An old draft, updated:
According to standard histories, the Assyrian empire vanished from history after its defeat at Carchemish in about 606 BC. Its loss was not greatly regretted, since the main question historians ask about the Assyrians was whether they ran the cruelest of the ancient empires or merely the one most into boasting of cruelty. They did, however, make one major contribution to civilization, establishing great libraries.
By coincidence, I was just pondering their fate- surely the Assyrians couldn’t have just disappeared- when a group of them resurfaced. They were living a short drive north of me, in Skokie, and had taken out a New York Times ad imploring the first Bush administration not to bomb their relatives left in Northern Iraq. The ad had a touch of the old boastfulness, but it focussed on their historical contributions to civilization and their early conversion to Christianity. It did not boast of torture. Worldwide, that habit had faded in the intervening two and a half millennia.
Or so we thought. Today the region of old Assur is mostly under the control of a small state that not only tortures, enslaves, and kills, but it makes slick modern videos boasting of exactly those feats. Unlike the Assyrians, however, they destroy libraries rather than building them.
That this should be happening right in the first heartland of civilization suggests that our faith in progress is misguided.
Updated: As do events here.