For two thousand years, three empires rewrote the rules of power in the ancient world. Each one chose a radically different path.

Each one succeeded beyond anything that came before. And each one left lessons that every ruler, CEO, and nation-builder since has been trying to copy—or avoid repeating.

Starting next week, we're launching a six-part series that traces the rise and fall of Babylon, Assyria, and Persia.

This isn't just ancient history. It's the origin story of how humans learned to organize power at scale. Every empire that followed—Rome, the Mongols, the British, the Americans—has been some remix of what these three civilizations figured out in the dust and heat of the ancient Near East.

But here's what makes this story compelling: these three empires couldn't have been more different from each other.

Babylon built the first real empire on paperwork and process. While their neighbors were perfecting bronze swords, the Babylonians were perfecting bureaucracy.

They understood something profound: you can conquer a city with an army, but you can only hold an empire with systems. Hammurabi's famous law code wasn't just about justice—it was about making power predictable and therefore durable. Babylon proved that administration could be a weapon as effective as any army.

Assyria took the exact opposite approach. They perfected terror as state policy. For three centuries, they were the most efficient killing machine the ancient world had ever seen. They didn't just defeat enemies—they traumatized them. They documented their atrocities with almost bureaucratic precision, carving detailed reliefs showing exactly what happened to people who resisted. And it worked. For three hundred years. Until it didn't.

Then came Persia, and Cyrus the Great did something nobody expected: he made people want to be conquered. Instead of Babylon's administrative control or Assyria's systematic brutality, Cyrus offered something else—autonomy, prosperity, religious freedom, and infrastructure. He built the largest empire yet seen by convincing subject peoples that life under Persian rule was better than independence. Somehow, it worked.

All three empires were trying to solve the same fundamental problem: how do you govern people who don't want to be governed by you?

This is the question every organization faces when it scales. How do you maintain control without crushing initiative? How do you enforce standards without destroying local adaptation? How do you grow without creating chaos?

Babylon's answer: build systems so robust that they outlast any individual leader. Create frameworks that make power predictable and compliance easier than resistance.

Assyria's answer: make the cost of disobedience so catastrophically high that nobody dares resist. Rule through fear and make sure everyone knows exactly what happens to rebels.

Persia's answer: make cooperation more attractive than resistance. Give people enough autonomy that they feel free, enough prosperity that they're grateful, and enough respect that they buy into the system.

Modern parallels are everywhere. Amazon's operational excellence is pure Babylon—systems and metrics governing everything. Certain authoritarian regimes follow Assyria's playbook—control through fear and surveillance. The European Union attempts Cyrus's model—integration through mutual benefit and respect for local identity.

But here's what makes the ancient story more interesting than modern examples: we know how it ended for all three empires. We can see which strategies led to collapse and which created durability. We can watch in real-time (well, historical time) what happens when you bet everything on bureaucracy, or terror, or tolerance.

We're living through a moment when questions about power, legitimacy, and governance feel urgent again. How do you hold together diverse populations? When does tolerance become weakness? When does strength become tyranny? How much control is too much, and how much freedom is too little?

These aren't academic questions. They're the daily struggle of anyone managing a team, running a company, or leading a country.

The ancient Near East was the laboratory where humans first worked out answers at empire scale. These weren't theoretical exercises. These were life-and-death decisions made by leaders who knew that getting it wrong meant destruction.

Babylon got it right for centuries, then couldn't adapt when circumstances changed. Assyria dominated through force but made so many enemies that when crisis came, nobody would help them survive it. Persia built something that lasted two hundred years and influenced governance structures for millennia afterward.

There's another reason this story matters: these three empires shaped the world that produced Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Abraham left Babylon's sophisticated urban culture to follow God into the unknown. Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and became the biblical symbol of imperial brutality. Babylon conquered Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and forced the Jewish elite into exile. And Cyrus ended that exile, funded the rebuilding of the Temple, and became the only non-Jew in the Bible to be called "the Lord's anointed."

The biblical authors weren't writing abstract theology. They were wrestling with real political powers that shaped their world. Understanding these empires means understanding the context that produced some of humanity's most influential religious and philosophical ideas.

Over the next six issues, we're going to break down exactly how each empire rose, what made them powerful, and why they ultimately fell. But more than that, we're going to extract the strategic lessons that made them successful—and the fatal mistakes that brought them down.

From Babylon, you'll learn:

From Assyria, you'll discover:

From Persia, you'll understand:

But we're also going to connect these ancient stories to something more immediate: how they shaped the Bible and Jewish identity, how they influenced Greek thought and Western civilization, and how the patterns they established still govern how we think about power today.

Because the patterns matter. Because every challenge you face in building something that lasts—whether it's a company, a team, a movement, or just a personal project—has been faced before at larger scale with higher stakes.

Because history is the closest thing we have to a controlled experiment in what works and what doesn't when humans try to organize power.

The series starts next week. Six issues that will take you from Hammurabi's clay tablets to Cyrus's bloodless conquest of Babylon. From the birth of written law to the perfection of systematic terror to the invention of soft power.

Three empires. Three radically different approaches to the same problem. Three sets of lessons that remain urgently relevant today.

The question is: are we still making the same mistakes?