Assyrian Culture

We start into the culture series a few weeks ago where we're addressing different cultures. We did the Egyptian culture last week, this week the Assyrian culture. And your handout, the sequence is you've got your first page and it's got, you know, first sheet and it's got page one and two on the back and then you've got a color printout for some kind of special references and then the third sheet there is your third page on the standard black and white stuff. Okay? Alright. Any questions, feel free to raise a hand. Whatever. Okay.

I've kind of switched maps on the Assyrian empire. I kind of do this with a little bit of misgivings, partly because I can't find any map that really says it like it is. Even this one kind of misrepresents things. Egypt was not a part of the Assyrian Empire from 699 to 627 BC, for example. What that means is during that period of time, this area, for some portion of the time, was under the control. Even with that, Judah paid tribute but was self-ruled, and the hold on Egypt was brief and tenuous, and shortly thereafter, Egypt and Assyria were actually allies. It's a little bit confused the way they've got it here, but nonetheless, that area Judah shouldn't actually be on the map because Judah just paid tribute, but was able to maintain its dynasty of kings and self-rule and all that. So at any rate, with that as a kind of a caution, that's what you have on your color handout sheet there, okay? Now, this is the timeline, and you do have that on page one of your handout.

The Assyrian culture, and I started prior to 3000 BC, and that's when we've got something recorded that seems to fit with the series of Assyrian culture history. Then we've got kind of an extra heavy line from about roughly 2500 BC up until around the year 600, and we'll talk about that in a minute. And then the line lightens out. We'll see what that means, but the bottom line is that Assyria had a period of substantial dominance, and then the times outside of that, yes, they were around as a culture, but they didn't have the dominance. Okay.

Now, the other thing, we've kind of had these markers in the past, Abraham, Moses, David, and the New Testament. Before the time of Abraham, Genesis 10, They begin referring to Assyria. So even before Egypt, there's reference to Assyria. And it starts there, Genesis 10.

We'll see there in a minute what that is. Twice in the Gospels, the city of Nineveh, which we'll see about in a little bit, was referred to. So it continues into the New Testament. And there's something else about it, too, which we'll make reference to that's deeper than just mention.

All right. Solomon held land within his kingdom there which extended into what has you know been in the lands and empires of other great nations notice it goes way into what what would have you know been the Assyrian Empire so he made he made some inroads there but the land that Solomon gained got lost not long after Solomon went home to be with the Lord okay you have this handout in your appendix. I want to bring that up because it's this period of time in here, after the time of Solomon and into this time between Assyria conquers Israel and the Babylonian exile, those times, that bracket in there is when the Assyrians had the biggest impact on Bible events. And these books, the pre-exilic, they call it, before the Babylonian exile, those prophets are the ones who are particularly influenced by the Assyrian culture. Okay.

Now here is, boy, lately it's almost becoming a fairly familiar map in the last year and a half. Here's Nineveh, which is the capital of Assyria for a portion of its history. It was located near modern Mosul. If you heard that in some of the, you know, goings on in the news, I'll mention Mosul. Modern Mosul is right next to and actually includes the ancient city of Nineveh. And so that's right up here. Okay. And we'll return to this map later and you'll see why in a little bit. Okay.

Here's Nineveh. And here's the aerial photo of the area of Nineveh. Now, some of the city wall portions might be a little hard to see, so let me put some lines on there. Here's these red lines. That's where it is. Okay, now I'm going to take the lines off. See, so that's the area that it's talking about. Let me back up. See, there's the lines. So, anyway, you can still see where the wall was. You can still see a lot of things in it. Still present. And one of the things you notice is even people just living right in and outside of that area.

There are also some areas that are untouched, in great part, and some where they'd like to do some excavations, some of them would be real interesting excavations, but because it's considered holy ground, they can't touch it. One, and we'll see here in a bit, one place is where they call it Nebi Yunus, Tomb of Jonah. How about that? Okay.

Here's a map, you have a small scale version of that, but hopefully somewhat readable on your handout. And this, here's the Nineveh City walls. Now, the whole wall is not built up like this, this is a portion that's been kind of restored so that you can see it, but at least you get an idea of what that was like. Substantial walls, if you're talking about the kind of Military technology that they had available then and you looked at that you'd say oh boy We've got our work cut out for us, right? So that and this is the way they would would build it And if you came in to try to break through the gates you look where you've got guys shooting down on you Dumping things on you, you know arrows spears hot oil, whatever We mentioned the tablets before the tap a lot of the tablets Reflect this character, especially the early part of the history of Assyria. One of the things we mentioned is, see that circular one? That was for school kids. School kids had a circular one because it was easy to hold. It was about four inches in diameter.

