“They Heard from a Distance”: The šemû-rūqu Paradigm in the Late Neo-Assyrian Empire
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Seth Richardson
Abstract
In its first 500 years, Assyrian imperial ideology was based on the idea that the empire was a monopole, a unique and ever-expanding core of order and right that continuously pushed back the borders of a disordered periphery, bringing new lands within the Assyrian state. Across these centuries, this precept resulted in virtually every encounter with other polities and peoples being described in terms of visuality and frontality: the enemy submitted on seeing the king, overwhelmed by his brilliant melammu, and bowed before him. By the late 9th century BC, however, the illusion of a monopolar world could no longer be sustained. Assyria began to come into (often second-hand) contact with numerous rival polities and peer states such as Phrygia, Kush, Dilmun, and Cyprus—places it did not, could not, and would never control. This new geopolitical paradigm formed a problem for Assyrian ideology, both conceptually and rhetorically, one that royal inscriptions attempted to solve through two new narrative tropes, often explicitly linked, about “distant” (rūqu) lands which were apprehensible through hearing (šemû) rather than seeing. As a historical matter, the hermeneutics of this rhetoric form a clear and demonstrable shift in literary style and topos in the last two centuries of the empire; but they further mark a change in mentalité, insofar as “the distant” emerged as a new ontological category of space which could not be integrated into the earlier imperial paradigm.
Abbreviations
- ARAB I-II
=Luckenbill (1927) (where marked by *=not yet edited in RINAP.)
- BIWA
=Borger (1996).
- Fuchs
=Fuchs (1994).
- RIMA 1
- RIMA 2
- RIMA 3
- RINAP 1
- RINAP 3/1
- RINAP 3/2
- RINAP 4
=Leichty 2011.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful to Gina Konstantopoulos for soliciting this paper. I also extend heartfelt thanks to Jamie Novotny, who identified numerous small errors in an earlier draft, provided additional references, and posed important questions; and the anonymous reviewers of another draft; all remaining mistakes are, however, my own. See the bibliography for abbreviations.
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© 2018 Walter de Gruyter Inc., Boston/Berlin
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- The Disciplines of Geography: Constructing Space in the Ancient World
- A Land with No Borders: A New Interpretation of the Babylonian “Map of the World”
- Hittite Geographers: Geographical Perceptions and Practices in Hittite Anatolia
- Assyrians Abroad: Expanding Borders Through Mobile Identities in the Middle Bronze Age
- “They Heard from a Distance”: The šemû-rūqu Paradigm in the Late Neo-Assyrian Empire
- Neighbors through Imperial Eyes: Depicting Babylonia in the Assyrian Campaign Reliefs
- Enemies, Lands, and Borders in Biblical Crossing Traditions
- The Center of the Earth in Ancient Thought
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- The Disciplines of Geography: Constructing Space in the Ancient World
- A Land with No Borders: A New Interpretation of the Babylonian “Map of the World”
- Hittite Geographers: Geographical Perceptions and Practices in Hittite Anatolia
- Assyrians Abroad: Expanding Borders Through Mobile Identities in the Middle Bronze Age
- “They Heard from a Distance”: The šemû-rūqu Paradigm in the Late Neo-Assyrian Empire
- Neighbors through Imperial Eyes: Depicting Babylonia in the Assyrian Campaign Reliefs
- Enemies, Lands, and Borders in Biblical Crossing Traditions
- The Center of the Earth in Ancient Thought
