Assyriology

Jusqu’à peu, on ne savait pas grand-chose de ce royaume. On connaissait à travers quelques documents (Listes royales) l’existence d’une succession de souverains – une dizaine – qui avait régné sur cette principauté maritime de la Basse Mésopotamie, ce qui était bien mince pour couvrir deux siècles d’histoire, de 1720 à 1500 av. J.-C. !

The nature of the relationship between the Assyrian state and the Syro-Hittite states is often represented in the writings of archaeologists and ancient historians under the rubric of imperialism, Assyrian sovereignty, and the Syro-Hittite resistance, an unchanging formula largely based on center-periphery models. This structuralist model of fixed relationships is thus characterized as a firmly-set trajectory of power relations and a teleological narrative of conquest, ending without exception with the eventual and complete submission and subjugation of Syro-Hittite states to Assyrian military power. While Syro-Hittite states are represented as vulnerable and politically weak entities, the Assyrian state is referred as an “expansionistic imperial power” or “superior invading force”. Had they escaped direct Assyrian sovereignty, these peripheral communities were at least deemed “Assyrianizing” in their material culture. This a priori qualification of Syro-Hittite-Assyrian relationships as an imbalanced power distribution is an outcome of the preponderance of studies of Assyrian sovereignty with an obsession with the (cosmic) image of the sovereign in his visual and verbal manifestations. Secondly it is often assumed that the study of Assyrian imperialism has always operated through coercion and military violence. Alternative forms of engagement between the Neo-Assyrian state and the Syro-Hittite kingdoms such as diplomacy, political negotiation, trade, exchange of ideas, politics of settlement, land management, taxation or traveling craftsmen and circulation of technology and knowledge are much more rarely discussed. In this paper, I suggest that historical perspectives on the unchallenged Assyrian imperialism are often driven by the alluring, yet biased perspectives offered by the sumptuous, if not excessive corpus of Assyrian annalistic accounts, state sponsored texts, and imperial monuments. Therefore such perspectives prioritize short-term political histories of conquest and domination over other longer term and more horizontally distributed aspects of the past such as cultural practices, ecological histories, political landscapes, socialization, or material worlds. The historicist accounts of the Near Eastern past can be challenged and perhaps balanced by evidence offered by archaeological, material, and environmental research, which present alternative and often contrasting perspectives on these particular histories. Prioritizing textual evidence often leaves out the material flows, delicate negotiations of power, dynamics of trade and exchange and the politics of resource extraction. Attending to other forms of evidence allows us to reflect on the complexity of the relationships between Assyria and the Syro-Hittite states. In this article, I pay particular attention to such interactions and encounters that are other than military in nature, and give priority to material evidence that challenge standard imperialist narratives of Assyrian textual accounts.

Temples were nearly ubiquitous across the ancient Near East. Rather than serving as a gathering place for a worshipping congregation, a temple served as a terrestrial divine abode. In it, the god(s) lived amid society, yet carefully sequestered from it behind walls and doors. While primarily a residence, the temple also granted people limited access, usually for the purpose of divine service. The people believed that gods dwelt outside of the realm of human experience. Temples bridged the gap between human and divine, allowing regulated access to the deity, usually present in the form of a cult statue, and giving people the opportunity to influence the gods. Through this mutually beneficial interchange, the gods received the service they desired, while the people hoped their service would elicit divine protection and blessing. Protection and blessing, though, were conditional. The gods would remain and stay favorably disposed only if they were satisfied with their accommodation and service. Temples then, at least in theory, were lavishly and fastidiously constructed and maintained in order to keep the gods happy. This article focuses on the major temples, especially those from 1500–500 BCE, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Hittite Anatolia, and Syria-Palestine. The article also focuses on the structure and ideology of the temples, not the rituals performed within them. For the most part, biblical and Israelite references will be kept to a minimum, as they are numerous enough to warrant their own article. Too numerous to include, archaeological reports generally have been excluded, yet they are referenced in the works cited and may be found with a Google web search.

ISBN 978-619-176-205-7

This monograph is on the topic of my successfully defended PhD dissertation. The book examines the royal authority and ideology in the early Neo-Assyrian Empire (934–745 B.C.). Its aims can be summarized as follows:
1. Study of the reign of each Assyrian king of the period, his military and political actions, including the dynamics of contacts with the countries of the region, the goals pursued by him; and – for whom applicable – the relevant internal affairs and building activities.
2. Study of the Assyrian royal ideology in the context of certain motives, beliefs, and suggestions attested in the sources. 
3. Concluding observations on and synthesis of the exercise of authority, which led to the historical processes and political contacts in combination with the motives, beliefs, and suggestions of the Assyrian royal ideology.

