Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

[admin]

Part 2 of 3

55:29
Assyrian carvings show remarkably detailed scenes of the army crossing one
55:35
of the land's great rivers, something they must have had to do multiple times a year. We see Assyrian men blowing into tied-up
55:46
sheepskins to inflate them and use as buoyancy aids,
55:51
chariots dismantled and turned into boats, rafts constructed to transport
55:57
supplies and equipment; army engineers could even cut paths through the treacherous mountains, as this inscription written by the late
56:06
Assyrian king Sargon II seems particularly proud of.
56:14
Mount Simirria is a great mountain peak that points upward like the blade of a spear. Its summit touches the sky above, and its roots are made to reach down
56:23
below into the netherworld. It is not fit for the ascent of chariotry or for allowing horses, and its access is very difficult for even the
56:32
passage of foot soldiers. I had my vanguard carry strong copper axes; they cut through the high mountain crags as if they were limestone, and
56:40
thereby improved the path. I took the lead of my army and made the chariotry, cavalry, and battle troops fly over the mountain as if they were brave
56:49
eagles. I had the common soldiers and like infantry follow behind them. The camels and donkeys bearing the baggage leapt up
56:57
its peaks like the ibexes native to the mountains. I had the numerous troops of the god Ashur ascend its difficult slopes in a good order, and then I set up camp
57:07
on top of that mountain. Tiglath-Pileser also increased production of iron in the empire.
57:16
It was a small-scale industrial revolution. Assyrian cities of this time must have become increasingly smoke-filled, the
57:26
furnaces belching charcoal smoke, the sound of billows and clanging hammers
57:32
echoing off the buildings. The use of iron allowed the Assyrians to enter the era of true mass production. Assyrians could now use iron to make
57:42
arrowheads, knives, pins, and chains, while Assyrian soldiers now marched with
57:50
iron swords, iron spear blades, iron helmets, and iron scales sewn into their
57:57
tunics. The effect was immediate. In the year 743 BC, only two years after coming to the
58:06
throne, King Tiglath-Pileser marched north against the kingdom of Urartu, and
58:12
conquered it easily. Two years later, he marched west into Syria against the kingdom of Arpad.
58:24
The people of the city of Arpad had fought the Assyrians before, and they knew what to do. They would simply close their gates and
58:34
hold tight. The Assyrian army may have looked fearsome, but they knew that when the summer came to an end, they would have to
58:42
go home and harvest their fields just as they always had.
58:47
But as autumn came, the people of Arpad must have realized that something was
58:53
wrong. The Assyrians showed no sign of going home. In fact, it looked like they were
59:00
settling in for a long stay. Tiglath-Pileser lay siege to the city of
59:07
Arpad for three years, something that would have been impossible with the old
59:13
seasonal armies. When the city finally fell, the Assyrian
59:18
king ordered Arpad to be destroyed and its inhabitants slaughtered. It was a
59:25
clear message to all those who stood in the empire's way, that a new age was dawning.
59:38
Much like superpowers today, the Assyrian Empire treated the areas outside its
59:44
boundaries as zones of extraction, where life was cheap and all that
59:50
mattered was the empire's continued access to their resources.
59:56
Assyria would grow rich from the vast wealth it extracted from these
1:00:01
areas. One text written during the reign of that cruel king Ashurnasirpal II lists all the wealth drawn from a single
1:00:12
campaign of terror against the region of Bit-Zamani.
1:00:19
I received harnessed chariots, equipment for troops and horses,
1:00:24
460 harness-trained horses, two talents of silver, two talents of gold,
1:00:30
100 talents of tin, 100 talents of bronze, 300 talents of iron, 3,000 bronze receptacles, bronze bowls,
1:00:40
bronze containers, 1,000 linen garments with multi-colored trim, dishes,
1:00:47
chests, couches of ivory and decorated with gold, the treasure of his palace,
1:00:53
also 2,000 oxen, 5,000 sheep, his sister with her rich dowry, and the
1:00:59
daughters of his nobles. On top of this, 15,000 slaves were rounded up and brought back to
1:01:10
Assyria to labor in manual jobs and provide a workforce for the empire.
1:01:17
In campaign after campaign, Tiglath- -Pileser conquered lands in Syria, and
1:01:23
marched all the way down the Mediterranean coast, taking coastal cities all the way to Egypt. He invaded the northern kingdom of
1:01:32
Israel, destroyed their army, installed a puppet king, and deported
1:01:38
large numbers of Hebrew tribes back to lands in Assyria.
1:01:43
Tiglath-Pileser also added one more remarkable new possession to the list of
1:01:50
Assyrian conquests; that was the mighty and ancient capital
1:01:55
of the south, the great city of Babylon.
1:02:14
The city of Babylon had been the political and religious heart of
1:02:19
southern Mesopotamia for more than a thousand years. It was perhaps the most ancient and revered great city in the region, and at
1:02:29
this time, it ruled over an area known today as Babylonia.
1:02:35
This is a landscape of marshes covering much of the south of what is today Iraq
1:02:41
on the coast of the Persian Gulf. This was once the largest wetland in the
1:02:47
Middle East, home to countless rare species of bird, and the reeds often grow so high that you can't see over them.
1:02:57
Mesopotamia had once been divided between the Sumerians in the south and
1:03:02
the Akkadians in the north, but this had now evolved to become
1:03:08
Babylonians in the south and Assyrians in the north, and it's a cultural division that still exists today.
1:03:16
In modern times, the distribution of the Sunni and Shia regions of modern Iraq
1:03:23
roughly follow this same geographical divide.
1:03:29
Babylon was the largest city in the world at several points in history, and
1:03:34
it was perhaps the first city to ever reach a population above 200,000. Today, its awe-inspiring ruins sit about
1:03:45
85 kilometers south of Baghdad, a sprawling mass of crumbling walls.
1:03:52
Its famous Ishtar Gate, with its ornate blue glazed tiles, its depictions of oxen,
1:04:00
lions, and dragons were at this time still several centuries in the future,
1:04:06
but Babylon would have still been a resplendent city glittering in the sun.
1:04:12
Tiglath-Pileser's conquest of Babylon shifted the balance of power in Mesopotamia. By the year 736 BC,
1:04:23
the empire encompassed almost the whole of the region known as the Fertile Crescent. It now formed an unbroken corridor from
1:04:32
the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, linking up the trade routes of the Indian Ocean with those of North Africa and Europe.
1:04:41
Its roads would have been thick with caravans of donkeys and camels, its
1:04:47
rivers full of barges carrying spices and precious stones,
1:04:52
wheat, barley and fruit, gold and silver, and brass.
1:04:58
It was this empire and the formidable army it now commanded that the king
1:05:04
Tiglath-Pileser III would pass down to his younger son, who would found the greatest dynasty of the Assyrian age.
1:05:14
His name was Sargon II, named after that great ancient Sumerian
1:05:20
hero. His dynasty would be known as the Sargonid Kings. They would rule for three generations
1:05:28
that would form the highest point of the empire's achievements in war, art, and
1:05:34
literature, but they would also be the twilight of its age.
1:05:40
When these three generations ended, the empire would finally collapse in ash
1:05:46
and flame.
1:05:57
At this point, I think it's worth pausing and asking what was life like for the
1:06:02
average citizen of the Assyrian Empire? Due to their officious record-keeping, we
1:06:09
actually have a great deal of detail about how the people of ancient Mesopotamia lived. Like the Sumerians ,the Assyrians wrote
1:06:20
on clay tablets, which is lucky for us since it has made their texts incredibly
1:06:26
durable. An enormous number of these pieces of writing have been recovered, so many that an estimated 90% have still never
1:06:36
been looked at by a trained expert, and far less translated.
1:06:42
The experience of reading these tablets is like hearing the babbling of
1:06:47
countless voices speaking up to us from the impossibly distant past about a
1:06:54
remarkable array of everyday matters. Just one out of countless examples is
1:07:01
this letter from a child away at school complaining to his mother that the other
1:07:07
children have nicer clothes than he does. Tell the lady Zinu her son Iddin-Sin sends
1:07:16
the following message; from year to year, the clothes of the young gentleman here become better, but you let my clothes get worse from year
1:07:26
to year. The son of Adad-Iddinam, whose father is only an assistant of my father, has two new sets of clothes, while you fuss even
1:07:36
about a single set for me. In spite of the fact that you gave birth to me and his mother only adopted him, his mother loves him while you,
1:07:47
you do not love me. As a result of this rich collection of texts, we can paint a remarkably clear
1:07:57
picture of what life was like for these very ancient people.
1:08:02
Walking the streets of a great Assyrian city during this time would have engaged
1:08:08
every one of your senses. One such city was Nineveh, which would
1:08:13
soon become the capital of the empire, the same city that the Greek writer Xenophon would one day pass by while fleeing from the Persian army
1:08:23
pursuing him. Nineveh was an enormous city for the time. Its city walls were 12 kilometers long,
1:08:31
built of a stone foundation surmounted by mud bricks and enclosing an area of
1:08:37
seven and a half square kilometers. The wall was broken by fifteen gates,
1:08:43
many of them named after gods such as the Adad Gate named after the god of
1:08:49
storms, or the Shamash Gate after the god of the sun, while others carried more descriptive names like the Desert Gate or the Gate
1:08:59
of the Water Carriers. The city was surrounded by a moat filled
1:09:04
with water from the river Tigris. The city would have been a kaleidoscope
1:09:10
of rooftops, built in a largely unplanned manner, and its alleyways would have been covered with mats and reed awnings to keep off
1:09:18
the heat, much as they still are in Iraq today. In the courtyards of houses, skins of wine and jars of water hang from the
1:09:28
rafters to cool. We can imagine a joint of meat boiling in a clay pot on a fireplace, the smells of baking bread wafting from
1:09:38
a clay charcoal oven nearby. The following recipe for lamb stew
1:09:43
translated from a clay tablet shows the kinds of smells that would have been wafting through the city streets in the afternoon.
1:09:53
Stew of lamb; meat is used. You prepare water. You add fat. You add fine grain salt,
1:10:01
dried barley cakes, onion, shallot, and milk. You crush together and add leek and garlic.
1:10:10
Like the Sumerians before them, the Assyrians loved to drink beer. They drank
1:10:16
it in groups, sipping it from large urns through hollow reed straws.
1:10:22
Beer held a prominent place in Assyrian culture, and this inscription by the late
1:10:27
king Ashurbanipal shows that even in the highest royal circles, it was considered
1:10:34
among life's greatest pleasures. In my reign, there is prosperity.
1:10:40
In my years, there is abundance. My kingship is good as the choicest oil.
1:10:45
Good beer I have placed in my palace.
1:10:51
Nineveh sat on the river Tigris, and had a bustling dock and waterfront beside
1:10:56
the gate known as the dock gate. This would have been a vibrant place
1:11:02
full of the smells of dried and fresh fish, stagnant water, and mud, the babbling
1:11:08
of the crowd, people arguing over prices and shouting greetings in dozens of
1:11:14
languages. Merchants would sail downstream on barges or ships woven from reeds, perhaps traveling south to Ashur or Babylon with
1:11:24
clay urns full of beer or wine. The following letter contains
1:11:30
instructions from a wine merchant to a friend.
1:11:35
Tell Ahuni Belanum sends the following message; may the god Shamash keep you in
1:11:41
good health. Make ready for me the myrtle and the sweet-smelling reeds I spoke to you about,
1:11:49
as well as a boat for transporting wine. Buy and bring along with you ten silver
1:11:55
shekels’ worth of wine and join me here in Babylon sometime tomorrow.
1:12:02
But the Tigris was a fast-flowing river, much faster than the Euphrates, and
1:12:07
sailing back upstream was very difficult. So, traders would often make the journey
1:12:13
back by road, accompanied by caravans of donkeys.
1:12:18
The road system was now much improved since the time of the Sumerians, and a
1:12:23
sophisticated highway network now joined all of Assyria's major cities, with
1:12:29
milestones at regular intervals telling travelers how much further they had to
1:12:34
go. But the roads were often dangerous, and although soldiers would patrol them,
1:12:40
banditry was extremely common. One letter from a local governor shows
1:12:46
his frustration with the lack of response to the bandit problem.
1:12:52
Tell Sin-Iddinam Sillee sends the following message; I have written to you repeatedly to bring here the criminal and all the
1:13:00
robbers, but you have not brought them, and so, fires started by the robbers are still raging and ravaging the
1:13:06
countryside. I am holding you responsible for the crimes which are committed in the country.
1:13:13
In the cities, a great deal of life took place on the roofs of houses.
1:13:19
During the day, women would gather on these roofs to perform the duties of maintaining their homes. They would pound grains into flour
1:13:28
and knead the dough to make bread, prepare food, wash linen, and hang it out to dry. We can imagine them talking with their
1:13:37
neighbors from roof to roof as they worked, and the sounds of their laughter
1:13:42
drifting overhead. During the hottest hours of the day, with the Iraqi sun often reaching more than 40 degrees Celsius or 104 degrees
1:13:53
Fahrenheit, the heat would drive everyone indoors. The
1:14:00
finer houses of the city often had a kind of cool room, with a floor made of
1:14:05
polished alabaster or marble, and the walls painted with plaster.
1:14:11
During the hottest parts of the day, the floor and walls would be splashed with water to cool the air inside. The city's poor would sleep on reed mats
1:14:22
while the rich had wooden bed frames with mattresses and coverings. The richest of the citizens had beds made of ivory and fine carved woods.
1:14:34
It's not just people that were thought to live in this city; the Assyrians believed that the world was populated by countless demons and
1:14:43
spirits who could not be seen or heard, but whose influence could constantly be
1:14:49
felt, and who often manifested as bad smells. These demons were responsible for illnesses and disease, and they required
1:14:59
the constant attention of exorcists to expel them. The following letter recounts the procedure for one exorcism for a person
1:15:09
suffering from epilepsy. As soon as something has afflicted him,
1:15:15
the exorcist rises and hangs a mouse and a shoot of thornbush on the vault of the
1:15:20
patient's door. The exorcist dresses in a red garment and puts on a red cloak. He holds a raven on his right arm, a
1:15:30
falcon on his left, and recites the incantation “Truly, you are evil!” After he has finished, he makes another
1:15:39
exorcist go around the bed of the patient, followed by incense and a torch, and recites the incantation “Begone evil
1:15:48
hutupu!” until the demon is driven out. He does this every morning and evening.
1:15:56
Talismans were often used to ward off these evil spirits, often small statues
1:16:02
in bronze or clay, sometimes precious stones like jasper.
1:16:08
They were often frightening images of demons with the wings and heads of goats
1:16:14
and dogs, and the tails of scorpions. These would be kept in every corner
1:16:20
of the house to ward off evil. As you walked the city, you would see these small talismans hanging from the rooftops.
1:16:30
For many Assyrians, one crucial everyday object was what's called a cylinder seal. These were a small cylinder of stone,
1:16:41
some no larger than a battery, which had complicated designs and symbols carved
1:16:47
into them. The idea was that someone could prove their identity using this seal, and they could be used to sign contracts just like a signature.
1:16:58
People would wear them around their necks on a string, and when a contract was written on clay, they would roll the cylinder over it so that their unique
1:17:08
image was left printed on it. You could even seal a chest, an urn, or a
1:17:14
door using clay or wax, and then print it with an official seal so that everyone
1:17:20
knew the last person to open it. The following letter of instruction to a
1:17:26
member of the king's household shows the importance that these seals held in all
1:17:32
manners of official business. Tell Manaya that Siqi-ilani will be coming to you carrying the cylinder seals to reseal
1:17:42
the entrance of the warehouse, and also the cylinder showing a lahmu monster for resealing the chests. Get everyone together,
1:17:51
open the storehouse, and take as many as you can carry of the garments which are in the chests under my seal. Put your cylinder seal on whatever has been
1:18:00
returned, and send me back the seal cylinders. But these cylinders were expensive, and they signified that their holder was
1:18:10
an important person of high class. Regular people had to get by without one,
1:18:17
and to sign a contract, they would simply press their fingernails into the clay,
1:18:23
meaning that the marks of these ancient people's hands are still left on some of
1:18:28
these documents.
