I came across this subject at the intersection of the fantastic book I’m finishing, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire, and a lifelong subject of interest; the march of the Ten Thousand from modern-day Iraq, north through the Caucasus to the Black Sea in the late fifth century BC. Every time I come around to Xenophon, I sit and wonder how someone leads ten thousand hardened Greek mercenaries over 1500 miles through enemy territory while the home team’s army (Persian), who outnumbers you by astronomical numbers, systematically hunts you down. Throw in several barbarian tribes that acted as gatekeepers to the Caucasus, unimaginable weather while traversing that mountain range, poisonous honey, and a cigar, and you have all the elements for a good time.
I served in Fallujah, Iraq, circa 2008, so roughly the same area where this story originates. But I had an old copy of Xenophon’s Anabasis in Afghanistan, where the subject first piqued my interest. The surroundings didn’t hurt. But I didn’t have a particular interest in ancient history at that point; it was just a book in English. However, that’s where I first tried to imagine how bad it must have felt to be left dead in the water after winning a smashing victory and then finding out that my leader and patron, the only reason I was in Iraq, was now dead. But that’s close to impossible to do with the modern mindset. The most interesting part of Xenophon’s story is when he comes across an ancient empire that has obviously been stomped out of existence. There were only ruins left, along with the shadows of a once-great people living amongst those ruins.
Xenophon was born around 430 BC in Athens and barely missed the Peloponnesian Wars. He was a historian and philosopher whose writings include his Anabasis, Hellenica, and Agesilaus. Around 401, he joined a Greek mercenary army of the Achaemenid prince Cyrus the Younger. Cyrus was involved in a rebellion against his brother, the Persian king Artaxerxes II. The Battle of Cunaxa was intended to settle the issue, and Cyrus’s side did emerge victorious; however, Cyrus was also killed, leaving the Greeks witho ut a princely (Persian) patron and Artaxerxes in charge of the field and furious that a bunch of foreign mercenaries thought they could play kingmaker with the OG king of kings. The Anabasis is Xenophon’s first-person account of his leading the ten thousand Greeks from that moment on from the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates up through the Caucasus to the Black Sea in one of the most epic journeys in ancient history.
In his Anabasis (3.4), Xenophon describes a withdrawal after the battle of Cunaxa (between the Euphrates and the Tigris, probably 75 miles NW. of Babylon). The Greeks marched north along the Tigris and passed a massive city in ruins, which he referred to as Larissa. He said the city was formerly occupied by the Medes. The walls were abnormally large, a hundred feet high and twenty-five feet thick. The circumference was two parasangs or about seven miles, and it was constructed with a stone foundation and brick.
At the time, the Persians had pushed the Medes out of most of the area, but this city apparently remained a holdout. But who did the Medes push out? Xenophon describes a remnant local population (the Assyrians didn’t just disappear after their empire fell) who feared the odd assortment of Greeks emerging from the desert. As the Greeks approached, they fled to a ‘stone pyramid,’ which Paul Haupt suggests is an Assyrian temple-tower, or ziqqurratu. The temple was one plethron wide, about 100 feet square, and two plethra high.
Xenophon and company marched from Larissa (Calah, present-day Nimrud) for one day (of six parasangs, around twenty miles) to the ruins of a large castle near the city he describes as Mespila (Nineveh), which was a former Mede stronghold after the fall of the Assyrian Empire, circa 612 BC. This great city was the former capital and heart of the empire. However, Xenophon was aware of none of this. The foundation walls were made of polished shell limestone, fifty feet wide and fifty feet high. On top of this layer was a brick wall fifty feet wide and a hundred feet high. The circumference of this wall was approximately six parasangs, or around twenty miles. To put the size into perspective, the walls of Jerusalem, even after reconstruction, measured 4,018 meters (2.497 miles) in length, 12 meters (39 feet) in height, and 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) thick.
