10
abili
ty to overwhelm peaceful towns by surprise attack, coming down
"like a wolf on the fold."11  What's worse, not long ago the Assyrians
had reduced the Babylonians to a secondary power.  Babylon's
politicians did  not want to see that fate occur again.
As for the Median threat, the Babylonian queen Nitocris was so
concerned that she underwrote a strategic defense initiative on the
scale of Star Wars.  She literally had a new course dug for the
Euphrates River, forcing the water to loop around in a confusing tangle
that would presumably keep the Medes from mounting a surprise
naval attack against her capital.  In addition, she fortified the river's
edge with huge embankments, and--to slow the Euphrates'
current--dug a lake some 47 miles in circumference, reinforcing the
margins with stone.12
With evil empires like those of the Medes and Assyrians
threatening them, who needed to worry about rabble from the hills?
But the rabble from the hills did, indeed, turn out to be the
Babylonians' major problem.  A tribe from the rocky Zagros Mountains
of southwestern Iran decided it would like to rule the lush valleys
where cities flourished and the wealthy wore fine apparel.  That tribe
was the Persians.
The Persians were unlettered and uncouth.  But they loved a
good  fight.13  It wasn't long before this mob no one had ever heard of
overwhelmed the Assyrians and the Medes--Babylon's two rival
superpowers.14  Then the Persians turned on the isolated Babylonians.
You can imagine who won.15
The irony came a few decades later.  By now, the victorious
Persian rulers had turned from barbarians to urbane city dwellers.
True, they still traveled up into the hills to eat and drink with the old
folks for a few weeks.16  But then they went back to their estates, their
servants, their armies of bureaucrats, and their imported luxuries.  One
by one they took over the superpowers of the day, finally subduing
Egypt in 525 BC.17  The Persian superorganism was now the master of
the international pecking order.
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