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1
Dewar, Ben. "US AGAINST THEM: IDEOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF ASHURNASIRPAL II'S CAMPAIGN AGAINST ASSYRIAN REBELS IN ḪALZILUḪA." Iraq 82 (August 13, 2020): 111–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/irq.2020.4.
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This paper is a study of the rebellion against the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II in the city of Ḫalziluḫa in 882 bc, which is an unusual instance of a rebellion by Assyrians being recorded in the Assyrian royal inscriptions. This paper explores the significance of the rebellion from two angles: the ideological problem of rebellion by Assyrians, and the psychological impact on Assyrian troops of killing their fellow Assyrians. Within the ideology of the royal inscriptions, Assyrians did not normally rebel against the incumbent king, who was in all ways presented as a model ruler. It will be argued that Ashurnasirpal therefore made efforts in his inscriptions to stress that the Assyrian rebels in Ḫalziluḫa inhabited territory that had been lost to Assyria prior to his reign, and had become “de-Assyrianised” and “uncivilised.” It will be argued that a similar message was conveyed to the Assyrian soldiers through the ceremonies surrounding the creation of a monument at the source of the River Subnat, and that this message helped the soldiers to “morally disengage” from the act of killing other Assyrians, thus avoiding “moral self-sanctions” for an otherwise morally problematic act.
2
Feldman, Marian H. "Nineveh to Thebes and back: Art and politics between Assyria and Egypt in the seventh century BCE." Iraq 66 (2004): 141–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s002108890000173x.
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In 671 BCE, Esarhaddon advanced south from the Levant and attacked Egypt, sacking Memphis. About seven years later, in response to repeated Kushite uprisings and following an initial campaign into Lower Egypt, Ashurbanipal's army reinvaded Egypt, marching as far as Thebes where, according to Assyrian accounts, the temples and palaces were looted and their treasures brought back to Nineveh. The Assyrians had been in conflict with Egypt for some time, but these clashes had always taken place in Western Asia, where the two states fought for control and influence over the small Levantine kingdoms. Not until Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal did Assyria penetrate into the heart of Egypt, attacking its two traditional capitals of Memphis and Thebes. This period of intensified antagonism, along with its consequence — increasingly direct contact with Egyptian culture — brought into greater focus Assyria's relationship to the Egyptian imperial tradition. I would like to propose here that Assyrian royal ideology, as expressed in art, developed in part out of an awareness of and reaction to the great imperial power of New Kingdom Egypt, in particular that of the Ramesside period of the thirteenth and early twelfth centuries. Indeed, it is more the reaction against Egyptian tradition that seems to have stimulated what we understand as characteristic and distinctive of Assyrian art, but at the same time, even these elements may owe some inspiration to Egypt. In this way, the New Kingdom Egyptian empire served as both precedent and “other” for Assyria, which began to develop its own imperialist ideology during the contemporaneous Middle Assyrian period.
3
Nadali, Davide, and Lorenzo Verderame. "Neo-Assyrian Statues of Gods and Kings in Context." Altorientalische Forschungen 46, no. 2 (November 6, 2019): 234–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/aofo-2019-0016.
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Abstract Neo-Assyrian letters are a broad and interesting corpus of data to investigate how ancient Assyrians dealt with the manufacture of statues, the shaping of royal and divine effigies, and the final arrangement of sculptures. This paper aims to analyse the ritual and practical aspects of the making of images in the Neo-Assyrian period with reference to this corpus of letters, which reveals how Assyrian kings, officials and sculptors worked together for this purpose. It explores the role of the personnel involved, the process of the creation, and the final display of statues. Based on the interplay of texts and archaeological data, the study reveals the intense activity of making statues of gods and kings in Assyria, with the administration supervising both projects for new statues and the maintenance of already existing ones.
4
Petrosian, Vahram. "Assyrians in Iraq." Iran and the Caucasus 10, no. 1 (2006): 113–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157338406777979322.
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AbstractThe article examines the question of the Assyrian identity; certain problems pertaining to the history of the Assyrian-Kurdish relationships; the problem of the Assyrian autonomy; the role of the political parties of the Iraqi Assyrians; the status of the Assyrians in Iraqi Kurdistan; the Assyrians after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, and several other issues.
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Dewar, Ben. "The Burning of Captives in the Assyrian Royal Inscriptions, and Early Neo-Assyrian Conceptions of the Other." Studia Orientalia Electronica 9, no. 2 (December 30, 2021): 67–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.23993/store.88852.
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This paper is a study of the topos of the king burning captives in the Assyrian royal inscriptions. This punishment is notable for both its rarity and its cruelty, being the only time that the royal inscriptions describe violence towards children. I approach this topic in terms of Donald Black’s model of social control, in which the form and severity of social control, including violence, varies in relation to the “social geometry” that separates the parties involved in a dispute or conflict. I argue that in the royal inscriptions burning is inflicted on those that the Assyrians saw as “uncivilized”: peoples inhabiting poorer cities in mountain regions who lacked the infrastructure necessary to stockpile prestige goods, such as precious metals, and were separated at a greater distance from Assyria by “social geometry” than other foreigners. These findings provide a useful insight into Assyrian conceptions of the other and give a better understanding of the variations in the severity of punishments inflicted by the Assyrians on their enemies.
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Seymour, Michael. "Neighbors through Imperial Eyes: Depicting Babylonia in the Assyrian Campaign Reliefs." Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 4, no. 1-2 (June 26, 2018): 129–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/janeh-2017-0022.
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AbstractThe Neo-Assyrian campaign reliefs are rich sources for understanding Assyrian ideas of empire, geography, and Assyria’s relationship to the wider world. They are also exceptions: the format of the later Assyrian campaign reliefs is in several respects so unusual in ancient Near Eastern art as to demand explanation. Not the least of the campaign reliefs’ unusual qualities is the extensive and often detailed depiction of foreign landscapes and people. This paper examines one instance of this phenomenon: the particular case of depictions of Babylonia and the far south in Assyrian campaign reliefs. Studies of the textual sources have done much to draw out the complex cultural and political relationship between Assyria and Babylonia in the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries B.C., revealing tensions between an identification with the cities of the south and their venerable temples on the one hand, and the undeniable political and strategic problems posed by Babylonian rebellions against Assyrian rule on the other. It is argued that the campaign reliefs attempt to resolve this tension by presenting conquest and pacification as accomplished facts, and Babylonia’s abundance as an Assyrian imperial possession. It is also suggested that one function of the reliefs was to process historical victories into a larger, ahistorical image of Assyrian imperial success.
7
Postgate, Nicholas. "THE BREAD OF AŠŠUR." Iraq 77 (December 2015): 159–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/irq.2015.14.
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As today, bread in antiquity came in a multitude of varieties, some of which were specific to particular regions or populations. Examining the terminology and iconography of breads in Assyrian texts, it is clear that there was a continuity of certain types of bread peculiar to Assyria from the Middle Assyrian period to the final century of the Assyrian empire. This exemplifies the strength of Assyria's identity over half a millennium, and the persistence of its cultural independence in some respects from its Babylonian neighbour. The majority of the written sources refer to cultic activities, and the conservatism expected in cultic contexts no doubt contributes to the long-term persistence of certain types of bread. There may even be reason to see one variety (ḫuḫḫurtu) as the forerunner of a bread used in Jewish cultic contexts to this day (challah).
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Edmonds, Alexander Johannes. "Just a Series of Misunderstandings? Assyria and Bīt-Zamāni, Ḫadi-/Iḫtadi-libbušu, and Aramaic in the early Neo-Assyrian State." Asia Anteriore Antica. Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures 3 (February 24, 2022): 73–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.36253/asiana-1188.
