Oldest Stories

The Pedubastis Cycle is a group of ancient Egyptian heroic tales centered on Pharaoh Pedubastis, Inaros, Petechonsis, Pemaus, and the powerful local rulers of Egypt during the centuries surrounding the Assyrian invasions. Preserved mainly in fragmentary Demotic Egyptian manuscripts from later periods, these stories transform an obscure era of Egyptian political fragmentation into a legendary age of heroes, feuds, enchanted objects, battles, divine intervention, and dynastic rivalry.

This episode examines several surviving stories from the Pedubastis Cycle, beginning with the fragmentary Story of Bes and the legendary hero Inaros. It then follows Petechonsis into the mythical Land of Women before turning to the much better preserved story of the Armor of Inaros, in which Pemaus and Werti-amon-nut plunge Egypt into civil war over possession of the dead hero’s famous armor.

Behind the legendary material lies a memory of real political conditions during Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period. Pharaoh Pedubastis appears as a weak central ruler surrounded by powerful local lords capable of raising armies, fighting private wars, and resisting foreign enemies independently. The tale even preserves a literary memory of warfare against Assyria, making the Pedubastis Cycle especially valuable for understanding how later Egyptians remembered the era immediately before the conquests of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal.

The episode explores the relationship between Egyptian heroic literature and historical memory, the legendary traditions surrounding Inaros and his descendants, the political fragmentation of Late Period Egypt, and the cultural background to the coming conflict between the Kushite pharaoh Taharqa and the Assyrian Empire.

How did ancient Assyria use divination, astrology, and animal livers to make decisions of war, government, and royal policy? Under King Esarhaddon, the Neo-Assyrian Empire developed one of the ancient world’s most sophisticated systems of omen interpretation, combining centuries of recorded observations with extispicy, celestial omens, ritual expertise, and consultation with the gods.

This episode examines the intellectual world of Assyrian divination and the system of experts who advised the royal court. Mesopotamian scholars collected and analyzed omens over generations, searching for correlations between unusual events, astronomical phenomena, medical symptoms, animal behavior, and subsequent historical outcomes. Their methods could involve careful empirical observation, elaborate textual traditions, linguistic interpretation, and an underlying theological assumption that the gods were ultimately responsible for events in the natural and political world.

At the center of the episode is Esarhaddon, king of Assyria from 681–669 BCE, whose surviving correspondence preserves an extraordinary record of royal consultation with scholars and diviners. We examine letters from court intellectuals, the formulation of oracle questions, the use of sacrificial sheep in extispicy, and the interpretation of the liver and other internal organs as signs of divine intention.

The episode also explores the specialized scholarly professions surrounding the Assyrian court: the ṭupšarru or learned scribe and celestial observer, the bārû or diviner and haruspex, the āšipu or ritual and magical specialist, the kalû or lamentation priest and chanter, and the asû or physician. Together these experts formed a complex advisory system through which observations were gathered, questions formulated, divine answers interpreted, and practical, ritual, or religious responses carried out.

More broadly, the episode asks how closely Mesopotamian omen scholarship resembles science. Assyrian and Babylonian scholars relied heavily on accumulated observation, classification, written records, specialized training, and the testing of inherited traditions against experience. At the same time, their investigations remained embedded within a theological model in which the gods were the direct causes of events and deliberately made their intentions visible through signs.

Topics include Neo-Assyrian religion, Mesopotamian divination, extispicy and hepatoscopy, Assyrian astrology, the State Archives of Assyria, Esarhaddon, ancient science, omen literature, cuneiform scholarship, the Tablet of Destinies, Enūma Anu Enlil, Šumma Ālu, Šumma Izbu, royal prophecy, ritual magic, and the intellectual culture of the ancient Near East.

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The Cimmerians were among the first great horse nomad powers to crash into the civilizations of the ancient Near East. Emerging from the Scytho-Siberian world north of the Caucasus, they struck Urartu, devastated Phrygia and Lydia, raided deep into the Near East, and became legendary in Greek memory as one of the great barbarian terrors of antiquity.

But how dangerous were they really?

In this episode, we look beyond the later legends to reconstruct the Cimmerians and their Scythian cousins as actual people: their pastoral economy, horses, clothing, settlements, weapons, trade, and political organization. We examine what made mounted nomads so difficult for settled kingdoms to fight, why mobility mattered more than any supposedly unstoppable horse-archer tactic, and why the mighty Assyrian army was surprisingly well suited to defeating them.

We also confront one of the strangest mysteries of Cimmerian warfare: if lightly equipped horse nomads struggled against an Assyrian battle line, how did they repeatedly overcome some of the greatest fortified cities of Anatolia?