And they could, you know, mark it and then erase it and redo it and redo it. So they find a lot of them like that and they know those are school kids' practices. And then they would even find some where the top part was written by somebody and then a slightly different and did the bottom part. So what they did is they did it and they say, OK, you copy this. You reproduce it. So you can see them practicing.

Here's a kind of a library with all these tablets broken down. Here's another example of these tablets just in piles. And so as they look through these things and they translate them with the cuneiform markup, this is the way a lot of them are found. Just masses of tablets, lots of information.

This is a bookshelf we showed previously in the area just southwest of Babylon, similar. We showed this one also, which is sort of a Babylonian or Assyrian post-it note. It's a little tiny thing. It's an ancient post-it note. I'm not sure if they stuck them in the refrigerators, but anyway, that's what it looks like.

Here you have on your handout, page one, the cuneiform alphabet. We want to make sure that you're all experts in ancient languages by the time you're done. And so here you have the alphabet and you can write your name or whatever you'd like to do. Okay? And of course you can send letters to your kids and things like that, you know, that'd be great fun. Anyhow, so there's a cuneiform alphabet.

Now, Assyria had this cuneiform writing on clay tablets in the earlier years, as we see, you know, in many of those that we've shown here. The 752 Aramaic language was made the official language of Assyria. Aramaic is the language that came out of the area of what we now call Antioch, where Christians were first called Christians. A city on the eastern Mediterranean, north of Jerusalem. That's where it originated.

And what happened is, here's these guys with these clay tablets. The clay tablets preserve well. and they've been doing it a long time. Now these guys come up and they say, look, we've got this stuff called papyrus. We've got this papyrus stuff and this stuff is light.

You can handle a lot of pages. You don't hand somebody a page and it weighs five pounds, right? And so now you can handle a lot more. It's a lot lighter and you can carry it easily. And so because of that, you can no longer just do this little stylus in the soft clay, right? It doesn't work on a piece of papyrus. So now we have to have a different script, and that's why they came up with this.

So it was under the Assyrians that they instituted this, okay, everybody's going to start using this Aramaic. Now that continued for centuries, and to the point where it is It's probable that much of the conversations going on with Jesus and the other people he spoke to, including the disciples, was spoken in Aramaic. So it's real interesting. Here's these Egyptians, they institute this thing long after the empire is gone. You find this language still having its impact. We'll see that in a little bit.

Aramaic is used instead of Hebrew in Ezra several places that you have there Noted and also in Daniel and in Jeremiah 10 11 So it's interesting and you'll be reading along the Hebrew all sudden boom and even in you see in Daniel 2 4 be right in the middle of the verse Oh switches over into Aramaic why? The guy just got kind of get sort of quirky or what happened What What you will find is that the Aramaic portions tend more to address non-Jewish audiences and issues. The Jews, they would tend to stick with the Hebrew. And when they had more non-Jewish audiences and issues, they would switch over to the Aramaic.

General pattern. In the New Testament, Jesus is on the cross. And he calls out, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, from the cross. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Aramaic. Twice, Paul writes, Abba, Father, Romans, Galatians, Abba, Aramaic, for Papa. Real interesting. We're not done. Oh, by the way, if you want to look up more on the Aramaic language, there's a link there at the bottom of the page, and that's on your handout, so you can punch that in.

Here's another instance in John 1.42.

It says, He brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, You are Simon, the son of John. You shall be called, and we say in English, Cephas. And it says there in the New Testament, which is translated Peter. Why Simon and Peter and Cephas? Cephas is the anglicized pronunciation. The Aramaic is actually Kephas. Kephas. So where you see Cephas in your New Testament, actually the original was Kephas. And Kephas is just the Aramaic for rock. Just like we have the name Peter means rock from the Greek. So that's all it is. He just gave him the Aramaic name for rock.

And that, by the way, is what Peter gets called a number of times and in Paul's letters is Kephas. And why would Paul do that? Paul, having been brought up a Jew and having had contact in Israel, spoke Aramaic as well as, you know, probably Aramaic, Hebrew, Latin and Greek were Paul's four languages.

Okay, we're not done. John 1.1, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. How many of you have seen the New World Translation that the Jehovah's Witnesses use? You ever talk with any Jehovah's Witnesses? Oh, come on, you've had to come up to your front door. At least once. Right?