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The region of the Upper Tigris serves as a key case study in understanding the early expansion of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Nevertheless, various aspects of its incorporation within the Neo-Assyrian pale remain obscure, particularly the date and nature of the establishment of the province of Amēdu or Na’iri, previously the Aramean polity of Bīt-Zamāni. After a summary of prior arguments and an investigation of the polity’s Middle Assyrian past, two overlapping and complimentary histories are written, one of the political interactions between Assyria and Bīt-Zamāni, and another of Assyria’s provincialisation of the Upper Tigris. The former finds that Bīt-Zamāni was remarkably resilient in the face of Assyrian aggression, while the latter argues that an early Assyrian presence at Damdammusa was replaced in 879 BC by the provinces of Sinābu/Na’iri and Tušḫan. These two histories are then supplemented by a prosopographical investigation of the Assyrian eponym of 849 BC, the first attested governor of Na’iri, one Ḫadi-libbušu or Iḫtadi-libbušu. It is demonstrated that the two contemporaneous variants of his name within the Assyrian textual corpus may be explained as an ambiguity in translating the Aramaic personal name *ḥdhlbbh into Akkadian for use as an eponym date. It is hence likely that Ḫadi-/Iḫtadi-libbušu was an indigenous potentate made governor, and thus that the polity of Bīt-Zamāni serves as a previously unrecognised example of the Postgatian ‘transitional case’ within the Early Neo-Assyrian Empire analogously to Bīt-Baḫiāni/Gūzāna. Indeed, it is argued that a similar phenomenon of translating the transitional ruler/governor’s name into Akkadian for limmu dating may here be attested for Gūzāna’s two initial governors. In light of these findings, their broader implications for the use of Aramaic in correspondence or record-keeping within 9th century Assyria are considered, and it is suggested that Ḫadi-/Iḫtadi-libbušu’s correspondence was conducted in Aramaic, whence scribes must have had recourse in spelling this potentate’s name. This would mark the earliest use of Aramaic within the Neo-Assyrian bureaucracy presently known. It is then finally concluded that the threat of Urarṭu in the last years of Aššur-nāṣir-apli II’s reign may well have compelled him to enter in a manner of compact with Bīt-Zamāni, and that the indigenous rulers were thereafter made Assyrian governors, only to be unseated in favour of Ninurta-kibsī-uṣur, šāqiu rabiu to Salmānu-ašarēd III just prior to Amēdu’s rebellion in the succession war of 826-820 BC, after which it was conclusively incorporated. Some insufficiencies of present theories of Neo-Assyrian imperialism in explaining this complex historical scenario are finally highlighted.
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Highcock, Nancy. "Assyrians Abroad: Expanding Borders Through Mobile Identities in the Middle Bronze Age." Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 4, no. 1-2 (June 26, 2018): 61–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/janeh-2017-0016.
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AbstractRecent work by both archaeologists and Assyriologists has characterized the main Assyrian settlement at Kaneš/Kültepe not as “colony” at all but as a place in which Assyrians fully integrated themselves into Anatolian society to create a hybridized community or “middle ground.” This paper builds upon their work by examining the ways in which Assyrians participated in such an intercultural society whilst still maintaining the bounded social category of “Assyrian.” Through the reconstruction of their civic institutions and social traditions abroad, Assyrian merchants were able to expand their mental topography of what constituted “Assyrian-ness” from northern Mesopotamia across central Anatolia. This phenomenon is framed within wider discussions of mobile societies and the Old Assyrian textual record to illustrate that a community identity founded upon the mother city of Assur and its cultural conventions continued to thrive across various political and cultural borders. Treaties and letters demonstrate that these borders were well defined and maintained by the Assyrians themselves, but concurrently, that the driving forces behind a trader’s life on the road also meant for such borders to be expanded and reconstituted. Analyzing the Old Assyrian mercantile phenomenon through the vector of mobility enables us to better understand the ways in which the Old Assyrian merchants maintained a cohesive social identity and bounded community whilst working and living in “foreign” territories. Mobility is not an inherently disintegrating force, but shape the common cultural and political institutions which act as fibers binding communities together across great distances.
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Weaver, Ann M. "The “Sin of Sargon” and Esarhaddon's Reconception of Sennacherib: A study in divine will, human politics and royal ideology." Iraq 66 (2004): 61–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021088900001649.
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According to his inscriptions, Sennacherib, king of Assyria, conquered and razed the city of Babylon in 689 BCE. Previous Neo-Assyrian monarchs had employed a variety of strategies while attempting to deal with what Machinist has dubbed their “Babylonian Problem”. None of these previous tactics, however, approached the level of violence and destruction evidenced in Sennacherib's own descriptions of this campaign. Indeed, as elaborated by Brinkman, the Neo-Assyrian court traditionally venerated Babylonian culture.Machinist's interpretation, while not dismissing the unprecedented destructiveness of Sennacherib's actions, positions these actions in the context of a larger struggle faced by all the Sargonid monarchs, the struggle of maintaining sovreignty over Babylonia while honoring its religious and cultural traditions. However, such an utter devastation of Babylon, its treatment as one of Assyria's many other de-cultured vassals, is disparate enough from the actions of Sennacherib's predecessors so as to place his son and successor, Esarhaddon, in a difficult position with respect to Babylon and the Babylonian population.Esarhaddon's decision to abandon his father's extreme tactics and adopt a primarily peaceful policy, comparable in aspects to those of the earlier Neo-Assyrian monarchs, was therefore a risky one. It is, however, a decision he stands by and justifies through many of the compositions produced during his reign. In the wake of the destruction and de-culturation in the service of Assyrian hegemony wreaked by his father, Esarhaddon designs a policy toward Babylonia based on construction and acculturation that influences and affects the cultures of both Assyria and Babylonia.
11
Nielsen, John. "Kings of Chaldea and Sons of Nobodies: Assyrian Engagement with Chaldea and the Emergence of Chaldean Power in Babylonia." Studia Orientalia Electronica 9, no. 2 (December 30, 2021): 108–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.23993/store.89456.
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From the ninth century until the last quarter of the seventh century BCE, the Assyrian Empire first extended its power over Babylonia and then engaged in a prolonged effort to retain control. The patchwork nature of Babylonian society—divided as it was between the traditional urban centers, territories controlled by five distinct Chaldean tribes, and regions inhabited by Aramaean tribes—presented opportunities and challenges for Assyria as it sought to assert its dominance. Assyrian interactions with the Chaldean tribes of Babylonia redefined the Chaldeans’ place within power relationships in southern Mesopotamia. Starting in 878, Assyria first perceived Chaldean territory as distinct from what they defined as Karduniaš, the land ruled by the king of Babylon. Shalmaneser III exploited and accentuated this division by recognizing the Chaldean leaders as kings and accepting their tribute even as he concluded a treaty with the Babylonian king, Marduk-zakir-shumi I. By decentralizing power in Babylonia, Assyria was able to assert indirect control over Babylonia. However, periods of Assyrian weakness created opportunities for several Chaldeans—drawing upon the economic and military power they could muster—to claim the title of king of Babylon with all the accompanying ideological power. These new developments prompted Assyria under the Sargonids to create counter-narratives that questioned the legitimacy of Chaldeans as kings of Babylon by presenting them as strange and inimical to the Assyrian order even as Assyrian interactions with the Chaldeans improved Assyrian familiarity with them.
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Russell, H. F. "The Historical Geography of the Euphrates and Habur According to the Middle- and Neo-Assyrian Sources." Iraq 47 (1985): 57–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021088900006744.