From Conan the Barbarian to Herodotus, from the Caucasus to Sardis, this is the story of the Cimmerians, the early Scythians, and the arrival of the horse nomad as a major force in Near Eastern history.

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Esarhaddon inherited the Neo-Assyrian Empire at the height of its power—but his kingship looked very different from that of the warrior-kings who came before him. Plagued by questions of legitimacy, surrounded by prophets and diviners, and often absent from his own military campaigns, Esarhaddon nevertheless presided over an extraordinarily aggressive and successful Assyrian state.

This episode follows the first half of Esarhaddon’s reign: the rebuilding of Babylon, the rise of prophecy as a political force, wars against Chaldeans and Arabs, the arrival of the Cimmerians, the destruction of Sidon, the treaty with Baal of Tyre, and the strange expedition to Bazu. Along the way, we look at how Assyrian kingship was changing, how religion and factional politics shaped the court, and how an empire built for conquest could continue functioning even when its king was no longer personally leading every army.

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The ancient story of Ahiqar follows a legendary wise man and royal adviser at the court of the Assyrian king Sennacherib. After adopting his nephew Nadan and teaching him a long collection of proverbs, Ahiqar is betrayed, falsely accused of treason, condemned to death, and forced to hide beneath his own house. His eventual return leads to a strange contest of riddles with the Pharaoh of Egypt and a final confrontation with the student who rejected his wisdom.

Preserved in an ancient Aramaic papyrus from Elephantine and in later Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Slavonic, and Ethiopic versions, the Tale of Ahiqar may be the oldest Mesopotamian story to survive beyond the disappearance of cuneiform culture. This episode explores the story’s Assyrian background, its relationship to ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature, its memorable proverbs and insults, and the way traditional stories were used to form memory, judgment, and moral character.

Topics include Ahiqar, Nadan, Sennacherib, ancient Assyria, Nineveh, Elephantine, Aramaic literature, Syriac literature, Mesopotamian wisdom, ancient proverbs, the Tale of Ahiqar, the Thousand and One Nights, ancient Egypt, Pharaoh, Assyrian court culture, and ancient Near Eastern storytelling.

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In the final years of Sennacherib’s reign, the Neo-Assyrian Empire entered a strange period of peace. After decades of war, conquest, rebellion, and the destruction of Babylon, the greatest military power of the ancient Near East suddenly stopped expanding.

Was Sennacherib simply more interested in building Nineveh than campaigning abroad? Had Assyria reached the natural limits of profitable conquest? Or were omens and divination beginning to restrain the king’s decisions?

The question became far more dangerous when Sennacherib unexpectedly removed his established crown prince and elevated a younger son: Assur-ahu-iddina, better known as Esarhaddon. Sickly, deeply religious, and apparently favored by prophets and diviners, Esarhaddon was proclaimed the heir during a period of intense religious activity surrounding the restoration of the Akitu festival.

His older brothers did not accept the decision.

This episode follows the final years of Sennacherib, the religious and political logic behind Esarhaddon’s elevation, the rivalry among the Assyrian princes, the assassination of Sennacherib by his own sons, and the brief civil war that brought Esarhaddon to the throne.

Along the way, we examine how omens actually influenced Assyrian policy, why sacred oaths may have mattered more than modern historians assume, and how royal propaganda transformed a violent succession crisis into proof that the gods themselves had chosen the new king.

Topics include Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, Urdu-Mullissu, Naqia, the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Assyrian divination, the Akitu festival, the destruction of Babylon, Assyrian succession, ancient prophecy, royal assassination, and the religion of ancient Mesopotamia.

An examination of the deepest level of the Ancient Mesopotamia iceberg, commonly labeled "Theories and Speculative Ideas." The video reviews each claim against primary sources from Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria, including cuneiform tablets, excavation reports, and geological data, to demonstrate how historical method evaluates extraordinary claims.

