The Burning of Captives in the Assyrian Royal Inscriptions, and Early Neo-Assyrian Conceptions of the Other

This paper is a study of the topos of the king burning captives in the Assyrian royal inscriptions. This punishment is notable for both its rarity and its cruelty, being the only time that the royal inscriptions describe violence towards children. I approach this topic in terms of Donald Black’s model of social control, in which the form and severity of social control, including violence, varies in relation to the “social geometry” that separates the parties involved in a dispute or conflict. I argue that in the royal inscriptions burning is inflicted on those that the Assyrians saw as “uncivilized”: peoples inhabiting poorer cities in mountain regions who lacked the infrastructure necessary to stockpile prestige goods, such as precious metals, and were separated at a greater distance from Assyria by “social geometry” than other foreigners. These findings provide a useful insight into Assyrian conceptions of the other and give a better understanding of the variations in the severity of punishments inflicted by the Assyrians on their enemies.

Playing with Peace: Solomon as the Man of Peace and Rest, and the Temple as the House of Rest

It is well-known that the notions of peace, rest and order belonged to the royal Achaemenid ideology, particularly from the time of Darius I onwards. This can be witnessed in Achaemenid architecture, iconography and royal inscriptions. However, although the relations between the Persian Empire and the Greek city-states were never completely peaceful, the diplomatic relations between Persia and particularly Sparta emphasised the value and importance of peace for international politics. How did this international discourse influence the literature formation in Yehud at the same time? In addition, can one read the Chronicler’s portrayal of King Solomon of old as playful (and undermining) irony and polemic against the imperial masters? In this article, I revisit an earlier study in which I have started investigating the rhetorical locus of the Chronicler’s portrayal of this king.

Buddhist Endowments by Śaiva Kings under the Maitrakas of Valabhī in Western India (5th–8th Cent.) and the Yodhāvaka Grant of Dharasena iv, [Valabhī] Year 326

The phenomenon of interreligious patronage on the Indian subcontinent in the pre-modern period is best attested in royal inscriptions recording religious endowments. It is striking that most pre-Islamic Indian rulers patronised priests, monks, ascetics, and religious establishments of multiple faiths. The personal religious affiliations of the kings often contrasted remarkably with the patronage patterns followed by them according to the testimony of their epigraphs. The strongest indication for the individual confessions of rulers is given by the religious epithets among their titles. While the ambivalent relationship between the personal beliefs of the kings and their donative practices has been repeatedly described as an expression of Indian religious “tolerance” or of the specific character of Indian religious traditions, this paper emphasises that there were several reasons for the dichotomy. This will be investigated on the basis of the epigraphic material of the Maitraka dynasty, which ruled in Gujarat from the 5th to the 8th centuries. The article also contains an edition and translation of the hitherto unpublished Yodhāvaka Grant of Dharasena iv.

War and Order in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt (1550‒1295 BCE)

Summary This paper studies royal inscriptions of the Eighteenth Dynasty—a period of extensive military activity in Nubia and the Levant—to examine the prevailing assumption that earthly wars were conceived as mirroring a cosmic struggle between order and chaos. Instead, the sources suggest a more intricate picture, in which royal prerogative and divine will are at play, often ambiguously intertwined.

History and the Kushite Royal Inscriptions

This chapter examines ancient Kushite perceptions and uses of the past that are featured in the corpus of royal inscriptions from the Second Kingdom of Kush, also known as the Napatan era (ca. 10th–3rd centuries bce), and it compares that corpus to previously published definitions of history as a genre. While most of the Kushite texts are retrospective in outlook, they also exhibit several features that differentiate them from paradigmatic Western examples of historical writing such as the accounts of Hecataeus of Miletus, Herodotus, and Thucydides. As a result, Kush is often portrayed as a prehistoric or ahistoric society in both scholarly and more popular literature. Nevertheless, the royal inscriptions of the Second Kingdom display at least four characteristics that are commonly associated with the writing of history: (1) commemoration of abrupt change; (2) explanation of human causality; (3) investigation of source material; and (4) presentation to a broad audience.

Law, Mercy, and Reconciliation in the Achaemenid Empire

The kings of the Achaemenid Empire are known for employing a number of particularly gruesome punishments for those who were deemed guilty of rebellion. While it is certainly true that the Achaemenids punished rebels with utmost severity, it is also true that they were, at times, willing to forgive rebels, and even to rehabilitate them. In this paper, I investigate the mechanisms by which the Achaemenid kings were able to show mercy to rebels. By examining a number of relevant cases from a period of a century and a half, I argue that the decision to be merciful was based on the king’s familial or social relationship with the rebel, the rebel’s relative strength vis-à-vis the king, the geography of the revolt, and the presence of other external factors which might also restrict the king’s powers. By a comparison with royal inscriptions and texts found throughout the empire, I demonstrate the ways in which these reconciliations stood apart from, and even in contradiction to, administrative and ideological norms concerning law and justice within the Achaemenid Empire. Finally, by reviewing the traditions and attitudes towards justice and mercy among the Achaemenids' Near Eastern predecessors, I put this policy in historical context and show that it is a unique response to a problem faced by other ancient empires.

Assyrian and Babylonian Sources

This article introduces the Assyrian and Babylonian sources relevant to the Old Testament historical books. The corpus of Assyrian sources consists mainly of royal inscriptions between the mid-ninth and mid-seventh centuries bce, pertaining to the period narrated in 1 Kgs. 16 to 2 Kgs. 21. In general, when the same events are described, the biblical accounts appear to be in basic agreement with the Assyrian sources, even though some episodes mentioned in the Assyrian sources are not included in the biblical texts and vice versa. It is plausible that the writers of 2 Kings had source-based knowledge of past events. In both cases, the historical information must be filtered through the ideological purposes of the Assyrian scribes as well as the deuteronomistic editors. The Babylonian sources confirm the conquest of Jerusalem in 597 bce and the forced migration of the Judeans, including King Jehoiachin and his entourage. Otherwise, there are no direct links between the Babylonian sources and the Old Testament historical books. Nevertheless, the Babylonian sources, especially those from Al-Yahudu, contain important information on the social environment and living conditions of the Judean population in a certain part of Babylonia in the sixth to fifth centuries bce.