Pandemic, Climate Change, and an Unknown Rebel King: Crisis and Empire in Mid-eighth Century BCE Assyria Eckart Frahm

Pandemic, Climate Change, and an Unknown Rebel King: Crisis and Empire in Mid-eighth Century BCE Assyria Eckart Frahm 2026, Infecting the Ancient Mesopotamian Cosmos: Epidemics and the Transmission of Disease in Assyria and Babylonia, ed. T. P. Arbøll. Beiträge zur assyrisch-babylonischen Medizin 1 https://www.academia.edu/169939030/Pandemic_Climate_Change_and_an_Unknown_Rebel_King_Crisis_and_Empire_in_Mid_eighth_Century_BCE_Assyria?email_work_card=title For the final version of the paper, please contact eckart.frahm@yale.edu. The emergence of an actual Assyrian “empire” under Tiglath-pileser III (745–727 BCE) – the world’s first, as has repeatedly been argued – is often considered the result of a long-term rise of the kingdom, beginning in the late tenth century BCE, with a few minor setbacks here and there but no major internal crises and a great deal of dynastic continuity. Here I argue that this picture is actually misleading. In the decades preceding Tiglath-pileser III’s accession, Assyria went through a period in which various members of the royal family competed with one another for the throne, oligarchs rose to positions of unprecedented power, precipitation slowly began to become less abundant, and, perhaps most remarkably, two major bouts of plague took place, in 765 and 759 BCE. Yet the result of all this – pandemic, climate change, succession crises, and even, for good measure, a solar eclipse – was not political collapse but Assyria’s transformation into a predatory empire of proportions unseen before – a scenario that resonates on some levels with global trends of our own times.