1:18:37
The people who lived these countless lives in the streets of the great Assyrian cities were probably largely unaware of what was going on in the vast,
1:18:47
grand palaces that loomed over their cities. They would have likely followed the comings and goings of kings with some
1:18:56
interest the way we might pay attention to celebrity gossip,
1:19:01
but to them, the inner workings of the royal palace would have been as inaccessible and mysterious as the center of the earth.
1:19:11
But what happened in those inner chambers would have an enormous effect on their lives, and as that final great dynasty of
1:19:20
Assyria, the Sargonid Kings, took to the throne, the dramas of the royal court would soon have deadly consequences for
1:19:30
all those who called Assyria their home.
1:19:40
The drama of the Sargonid Kings truly begins with the son of Sargon, a man
1:19:47
named Sennacherib. He came to the throne in the year 705 BC,
1:19:56
and he would begin one of the most remarkable family dramas to come down to
1:20:01
us from the ancient world, and he would be the father and the grandfather of the
1:20:08
last two great kings of Assyria; Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal.
1:20:19
This great drama got off to a remarkably rocky start.
1:20:25
Sennacherib's father, Sargon, had been a respected and feared king,
1:20:31
but it's clear that something about Sennacherib meant that he didn't quite hold the same level of command. After only two years of his rule, several
1:20:41
Assyrian vassals in the foothills to the east, in Syria, and along the Mediterranean coast all suddenly stopped paying their tribute to the empire.
1:20:52
The Egyptians, always happy to throw sand in the eyes of the Assyrians, moved to
1:20:59
back the rebels’ fight for independence, and the young Sennacherib quickly found
1:21:04
himself plunged into a fight for the empire's survival.
1:21:10
The young king quickly gathered the full force of the imperial army and dealt
1:21:16
with the rebel kings in the usual Assyrian fashion, taking them on one by
1:21:21
one. He first marched east and crushed the peoples of the Iranian lowlands. Then he marched north and around the
1:21:30
Fertile Crescent to the Mediterranean coast, and reconquered the rebellious
1:21:36
kingdoms there, as he recalls in the following inscription.
1:21:42
With the weapons of the god Ashur, my lord, and my fierce battle array, I turned them back and made them retreat. I quickly slaughtered and defeated the
1:21:51
king of the land of Elam, together with his magnates who wore gold jewelry like fattened bulls restrained with chains.
1:21:59
I slit their throats like sheep and cut off their precious lives like thread. Like a flood after a rainstorm, I made their blood flow over the broad earth.
1:22:09
The swift horses, harnessed to my chariot, pulled into floods of their blood. The wheels of my war chariot, which lays criminals and villains low, were bathed
1:22:18
in blood and gore. I filled the plane with the corpses of their warriors like grass. I cut off their lips. I cut off their
1:22:26
hands like the stems of cucumbers in season.
1:22:32
One of these campaigns is remarkable because we have accounts of it written
1:22:37
by both the winners and the losers in a level of detail almost unprecedented
1:22:43
anywhere else in the 8th century BC. This is because its records have
1:22:50
survived not just in the chronicles of Assyria, but also in the Bible.
1:22:56
This was Sennacherib's campaign against the Kingdom of Judah.
1:23:05
The Kingdom of Judah was one of the region's two major Hebrew kingdoms, and
1:23:10
it centered on the powerful city of Jerusalem. It had once been part of a united Kingdom of Israel, but in the face of
1:23:20
Assyrian aggression, the kingdom had been broken up. It was now divided into the
1:23:26
Kingdom of Israel in the north ruled by a puppet king, and Judah in the south. The Judean king at the time was a
1:23:36
man named Hezekiah. He was an energetic ruler and seems to
1:23:42
have been driven by religious fervor. The religion of the ancient Israelites was something of an oddity in this
1:23:52
region at the time, because it disallowed the worship of any god but the Hebrew
1:23:58
god Yahweh. As we've seen, worship in places like
1:24:03
Assyria was a much more eclectic affair. You might make offerings to Marduk while
1:24:10
you were visiting Babylon on business, and make an offering to Ashur when you got home. You might make an offering to Ea if your son was going on a long
1:24:19
voyage by boat, or to Gula if someone you knew was sick.
1:24:24
In the Assyrian worldview, the gods of other cities were often seen as hostile
1:24:30
and were thought to be subordinate to the great god Ashur, but they were still thought to very much exist. In fact, the Assyrians had a habit of
1:24:40
kidnapping the gods of their conquered enemies. Sometimes when they captured a new city, they would take the statues of its gods
1:24:49
back to the Assyrian capital as a way of harnessing their power for themselves.
1:24:55
But the religion of the Hebrews was different; it held that there was only one god. If you worshiped any other deity, it was
1:25:04
believed that you were at best talking to the air, and at worst communing with
1:25:10
evil spirits. King Hezekiah was one of the most
1:25:15
strident religious rulers of ancient Judah. He enacted sweeping religious reforms, including strict instructions to worship
1:25:25
only the Jewish god Yahweh. He removed all other statues and icons
1:25:31
from the temple of Jerusalem, as the Book of Kings, Chapter 2:18 in the Hebrew
1:25:38
Bible recalls.
1:25:47
Now it came to pass in the third year of Hoshea, son of Elah, king of Israel, that
1:25:52
Hezekiah, the son of Ahaz, king of Judah began to reign, and he did that which was
1:25:58
right in the eyes of the lord, according to all that David, his father, had done. He removed the high places and broke the
1:26:06
pillars, and he broke in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made, for unto those days, the children of
1:26:14
Israel did offer to it.
1:26:24
Perhaps it was Hezekiah's religious devotion that led him to make the
1:26:29
enormous gamble of defying the Assyrian Empire, or perhaps the recent rebellions in Assyria had emboldened him, and he
1:26:39
believed that it might be on the brink of collapse. Whatever his calculation, it backfired completely.
1:26:49
He soon heard news that the Assyrian king Sennacherib was marching out to
1:26:55
punish the Kingdom of Judah with the full might of the Assyrian army.
1:27:00
The news coming from the north would have been terrifying. Sennacherib first conquered the rebels of Ekron, and then
1:27:10
swung his armies south to march on Jerusalem. On the road, he came across the fortified Judean city of Lachish.
1:27:22
Lachish was the second-most important of the cities of Judah. It was built on a hill about 40 kilometers to the southwest of
1:27:30
Jerusalem, and had a strong wall running all the way around it.
1:27:36
The hill was steeper on the north side and for defensive purposes, this is where
1:27:41
its gate had been built. We can imagine the sight that the citizens of Lachish would have seen one day in the year 701 BC.
1:27:53
From the north, a great cloud of dust would have begun to gather on the horizon, looking like some great natural disaster
1:28:02
on its way. As the dust grew closer and thicker, you would have been able to hear the vibrations through the earth.
1:28:10
If you've ever been inside a large sports stadium at full capacity, try to
1:28:16
imagine what three or four times as many people would sound like
1:28:21
all marching together in their heavy armor, along with their horses and the
1:28:26
clattering of chariot wheels and harnesses. Finally, the enormous force would have come into view like a shadow on the land.
1:28:37
In the center of their formations, the main body of infantry would have massed, organized into tight, compact units, their spear points glittering in the sun.
1:28:49
Even more terrifying would be the trundling wheels of enormous siege engines come to tear down the walls of the city.
1:28:58
The Judean military was insignificant in comparison.
1:29:03
They were made up of militias and mercenaries huddled behind the walls of
1:29:09
Lachish that must have suddenly seemed like a pitiful defense.
1:29:19
What happened next is depicted on a remarkable series of carvings etched in
1:29:25
meticulous detail in gypsum, designed to decorate the walls of Sennacherib's
1:29:31
southwest palace in Nineveh. In their day, these carvings would have
1:29:36
been coloured, their details picked out with dyes of green, blue, red, and yellow.
1:29:43
The Lachish relief is an incredible piece of art, although the events it depicts are horrific. It's a perfect snapshot of a moment in
1:29:53
history that would otherwise be completely lost, capturing the clothes and the faces of the soldiers and the frenzied action of the battle.
1:30:03
The Assyrians first built a camp and began to settle in for a long siege of
1:30:09
the city, and it's here that their expertise at engineering came into play. As the weeks dragged by, they slowly
1:30:19
built a ramp of stone and earth leading up to the city's walls.
1:30:24
It would have been around-the-clock effort. Assyrian workers toiled to form the mud bricks that made up the ramp, baking them
1:30:34
in the sun, while soldiers shielded the workers as they built it, the occasional arrow or slingstone whistling down from the
1:30:44
defenders on the walls. The desperation of the city's defenders can be clearly seen in the archaeological record at the site of
1:30:53
Lachish. At some point, we can see that they ran out of iron, and in desperation began to carve new arrowheads out of bone.
1:31:05
Finally, when the ramp was completed, the vast Assyrian siege engines would have
1:31:10
rumbled into life. These siege engines were something like an iron age tank. They were made up of a large wooden
1:31:19
frame like a mobile fortress on enormous wheels. They had a tower on top from which archers could rain fire on the defenders.
1:31:29
At the front of the engine was a large, heavy instrument, somewhere between a
1:31:34
battering ram, a spear, and a hammer. This was used to break the mud brick walls of
1:31:40
enemy cities, jimmying between the gaps in the bricks and stones, and slowly wearing them down. Defenders would constantly try to set
1:31:49
these engines on fire, and so, they were covered in thick layers of wet animal
1:31:54
hides. A constant stream of Assyrian workers would hurry up to the front lines, carrying jars and skins of water, dousing
1:32:04
the engine and putting out the fires. As well as these engines, the Assyrians
1:32:10
would have laid countless ladders against the walls. The defenders rained down arrows and stones,
1:32:18
but the result was inevitable.
1:32:25
The defense collapsed. People fled the city in all directions,
1:32:31
and the Assyrian army finally marched into Lachish.
1:32:36
From here on, the carvings begin to look like a depiction of hell.
1:32:41
As a punishment for resisting, the city of Lachish was utterly destroyed.
1:32:47
The inhabitants of the city were rounded up and deported to faraway lands on the other side of the river Tigris. The carvings show them leaving the city
1:32:57
in long columns, men and women riding bullock carts piled
1:33:02
high with all their possessions, children sitting on the carts or cradled
1:33:08
in their mother's arms. The carvings even show some prisoners being forced to play musical instruments as they march away from their home,
1:33:18
an episode perhaps also recorded in the ancient lament of Psalm 137.
1:33:34
By the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.
1:33:39
There on the poplars we hung our hearts, for there, our captors asked us for songs.
1:33:45
Our tormentors demanded songs of joy. They said sing us one of the songs of
1:33:51
Zion. How can we sing the songs of the lord while in a foreign land?
1:34:03
It's in this psalm too that we get one of the first recorded warnings delivered
1:34:10
to the empire of Assyria about the fate that might befall it in
1:34:15
the future, a fate that its various enemies were increasingly beginning to long for.
1:34:27
Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you
1:34:32
according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants
1:34:39
and dashes them against the rocks. Next, the Assyrian army marched on Jerusalem, and Hezekiah was ready for
1:34:50
them. He'd built a new wall around the great city, and dug an underground tunnel
1:34:58
through solid stone that would bring fresh water directly into the city.
1:35:04
But even so, the situation must have looked bleak. The Judean king decided that he would have to negotiate. "Now in the 14th year of King
1:35:24
Hezekiah did Sennacherib, King of Assyria, come up against all the fortified cities of Judah and took them.
1:35:30
Hezekiah, king of Judah, sent to the king of Assyria to Lachish,
1:35:36
saying “I have offended. Return from me that which thou putted on me will I bear.”
1:35:44
The king of Assyria appointed Hezekiah, king of Judah, 300 talents of
1:35:50
silver and 30 talents of gold."
1:35:59
In order to pay the bounty, he even stripped the gold from the great temple,
1:36:04
something that must have been a heart-rending decision for this devout king. But this seems to have hardly appeased
1:36:13
the Assyrian king Sennacherib, who continued his siege.
1:36:18
At one point, he sent his general, a man named Rab-Shakeh, to approach the walls of
1:36:25
Jerusalem and demand the surrender of its defenders. The Assyrian general Rab-Shakeh
1:36:32
reminded the Jewish holdouts of all the other lands that had fallen to the military might of the Assyrians.
1:36:44
Have any of the gods of the nations ever delivered his land out of the hand of
1:36:50
the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and of Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? Of Hena?
1:37:00
Have they delivered Samaria out of my hand?
1:37:08
It looked as though all was lost, but it's at this point that luck began
1:37:14
to turn in Hezekiah's favor. The Hebrew Bible recalls him praying to
1:37:21
his god Yahweh to deliver him from the Assyrian siege, and the Hebrew poet historians who wrote the Book of Kings record this reply
1:37:32
coming down to him from the heavens.
1:37:40
Now have I brought it to pass. Yea, it is done, that fortified cities
1:37:46
should be laid waste into ruinous heaps. Their inhabitants were as the grass of
1:37:52
the field and as the green herb, and as the grass on the housetops, and as
1:37:58
corn blasted before it is grown up. Thus saith the lord concerning the king
1:38:03
of Assyria; he shall not come unto this city, nor shoot an arrow there. Neither shall he come before it with shield, nor cast a
1:38:13
mound against it. It came to pass that night that the angel of the lord went forth and smote in the camp of the Assyrians
1:38:22
104 score and 5,000. When men arose early in the morning, behold; they
1:38:36
were all dead corpses. We may never know the truth of what happened to bring an end to the siege of Jerusalem. The most likely explanation is probably
1:38:44
an outbreak of plague among the army of Assyria. Plague was a constant threat to any campaigning army, and it wouldn't have
1:38:53
been the first campaign to end in this way. One Egyptian account repeated by the later historian Herodotus, recounts how
1:39:02
the Assyrian army was turned back after an infestation of field mice swarmed
1:39:08
their camp. The mice are said to have gnawed away at the Assyrian bowstrings and shield handles, making them unable to fight.
1:39:18
This is possibly another slightly fanciful description of a plague
1:39:23
decimating an army. The Assyrian sources are understandably quiet about what must
1:39:30
have been an embarrassing failure. The only source to mention this campaign
1:39:36
focuses on the early victories won by the Assyrians, and on the tribute that
1:39:41
Hezekiah handed over. This campaign gives just one brief
1:39:47
snapshot of what the Assyrian war machine was like, and how it felt to be on the receiving end of its fury.
1:39:56
Still, the campaign had ended in an embarrassment, and it was perhaps this
1:40:01
defeat that led the city of Babylon in the south to desire its freedom.
1:40:13
The question of what to do with Babylon was one of the constant pressing
1:40:18
concerns of the Assyrian kings, and it had been a thorn in their side for
1:40:24
centuries. Babylon was a proud and ancient city
1:40:30
with a distinct culture, and it was so powerful that it was exceptionally
1:40:35
difficult to keep it in the empire. Various Assyrian kings tried different
1:40:42
approaches to this problem. Some simply allowed a native Babylonian
1:40:47
to rule the city and its surrounding territories, which kept the Babylonian people happy, but this often led to the Babylonian
1:40:56
king declaring independence whenever the central power of Assyria was distracted
1:41:02
or deployed elsewhere. Others tried imposing an Assyrian governor on the Babylonians. This naturally enraged them, and these
1:41:12
Assyrian kings of Babylon would often face plots and rebellions, and would
1:41:17
quite often be toppled in favor of some Babylonian noble who would then
1:41:22
immediately declare independence. The third option was to keep the throne
1:41:28
of Babylon in the family. This usually involved the king of Assyria crowning his brother or uncle as the king of Babylon,
1:41:38
but this held another danger. If this brother was a little too ambitious, he might consider using the might of Babylon as a springboard to try
1:41:49
and take the whole empire for himself. By the year 694 BC, this repeated cycle
1:41:58
and seemingly impossible problem had become too much for King Sennacherib, and
1:42:04
for him, the conflict had become personal. Babylonian rebels were partly
1:42:10
responsible for the death of one of his sons, and after crushing his enemies in the north in the Kingdom of Judah and along
1:42:19
the Mediterranean coast, he swung around and set out on campaign to decisively
1:42:25
beat the city of Babylon and solve the Babylonian problem for good.
1:42:38
In the year 689 BC, the Assyrians laid siege to Babylon.