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The importance of control of the valleys of the Habur and Euphrates rivers to the Assyrians can hardly be over-estimated. The two river valleys are major routes from N. Syria and S.E. Turkey to southern Assyria and to Babylonia.In the Neo-Assyrian period, control of the valley of the River Habur was won early, as the Assyrian armies marched westwards across N. Mesopotamia. Control of the Euphrates, between the confluence of the Habur and the Babylonian border, followed soon after.We are particularly well-informed about the geography of the Habur and the Euphrates, below the confluence with the Habur, during the reigns of Adad-nerari II, Tukulti-Ninurta II and Aššurnaṣirpal II. Texts from the reigns of these three kings describe campaigns along the banks of these rivers and list each night's halting-place. These are usually described as “itineraries”. (Such texts are exceptionally rare from ancient Mesopotamia. Besides these three passages in the Assyrian annals, only two other lengthy, well-preserved itineraries in cuneiform have come down to us.) 2 Other, conventional passages from the Annals of Aššurnaṣirpal II are a valuable supplement to these texts.
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Kertai, David. "EMBELLISHING THE INTERIOR SPACES OF ASSYRIA'S ROYAL PALACES: THEBĒT ḪILĀNIRECONSIDERED." Iraq 79 (October 6, 2017): 85–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/irq.2017.12.
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Thebēt ḫilāniis one of the most famous features of Assyria's royal palaces as well as one of its most elusive. The term is mostly known from Assyrian royal inscriptions, which describe it as an architectural feature inspired by the architecture of Syro-Anatolia. Such explicit references to the architecture of other cultures is exceptional and provides a rare glimpse into the valuations of Assyria's architects.Modern attempts to identify thebēt ḫilāniarchaeologically are almost as old as the field of ancient Near Eastern Studies. Unfortunately, the discourse has become more convoluted over time through the integration of disparate architectural features into a singlebēt ḫilānidiscourse and a narrow view of how architectural exchanges occur. Past research has generally assumed a morphological correspondence between the Assyrianbēt ḫilāniand the external porticoes that typify Syro-Anatolian architecture. This article will argue that Assyrian architects had a different set of ideals and interests which led them to change the external Syro-Anatolian portico into an interior feature used to add monumentality and ornamentation to the rooms of Assyria's palaces. This changes thebēt ḫilānifrom a morphological category into a decorative one and contextualises it within the architectural traditions of Assyria.
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Zaia, Shana. "GOING NATIVE: ŠAMAŠ-ŠUMA-UKĪN, ASSYRIAN KING OF BABYLON." Iraq 81 (July 19, 2019): 247–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/irq.2019.1.
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Šamaš-šuma-ukīn is a unique case in the Neo-Assyrian Empire: he was a member of the Assyrian royal family who was installed as king of Babylonia but never of Assyria. Previous Assyrian rulers who had control over Babylonia were recognized as kings of both polities, but Šamaš-šuma-ukīn's father, Esarhaddon, had decided to split the empire between two of his sons, giving Ashurbanipal kingship over Assyria and Šamaš-šuma-ukīn the throne of Babylonia. As a result, Šamaš-šuma-ukīn is an intriguing case-study for how political, familial, and cultural identities were constructed in texts and interacted with each other as part of royal self-presentation. This paper shows that, despite Šamaš-šuma-ukīn's familial and cultural identity as an Assyrian, he presents himself as a quintessentially Babylonian king to a greater extent than any of his predecessors. To do so successfully, Šamaš-šuma-ukīn uses Babylonian motifs and titles while ignoring the Assyrian tropes his brother Ashurbanipal retains even in his Babylonian royal inscriptions.
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Özdemi̇r, Bülent. "Making History to/as the Main Pillar of Identity: The Assyrian Paradigm." Belleten 76, no. 276 (August 1, 2012): 631–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.37879/belleten.2012.631.
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In the 20th century Assyrians living in Diaspora have increased their search of identity because of the social and political conditions of their present countries. In doing so, they utilize the history by picking up certain events which are still kept fresh in the collective memory of the Assyrian society. World War I, which caused a large segment of the Assyrians to emigrate from the Middle East, has been considered as the milestone event of their history. They preferred to use and evaluate the circumstances during WW I in terms of a genocidal attack of the Ottomans against their nation. This political definition dwarfs the promises which were not kept given by their Western allies during the war for an independent Assyrian state. The aspects of Assyrian civilization existed thousands of years ago as one of the real pillars of their identity suffer from the artificially developed political unification around the aspects of their doom in WWI presented as a genocidal case. Additionally, this plays an efficient role in removal of existing religious and sectarian differences for centuries among Assyrians. This paper aims at showing in the framework of primary sources how Assyrian genocidal claims are being used pragmatically in the formation of national consciousness in a very effective way. Not the Assyrian civilization but their constructed history in WWI is used for the formation of their nation definition.
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Hays, Nathan. "Humility and instruction in Zephaniah 3.1-7." Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 44, no. 3 (December 20, 2019): 472–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309089219862823.
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The rapid and unmarked transition from the oracle against Assyria/Nineveh in Zephaniah 2.13-15 to the condemnation of Jerusalem in 3.1-7 rhetorically underscores the deep and troubling continuity between Jerusalem and Assyria/Nineveh. This article examines this continuity in light of two important elements of the book of Zephaniah: the depiction of Assyria (and those nations aligned with it) as prideful and the scribal character of 3.1-7. The finding is that Zeph. 3.1-7 presents Jerusalem and its leaders as paralleling the arrogant Assyrians and like-minded nations in a way that spurs Zephaniah’s exilic scribal audience to adopt a fundamental attitude of humility. Such humility accepts the authority of Yahwistic teachers and instructional texts in order to avoid future judgment against Jerusalem. In a scribal context, repudiating Assyrian-style pride may also entail rejecting education (putatively) aligned with Assyria/Babylon.
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FARROKH, Kaveh, Katarzyna MAKSYMIUK, Patryk SKUPNIEWICZ, and Salam FATHI. "An Overview of Military Confrontations between of the Assyrian Army against the Medes in the 7th centuries BCE." Historia i Świat 11 (August 28, 2022): 125–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.34739/his.2022.11.07.
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The article discusses the military confrontation between Neo-Assyrian kingdom and the Median polities in the 7th century BCE. At the beginning the outline of the history of wars between the Medes and Assyria from the 9th century onwards is presented which is followed by the brief description of the Assyrian forces of the era and detailed examination of the events until the fall of the Neo-Assyrian empire. In conclusions an attempt to reconstruct possible principles of the Median warfare was made.
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Arikan, Arda, Ozan Varli, and Eyüp Yaşar Kürüm. "A Study of Assyrians’ Language Use in Istanbul." Sustainable Multilingualism 10, no. 1 (May 1, 2017): 56–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/sm-2017-0003.
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Summary Being one of the oldest Christian communities in the Middle East, Assyrians have continued to live in various parts of Turkey for thousands of years. Today, the estimates related to the number of Assyrians living in Turkey vary between 4,000–25,000 while they cannot benefit from the rights put forward by the Lausanne Treaty among which schooling is the most important. Assyrian community can be said to be deteriorating in number. This decline in the number of Assyrians living in Turkey raises the question of whether they could maintain their ethnic identity while maintaining their language (Syriac). No studies so far have been carried out to find out the linguistic practices of Assyrian community living in Turkey, as well as their attitudes toward the languages they use. This study aims at shedding light on the present situation of Syriac used among the Assyrian community living in Turkey. The participants are limited to those living in Istanbul due to practical reasons. In this study, language attitudes and language use practices of Assyrian community living in Istanbul are found out through a language attitudes questionnaire. It is hoped that the results of the study will provide the current situation of the Syriac language in terms of its ethnolinguistic vitality as spoken among the community. It is also hoped that the results of the study will provide useful data for those who would like to help protect the ethnolinguistic identities of Assyrian minority in Turkey, as well as all those dispersed around the world, which seems to have become increasingly important for such a country at the gates of the European Union as Turkey.
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Timmer, Daniel C. "Nahum’s Representation of and Response to Neo-Assyria: Imperialism as a Multifaceted Point of Contact in Nahum." Bulletin for Biblical Research 24, no. 3 (January 1, 2014): 349–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/26371181.
