Oldest Stories

He is a little bit creepy and king of the gods. He is Enlil, lord of wind, and today's episode is focused on the him as the head of the Sumerian pantheon. Online at oldeststories.net

True crime! Corruption in city hall! A gang of thugs terrorizing a town! One of the most interesting finds in the town of Nuzi is a series of court documents which contain testimony about a large number of criminal activities by a gang of thugs, including men who have positions in city hall. Today we get an on the ground look at what sort of crime went on in Nuzi, and what was done about it. Plus, we will start to get a sense of how many sheep the Hurrians actually had.

Hammurabi conquers Larsa in another lightning campaign displaying his strategic and diplomatic cunning. But once it is conquered, he needs to bring this massive new territory into his growing empire. This will give us an occasion to look at what exactly justice looked like in an Amorite city. We will also have an opportunity to discuss Middle Bronze Age medicine and what kind of surgical practices were known in Babylon. Online at oldeststories.net

The Amorites swept through Syria and held the region in a dark age longer than any other part of Mesopotamia. But when the dust finally does settle, we will see a number of nations ruled by barbarians, but behaving in quite civilized fashions. Today we will look at the establishment of Yamhad, Qatna, and Mari as well as the early kings of Assyria, getting a feel for the new players that will be with us for the next few hundred years. In the second half of the show, we enter briefly into the Age of Biblical Patriarchs and events of the Book of Genesis, though this is more of an interesting tangent than a major part of the historical narrative at this point. Online at oldeststories.net

Today we examine the situation in the Levant from the Bronze age Collapse to the entry of the Assyrians, and then follow Shalmaneser's levantine campaigns as they reshape the region through violence and indigenous reactions. We reach the end of Ahumu the Aramean's anti-Assyrian activities, and ponder some of the big questions of the series, like what motivates Shalmaneser and what happens to civillians in a conquered Assyrian territory.

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