Addressing the relationship between religion and ideology, and drawing on a range of literary, ritual, and visual sources, this book reconstructs the cultural discourse of Assyria from the third through the first millennium BCE. Ideology is delineated here as a subdiscourse of religion rather than as an independent category, anchoring it firmly within the religious world view. Tracing Assur's cultural interaction with the south on the one hand, and with the Syro-Anatolian horizon on the other, this volume articulates a "northern" cultural discourse that, even while interacting with southern Mesopotamian tradition, managed to maintain its own identity. It also follows the development of tropes and iconic images from the first city state of Uruk and their mouvance between myth, image, and royal inscription, historiography and myth, and myth and ritual, suggesting that, with the help of scholars, key royal figures were responsible for introducing new directions for the ideological discourse and for promoting new forms of historiography.

This book will allow the reader to understand better the hidden meaning behind many passages in Isaiah. Many of the majestic prophecies of Isaiah contain a hidden polemic with the imperial propaganda of the Assyrian Empire, which ruled the ancient world in the time of Isaiah. This book explains the arguments found in many passages of Isaiah, including chapters 1-2, 6-8, 10-12, 14, 19, 31, and 36-37. In these, the prophet adapts motifs from Assyrian propaganda, while subverting Assyrian claims to universal dominion. He does this in order to promote belief in a single omnipotent God who is more powerful than any human empire. The book exposes the meaning behind these passages, as well as the history of biblical Israel in the period 745-701 BCE.

This volume examines the state ideology of Assyria in the Early Neo-Assyrian period (934-745 BCE) focusing on how power relations between the Mesopotamian deities, the Assyrian king, and foreign lands are described and depicted. It undertakes a close reading of delimited royal inscriptions and iconography making use of postcolonial and gender theory, and addresses such topics as royal deification, “religious imperialism”, ethnicity and empire, and gendered imagery. The important contribution of this study lies especially in its identification of patterns of ideological continuity and variation within the reigns of individual rulers, between various localities, and between the different rulers of this period, and in its discussion of the place of Early Neo-Assyrian state ideology in the overall development of Assyrian propaganda. It includes several indexed appendices, which list all primary sources, present all divine and royal epithets, and provide all of the “royal visual representations,” and incorporates numerous illustrations, such as maps, plans, and royal iconography.

The internal stability and cohesion of the Neo-Assyrian Empire to a very considerable degree rested on the public image of the King as an omnipotent earthly representative of God. Many elaborate rituals were designed and performed in order to promote this image and firmly implant it in the minds of the king's subjects, vassals and enemies. The corpus of royal rituals known to us includes a long series of ritual acts to be performed by the king in the temples of Assur, Istar and other gods; rituals performed during the New Year's festival and other seasonal festivals in front of audiences consisting of domestic and foreign dignitaries as well as common people; coronation, battle and victory rituals; rituals designed to secure the continuity of the royal line; a protocol for the royal dinner; directions for performing the daily liturgy in Assyrian temples, and so on. The present volume is a critical edition of all currently known Assyrian royal rituals and related cultic texts written in the Neo-Assyrian language. Many of these texts are previously unpublished or inadequately edited, and very few of them have been previously translated into English. They constitute an extremely important source for the study of Assyrian religion, cult and royal ideology and ancient Near Eastern religion and cult in general.

Neo-Assyrian religious imperialism was expressed by punitive measures such as "godnapping", and by the geographical focus and extent of the material support the Assyrians lavished on favoured polities. This work is devoted to Neo-Assyrian religious imperialism.

Excerpt from Aspects of Religious Belief and Practice in Babylonia and Assyria When the American Committee for Lectures on the History of Religions kindly invited me to deliver a course of lectures under its auspices, I hesitated at first for various reasons, but was led to accept by the consideration that the invitation would afford an opportunity to summarise in a popular and (I trust) a readable form the results of recent researches on some aspects of the religion of Babylonia and Assyria, in which I was privileged to have a share. The importance of the extensive omen literature of Babylonia and Assyria, very imperfectly known until a few years ago, is now generally recognised, and I feel that no apology is necessary for devoting two of the lectures to the two chief aspects of this literature - divination through the liver, and divination through the observation of the heavens. Both forms of divination have wide and significant bearings on the general history of religious rites and beliefs. Through hepatoscopy, a definite link has been established between the Euphratean culture and the Etruscan civilisation, with the Hittites, apparently, as the mediating factor. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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