Beyond Aššur: New Cities and the Assyrian Politics of Landscape

Abstract

This article investigates the making of Assyrian landscapes during the late second and early first millennia B.C.E. From the late 14th century B.C.E. onward, the Assyrians designated the emergent core of their territorial state as the “Land of Aššur” in their royal inscriptions. However, over the course of the next several centuries, the cultural geography of the Land of Aššur was continuously redefined while gradually shifting northward from the arid environs of the city Aššur to the well-watered and resourceful landscapes around the confluence of the Tigris and the Upper and Lower Zab Rivers. Contemporaneously, the landscapes of the Upper Tigris basin (southeastern Turkey) and the Jazira witnessed extensive settlement and cultivation as Assyrian provinces and frontiers. Drawing on archaeological survey evidence and a critical reading of the textual accounts of urban foundations, this paper argues that such mobility of Assyrian landscapes was part and parcel of broader processes of environmental and settlement change in Upper Mesopotamia. Assyrian annalistic texts point to an elaborate rhetoric of landscape that portrays state interventions in the form of city foundations and building programs, construction of irrigation canals, planting of orchards, opening of new quarries, and settlement of populations. Furthermore, the making of commemorative monuments such as rock reliefs and stelae allowed the Assyrian state to inscribe symbolically charged places in foreign landscapes and incorporate them into the narratives of the empire. By drawing attention to the long-term trends of settlement in Upper Mesopotamia during the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages and the agency of landscapes, the article contextualizes the Assyrian political rhetoric of development at the time of a highly fluid world of geographical imagination.