They have, in this verse, and the word was a god lowercase g the problem with that but here's the interesting insight and then we go to to verse 14 and the word became flesh and dwelt among us and we saw his glory glory as of the only begotten from the father full of grace and truth here's what the Aramaic comes across with by the way this is on page three on your hand out there In the ancient Jewish Commentary translations called the Targums whenever God walked on earth and interceded with humans they use the Aramaic term Memra to refer to God Isn't that interesting the term Memra actually means word? So the the Aramaic translation of John 1 1 in the beginning was the Word that is God the One who is the manifestation of God, and the Word who was God, was with God, and the Word who was God's manifestation was God.

It's that clear. It's abundantly clear. So, real interesting how it's translated. That again, here's an interesting thing. We have all this impact on the Bible, including the New Testament, And it all came about by these guys who were the Assyrians. We'll find out in a minute how incredible that is. Here.

Here's your Aramaic alphabet, because we also want you to learn that too, right? One of the things that was interesting, like Hebrew, there's no consonants in the alphabet. So you don't get those. So to us, that seems a little puzzling, but that would be the way it would be written And you would understand the meaning in context if there was a variation. Just like we understand different word meanings by looking at context. Similar thing here. So, no vowels.

And, like Hebrew, it's written right to left. So if you're left-handed, whoopee! You don't have to write on top of your own wet ink. I'm left-handed, so I know that's been a tough time. Yeah, Aaron's raising his hand. Yep, Ruth. So, you know, for years, you've had to write over your own thing or else do some really strange writing like this to avoid smearing your ink. Turn the paper all cockeyed, you know. Everybody just wonders, how on earth do you do that? Anyway, that's the deal here. Oddly enough, it starts on the right, goes to the left, and if you're left-handed, it works beautifully, especially since you've got ink that doesn't dry real fast. Okay, this is an interesting thing.

It's an Aramaic amulet. I wish I had more information on it. It was one that was in a collector's set rather than found in context in an archaeological dig. So it makes it a little tougher to know exactly what it is. Real interesting, here is Genesis 22 in Aramaic on the one side of this little pendant kind of thing. The other side shows the account of Abraham ready to offer Isaac, and here's the ram and the thicket. So, real interesting. But again, it just shows that people actually began embracing Aramaic as a way of even explaining, you know, Bible accounts and things of that sort. Okay, now, here's the wild thing. While we have Aramaic, which the Assyrians said, you shall use this as the official language, the Assyrians were known to be extremely cruel.

And that explains why Jonah would be so reluctant to go to Nineveh. First of all, why, you know, imagine Jonah thinking to himself, first of all, why would I want to go to this place? These people are cruel. They'd just as soon, you know, torture me as listen to me. I mentioned some weeks ago, I'll bring it up again, the Assyrians, one of the things they would do in order to torture people is they would peel their skin off and pour salt water and salt all over the exposed flesh. That was one of the nicer things that they did. I won't go into some of the other stuff. But anyway, they were just nasty.

They were known for being outrageously cruel. And so there's just tremendous reluctance on Jonah's part. Then, one of the things you find out as you read the book of Jonah, a short book, about four chapters, Jonah didn't want the Lord to be merciful to them, because these people, if anything, deserve to get really tough treatment. So you can see his multiple reluctance to preach a gospel of mercy and repentance to them, if they would but respond and repent.

The Assyrians, when they would capture a land, and this is something, as we go through the cultures, we'll find a contrast. When they would capture a land, they would take some of the people captured and mix them with another captured population. Not all of them, not just some small portion, but a significant portion of the population. And then they would switch them with somebody else, some other place.

And now, this is significant, and here's why. I'm sorry. This one is a little out of sync here. Let me go back to this. Here's this Nebi Yunus. You see that? That is the one that is known as the tomb of Jonah. Anyway. Okay. Here's what we got. Judah paid tribute, but was self-ruled. And then the hold on Egypt was brief and tenuous. But what happened is, remember, Assyria conquered Israel, 722, but not Judah. Judah paid tribute.

Now, so the Assyrians come in to the northern kingdom, the ten tribes, and they take some of them and haul them off. They don't care where, just spread them around the other parts of the Assyrian Empire. Then, they take somebody else who is non-Jews, take them and stick them into the area where the ten tribes were, and say, you're going to live here.

