Jessie DeGrado

"Authors of Empire: Assyria, Judah, and the Dynamics of Imperial Exchange"

In both the scholarly and public imagination, ancient Assyria looms large as the paradigmatic evil empire. Prior to the decipherment of cuneiform, the main sources for the Neo-Assyrian empire (10th–7th centuries BCE) consisted of texts written in the client states of Israel and Judah that were ultimately edited and preserved in the larger anthology of the Hebrew (Jewish) Bible. Although the decipherment of cuneiform significantly expanded our primary sources, it did not unleash Assyria to speak on its own terms. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Mesopotamian artifacts were removed from Iraq by European government appointees, who laid bare Assyrian palaces in the service of their own nations’ imperial ambitions. This context set the stage for the articulation of Assyria as prototypical Oriental despot. The primary scholarly mode of engagement with Assyria has hewed closely to this adversarial model through the present, with each generation of scholars remaking the ancient empire through the lens of contemporaneous geopolitical anxieties.

My current project offers a new history of Assyrian cultural interaction with its client states, taking Israel and Judah as a primary focus. These states provide a fertile ground for studying subject populations’ response to Assyria imperialism for two reasons. First, the Hebrew Bible still provides us with the largest repository of ancient texts that directly address Assyrian hegemony from a colonized region. Second, the ongoing cultural and religious significance of the Bible in Europe and America continues to color negative valuations of Assyria. Focusing on biblical texts thus provides a way to explore how religious commitments and aesthetic preferences actively shape our reconstruction of ancient history and to develop a new model for understanding cultural interaction under Assyrian hegemony. Ultimately, the book presents the intertwined histories of modern colonialism and ancient empire. It moves us beyond an established narrative that casts biblical authors as resistance fighters, showing instead the variegated ways in which biblical authors contested Assyrian hegemony even as they appropriated Assyria's articulation of a world empire.

Jessie DeGrado is an Assistant Professor of Ancient Middle East Studies.