Assyria: 'Still an Unfolding Enterprise?'

As much as 3rd-1st millennium BCE Assyria looks separated from our contemporary baggage of ‘the East’ and ‘the West’; these divides in fact live at the heart of the disciplines that study Assyria in particular and the Near East in general.

The beginnings of Assyriology are intertwined with Biblical Archaeology in such a way that the quest for Assyria was in fact hand in hand with the quest for finding the ‘sinners’ as described in the Bible. Biblical stories were projected onto the landscape. With the addition of imperial, racial, political and Semitic/Anti-Semitic agendas, the views and studies of Assyria became the stage for a modern, artificial dichotomy between the east and the west (Diaz-Andreu 2007). From this sense, it is only fitting that Bohrer (1998) calls Assyria a ‘mirror’, one which was came to reflect the multiple, fragmentary and localized views of 19th and 20th century Western societies.

Studies on the reception of Assyria upon its post-Enlightenment rediscovery are crucial in this sense. Study of reception stands against all the assumptions of an ‘ideal’ audience; which is homogeneous, objective and unbiased. Bohrer’s study, on the other hand, clearly demonstrates the individual and socio-cultural lenses that our gaze is filtered through. Besides enabling us to think about the beginnings of Assyriology, this approach is helpful to the contemporary Assyriologist/Near Eastern Archaeologist as well: our own baggage has bearing about how we study what we study as well. Hence, the study of Assyria is ‘still an unfolding enterprise’ (Cohen and Kagan 2010), and will remain so as there are people engaging with its material culture.

Another striking theme that constantly came up through the readings of the first week is the initial struggle between Britain, France, Germany and the United States to be able to get a hold of the archaeological material. With different imperial, political, social, cultural and maybe also religious agendas; all these countries sent expensive campaigns to Mesopotamia, with the purpose of incorporating the material into their own museum exhibits. One point that is really striking about this process is how this was seen as a ‘national pride’ for these countries, although they were spatially and temporally removed from Mesopotamia.

Lastly, even contemporary studies as the ones we read this week doesn’t seem to fully succeed in removing the oriental lenses from their gaze. Bohrer’s (1998) generalization about the French men’s power over women reflected in the Delacroix Sardanapolus painting was in conflict with the post-colonial discourse that he was adapting throughout his paper. In a similar vein, Holloway’s (2006) discussion of Orientalism was short of successfully assessing the Oriental critique beyond Edward Said. Holloway (2010) was also harsh in his comparison between Britain and the US in terms of the reception of Assyrian material culture. His sentence “American popular culture made no such appropriation, because American national identity was not bound up with the decipherment of Akkadian and the acquisition of Assyrian antiquities, unlike one John Bull” is full of generalizations.

Maybe, then, it is time to search for a middle ground between all these generalizations and specific prejudices towards Assyria. Frahm (2006) called for such a middle ground that can recognize both the dark and the bright sides of Assyria. The trap implied here is evident: Assyriology shall try to go beyond modern biases, as well as Oriental and Colonial discourses. Escaping from these, however, it is easy to come to see and reflect Assyria as something that it was never before.

Works Cited:

Bohrer, Frederick N.; 1998.“Inventing Assyria: Exoticism and Reception in Nineteenth-Century England and France,” Art Bulletin 80: 336-356.

Cohen, Ada and Steven E. Kangas (eds); 2010. Assyrian reliefs from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II: a cultural biography. Hanover: Hood Museum of Art and University Press of New England.

Diaz-Andreu,Margarita; 2007. A World History of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology: Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Past.Oxford University Press.

Frahm, Eckart; 2006.“Images of Assyria in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century western scholarship.” In Orientalism, Assyriology and the Bible. S.W.Holloway (ed). Sheffield Phoenix Press, 74-94.

Holloway, Steven W.; 2004.“Nineveh Sails for the New World: Assyria Envisioned by Nineteenth-Century America” Iraq 66: 243-256.

Holloway, Steven W. (ed); 2006. Orientalism, Assyriology and the Bible.S.W.Holloway (ed). Sheffield Phoenix Press.

Posted at Oct 02/2011 05:50PM:
omur: Very nice piece Muge! I think that the generalization is a major flaw in a text that has any claims to be affiliated with the postcolonial discourse, since postcolonialism's main premise is about the historical specificity and the importance of locality --the task of taking notice of cultural encounters that geographically and historically specific and not stereotyped. On the concept of stereotypes, cf Homi Bhabha's Location of Culture. We should probably have spent some time on those stereotypes.