Literary Representations of Assyria

Literary Representations of Assyria Synopsis

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.