My Brother’s Keeper: Assurbanipal versus Šamaš-šuma-ukīn

AbstractWhen Esarhaddon named his successors, he split the empire between two of his sons, with Assurbanipal as king of Assyria and Šamaš-šuma-ukīn as king of Babylonia. This arrangement functioned until 652 BCE, at which point a civil war began between the brothers. The war ended with Assurbanipal’s victory and Šamaš-šuma-ukīn’s death in 648 BCE. While Šamaš-šuma-ukīn’s death is mentioned in several of Assurbanipal’s inscriptions, it is still unclear how the king of Babylon met his end, and scholars have suggested theories ranging from suicide, assassination, execution, and accidental death. By offering a reexamination of the evidence for royal death in general and Šamaš-šuma-ukīn’s demise in particular, this article explores how possibly taboo topics such as fratricide, regicide, and suicide were depicted in Neo-Assyrian state texts and how Assurbanipal appears to have coped with his brother’s rebellion and death, especially as compared to Assyrian treatments of belligerent and rebellious foreign kings. This article argues that the relative silence around Šamaššuma- ukīn’s death is due to the fact that, while he was an enemy combatant, he was nonetheless a member of the Assyrian royal family and a legitimately-installed king. Overall, this article concludes that Assurbanipal uses several rhetorical strategies to distance himself from Šamaš-šuma-ukīn, especially invoking deus ex machina as a way to avoid even the potential accusation of fratricide and ultimately erasing his brother from the written record and Assyrian history.

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A mangled chime: the accidental death of the opera libretto in Civil War England

Early Music ◽

10.1093/em/can046 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 36 (2) ◽

pp. 265-284

Author(s):

A. Pinnock ◽

B. Wood

Keyword(s):

Civil War ◽

Accidental Death

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‘Adventurous Song’: Samuel Butler, Abraham Cowley, Katherine Philips, John Milton, and 1660s Verse

10.1093/oso/9780198183112.003.0012 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Margaret J. M. Ezell

Keyword(s):

Civil War ◽

John Milton ◽

Paradise Lost ◽

Royal Family ◽

Samson Agonistes ◽

Samuel Butler ◽

Epic Poem ◽

Katherine Philips ◽

Reward And Recognition

The decade after the Restoration saw the publication of several important works and collections of verse. Samuel Butler’s mock-heroic Hudibras satirized the civil war conflict, and although Abraham Cowley’s reputation was at its height, he lamented in his Pindaric odes the lack of reward and recognition for his hardships in the service of the royal family in exile. Katherine Philips’s poems were printed without her consent, and she was preparing an authorized edition when she died from smallpox. John Milton published his epic poem Paradise Lost in 1667, divided in 1674 to form twelve books, followed by Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes in 1671.

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What’s in a word? Your enemy combatant is my refugee

Journal of Language and Politics ◽

10.1075/jlp.12.3.04bea ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 12 (3) ◽

pp. 378-399 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Morven Beaton-Thome

Keyword(s):

European Union ◽

European Parliament ◽

Rhetorical Strategies ◽

Simultaneous Interpreting ◽

Eu Member States ◽

Guantanamo Bay ◽

Multiple Voices ◽

Enemy Combatant ◽

The Impact

As a result of the fierce controversy surrounding Guantánamo Bay detention camp, the process of naming, or lexicalising, the group of individuals detained there has become central in legitimising or challenging their detention. This positioning becomes even more complex when conducted in a multilingual setting where such lexical choices are also simultaneously interpreted. In this paper, a case study of a simultaneously interpreted plenary debate from the European Parliament (EP) on the potential resettlement of Guantánamo detainees in European Union (EU) member states is presented, with particular focus on the impact of simultaneous interpreting on the negotiation of contested lexical labels. After conceptualising plenary debate at the EP as multivoiced discourse (Bakhtin 1981), this paper investigates the rhetorical strategies employed in the process of overlexicalising Guantánamo detainees throughout the German and English original and interpreted versions of the debate. Interpreter response to controversial lexical labels is then explored, before instances of interpreter intervention in the form of lexical contraction and self-correction are analysed in relation to the ideological impact of such intervention on the multiple voices present in the debate.

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“Most Fitting Companions”: Making Mixed-Race Bodies Visible in Antebellum Public Spaces

Theatre Survey ◽

10.1017/s0040557415000046 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 56 (2) ◽

pp. 138-165

Author(s):

Lisa Merrill

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Civil War ◽

Social Class ◽

Mixed Race ◽

Public Spaces ◽

Rhetorical Strategies ◽

Crystal Palace ◽

Social Scripts ◽

Class Privilege ◽

The U.S

In the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War, free and fugitive persons of color were aware of the need to frame how they were seen in their everyday lives as part of an arsenal of rhetorical strategies to attract audiences to the abolitionist cause. In this article, I examine three spatial contexts that nineteenth-century mixed-race persons navigated for abolitionist ends in which their hybrid bodies were featured as an aspect of their public performances. These locations—Britain's imperially sponsored Crystal Palace, a Brooklyn church pulpit, and the dramatic reader's lectern—were not merely static places but were spaces animated and made meaningful by the interactions performed therein. Each framed a particular ocular and locational politics and strategically imbued some degree of social class privilege on the hybrid persons following its social scripts. But in so doing, each setting also reinforced colorism and contributed to notions of the supremacy of “whiteness” even while it furthered an antislavery agenda.

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Civil War in Yemen

The Arab World and Western Intelligence ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9780748698912.003.0006 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Dina Rezk

Keyword(s):

Saudi Arabia ◽

Civil War ◽

Arab World ◽

Master Plan ◽

Royal Family ◽

Guerrilla War ◽

Army Officers ◽

Proxy War ◽

Anglo American

In September 1962, a group of army officers led by Colonel Abdullah al Sallal overthrew the Hamid’Ud’Din royal family in Yemen. The coup provided just the occasion for Nasser to re-establish his credibility abroad as the vanguard of Arab revolution. Nasser immediately sent Egyptian troops to bolster the republican revolutionaries led by Sallal. They began a guerrilla war against royalist forces loyal to the deposed Imamate which was propped up by Saudi Arabia and the British. The Yemeni conflict quickly became a proxy war between these rival interests, causing a rift in the Anglo-American alliance and symbolising the division between ‘traditional’ dynasties against the ‘progressive’ republics in the Arab world. Analysts recognised that Nasser had no blueprint or master plan for revolution in Yemen and that he had underestimated the commitment the conflict would entail. Bound by his ‘face’ as the leader of Arab revolution, he was compelled to maintain support for the republicans despite the unassailable stalemate that ensued. Nevertheless, Nasser’s determination to capitalise on the protracted British withdrawal from Aden led to a revival of widespread hostility towards the nationalist.

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