1:42:44
The siege lasted for 15 months, and when the city finally fell, Sennacherib wrote
1:42:50
this description of what happened next. I destroyed the city and its houses from foundation to parapets.
1:43:00
I devastated and burned them. I razed the brick and earthen work of the outer
1:43:05
and inner wall of the city, of the temples, and of the ziggurat,
1:43:10
and I dumped these into the Arahtu canal. I dug canals through the midst of that
1:43:16
city. I overwhelmed it with water. I made its very foundations disappear, and I
1:43:22
destroyed it more completely than a devastating flood so that it might be impossible in future days to recognize the sight of that city and its temples. I
1:43:32
utterly dissolved it with water and made it like an inundated land.
1:43:39
Even by the standards of the time, this action was considered excessive.
1:43:45
Burning a Judean or Elamite city to the ground was one thing,
1:43:50
but to do the same to the cultured, ancient, and holy city of Babylon was too
1:43:56
much. There was a great outcry in Assyria, and Sennacherib responded by kidnapping the Babylonian god Marduk, carrying him back
1:44:06
to Nineveh, and placing him on trial. We can imagine the scenes as a group of
1:44:13
Assyrian legal officials gathered in court to condemn the silent stone statue
1:44:19
of the god. Marduk was eventually found guilty, but the broken text recounting this episode gives no clue about what
1:44:29
punishment was handed down. Sennacherib's goal had been to utterly
1:44:34
destroy Babylon, and he had succeeded. Its northern provinces were folded into the Assyrian Empire, and the city itself
1:44:44
was left in ruins.
1:44:51
The war in Babylon seems to have drained something from King Sennacherib.
1:44:57
After destroying the ancient city, he no longer seems to have had any appetite
1:45:02
for war. Instead of destruction, he dedicated the later years of his reign to building. He settled down in the city of Nineveh
1:45:12
and named it his new capital. Nineveh had been an important city for
1:45:18
millennia, but when Sennacherib moved there, it was in a sorely neglected state.
1:45:25
He renovated its palaces and built new ones, decorating them with carvings of his early victories like the one at the siege of Lachish,
1:45:34
as the following inscription recounts. I had a palace built with elephant ivory, ebony, boxwood, cedar, cypress,
1:45:45
juniper, and terebinth, a palace that I named The Palace Without
1:45:51
A Rival. I roofed its rooms with beams of cedar grown on Mount Amanus. I fastened bands of shining bronze on magnificent doors
1:46:03
of cypress, whose scent is sweet on opening and closing.
1:46:08
I installed eight striding lions standing opposite one another, which were
1:46:13
made from 11,400 talents of shining copper cast by the
1:46:19
god Ninagal, and were filled with radiance.
1:46:26
One inscription on a stone lion in the quarter associated with Sennacherib's
1:46:31
queen, named Tashmetu-sharrat, contains hopes that the royal couple would both
1:46:37
live long and healthy lives within the new palace. Sennacherib constructed beautiful gardens at his new palace, importing various
1:46:47
plants and herbs from across his empire and beyond. Cotton
1:46:53
trees may have been imported from as far away as India, and it's been suggested
1:46:59
that the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, may actually have been these gardens in Nineveh, which were
1:47:10
designed to represent the empire in miniature form. Sennacherib recounts these efforts in the following inscription.
1:47:20
I planted alongside the palace a botanical garden, a replica of Mount
1:47:25
Amanus which has all kinds of aromatic plants and fruit trees, trees that are
1:47:31
the mainstay of the mountains and Chaldea, collected inside it.
1:47:37
By the end of Sennacherib's reign, Nineveh must have shone, a resplendent
1:47:42
city fit for the world's mightiest empire. I think in this change we see in Sennacherib, we see a possible different
1:47:52
path that history might have taken. The war-like king who had torn down the
1:47:57
walls of Lachish and burned Babylon to the ground now seemed to turn away from battle. He settled down and began building
1:48:07
instead. If this really indicates a change of personality in this Assyrian king, the tragedy is that he would not live to
1:48:17
pass on this spirit to his sons.
1:48:32
Sennacherib had at least seven sons, but when the crown prince, the oldest of them all, died in battle against the Elamites, Sennacherib was left to choose
1:48:43
between the remaining younger sons who would be the next king.
1:48:48
In the end, he had to decide between only two candidates. These two sons were named Udru-Mulissu and Esarhaddon. For Sennacherib,
1:49:03
this seems to have been a difficult decision. At first, the older son Udru-Mulissu was named the crown prince, but after a few
1:49:14
years, he seems to have fallen out of favor with his father.
1:49:20
We can only guess what it was that made the king change his mind, but considering what would go on to happen, we might offer a guess.
1:49:29
It may be that Sennacherib detected something cold and hard in the character
1:49:35
of Udru-Mulissu, a hunger for power that frightened him.
1:49:40
Whatever it was, Sennacherib decided to name the youngest of his sons as crown
1:49:46
prince instead, the man named Esarhaddon.
1:49:52
Esarhaddon's brothers were enraged. In a later inscription, he recalls the
1:49:59
effect this announcement had on them. I am my older brother's youngest brother,
1:50:05
but by the command of the gods, my father elevated me firmly in the assembly of my brothers, saying this is the son who will succeed
1:50:13
me. He questioned the god Samas and Adad by divination, and they answered him with a firm
1:50:20
yes, saying he is your replacement. He heeded their important words and
1:50:27
gathered together the people of Assyria, young and old, and my brothers, and told them.
1:50:35
Afterwards, my brothers went out of their minds and did everything that is displeasing to the gods of mankind, and they plotted evil.
1:50:43
They butted each other like goats for the right to exercise kingship, and then my brothers went mad.
1:50:50
They drew their swords godlessly in the middle of Nineveh.
1:50:56
The other brothers begged their father to reconsider, but King Sennacherib's mind was made up. Udru-Mulissu was forced to swear an oath
1:51:06
of allegiance to his brother. We know the kind of thing this oath would have contained because we have surviving copies of this kind of treaty
1:51:15
that Assyrian kings always sent out to their vassals. These were long legal documents running over many pages containing an oath in
1:51:25
which they swore their loyalty to the new crown prince, complete with terrifying heavenly punishments if they broke their word.
1:51:36
This is the treaty which the king of Assyria has concluded with you
1:51:41
in the presence of the great gods of heaven and earth. If you should remove it, consign it to the fire, throw it into the water, bury it
1:51:52
in the earth or destroy it by any cunning device, annihilate or deface it,
1:51:58
may Anu, king of the gods, let disease, exhaustion,
1:52:03
malaria, sleeplessness, worries, and ill health reign upon all your houses, clothe
1:52:10
you with leprosy, and forbid your entering into the presence of the gods
1:52:15
or king roam the desert like the wild ass and the gazelle.
1:52:21
May Shamash, the light of heaven and earth, remove your eyesight.
1:52:26
Walk about in darkness. May Ishtar, lady of battle and war, smash your bow in the
1:52:33
thick of battle. May Nabu, bearer of the tablet of fates of the gods, erase your
1:52:40
name and destroy your seed from the land. But still, the bitter former crown prince Udru-Mulissu refused to accept it.
1:52:52
Esarhaddon's brothers began plotting to have him killed, forcing him to flee to the western regions far from the increasingly
1:53:01
dangerous atmosphere in Nineveh. Esarhaddon later remembers this exile
1:53:07
with bitterness. They started evil rumors, falsehoods, and
1:53:13
slander about me against the will of the gods, and they were constantly telling insincere lies, hostile things behind my back.
1:53:21
They alienated the well-meaning heart of my father from me against the will of the gods, but deep down he was compassionate, and
1:53:30
his eyes were permanently fixed on me exercising kingship.
1:53:39
Esarhaddon's escape from Nineveh probably saved his life, but his father Sennacherib failed to see the danger that was increasingly growing
1:53:49
against his own person. On the twentieth day of Tebet, the tenth
1:53:55
month of the Assyrian calendar in the year 681 BC, the snubbed oldest prince
1:54:02
Urdu-Mulissu, accompanied by another brother, fell upon the king Sennacherib while he prayed in one of Nineveh's temples,
1:54:10
and killed him. The death of Sennacherib sent shockwaves
1:54:16
across the whole region. In Judah and in all the other places where the Assyrians were despised, people must have celebrated in the streets.
1:54:27
But in Assyria, the murder of the king was an abomination.
1:54:32
The treacherous prince Udru-Mulissu and the other brothers had miscalculated the
1:54:38
strength of the reaction against them. Riding this tide of outrage, the crown
1:54:45
prince Esarhaddon quickly gathered an army and marched out to meet his
1:54:50
treacherous brothers in battle. They also mustered a mighty force,
1:54:57
but on the eve of the first battle, the soldiers of the brothers deserted en
1:55:02
masse, unwilling to fight for the men who had murdered the old king. Esarhaddon now marched on Nineveh,
1:55:12
facing virtually no resistance. One of his later inscriptions recalls
1:55:18
his emotion upon retaking the city where his father had been murdered.
1:55:25
I entered into Nineveh, my royal city, joyful, and took my seat upon the throne of my father in safety.
1:55:35
The south wind blew, the breath of Ea, the wind whose blowing is favorable for exercising kingship.
1:55:42
They awaited me favorable signs in heaven and on earth, a message of the soothsayers, tidings from the gods and goddesses,
1:55:50
giving my heart courage. Esarhaddon's rage against the conspirators was overwhelming. He quickly
1:56:00
moved to execute all of their accomplices and the entire families of his brothers, as one chilling inscription recounts.
1:56:12
I sought out every one of the guilty soldiers who wrongly incited my brothers to exercise kingship over Assyria, and imposed a grievous
1:56:21
punishment on them. I exterminated their offspring.
1:56:29
Esarhaddon had retaken the throne that his father had left for him,
1:56:35
but the way he was forced to take it forever scarred the young king.
1:56:40
The rest of his life he lived in a cloud of paranoia, never knowing who he could
1:56:45
trust. Messages written on clay tablets show that he frequently sought the advice of oracles and priests,
1:56:54
asking them whether any of his relatives or officials wished to harm him.
1:57:00
He spent much of his time in a heavily fortified palace in the city of Kalhu,
1:57:06
with high walls and only one entrance and exit, designed to be impregnable to
1:57:12
assassins. Perhaps fearing that the gods were angry with him, Esarhaddon also set out to undo some of the damage that his warlike
1:57:22
father had done. He especially wanted to repair relations with the southern metropolis of Babylon after the destruction that his father
1:57:32
Sennacherib had wrought on it. He ordered that various statues of Babylonian gods should be returned to their rightful home,
1:57:41
and in the year 680 BC, he announced that he would rebuild the ancient city.
1:57:48
Many letters written between King Esarhaddon and his chief architects have survived, and in them we get a clear sense that he
1:57:57
wanted to rebuild Babylon just as it had been before the destruction.

[admin]

Part 3 of 3

1:58:03
I laid its foundation platform over its previous foundations, and in exact accordance with this earlier plan. I did not diminish it by one cubit or
1:58:12
increase it by half a cubit. I drew its grand plan exactly as it had
1:58:18
been written. I made its foundation platform as strong as the base of a mighty mountain, and built its structure as it was in
1:58:26
former days. Esarhaddon's rebuilding was a clear message to Babylon's people,
1:58:35
and if reports are to be believed, it seems the Babylonians were grateful for the work done on their city. One message written by the governor that
1:58:45
Esarhaddon installed in Babylon gives a glowing impression.
1:58:51
I have entered Babylon. The people of Babylon welcomed me, and they blessed the king every day, saying he is the one who returned Babylon's
1:59:02
captives and booty. Also, the chiefs of Chaldea from Sippar
1:59:07
to the mouth of the sea blessed the king, saying he is the one who resettled Babylon. But Esarhaddon was also a fierce
1:59:18
war-maker. He even invaded Egypt, sick and tired of their activities funding and supporting rebels in Assyrian lands.
1:59:28
His first campaign in 673 BC was an embarrassing failure, but he succeeded
1:59:35
with another push two years later. One victory monument put up in the south
1:59:41
of modern Turkey proclaimed the totality of his victory.
1:59:47
Memphis, his royal city, in half a day with mines,
1:59:52
tunnels, assaults, I besieged, I captured, I destroyed, I devastated, I burned with fire.
2:00:03
But around this time, Esarhaddon's health began to deteriorate.
2:00:17
It's not exactly clear what his illness was, but I think there's a good argument to be made that this Assyrian king was
2:00:25
suffering from one of the first recorded cases of depression. The king would often spend days in his
2:00:33
sleeping quarters without food, drink, or human contact, and matters were made much worse when his queen, the great love of his life,
2:00:43
passed away. Esarhaddon began writing letters to his
2:00:49
chief exorcist and medicine man, a person named Adad-shumu-usur.
2:00:56
This man was the one most responsible for Esarhaddon's wellbeing, and he
2:01:01
often replied with hopelessness to the king's constant requests,
2:01:06
as this letter written by him to the king shows.
2:01:12
As to what the king, my lord, wrote to me, I'm feeling very sad. How did we act that I have become so
2:01:21
depressed for this little one of mine? Had it been curable,
2:01:27
you would have given away half of your kingdom to have it cured, but what can we do? Oh,
2:01:34
king, my lord, it is something that cannot be done.
2:01:44
Letters preserved from Esarhaddon's royal court describe his condition in
2:01:49
some detail. He suffered violent vomiting, constant fevers, nosebleeds, and dizziness, painful earaches, and melancholy.
2:02:01
The king often feared that his death was near, and a rash began to cover most of
2:02:06
his body, including his face. His royal physicians could do nothing to
2:02:11
help him, and they often wrote despondently back to him.
2:02:16
The king, my lord, keeps on saying to me why do you not diagnose the nature of
2:02:23
this illness of mine and bring about its cure? I spoke to the king at the audience and could not clarify his symptoms.
2:02:35
As Esarhaddon's death neared, the question of his succession became a
2:02:41
pressing concern. He had seen firsthand what a civil war
2:02:47
over the throne could do to tear the empire apart, and he wanted to do everything he could to ensure a smooth transition.
2:02:57
Determined not to repeat his father's mistakes, Esarhaddon decided on an
2:03:02
inventive course of action. He would name one of his young sons the
2:03:08
king of Assyria, ruling the whole empire from Nineveh, and another son he would name the king of Babylon, who would rule over that city,
2:03:18
swearing an oath to the Assyrian Empire. In Babylon, he appointed his eldest
2:03:25
surviving son Shamash-shum-ukin, and in Nineveh to be the king of the
2:03:30
whole empire in his place, he appointed a younger son named Ashurbanipal.
2:03:39
It was a beautiful vision; two brothers ruling over the world's two greatest cities together,
2:03:47
the two of them uniting these two cities, bringing in an age of peace and
2:03:53
prosperity. It was a beautiful vision, but a mistaken
2:03:58
one. In fact, Esarhaddon's miscalculation would backfire enormously, and the war he caused would usher in the final chapter
2:04:10
of the Assyrian age.
2:04:20
One day in the year 670 BC, in the city of Harran in northern Mesopotamia,
2:04:28
a woman fell into an ecstatic fit and began speaking in tongues.
2:04:35
She ran through the street and shouted out for all to hear a clear and unmistakable prophecy.
2:04:45
A slave girl of Bel-ahu-usur in the suburb of Harran; since the month of Sivan she is enraptured and speaks these prophecies
2:04:54
about him. It is the word of Nusku. I will destroy the name and seed of Sennacherib.
2:05:02
King Esarhaddon's network of spies soon delivered this information to him, and he
2:05:09
was appalled at the news. He immediately ordered a crackdown
2:05:14
across the empire, burning the homes of anyone found to be spreading this conspiracy, but the news of the prophecy does seem
2:05:24
to have shaken him. During the final years of his life, Esarhaddon became obsessed with omens and prophecies, and his court astrologers
2:05:35
spent a lot of their time reassuring him, as this letter from one of them shows.
2:05:42
The eclipse of the moon moved from the eastern quadrant and settled over the
2:05:47
entire western quadrant to the moon. The planets Jupiter and Venus were
2:05:53
visible during the eclipse until it cleared. This is fortunate for your majesty, and portends evil for your enemies in the
2:06:03
westland. Because of the dark omens seeming to
2:06:08
gather around him, Esarhaddon undertook a number of times a bizarre ritual known
2:06:15
as the substitute king. The substitute king ritual involved the Assyrian monarch going into hiding for a
2:06:24
hundred days, during which a substitute was found to take his place.
