Neo-Assryian history

This article offers new material and a new edition of a unique ritual text from the first millennium BC in Mesopotamia, which describes a ritual for increasing the profit of the innkeeper. One of the text-representatives is written on a tablet with a handle, which was displayed in a Mesopotamian pub, which had the character of a bordello. The new score text presented here is based on collations of all known duplicates and on new copies by M.J. Geller. The primary aim is to publish comprehensive copies, a reliable transliteration, and a translation. Additionally, a publication history and a description of the sources are presented. Furthermore, text and context commentaries will be offered, focussing on one of the representative objects, a so-called 'amulet-shaped' tablet, or tablet with handle.

As an urban oligarchy embarking upon an imperial project, Assyrian elites lacked an ideological roadmap for managing the cultural differences they encountered, or for preserving their integrity as a trans- regional class. If rank, prestige goods, and landed estates distinguished the imperial elite, they were primarily bound through their personal oaths of loyalty to the king rather than a shared class consciousness. Competition among elites is thus more visible in their correspondence than consolidation. “Confidence” was something the king conferred instead of the common possession of a self-affirming trans-regional elite. They therefore also were incapable of framing their relations with local, subordinated elites as encounters of groups, and the Assyrian regime appears neither to have valued nor to have acquired ethnographic capital.  The legitimacy of both imperial and local elites alike depended on royal confidence, a loyalty to the center that overrode all relations with the province—its sub-elites and subjects—that were necessary to ensure effective domination. Toward the end of their empire, the Assyrian kings began to acknowledge the autonomous legitimacy of local elites and the importance of maintaining their distance from the center. In so doing, they pre!gured the development of actual cosmopolitanism.

The discipline of philosophy was not invented by the Greeks, but was in existence elsewhere, and as far back as the middle of the second millennium BCE. It has its origin in ancient divine cult. The detail of its presence can be traced in the civilizations around the ancient Near East, and particularly in Assyria and Babylonia.

The Sacred History of Being  collects the key evidence together, and examines the idea of the divine as a philosophical concept in Greece, Israel, and ancient Assyria.

Published as an eBook by the Anshar Press, November 2,  2015. 113k words. Available from Barnes & Noble, Itunes, Kobo, Blio, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. More information available at: https://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/p/the-sacred-history-of-being-as-its.html