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Using an intertextual approach that focuses on the multifaceted transmission of concepts in addition to textual transmission of discrete points of ideology, this article examines how the biblical book of Nahum presents the Assyrian Empire and how it responds to it. While Nahum’s categories nearly mirror those of the relevant Neo-Assyrian sources, the response Nahum formulates to Assyrian imperialism is radically different from the militarily-driven project of world domination whose influence Nahum’s author so keenly felt. The nature of Nahum’s reaction to Assyria also distinguishes it from some other responses to non-Israelite nations in the HB/OT.
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DeGrado, J. "KING OF THE FOUR QUARTERS: DIVERSITY AS A RHETORICAL STRATEGY OF THE NEO-ASSYRIAN EMPIRE." Iraq 81 (September 30, 2019): 107–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/irq.2019.8.
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Recent studies of cultural interaction in the Assyrian empire have focused on the process of assimilation and the production of alterity. In this article, I argue that Assyrian royal rhetoric goes beyond emphasizing simple difference, instead using depictions of cultural diversity to demonstrate the truly universal nature of the empire. I elucidate this rhetoric by comparison the world fairs of the 19th and early 20th-centuries. These fairs advanced European imperialism by allowing visitors to explore the vast extent of empire. I argue that the enumeration of exotic tribute in Assyrian texts and the iconographic depiction of foreigners on reliefs similarly served to concretize Assyrian power. Unlike modern European empires, however, Assyrians did not consider ethnicity to be constitutive of citizenship. Thus, while the Assyrian approach to diversity was certainly instrumentalizing, it was also inclusive of cultural difference. In this respect, the Assyrian understanding of human diversity shares much in common with the way the empire treated other types of difference, ranging from topographic variation to biodiversity. From the imperial vantage point, each of these elements had the potential to be tamed in a way that highlighted the control of the king over the four quarters of the world.
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Cook, Gregory D. "Human Trafficking in Nahum." Horizons in Biblical Theology 37, no. 2 (October 1, 2015): 142–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18712207-12341304.
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Nahum has come under recent censure for the term זונה (3:4). Scholars have argued that calling Nineveh a prostitute does not fit the brutal Neo-Assyrian Empire. This article argues that the book of Nahum charges Nineveh with multi-national human trafficking. Assyrian practices conform to the United Nations definition of human trafficking. The methods Assyria used to recruit, transport, and prostitute peoples match methods of modern slavers. The title זונה therefore is used because the city acted as a spiritual madam. Vast populations were kidnapped for economic purposes and much of the labor, money, and people acquired through conquest were used to serve the Assyrian pantheon.
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Mikhailov, Sergei Sergeevich. "The Research of the Assyrian Diaspora in Central Russia on the Example of the Communities of the Ryazan Region Cities." Ethnic Culture 3, no. 1 (March 25, 2021): 41–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.31483/r-97795.
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The history of the Assyrians who settled on the territory of Russia is an important and understudied topic. The purpose of the article is to acquaint readers and the scientific community with the results of the study of the Assyrian diaspora in the Ryazan region. The local Assyrian communities formed in the 1920s-1930s were studied. Ryazan region of Russia. Using the methods of field research, we find out that in Ryazan in the twentieth century, two small Assyrian necropolises arose – at the historical Lazarevskoye and Skorbyashensky cemeteries. The author inspected the graves preserved for 2019–2020. The Ryazan Assyrian necropolis does not differ from the places of compact burials of representatives of this people in other cities, which were examined by the author. Nevertheless, it is very important for the study of this diaspora. The results of the study showed that the Assyrian people were subdivided by the beginning of the twentieth century. for two dozen subethnos (tribes), representatives of some tribal and groups created diasporas. Regarding Ryazan, this is a large part, natives of the independent («ashiret») region of Djilu (the Jilvai tribe), the Maliks of Djilu Gorta (Big Djilu), from the villages of Alsan (local group of alasnaya), Zirini (grain), Midi (copper). A rather small number of families turned out to be in Russia – natives of the Ashiret independent Maliks – Thuma (the Thumnaya tribe), as well as natives of the small village of Shvava, whose inhabitants make up a small group of Shavetnaya. In the latter case, we have established the name of the genus-otzhah. Ryazan thumnaya, judging by what we know about their fellow tribesmen in neighboring Moscow, Tula, as well as in Georgia, most likely came from the village of Myazrya (maser group). The paper presents facts of the history of small Assyrian communities in other cities of the Ryazan region – Kasimov, Ryazhsk and Mikhailov. The main professional occupation of the representatives of the Assyrian communities in the 1920–1970s was shoe cleaning. It is concluded that the Assyrians, despite the small number of the diaspora, played a role in the urban culture of Ryazan in the twentieth century. In the future, we intend to expand the resources of the research base and continue to study various aspects of the life of the Assyrians in Russia.
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Cheng, Jack. "The Horizontal Forearm Harp: Assyria's National Instrument." Iraq 74 (2012): 75–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021088900000279.
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A horizontal harp, strung with seven to nine strings and usually decorated with a finial in the shape of a human forearm, is likely to have been a symbol of the Neo-Assyrian state. Various features distinguish this musical instrument from contemporary Elamite harps, and from other harps in Mesopotamian history. The horizontal forearm harp was the most frequently depicted musical instrument on Neo-Assyrian palace reliefs and bronze doors; pairs of male Assyrians play the harp for the king in official duties of state or cult. The decorative forearm sometimes wears the rosette bracelet associated with royalty. Consideration of the iconographic significance of the forearm suggests possible Neo-Assyrian attitudes toward music.
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MURRE-VAN DEN BERG, H. L. "Geldelijk of Geestelijk Gewin? Assyrische Bisschoppen Op De Loonlijst Van Een Amerikaanse Zendingspost." Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis / Dutch Review of Church History 77, no. 2 (1997): 241–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/002820397x00270.
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AbstractIn the forties of last century, American Protestant missionaries, sent forth by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, were working among the Assyrian (Nestorian) Christians in northwestern Iran. Nearly ten years after its beginnings, the 'Nestorian mission' went through a difficult period. Not only had the mission to cope with opposition from Roman Catholic missionaries and the Persian government, but also with internal quarrels about the preferred policy of the mission. The internal conflict concentrated on the employment of Assyrian bishops by the mission. Some of the missionaries were convinced that the earlier cooperation of the bishops with the mission was only to be attributed to the fact that they received salaries, rather than out of conviction. Even more, the mission's employment of the bishops could be understood as its approval of the episcopal organisation and various customs of the Assyrian Church. For some of the missionaries, these consequences were hard to accept. Their opponents within the mission greatly valued the positive aspects of the employment of the bishops: it provided the missionaries with good opportunities to preach among the Assyrians, at the same time showing the Assyrians that the Protestants' main aim was not to subvert their customs but to stimulate a revival within the Assyrian Church. In this article, I have argued that it were these opportunities for preaching among the Assyrians which constituted the main reason for Rufus Anderson to support the latter party, even if some aspects of their policy were not in line with the general policy of the American Board of that time. As to the reasons for the Assyrian bishops to work with the American missionaries, I assume that both 'spiritual' and 'material' aspects were involved; the main reason, however, not being the bishops' attraction to the Protestant faith as such, but to the process of modernization and emancipation which the Protestant mission was thought to represent.
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Jones, Christopher W. "The Literary-Historical Memory of Sargon of Akkad in Assyria as the Background for Nimrod in Genesis 10:8–12." Journal of Biblical Literature 141, no. 4 (December 15, 2022): 595–615. http://dx.doi.org/10.15699/jbl.1414.2022.1.