Coverage includes: Ancient Astronauts and the Annunaki: the origin of the theory in Zecharia Sitchin, what the Akkadian term actually means in Mesopotamian religion, and the evidential standards for alien contact claims. Great Flood myths: comparison of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Genesis, and other flood traditions with evidence for Persian Gulf and Black Sea inundations. Gilgamesh's tomb discovered in 2003: the Uruk excavation, the Iraq War interruption, and why no inscription links the tomb to the historical king. Hanging Gardens location: the case for Nineveh and Dur-Sharrukin, Archimedes screw technology by 700 BC, and why Babylon remains plausible. Nimrud Lens and Saturn's rings: what the 3x quartz lens can and cannot do, and the absence of telescopic astronomy in Assyrian records. Annunaki gold-mining slaves: the actual Mesopotamian creation motive of humans as laborers for the gods versus modern reinterpretations. Abraham from Ur: the biblical text, the Amorite migrations circa 2000 BCE, and the northern vs southern Ur debate. Sumerian King List long reigns: hundreds of thousands of years, symbolic numbers, and attempts at dynastic or calendrical readings. Sumerian origins: language isolate status, the Persian Gulf marsh hypothesis, and pre-flood settlement theories. Nibiru and the 12th planet: claims of hidden planets in tablets and the current state of translation work. 4.2 kiloyear event: climate data and its role in the fall of the Akkadian Empire alongside Gutian pressure. Structures beneath Eridu: the E-Abzu temple's 18 rebuild phases and what lies under ziggurat foundations. Linguistic fringe theories: proposed links between Sumerian and Turkic, Hungarian, Elamite, and Dravidian. Meluhha trade network: Indus Valley contacts, Neo-Assyrian memory loss, and claims of an Ethiopia-to-India empire. Nuclear war dark ages: why nuclear events leave unmistakable geological signatures

Sumerian copper from Lake Michigan: sourcing from Cyprus and Iran versus New World contact hypotheses. Sacred marriage as genetic experiment: Ishtar priestess rituals and kingship legitimation. Ur III bala system as socialism: command economy, ration payments, and modern ideological projections. King List as doomsday calendar, Nam-Shub virus, 676 BC simulation, and Enki vs Enlil secret societies: modern fiction, numerology, and conspiracy narratives

The purpose is not to ridicule speculation, but to show what counts as evidence in early Mesopotamian studies, where the limits of knowledge currently lie, and what kind of discovery would be required to reopen closed questions.

Keywords: ancient Mesopotamia, Sumerian history, Akkadian Empire, Babylon, Assyria, Annunaki explained, ancient aliens debunked, Sumerian King List, Gilgamesh tomb 2003, Nibiru 12th planet, Hanging Gardens Nineveh, Nimrud lens, flood myth, 4.2 kiloyear event, Mesopotamia iceberg

Sennacherib is remembered as one of the most powerful kings of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, but his greatest legacy may not have been conquest. It was Nineveh: a rebuilt imperial capital of canals, gardens, temples, walls, lamassu, and the famous Palace Without Rival.

In this episode of Oldest Stories, we look at Sennacherib’s engineering innovations and his massive transformation of Nineveh in the late 8th and early 7th centuries BCE. Unlike many earlier Assyrian kings, Sennacherib did not focus primarily on expanding the borders of the empire. Instead, he poured the wealth, labor, and power of Assyria into construction, urban planning, waterworks, palace architecture, royal gardens, and monumental art.

We explore the building of the Palace Without Rival, the reshaping of Nineveh’s streets and walls, the canal systems that watered the city, the possible connection between Assyrian royal gardens and later stories of the Hanging Gardens, and the way Sennacherib used architecture to express kingship, divine favor, imperial control, and personal ambition.

This is the story of an Assyrian king who turned the machinery of empire toward building one of the most impressive cities of the ancient world.

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Its the siege of Lachish, but also a much more wide ranging explanation of Assyrian siegecraft more generally. Including how it was recognizably modern and, in many ways, responsible for modernity.

In 701 BCE, Assyrian king Sennacherib launched his western campaign against Judah, bringing him into direct conflict with King Hezekiah and the political counsel of the prophet Isaiah. The decisive field battle of that year was not at Jerusalem, but at Eltekeh, where Assyrian troops defeated an Egyptian and Kushite force sent to support the rebellious Philistine city of Ekron.

This episode reconstructs the full 701 campaign from Assyrian annals and biblical accounts, beginning with the minor 702 operations in the Zagros mountains against Zamua, Parsua, and Ellipi, then following Sennacherib to the Phoenician coast. We cover the flight of Luli, king of Tyre, to Cyprus, the installation of Itobaal at Sidon, and the submission of eight Levantine rulers from Ashdod, Byblos, Ammon, Moab, Edom, and Arwad.

We then turn to Philistia: the internal coup at Ashkelon, the Ekronite revolt that handed King Padi over to Hezekiah, and Sennacherib's restoration of Padi after the victory at Eltekeh. The episode explains why Jerusalem faced only a blockade rather than a full siege, examines Isaiah's advice against an Egyptian alliance, and considers the logistical, political, and possible epidemiological reasons Sennacherib withdrew with massive tribute but without taking the city.

Music from the show: oldeststories.net/music (or search "Oldest Stories Music")

Support the show:

Books: https://a.co/d/7Wn4jhS

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