by Eckart Frahm
Mogens Trolle Larsen, Emeritus Professor of Assyriology at the University of Copenhagen, is a specialist in the history and culture of the Old Assyrian period. His most recent book is Ancient Kanesh: A Merchant Colony in Bronze Age Anatolia (2015).
Mario Liverani is Emeritus Professor of History of the Ancient Near East at the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” He is former director of the Institute of Near Eastern Studies, of the Department of Sciences of Antiquity, and of the Inter‐University Center on the Ancient Sahara, in the same “Sapienza” University. He has received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Copenhagen and Madrid, is a honorary member of the American Oriental Society, and member of the Lincei National Academy (Rome), of the Academy of Sciences (Turin), and of the European Academy. He was a member of archaeological missions in Syria (Ebla, Terqa, Mozan), Turkey (Kurban, Arslantepe), Yemen (Baraqish), and Libya (Akakus). He is author of nineteen monographs and ca. 260 articles, and the editor of eight books.
Alasdair Livingstone is Reader in Assyriology at the University of Birmingham and a specialist in cuneiform scholarly and literary texts, especially from Assyria. His publications include Mystical and Mythological Explanatory Works of Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars (1986) and Hemerologies of Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars (2013).
Mikko Luukko studied Assyriology, Semitics, and Linguistics at the University of Helsinki and the Freie Universität Berlin. In 2004, he gained his PhD from Helsinki, with a study of “Grammatical Variation in Neo‐Assyrian.” Luukko is currently working on a research project entitled “Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti‐witchcraft Rituals,” directed by Daniel Schwemer at the University of Würzburg. He has published monographs and articles on Neo‐Assyrian letters and Assyrian grammar, including The Correspondence of Tiglath‐pileser III (2013).
Stefan M. Maul is Professor of Assyriology at the University of Heidelberg. His research focuses on Assyrian and Babylonian religion and intellectual life; over the past years, his main project has been the edition of the literary and scholarly texts from Ashur. Maul’s books include “Herzberuhigungsklagen”: Die sumerisch‐akkadischen Eršaḫunga‐Gebete (1988), Zukunftsbewältigung: Eine Untersuchung altorientalischen Denkens anhand der babylonisch‐assyrischen Löserituale (Namburbi) (1994), Die Wahrsagekunst im Alten Orient (2013), and Das Gilgamesch‐Epos neu übersetzt und kommentiert von Stefan M. Maul (2014, 6th edn.). In 1997, Maul received the prestigious Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for his research.
Cécile Michel is a historian and Assyriologist, Director of Research at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in the laboratory Archéologies et Sciences de l’Antiquité at Nanterre (France). She is currently heading the International Association for Assyriology (2014–18). Working on the decipherment and study of cuneiform texts from the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE (private archives of merchants, state administrative archives), she has published books and articles on Mesopotamian trade, Upper Mesopotamian and Anatolian societies, gender studies, daily life and material culture (fauna, food, metals, minerals, and textiles), calendars and chronology, history of science, education, writing, and computing.
Karen Radner is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Ancient History of the Near and Middle East at LMU Munich and Honorary Professor of Ancient Near Eastern History at University College London. She has published extensively on the Assyrian Empire’s political, administrative, social, legal, and cultural history. Her books include editions of cuneiform archives from Assur (Iraq), Dur‐Katlimmu (Syria), and Dunnu‐ša‐Uzibi (Turkey), an analysis of Mesopotamian inscriptions as “written names” (Die Macht des Namens: altorientalische Strategien zur Selbsterhaltung, 2005), and Ancient Assyria: A Very Short Introduction (2015), as well as several edited volumes. She currently directs the Peshdar Plain Project in the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq and, together with Jamie Novotny, the Munich Open‐access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative.
Lauren Ristvet is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include Near Eastern archaeology, the political transformations of complex societies, and ritual and performance theory. She recently published Ritual, Performance and Politics in the Ancient Near East (2014).
