J. N. Postgate

The land of assur and the yoke of assur

Abstract Assyrias role in Near Eastern history was first to create a territorial kingdom in northern Mesopotamia, and then to absorb into this state and its administrative structure virtually the whole of the Near East. This short article looks at how, in the exercise of this imperial power and in its terminology, a sharp distinction was maintained between Assyria proper and the foreign states which acknowledged her overlordship. After describing these two forms of domination, we turn to consider the implications for the archaeological record, particularly in relation to the flow of elite goods and artistic and architectural style.

Excavations at Abu Salabikh, 1988-89

The British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq returned to Abu Salabikh for a second season from September to December, 1976, and we must first record our gratitude to all those who made the excavations possible. As last year our thanks go first to Dr. Isa Salman, Director General of Antiquities, Dr. Abdul-Hadi al-Fouadi and all members of the Directorate without whose co-operation our work would have been impossible. To our representatives, Sd. Sabah Abboud, M.A., and Sd. Abdul-Mejid Muhammad, goes the appreciation of the team, both as a whole and individually, for their unfailing courtesy and assistance. Financial support for the excavations was given by a number of institutions to all of which we wish to acknowledge our indebtedness: the British Academy (Albert Reckitt Archaeological Fund), the Trustees of the British Museum, Birmingham City Museums and Art Gallery, the C. H. W. Johns Fund, University of Cambridge, the Manchester Museum, the National Geographic Society, Washington D.C., and the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. As last year we owe a special debt to Professor G. Gullini and members of the Italian Archaeological Institute in Baghdad for the hospitality of their superb dark-room facilities which they generously placed at our disposal. I should also like to record our gratitude to Monberg Thorsen A/S for a gift of cement which enabled us to add a kind of bathroom to our facilities at the site.

Assyrian Texts and Fragments

The John Rylands Library, Manchester (No. P 28, Box 22). Dimensions: 5·5 × 6·4 × 2·3 cm. Copy and photographs: Plates XIII, XIV a, b (the copy is traced off the photographs and corrected after collation).

The Governor's Palace Archive

A continuation of publishing the discoveries made at Nimrud by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq.

The Assyrian army in Zamua

The article of Manitius published in 1910 has never really been superseded: that is because it was based on the Assyrian royal inscriptions, which were well understood at the time and to which there have been few major additions (and those principally from before the reign of Assur-naṣirapli II). With new texts from Nimrud and new editions from Helsinki of the Kouyunjik archives, the time is overdue for a reassessment of the textual evidence for the composition of the Neo-Assyrian army. In any case Manitius only covered some aspects of military organization and he himself wrote that he hoped to publish a work which “would present the development of the whole military world of the Assyrians, exploiting the entire available material in literature and sculpture”. No doubt the Great War foiled these plans, and indeed there is still no comprehensive study of the Assyrian army which pulls together the evidence from both the texts and the reliefs. Two recent books on the Assyrian army have no illustrations (Malbran-Labat 1982; Mayer 1995). Yet the palace reliefs are an inexhaustibly rich mine of information which is always susceptible of further interpretation. The most important initiative in exploiting this resource and achieving Manitiuss goal has been Reades article of 1972, but the textual sources have improved significantly since then. This present article is thus a partial and belated response to his plea of a quarter of a century ago that “the epigraphists who are at present rewriting and re-interpreting” the administrative documents “will bear the evidence of the sculptures in mind” (p. 108).

Kilise Tepe 1994

The Goksu valley (Fig. 1), which furnishes one of the two main routes from Turkeys southern shore through the Taurus to the Konya plain and the rest of the central plateau, must be deemed one of the countrys national treasures. The clear turquoise ribbon of the river threads its way south-eastwards from high in the mountains west of Ermenek to reach the Mediterranean at Silifke, or rather at the mouth of the delta it has created to the south of the classical and modern town. The valley itself, however, is by no means uniform, nor is the road which follows it. Coming from the interior, the traveller leaves the Konya plain not far south of Karaman, and after a gentle climb to the pass at Sertavul, begins to descend thickly pine-grown slopes high on the eastern shoulders of the valley, with the Goksu itself glimpsed occasionally flowing far below. Dropping steeply down, leaving the monastery of Alahan high above one to the left, one passes into a very different landscape around the regional centre of Mut, Roman Claudiopolis (earlier Ninica, see Mitchell 1979). Here the Goksu is joined from the west by the Ermenek Su, and the narrow valleys of their upper courses give way to a wide, low-lying basin, where the stream has cut through one terrace after another, to yield a curiously desert landscape in which remaining patches of the geological terraces, harbouring olive groves and cereal crops in early summer, stand isolated from one another by high eroded scarps, whose steep bare yellow and white limestone slopes are studded only sparsely with pines and low evergreen bushes like prickly oak.

