Politik und Kreigskunst der Assyrer.

• Author: Liverani, Mario
• Position: Review

By WALTER MAYER. Abhandlungen zur Literatur Alt-Syrien-Palastinas und Mesopotamiens, vol. 9. Munster: UGARIT-VERLAG, 1995. Pp. xv + 545, 2 maps.

In recent years, the publication or republication of Assyrian texts of historical relevance, such as royal inscriptions (especially in the RIMA series, edited by K. Grayson), letters, administrative and legal documents (especially in the SAA series, edited by S. Parpola) has made it possible to engage Assyrian history on the basis of a substantially enlarged and improved textual corpus. In fact, much historical work has been produced in recent years, both on problems of detail and on general topics, including the very nature of the Assyrian empire, the processes of its rise and the cause of its eventual collapse.

The book under review partakes of the recent trends and avails itself of the new editions. However, it also adopts a negative posture toward "speculations" found in the "Sekundarliteratur," advocating, instead, a direct contact with the ancient texts. ("Seit einiger Zeit wird zudem die Arbeit mit und an den Quellen in zunehmenden Masse dutch Meditationen tiber Stil, Ideologie und propaganda ersetzt" [p. 37]). Such a counterposition seems to me much too simplistic and not aware of the real achievements of modern historical studies on Assyria. The "secondary literature" Mayer bemoans is in fact based on the very same texts that he himself studies, and the best works in the vein that Mayer dislikes are themselves dependent on a much "deeper" reading of the texts than Mayer can imagine. (By the way, Mayer's book itself belongs to the secondary literature he scorns!) The real difference is that while a more conscious approach to history demands a refined and complex use of concepts and models, Mayer's approach is simply naive (of., e.g., at p. 38, on source criticism), with results that too often take the form of a trivial and useless paraphrase of the ancient texts. Mayer's explicit renunciation of confronting other "schools" and different approaches to the texts (p. 16) is something almost unprecedented in scholarly literature.

Unfortunately, the "methodological" premises, explicitly formulated in the introduction, are methodically applied in the subsequent discussion, which is largely a political and military history of Assyria, a true and proper "histoire-bataille," conceived on a pre-Annales level of historical consciousness, and with no attention paid to the works of other scholars...