Robert Rollinger is Professor of Ancient History and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the Leopold‐Franzens University at Innsbruck. His main research areas are the history of the ancient Near East and the Achaemenid Empire, contacts between the Aegean World and the ancient Near East, and ancient historiography. Recent publications include: Imperien in der Weltgeschichte. Epochenübergreifende und globalhistorische Vergleiche (co‐edited; 2014), Mesopotamia in the Ancient World. Impact, Continuities, Parallels (co‐edited; 2015), Alexander und die großen Ströme. Die Flussüberquerungen im Lichte altorientalischer Pioniertechniken (2013).
John M. Russell is Professor of the History of Art at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. He specializes in the art and architecture of the ancient Near East, in particular the Neo‐Assyrian period. His books include Sennacherib's “Palace without Rival” at Nineveh (1991), From Nineveh to New York (1997), The Final Sack of Nineveh (1998), and The Writing On the Wall (1999).
Jason Ur is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, and director of its Center for Geographic Analysis. He specializes in early urbanism, landscape archaeology, and remote sensing, particularly the use of declassified US intelligence imagery. He has directed field surveys in Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. He is the author of Urbanism and Cultural Landscapes in Northeastern Syria: The Tell Hamoukar Survey, 1999–2001 (2010). Since 2012, he has directed the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey, an archaeological survey in the Kurdistan Region of northern Iraq. He is also preparing a history of Mesopotamian cities.
Klaas R. Veenhof is Emeritus Professor of Assyriology at Leiden University and a specialist in the history and culture of Mesopotamia during the first half of the second millennium BCE, the so‐called Old Assyrian and Old Babylonian periods. His publications include the books Aspects of Old Assyrian Trade and its Terminology (1972), Altassyrische Texte und Tontafeln aus Kültepe (1992), Letters in the Louvre: Altbabylonische Briefe 14 (2005), and part I of Mesopotamia: The Old Assyrian Period (Annäherungen 5, 2008). At the invitation of the director of the Turkish excavations at Kültepe (ancient Kaniš, in Central Anatolia) he has been working on the edition of some of the Old Assyrian archives found there, publishing, inter alia, The Archive of Kuliya, son of Ali‐Abum (Kültepe Tabletleri V, 2010) and The Old Assyrian List of Year Eponyms from Karum Kanish and its Chronological Implications (2012).
Shigeo Yamada is Professor of History at the University of Tsukuba, where he teaches history and languages of the ancient Near East. He is the author of The Construction of the Assyrian Empire: A Historical Study of the Inscriptions of Shalmaneser III (859–824 BC) relating to His Campaign to the West (2000), and the co‐author (with Hayim Tadmor) of The Royal Inscriptions of Tiglath‐pileser III and Shalmaneser V, Kings of Assyria (744–722 BC) (2012). He is currently working on the texts unearthed by the Japanese excavations at Tell Taban, Syria.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Shana Zaia, an advanced PhD student in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale, for helping me edit many of the contributions in this book, and for translating Chapter 18 from the German. She spent a substantial amount of her time on these tasks and suggested many important improvements. Nicholas Kraus, another graduate student in the department, standardized the writings of personal and place names and formatted the bibliographies. Christine Ranft, a freelance copy‐editor for Wiley‐Blackwell, reviewed the whole manuscript before it went to press, for which I am much indebted. Yale graduate students Jonathan Belz and Benjamin Scruton and undergraduate students Jacob Neis and Sergio Tang helped with the index. I am grateful to Haze Humbert, Wiley’s acquisitions editor for Classics and History, for accompanying the process of editing this book, and to De
nisha Sahadevan and Sakthivel Kandaswamy for helping carry the manuscript across the finishing line. Kathryn Slanski provided critical feedback on some of my own contributions to this book and kept up my spirits throughout the long process of its gestation. Finally, I would like to thank the authors for their willingness to contribute their time and knowledge to this project, and for their patience vis‐à‐vis various delays it has faced over the past years.
