Friday essay: how societies evolved into fear-dominated goliaths – then collapsed

Friday essay: how societies evolved into fear-dominated goliaths – then collapsed

We think of ancient civilisations as operating very differently from the way our economy works today. Yet the Bronze Age Assyrians living in Mesopotamia, around 4,000 to 3,000 years ago, began the basis of modern capitalism, in a region spanning most of modern-day Iraq, eastern Syria and southeastern Turkey. The Assyrian empire was the root of what many scholars would now call “the West”. Cuneiform writing, the oldest in the world, records evide…