The Assyrians ruled Mesopotamia with an iron fist for thousands of years, which is amazing considering it's usually skipped over in history class. Ever hear about the Egyptian library in Alexandria? Yeah, that's just a tiny portion compared to the Assyrian library in Nineveh. And unlike the Roman Empire, which decayed slowly over centuries, the Assyrians fell quickly within a few years after one of their most powerful and glorious moments of their history. It's like the Soviet Union collapsing except a thousand times more important and shocking. Remember, these fuckers ruled for thousands of years! The Soviets were just around for seventy!

I've heard several times about the accuracy of oral traditions because illiterate people have better memories since they have no text to rely on. For example, if I can't read a shopping list, I learn to just remember the twenty items I need at the supermarket. Maybe, but I can say "oral traditions" are complete bullshit because otherwise shit would make sense. You know all those fabulous Roman and Greek myths we know about? Yeah, those are just written down from sung stories, and I can safely say none of that crap ever happened. Zeus never turned into a golden shower to have sex with a woman, however the hell that worked.

I'm bringing this up because of Xenophon. To summarize he's a Greek who joined a Persian army that lost, and he had to get the fuck out of Persia quickly before he was killed by the winning side. He wrote a book about his travels westward back to Greece and he describes an abandoned city he came across, detailing the height of the walls and the size of the buildings. Upon asking the local residents, they tell him it's a Median city. The Medes were a group of people living around the area of Syria and Iraq today, but what's most interesting is they were one of the groups to topple the Assyrians. And scholars realize from Xenophon's descriptions is he's talking about Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire.

Xenophon came about two hundred years after Assyria's fall, but people already forgot about it. If oral traditions were so fucking good, people would've fucking remembered this huge-ass town — the biggest in the world for a long time — belonged to a civilization that ruled the region for thousands of years. It'd be like archeologists coming to the ruins of New York City and deciding it belonged to the Mexicans. Yeah, you're in the general area, but at the same time completely off.