Final Thoughts

Where everyone depends on its welfare and, therefore, in its decisions on the expectations of the other players’ actions, the least movement within the web of power relations results in actions to cope with the change produced. The disruptive actor unleashes a series of responses against its agency; nonetheless, by virtue of this very disturbance, the opportunity to accommodate and work with it, in order to advance its interests, arises. It depends on him to seize it.

Assyria’s independence from Mitanni and its immediate expansion over this former great kingdom certainly meant a factor of disruption in the political system of the Near East in the Late Bronze Age. Every power threatens those who do not possess it; within a context of insecurity and uncertainty, the more powerful a unit becomes, the more power it takes away from the other units. Hatti and Babylonia perceived the Assyrian rise as a direct menace to their position and their interests; Egypt, for its part, played with this disruptive factor; while Assyria prepared to make its neighbors certain of its new share in the distribution of power —either by means of violence or diplomacy, always by means of politics.

The texts left by the ancients are the undeniable evidence that what might be considered as a modern reality —“power politics” (as if politics could be about another thing rather than power)— is a reality that has inevitably been present in the history of humankind, ever since it acquired its humanity. To understand power and its struggle is to understand its creatures —among those, men.