Neo-Assyrian Research Articles

Assyrian Imperial Elites and Textile Culture of the 1st Millennium BC: Shaping Power Visions Through Textiles

Abstract As a crucial component of the materiality of the first world empire, textile culture documented in archival cuneiform documents, visual art, and archaeological materials from 1st-millennium BC Assyria enables historians to reconstruct the social identities, power visions, and economic systems of the people who ruled the “Land of Aššur”. Through the analysis of royal clothes, it is possible to form an idea of the clothing ensemble, the aesthetic, and power visions that shaped the presence of the king and his queen in public ceremonies and in visual art narratives, and to see how royal textile art played a role in political communication. Royal garments, combined with power accessories such as royal insignia and other objects, represented a powerful means to visualize royal personhood and what the institution of Assyrian kingship meant in the imperial phase of Assyrian history. Representations of royal scenes in visual art integrate the documentary picture from texts and archaeological materials and show how the royal costume developed over the Neo-Assyrian period and how the centrality and superior status of the royal person were emphasised by visual interaction between the king’s clothes and other textiles in the scene. Queenly garments represent another channel for the communication of the success of the Assyrian imperial project. Less represented in textual sources and material evidence are other upper-class sectors of Assyrian imperial society, in which textiles equally played an important role as markers of social identity and status. Non-royal textiles were an integral part of power narratives in the Neo-Assyrian age, contributing to create the sense of a common Assyrian identity, of elite’s unity and cohesion, and full adherence to the imperial project.

The Judean Problem in Nahum 1:9

Abstract This article investigates the socio-historical background of Nah 1:9 amidst seemingly contradictory scholarly claims that its addressees were skeptical about the power of YHWH in the face of the power of the Neo-Assyrian empire at a time that the same empire was weak. The research ends with two conclusions. First, the basis of the skepticism among the addressees was fear that the dying empire could recover with disastrous consequences for disloyal vassals who abandoned the empire in its time of weakness. Second, far from being timid Judeans, the skeptics had rationally defensible bases for their fear. They were simply being cautious. This was no cowardice.

Examining long-term fuel and land use patterns at Ziyaret Tepe, Türkiye using an integrated analysis of seeds, wood charcoal, and dung spherulites

This study presents the results of a combined dendrological, macrobotanical, and dung spherulite analysis of flotation samples collected from Bronze Age, Late Assyrian, and post-Assyrian contexts at the site of Ziyaret Tepe, located on the southern bank of the Tigris River in southeastern Anatolia. The results of this study show shifting fuel resource exploitation between pre-urbanized phases of the site (ca. 3000–1600 BCE), the urbanized Late Assyrian occupation (882–611 BCE), and the ruralized post-Assyrian (ca. 611 BCE–1500 CE) re-occupations of the site. During the Late Assyrian period, Ziyaret Tepe is thought to have been the location of the city of Tušhan, an important provincial capital of the Neo-Assyrian empire. Evidence for local deforestation near the Tigris River and expanding reliance on dung fuel use during this period indicate overexploitation of fuel resources as larger populations and extractive imperial economic policies placed heavier pressure on local land use. Qualitative dendrological data provides evidence for the intensification of fuelwood harvesting during this period, while textual evidence documented an expansive program of timbering to the north of the site intended to fuel imperial construction projects in the Assyrian heartland. Following the abandonment of Tušhan and the collapse of the Neo-Assyrian empire, local fuel resource exploitation during subsequent occupations of the site shifted towards the direct management of wood fuel resources and increasing reliance on rural pastoralism.

Curious Case of the Vanished Coordinative Conjunction in Neo-Assyrian

While most Akkadian dialects use two coordinators, a phrase and clause level u= and a clause level =ma, in the Neo-Assyrian period both are mostly missing from native Assyrian texts. Not only is lack of overt coordination exceptional among the Semitic languages, cross-linguistically asyndeton is a rare strategy, only attested in languages with no writing tradition. In this paper, we will concentrate on u=. We sketch the various environments where u= is no longer used in Neo-Assyrian and consider what other strategies are used to mark coordination in this dialect. Finally, we propose a diachronic path to explain which processes contributed to the loss of the coordinator u=.