Now, what kinds of conflicts can you see that creating? Were the Jews allowed to, you know, eat everything? No. So now, actually, you've got people, they're bringing in stuff. You're going to eat that? I mean, these people are ticked, you know? You're going to eat that? That's horrible, you know? And then, the Jews were not allowed to intermarry with them, right?

So now you're going to have them living right next to you because the Assyrians say so. And so you have extreme conflicts of culture. And so that's why the Jews in Judah, who did not get scrambled in the same way, just absolutely despised the people who lived north of them, the Samaritans, they became called. Because now you've got these people that have just horrible, awful practices and habits And you don't know whether the Jews are not. They're all mixed up because the Assyrians said, you're going to do this. And the people would come in and they were mad to be there in the first place, but they certainly didn't like the Jews, but they can't move because the Assyrians say they got to live there. So it was a real mess, but that was the way the Assyrians wanted to do things so that people couldn't kind of get their culture together.

Rise up and rebel at least that was what they thought would happen Okay So here's here's the northern kingdom there and They just had everybody in that northern kingdom Had imposed upon them other cultures, and you never knew which one so the Assyrians didn't care either. There's somebody else We're going to scramble them Now Assyria adopted the gods of its neighbors in the Tigris Euphrates Valley except to make Asher the king of the gods.

So what you find is the name Assyria, which is the way we pronounce it, basically had three applications there. Asher was their god. It was also the name of a city next to Nineveh, Asher. And it was also the name of the empire. They were Asherians, okay? So that's how they applied that. But basically they took the Babylonian religion and the religion of all the countries around them and just made Asher the supreme being, named the city and the culture and the empire all after that, and maintained a lot of the religious ideas. Like most kingdoms and empires in ancient Near East, the population was expected to follow whatever the ruler did and helped to.

So it wasn't like, you know, hey, you want to believe something else? That's fine. We don't mind. Just don't cause any trouble. No. You will hold to the king's religion. To the ruler's religion. That was their practice. The ruler was a deity. The ruler was a ruler. And he was also a military commander. All at once. It's really quite a lot to put on a guy, huh? But that was a practice they held.

Our modern horoscope, they basically had a lot of similar things. And basically what we have now is just rooted in the Assyrian horoscope. It was really important to them that they followed the horoscope. And the way it looks is this. For example, here is the bowl. Like today, we use the name Taurus because that's the way it comes across in Latin. But basically, that comes out of Assyria. And here's the winged bull of Assyria.

Now, it's a little hard to see. There's nothing I can do to fix it. A little hard to see. How many legs does this thing have? Can you see it? It's a little tough to see. What's that? Five, yeah. Now, why five? They would put five legs on this bull and you'd think, well, that's kind of odd, you know. And, and, what's that? Yeah, that would be good. That's a good idea. Yeah.

Actually, the way it works out, if you got completely perpendicular on the side, you would see four. And if you got completely perpendicular on the front, you'd see two. But if you get diagonal like we've got, then you see five. So it's interesting how they did that. They put five legs on it so that if you got perpendicular either way, it would look normal. So that was their way of resolving it. Nonetheless, the point being, this is their winged bull, which they really exalted this winged bull, which is the sign of what we would call Taurus today in our modern horoscopes.

Now Assyria had about 20 court scholars. The king would rely upon basically a daily horoscope, but other things as well. Let's go through them. One of them, they'd have celestial diviners. That was the horoscope. And so the king would have a daily horoscope that would come from the celestial diviner. They'd be looking at the stars and planets and things of that sort.

Now, one thing is they only had five visible planets, right? So look at that and the moon. So it isn't the full set of planets. The other thing is, is things have shifted since then. So the horoscopes of today are all one house off. But anyway, now you have the celestial diviners to tell you from the stars, what does that say? You have the terrestrial diviner who'd be looking at other things like, you know, weather. And, you know, they'd, they'd cut open an animal and look at its liver. and have readings off of the liver, and they had a map for, here's how you read the liver on an animal, and you cut it open. So they'd get that together with the horoscope to tell the king, you know, here's who you attack, and, you know, lay low today, and be careful, you got somebody that's bad this week, or, you know, things like that.

And so they'd have that, and then there was a diagnostic healer. This was a guy whose whole job was to figure out what was wrong, you know. Now, their sense of medical things was not terribly sophisticated, but nonetheless, that was his job. And he didn't really heal anything. I'm not sure they did too much healing anyway, but their idea was you have a diagnostician. You also had a therapeutic healer, and his job was, okay, now you've got the diagnostic conclusion.