Xenophon doesn’t know it, but he and the Ten Thousand were marching past the very ancient world’s greatest empire up until its fall in the late seventh century BC. The Babylonians and Medes had done such a decent job of eliminating everything Assyria that even the names were forgotten. In his masterpiece book on Assyria, Eckart Frahm says Xenophon doesn’t even use the ancient names the locals were accustomed to. (Frahm, 352) Any recognizable features of the Assyrian Empire had been pulled root and branch from the land. Frahm includes a comment from the leading historian of the ancient Near East, Mario Liverani, who said the Assyrian Empire “vanished into thin air.” According to Liverani, the “elements of the Assyrian imperial structure that survived the collapse of the empire” were “few and ephemeral.” (Frahm, 369)
In its heyday, the Assyrian Empire exerted a significant amount of influence in the region through domination and astute political maneuvering, including the threat of deportation to a different part of the empire or an extremely violent death. Assyria emerged as an independent state in the 14th century BC. Their last great ruler was Ashurbanipal, who built the famous library at Nineveh, but with his death in 627, the empire began its spiral into oblivion. And that is what it was. The Babylonian-Median coalition completely stamped out everything Assyrian, so much so that Xenophon passed ruins with names that had nothing to do with their Assyrian past.
The Assyrians were famous for their cruelty and didn’t hide it, as attested to in Assyrian reliefs. However, that was the gold standard of the ancient world. At their peak, Assyria controlled a vast empire, either directly through provincial satraps or client states, from Anatolia to the Levant and Egypt, and their influence extended into the Zagros in the east. In the ninth century, Tiglath-Pileser took control in a brutal coup that included the murder of the entire previous royal family. He was responsible for the world’s first-ever professional army. The Assyrians at that point could field an army of 150,000 to 200,000, which could wage war year-round, a novel concept in the ancient world. (Ancient Battles, 54)
Xenophon and the Ten Thousand marched from Larissa (Calah) for one day (of six parasangs, about twenty miles) to a large, ruined castle near a city called Mespila (Nineveh), which was a former Mede stronghold. It was another former great city with obnoxiously large defenses. These walls were made of polished shell limestone, fifty feet wide and fifty feet high. The circumference was six parasangs, roughly equivalent to the distance they had just covered from Larissa. Xenophon says the Queen of the Medes fled here when the Persian offensive initially kicked off. However, even the Persians struggled to capture it. It was the intervention of the divine, specifically Zeus, who terrified the inhabitants with a vicious thunderstorm, which eventually led to the city’s capture. At least, that’s the way Xenophon interpreted it.
In “Xenophon’s Account of the Fall of Nineveh,” Paul Haupt identifies several discrepancies in Xenophon’s account. First, the names of cities are off. Substitute Assyrians for Medes, and Medes for Persians. The cities Xenophon describes are primarily Assyrian, which were captured by the Medes and then the Persians after the empire’s fall. Ultimately, the Assyrians fell to a coalition of Babylonians and Medes in 612-609. In many ancient accounts, the names of Medes, Elamites, Persians, Assyrians, and Babylonians are often confused. Nothing new under the sun. Herodotus and select books in the Bible, such as Judith and Daniel, encounter similar issues. The thing to keep in mind is that Xenophon wasn’t traversing Mesopotamia on an ethnographic fact-finding mission. He was trying to escape the grasp of Artaxerxes II and avoid the horrific fate of his superior officers.
Nineveh was always a tough nut to crack. Diodorus of Sicily referred to an old oracle that said Nineveh could not be captured unless the river turned against the city. And the river, in fact, did play a role in the city’s fall. Xenophon refers to a queen in charge or present at the cataclysmic end of Nineveh. The Assyrians received what they had constantly put out into the world. They had risen to become the hegemon of Mesopotamia and maintained that track, off and on, for centuries. It’s just really fascinating that, after almost 200 years, when Xenophon passes through, it’s all just a ruin, and no one knows or remembers what happened.
The Assyrians by no means disappear; there are holdouts in the mountains to the east and a remnant population among the ruins. But the name of Assyria was purposely stomped out of existence, enough that Xenophon might as well be marching through a different, shattered world. And if you thought this was just an old tale with no relevance to the modern world, think again. It was not that long ago, in 2014-2015, that ISIS rampaged through these same areas, destroying the very last remnants of the great Assyrian empire. The whole story is a gentle reminder that real life is stranger than fiction. Seriously, who needs fiction and sci-fi when you have ancient history and this bat-shit-crazy world?
Bib
Encyclopædia Britannica. “Xenophon.” Encyclopedia Britannica, May 2, 2020.
Frahm, Eckart. Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire. New York: Basic Books, 2023.
Haupt, Paul. “Xenophon’s Account of the Fall of Nineveh.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 28 (1907): 99–107.
“The Assyrian War Machine.” Ancient Battles Magazine.
Xenophon. The Anabasis of Cyrus. Translated and Annotated by Wayne Ambler. London: Cornell University Press, 2008.
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