The Assyrian Empire

Assyria built the ancient Near East's most formidable military machine — iron weapons, siege engines, cavalry, and a standing professional army — and used calculated terror as policy, carving accounts of flayed rebels into palace walls so that the next city would surrender rather than resist. It also invented mass deportation, uprooting whole conquered populations and resettling them elsewhere to break their capacity to revolt. It ruled from Egypt to the Persian Gulf. Then a coalition of its subjects destroyed it so completely that Nineveh was never reoccupied, and Greeks two centuries later doubted it had existed.