Here's what you need to do. They had really strange things, like if you got a big deep sliver in you, they'd put donkey dung, you know, on it. Really odd stuff. Okay. And then finally you had a professional lamentor. And that was certain times that there were things to lament, you want to make sure you did it right. So he was in charge of professionally lamenting. And real oddly, they had about 20 court people to advise on all these things. Really amazing stuff. Here's the Diviner's Manual, which for the top couple of guys, they actually found a good portion of that Diviner's Manual to tell them here's how you do what. All right.

Now, looking at this map, Assyria didn't stick around. And what you see is Babylon came against them. And the Medes and the Scythians, who at one point were fighting each other, were also fighting against Assyria. They came against them. You had the royalty from the capital head off to Haran. Remember, that's one of the places that Abraham went. And you had the people from Egypt pushing up out of their territory.

And so they put Assyria down big time. Finally, it collapsed. And at one point, right towards the end, Assyria and Egypt actually made an alliance The Babylonians came in and just defeated them badly. And so the Assyrians were no more and the Egyptians were from that point on greatly diminished in power. They never did come back from that defeat. And so the Babylonians took over the Assyrian territory in great part all the way up to the edge of the Egyptian Nation and That's that leads us into the next you know part.

We'll get into Babylonian culture now How does impacting remember that what we said is that our excuse me Aramaic ended up becoming the prominent language it was spoken as the dominant language in Israel during New Testament times Thomas then, this is the one who doubted, would have spoken Aramaic.

And the information he has says he finally went to India, but on the way he went up into the area that was the home of the Assyrian Empire. He spoke Aramaic, they spoke Aramaic, and he gave them the gospel, and they responded. So it's real interesting. If you talk to the Christians, and there are some Christians still in that area who claim descendancy from that particular group that Thomas went to, they'll tell you that Thomas is the one who brought it here. They have that as their historical understanding of things. And several other of the apostles went into this area. because the Aramaic was, you know, again, there's a similar dialect and they could go in and tell the gospel exactly as the Lord had said things to them and pass it on, you know, right along.

And Nineveh, the capital of Assyria for a portion of its history, is located in modern Mosul. We've mentioned that. Right here, Tikrit, just south of that area, hometown of Saddam Hussein. One of the things we mentioned earlier, Syria was extremely cruel. There was also Babylonian influence. Tikrit's one of those places that's sort of halfway between. We'll see next week that Babylonians were also extremely cruel.

What Saddam had been carrying on in his nation was just a long-standing cultural tradition. Extreme cruelty? We've always done that for centuries. So he just carried on the cultural tradition. That's all he was doing. And you don't like it? Tough. We're mean and that's the way we are. And that's the way we like it.

Here is one, I know you have a copy of this, and it's a little tough to see the detail of a rack, but I don't have one that specifically covers a rack. So here's a rack right there in the middle. The lighter green color is for the Sunni, which is the dominant Muslim throughout the world and throughout most of Iraq. The darker green color is the Shiite Muslim, because they've got two different kinds. And interesting, you'd think, well, they're Muslim, they're all happy to be Muslims. No, there is extreme animosity between the groups.

And because the Sunni are the majority, the Shiites get very ill treatment and so this pattern of cruelty that you see established with the Assyrians carried on with the Babylonians that was built into the culture is something that we were dealing with when we went in there. You read about like thousands of people in these graves where they would just dig out a grave and mow people down into the grave. Assyrian tradition. Assyrian cultural tradition.

If you have the power, then you use it. And you'd be exceedingly cruel, and that's just the way we do things. That's just the norm. We've done it for centuries. So what you see, you know, that's coming to the surface in terms of these extreme cruelties, perfectly normal Assyrian thing to do. Perfectly normal.

And it also follows, to some degree, the pattern of the Assyrians were in the northern part, the Babylonians were more in the southern part. So the northern southern division was was kind of long standing, you know, conflict. Yeah, now, now you see that carried out again here. Instead of being Assyrian and Babylonian, it's Sunni and Shiite, extremely cruel to the Shiites.