2:06:30
This was often a commoner, and he would spend those hundred days living in the
2:06:36
palace, sleeping in the king's bed, wearing his crown and royal clothes, and
2:06:42
eating his food. During this time, the actual king remained hidden, and even
2:06:48
took on the title “the farmer” to try to fool the evil spirits out to harm him.
2:06:56
At the end of the hundred days, having absorbed whatever negative energy was
2:07:01
out to get the king, the substitute was put to death and the real monarch was
2:07:06
returned to the throne, the evil supposedly having passed him by.
2:07:13
Esarhaddon repeated this ritual three times during the final years of his
2:07:19
reign, showing just how desperate he was to shake the feeling of doom that had begun to gather around him.
2:07:28
But it was no use. After a rebellion in Egypt, Esarhaddon
2:07:35
marched out to fight against those who opposed him, and on the way, his health worsened.
2:07:42
His condition became critical as his army passed through the north of Mesopotamia, and he died in the town of Harran.
2:07:52
This was the same town where only a few years before, the woman had run through the streets, shouting in ecstasy about the prophecy
2:08:02
of his doom.
2:08:09
When Esarhaddon died, his sons Ashurbanipal and Shamash-shum-ukin
2:08:15
successfully ascended the thrones of Assyria and Babylon, and began the twin
2:08:21
rule that their father had planned. This began as a remarkable success.
2:08:29
Shamash-shum-ukin journeyed to Babylon and brought with him the statue of Marduk that his grandfather had put on trial, the last
2:08:38
artifact that remained to be returned to Babylon. The two princes took up their thrones without any turmoil or unrest,
2:08:49
and at first it seemed like the old king's plan was about to usher in a new
2:08:54
age of peace. But for a number of reasons, that peace wasn't to last.
2:09:13
The reign of Ashurbanipal is without doubt the golden age of the Assyrian
2:09:19
Empire. At the time of his reign, it was the largest empire that the world had ever seen, and its capital of Nineveh was
2:09:28
probably the largest city on the planet. The king Ashurbanipal himself springs
2:09:35
out of the historical sources as a fully formed character, full of his own preoccupations and obsessions.
2:09:44
One of the most interesting aspects of his character is that he was possibly the first Assyrian king to be able to read.
2:09:54
Up until this time, reading wasn't considered a particularly kingly activity. Kings had servants and scribes to do
2:10:03
their reading for them, and rulers were supposed to take part in more manly pursuits like hunting and fighting. But Ashurbanipal hadn't been intended
2:10:13
for the throne. Before being named the crown prince, he had been preparing for some kind of position in the temples, and this meant
2:10:23
he was taught to read from a young age. It's something he was clearly quite
2:10:28
proud of, as this inscription written by him attests.
2:10:35
I, Ashurbanipal, understood the wisdom of Nabu, the god of learning, all the art of writing of every kind. I
2:10:43
made myself the master of them all. I read the cunning tablets of Sumer and
2:10:48
the dark Akkadian language which is difficult to rightly use. I took my pleasure in reading stones inscribed before the flood,
2:10:56
such works as none of the kings who went before me had ever learnt. I wrote on tablets, checked and collated, and deposited within my palace for
2:11:05
perusing and reading. Ashurbanipal's collection of clay
2:11:10
tablets was something quite unprecedented in the world at the time.
2:11:16
It was the first attempt to create a universal library, a place where all the
2:11:22
books ever written could be kept. He wrote to cities and centers of
2:11:28
learning all across the empire, requesting copies of every written work
2:11:33
ever set in clay. Eventually, he would amass a collection
2:11:38
of over 30,000 clay tablets. Most were observations of events and
2:11:45
omens, texts detailing the behavior of certain peoples and animals, texts on the movements of heavenly bodies, the planets,
2:11:55
and stars. But the library also contained dictionaries for the languages of Sumerian, Akkadian, and others, as well as
2:12:04
religious texts, rituals, fables, prayers, and incantations, even comical satirical
2:12:12
pieces of writing, as well as the great ancient mythology and poetry of
2:12:17
Mesopotamia. Many of the traditional Mesopotamian stories and tales known today, among them the epic of Gilgamesh, have only survived
2:12:29
into the modern day because they were included in Ashurbanipal's library.
2:12:38
But Ashurbanipal would soon have to deal with the very real challenges of ruling
2:12:44
the Assyrian Empire. Egypt, Assyria's newest imperial
2:12:49
possession, was already in full rebellion, and so in the year 667 BC, Ashurbanipal
2:12:57
marched the Assyrian army as far south as Thebes and sacked numerous Egyptian
2:13:03
cities in classic Assyrian fashion. This campaign crushed the insurgency, but
2:13:11
as usual, it only created more resistance in the long term.
2:13:16
Rebellions sprang up once again the very next year, forcing him to march back to
2:13:22
Egypt and stamp it out even harder. But despite his efforts, the Assyrians
2:13:28
would never successfully integrate Egypt into their empire. At this time, another power on the opposite side of the empire
2:13:38
began to become an increasingly painful thorn in the side of Assyria.
2:13:44
These were the Elamite peoples of southern Iran.
2:13:53
The Elamites were an ancient people. They had been instrumental in the fall
2:13:58
of Sumerian society more than a millennium before, and since then had
2:14:04
built a powerful and wealthy kingdom centered on the capital of Suza.
2:14:10
The people of Elam had clashed with the Assyrians a number of times, and today
2:14:16
their border is more or less in the same place as the modern border between Iraq
2:14:21
and Iran. Ashurbanipal's father Esarhaddon had taken pains to exist peacefully with the people of Elam, and even allowed
2:14:32
outbursts of violence on the border to go unpunished. Now, Elam was growing in confidence. Without much hope of defeating Assyria
2:14:43
on the battlefield, they had settled for a similar tactic as the Egyptians in
2:14:48
dealing with their powerful neighbor, supplying and arming rebel groups in Assyria, and causing as much trouble for them as
2:14:56
they could without provoking an all-out war. But in the year 653 BC, it's thought that the Elamite king,
2:15:06
a man named Teumann, received a secret message. This message was from the older brother of King Ashurbanipal, then ruling as the
2:15:17
king of Babylon as their father had decreed, the man named Shamash-
2:15:28
-shum-ukin. Shamash-shum-ukin had been dissatisfied with his lot in life for a long time now. Since their father's death 13 years
2:15:38
before, he had ruled as king of Babylon while his brother ruled over the whole
2:15:43
empire. He must have had a pretty good life, but he didn't feel all that powerful. In theory, he ruled over all of Babylonia,
2:15:55
but in practice, most of his governors simply ignored him and considered Ashurbanipal to be their true king. Inscriptions show that Ashurbanipal
2:16:06
would often dictate orders to him and would frequently meddle in the affairs of Babylon. His anger at this situation was clearly
2:16:15
growing, and if he did send a message to Teumann, the king of Elam, we can imagine
2:16:21
that it contained a clear proposition. I will help you invade Assyria, topple
2:16:28
Ashurbanipal, and destroy your ancient rival, and in return I want to rule over Babylon as its only king.
2:16:38
The Elamites were all too eager to accept.
2:16:45
When the season of war came back around in the year 664, the Elamites launched a
2:16:51
surprise attack. They swept down from the mountains and attacked the Assyrian’s southern territories.
2:16:59
Ashurbanipal was enraged. He gathered his armies and marched down the rivers to
2:17:05
face them. He successfully repelled their attack and chased their soldiers back into Elam.
2:17:13
He defeated them in battle beside the river Ulay, close to their capital of Suza, and one of Ashurbanipal's inscriptions boasts
2:17:23
about this victory, which is also immortalized in a series of carvings
2:17:29
that were displayed on his palace walls. By the command of the gods Ashur and Marduk, I blocked up the Ulay River with
2:17:38
their corpses and filled the plane of the city Suza with their bodies like water weeds. In the midst of his troops, I cut off the
2:17:46
head of Teumann, the king of the land Elam. One remarkable carving even depicts the king Ashurbanipal
2:17:56
relaxing in his gardens with his queen, surrounded by musicians and servants
2:18:01
fanning him, bringing him drinks and food, and all the while the head of his
2:18:08
conquered enemy Teumann hangs in the branches of a nearby tree.
2:18:14
It's not clear whether Ashurbanipal suspected his brother's hand in the surprise attack. Either way,
2:18:21
one year later, Shamash-shum-ukin revealed his true intentions.
2:18:28
He rose his armies in rebellion against his brother, and declared the lands of Babylonia to be independent.
2:18:38
This clearly shook King Ashurbanipal. We can almost hear the betrayal, the hurt,
2:18:45
and the anger speaking directly from his official inscriptions. Shamash-shum-ukin,
2:18:54
my unfaithful brother, for whom I performed many acts of kindness and whom I had installed as king of Babylon, I made and gave him everything that
2:19:04
kingship calls for. I assembled soldiers, horses, and chariots, and placed them in
2:19:09
his hands. I gave him more cities, fields, orchards, and people to live inside them than the father who had engendered me had
2:19:17
commanded. He forgot these acts of kindness that I had done for him, and constantly sought out evil deeds.
2:19:25
Aloud with his lips he was speaking friendship, but deep down his heart was scheming for murder. He lied to the citizens of Babylon who
2:19:34
had been devoted to Assyria, servants who belonged to me, and he spoke words of
2:19:39
deceit with them. But privately, Ashurbanipal was clearly afraid.
2:19:47
He frequently wrote messages to his oracles and soothsayers, giving them
2:19:52
questions that he wanted to ask the gods, and in these questions we get a
2:19:57
remarkable sense for the uncertainties and doubts that plagued him during these
2:20:03
dark days. Will the Elamite army gather, get organized, march, and fight with the men and army of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria?
2:20:15
His fears were soon realized, and the Elamite army, still stinging from their
2:20:21
defeat the previous year, joined with his brother to fight him.
2:20:26
Ashurbanipal responded by marching with his full force on the city of Babylon.
2:20:33
His brother Shamash-shum-ukin was forced to retreat behind its mighty walls, and the Assyrians settled in for a siege.
2:20:44
The siege of Babylon went on for four years. Conditions within the city of Babylon became horrific during this time.
2:20:53
People began to starve and resort to cannibalism. When the city finally fell, the Assyrian soldiers poured over its walls and into
2:21:04
its streets. Shamash-shum-ukin himself appears to have died in a fire, although it's not clear how it was
2:21:14
started. The citizens of the city who had held out for so long under horrific conditions were cut down by the Assyrian
2:21:23
soldiers, as Ashurbanipal's inscriptions recall.
2:21:30
Those of them who fled before the murderous iron dagger, famine, want and
2:21:35
flaming fire, and found a refuge; the net of the great gods, my lords, which cannot
2:21:41
be eluded, brought them low. Not one escaped. Not one sinner slipped through my hands. As for those men and their vulgar mouths
2:21:51
who uttered vulgarity against Ashur, my god, and plotted evil against me,
2:21:57
I slit their tongues and brought them low. The rest of those living I destroyed, and their carved-up bodies I fed to dogs, to
2:22:05
pigs, to wolves, to eagles, to birds of the heavens, to fishes of the deep.
2:22:13
After all his father Esarhaddon's efforts to rebuild Babylon, Ashurbanipal
2:22:19
had now turned it back into ruin.
2:22:25
With his vengeance on Babylon complete, Ashurbanipal turned his attention to
2:22:31
Elam. In the next year, he marched up into the mountains, but this time he would not simply punish
2:22:39
Elam. This campaign was waged as a war of extermination, designed to utterly remove it as a political entity in its entirety.
2:22:51
Carried by wounded rage, Ashurbanipal scattered the armies of Elam and rounded
2:22:57
on its capital city of Suza. One Assyrian carving shows what happened
2:23:03
next. It shows the city of Suza in the background. Flames are rising from its towers and
2:23:11
pouring out the mouth of its gate. In the foreground, Assyrian soldiers are
2:23:16
carrying off all kinds of loot, and on the walls and towers of Suza, more
2:23:22
soldiers are steadily and meticulously going to work demolishing every building
2:23:28
in the city brick by brick. Ashurbanipal, in one of his inscriptions, describes the
2:23:36
destruction he ordered. Suza, the great holy city,
2:23:43
abode of their gods, seat of their mysteries, I conquered.
2:23:48
I entered its palaces, I opened their treasuries where silver and gold, goods
2:23:53
and wealth were amassed. I destroyed the ziggurat of Suza. I smashed its shining copper horns. I reduced the temples of Elam to naught.
2:24:04
Their gods and goddesses I scattered to the winds. The tombs of their ancient and recent kings I devastated.
2:24:12
I exposed to the sun and I carried away their bones toward the land of Ashur. I devastated the provinces of Elam, and on their lands I sowed salt.
2:24:25
The Assyrians had once more emerged victorious, their army undefeated, all challenges overcome,
2:24:34
and now one of their oldest rivals utterly eradicated.
2:24:39
The empire was at the height of its confidence, but in little over 30 years, its end would come,
2:24:47
and all that would be left would be a series of enormous smoking ruins
2:24:53
crumbling into the desert sands.
2:25:01
It's in the final decade of his reign, perhaps around the year 640 BC, that King
2:25:08
Ashurbanipal commissioned the works of art that would stand as perhaps the
2:25:14
defining and lasting legacy of his entire civilization.
2:25:19
These are the lion hunt reliefs of the northwest palace in Nineveh.
2:25:28
At this time, a breed of lion known as the Asiatic lion roamed freely right
2:25:34
across the Middle East. They are slightly smaller than their African counterparts, with a much shorter mane and a distinctive fold of skin
2:25:44
running down their bellies. Although we think of them today as endangered animals to be protected, lions were a constant menace for the people of
2:25:54
Assyria. They would often roam down from the hills and take away livestock, and they could be a very real danger to
2:26:03
the people. This letter, written by a panicking servant to his master who's away from the house on business, shows how
2:26:12
prevalent this danger could be. Tell my lord your servant Yakim-Addu sends the following message.
2:26:21
A short time ago I wrote to my lord as follows; a lion was caught in the loft of
2:26:26
a house in Akkaka. My lord should write me whether this lion should remain in that same loft until the arrival of my lord or whether I should have it brought to
2:26:35
my lord, but letters from my lord were slow in coming, and the lion has been in the loft for five days. Although they threw him a dog and a pig, he refused to
2:26:44
eat them. I was worrying; heaven forbid that this lion pine away. I became scared, but eventually I got the
2:26:52
lion into a wooden cage and loaded it on a boat to have it brought to my lord.
2:27:00
The kings of Assyria had hunted lions for centuries, and the killing of these
2:27:05
creatures had taken on a symbolic meaning. For the kings of Assyria, the lion came to represent all the dangers that
2:27:13
menaced their people, and by triumphing over a lion, they were shown to be
2:27:18
capable of protecting their people from all other dangers. In the early days, these hunts would take the form of expeditions out into the
2:27:28
wilderness to find wild lions in the hills, but in the later years of the
2:27:34
empire, lions were rounded up from the countryside and brought to the capital
2:27:39
to be bred in captivity, as one inscription by the 9th century
2:27:44
king Ashurnasirpal recounts. With my outstretched hand and my fierce
2:27:51
heart, I captured 15 strong lions from the mountains and forests.
2:27:57
I took away fifty lion cubs. I herded them into Kalhu and the
2:28:02
palaces of my land into cages. I bred their cubs in great numbers.
2:28:10
These lions could be hunted in more controlled performances
2:28:15
in full view of all the city's inhabitants, and it's one of these incredible spectacles that the lion hunt reliefs
2:28:23
portray. We can see the king in his chariot fighting with spear and bow. We can see the lions in their cages with
2:28:32
a small person or child in a smaller cage above, tasked with the job of
2:28:38
opening the cage door. We can see the soldiers penning in the lions with
2:28:43
shields and spears, with trained dogs straining on their leashes.
