The Assyrians were brutal SOB’s, but it worked for them a long time.
Yes indeed. They marched against cities and towns over a wider swath of the Earth than anyone who’d come before them, there’s even evidence that they conquered Egypt, then had their first collapse (end of the Akkadian period), then reemerged in the more familiar, Old Testament form. When the end came at Nineveh it must have shaken the Middle East (figuratively).
http://www.varchive.org/tac/end.htm
[snip] For many years the fortunes of war changed camps. Then Nabopolassar and Cyaxares, the Mede, brought the Scythians over to their side. Their armies advanced from three sides against Nineveh. In August of the year -612 The dam on the Tigris was breached, and Nineveh was stormed. In a single night the city that was the splendor of its epoch went up in flames, and the centuries-old empire that ceaselessly carried sword and fire to the four quarters of the ancient world — as far as Elam and Lydia, Sarmatia and Ethiopia — ceased to exist forever. [snip]