Knowledge and power in the Neo-Assyrian empire

Eleanor Robson and Karen Radner

Department for the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge

Start date: July 2006

In the seventh century BCE the Assyrian monarch was the most powerful human being in the whole Middle East. Hundreds of letters and reports show scholars advising the Assyrian royal family on matters ominous, astrological and medical, often with direct impact on political affairs. They give an extraordinary vivid insight into the actual practice of scholarship in the context of the first well-documented courtly patronage of scientific activity in world history. This project will bring together on a single website translations and transliterations of all those letters and reports, and a wealth of material from our undergraduate lectures and seminars, as well as student work, to support our own teaching and to provide resources for colleagues in history of science and religion who do not have access to specialist libraries.

Aims

The PRS subject centre funded us to develop a teaching website on the relationships between intellectual activity and political power in the Neo-Assyrian empire (northern Iraq, 7th century BC) over the first six months of 2007, with a period of review and revision in May-June 2008. Most of the funds were to pay for the time of Ruth Horry, an experienced web developer at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge. Substantial amounts of Eleanor's time in 2007 were also funded by a term of research leave granted by the Centre for Research the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge.

Much of our undergraduate teaching is on the intellectual history of ancient Iraq and its neighbours, to undergraduates who usually have no ancient languages and (in Eleanor's case) little ancient history. We have thus been trying to build up good teaching resources for our students. As well as the usual problems of limited library budgets, we are additionally hampered by small print runs of expensive specialist works, often in foreign languages, which quickly go out of print. It thus seemed of huge benefit to us, our students, and colleagues in other institutions, to pool our material in a single website and to generate new resources that would be beyond the capabilities of either of us individually.

We designed the e-learning website to be usable in three different ways:

  • to support our class-based lectures, seminars, and discussion groups;
  • as a resource for self-directed learning and research, potentially accessible, engaging, and comprehensible to anyone;
  • as an adaptable set of tools for other university teachers to use in their own pedagogical settings.

Phase I (2007)

In September 2007 we reported that the following material had been integrated into a website hosted by the PRS Subject Centre but managed by us:

  1. Primary sources: 1400 letters, queries, and reports, encoded to Cuneiform Digital Library standards for reading, printing, and searching. Users can also select subsets of the material to view, through searches of substantial catalogue data.
  2. Secondary sources:
    • Teaching resources: eight lecture plans and eight seminar plans; ideas for essays and dissertation topics;
    • 'Essentials' background information: thirteen substantial illustrated essays of 1500–2000 words, often based on our original research, on the political and intellectual background of the primary sources;
    • Bibliography: a structured list of 170 relevant academic articles and books, of which 40 (some 24%) are downloadable as PDFs directly from the website (with the kind permission of the authors and publishers) or are available online through JSTOR or other repositories;
    • Glossaries: accessible definitions and explanations of over of 900 technical terms and the names of people, gods, and places'
    • Images: many original photographs of relevant images and objects from the collections of the British Museum (thanks to the generous assistance of Jon Taylor, Assistant Keeper in the BM's Middle East Department), original drawings of our own, and links to relevant objects in online museum databases;
    • Google Earth and Google Sky content: over 100 files of all the terrestrial and celestial locations mentioned in the primary sources;
    • As well as lists of links to other relevant sites, information about the project and the website, and detailed descriptions of how to access and search the primary sources.

Phase II (May–July 2008)

Eleanor and Karen both taught with the site during the academic year 2007–08, and concluded that no major changes were needed. Feedback from students and colleagues was also very positive. Apart from minor re-writes and technical fixes, in this phase we have added:

  • about 200 further primary sources from another three volumes originally published by the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, with the kind permission of the NATCP and the volume authors:
  • A. Livingstone, Assyrian court poetry and literary miscellanea (State Archives of Assyria 3), Helsinki 1989;
  • S. Parpola, Assyrian prophecies (State Archives of Assyria 9), Helsinki 1997;
  • S. Cole and P. Machinist, Letters from priests to kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal (State Archives of Assyria 13), Helsinki 1999;
  • improved translations of five astrological reports in the Letters, Queries, Reports section, and many new links to original technical publications via ETANA (http://www.etana.org);
  • high-quality photographs of about 30 of the primary sources in a new Highlights section (in collaboration with Frans van Koppen and the British Museum);
  • 262 new or updated entries in the People, Gods, and Places reference list;
  • 69 new entries in the Technical Terms reference list;
  • 12 new entries and many new links to JSTOR and Google Books in the Bibliography.