2:28:48
We can imagine the thunder of the king's chariot as it rides around the arena, and
2:28:54
the whistling of his arrows as they find their mark. These reliefs show the craft of the Assyrians at its most realistic, and
2:29:03
demonstrate an art form that had matured over centuries. The immaculate details in
2:29:09
the human figures in the embroidered clothes and the details of the chariot,
2:29:15
even the fingernails and eyelashes of the figures are all realized in perfect
2:29:20
detail. But while the human figures are depicted formally with little or no
2:29:26
emotion on their faces, it's these lions that carry almost a human expressiveness.
2:29:34
As the arrows and spears strike them, the faces of the lions seem to cry out with
2:29:41
human sorrow, and it can be tempting as a modern observer to see in that sorrow a distillation of the mood that must have
2:29:51
been enveloping the empire in its final years as things began to crumble around
2:29:57
it. These would be the last great pieces of art to ever be created in the empire of Assyria in the final years of its last
2:30:07
great king. Within little more than three decades,
2:30:12
the empire of Assyria would collapse, and all of its great cities would be
2:30:18
abandoned to the sands.
2:30:37
As is always the case, there were multiple causes of the Assyrian collapse,
2:30:44
and the latest research suggests that one of these was something we've encountered a number of times throughout this series.
2:30:53
That's a rapid and dramatic climate shift.
2:30:58
In the south of Mesopotamia, what was then the lands of Babylon, the land is arid, broken only by the rivers and marshland,
2:31:07
while in the north there is a great deal of rainfall in the winter. This means that in the south, vast networks of irrigation canals have been necessary
2:31:18
since the earliest Sumerian days. But in the north, irrigation was less of
2:31:23
a concern, since the seasonal rains were able to water the crops. The last 200 years had been a time
2:31:33
of unusually high rainfall. But new studies of stalagmites in the
2:31:40
Kuna Ba caves of northern Iraq have suggested that around the year 675 BC, in
2:31:47
the final years of the reign of King Esarhaddon, this situation began to change.
2:31:55
Stalagmites are rock formations that form slowly as mineral deposits drip
2:32:00
down from the roofs of caves. This means that they grow outwards, leaving rings just like the rings of a tree.
2:32:10
Studying the chemical composition of these rings can tell us a lot about how the climate changed over the course of their formation,
2:32:19
and these stalagmites clearly show that there were two distinct phases in the
2:32:24
climate of the Assyrian age. The first was one of the wettest periods
2:32:30
of the whole 4,000-year span that the stalagmites show. During this time, Assyrian fields would have been thick with barley and wheat,
2:32:40
its grazing lands rich and capable of supporting huge herds of animals. But
2:32:46
this phase came to an end around 725 BC, just before King Ashurbanipal came to the
2:32:55
throne. This second period was marked by increasingly dry conditions. In fact, the region was soon gripped by a
2:33:04
mega drought. Even today with all our modern farming techniques,
2:33:12
crop productivity in northern Iraq is highly sensitive to small changes in
2:33:18
rainfall, and it's possible that a protracted period of drought may have acted to weaken the imperial center of Assyria.
2:33:27
There is some evidence that during the decades of drought, the people of the north began to dig irrigation canals of the kind more usually found in the dry
2:33:38
south, suggesting that the rains were becoming increasingly unreliable. But there's little evidence to be found
2:33:46
in historical texts, and no real mention of devastating droughts. After all, drought was one of the
2:33:54
problems that Assyrians had learned to deal with expertly.
2:34:00
Records show that the prices of grain and slaves remained relatively stable
2:34:05
throughout this period, meaning that the picture wasn't one of starvation or people dying in the streets. But it's still worth bearing in mind
2:34:15
that the Assyrian state was now under pressure from its environment and were suddenly put at an economic disadvantage to their southern neighbors.
2:34:25
Whether this was a major factor in their downfall is still subject to lively
2:34:31
debate, but I think another factor is perhaps the most important. Assyria was perhaps the first true
2:34:40
military superpower. Their military was easily the most powerful in the region, a
2:34:45
hammer that crushed all opposition, but their heavy-handed approach to
2:34:50
maintaining their empire made them incredibly unpopular.
2:34:56
This meant their subject peoples were constantly on the verge of rebellion, and
2:35:01
whenever this happened, the Assyrians did the only thing they knew how;
2:35:06
crush the rebellions even harder and make themselves even more hated.
2:35:13
Eventually, they were left with no other option but the kind of thing Ashurbanipal did to the lands of Elam, to crush their enemies so ruthlessly
2:35:25
that they simply ceased to exist. But nature abhors a vacuum, and beyond
2:35:32
the blackened and smoking lands of Elam, another power had been building for
2:35:37
centuries, just waiting for their opportunity to expand, an opportunity that the Assyrians had just dropped right into their laps.
2:35:49
These were the people of Medea, who were called the Medes.
2:36:00
The Medes were an ancient Iranian people who spoke the Medean language and lived
2:36:05
in the region of northern and western Iran. For centuries now, the powerful Elamites had been their rivals and kept their
2:36:15
ambitions in check, but with the Elamites now virtually eradicated, that was no longer the case. In the next decades, the Medeans expanded
2:36:27
rapidly and moved to occupy the lands of Elam, gathering its scattered and angry peoples beneath its banner.
2:36:37
Soon they were a formidable force, and they were all animated with a common
2:36:42
purpose; a burning hatred for the Assyrian Empire and everything it stood
2:36:47
for. All they would need was an opening, and that opening would come in the form of the death of the great king
2:36:57
Ashurbanipal.
2:37:06
For someone whose early life was so meticulously recorded and who professed
2:37:11
his love of literature and writing, the final 12 years of Ashurbanipal's
2:37:17
reign are a surprising mystery. We don't actually know how he died or
2:37:24
really how he spent the last decade of his life. It's possible that the king was struck with a period of illness,
2:37:32
or like his father, he fell to the family tendency for depression and paranoia.
2:37:40
One inscription, possibly the last ever written by Assyria's last great king,
2:37:47
does seem to represent a kind of lament, a wail of pain for the misfortunes that
2:37:53
have befallen him. It stands out among all the boasting and bluster of the Assyrian kings as a true moment of vulnerability and suffering
2:38:04
speaking up to us through the ages.
2:38:11
I did well unto god and man, to dead and living.
2:38:16
Why have sickness and misery befallen me? I cannot do away with the strife in my
2:38:24
country and the dissensions in my family. Disturbing scandals oppress me always.
2:38:31
Illness of mind and flesh bow me down. With cries of woe, I bring my days to an end.
2:38:40
On the day of the city god, the day of the festival, I am wretched. Death is seizing hold upon me and bears
2:38:49
me down. With lamentation and mourning, I wail day
2:38:55
and night. I groan oh, god, grant even to one who is impious
2:39:02
that he may see the light.
2:39:09
Whatever the cause, in the year 639 BC, the chronicles that
2:39:15
had until then kept detailed records of the life of the king suddenly stop.
2:39:21
For this period, virtually the only sources we have to work from are the Bible and the writings of Herodotus, who compiled his histories 200 years later,
2:39:34
and for whom Mesopotamia was a distant and mysterious land.
2:39:40
But one thing is clear; after the death of Ashurbanipal, chaos
2:39:45
began to reign in Assyria. There was fighting in the streets, and
2:39:50
all its provinces rose up in rebellion. Babylon once more declared independence, and civil war split the empire.
2:40:02
In the year 616 BC, a series of Babylonian chronicles begins,
2:40:08
and they tell the story of the final collapse of Assyrian society.
2:40:14
The great instigators of this downfall would be the people who the Assyrians
2:40:19
had so inadvertently helped. These were their enemies waiting and
2:40:25
watching in the hills, the people of Medea.
2:40:30
In a startling surprise attack, the Medean armies marched down through the foothills of the Zagros mountains and invaded the lands of Assyria.
2:40:41
First, they marched to the great ancient capital of Ashur, birthplace of the
2:40:47
Assyrian nation and the home of its god. The Babylonian chronicles record what
2:40:53
happened next. He made an attack on the town and
2:40:58
destroyed the city wall. He inflicted a terrible massacre upon the greater part of the people, plundering it and carrying off prisoners
2:41:08
from it. This victory must have rocked the ancient world.
2:41:15
This was the first time in centuries that a city of the Assyrian heartlands
2:41:20
had been captured and sacked, and it must have sent a clear message to all of its
2:41:26
enemies; the empire of Assyria was weak, and with enough of a push, perhaps it could even be toppled.
2:41:35
One man heard this message loud and clear. He was one of the new kings of the independent Babylon who had big plans
2:41:45
for the ancient city he ruled, and his name was Nabo-polassar.
2:41:56
Nabo-polassar was a curious character. We don't know anything about his origins,
2:42:02
but he refers to himself in his inscriptions using the phrase ‘mar la
2:42:08
mammana’, or the son of a nobody. No other Mesopotamian king had ever
2:42:14
described himself in this way, and it shows that in the social upheaval of
2:42:20
this period of chaos, some of the power of the nobility was being eroded, and men
2:42:26
were rising from the ranks of the common people to rule.
2:42:31
When he heard about the Medean victory at Ashur, Nabo-polassar must have been
2:42:37
overjoyed. He had spent years fortifying his borders, strengthening them for a conflict with
2:42:45
Assyria that he knew must be around the corner. But now, he began to dream of even bigger things. He gathered his armies and
2:42:56
marched to Ashur as fast as he could to join forces with the Medes.
2:43:02
The Babylonian armies arrived too late for the fighting, but in the ruins of the
2:43:08
Assyrian city of Ashur, they formalized their alliance.
2:43:13
The Medean king Cyaraxes married his daughter Amytis to the
2:43:18
Babylonian prince Nabu-kudurri-Usur, and they joined forces for war.
2:43:26
This is the situation that had been the Assyrian nightmare for centuries,
2:43:31
and it had finally come to pass. Its enemies had united against it at its
2:43:38
moment of greatest weakness. For the rest of that year, the joint Medean and Babylonian forces pushed
2:43:47
north up the river Euphrates, but they found that even a wounded lion
2:43:54
can still bite. The Assyrian army, even in its weakened state, was still a formidable force and made them pay for every inch of land.
2:44:06
It wasn't until the year 612 BC, a full two years after the invasion had
2:44:12
begun, that the Medean army reached the walls of Assyria's greatest city,
2:44:18
the capital of Nineveh.
2:44:24
We can only imagine how that army must have felt, looking out over that great city, the capital of the world, with its
2:44:32
towering ziggurat, its glorious palaces, and its double line of defensive walls.
2:44:39
The Babylonian chronicles record what happened next. Cyaxeres
2:44:47
ferried across the river and marched upstream on the embankment of the Tigris,
2:44:53
and pitched camp against Nineveh. From the month Simanu till the month Abu, three battles were fought.
2:45:01
Then they made a great attack against the city.
2:45:06
We can see evidence of the fierce battle that unfolded here, left in the archaeological record. Excavations in Nineveh's southeastern
2:45:17
gate, the Halzi Gate, have found the ground here littered with skeletons
2:45:22
lying one on top of another on the cobbled pavement. The bodies of horses
2:45:28
also litter this gateway, along with countless iron spearheads and arrows.
2:45:35
All of them are lying exactly where they fell, in the last ditch defense of the city over 2,600 years ago.
2:45:46
The Babylonian chronicles recall the last desperate attempts of the defenders.
2:45:55
In the month of Abu, the city was seized, and a great defeat inflicted on the
2:46:00
entire population. On that day, Sin-shar-ishkun, the king of
2:46:05
Assyria, fled. The great spoil of the city and the temple they carried off. Many prisoners of the city, beyond
2:46:14
counting, they carried away. They turned the city into ruined hills and heaps of debris.
2:46:24
The destruction of Nineveh was recorded by Hebrew scholars of the time with an
2:46:30
understandable delight. One vivid account has survived in the
2:46:36
Hebrew Bible in a chapter known as the Book of Nahum,
2:46:41
and in these lines we can almost hear the sound and fury of the battle as the
2:46:47
soldiers of Medea and Babylon rampaged through the streets of Nineveh.
2:46:58
Chariots rush madly in the streets. They jostle one against another. They run to and fro like the lightnings. The shield of his mighty men is made red,
2:47:09
and the valiant men are in scarlet. Chariots of fire, of steel, in this day of
2:47:14
his preparation and the cypress spears are made to quiver. Behold, I am against thee, said the lord of
2:47:23
hosts, and I will burn her chariots in the smoke, and the sword shall devour thy young lions. I will
2:47:30
cut off thy prey from the earth, and the voice of thy messenger shall no more be heard.
2:47:46
Woe to the bloody city. It is full of lies. The horsemen charging and the flashing sword and the glittering spear, and a multitude of slain, and a heap of carcasses. There is no end of the corpses, and they stumble upon their corpses. All thy fortresses shall be like fig
2:47:56
trees with the first ripe figs. If they be shaken, they fall into the mouth of the eater.
2:48:11
For Nahum, the destruction of Nineveh was a moral judgment on an empire that had wrought
2:48:17
such suffering on the lands of others.
2:48:26
The lord is a jealous and avenging god. The lord avengeth and is full of wrath.
2:48:34
The lord taketh vengeance on his adversaries and he reserveth wrath for
2:48:40
his enemies. The lord has given commandment concerning thee, that no more of thy name be sown,
2:48:51
for thou art become worthless. Behold, the gates of thy land are set
2:48:57
wide open unto thine enemies. The fire hath devoured thy bars.
2:49:04
Oh, king of Syria, thy people are scattered upon the mountains and there is none to gather them.
2:49:12
There is no assuaging of thy hurt. Thy wound is grievous.
2:49:18
All that hear the report of thee, clap the hands over thee,
2:49:23
for upon whom has not thy wickedness past continually?
2:49:35
By the end of the year 612 BC, the three great capitals of Assyria,
2:49:41
Ashur, the religious heart, Nineveh, the administrative center, and Nimrud, the military capital, all lay in ruins.
2:49:56
The Medes made no attempt to occupy them, and instead set about destroying the
2:50:02
cities with the same viciousness that the Assyrians had once reserved for the
2:50:07
cities of Elam. The Assyrian king was killed in the battle, and one general named Ashur-Uballit
2:50:17
seems to have held out a brave resistance to the invaders, gathering what remained of the Assyrian army around him.
2:50:25
These were mostly troops brought back from Egypt who had arrived too late for
2:50:30
the defense of Nineveh, but they must have known that it was hopeless. They shut themselves up in the town of
2:50:38
Harran, and I wonder whether any of them remembered that this was the place where a century before, that woman had given
2:50:47
her prophecy of doom for the empire of Assyria. In 610 BC, two years after the sacking of Nineveh,
2:50:56
the Medean armies finally marched on Harran and crushed what remained of
2:51:01
Assyrian resistance. The general Ashur-Uballit
2:51:06
faded from history, and the empire of Assyria passed into dust.
2:51:12
The Babylonian king Nabo-polassar wrote the following inscriptions celebrating
2:51:19
the destruction of his great enemy. As for the Assyrians, who had ruled over the land of Akkad
2:51:28
because of the hatred of the gods and had made the people of the land suffer under its heavy yoke, I,
2:51:35
the weak and powerless one who constantly seeks out the lord of lords Marduk, with the powerful strength of the gods
2:51:42
Nabu and Marduk, my lords, I barred their feet from the land of Akkad and had the
2:51:48
Babylonians cast off their yoke.
2:51:54
As he grew older, Nabo-polassar increasingly relied on his son, the
2:51:59
prince Nabu-kudurri-Usur, who we know by the biblical name
2:52:05
Nebuchadnezzer. His reign would begin the line of Babylonian kings which would usher in the next phase of history in this region,
2:52:16
but the great cities of Assyria would never be reoccupied.
2:52:22
The ruins of Nineveh would have stood for some time as smoking heaps of
2:52:28
blackened rubble, its streets carpeted with bodies,
2:52:33
but slowly the wind-blown desert sands would have rolled over them.
2:52:38
Its walls and houses were covered in dust and earth.
2:52:44
The skeletons lying in its streets were buried by the sands.
2:52:49
The great library of the king Ashurbanipal was also buried.