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Abstract The figure of Nimrod in Gen 10:8–12 remains enigmatic: while the passage clearly depicts a Mesopotamian figure, no consensus has been reached on attempts to identify Nimrod with any historical or mythological character. I argue that the passage dates from the mid-seventh century and should be understood in light of the literary-historical memory of Sargon of Akkad and the Akkad dynasty then circulating in the Neo-Assyrian Empire. With royal support, Assyrian court scholars used omens, chronicles, epics, and geographic lists to present the Neo-Assyrian Empire of the seventh century as the heir to the legacy of Sargon’s empire a millennium and a half earlier, a process that culminated in the refounding of the city of Akkad by Esarhaddon in 674 BCE. The identification of Assyria with Sargon of Akkad served as an ideological justification for imperialism, and the Nimrod pericope should be understood as a response to and a critique of Assyrian imperial ideology.
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Bahrani, Zainab. "The king's head." Iraq 66 (January 2004): 115–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021088900001704.
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The composition of the battle of Til-Tuba from Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh is usually described as a relief depicting a recorded historical event. It is considered a good and solid example of the Assyrian concern with history and the Assyrian propensity for propagandistic depictions of current events. The scene, which is surely saturated in the ideology of empire, has already been discussed from that point of view. Is it true to the historical event? Is it an exaggeration? Did the Assyrians really do these things? How close or how distant is this depiction of the battle from the real historical event of war?The Assyrian method of representation is generally one that is attentive to minute details and concerned with ethnographic accuracy, even when the composition is hierarchical and representations of the body are stylised into abstract patterns. Realism is certainly a distinctive aspect of Assyrian narrative art and accurate details of dress and landscape were used to create what Roland Barthes would have called the effect of the real.
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Novák, Mirko. "From Ashur to Nineveh: The Assyrian town-planning programme." Iraq 66 (2004): 177–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021088900001765.
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During the last century of Assyria's existence the urban landscape was characterised by a bipolar structure. The old capital Ashur was still the religious, ceremonial and cultural centre, while Nineveh was the seat of royal power (Maul 1997). Both cities were not only the oldest urban entities of the Assyrian heartland, flourishing at least from the third or even fourth millennium BC onwards; they both also represented two different regions within Assyria with very specific geomorphologic environments and distinctive socio-ecological conditions. While the Ashur region is situated at the southernmost edge of the dry farming belt, the Nineveh area is one of the most fertile regions in northern Mesopotamia (Fig. 1).The political fates of the two cities were unconnected for a long time. Ashur became an important trading centre and an independent kingdom at the beginning of the second millennium, whereas for a long time Nineveh stood in the shadow of more powerful neighbours. But in the seventh century it was Nineveh that became the capital of Assyria and the outstanding urban structure of the whole Near East. The refounding and enlargement of the city by Sennacherib was by far the most ambitious town-building programme ever realised in Assyria. Furthermore, it marked the end of a long process of moving the political centre of the country from the Ashur region northwards to the Nineveh region, which coincided with the rise of Assyria from a small kingdom to a world empire. During this development there were several (other) temporary capitals, all of them new foundations like Kār-Tukultī-Ninurta, Kalhu and Dūr-Šarrukēn.
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Rzepka, Marcin. "Migracje Asyryjczyków z Iranu w czasie I wojny światowej: fragmentaryzacja tradycji i nowe formy religijności." Prace Historyczne 148, no. 2 (2021): 363–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.4467/20844069ph.21.027.13864.
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Migrations of the Assyrians from Iran during World War I: Fragmentization of tradition and the new forms of religiosity By focusing on the Assyrian Christians scattered around Urmia in the north-western part of Iran during World War I, the article analyzes the processes and changes that occurred in the religious life of the population under the circumstances of depravity, trauma and migration. The migrations, as it is suggested, caused two opposing tendencies among Assyrians strengthening individualization and ethnicization of the religious matters. The migratory experience played a crucial role in transforming the Church institutions as it might be seen in reference to the Assyrian Church of the East and shifting the focus away from religious authority while giving space to more emotional, private, and finally Pentecostal religiosity.
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Faust, Avraham. "The Interests of the Assyrian Empire in the West: Olive Oil Production as a Test-Case." Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 54, no. 1 (2011): 62–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156852011x567382.
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AbstractThe 7th century BCE in Philistia and Judah is characterized by economic prosperity, which is usually regarded as resulting from the “Assyrian Peace”, and from a policy of the Assyrian empire that aimed at maximizing production. The large center for the production of olive oil that was unearthed at Ekron in southern Israel is regarded as the best example of this policy. The present paper questions this scholarly consensus regarding the role of Assyria in the economy of the southern Levant, through a closer look at the olive oil industry in the region.
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Staszak, Martin. "Die assyrische Deportationspolitik unter Sargon II und die Midianiternot im Richterbuch." Biblische Zeitschrift 64, no. 2 (July 23, 2020): 189–208. http://dx.doi.org/10.30965/25890468-06402001.
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Abstract This article assumes that the so called misery that Midian brought to Israel (Jdg 6:1–6) refers to the activities of deported Arabs who were settled in Samaria by the Assyrian king Sargon II in 715 BCE, in order to pacify the Arabs. Assyrian texts show that the Assyrian empire had to struggle both with raids by Arabs against cities and their inhabitants and with difficulties caused by deported people. A probably multilayered pre-deuteronomistic redaction (ca. 700) that formed a cycle of narratives (Ehud, Deborah and Baraq, Gideon) transfered a local problem to the whole country of Israel and called the Arabs Midianites because of their common origin in Northern Arabia. It is possible that the Assyrians tolerated the raids by the Arabs in order to suppress the defeated Samarian population and to garner some profit from the Arabs.
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Zaia, Shana. "State-Sponsored Sacrilege: “Godnapping” and Omission in Neo-Assyrian Inscriptions." Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 2, no. 1 (December 1, 2015): 19–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/janeh-2015-0006.
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AbstractBecause of the symbolic and religious importance of cult statues in ancient Mesopotamia, these images were targeted on numerous occasions by invading forces as part of the conquest of a foreign polity. In the case of the Assyrians, triumphant kings would sometimes list cult statues from a newly-conquered city or group as spoils of war, alongside members of the royal family, their subjects, and their precious goods. Such acts of divine deportation are sometimes called “godnapping” in secondary literature. A conspicuous feature in godnapping reports is the paucity of divine names mentioned. Deported cult images are instead simply called “gods” of a foreign king, people, or city. Because godnapping has thus far been studied purely as a political tactic, the omission of names has been ascribed to the Assyrians’ disinterest in or ignorance of non-Assyrian divinities. This study proposes viewing godnapping not through a political lens but rather a religious one, arguing that the Assyrians would certainly have been aware of which cult statues they were deporting, and that they would have considered the non-Assyrian cult images gods in their own right. Focusing upon the religious and inscriptional traditions of the Assyrians, this paper seeks to demonstrate that omitting divine names in deportation accounts may have been purposeful and meant to prevent these gods from seeking retribution. Instead of using the traditional approach of examining the political ramifications for the conquered polity whose gods have been deported, this paper turns instead to the religious and psychological consequences for those who were deporting the gods and exposes the Assyrian perspective of godnapping as presented in their own inscriptions.
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Ridder, Jacob Jan de, and Leonhard Sassmannshausen. "A Middle Assyrian Fragment Mentioning Iron from Kassite Nippur." Altorientalische Forschungen 48, no. 1 (June 8, 2021): 56–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/aofo-2021-0003.
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Abstract In this study, a fragment from the Hilprecht Collection in Jena will be discussed. The tablet was previously identified as Middle Babylonian and published as TMH NF 5, 59. Closer inspection reveals Middle Assyrian palaeography. The fragmentary tablet deals with metals used for precious objects and was part of a larger inventory or letter. Noteworthy is a reference to iron, a metal rarely attested in Kassite Nippur but better known from the archaeological material and philological evidence from the Middle Assyrian Empire. An overview of philological evidence for iron in 2nd millennium Assyria will be given in this study.
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РАХНО, К. Ю. "ASSYRIAN PARALLELS TO THE NART EPOS OF THE OSSETIANS." Kavkaz-forum, no. 6(13) (June 21, 2021): 72–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.46698/vnc.2021.13.6.007.