Strangers "par excellence". Arabs in the Neo-Assyrian Royal Inscriptions

The basic questions posed in the article were: what characteristics caused Arabs to be per­ceived by the elites of the Neo-Assyrian Empire as strangers, and whether such classification resulted in their treatment differently from other peoples? Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions and correspondence with the court were analysed to answer these questions. On this basis, three features that together are unique only to Arabs were distinguished: nomadism, camel farming and the presence of queens. These traits are unique to Arabs, so they are strangers par excellence from Assyria’s perspective. Interestingly, these features generally do not result in exceptional treatment. Only in a situation of conflict and defeat of the Arabs can one perceive their specific treatment, marked by exceptional cruelty even for Assyrians. For example, mainly Arab rulers were chained along with wild animals to the gates of the Assyrian capital. Moreover, only Arab women were subjected to tearing unborn children out of their wombs. This shows that Arabs were treated as half-humans against whom the most heinous crimes could be committed because Assyrians were not bound by the standards applicable to other peoples.

Nabû at the Frontiers of the Assyrian Empire: An Inscribed Bronze Necklet from Yasin Tepe, Iraqi Kurdistan

Abstract This paper presents an inscribed bronze necklet discovered at Yasin Tepe, one of the largest tell-type sites in the Sulaymaniyah Governorate in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. The necklet was found on the floor of a large building complex of the Neo-Assyrian period that probably belonged to an elite family living at the site. The two-line inscription dates to around the eighth to seventh centuries BCE, and mentions the dedication of a son by his father to the god Nabû, implying the diffusion of his worship to the frontier of the Assyrian empire. Nishiyama wrote Sections 1–4, and Yamada Section 5, respectively; both share the responsibility for Section 6. Abbreviations follow M. P. Streck et al. (eds.), Reallexikon der Assyriologie, vol. 15. Berlin/Boston, except for RINAP 2 = Frame 2020; RIMA 2 = Grayson 1991, RIMA 3 = Grayson 1996.

“The Yoke Before the Oil” (Isa 10:27d) in the Light of Neo-Assyrian Covenant-Making Rituals

Abstract Following a study by Robertson (1885), Old Testament scholars have attempted to resolve the difficult reference to oil in Isa 10:27d by means of emendations, generally of a geographical nature. In this way, the verse becomes the opening line of the following war oracle (10:28–32). The study of royal inscriptions from the Neo-Assyrian period reveals instead the existence of covenant-making rituals in which oil was employed, especially as an image of the curse associated with covenant transgressions. Since in Assyrian propaganda, the yoke was an image of the king’s lordship over the conquered peoples, with the prophecy that “the yoke before the oil will be destroyed,” the prophet alludes to the termination of the treaty obligations stipulated through the ritual, as well as any form of curse associated with it.

:The Neo-Assyrian Empire in the Southwest: Imperial Domination and Its Consequences

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Neo-Assyrian Empire in the Southwest: Imperial Domination and Its Consequences, by Avraham Faust. Oxford: Oxford University, 2021. xiv + 384 pp., 21 figures. Hardcover $125. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198841630.001.0001Alessio Palmisano and Andrea SquitieriAlessio PalmisanoUniversity of Turin. [email protected] Search for more articles by this author and Andrea SquitieriUniversity of Heidelberg. [email protected] Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 389May 2023 A journal of ASOR Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/724130 © 2023 American Society of Overseas Research. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Building Walls, Social Groups and Empires: A Study of Political Power and Compliance in the Neo-Assyrian Period

This contribution aims to use social history and social theory to investigate political power and compliance with authority in ancient Western Asia, through the case study of Neo-Assyrian imperial building projects. Our first aim is to discuss the realities of construction work in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, focusing on the building process both through literary sources and archaeological data. Our second goal is to understand the role played by these building sites in the strengthening of local and supra-local political orders, in the consolidation of social group boundaries, and in the construction of political subjectivities of the ancient social actors involved. Our reflection sheds light on the new interpretative possibilities – and challenges – that integrating social theories, archaeological work, and language technology may create.