2:52:54
In a twist of ironic fate, it was the destruction of Nineveh that ensured that
2:53:00
its texts would survive. The fires that tore through the city
2:53:05
baked the clay, hardening it, and meaning that the writing on these tablets was just as sharp on the day they were unearthed by
2:53:14
archaeologists as the day an Assyrian scribe wrote them twenty-six
2:53:19
centuries in the past. The people who destroyed Nineveh
2:53:25
celebrated by rampaging through the palaces of Ashurbanipal, Esarhaddon, and
2:53:31
Sennacherib. They looted them of all their valuables,
2:53:36
and celebrated by defacing some of the carvings that lined the palace walls.
2:53:43
They struck particularly at the carved faces of the Assyrian kings,
2:53:49
cracking the soft alabaster, and reveling in their destruction.
2:53:54
But of all the carvings, those depicting the lion hunt remained untouched.
2:54:00
The sorrowful expressions of those hunted lions would have stared out with their sad eyes over the abandoned halls, once so full of life,
2:54:12
as the days and months rolled by. Ash and dust soon filled the rooms. Eventually, the roof beams rotted and
2:54:24
collapsed. Grasses would have begun to grow in the halls of the Assyrian kings. Birds and wild foxes would have made
2:54:34
their homes among the ruins, and bluish tamarisk bushes would have
2:54:39
soon filled up the corridors. Hundreds of years later, when the Greek
2:54:45
writer Xenophon marched past with his 10,000 Greeks, fleeing from the Persian army that pursued them, the people who lived in
2:54:54
this region would not even remember the names of the people who had built this
2:54:59
city. They would say only that it might have been the Medes and that for some reason,
2:55:06
the gods had punished them and turned their cities into a mound of ruins.
2:55:17
Writing in the 1850s, the Victorian archaeologist Austen Henry
2:55:23
Layard visited the ruins of Nineveh and wrote the following account
2:55:28
of the sight of these desolate ruins.
2:55:34
During a short stay in this town, we visited the great ruins on the east bank
2:55:39
of the river, which have been generally believed to be the remains of Nineveh.
2:55:45
From the summit of an artificial eminence, we looked down upon a broad plain separated from us by the river.
2:55:53
A line of lofty mounds bounded it to the east, and one of a pyramidical form rose
2:56:00
high above the rest. Its position rendered its identification easy; this was the pyramid which Xenophon had
2:56:08
described, and near which the 10,000 had encamped. The ruins around it were those which the Greek generals saw 22 centuries before,
2:56:20
and which were, even then, the remains of an ancient city. Layard was struck with the haunting
2:56:29
beauty of these empty places, where the ruins hardly even seemed to bear the
2:56:35
marks of human construction. Were the traveler to cross the Euphrates and seek for such ruins in Mesopotamia
2:56:45
as he had left behind him in Asia Minor or Syria, his search would be in vain. The graceful column rising above the thick foliage of
2:56:55
tile myrtle, ilex, and oleander, the gradines of the amphitheater covering a gentle
2:57:02
slope and overlooking the dark blue water of a lake. None of this can be found. All are replaced by the stern, shapeless
2:57:12
mound rising like a hill from the scorched plain, the fragments of pottery,
2:57:18
and the stupendous mass of brickwork occasionally laid bare
2:57:23
by the winter rains.
2:57:30
Layard, like Xenophon more than two millennia before, was struck by the
2:57:36
immensity of what these ruins represented, their silent testimony to
2:57:41
the vast gulf of time that separates their time from ours.
2:57:50
The scene around is worthy of the ruin he is contemplating.
2:57:56
Desolation meets desolation. A feeling of awe succeeds to wonder. There is nothing to relieve the mind, to lead
2:58:08
to hope, or to tell of what has gone by. These huge mounds of Assyria made a
2:58:13
deeper impression upon me, gave rise to more serious thoughts and more earnest reflection than all the temples of Balbec and the theatres of
2:58:24
Ionia.
2:58:29
It's only through the painstaking and meticulous work of generations of
2:58:34
scholars that the texts of the ancient Assyrians have been slowly deciphered and translated,
2:58:42
and their voices have once more been allowed to speak to us from the clay,
2:58:47
breaking the silence of millennia.
2:58:55
I want to end the episode with one of these voices. It's a mysterious poem written by an unknown author in the
2:59:05
language of Akkadian, and it's known as The Lament for a City.
2:59:12
While these kinds of sorrowful laments were common in the earlier language of Sumerian, they're less well-known in the Assyrian age.
2:59:21
The poem speaks in the voice of a goddess whose city has been destroyed,
2:59:27
and who now wanders the bare and level deserts alone, mourning for the place that she once called home.
2:59:36
This poem, broken and fragmentary, full of gaps and silences, captures what
2:59:43
must have been the feeling of loss felt in those days
2:59:49
by all the peoples of Assyria. As you listen, imagine what it would feel
2:59:54
like to live in the rich heart of the world, knowing that the final days of the
3:00:00
empire stretched out before you. Imagine how it would feel to live in the
3:00:06
center of an empire that had caused so much suffering to others as the other
3:00:12
peoples of the world finally gathered around you and demanded their revenge. Imagine how it would feel to watch the
3:00:21
grand painted halls covered in carved alabaster, the gardens overflowing with
3:00:27
rare trees and flowers, the libraries full of books and stories,
3:00:33
the city full of your memories of childhood, your family and loved ones, all of it
3:00:41
going up in flames and then covered finally in the drifting dust and sand of
3:00:49
the desert. Who stood where I stand to cry out, to cry out like a helpless one on her
3:00:58
bed? Among the established cities, my city has been smashed. Among the established populace, my man
3:01:07
has gone away. Among the gods residing there, I too have surely fled. My lost lamb cries out in the land of
3:01:17
the enemy. My lamb is bleating. My sheep and her lamb, they have been taken away. When my sheep crossed the river, she
3:01:25
abandoned her lamb on the bank. My birds, all of them with their wings cut off. Where is my house that I used to dwell
3:01:36
in?
3:01:45
Thank you once again for listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast.
3:01:50
I'd like to thank my voice actors for this episode; Mustafa Raee, Peter Walters,
3:01:56
Lachlan Lucas, Carson Wishart, Nick Denton, Rhy Brignell, and Annie Kelly.
3:02:03
Many thanks to the assyriologist Dr. Ellie Bennett at the University of Helsinki for acting as a special consultant on this episode.
3:02:14
Reading the ancient Greek of Xenophon's Anabasis was Pavlos Kapralos, and reading
3:02:20
the Book of Nahum in Hebrew was Rabbi Yaakov Wolbe, who hosts the Jewish
3:02:26
History Podcast. For the last few months, the team behind Fall of Civilizations has been working on a sister project which is now being
3:02:35
released. It's called Vaccine. Vaccine is a podcast that tells the
3:02:41
story of the global fight against smallpox through the ages, from its earliest history as a folk demon through the history of its treatment along the
3:02:51
Silk Road and in the libraries of Baghdad, up to its eradication by a global effort in the 1960s.
3:03:00
It's the story of human triumph and tragedy, and explores the debates that
3:03:06
raged throughout history around power and public health, and what they can teach us today. Vaccine is available now on all
3:03:17
podcasting platforms, and to YouTube as a video series today.
3:03:23
I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so please come and tell me what you thought. You can follow me at @PaulMMCooper, and
3:03:32
if you'd like updates about the podcast, announcements about new episodes, as well as images, maps, and reading suggestions, you can follow the podcast at Fall_of_
3:03:42
Civ_Pod with underscores separating the words. If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy a novel I wrote, titled All
3:03:52
Our Broken Idols. It's a story set during the time of King Ashurbanipal in the
3:03:58
final days of the Assyrian Empire, and during the fall of Mosul in 2014.
3:04:05
It's available from all bookstores today. This podcast can only keep going with the support of our generous subscribers
3:04:14
on Patreon. You keep me running, you help me cover my costs, and you help to keep the podcast ad-free.
3:04:22
You also let me dedicate more time to researching, writing, recording, and editing to get the episodes out to you faster and bring as much life and detail
3:04:32
to them as possible. I want to thank all my subscribers for making this happen. If you enjoyed this episode, please
3:04:40
consider heading onto patreon.com/ fallofcivilizations_podcast,
3:04:46
or just Google Fall of Civilizations Patreon. That's
3:04:52
P-A-T-R-E-O-N to contribute something and help keep this podcast running.
3:04:59
For now, all the best, and thanks for listening.

[admin]

The $350 Million Haul Of Stolen Medieval Art Found In Texas
The Liberators
Perspective
Nov 11, 2021

A tiny Texas town. $350 million worth of medieval treasure. The discovery is just the beginning.

Spoils Off War: Recovering Stolen Art | The Liberators (Full Documentary)



Transcript

0:14
so when did you become mayor of white right texas eight of 1984
0:21
and aided for 30 years did you know the meadow family oh yeah i
0:27
knew all of the sisters the him the uncles the son the nephew the whole
0:33
bunch and had you seen the treasures before this whole crazy story broke no i i
0:39
didn't in fact no one knew i was coming in from work and i seen all these cameras and
0:46
pictures and people running all over town they said they waiting on you to come and i said what
0:51
they said they just found the treasure in town i said what what do you mean treasure
0:59
an astonishing turn today in a trail that leads from europe in the final days of world war ii to a small desolate
1:06
texas town near the oklahoma border and perhaps to a treasure trove of masterpieces
1:12
[Music]
1:24
[Music]
2:12
[Music]
2:30
my name is willy corte and what i've been doing for a living for the last 30 years is
2:36
recover stolen art klaus goldman told me that at the end of world war ii
2:42
half of the treasure disappeared during the occupation by the americans and that he had some documents and what
2:48
i was interested to have a look at it and could possibly research more about this story
2:54
i mean the cued limb book treasures of course are you know tremendous religious historical value
3:00
it's not just another painting you know or another museum's piece it is something that has a history of over a
3:06
thousand years and and and um i couldn't think of any any other case
3:12
that i could ever pursue you know for the rest of my life that would have that kind of significance
3:21
the treasure was known to me because i'd visited kweilenberg as a graduate
3:26
student but knowing that parts of it had been lost during the war many of the earliest objects in the
3:33
treasure a wonderful ivory comb that is very exotic and its carving almost took
3:39
on a reliquary and holy status at a very early date once they arrived in quedlenberg these
3:46
objects took on their own beauty and life and sanctity there's a
3:52
story from a saints life where a famous autonian woman hathamoda had one
4:00
of these hanging over her bed and there was a miracle associated with it so they
4:05
were seen as almost miraculous stuff and they were things that to some extent in the private possession of these queens
4:11
these princesses etc they're really very very precious objects most books are are
4:17
composite objects they comprise all kinds of different materials like textiles and wood and ivory and
4:25
parchment and obviously medieval manuscripts are a very special category that can involve
4:31
you know precious stones and gold and metals but when they have these fantastic treasure bindings on them the
4:38
books can be difficult to handle safely in a way that preserves both the cover and the illuminations inside these are
4:45
medieval manuscripts are often extraordinary works of art
4:55
[Music]
5:13
my father was in a precious metal business at the end of the war when he had to flee from dresden on the soviet
5:21
occupation he hid a good deal of gold and silver before he he fled so
5:30
once german reunification takes place we could go back and dig up the
5:38
treasures i grew up with with the idea that
5:43
the family has a treasure in a place that is
5:50
inaccessible and one day we should be able to go there and
5:55
and recover it and i actually went to east germany to recover the treasure but
6:02
but it was gone well this is the
6:08
national record center in siouxland maryland and at the time when i did the kudlenberg research it also
6:14
had a reading room for the national archives and the military records which were the ones that were most relevant for my
6:21
research were actually in this building so this is where i did all the essential research on the quedlinberg case
6:29
the job that i initially had from klaus goldman was to go through the records of
6:34
the u.s military government pertaining to the knowledge in those documents as far
6:41
as the fate of these missing museums because they had evacuated pretty much everything
6:48
when i started the research in 86 we still had a full-blown east germany
6:54
so i i didn't know what what records existed in cretelenburg
7:00
and and the only place i could go to was the national archives and do the research on the unit that was in
7:06
queensland work at the time and from there try to find out who the thief or the thieves could have been
7:18
i needed and received the help of klaus goldman who then introduced me to bill hornan at the new york times
7:26
well bill holland from the new york times initially was rather skeptical of the whole story but i think once he had
7:32
accepted it as a credible story he got very excited about it and
7:37
we worked very closely together it was really a very productive i think
7:43
type of sort of secret collaboration for both of us and and i think we we developed a very
7:49
sort of friendly type of cooperation so i had to go back to washington and we
7:56
document and sit hours and hours in the archives for weeks and weeks things like the cuddling book treasures
8:03
works of art are usually stolen by officers
8:09
because they had privileged access to places you know if if there was a castle
8:14
full of artworks they are the ones who could go in they are the ones who had the opportunity to
8:19
uh you know to pick out the pieces and and and they wouldn't be seriously questioned if they would walk out with
8:26
something because i mean they could be taking it to you know higher headquarters or whatever what i was
8:32
looking for was information pertaining to the discovery of valuables in or around
8:40
cuddling work [Music]
8:49
i had been told at the time that the city moved its most valuable possessions
8:55
into this cave i was looking for some information in
9:01
the military documents that reported the discovery of the cave and to find proof
9:08
that the americans had discovered the cave and secondly find some details on the particular unit smaller unit
9:16
that either had discovered it reported it guarded it or whatsoever and i read
9:22
like documents like this and i think it's time to you know turn the page
9:28
and then somehow something tells me are you sure you read everything carefully
9:33
then you have to read the whole thing again so so it's it's very time consuming
9:39
finally i found this entry for april the 20th 1945 cave at and then
9:48
coordinates are given big room statues and crates two rooms in upper level oil
9:53
paintings and records fourth squadron once i had these coordinates i could
9:58
then locate the specific place that these coordinates referred to and that
10:04
indeed was right there where the cave was in kwedlenburg once i'm in the archives
10:11
and i have a question in front of me and and it doesn't go very well you know
10:19
i know there must be something somewhere i have a tendency to not give up easily and and
10:25
and that kind of an attitude i had at the time where i at least want to find out who was in kwetlenburg
10:37
[Music]
10:50
soldiers sailors and airmen of the allied expeditionary force
10:56
you are about to embark upon the great crusade [Music]
11:03
the countryside is peaceful green rolling very lazy looking in general there's a very neat little farm off to
11:09
the left with neat barns haystacks that look like a bread pan full of hot ponds or toadstool patch
11:16
on the approach from the rear one finds that that sweet smelling haystack stinks with a jerry anti-tank gun inside
11:22
well the problem is solved fire incendiary at the haystack then we have roasted gerry in about 20 minutes
11:29
the tradition began um years in september
11:37
in 1942 the english american started to destroy
11:42
german towns the his first town was leaving
11:53
borderlands [Music]
12:08
a
12:17
[Music]
12:28
[Music]
12:48
[Music] b [Music]
12:59
when circle has inside that expansion folded their shots then
13:04
[Music]
13:11
when american bombardment of germany began in about 1943 himmler who'd fallen in love with them
13:17
had them uh secreted in this cave didn't himmler think that he was the reincarnation of
13:24
some past german yes he did uh he was quite a screwball and believed
13:30
that he was a reincarnation of heinrich the first
13:35
she said the american came after the world war no they came
13:42
to finish the war and my native town is on the elk and
13:48
from the west the american conquered it they came to tangamwinde in the night and
13:56
the house of my parents is on the town wall they needed this house
14:03
to look for german soldiers and
14:08
therefore was a machine gun in our room so they were sitting on the
14:13
floor and they read a newspaper and i write whose word is that and that was
14:19
the news on 13th of april 45 [Music]
14:26
two years after the end of the second world war we had to learn that our
14:33
own soldiers had done criminality at the top criminality other
14:41
muslim land of the adults
14:46
the list of things stolen by the nazis is as broad as anyone can imagine if it had monetary value or historic value it
14:52
was stolen if it wasn't destroyed beforehand the monuments officers are there to protect it regardless of what country it
14:58
came from including things that belong to germany their view was dispassionate in that
15:04
regard despite having very strong passions about the horrific war crimes that they were also witness
15:11
to here you have this conundrum of the united states government being on
15:18
the side of the hated ss the most brutal organization
15:25
uh hitler's nazi germany was not a friendly attitude towards germany and the germans right at the end
15:32
of the war you will not be friendly you will be aloof watchful and suspicious every german is a
15:39
potential source of trouble therefore there must be no fraternization with any of the german
15:45
people looting spoils of war was generally accepted usually these
15:52
units were stationed in larger buildings outside cities so they were often castles and estates and so forth
15:59
i sent home the second book it has a hammered gold cover with some 80 jewels and laid in it please store it most
16:06
carefully for me as it is very valuable in the history of warfare
16:11
taking of spoils of war was a commonly accepted practice in fact armies sometimes paid their soldiers by
16:17
allowing them to take the things that they could walk away with that's what makes world war ii such a demarcation
16:23
line with how wars have been fought in the past that you had the western allies
16:28
through general eisenhower's orders stipulate that this policy was going to
