Organising an Empire
The Assyrian Way

Organising an Empire: The Assyrian Way - Coursera class

Organising an Empire: The Assyrian Way is taught by Karen Radner and is available for free on Coursera (you do have to register).

Professor Radner also wrote Ancient Assyria: A Very Short Introduction and edited The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture (with Eleanor Robson), and has also written many scholarly works. She's also a fun and engaging speaker.

Here is the class link: https://www.coursera.org/learn/organising-empire-assyrian-way

It covers topics from the Assyrian post system to the deified covenant to the conoisseurship of luxury wines. The class is a delight and I highly recommend it.

Coursera has a free online course on the Assyrian empire of the 9th - 7th centuries BC. The Neo-Babylonian empire replaced them. The Assyrians and Babylonians spoke different varieties of the same language (Akkadian).

It would give you a pretty good overview of that area. https://www.coursera.org/learn/organising-empire-assyrian-way

https://www.coursera.org/learn/organising-empire-assyrian-way/lecture/6cf1C/focus-on-population-management

A free video on the subject found in the sources list of op's link.

Sure! It’s on Edx, I edit my post and added a link to it, here’s it again: https://www.coursera.org/learn/organising-empire-assyrian-way

If you're interested in Mesopotamian history, my department runs a massive open online course on the Neoassyrian Empire, which includes various video segments etc. https://www.coursera.org/learn/organising-empire-assyrian-way

I recently started a thread asking about resources for Assyrian history, and someone suggested Organising an Empire: The Assyrian Way. I really like the lectures so far, and it seems a lot more reliable than Dan Carlin.

I wasn't too impressed with Carlin's Bronze Age episode, so I'm not sure how accurate his thoughts on the Assyrians are. They don't strike me as particularly sinister, though they were more upfront about the ruthlessness of ancient warfare than most ancient states. The Egyptians burned cities, impaled defeated people, etc. as well but have a more happy-go-lucky personality in popular imagination for some reason.

I forgot to mention it earlier, but Karen Radner's free Coursera course Organising an Empire: The Assyrian Way is a superb introduction to the Assyrians.

There is not a lot of tutorials on that because it is really hard to do. If your going to do procedural generation of civilisation, monsters and characters, then you would need to do some terrain generation. So you could start there.

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On civilisation, understanding the most simple civilisation is hard work. There an interesting free course on this https://www.coursera.org/learn/organising-empire-assyrian-way where even Assyrian empire is really complex. It also describes how terrain plays a bit part in a civilisation.

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There is some interesting academic work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwvjBbh05ts some of his work is interesting if you want to model realistic religions.

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My advice pick a civilisation that interest you. Try to break it down into procedural rules. Then iterate.