The Assyrian And The Persian Empires

The fall of the territorial states, with a shockingly similar cause to the cause of the fall of their predecessors being climate change, gave rise to a new type of political ruling, empires which are groups of different ethnic groups or states under the control of a single ruling power. The two prime examples of these new empires and ways in which political ruling changed are the Assyrian and the Persian Empires, both viewed as political models as well as models of the effective use of ideology. The Zhou Dynasty, although not politically centered enough to be considered an empire, also mastered the efficient and effective working of ideologies and successful political rule. These three empires, or dynasty in the case of the Zhou, perhaps the
The Assyrians used ideology, or a dominant collection of ideas of a widespread movement or culture, as means to support and justify expansion, exploration, and pervasive inequality. Assyrian ideology used depictions of the national god Ashur to demand support for the empire's expansion and for support of the sovereign. The use of propaganda, or the use of information specifically modified to convince a certain targeted group of people to support or believe a certain idea, by the Assyrian Empire also served a purpose of convincing subjects to support the empire, with a focus of glorifying the king as well as the empire. The Neo-Assyrians, adept at the ability to manipulate the minds of their subjects, used three differing types of propaganda, including elaborate architecture and artwork with a purpose of glorification. Other types of propaganda used by the Assyrians consist of literary texts known as annals and oral versions of the annals recited at important gatherings. The Assyrians’ harsh use of propaganda to enforce their imperial ideology arguably convinced many subjects to advocate for the empire and influenced many of the sequential empires to borrow and expand on the method of propaganda
The success of Cyrus the Great and other Persian leaders ties back to the ideology used by the empire. The Persian Empire borrowed the foundations of their ideology from not only the Assyrians, but also the Elamites and Babylonians because the Persian Empire’s origins came from nomadic people meaning that the Persian’s had no previously existing urban tradition. Unlike the ideologies and propaganda of the Neo-Assyrians, the Persians used persuasion, not violence, to subdue others and used this fact as a way to personify the ruler as a benevolent king who truly emancipated the subjects from the oppressive reign of their previous monarch. To further support the image of the empire freeing those whose lands they conquered, the Persians had their own propaganda in the form of elaborate architectural decoration that portrayed the subjects as gladly and willingly obedient, a sharp contrast to that of Assyrian propaganda depicting the military might and inevitable future of being conquered by Assyria. The Persian Empire used its ideologies and propaganda not only as a way to reel in support for the empire and the ruler, but also as a means of enforcing the fact that theirs was a multicultural empire that thrived on the equality of its