16:34
be different than how things have worked in the past these works of art and cultural treasures were not going to be taken and in fact an enormous amount of
16:41
resources were going to be put into place to try and identify who the rightful owners were and get them back
16:47
the first thing they did they go into the basement and see what's in the wine cellar after the cognac and the red wine is gone then
16:54
they go upstairs and they picked out something which they took home from for mother as a souvenir
17:00
and and it was one piece now joe you know obviously wanted to take more than just
17:05
one souvenir from mother he wasn't a different devil we'll imagine people going into quindlenburg which was not
17:10
damaged by the war and the primary draw of people going into the church
17:16
are these great relics that are gone stolen and even worse by american forces
17:21
but it brings shame on the american army and soldiers that one soldier
17:27
would choose to do something like that which is why the soldiers that were able to be identified right at the end of the war were so severely punished was to
17:34
send the message you know this isn't going to be tolerated our cultural treasures our heritage as a civilization
17:40
that defines who we are is one of the reasons they were fighting so the fact that one of these soldiers
17:47
would have stolen stuff from so many other millions of troops were risking lives to try and protect as part of
17:53
their overall mission is disrespectful and offensive to every one of the troops that served and in
17:59
particular those that didn't come home because they're buried in europe
18:04
[Music] i'm perfectly happy that the book got home
18:10
it is a very valuable thing so care for it there's one more on the way somewhat like it
18:16
also a chest at the same time except the chest has a bunch of ivory and lay in it
18:21
life here is most boring nothing to do at all all the high rank takes all the passes
18:26
to paris to brussels to antwerp to italy to switzerland
18:32
we just sit here in the woods going nuts slowly
18:38
you should know that during the cold war we had no real chance to speak with
18:44
the soviet union or with the united states of america or great
18:51
britain or france about the returning of treasures which were stolen during the
18:57
war and i believe personally i believe also the gdr government had no interest no
19:04
interest [Music]
19:12
the folks of kwedlenberg complained at the end of the war that numerous pieces
19:17
were missing ever since the americans were in town so there was this original list that i
19:24
had of the the pieces that were missing from puedlin book you have to keep in mind when i did the research
19:30
i couldn't get any research done in cretelenburg which was east germany
19:36
one of the reasons why the church was trying to keep a low profile because they feared
19:43
that the government would remove the remaining pieces and put them
19:48
in a museum the church was always fearful that they would lose the remaining
19:54
pieces in the beginning it was very risky for everybody my family and me we were observed for
20:02
several months around our house we had cars with
20:07
officials of the secret service of the gdr and the people who came to me
20:14
were controlled by them and i i found also uh
20:21
in my file of the secretary that they had a lot of people who
20:28
were responsible to deliver information about my
20:33
private life my contacts and also my all my activities
20:41
i came home from school by bus and my boys 14 and 10 were still sitting in front of
20:47
the television and i said well what are you doing here why aren't you
20:52
in bed and george my my other son said well the border is open
20:58
so they were sitting and watching this and i was sitting and watching this i couldn't really believe it
21:04
because you you weren't prepared for that that it went so that that it went so fast it
21:10
went really too fast it was my official job to check
21:16
where are our objects of this museum therefore i had to check
21:22
what really happened at the end of the war i found that many many published stories
21:30
are pure lies and now it was an open question
21:37
where can it be then so i tried to puzzle it together from
21:44
the records in the archives unfortunately those records were not maintained these records don't come with
21:51
with rosters so i still didn't know you know who served at that time
21:58
in which unit the place to go to for personnel related information
22:04
is not in washington business in lewis so i went to saint louis with the hope
22:10
of finding the rosters for these units i couldn't just call them up i didn't
22:16
say listen do you know anything about the quellenberg pressure and what happened to them because i never knew who i was talking
22:23
to i could have called up one of the thieves that was before the internet
22:29
anything i wanted to find out i had to call people up i had to send them faxes
22:35
i had to drive because i didn't have the money for an airplane ticket so i drove down
22:41
there and and slept in my car
22:46
and come back empty-handed this was my first contact with willie in this case and and he was driven
22:53
he drove me he's very good at getting people to do what he wants he was passionate about
23:00
solving this case it became pretty time consuming and pretty
23:05
pretty frustrating and i'm not sure how much i much longer i could have continued if
23:11
that samuel gospel wouldn't have shown up
23:17
[Music]
23:24
it had been a 10-year long effort of joe tom meadors brothers and sister
23:30
to sell this material and to find a buyer for it they've showed these things
23:36
to 10 private dealers and also christie's the art auction house and christie's didn't think it was necessary
23:43
to alert the german government it is it is outrageous in my view but that is their opinion and
23:51
uh so after having kept these treasures two of the most valuable of them the manuscripts for nearly half a year
24:00
uh ins and and determining beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was stolen property what did they do did they do
24:06
what you and i would do which is call the police or at least notify the germans as you as you suggested no they
24:12
didn't they surreptitiously returned them to the presumptive thief
24:20
s-a-m-u-h-e-l samuel so it's spelled in an odd way but that's but that's just
24:27
one page of it and it's just wonderful a later carolingian
24:32
gospel book so each gospel matthew mark luke and john is has a preface
24:38
of the evangelist sitting there writing his gospels the world is small when it
24:43
comes to things like this because there are only so many specialists whose opinions might matter if a family
24:50
is trying to sell or get an appraisal of a an illuminated
24:56
medieval manuscript for example not to speak of one as valuable
25:02
as the gospels or the other works that were part of the quinlan work treasures
25:07
the price tag has been put on them they are said to be worth more than 200 million dollars they
25:14
were said to be worth more than a van gogh painting and they're just extraordinarily valuable my wife uh who's a religious
25:21
person um and i think that i'm you know a person sort of lacking faith i said
25:27
listen don't worry about my my faith
25:33
i think i'm i'm clearly a person of faith because certain things happened along
25:39
the way in the quentin brook case that were highly unexpected
25:44
after the samuel gospels had reappeared i was going to go to see mr falter at
25:51
h.p krause to whom the samuel gospels had had been offered
25:58
and i wanted to have a witness with me because mr falter could have told me
26:03
anything and afterwards could have denied everything bill honan had heard about the rumors of
26:10
reappearance of the quedlinburg treasures and he referred willie corte to me so willie
26:16
searched for the treasures and i tried to make sure that no mistakes were made and that a legal claim could be brought
26:22
if he found them i went back to folder uh and said listen is there anything else you can tell me then i guess falter
26:30
thought well i mean the story's over so there's nothing for me to gain or lose anymore he
26:36
gave me a copy of the letter that he had received from the bank offering him
26:42
the two manuscripts of course it was anonymous so i didn't know from whom the letter came and then falter helped me
26:48
further by opening in the atlas with a map of texas and then putting a pencil
26:55
underneath the name of white right i got on the next plane and flew to
27:01
dallas drove into white right
27:10
[Music] i stood in front of the bank and the
27:16
question was how do i go into a bank and and say listen i'm looking for the quinlan book treasure
27:22
they told me i have to go to denison so i drove to denison
27:28
we were up in john farley's office one afternoon making some phone calls and
27:34
the secretary came up and said you have some visitors and
27:39
it was willie corte [Music]
27:46
i introduced myself and what i did have at the time was this article from the new york times this
27:53
front page story the business card he gave us was was just kind of
27:58
had a bunch of scratch through marks and stuff and so we really didn't know who they were
28:03
the giveaway was that i gave farley the article from the new york times the front page story that was about the
28:10
samuel gospels and the way he read it he read it with interest
28:16
i was convinced that you read it the way somebody reads it who has a
28:23
connection to what it is he's reading and then he called in sylvester and said
28:29
hey you gotta come in here listen to this story and close the door so when they left
28:36
we thought we need to come up with a plan because it had been
28:42
in the dallas morning news like that monday morning so we contacted
28:48
a law firm haynes and boone in dallas we hinted at what it could possibly be
28:54
and could they possibly meet with us the attorney that specialized in art was very excited she said she had seen the
29:01
article in the paper and it mentioned white right texas so and she said i wondered when
29:07
somebody would come up with this and she never dreamed that she would have the opportunity to be the attorney
29:13
working on the case i subsequently got a call to meet with the lawyers in dallas
29:20
who initially represented the bank and then represent the bank and the family and i
29:25
think i was sitting across the table with four or five lawyers
29:31
who pretty much told me young man there is nothing really here to pursue
29:38
this this is a lost cause and and they gave me i remember all
29:43
kinds of all kinds of legal explanations
29:48
why under texas law u.s law international law there was nothing that the church or
29:56
anybody else could really successfully pursue and and and i listened to all of this and
30:02
and i just said listen uh to me this looks like just stolen property
30:08
you know nothing else
30:14
[Music]
30:26
bill honen of course was still continuing the research on the thief
30:31
so he went back to white right and dennison and continued what i had to to give up
30:38
on which was asking people who amongst you was a world war ii veteran
30:44
who served in europe and so forth and so forth it was a matter of uh pursuing a whole
30:51
bunch of leads a lot of telephoning and then finally uh triangulating you
30:57
might say where i picked up various hints
31:03
joe did go to north texas he did major in art so he had
31:09
i don't know that he knew necessarily what these things were but he knew they were pretty
31:14
i mean he had he had good taste yeah there's you know and i don't know that he knew they were that
31:21
valuable it wasn't like no i brought them home and they're worth a
31:26
billion dollars or anything like that you know what any of that sort of thing that's just that's the way it was
31:31
joe was so happy with his treasures that he wanted really to show them off
31:40
but he was afraid to most people didn't have any idea what they were they were
31:46
beautiful but they didn't know where they came from
31:52
one day this man came in and said he was looking for a picture of joe meador and i said well seems like i remember
31:59
something in our file let me go see what i have so i pulled the file out and i found i think there were three negatives
32:05
of him holding some orchids that he grew and so we talked a little while and he
32:11
said he was from new york and he was doing i remember that he said he was doing something on orchids
32:16
i said well i don't know that we would need three negatives of this so here you can take one of them and you don't have
32:21
to worry about bringing it back because he was dead he had died already died and i couldn't see why we would need a
32:28
picture of a man who was deceased with an orchid so i gave him one of the negatives and
32:34
the next day it came out in the new york times [Music]
32:40
the reporter asked me if i had come to school with joe thomas i was incensed i
32:46
said no you want me to smack you and he really jumped back a little bit and so after
32:52
that since i didn't know that much about the whole magilla in the first place i'm sure he thought crazy
32:58
we went to work that morning and everything was fine and all of a sudden we had all these newscasters bursting in
33:04
the doors and wanting to film in the building and all this out in the other
33:11
it got to be a mess and then there was one person that lived out in white rock which is a few miles
33:17
up by my out of here and i knew him very well and i and he used to drive joe
33:23
meadows to dallas all the time and and i asked him and we called him skunk
33:30
and i said skunk i said have you heard anything about this so-called treasure stuff around here and
33:37
he said well i've seen some of it but i didn't know what it was you sit around all the time wanting
33:42
something big to happen you know big murder case or a big something robbery or something and then when it happens
33:49
you know you remember it everybody knew joe towns everybody knew mrs mitter
33:55
and the met her family for pity sex jack gene everybody [Music] he was very well educated
34:02
he he knew his way around he was worldly before i graduated i was invited up to
34:08
his one room apartment and while i was there he casually talked about
34:14
the german jewels they were just out on tables and i don't know how much it was there
34:21
they were there and he was very open about showing he had a lot of art in the in the apartment and there was a painting
34:28
that somebody did of him in i imagine the early 40s and it was like a military he wasn't in
34:36
military guard but it set the style for joe all all along he was he liked to dress
34:43
fancy he had beautiful hair that he kept perfectly quaffed and
34:49
one of the things that i remember is towards the end of his life after he had gotten cancer
34:55
he had to get away but his wigs sort of went askew and
35:01
we very gently tried to straighten it for him without him realizing because he was a sensitive and proud proud man
35:09
and vain [Music]
35:25
[Music] this is some of the stuff that [ __ ] up
35:30
and they're very artistic and that that's one of hers
35:37
that is not that is and basically all this over here
35:44
is from the from the meadow family grandmother used to teach uh art class
35:50
out here in this this shed behind us my grandmother was very into into painting
35:55
and she would paint china she was always painting painting something
36:01
this was this was the the step up to the to the greenhouse
36:06
you have the uh you know that's where where uh she taught her art classes in that in
36:13
that building right there i guess the best way to describe joe
36:19
would be a renaissance man joe was a an intelligent man um
36:25
didn't say a lot but it was the kind of guy that when when he talked you you listen of course i was a i was a little
36:31
child and so i i was raised to listen anyway uh but he uh
36:37
he was very very very seemed like he had a lot of wisdom
36:42
he always wanted to be the best or he wanted to buy the best um
36:48
if it meant saving for a long time to buy something he would do that to get the best
36:53
with his orchids he tended those orchids
36:58
day in and day out all the time one of one of joel's primary purposes you know during that time
37:04
period was taking care of his mom and i think that's why he moved back back here later in life
37:11
simply to take care of her they were very very close but i'm gonna say something awful here
37:18
aren't most gay men
37:23
[Music] some people didn't like to think about
37:28
that but he was he never bothered anybody anybody here in white right
37:36
and that was his lifestyle and that is fine you know he's grown man i don't
37:43
well it's just none of my business what he does on the weekend he wasn't it wasn't ever in your face it wasn't ever
37:50
i'm a gay man and here's here's my boyfriend it was just it was very [Music]
37:56
he was very discreet with that i remember
38:01
reading or hearing that joe would walk around and disguise us not to be seen and
38:06
and dress up in odd characters and that that was so far from the truth
38:13
then he was you know this this had this dual personality or dual
38:18
life well he didn't have a dual life he was compassionate he was he was he was true to his word
38:24
for them to make him out as this you know person that they did this grand
38:30
arch connoisseur you know it's just it's it's irrational
38:37
it's it's irrational it's not true joe showed you what
38:43
he wanted to show you and in many cases i think what he thought you wanted to see
38:51
now bill honan ended up going to the library in denison
38:56
where they had this obituaries and there was joe meadow's obituary so bill honan
39:03
had a most likely candidate but he didn't know what the dual matter
39:09
you know was that your matter who was in the unit in the archives which is why he asked me so he could put
39:16
one and one together and then have a story i at the same time was now you know
39:21
negotiating with the lawyers in dallas who were eager to keep this all
39:26
confidential so i had a serious problem
39:32
so all i gave to bill honen was the information from the national
39:37
archives which is a matter of public record anyway i mean he could have done it himself
39:43
i gave it to to bill with the the strong request to not run the story until monday of
39:51
course that didn't happen particularly you know when it's a front-page story and bill rightfully
39:58
said you know we don't want to lose this story to anybody else particularly the dallas papers
40:05
so sure enough when we were supposed to meet with the
40:12
lawyers on friday we had the front page story on the new york times which meant the
40:18
story was all across the country [Music]
40:29
[Music]
40:38
[Music] [Applause] [Music]
40:43
we had half of the country's media in front of the law firm and i had reporters following me to my hotel room
40:51
standing in front of my door in order to get a follow-up story so we all got together at the adolphus waiting
40:59
for the lawyers to take us to the warehouse where the remaining pieces were supposed to be including the second
41:05
manuscript which we were supposed to photograph and send the photos to quedlenberg so they could identify the
41:11
pieces positively so we waited and waited and waited everybody was sort of scared to to leave
41:18
because we never knew when when it was time to now go to the warehouse so so
41:23
you know nobody went for dinner or anything like that and then i think shortly before
41:28
what midnight vilhonen came and took me aside and said willie i'm gonna run a
41:34
story tomorrow about the second manuscript which has just been offered
41:41
in switzerland to the germans we saw that the cultural foundation of the
41:48
states had purchased the second book and so we felt that we were dealing with people
41:55
who were capable of anything to sell a book while we were negotiating