EF
Introduction
Eckart Frahm
Aims and Scope of this Book
Assyria was one of the great civilizations of the ancient world. It had a long and variegated history, with beginnings in the third millennium and various phases of growth and decline. During the eighth and seventh century BCE, Assyria became what many consider the first empire in world history, its borders stretching from the Persian Gulf to central Anatolia and from the Zagros mountains in Iran to the Egyptian Nile. The main beneficiaries of this unprecedented accumulation of power and wealth were the Assyrian military and administrative elites and, most notably, the Assyrian kings, who used a mixture of political cunning, military force, and administrative malleability to forward the Assyrian cause. Between 616 and 609 BCE, after a dramatic showdown with the Babylonians and Medes, the Assyrian state collapsed, and only vestiges of Assyrian culture survived. But the imperial structures built by the Assyrian kings provided a blueprint for the later empires of ancient Western Asia, beginning with the Babylonians and Persians. And Israelites and Greeks, while oblivious of earlier Mesopotamian rulers, immortalized in their historical writings their encounters with the great Assyrian kings (and a few queens) of the first millennium BCE. Thus, Assyria lived on, both in the political and administrative institutions of later states and, thanks to the Bible and classical authors, in the cultural memory of the Western (and Middle Eastern) world.
For a long time, this afterlife remained a rather shadowy one. Over a period of more than two millennia, the imperial cities of ancient Assyria lay buried under heaps of rubble, and no one was familiar any more with the languages the Assyrians had spoken and the literatures they had studied. It was only in the middle of the nineteenth century, when British and French adventurers, diplomats, and scholars embarked on excavations in Nineveh, Kalḫu (Calah), and Dur‐Šarrukin, that Assyria’s ancient civilization began to reemerge. In palaces, temples, and private houses, impressive examples of Assyrian artwork and tens of thousands of Assyrian texts came to light, the latter ranging from literary and scholarly works to royal inscriptions, state correspondence, and economic documents. Many of the finds uncovered by the European explorers were transferred to the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris.
Once the Sumero‐Akkadian cuneiform writing system was deciphered, an achievement of the late 1840s and early 1850s, scholars were able to embark on the long and arduous task of reconstructing Assyrian history and culture based on original sources. Their work has now proceeded for more than 150 years, with new discoveries requiring repeated revisions of earlier views and giving rise to new directions in research. The twentieth‐century excavations in Assyria’s long‐time capital Ashur, for example, and in Kültepe (Kaniš), a city in central Anatolia with a settlement of Assyrian traders, have given us a much better view of the earlier periods of Assyrian history, up to then largely shrouded in darkness.
Future discoveries and new scholarly agendas will undoubtedly advance our understanding of Assyrian history and culture even further. But the materials at our disposal are now so rich and so well studied that the time seems ripe for a volume to summarize our current knowledge and provide an overview of Assyrian history and culture throughout the ages. Except for a few excellent but very short overviews (e.g., Cancik‐Kirschbaum 2008; Radner 2015), there is, somewhat surprisingly, no such volume yet.1 The present book, with its thirty‐two chapters on Assyrian geography, history, and culture, aims to fill the gap. While obviously not comprehensive, the book seeks to provide enough information to help readers gain a more in‐depth idea of the rich world of ancient Assyria. As for those who wish to go beyond what the volume has to offer, they will find ample material in the “guides to further reading” and the substantial bibliographies that accompany individual chapters.
Assyrian Civilization and its Study: Some Fundamentals
Geography
Assyria can be subdivided into three geographical zones (see Chapter 1). Its heartland, situated east of the Tigris in what is now the northeastern portion of the Republic of Iraq, was demarcated by the cities of Ashur in the south, Nineveh in the north, and Arbela in the east. These three important cities formed what has been dubbed the “Assyrian triangle” (Radner 2011), with a fourth one, Kalḫu, situated in the center. Assyria’s closer periphery reached to the Cizre plain in the north, the foothills of the Iranian Zagros mountains in the east, the border with Babylonia, in central Iraq, in the south, and the Khabur valley in the west, in modern Syria. From the 13th century BCE onwards, and especially during Assyria’s imperial phase in the first millennium BCE, Assyria also comprised a further periphery, which stretched in some periods as far as Babylonia in the south, Elam in the east, and the eastern Mediterranean and even Egypt in the west (see Figure 0.1).
Figure 0.1 Map of the ancient Near East in the first millennium BCE.
Source: M. Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000–323 BC, 3rd ed., Malden, 2016, 8, Map 1.1. Reproduced with permission of Wiley Blackwell.
Sources
Our reconstruction of Assyrian history and culture is based on a plethora of sources. Of particular significance are tens of thousands of cuneiform texts from various Assyrian and non‐Assyrian sites, written by Assyrian scribes on clay tablets in Assyrian, Babylonian, and Sumerian language. Important to keep in mind is that their distribution, both in time and space, is highly uneven.