A Look into the Neo-Assyrian Countryside: the Iron Age III Settlement of Taşlı Geçit Höyük in the Islahiye Valley

Turco-Italian excavations on the site of Taşlı Geçit Höyük, located in the Islahiye valley (South-Eastern Turkey), partially investigated a rural settlement dating to the Iron Age III (late 8th-7th cent. BC). The evidence from the site represents an opportunity for further insights on the impact of the Neo-Assyrian Empire on the countryside of the Northern Levant.

Age and Masculinities During the Neo-Assyrian Period

Age and Masculinities During the Neo-Assyrian Period

The Literary-Historical Memory of Sargon of Akkad in Assyria as the Background for Nimrod in Genesis 10:8–12

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.

Faust, Avraham. The Neo-Assyrian Empire in the Southwest: Imperial Domination and Its Consequences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xi+362 pp. $115.00 (cloth).

Faust, Avraham. <i>The Neo-Assyrian Empire in the Southwest: Imperial Domination and Its Consequences</i>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xi+362 pp. $115.00 (cloth).

Global Empires and The Roman Imperium

Global Empires and The Roman Imperium Brent D. Shaw P. Fibiger Bang, C. A. Bayly, and W. Scheidel, eds. The Oxford World History of Empire. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021; xxviii + 552 pp.; xxxiv + 1,318 pp. The volumes under review are an impressive if unequal diptych. The first, the slimmer of the two, entitled "The Imperial Experience," comprises a series of analytical studies on the creation, management, and ideologies of empires, and forms of resistance to them. The second, "The History of Empires," is a forbidding tome of forty-four specific studies of individual empires and imperial ventures, from Ur III and Middle Kingdom Egypt to the Mongols and the British, ending, naturally, with America's "global imperium." In the analytics, the usual suspects, including Michael Doyle, Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank, are on display; and the conceptual approaches of Michael Mann and Ernest Gellner are favorite points d'appui. For premodern empires, the ideas of the Maghribi thinker Ibn Khaldūn provide a different focus, so it is heartening to see Bang and others applying them more consistently (e.g., 1:13, 40, 326–9; 2:162, 246–8, 253). Especially for premodern empires, these volumes can be seen as an extension of earlier handbooks devoted to the state, one devoted to the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean state and another on ancient empires.1 As an aspect of world history, the endeavor is the culmination of a decades-long project on the history of empires fronted by Peter Bang.2 He has usefully produced detailed historical introductions not only to both volumes, but also to the subsections in each of them. Perhaps not surprisingly, empire turns out to be a virile enterprise. As Ian Morris notes, "the story of empire . . . is so strongly gendered that it [End Page 505] seems reasonable to call rulers and commanders 'he' throughout" (1:162 n. 14). The muscular subject is mirrored by its principal actors and by its students. All the editors are men. Reflecting the same balance, out of the forty-five authors of individual studies in the large history of empires volume, there are five (lonely) female voices. In both volumes, women as subjects of empire are, for all intents and purposes, absent.3 From the perspective of an historian who has actually worked on the history of an empire, it must be plainly stated that almost all of the theories, adequately reviewed by Bang (1:20–48), are worth about as much as the paper or pixilated screens on which they have been written. Obvious and serious exceptions to every one of the definitions and hypotheticals abound. In fact, a fair number of the exemplary histories in the second volume do not obey the strictures of most of the theories advanced in the first. So it is with a sense of relief that one turns from theory to the hard quantities offered by Walter Scheidel (1:chap. 2). To a considerable degree, his analysis depends on the well-known measurements made by Rein Taagepera. Rather alarmingly, Taagepera counted as an empire "any large sovereign political entity whose components are not sovereign," say, like the well-known empires of Algeria, Finland, or Canada.4 What an analysis of these global entities confirms is that size or orders of magnitude mattered, and that the first entities to count as empires emerged in the 7th to 5th centuries bce in southwestern Asia (1:53; 2:161, 245). The neo-Assyrian empire was the first super-large territorial state and its successor, the Achaemenid empire, was the first "hyper-power without rival" (1:172; 2:83, 111, 161). Subsequent premodern empires were able to reach higher levels of millions of square kilometers of territory and larger populations of dozens of millions of subjects nominally under their aegis. The magnitudes reached by a given generation of super-states set base-lines above which a successor might be able to reach greater sophistication of rule, numbers of subjects, and extent of territory. In some cases, being able to piggy-back on existing empires, they were able to skip early developmental stages and to advance quickly to imperial status, as a succession...

