Addressing the relationship between religion and ideology and drawing on a range of literary
ritual and visual sources this book reconstructs the cultural discourse of Assyria from the
third through the first millennium BCE. Ideology is delineated here as a subdiscourse of
religion rather than as an independent category anchoring it firmly within the religious world
view. Tracing Assur's cultural interaction with the south on the one hand and with the
Syro-Anatolian horizon on the other this volume articulates a northern cultural discourse that
even while interacting with southern Mesopotamian tradition managed to maintain its own
identity. It also follows the development of tropes and iconic images from the first city state
of Uruk and their mouvance between myth image and royal inscription historiography and myth
and myth and ritual suggesting that with the help of scholars key royal figures were
responsible for introducing new directions for the ideological discourse and for promoting new
forms of historiography.