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Статья рассматривает параллели к нартовскому эпосу осетин в фольклоре современных ассирийцев – этнической группы родом из Месопотамии. Если современные ассирийцы являются потомками древнего населения Ассирии, то осетины – потомки скифов, которые в прошлом атаковали Ассирийскую империю. Фольклор ассирийцев испытал сильное иранское влияние. Их сказки содержат множество иранских мотивов, часть которых перекликается с нартовским эпосом. В частности, в ассирийских сказках присутствует волшебная яблоня, плоды которой похищают сверхъестественные силы. Ложась спать с женой своего брата-близнеца, герой сказки кладет свою саблю между ними. С помощью орла, птенцов которого он спас, герой ассирийских сказок обычно выбирается из подземного мира. В некоторых сказках он попадает во враждебный дом, переодетым в женское платье, под видом невесты, соблазняет там женщину. Он охотится на джейрана, серну или газель, которые оказываются девушками-колдуньями. Находит соответствие в нартовском эпосе и мотив огромной антропоморфной лягушки. В ассирийских сказках есть также волшебное зеркало и чудесный котел, в котором варятся змеи, лягушки и черепахи. Герой похищает этот котел. Фигурируют там и морские кони. Советы коня помогают герою привезти чудесное дерево из охраняемого сада. Три героя состязаются за находку, рассказывая случаи из жизни. История одного из них заключается в том, что он был превращен ведьмой в быка, но девушка-волшебница помогает ему расколдоваться и наказать ведьму. Встречаются и амазонские мотивы. Как и у осетин, в ассирийской сказке есть мотив руки, высовывающейся из морской пучины. С осетинскими преданиями сближается история о трех купленных советах. Мотив рождения ребенка, жеребенка и щенка в сочетании с мотивом женщины, которая неузнанной соблазняет своего мужа, дабы проучить его, особенно близки нартовскому эпосу. The article examines the parallels to the Nart epos of the Ossetians in the folklore of modern Assyrians, an ethnic group indigenous to Mesopotamia. If the modern Assyrians are the descendants of the ancient population of Assyria, then the Ossetians are the descendants of the Scythians who attacked the Assyrian Empire in the past. The folklore of the Assyrians underwent strong Iranian influence. Their tales contain many Iranian motives, some of which have something in common with the Nart epos. In particular, in Assyrian tales there is a magic apple tree, the fruits of which are stolen by supernatural forces. Going to bed with the wife of his twin brother, the hero of the fairy tale puts his sword between them. With the help of the eagle, whose nestlings he saved, the hero of Assyrian tales is usually got out of the underworld. In some tales, he enters in a hostile house dressed in a woman's dress, disguised as a bride, and seduces a woman there. He hunts gazelle, chamois or gazelle, which turn out to be witch girls. The motive of a huge anthropomorphic frog finds a correspondence in the Nart epos as well. In Assyrian tales, there is also a magic mirror and a wonderful cauldron in which snakes, frogs and turtles are boiled. The hero kidnaps this cauldron. There are also sea horses. The horse’s advice helps the hero to bring a wonderful tree from the protected garden. Three heroes compete for a find, telling stories from their life. The story of one of them is that he was turned into a bull by a witch, but a girl sorceress helps him to disenchant and punish the witch. There are also Amazon motives. Like among the Ossetians, in the Assyrian fairy tale there is a motive of a hand sticking out from the depths of the sea. The story of three purchased councils comes close to the Ossetian legends. The motive of the birth of a child, a foal, and a puppy, combined with the motive of a woman who, being unrecognized, seduces her husband in order to teach him a lesson, are especially close to the Nart saga.
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Lange, Dierk. "Sao Traditions of Makari South of Lake Chad." Anthropos 116, no. 1 (2021): 111–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.5771/0257-9774-2021-1-111.
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The present study tries to solve the enigma of the legendary Sao on the basis of the traditions of the city-state of Makari south of Lake Chad. It analyses the town’s king list, its oral traditions and its ritual heritage in the light of the Assyrian hypothesis (put forward by the author in several publications). It suggests that Makari’s ancient traditions correspond to extensive transcontinental projections which underwent important transformations by processes of localization. By resetting the traditions in their original Mespotamian context, it shows that the Sao were the Neo-Assyrian conquerors of vast regions of the ancient Near East. After the destruction of Nineveh by the Babylonian insurgent Nabopolassar in 612 B.C. and the subsequent fall of the Assyrian Empire, some of the formerly resettled deportees fled to the region south of Lake Chad where they founded the city-state of Makari. Their desacralized traditions bear witness to the former prestige accorded to the Sao-Assyrians.
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Krikh, Sergey B. "The Formation and Significance of Assyrian Narrative for the Soviet Historiography of Antiquity." Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. History 67, no. 1 (2022): 228–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.21638/11701/spbu02.2022.115.
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The author of the article, using the method of backward chronology, highlights characteristic features of the narrative about Assyria from the beginning of the 21st century until the middle of the 20th century, and points out that I. M. Dyakonoff, who used to be the leading Assyriologist, gradually had delegated to his pupils almost all of the aspects of Assyrian history, retaining the history of Sumer within his major research scope. On the basis of archival documents, the author shows that the Assyrian narrative of I. M. Dyakonoff had been generally shaped even before the war, during his work on the chapters for the multi-volume “World History”. His Assyrian narrative was formed under the influence of the “Cambridge History of Antiquity” and V. V. Struve’s lectures: in the first case, this was evident in the presentation of a large amount of material; in the second case — in the desire to search for non-obvious explanations of the essence of historical processes. Moreover, I. M. Diakonoff did not share V. V. Struve’s views on the Assyrian history and attempted to present his position. The author concludes that the shift of I. M. Diakonoff’s interests from Assyrian history to mainly the history of Sumer was inevitable and was very unlikely to have been caused by the desire to supersede academician V. V. Struve in his status of the classic of Soviet scholarship. Two main factors influenced this transition: first, the features of Soviet historical scholarship, which presupposed a search for in-depth explanations almost exclusively in the socio-economic field, and secondly, the specificity of Assyrian sources, which contained scanty information about socio-economic processes.
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Valk, Jonathan. "The Origins of the Assyrian King List." Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 6, no. 1 (May 26, 2019): 1–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/janeh-2017-0009.
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AbstractThe Assyrian King List (AKL) is central to the reconstruction of Assyrian and broader Near Eastern history and chronology. Because of AKL’s significance, locating its original moment of composition has far-reaching historiographical implications. There is no scholarly consensus on the dating of AKL, but a closer look at the internal evidence of AKL indicates a firm, fifteenth century terminus post quem for the creation of AKL, while the bilingual tablet fragment BM 98496 establishes the thirteenth century reign of Tukulti-Ninurta I as a secure terminus ante quem. Within this temporal range, it is possible to trace the genesis of AKL to the reign of Aššur-uballiṭ I. This period witnessed great change in Assyria, and the nature of this change provides an ideal historical, political, and ideological context for the production of AKL. No other moment in Assyrian history offers so compelling a conjunction of political motives and historical circumstances for AKL’s composition.
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Brown, Brian. "Kingship and Ancestral Cult in the Northwest Palace at Nimrud." Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 10, no. 1 (2010): 1–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156921210x500495.
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AbstractBuilt in the early 9th century BCE, the Northwest Palace at Nimrud presented a new “imperial” architecture and iconography that was related to Assyrian expansionism at this time. Yet it also contained specific points of contact with the past via the royal Assyrian ancestors. A monument in the throneroom, the “center” of the state, provided the “public” view of this ideology, while one of the palace’s more secluded wings was devoted to the performance of ancestral cult. Through these and other means, rapid and fundamental socio-political change was accompanied by the idea of a logical and direct continuity with the history of Assyria.