In this study, I argue that the literary depictions and iconographic images of wings on various hybrid creatures are a means of depicting that creature’s association with wind and the cardinal directions, and that recognizing this correlation offers greater insight into the function and meaning of these creatures in the written and iconographic records generally. As such, I intend to add to our increasing awareness of the close relationship between textual and iconographic motifs in the ancient Near East. Furthermore, I contend that attention to the number of wings a creature possesses informs our understanding of the entity’s perceived cosmological abilities.

The King's Two Bodies- Reflexion on the Symbolic of Power

Among the so-called Mari Prophetic Letters, one interesting text (ARM X 10) reports a cheerful vision of the king's return. The king, as usual, is acclaimed by the soldiers, in a formal exhibition of loyalty. Incidebtly, the scene occurs on two larges boats blocking the river course. The narrative also mentions several insigna embedded within the military acclamations. Since the symbolic character of the omen is highly significant, I discuss the account through interpretative ethnography.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/716031

Babylonian hermeneutics has been the subject of several studies in recent years that have showed that speculative thought exploited the potentiality of the cuneiform system through analogical reasoning in order to find and create new meanings according to phonetic, semantic and graphic similarities. Analogical hermeneutics was prompted by the polysemic and homophonic nature of cuneiform writing and was intended as an inquiry into the cuneiform system itself. Analogical reasoning is also well known in ancient Greece particularly in Heraclitus producing semantic proliferation and ambiguity. A comparison between Mesopotamian and Greek sources shows that Heraclitus’ fragments share with cuneiform scholarship a similar epistemic reasoning based on analogy. The present contribution aims at setting the Babylonian epistemological system in light of Heraclitus' philosophy.

A full ten years  after its publication, here is the PDF of this book, drawn from a course held in Paris at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes - Section de sciences religieuses, by the kind invitation of Prof. M.G. Masetti.

REVIEWS: Dominique Charpin, Revue d'Assyriologie 103 (2009), 190; JoAnn Scurlock, JAOS 132 (2012), 313-315; Brigitte Lion, Revue des Etudes anciennes 115 (2013) , n° 1.

The Neo-Sumerian (Ur III) period is known for having produced tens of
thousands of tablets though, paradoxically, much of the history and culture of this period remains in the dark. One of these areas is the history and organization of the Ur III military. This dissertation is an investigation of selected issues and the terminology related to the military history of this period. It attempts to rectify the absence of monographic studies on this topic and to clarify problematic issues that recur in the secondary literature.  Chapter one introduces the historical background of the Ur III period, focusing on the available sources and their associated biases. Chapter two establishes the framework for a military history of this period by utilizing year-names and textual references to plunder, and teases out some of the problems involved in using this data. This chapter utilizes the vast administrative corpus to build portraits of the enemy toponyms mentioned in year-names and attempts to determine their organizational structure and political relationship to the kingdom of Ur. Chapter three discusses the primary terms for soldiers (eren2, aga3-us2, gar3-du) and the garrison system that was established in the periphery. It demonstrated that the taxes on garrison settlements (gun2 ma-da) exhibited an array of formats and utilized a multiplicity of terms; this aids our understanding of the political statuses of a number of foreign toponyms. Chapter four investigates the context of the messenger text genre and some of the military terminology found within. This resulted in the discovery that different provinces and their messenger text corpora dealt with different regions of the periphery. Additionally, it was discovered that foreign groups from the periphery traveled in greater numbers and with greater frequency than previously assumed. Lastly, selected military terms were investigated and some previous assumptions regarding their meaning were challenged.  This dissertation increases and redefines our knowledge of the military and political contexts of the Third Dynasty of Ur and provides a beginning point for further research into this area.

Eski Mezopotamya'daki inanışa göre tanrılar insanlar hakkındaki düşüncelerini çeşitli
yollardan mesajlar göndererek bildiriyorlardı. Gök olayları tanrı mesajlarını
okumak için birer işaret olarak görülerek incelenip yorumlanmış ve geleceğe dair
astrolojik kehanetlerde bulunulmuştur. Kehanetlere göre, eğer gökyüzünde olumlu
bir işaret görülmüş ise, yeryüzünde de olumlu bir gelişme meydana gelecektir. Tam
tersine gökyüzünde görülen olumsuz bir işaret de yeryüzünde meydana gelecek
olumsuz olayların bir habercisidir. Kehanetlerden anlaşıldığına göre gök cisimlerinin
her birisinin yeryüzüne etkileri farklıdır. Bununla birlikte mana bakımından
olumlu veya olumsuz göksel fenomenlerin birbirleri ile kombinasyonları belirli bir
mantık çerçevesinde yorumlanmıştır. Gökte meydana gelen değişken durumlar kehanetlere
konu olmuştur. Bu değişkenlerden bazıları: Gök cisimlerinin parlak veya
sönük olmaları, renkleri, birbirlerine yaklaşıp uzaklaşmaları, Ay ve güneş tutulmaları
ile fırtına gibi meteorolojik olaylardır. M.Ö. I. Binyıl ortalarına kadar astrolojik
kehanetler krallar ve ülke için iken, bu devirden sonra sıradan kişiler için de astrolojik
kehanetlerde bulunulmuştur. Astrologlar saraya bağlı olarak görev yapmışlar,
saray tarafından maddi olarak desteklenip saygı görmüşlerdir.
Anahtar kelimeler: Astroloji, Enuma Anu Enlil,, Yıldız falı.

