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Many scholars, in the U.S. and elsewhere, have decried the racism and "Orientalism" that characterizes much Western writing on the Middle East. Such writings conflate different peoples and nations, and movements within such peoples and nations, into unitary and malevolent hordes, uncivilized reservoirs of danger, while ignoring or downplaying analogous tendencies towards conformity or barbarism in other regions, including the West. Assyrians in particular suffer from Old Testament and pop culture references to their barbarity and cruelty, which ignore or downplay massacres or torture by the Judeans, Greeks, and Romans who are celebrated by history as ancestors of the West. This work, through...
The Conquest of Assyria tells what must surely be one of the most romantic tales of archaeological endeavour. The great cities and ancient palaces of Mesopotamia had lain buried for over two millenia, and were all but forgotten, half remembered in the Hebrew Bible and Classical texts. This volume records the dramatic finds, the decipherment of the cuneiform system of writing and the rediscovery of a lost civilisation.
This is a revised edition of the author's The Nestorians and Their Muslim Neighbors (Princeton University Press, 1961). Early in the nineteenth century, the Aramaic-speaking "Nestorian" Christians received special attention when American Protestant missions decided to educate and reform them to help meet the challenge that Islam presented to the growing missionary movements. When archaeologist Layard further publicized the historic minority as "Assyrians", the name acquired a new connotation when other forces at work in the region - religious, nationalistic, imperialistic - entangled these modern Assyrians in vagaries and manipulations in which they were outnumbered and outclassed. The study examines Western Christendom's current position on Islam, with emphasis on the Roman Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches. The revision draws on a wide variety of sources not used in the original.
Examining the relationship between the Iraqi state under the Baʿth regime and the Assyrians, a Christian ethno-religious group, Benjamen looks at the role of minorities and identity in twentieth-century Iraqi political and cultural history, based on new sources and bilingual voices for a nuanced and focused historical exploration.
Some scholars have doubted or denied the continuity of the Assyrian people from the times of empire to the present time. This work, based on a scientific analysis, sheds light on the subject, and demonstrates the continuous existence of the Assyrian people. Assyria, (northern Iraq), was a state grouped about the heavily fortified city of Ashur, on the middle of the Tigris River. Assyrians had become civilized in the third millennium BC, under the impetus of Mesopotamian development. They created the first empire known to history that was run by an empire administration. The empire created by Sargon Sharukin, much earlier in the third millennium, did not have an administration to hold it toge...
Assyria—the missing link in the superpower oppressor type in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament—still suffers from modern scholarly neglect. The Characterization of an Empire aims to alleviate this neglect while also elucidating the historical biblical books that convey characterizations of Assyrians. The narratological insights gained throughout this study contribute to biblical literary studies at rigorous, detailed, sometimes deep, and sometimes complex levels. Thus, this book offers to be not only a contribution to the general corpus of biblical literary studies, but also an expansion of our paradigms regarding the detail, depth, and complexity at which narratological intention and artistry function in the biblical text.
Was Assyria merely a more brutal, more uncivilized and less interesting offshoot of the culture created by Sumerians and Babylonians in Southern Mesopotamia at the dawn of history? Do the Assyrian reliefs that fill our museums give a complete picture of the phenomenon that was Assyria? Was the contribution of this people to world culture merely an incredibly effective military organization? The answers to these questions are sought here in this detailed book from 1963, referring to personal documents of the time, in the letters Assyrians wrote to one another rather than in the annals of the rulers.
For the greater part of the period from the end of the 10th century to the 7th century BC, the Ancient Near East was dominated by the dynamic military power of Assyria. At the zenith of its rule Assyria could lay claim to an empire that stretched from Egypt in the west to the borders of Iran in the east and encompassed for the first time in history, within the realm of a single imperial domain, the whole of the 'Fertile Crescent'. Mark Healy, covers the history of the Assyrians from their ancient beginnings to the eventual fall of the city of Nineveh.