In 673 BC, the mighty Assyrian Empire marched against Egypt, determined to achieve a conquest greater than any Assyrian king had accomplished before. Instead, its army suffered a humiliating defeat.

My voice is a bit different because I am recovering from a bad cold. Editing is probably more choppy than usual. Such is life.

But why did King Esarhaddon invade Egypt in the first place? And how had Egypt, after centuries of political fragmentation, become powerful enough to resist the greatest empire in the ancient Near East?

In this episode of Oldest Stories, we explore the remarkable reign of Pharaoh Taharqa, the Kushite ruler of Egypt's Twenty-Fifth Dynasty. Under Taharqa, Egypt experienced a revival of wealth, monumental construction, religious life, and royal authority. Meanwhile, the small kingdoms of the Levant increasingly found themselves caught between the growing influence of Egypt and the crushing demands of Assyrian imperial rule.

We examine the uncertain extent of Egyptian involvement in Levantine rebellions, the strategic ambitions of the Assyrian kings, and the political calculations of the minor rulers who struggled to preserve their independence. Finally, we follow Esarhaddon's ill-fated expedition across the Sinai and into Egypt, where the Assyrian army met a defeat that its own royal records preferred to forget.

For an emperor who had promised extraordinary greatness under the favor of the gods, this was a serious problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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