Okay. Questions? How we doing? Plenty early on time. Questions? Yes. Yes. Yeah, some of those, it's a little uncertain, and that's the only reason why the question mark. It's just, you know, when you're looking at an ancient culture, Sometimes you'll have things like, okay, here's our nice table and we've got it all and it may be either something is linguistically unclear or the language is a little or the symbol is a little bit broken. So you can have everything from the document we have is a little bit marred or broken in a spot to something we never were able to quite figure out. something that scholars debate. So that's why there's a question mark there. Scholars are not quite sure between the debates that go on and partial evidence in order to come to a firm conclusion. So it's like there's some indications that's as close as we can get so far. Yeah. Other questions? It's an interesting thing as we go in and try to deal with the Iraqi situation. To look back and just say, you know, we're trying to go in and correct something that has been a centuries-old tradition. Can you imagine that?

What it would indicate to you is that extreme patience and perseverance is going to be needed in order to make any change. Because we're talking about something that, hey, they've been doing this for thousands of years. That's the way we grew up. I mean, that's what my great-great-grandfather taught me, you know. So you're talking about turning a culture upside down that has had this entrenched for centuries. Entrenched for centuries.

The Babylonians, again that's the next culture we'll get into, one of the ways that they would defy a leader that they would take over. One instance we have a record, they kept the leader alive, they forced him to watch him As his to have him watch as his children were eaten in front of him and then gouged his eyes out They didn't kill him. He had they say, okay, that's the last thing you saw. That's what you're going to remember the rest of your life How's that for cruelty profound cruelty?

That's the tradition that's been passed along and we're going to go in and change that in a year. Good luck It's so well established that centuries of time have not erased it and So it's understanding those kinds of things that come out of the Bible history that our own culture and even much of our own leadership does not understand. But we even have the opportunity to get some background on that here this morning.

There is not the sense of mercy, kindness, all that, just simply not a part of the culture. Not a part of the culture. profound cruelty is that it was the norm yeah no because it spreads out to the region the the Assyrians were the were the center of that but then what you what you find out next is the Babylonians took over and and they did things that were equally as cruel so it's a question of of In the Muslim mindset, you do what you have the power to do. They've obviously gotten things from Muhammad, but Muhammad didn't introduce this cultural concept.

Muhammad made an agreement with the leaders of Mecca. I won't attack you for the next ten years. A peace agreement. And then two years into that agreement, he got enough power to overcome them and he attacked them. So the agreement meant nothing. It's a question of, do I have enough power to do what I want to do? Forget the agreement. It doesn't matter. So it's a mindset that's built in.

And if Muhammad did that, and that's the example that you have, here's the guy that's the great prophet, what do you think the rest of the culture thinks? Are you going to establish a written peace agreement with these people when they're exalted prophet? doesn't, you know, hold to that himself, the very example and teaching that he has, if you have the power, do it. So real interesting. I mean, the whole cultural concept is not what our thinking is at all.

They think very, very differently. And the Assyrian and Babylonian tradition fed into that. Muhammad changed some things, but he also carried on some things that were well entrenched in the culture. And a lot of it's throughout the Middle East, because it came first, the Assyrians were there, then the Babylonians, as we see, then you got the Persian culture, then you got the, you know, the Medes, you got all these different cultures. The Scythians were ones to the north, they were also profoundly cruel. They were the ones that, you know, came against the Jews with drunken elephants.

Just a very different way of thinking than ours. Very different way of thinking. The first century After Christianity was introduced, peacefully, without a sword being drawn, peacefully the gospel went into three different continents. The first century after Islam was introduced, with the sword, Islam went into all three continents. So it's just a sharp contrast in the very character of it.

And the root of it is the cruelty that you see with the Assyrian culture and the Babylonian culture, and it's carried on. It's part of the whole region. It's one reason why we have to go in with military power to make a democracy, because otherwise it doesn't exist in the whole region. One of the things you'll find is that, like the Egyptians, they'd have the tombs and the palaces would be the things that they'd have hieroglyphics on. The Assyrians had much the same thing. And a point that, I'm glad you brought this up, a point that is to be noted, all those hieroglyphics we saw, like for Egypt, and what you would see similar, like with the wing bowls, you know, on the walls and that kind of thing, all those things were more representative of the royalty.

You don't get a lot of information about what's the common person's life like. Because nobody's going to, you know, you're not going to get paid lots of money for recording that. So there's a tendency for the information we have to kind of be skewed towards royalty and the upper echelon, you know, economically. And so we don't have lots of information about how did the average person live. Because nobody wanted to or bothered to record that.

Once in a while we'll come across little bits and pieces. But yeah, they had a lot of the same, you know, Relief carvings on the wall and statues and things of that sort. Similar, just reflecting their culture instead of the Egyptian. Anyway, enough.