42:00
over it in fact it had agreement about it and so we thought we had to
42:06
uh take legal action so i was able to reach minister goslar
42:11
in korlenburg from dallas texas and explained to him
42:16
what was going on i said listen we need to go to court on monday
42:22
and i need your authorization so he basically asked me well what do you
42:29
think i need to do i said you need to authorize me
42:38
[Music] off dr marie says we can't lead us too
42:47
and he said well if that's what you think i need to do then that's what i do and then of course he was bit concerned
42:53
about money i said it's too late for that now so
42:58
i was now you know properly authorized on the weekend before we went to court
43:05
but but of course we had no money
43:13
we went to the courthouse at nine o'clock monday morning and filed a lawsuit and then
43:18
uh you know we had the hearing with the judge about the temporary training order because now of course we were extremely
43:23
concerned that if there was anything else it would quickly leave the country it was very important for us to get the
43:29
depositions on the way because we knew so little about joe matter and the family and their whole involvement in
43:34
the case there was no basis for trust between the church
43:40
and the texans they were completely different worlds the wall had just come down there was
43:45
really no communication between east and west no reasonable expectations the education
43:52
we had about east germany was minimal education they had about the west i'm sure was all twisted they were very
43:58
moscow oriented we were very western oriented in this country when willie and
44:03
i showed up in texas we were vilified particularly and
44:08
their lawyers the lawyers for the family were extremely hostile
44:16
yeah willie cartey i didn't really realize it was going to
44:21
be a depth position i was a little bit little bit annoyed i was a little bit annoyed and i think
44:27
willie picked up on that pretty big he kept pacing back and forth and standing up and i'm going oh lord huge big long
44:33
conference table german lawyers on one side our lawyers and myself on the other and it was just
44:39
question after and they would um they would ask a question and you'd answer and then they'd ask it another
44:45
way and you'd answer and then they'd ask it in another way the man from germany uh willie court
44:53
he contacted us i got a letter from somebody one of the priests or something
44:59
in germany he said if you have these things god will get you and i called the attorney and i said you tell him to
45:04
where he can put it what do you want me to i don't know where it's at i don't know what happened i don't know how i got there i don't
45:09
know when they decided to do this there was never a basis for trust between us and the families one of the family
45:15
members came out and said to me uh a one-eyed ass could have found those
45:20
treasures they asked where i got the stuff when did he give me this stuff what did he tell me about the stuff it absolutely
45:27
wore gene and jack out and of course you know and mom too uh you know they were they were up in
45:33
age at that time and and i honestly do not well matter of fact i can i can pretty
45:40
pretty vehemently say that if they had known the firestorm was able to later cause this would have this caused they
45:47
wouldn't have touched it because it was a mess i mean it was it was a mess and it
45:53
wasn't just a mess for a minute you know mama's mom was talking about if i you know i could go to prison i'm like
46:00
what for what the story that
46:05
i understood was that he had uh the priest at the church had
46:11
approached him and asked him to get this group of valuables out of the country
46:17
and that he would get with him later and get them back this is where
46:22
page by page you slowly get to see the depth of the man as chaotic
46:31
as it was perhaps for him to take all of this from quailenburg
46:37
germany for whatever reason uh in his own mind you know i i could
46:43
see it i can see it in his personality that he really believed it he really believed in his own mind that he was
46:48
saving part of civilization he was an interesting fellow i never knew him but every description of joe meador
46:54
was that he was very aesthetic and
47:00
appreciated the historical value and beauty of the things that he took
47:07
but he did take him this is not really like war booty like captured guns or
47:13
uniforms or helmets or things like that this was real treasure at the end of the war when he was in the
47:20
south of france and stole silverware for that he got court-martialed
47:25
so was he a pathological thief or was it this sort
47:31
of attitude that the spoils of war go to the victor
47:36
i i don't know the witness accounts we got were that he was a step beyond the normal
47:43
souvenir hunting he had been educated in art it taught
47:49
art when he came home he operated this small hardware store with his brother
47:56
we had this impression that he and his brother had separate desks at this hardware store in separate entrances and
48:02
separate safes because the brother disapproved of his homosexuality the pictures that you see of him like from
48:08
texas monthly show a very complex intelligent well-educated person [Music]
48:15
was tormented apparently about these treasures tried to keep the queenberg treasures together but
48:21
maybe lived off other things he stole he didn't necessarily talk about it but
48:29
he had written extensively letters home
48:35
if not daily weekly the whole entire time he was in the war and
48:40
we had read those letters over the years i mean they were there they were beautiful letters he was very
48:46
descriptive in his writing and i'd read a letter you know at some point in the game
48:53
that he had mailed home some objects you know put them up
48:58
and i'll take care of it when i get home and they came in a wooden box with brown
49:04
paper around it and after everybody died the box was still in the attic i mean we we found it
49:10
you know and it was written on he'd written on this wooden crate that's apparently how joe got these
49:17
things back to texas he mailed them two books a box
49:23
you know it had some other things on the box up in the attic you know i don't even know
49:28
i don't even know what happened to it so if he mailed things uh you know there
49:35
should have been things that were mailable in other words it's highly unlikely that he mailed you know
49:41
large size paintings i'm not trying to justify what joe meador did but a lot of people were
49:46
doing things like that and he bundled this up and sent it back you know the us
49:52
army they could have taken a look at it to see what it was maybe they did and just didn't care
49:58
there were a number of people that were involved in this he couldn't have done it by himself and didn't do it by himself
50:04
that's not to cast blame on anyone else it's just it's a fact
50:09
i don't know what i would have done but i very well might have done the same thing but i can't
50:15
justify what joe did and we're talking about a cathedral a church a thousand-year-old
50:23
collection you know it just goes and on
50:31
i knew that my efforts had been somewhat successful
50:36
in flushing out the second manuscript so to speak but it was in switzerland so
50:41
there was nothing else to do in dallas now that would that left me with the
50:47
remaining pieces which indeed i still hadn't seen so by
50:53
by then we had a temporary straining order on something i had no idea what it was
51:00
so that's that's why then we went to when we finally went to denison to the bank with the federal marshals
51:06
all the excitement and tension was back on my shoulders because now it was the moment of truth
51:14
whether what folly you know was bringing up in his cardboard box from from the file cabinet not from not
51:21
from the safe but from the file cabinet where he had kept it was actually you know anything that had
51:28
anything to do with kwadlenburg the judge had an approved list of people
51:34
who were allowed to attend the inspection and so we had all these attorneys
51:39
representing the matters we had our attorneys representing the bank and then we had
51:44
willie corte and the attorneys representing the german church they they brought
51:52
art handlers who wore all these white gloves and and they very delicately handled
51:58
all these artifacts their intent was to verify that these were indeed the treasures that were in
52:05
question and our question was well just because they say these are the
52:12
treasures how do we know it really is what proof do we have that they have a claim
52:19
and as it turned out they brought a notebook that had eight by ten black
52:24
and white photographs that were taken by the germans before the u.s and allied
52:29
occupation of germany they knew that was coming and to protect art they put all
52:35
this in a cave and they inventoried it and they took pictures of
52:41
each item the big box was wrapped so they took it out of the box and the guy then unwrapped it and it sat there the
52:48
photographer took all these multiple photographs you know from all different
52:54
sides and of course each time the flash lights went off so it it really put this
53:00
put the the the the the reliquary in the sort this you know flashing glowing bright light
53:08
as if it had sort of like a phoenix you know come out of out of the ashes
53:15
and and reveal itself it's you know something like we have in some of these movies you know where something
53:20
irregularly appears [Music]
53:28
i was absolutely flabbergasted at the quality and beauty of these objects here's something as you thought
53:35
had been lost to history but here they were brought back to life because they survived
53:42
once willie saw he knew that he had found the treasures it was kind of interesting to watch his reaction i mean
53:49
years and years of work and and everything was coming to fruition he was
53:55
almost giddy to to actually be able to see it and touch it after all the work he had put
54:01
in and i could understand that
54:16
the treasures came out of the box and we saw that we really had found the quellenberg treasures and we shared a
54:21
little private handshake that we had really done what we had set out to do
54:26
and and that was really the moment you know that i had been waiting for all those years basically because now
54:33
i had confirmation that all this effort all this risk that we all had taken
54:39
[Music] had been worth it [Music]
55:03
right over here see the door uh at the back of the bank just across the street is where the wetters and
55:09
their uh lawyer and their people came out then they loaded them in this van
55:14
and took off to dallas we were kind of glad to see them go we were afraid you know somebody might hold
55:20
them up or something you know in them while they were coming out but anyway it was just right across the street well
55:26
willie and i went to germany together uh
55:32
several months later and we had a series of meetings in bonn
55:38
and berlin quentlenberg machterberg because the case needed to be regularized
55:46
and so i was present at the meeting where he was fired from the case
55:51
i spoke with the head of the cultural affairs department uh at a time you know when we had
55:57
reached this sort of level where i had been to texas and and i said now
56:03
now we have to get serious about it um they try to discourage me
56:10
they thought it was politically a bad idea to to to do that meaning to
56:17
for for the germans to pursue an american soldier and accuse him of being a thief
56:25
so my relationship with the folks who had initially encouraged me
56:31
and say you know go ahead that would be interesting uh then were the same people who
56:37
who really didn't want to deal with me after willie was fired he continued to
56:44
want to talk to me and we communicated once in a while about what was going on with the case
56:50
but since he was not part of the team i couldn't share client information with him or
56:55
confidences or strategy and
57:00
i couldn't stop him from going to the press
57:06
when we settled the case he made it known that he was not enthusiastic about the settlement
57:11
so i think he he maintained his own independent posture i can't say that i know
57:17
everything he was doing though [Music]
57:36
i went to the this federal trial that they had at sherman we had an old judge up there
57:42
named brown and he asked that prosecutor how come he was that long getting it
57:48
done she says well that was wasn't any rush on it they suggest they
57:54
are the statute's limitations it says it's done run out he dismissed the case
58:01
and boy you talked about somebody mad that gal was mad she lost her case right there in front
58:08
of everybody and the whole town was in that courtroom just about the statute of limitations had run and that's a law
58:14
that's written to guard against
58:20
prosecutions when the case has become so old
58:26
that the witnesses have lost their memory or evidence is hard to come by or
58:32
memories fade and evidence goes away
58:37
it was not easy it was a very close call but i'm i'm proud to say that he did
58:43
exactly what was right in the fifth circuit agreed you know people and honen did it he said
58:50
well it's a technicality but the old the old saw among lawyers is a technicality is a law that the other
58:57
side didn't research and we did the law is the law
59:03
it's not a technicality [Music] well mother always laughed and said the big pickle building downtown the big
59:09
building downtown dallas with the green lights on that we bought five floors so yeah the lawyers got a big chunk of
59:16
that and then the rs got a big chunk so
59:21
so it wasn't as lucrative as as it looks like on paper maybe
59:28
[Music] joe had given me a heart a silver heart
59:36
and i had a house down in east texas that we rented and it laid on the coffee table
59:43
and was decoration on a coffee table in my rent house for about two years and
59:48
when i got the call that said hey they're gonna they want anything and everything that joe ever gave you
59:53
or anything that might be and by that time we had a list of what the items were and there was a silver heart listed
59:59
and so i had to call my renter and say hey you know you might take that heart and put it in a drawer until i can get down
1:00:06
there and get it and you know it had had a little cloth on the inside and i'd push on the cloth you know try to figure out what it said
1:00:13
and now i probably have damaged things i shouldn't have but oh well
1:00:19
[Music]
1:00:25
you know like one of the final numbers was 354 million dollars at one point that's what they said and it's like
1:00:32
for this wow you know we had it all these years who knew who knew
1:00:38
it normal people don't have that and so if we were normal people
1:00:44
and we had it so it's like how do you how do you even wrap your head around that kind of number
1:00:50
those kinds of decisions would not be made today there's absolutely no basis for
1:00:56
a government to reward someone by purchasing back things that were stolen clearly from
1:01:02
an important church within their country i really felt like the whole thing was was
1:01:08
meant to be i felt like it was meant to be returned to to the church and
1:01:13
i felt like even though joe meador took it
1:01:21
he protected it and most of it was returned had it fallen
1:01:26
into other i think he had an appreciation for art and
1:01:33
by having that appreciation he protected it and it didn't had it gone to someone
1:01:39
else who knows what would have happened to it there was no physical damage as i
1:01:44
remember at the time i took extensive notes on it but i i think there was the
1:01:50
damage was minimal considering the harsh treatment they had it was surprising
1:01:56
they did survive so well
1:02:04
[Laughter] [Music] it's not like we were trying
1:02:10
to be sneaky and be crooks and you know go around and make a whole bunch of money it's just
1:02:17
there were some financial issues maybe these are worth something and we can't this will help
1:02:22
and so to be done settled and done yeah
1:02:27
yeah how can you how can you describe somebody that you don't know
1:02:33
you know from what you read or what you hear if you don't know the person what gives you the right to judge that person
1:02:40
it's called gossip gossiping hearsay it's just my opinion
1:02:47
there's always another part of the story i have found that
1:02:53
frequently good people do bad things
1:02:58
and that doesn't make them bad people i have an attitude about that that
1:03:03
even though someone may have committed a criminal act
1:03:09
that they deserve consideration for the way that they've lived the rest of their lives what's not not right that this
1:03:16
young american lieutenant took the the things from the treasure
1:03:23
but on the other hand there were so many dreadful things that happened during the war
1:03:28
so many people who lost their lives that well let him take those old bibles
1:03:36
at least i like to think about a progression of culture to greater and greater levels of
1:03:41
humanity in spite of what we learned in the 20th century and i think the cultural expressions of
1:03:47
people are preserving them and appreciating them trying to understand them is one way for
1:03:53
us to do that scholars who have studied the movements of relics have have
1:03:58
noticed that saints have power over their relics and they can move when they want to uh they don't think they're
1:04:04
getting enough prayers or have enough federation from the local populace so they want to go somewhere else where
1:04:09
where they're they're going to be more important and they can
1:04:14
go where they want to people say well why should i care about cultural treasures one they belong to
1:04:20
you whether they're in iraq whether they're in syria whether they were in
1:04:26
soviet union during world war ii they're the shared cultural treasure of everybody which is why joe tom meador's
1:04:32
theft of the quinlanberg treasures is offensive on all levels it didn't belong to him it didn't belong the united
1:04:39
states didn't belong to his family and it really doesn't belong to quinlenberg it just happens to be there within that
1:04:45
church available for people around the world to go and see these things and understand something that's important
1:04:52
going back to the 9th century about western civilization but it belongs to everybody so when you steal something
1:04:58
like that you're stealing it from you and me and anybody else that's out there you don't own things like this they own
1:05:04
you if you steal them i had no reason indeed from a my
1:05:11
professional situation at the time nor my personal qualifications
1:05:16
[Music] to do this i mean i was not an story in pursuing
1:05:22
you know aspects of museums losses honestly
1:05:28
i didn't really bring anything in particular to the table which on the other hand may have
1:05:35
been a good thing because if i would have been sort of knowledgeable in this area
1:05:42
i may have not had this curiosity this desire
1:05:47
to find out
1:05:55
[Music]
1:06:06
[Laughter] [Music]
1:06:14
i wanted to talk a little bit if you're comfortable about um there were the two items that were still
1:06:21
missing and what you think might have happened to one of them are you comfortable talking about that
1:06:28
i don't know i'm not sure okay on camera i don't know um
1:06:34
just because i don't want any i don't know that that's what happened it's just kind of a speculation as to
1:06:40
what that that's what happened but it's not anywhere that you it's not in the family oh no no no no no
1:06:47
no no no go check the goodwill i don't know
1:06:52
i won't say a name how about that there is a possibility that it was given
1:06:57
in a sack of other costing jewelry to some employees
1:07:04
how's that that's good [Music]
1:07:27
you