Neo-Assyrian Inscriptions Research Articles

Bereaved Mothers and Masculine Queens: The Political Use of Maternal Grief in 1–2 Kings

AbstractRecent research demonstrates that maternal grief functions paradigmatically to epitomize despair and sorrow in the Hebrew Bible. These literary uses of maternal grief reinforce the stereotype of womanhood, defined by devotion to children and anguish at their loss. In 1–2 Kings, narratives about unnamed bereaved mothers are used politically to create a contrast with named biblical queens who lose their sons but never grieve for them. Although 1–2 Kings names the queen mothers alongside the male rulers, these mothers have no agency or when they do, they act more like men than women. Neo-Assyrian inscriptions attest the masculinity of royal female power, and this article argues that conceptions of royal female power in Judah were similar. By contrasting the masculine queens with stereotyped “real men” and “real women,” traditional gender performances literarily overcome the institution of queenship. While the queens are polemicized, unnamed mothers emerge as the female heroes of Kings. Royal female power is demoted beneath reproductive ability and emotional responses to children, while the gender fluidity of royal power is circumscribed.

Iconographies of the Sacred and Power of the Desert Nomads: A Reappraisal of the Desert Rock Art of the Late Bronze/Iron Age Southern Levant and Northwestern Arabia

Summary During the Late Bronze and Iron Ages, the vast arid areas of the southern Levant, northwestern Arabia and Sinai were inhabited by populations whose main way of living was nomadic herding and trade, small-scale agriculture and occasional mining, complemented with a few settled centers. The nomadic, non-literate communities have been traditionally studied through the lenses of the outside written sources (especially, the New Kingdom Egyptian and Neo-Assyrian inscriptions) and sometimes seen as intrinsically stable, unranked societies. However, the desert societies left an enormous record of rock art that has not received similar attention. This article aims to study the local rock art and the iconography of other visual media it influenced, focusing on the information they supply on the social organization of these societies. The analysis provides several – yet still tentative – results on the sacred and power of the desert nomads: it attests the emergence of local nomadic chiefs in the LBA/IA trans...

Assyrians under the Walls of Jerusalem and the Confinement of Padi

According to the Neo-Assyrian annals, Padi, king of Ekron, was imprisoned in Jerusalem, freed during Sennacherib’s third campaign (701 Bc), and then reinstated as king in Ekron. This sequence of events raises a question: how did Sennacherib get Padi out of Jerusalem, since in Sennacherib’s royal inscriptions there is no claim of a capture of Jerusalem? In order to answer this question, I will first study pertinent Neo-Assyrian inscriptions and letters mentioning Padi in the first part of this paper. The most relevant passage reads:

State-Sponsored Sacrilege: “Godnapping” and Omission in Neo-Assyrian Inscriptions

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.

Ashurbanipal Prisms K and C: Further Restorations

During the recent work of clearing and reconstruction at Nimrud in the area of the Temple of Nabu, close to a dozen fragments of Neo-Assyrian inscriptions were recovered.' Of particular interest is the stone tablet with a copy of the annals of the early years of Shalmaneser III; but the Ashurbanipal fragments, taken for copies of well-known texts, are not to be overlooked. The fragment presented as Text 2 and identified as part of Prism B, in fact turns out to belong to Ashurbanipal Prism C.2 Text 4 is a welcome addition to Prism K. As these new texts add to our knowledge of these prisms, updated editions of which remain Assyriological desiderata,3 they are presented below, followed by brief remarks.