The Neo-Assyrian Empire of roughly 911 to 609 BCE, the first state to dominate most of the major centers of the ancient Near East — built on a standing professional army, iron weapons, and siege engineering, run through the mass deportation of conquered peoples, and remembered both for its own boasts of terror and for the great library at Nineveh that preserved the Epic of Gilgamesh.
When the Assyrian army took a rebel city, it often left a record carved in stone showing what came next: captives led away in long files, families marched hundreds of miles from home to be resettled among strangers. The kings called this policy openly in their inscriptions. They wanted neighbors to read it and surrender first. This was a state that turned fear into a tool of government, and it ran that tool across the largest empire the world had yet seen. Yet the same kings filled a palace at Nineveh with a library of clay tablets, and one of those tablets carried one of the oldest great works of literature still read today.