This article will examine the occurrence of the " Vanity Theme " in Mesopotamian wisdom literature and elsewhere. However, the main interest of this investigation lies in the list of rulers or illustrious men of old which is manifest in a variety of wisdom " Vanity Theme " compositions. We will argue that it will not suffice to speak about the " Vanity Theme " in various literatures of the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean. We should try to identify a particular literary expression that is associated with this type of composition. We contend that this expression is the list or naming of " Early Rulers " that comes to serve as an exemplum to the basic assertion of the " Vanity Theme. "

Les neiges d'antan: " Gobernantes antiguos " y el tema de la vanidad en la literatura sapiencial de Mesopotamia y más allá Este artículo examinará la aparición del " tema de la vanidad " en la literatura sapien-cial de Mesopotamia y más allá. Sin embargo, el interés principal de esta investiga-ción radica en la lista de gobernantes u hombres ilustres de antaño que se manifiesta en una variedad de composiciones sapienciales con el " tema de la vanidad ". Argüiremos que no es suficiente con hablar sobre el " tema de la vanidad " en las diversas literaturas del antiguo Cercano Oriente y el Mediterráneo. Deberíamos tratar de identificar una expresión literaria particular que esté asociada con este tipo de composición. Sostenemos que esta expresión es la lista o denominación de los

In diesem Buch finden sich die Tagungsberichte des jahrlichen Kongresses fur Altorientalistik. In dieser Folge, mit dem Thema »Text und Bild«, fallt die ungewohnlich hohe Anzahl von Farbbildern ins Auge. Ausnahmsweise wurde die Rencontre von zwei Universitaten organisiert: Bern und Geneva.

The recorded family division agreement in a deceased estate encompasses a variety of
components, mechanisms and details ranging from elementary to lengthy and complex
ones. Moreover, the agreement is drafted in accordance with the contractual parties’
particular oral agreement and the scribe’s idiosyncratic inclusion of some of the detail
of the oral agreement. A specific methodology is devised in order to analyse the content
of the family deceased division agreements.Thus the aim and purpose of this content
analysis methodology is to simplify the analysis of old Babylonian division agreements.
In this article, special attention is accorded to the creation of a methodology, termed the
analysis model, for the analysis and study of the content of family deceased division
agreements. Within this framework, firstly the obligatory essential elements of a family
deceased division agreement are identified and then other aspects and elements of the
agreement are identified and studied in different groups, named the natural and incidental
elements, to reflect new perspectives on the division agreement’s meaning, purpose and
spirit in ancient Babylonian urban life.

Akkadian is a fairly well resourced extinct language that does not yet have a comprehensive morphological analyzer available. In this paper we describe a general finite-state based morphological model for Babylonian, a southern dialect of the Akkadian language, that can achieve a coverage up to 97.3% and recall up to 93.7% on lemmatization and POS-tagging task on token level from a transcribed input. Since Akkadian word forms exhibit a high degree of morphological ambiguity, in that only 20.1% of running word tokens receive a single unambiguous analysis, we attempt a first pass at weighting our finite-state transducer, using existing extensive Akkadian corpora which have been partially validated for their lemmas and parts-of-speech but not the entire morphological analyses. The resultant weighted finite-state transducer yields a moderate improvement so that for 57.4% of the word tokens the highest ranked analysis is the correct one. We conclude with a short discussion on how morphol...

The chief aim of this essay is to posit a well-known Mesopotamian royal and divine epithet, ušumgallu "great dragon," as the source behind Ezekiel's enigmatic description of Pharaoh in 29.3, hattannīn haggādôl, "the great dragon." This relationship sheds new light and meaning on an old problem: why does Ezekiel refer to Pharaoh as a dragon? Rather than viewing this prophetic expression as a pejorative, the cognate evidence argues for the converse by rooting it in an enduring tradition of regal titles. Replicating Akkadian ušumgallu (Sumerian UŠUM.GAL) as efficiently as possible and drawing upon Israelite cosmological history (viz. Gen 1.21a), Ezekiel feigned including Pharaoh within a venerable, long line of Mesopotamian kings and deities to receive this title. Instead, and as is characteristic of Ezekiel's rhetoric, he upended the putative associations of the "great dragon," thereby exposing its true subordinate position under the hegemony of YHWH

Establishing the correct reading of a hitherto misunderstood inscription, (re-)published in A. George, Mesopotamian Incantations and Related Texts in the Schøyen Collection (CUSAS 32; Bethesda 2016). The carnelian gemstone bearing the text turns out to have functioned as an amulet to prevent a curse from materializing.