This book examines popular and scholarly representations of ancient Assyria through both ancient and modern sources. The ancient sources include Babylonian, Biblical and Egyptian, while the modern sources include the well-publicized excavations of Nineveh in the 19th century, which captured the popular imagination of Christian Europe. In order to interrogate these representations, the reader is taken back to examine the scholarly and cultural allegiances of the ancient Greek and native Egyptian sources, then to Assyrian self-representation and finally to an interrogation of the cultural and scholarly allegiances of contemporary historians. Straddling Biblical studies, religious studies, classics and ancient Near Eastern studies, this book examines how popular opinion can be informed by scholarly orthodoxy, and simultaneously, how scholarly consensus often rests on cultural orthodoxy.

Autorentext
Anne Fitzpatrick-McKinley is Professor of Near and Middle Eastern Studies and Director of the Al Maktoum Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. She is the author of The Transformation of Torah from Scribal Advice to Law (1999) and Empire, Power and Indigenous Elites (2015).

Inhalt

1. Assyria's reputation in scholarly and popular discourse since the 19th century
   
   2. Empire in the Ancient Near East: a re-evaluation of the neo-Assyrian Empire.
   3. Assyrian Self-Representation: image and reality
   4. Assyria in Babylonian Representations: from the reign of Nabopolassar to the time of Berossus
   5. Representations of Assyria in Egyptian Literary Tradition
2. Assyria in Israelite and Judean Representation: the Deuteronomistic history and the prophets
   
   7. Assyria in Aramaic and later Judean/Jewish literary sources
   8. Conclusion: Towards a Reassessment of the Neo-Assyrian Empire
      Bibliography
      Index