2019/09/30 by Jessie DeGrado · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Ancient Near East History #Eurasian Exchange Networks #Islamic Studies and History #Empire #Diversity (politics) #Rhetoric #Tribute #History #Depiction #Literature #Sociology #Art #Ancient history #Anthropology #Philosophy #Art history #Theology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/irq.2019.8
openalex publication_date 2019/09/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/22
Recent studies of cultural interaction in the Assyrian empire have focused on the process of assimilation and the production of alterity. In this article, I argue that Assyrian royal rhetoric goes beyond emphasizing simple difference, instead using depictions of cultural diversity to demonstrate the truly universal nature of the empire. I elucidate this rhetoric by comparison the world fairs of the 19th and early 20th-centuries. These fairs advanced European imperialism by allowing visitors to explore the vast extent of empire. I argue that the enumeration of exotic tribute in Assyrian texts and the iconographic depiction of foreigners on reliefs similarly served to concretize Assyrian power. Unlike modern European empires, however, Assyrians did not consider ethnicity to be constitutive of citizenship. Thus, while the Assyrian approach to diversity was certainly instrumentalizing, it was also inclusive of cultural difference. In this respect, the Assyrian understanding of human diversity shares much in common with the way the empire treated other types of difference, ranging from topographic variation to biodiversity. From the imperial vantage point, each of these elements had the potential to be tamed in a way that highlighted the control of the king over the four quarters of the world.