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Lovell, Nathan. "Immanuel in Imperial Context: Isaiah, God, and History." Bulletin for Biblical Research 32, no. 2 (July 1, 2022): 123–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/bullbiblrese.32.2.0123.
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Abstract This article investigates the implications of the Immanuel prophecy for the doctrine of God and the political idea of Israel that emerge from the book of Isaiah. It does this in conversation with both the Immanuel tradition elsewhere in the OT, as well as with an alternative ideology that Isaiah encountered through Assyria. I argue that Isaiah’s use of Immanuel in the context of the Syro-Ephraimite crisis and Assyrian aggression (Isa 6–12) allows him to avoid framing Zion theology as an Israelite version of Assyrian imperialism. But, in doing so, Isaiah also implies that the transcendent, high, and lofty God of Isa 6 will be willing to be “with” a people suffering his own judgment.
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Groß, Melanie, and David Kertai. "Becoming Empire: Neo-Assyrian palaces and the creation of courtly culture." Journal of Ancient History 7, no. 1 (May 26, 2019): 1–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jah-2018-0026.
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Abstract Assyria (911–612 BCE) can be described as the founder of the imperial model of kingship in the ancient Near East. The Assyrian court itself, however, remains poorly understood. Scholarship has treated the court as a disembodied, textual entity, separated from the physical spaces it occupied – namely, the palaces. At the same time, architectural analyses have examined the physical structures of the Assyrian palaces, without consideration for how these structures were connected to people’s lives and works. The palaces are often described as secluded, inaccessible locations. This study presents the first model of the Assyrian court contextualized in its actual palaces. It provides a nuanced model highlighting how the court organized the immense flow of information, people and goods entering the palace as a result of the empire’s increased size and complexity. It argues that access to the king was regulated by three gates of control which were manned by specific types of personnel and a more situational organization that moved within the physical spaces of the palace and was contingent on the king’s activity.
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Sinha, Ashish, Gayatri Kathayat, Harvey Weiss, Hanying Li, Hai Cheng, Justin Reuter, Adam W. Schneider, et al. "Role of climate in the rise and fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire." Science Advances 5, no. 11 (November 2019): eaax6656. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aax6656.
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Northern Iraq was the political and economic center of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (c. 912 to 609 BCE)—the largest and most powerful empire of its time. After more than two centuries of regional dominance, the Neo-Assyrian state plummeted from its zenith (c. 670 BCE) to complete political collapse (c. 615 to 609 BCE). Earlier explanations for the Assyrian collapse focused on the roles of internal politico-economic conflicts, territorial overextension, and military defeat. Here, we present a high-resolution and precisely dated speleothem record of climate change from the Kuna Ba cave in northern Iraq, which suggests that the empire’s rise occurred during a two-centuries-long interval of anomalously wet climate in the context of the past 4000 years, while megadroughts during the early-mid seventh century BCE, as severe as recent droughts in the region but lasting for decades, triggered a decline in Assyria’s agrarian productivity and thus contributed to its eventual political and economic collapse.
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Zaia, Shana. "My Brother’s Keeper: Assurbanipal versus Šamaš-šuma-ukīn." Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 6, no. 1 (May 26, 2019): 19–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/janeh-2018-2001.
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AbstractWhen Esarhaddon named his successors, he split the empire between two of his sons, with Assurbanipal as king of Assyria and Šamaš-šuma-ukīn as king of Babylonia. This arrangement functioned until 652 BCE, at which point a civil war began between the brothers. The war ended with Assurbanipal’s victory and Šamaš-šuma-ukīn’s death in 648 BCE. While Šamaš-šuma-ukīn’s death is mentioned in several of Assurbanipal’s inscriptions, it is still unclear how the king of Babylon met his end, and scholars have suggested theories ranging from suicide, assassination, execution, and accidental death. By offering a reexamination of the evidence for royal death in general and Šamaš-šuma-ukīn’s demise in particular, this article explores how possibly taboo topics such as fratricide, regicide, and suicide were depicted in Neo-Assyrian state texts and how Assurbanipal appears to have coped with his brother’s rebellion and death, especially as compared to Assyrian treatments of belligerent and rebellious foreign kings. This article argues that the relative silence around Šamaššuma- ukīn’s death is due to the fact that, while he was an enemy combatant, he was nonetheless a member of the Assyrian royal family and a legitimately-installed king. Overall, this article concludes that Assurbanipal uses several rhetorical strategies to distance himself from Šamaš-šuma-ukīn, especially invoking deus ex machina as a way to avoid even the potential accusation of fratricide and ultimately erasing his brother from the written record and Assyrian history.
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Miller, Eva. "Drawing Distinctions: Assyrians and Others in the Art of the Neo-Assyrian Empire." Studia Orientalia Electronica 9, no. 2 (December 30, 2021): 82–107. http://dx.doi.org/10.23993/store.87846.
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Between the ninth and seventh centuries BCE, the Neo-Assyrian Empire became the largest the world had yet seen. In the process of imperial conquest, the Assyrian state incorporated previously foreign territories and people into their world. Landscapes, materials, and the labor of conquered bodies became a part of the Assyrian royal palaces of northern Iraq, both as elements of their construction and as themes emphasized within the extensive visual programs of the palace reliefs. Within and through visual depiction of enemy bodies and foreign landscapes, in the process of being (often violently) reshaped by Assyrian hands, Neo-Assyrian kings brought the farthest reaches of their world into the center of imperial power. This article considers how specific strategies of representation in palace art allowed the Assyrian palace to serve as a microcosm of the empire and a map of its borders. Palace art emphasized the remade, reworked, or recreated, defining “Assyrianness” as that which remakes and has been remade. As a central act of remaking, I examine representations of captive or submissive foreigners, whose presence in the reliefs commemorates their humiliation while compounding and enhancing it in the very ways that these figures are depicted: cringing, deficient, and physiologically incorrect. I pay particular attention to examples from the late King Ashurbanipal’s reign, in which foreign leaders are singled out through representation with distinctive facial features. I argue that this act of (literally) drawing distinctions was an inherently imperial process, one that both expressed and enabled an ideology of expansion and control.
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Woźniak-Bobińska, Marta. "Assyrians Without Borders: Middle Eastern Christians Towards a New Form of Citizenship in Sweden." Studia Religiologica 54, no. 1 (2021): 63–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.4467/20844077sr.21.005.13929.
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This article presents a case study of a Swedish-based NGO, Assyrians Without Borders (AWB), whose priority objective is to help Middle Eastern Christians, mainly Assyrians/Syriacs, in need in their homeland. The paper argues that Assyrians/Syriacs in Sweden have developed three forms of citizenship – religious, political and democratic. All three forms are transnational and have the potential to challenge the idea of national citizenship as being the dominant model of citizenship. Participating in AWB is understood as practising democratic citizenship, a concept seen as the Swedish ideal of model citizenship. The paper claims that AWB empowers its members and helps them to construct a mutually reinforcing dual Assyrian-Swedish identity.
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Postgate, J. N. "Assyrian Prophecies." Journal of Semitic Studies 47, no. 2 (September 1, 2002): 312–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jss/47.2.312.
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Kwasman, Theodore, and Simo Parpola. "Assyrian Prophecies." Jewish Quarterly Review 92, no. 1/2 (July 2001): 227. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1455635.
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Miller, Daniel. "Objectives and Consequences of the Neo-Assyrian Imperial Exercise." Religion and Theology 16, no. 3-4 (2009): 124–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/102308009x12561890523474.
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AbstractThe Neo-Assyrian Empire was most ascendant in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E., ultimately controlling most of the ancient Near East before fading from history in 612. Assyrian ideology was predicated on cosmic supremacy of their chief deity Ashur, with the Assyrian monarch considered to be his vice-regent in "world" conquest. Assyrian imperialism may thus be said to have been religious in character. Nevertheless, the impetus for Assyrian domination was not primarily cultic. It was not compulsive desire to make subject peoples worship Ashur, but rather (as with empires in general) political and economic concerns that motivated Assyrian actions.
