Assyria: The and Fall of the World's First Empire, Eckart Frahm, c. 2023.

Having completed these four books over the past couple of weeks, I was led to this book which arrived from Amazon yesterday:

• Assyria: The and Fall of the World's First Empire, Eckart Frahm, c. 2023.

The author: a professor of Assyriology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University.

I bought the book specifically to track the interaction and progression of hieroglyphics, cuneiform, the alphabet, and written language. I have no idea how this will play out; I've not seen reviews of the book, but my first impression: it's gonna be a great book. Comes in at 509 pages including notes to chapters and the index.  

First thing I did: paged through the book to look at author's take on 1177 BC, pages 83 to 89.  Awesome -- fits exactly with the recent books I've read. Amazing.

The Long Road To Glory

Chapter 1: A Small Town on the Tigris

Chapter 2: Birth of a Kingdom

Chapter 3: Disruption and Recovery

Chapter 4: The Crown in Crisis

Empire

Chapter 5: The Great Expansion

Chapter 6: On the Edges of Empire

Chapter 7: A Ghost Story

Chapter 8: At the Gates of Jerusalem

Chapter 9: Sennacherib's Babylonian Problem

Chapter 10: Mother Knows Best

Chapter 11: 671 BCE

Chapter 12: Scholar, Sadist, Hunter, King

Chapter 13: Everyday Life in the Empire

Chapter 14: Imperial Twilight

Afterlife

Chapter 15: Assyria's Legacy on the Ground

Chapter 16: A Model Empire

Chapter 17: Distorted Reflections

Chapter 18: The Second Destruction

Epilogue

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1171 BC

It will take a long time to get through this book, for now, I'm most interested in 1171 BCE.

Eckart Frahm covers this period starting on page 84 and completely ended by the bottom of page 87.

But he says the same thing.

During the late 13th century BC, most people in the Near East saw their communities as unchanging and permanent. There was little to suggest the impending collapse of the political system they were used to.A few large states -- Egypt, the Hittite kingdom, Assyria, Babylonia, and the eastern kingdom of Elam -- and may smaller ones, all organized around palatial centers ruled by more or less powerful kings, coexisted in what must have looked to everyone like a fairly well-balanced equilibrium. But as it turned out, such notions of stability were mistaken. A series of disasters were about to turn the world as people knew it upside-down.

Around 1200 BCE, seemingly out of nowhere, groups of warriors began to attack large and small states in the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. The most famous of these groups were the "Sea Peoples," as they have been called in modern times.

Shekeleh
Sherden
possibly originating in Sicily and Sardinia
Peleset --> Philistines and the geographic region of Palestine

Mentions a letter from the coastal city of Ugarit -- same as in the book 1171 by Cline.

Confirms the date: 1177.

Cataclysmic naval battle with Egyptian troops in the Nile Delta. Pharaoh Ramses III claimed to have defeated the intruders -- and Egypt remained a state of considerable power for centuries to come -- but in the course of the events, it lost almost all of its influence in western Asia -- p. 85.

Again, "climate change."

Palace states replaced -- organized along tribal or ethnic lines -- Hebrews and Philistines in Canaan to the Arabs on the Arabian Peninsula; the Neo-Hittite Luwians in Anatolia and northern Syria, and the Semitic Aramaeans farther south in Syria.

Cuneiform, the complex writing system used during the Late Bronze Age by the rulers of the region to communicate with one another was abandoned in the Levant (but not in Mesopotamia) and slowly and haphazardly replaced by simpler and more "democratic" alphabetic writing systems.

When this all began, Assyria was far from the center of the storm -- p. 86.