assyria's field commander mocks Judah for leaning on. It promises help and cannot deliver, and Isaiah spends decades saying so. Assyria eventually invades and sacks Thebes.
- Further afield
- Greece is in its archaic period, founding colonies from Spain to the Black Sea. Rome is under kings. Assyria's own libraries are collecting the literature of Mesopotamia, which is how Gilgamesh survived to be read again in the nineteenth century.