For the third millennium (see Chapter 2), the textual evidence is meager, and most of our knowledge about developments in the Middle Tigris region and Upper Mesopotamia in general comes from uninscribed archaeological sources. Much richer for the study of Assyrian history and culture is the textual record from the first centuries of the second millennium, the so‐called Old Assyrian period (see Chapters 3 and 4). Some 23,000 tablets inscribed in Assyrian are known from this time. Practically all of them originate from a site outside Assyria proper, Kültepe (Kaniš) in central Anatolia. The tablets deal almost exclusively with the activities of the Assyrian merchant colony located there and their interactions with their families in Ashur. We therefore know a lot about the socio‐economic conditions of the Old Assyrian period, the long‐distance trade in which the Assyrian merchants were engaged, and the individual biographies of some of them, but comparatively little about Assyria’s political history, even though there are a few short inscriptions of the Old Assyrian rulers of Ashur.
One source type first attested in the Old Assyrian period is the “eponym list,” which records in sequential order the officials after whom individual years were named. The Assyrians used this dating system throughout their history. Lengthy eponym lists, which together with king lists serve as the chronological backbone of our reconstruction of Assyrian history, are available for substantial portions of the Old Assyrian and Neo‐Assyrian periods, but not for Middle Assyrian times.2
The Middle Assyrian period (see Chapters 6 and 7), which followed the Old Assyrian era after a “Dark Age” that lasted from the 17th to the 15th century BCE (see Chapter 5), has left us fewer but more diverse texts, discovered in Ashur and a few other cities in central Assyria and eastern Syria. They include detailed royal inscriptions, political letters, administrative documents, epics, and scholarly texts from Assyria’s main urban centers, all of them important for our understanding of the history, culture, and socio‐economic conditions of the Middle Assyrian state.
By far the richest textual evidence is available for the so‐called Neo‐Assyrian period, which lasted from the tenth to the seventh century BCE (see Chapters
8 and 9). Particularly well documented are the roughly one hundred years from 745 to 631 BCE during which Assyria ruled over most of Western Asia. Thousands of often long and detailed royal inscriptions, and thousands of political letters, the “state correspondence” of the empire, found in Kalḫu and Nineveh, cast light on the political history of the period, while the roughly 20,000 scholarly and literary tablets and fragments from Assurbanipal’s famous library at Nineveh, created in the mid‐seventh century BCE, provide a detailed panorama of the intellectual pursuits in which members of the Late Assyrian elite were engaged. Numerous scholarly and literary texts were also discovered in Neo‐Assyrian Ashur, Kalḫu, and Sultantepe (Chapters 20 and 21). Thousands of legal texts, especially debt notes and sale documents, inform us about the social and economic history of the Neo‐Assyrian period and provide us with glimpses into the lives of non‐elite Assyrians, such as small traders, farmers, and slaves.
Texts written by other people in the ancient Near East also cast light on Assyrian history and culture. Examples include Sumerian economic documents from southern Mesopotamia from the 21st century BCE, diplomatic letters from 18th‐century Mari in eastern Syria, royal inscriptions and letters from the Hittite capital Ḫattuša from the second half of the second millennium, inscriptions in Luwian hieroglyphs from early Iron Age Syria and Anatolia, and Babylonian Chronicles from the late first millennium BCE. The reports on Assyrian history found in the Bible and the writings of Greek and Roman authors provide some interesting information as well. Though often historically inaccurate, they illuminate how the Assyrian state was perceived by less powerful neighbors and later tradition.
Attempts to reconstruct the history and culture of ancient Assyria cannot be based on written documents only. In fact, the material remains of Assyrian city walls, palaces, temples, and domestic quarters tell us a lot about the way ancient Assyrian city‐dwellers, whether rich or poor, lived their lives (see Chapter 23); and images on large artifacts such as bas‐reliefs or stelae or on small ones such as cylinder or stamp seals provide us with pictorial evidence of Assyrian deities and demons, the ways the Assyrians practiced warfare, and the urban and non‐urban landscapes they inhabited (see Chapter 24).