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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.
2018 •
The Neo-Assyrian Empire was a complex political entity that controlled most of the Near East from the 9th to the 7th centuries BCE. This empire has been described in recent scholarship as having made a unique imprint on the regional landscape. This thesis is a re-examination of the archaeological evidence that explores the changes in settlement patterns that have been noted in surveys carried out in various parts of the Near East. It also examines excavation evidence from a number of sites in former Assyrian provinces in order to obtain a clearer picture of the rural landscape of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and to consider whether the Pax Assyriaca hypothesis provides a valid interpretative framework for the survey and excavation evidence. The thesis will reconsider the survey data from the Tigris-Euphrates Archaeological Reconnaissance Project, which was used to support the ‘agricultural colonisation’ hypothesis proposed by Bradley Parker, and compare this with evidence obtained from ...
The first ten volumes of SAAB were digitised at University College London in 2010, thanks to a UCL research incentive grant awarded to Karen Radner.
Nineveh. Papers of the XLIXe Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, London, 7–11 July 2003 (also Iraq 66)
From Ashur to Ninive: The Assyrian Town Planning Project2005 •
2013 •
This volume contains thirty-three chapter in which a wide range of methodological and interpretive approaches are brought to bear on data relating to the Assyrian presence in Iran, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Syria and Turkey. Analyses of environmental zones and ecofactual datasets, material culture and architectural traditions, the permeation of literacy and the use of para-literate systems form the platform for innovative and integrative evaluations on the diversity of local responses to the Assyrian expansion.
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A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient …
The Assyrian Heartland, in: D. Potts (ed.), A companion to the archaeology of the Ancient Near East, Vol. II (2012), 851-8662012 •
Bulletin of the American Society of Overseas Research
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The Archaeology of Political Spaces: The Upper Mesopotamian Piedmont in the Second Millennium BCE
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Time and History in the Ancient Near East. Proceedings of the 56th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Barcelona, July 26-30, 2010. Eisenbrauns.
Palmisano, A., 2013. Computational and Spatial Approaches to the Commercial Landscapes and Political Geography of the Old Assyrian Colony Period.2013 •
2015 •
Dans les pas des dix-mille, Toulouse 1995
The Assyrian Heartland in the Achaemenid periodUnderstanding Hegemonic Practices of the Early Assyrian Empire. Essays dedicated to Frans Wiggermann. (PIHANS 125). Edited by B. Düring
The Rise and Consolidation of Assyrian Control on the Northwestern Territories2015 •
A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law (2 vols)
Mesopotamia: Old Assyrian Period2000 •