I recall that in The Chalice & the Blade, author Rian Eisler used the Assyrian empire as an example of a "dominator" culture that wiped away earlier, matriarchal-based cooperative cultures. She used examples of art & craft associated with both to demonstrate that matriarchal cultures were more sophisticated than dominator ones.

Shorter after Chalice was published, however, a huge cache of Assyrian art was uncovered, demonstrating to archeologists that their esthetic was far more accomplished than had hitherto been known or suspected. I think that find destroyed much of Eisler's thesis, at least as far as that particular example was concerned.