An Overview of Military Confrontations between of the Assyrian Army against the Medes in the 7th centuries BCE

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.

Post-Destruction Squatter Phases in the Iron Age IIB–C Southern Levant

The destructions caused by the military campaigns of the Neo-Assyrian empire in the southern Levant during the Iron Age IIB and IIC (8th–7th centuries b.c.e.) led to mass deportations of local populations and a forced displacement of refugees. Although several studies in recent years have focused their attention on displacement and refugees in the ancient Near East during the period in question, they often deal with large scale processes, while generally neglecting more localized phenomena. Such phenomena include, among others, post-destruction squatter phases. These frequently overlooked strata reflect the resettlement of a site following its destruction by local individuals who were forced, to some degree, to leave their homes for an unknown period. This paper attempts to define some of these post-destruction squatter phases in the archaeological record during the Iron IIB–C through the analysis of nine case studies, and to examine this phenomenon from a refugee standpoint.

Alanya Müzesi’nden Urartu, Lydia Ve Phrgia Dönemleri’ne Ait Bir Grup Demir Çağı Çanak Çömlek Ve Altlıkları Üzerine Değerlendirme

Thanks to its geopolitical and strategic location, Anatolia has hosted numerous rich cultures from the prehistoric eras up until today. While the political conflicts and the socio-economic changes that these cultures experienced throughout history caused the end of an era, they also laid the groundwork for the beginning of a new era. As a matter of fact, this cultural cycle can also be seen in the collapse of the Great Hittite Empire in 1190 BC and the Iron Ages that began after the collapse. Blended with numerous cultures from Urartian’s in the east, Phrygians and Lydian’s in the west, Late Hittite Empires in the southeast to Middle Assyrian Empire and Neo-Assyrian Empire, Iron Age is dated between 1190-330 BC. Pottery findings belonging to the 850-year period, which consists of the Middle and Late Iron Ages, constitute the subject of our study. In this context, 27 pieces of ceramics, most of which were brought to the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations by purchasing from Burdur and Isparta regions and from there to Alanya Museum, were examined. Each ceramic was classified chronologically and typologically within its own period and was attempted to be introduced scientifically by comparing it with similar samples

An Assyrianised rock wall panel with figures at Başbük in south-eastern Turkey

The Neo-Assyrian Empire of the early first millennium BC ruled over the ancient Near East. South-eastern Anatolia was controlled through vassal city-states and provincial structures. Assyrian governors and local elites expressed their power through elements of Assyrian courtly style. Here, the authors report a rare processional panel recently discovered at Başbük in south-eastern Turkey. Incised on the rock wall of a subterranean complex, the panel features eight deities, three with associated Aramaic inscriptions. The iconographic details and Syro-Anatolian religious themes illustrate the adaptation of Neo-Assyrian art in a provincial context. The panel, which appears to have been left unfinished, is the earliest-known regional attestation of Atargatis, the principal goddess of Syria c. 300 BC–AD 200.

A Social Network of the Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire

The dataset is a social network of over 17,000 individuals who lived during the so-called Neo-Assyrian period of Mesopotamian history, primarily in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. The undirected network of individuals connected by co-occurrences in cuneiform documents was semi-automatically extracted from the <em>Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire</em>. In addition to two weighted versions of the one-mode co-occurrence network, the dataset also contains a two-mode person-text network and rich metadata for each individual. For the first time, the dataset allows large-scale computational analysis of social structures in the Assyrian Empire. The data is primarily stored as plain text and CSV files, inviting scholars to further expand and enrich it. The scripts and files used for creating and standardizing the data are also available in the Zenodo repository.

Just a Series of Misunderstandings? Assyria and Bīt-Zamāni, Ḫadi-/Iḫtadi-libbušu, and Aramaic in the early Neo-Assyrian State

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.