In Search of the First Empires

The correlation of archaeological evidence with political phenomena is notoriously difficult and has rarely been seriously addressed in a Mesopotamian context. Here the complex relations between the political and cultural regions attested for early historical times in ancient Mesopotamia are reviewed, and how they might be reflected in the archaeological record is considered. Two or three culturally defined regions (southern Mesopotamia, the middle Euphrates, and northern Mesopotamia) are recognized in the third and early second millennia B. C., and are compared with the political realities claimed in the public statements of ruling dynasties. Cultural homogeneity and political regimes of different kinds should have different archaeological correlates, and we should be looking for them. Such a comparison with the historical record may well suggest interpretations for the effective prehistoric archaeology of the formative Uruk period in the later fourth millennium.

On Some Assyrian Ladies

Legal documents relating to marriage have always attracted the attention of Assyriologists, and rightly so, since they throw light on the social as well as the legal customs of their time. Although the laws and contracts between them have permitted some detailed studies of marriage customs in Babylonia, the evidence for Assyria is much scarcer, and in his edition of Neo-Assyrian legal documents A. Ungnad was able to transliterate no more than four “marriage texts”, three of which belong to a single archive and are extremely similar in content. However, the excavations at Nimrud have made substantial additions to our documentation, and the time seems ripe to summarize what evidence is now available, and to present some which is new. The subject of marriage in any society is a complex one, and it is hardly necessary for me to point out that no attempt has been made to pursue the legal or anthropological implications of these texts. In the first place, the writer is not qualified to do this in either field, and secondly, it seems very doubtful, given the variety displayed by the texts in question, whether we yet have a body of evidence sufficient to warrant a more penetrating study. Nevertheless, it is clearly desirable that what evidence we do have should be readily accessible, even to the non-cuneiformist, and we hope that this medley will serve a purpose.

More 'Assyrian Deeds and Documents'

In a sense the present article continues the work of the Rev. C. H. W. Johns in publishing the neo-Assyrian legal and administrative texts from Nineveh. The majority of the new texts come from the excavations of R. Campbell Thompson at Nineveh, but in addition to these I have copied some small fragments from the older K texts, and a few pieces from the excavations of 1904 and 1905. Further, by the kindness of the authorities of the Ashmolean Museum, I have been able to include a single text, which is probably not from Nineveh (No. 1). No one would maintain that these texts, many of which are ‘useless’ fragments, are of great importance. None the less, I have copied every piece, since there is always the chance of a join to a larger published text, and since publication of even the smallest fragment saves later scholars the trouble of establishing its unimportance on the original. I have given transliterations of almost every one, and translations of most, in the hope that this will make them more accessible to the non-specialist, and prompt the specialist to study the texts more deeply in taking issue with my own interpretations. This journal has seen the publication of many similar texts from Nimrud over the past 20 years, and it is equally fitting that texts excavated by Campbell Thompson should find a place in Iraq , with which he was so closely associated.

The Place of the Šaknu in Assyrian Government

The legacy of the Assyrian empire consisted chiefly in the administrative structure inherited by its successors, and hence Assyriologists have always been conscious of the interest of the “army” of officials who appear in the correspondence and administrative documents found in the palaces of Assyria. In reconstructing this system the views of the Assyrian scribes themselves are obviously worthy of our careful attention, and a long-known “practical” list of officials, etc. from Kouyunjik (K 4395, hereafter “the Kouyunjik list”) has been joined by two copies of a longer list from Sultan Tepe (STT 382 to 385, hereafter “the Sultan Tepe list”). Although parts of each are missing, and their arrangement is far from consistent, both lists give an invaluable idea of how the scribes viewed the different professions and appointments, and, within their own limits, they are obviously meant to give a fairly comprehensive account. Moreover, and this is of particular importance, they are lists of Assyrian terms, composed freshly from Assyrian sources and not dependent on the Babylonian lexical canon. Hence there is a reasonable expectation that they will give a picture of the situation at about the time in which we are interested, and we may even be allowed to hope that the lists may have been “up-dated” in the course of their existence to allow for changes. This hope does indeed seem to be fulfilled by the individual entries, which coincide very well with the repertoire of titles and their Schreibweise as these are known from 7th century documents. In this article devoted to a single title, saknu , we shall have frequent occasion to refer to these practical lists, underlining their value to the “Neo-Assyriologist”.