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Mikhailov, Sergei Sergeevich. "On the History of the Formation of Assyrian Diasporas in Cities on the Riga Railway." Ethnic Culture 3, no. 2 (June 25, 2021): 10–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.31483/r-98421.
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In the article the author talks about a local episode in the history of the formation of one of the little-studied diasporas of the cities of Central Russia – the Assyrians. The author's goal is to consider the emergence of communities of the considered ethnic group using the example of small Assyrian diasporas known from the Riga Railway. Since the Assyrians settled in the cities of European Russia for the most part after exodus from their places of traditional residence, fleeing the genocide unleashed by the Turkish authorities during the First World War, their new places of residence anyway were tied to the lines of the railways that existed at that time. For this study, the Riga (formerly Vindava) direction was chosen, about the Assyrians of which the author has so far collected the maximum possible information. Based on the materials of the largest researcher of the Assyrian diaspora of the former USSR – archimandrite Stephen (Sado), as well as on the materials of his own field research, the author provides the reader with information on the diasporas that arose at the early stage of the formation of the Russian Assyrian community – in the 1920s-1930s. The article deals with the Assyrians of the former city of Tushino, which in 1960 became part of Moscow, Istra, Volokolamsk, Rzhev, Velikiye Luki, Toropets, located on the territory of the Moscow, Tver and Pskov regions of the Russian Federation. First of all, the participation of families from different tribal and rural communities in the formation of diasporas is considered, as a result, the author identifies at least three parts on this railway direction, inhabited by people from certain tribes. The first part, which includes the former city of Tushino and, possibly, Istra and Volokolamsk, is represented by the diasporas of the Jylu tribe. In the second, on the indicated railway direction, we include only the city of Rzhev. There, first of all, we see two groups of families of people from the village. Kochanis (Kuchisnaya tribe) and the Diz region (Diznaya). The latter point allows us to consider the city as part of the settlement area of the diasporas of this group, which includes some cities of the Tver and Smolensk regions, located along the adjacent Torzhok – Vyazma branch. The third part is the cities of Velikiye Luki and Toropets, in which we know mainly the Assyrians of the Shapatna group, who in the 1920–1930s created a large array of settlement of their diasporas, covering part of the north-west of Russia, Belarus, part of the north of Ukraine.
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KIBUUKA, BRIAN. "O IMPÉRIO NEOASSáRIO E ISRAEL: imperialismo e exálio." Outros Tempos: Pesquisa em Foco - História 16, no. 28 (July 21, 2019): 200–226. http://dx.doi.org/10.18817/ot.v16i28.728.
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Os deslocamentos populacionais decorrentes de crises são problemas hodiernos que requerem a adoção de poláticas públicas e a constante reafirmação dos Direitos Humanos e dos valores da cidadania. Na Antiguidade, O Imperialismo Assário constitui um dos exemplos que permitem a observação do fenômeno da crise migratória. O Antigo Israel foi um dos povos submetidos pelos assários ao desterramento. Este artigo analisa as poláticas imperialistas assárias a partir da documentação textual e material, e relaciona essa documentação com as referências ao exálio na Báblia Hebraica.Palavras-chave: Exálio. Império Neoassário. Antigo Israel. THE NEO-ASSYRIAN EMPIRE AND ISRAEL: imperialism and exileAbstract: Population displacements due to crises are current situations that require the adoption of public policies and constant reaffirmation of Human Rights and the values of citizenship. In Antiquity, Assyrian imperialism is one of the examples that allow us to observe the phenomenon of the migratory crisis. The Ancient Israel was one of the peoples submitted by the Assyrians to the exile. This article analyzes Assyrian imperialist policies from textual and material documentation and relates this documentation to the references to exile in the Hebrew Bible.Keywords: Exile. Neo-Assyrian Empire. Ancient Israel. EL IMPERIO NEOASSáRIO E ISRAEL: imperialismo y exilioResumen: Los desplazamientos poblacionales derivados de crisis son problemas cotidianos que requieren la adopción de poláticas públicas y la constante reafirmación de los Derechos Humanos y de los valores de la ciudadanáa. En la Antigá¼edad, el imperialismo asirio constituye uno de los ejemplos que permiten la observación del fenómeno de la crisis migratoria. El Antiguo Israel fue uno de los pueblos sometidos por los asirios al destierro. Este artáculo analiza las poláticas imperialistas asirias a partir de la documentación textual y material, y relaciona esa documentación con las referencias al exilio presentes en la Biblia Hebrea.Palabras clave: Exilio. Imperio Neoasário. Antiguo Israel.
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Parker, Bradley J. "Garrisoning the empire: aspects of the construction and maintenance of forts on the Assyrian frontier." Iraq 59 (1997): 77–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021088900003363.
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It is clear from the royal correspondence of the Assyrian empire and from the annals of Assyrian kings that the construction of forts was an integral part of the permanent establishment of Assyrian sovereignty in newly conquered regions. Forts served as garrison outposts in formerly hostile areas and were therefore the first footholds of Assyrian expansion into recently annexed territories. They were military centres, from which campaigns and intelligence operations were conducted into and beyond the frontier, administrative centres where the daily affairs of the surrounding areas were directed and monitored, and communications hubs through which news and information were channelled. In addition to these roles, forts or garrison centres also served as conduits through which the Assyrian ideology of imperialism could be diffused into the periphery of the empire and the process of the acculturation of the “foreign” inhabitants of peripheral zones could be conducted.Liverani has suggested that Assyrian military expansion was not a process of conquering contiguous areas, in which a clear line could be drawn between regions under Assyrian control and those that were not. Instead, the process of Assyrian imperialism was one in which “islands” of Assyrian occupation were planted in peripheral zones soon after military incursions. In regions of Assyrian expansion, “the empire was not a spread of land but a network of communications” between Assyrian strongholds. The spaces between the “islands” of this “network empire” were slowly filled in through successive military incursion. Following these conquests new forts or garrison towns were constructed at critical junctures, to protect and fortify the networks connecting the existing Assyrian strongholds, and foreign populations were forcibly settled in the surrounding countryside. Peripheral regions were not, therefore, brought under the Assyrian yoke solely through swift military action but by the gradual growth and spread of “islands” of occupation into new regions. These “islands” must have initially consisted of forts or fortified settlements such as those referred to in the royal correspondence as birtu or HAL.ṢU meaning “fort”. This system of planting Assyrian garrisons in newly conquered regions is perhaps best exemplified in Nimrud Letter 48, in which the author speaks of “establishing the foundations (of a fort)” at several junctures in his campaign in the Iranian Zagros. As the system of Assyrian strongholds became more contiguous across the landscape, the area came more firmly into the grip of the imperial administration and the stage was set for expansion further into the periphery or into regions between these pockets of Assyrian control.
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Thomason, Allison Karmel. "The Sense-scapes of Neo-Assyrian Capital Cities: Royal Authority and Bodily Experience." Cambridge Archaeological Journal 26, no. 2 (February 3, 2016): 243–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0959774315000578.
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This study approaches the material world of the Neo-Assyrian period in Mesopotamia from the theoretical and methodological standpoint of the field of sensory archaeology. Analysis of relevant royal inscriptions, administrative tablets, bas-reliefs and artefacts excavated from the palaces in the Assyrian capital cities of Nimrud, Khorsabad and Nineveh demonstrates that the Assyrian kings and their courtly advisors participated in activities of biopolitics. The study identifies several phenomena and features of the Assyrian world, including palaces that served as sensorial envelopes, commensal feasts, travelling processions, water-control projects and libation rituals that the Neo-Assyrian royal authority deployed in attempts to control sensory experiences. At the same time, the study reconstructs the sensory experiences of Assyrian bodies as they passed through royally curated structures and landscapes.