Thoughts and reflections on: Grisly Assyrian Record of Torture and Death

Katie Taylor, world history 6                                                                               December 9, 2013

Thoughts and reflections on: Grisly Assyrian Record of Torture and Death

By:  Erkia Bleibtreu

The dominate theme of Assyrian history is conquest and gruesome murder. The pictorial representation of Assyrian exploits only showed victory. The Assyrians only showed victories and never depicted a single Assyrian getting injured.

There are several possible reasons as to why the Assyrians only depicted the victories and left out all bad things. The first being that they wanted to look powerful and showing only victories mad there empire appear to be stronger than it actually was. The second possible reason is that they wanted it to appear as if the Assyrian God was supreme and as if their god was protecting them with unfailing benevolence and showing wrath for Assyrian enemies, and the last reason is that the Assyrians wanted to scare their enemies and only documenting stories of Assyrians mutilating their enemies spread the fear of the Assyrian empire throughout the middle east causing the cities under attack to be submissive.