Classroom Use at UCL and Cambridge

In the History Department at UCL, Karen used the website as a self-directed e-learning resource in two undergraduate courses: Power and Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia (a second and third year seminar course, over one term) and The Ancient Near East, 1200-300 BC (a survey lecture course with accompanying discussion groups, over two terms). She also used it for her session in the core course for the MA in Ancient History. Several final-year and MA students chose to write their dissertations on topics that made extensive use of the primary sources and bibliography on the website. Undergraduate dissertations that were awarded first-class marks included: 'The role of scholars as special advisors to the Neo-Assyrian king' and 'The education of princes in the ancient Near East'. MA dissertations still in progress include: 'The emergence of cuneiform: the importance of writing to Mesopotamians and us', 'Sargon of Assyria and his officials in the provinces' (using the website's geographical data), and 'Unequal equals: international treaties between superpowers and city states in the ancient world'. Karen has noticed a substantial improvement in the quality of student work on the Power and Knowledge course since the website was launched, as students can now work extensively and confidently with online primary sources that were formerly accessible only in two library copies of an out-of-print book. Student feedback was very favourable. In July Karen was awarded a Provost's Teaching Prize for her work on the site, amongst other achievements, the only prize awarded this year in the Early Career category. The website was mentioned prominently in the oration at the prizegiving.

In the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, Eleanor used the website as the core resource in her final-year seminar, Letters, Queries and Reports from Assyrian Scholars. The students researched and wrote examinable essays on selected primary sources from the website, and made extensive use of the secondary resources on it too. Unusually all eight of the students chose to write the essay (one expects about 2/3 of them to do so) and almost all were awarded marks in the high II.1 and first class range. Topics were: 'The role of royal women in the correspondence of Assyrian scholars', 'Petitionary rhetoric: a comparison of two scholars' styles', 'Divination in military decision making in relation to conflicts with Mannea', 'Adapa and the fish-men sages', 'Ašipu: sorcerer, physician, holy cleanser', 'Extispicy and its practitioners in Neo-Assyrian society', 'Human and divine in medical diagnosis and prognosis', and 'Status, nationality and conventionality: the authors of astrological reports'. Like Karen, she noticed a substantial shift in the range and depth of the students' work compared to previous years in which the course had run. She also set the website as a self-directed e-learning resource for one or more lectures in her courses Mesopotamian Medicine, Science and Patronage in the Middle East, 700 BC-1500 AD, and Science and Scholarship in Mesopotamia.

Dissemination and Reception

In our interim report we listed dissemination efforts made during the first phase of the project. In this phase, Eleanor gave the following visiting lectures about the website:

  • 'Patronage, priests, and politics: contexts of Mesopotamian scholarship', Mesopotamia and the History of Science seminar series, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, October 2007
  • 'The geography of knowledge in Assyria and Babylonia: Assyriology meets history of science', TOPOI Senior Fellow's Lecture, Freie Universität Berlin, June 2008
  • 'Scholarship and power: geographies of knowledge in the first millennium BC, Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Universität Würzburg, July 2008

Karen spoke to sixth-form students at a UCL Taster Day on 'History and Empire', in June 2008.

We have had extensive anecdotal evidence that university teachers in Assyriology and ancient Near Eastern studies have found the website an invaluable addition to their repertoire of teaching and learning resources. In the UK, they include Frans van Koppen (Birkbeck), Frances Reynolds (University of Oxford), and Alasdair Livingstone (University of Birmingham).

Since the website went live in September 2007, it has received nearly 10,000 visitors, that is about 1000 a month, from almost every country in the world. A quarter of those were from the UK (about half of which were from London and Cambridge) and just over a fifth of world users are regular visitors. Much to our surprise, a large proportion of visitors are not from university cities, or even from countries with a strong academic tradition. Our aim of absolute accessibility thus seems to have been achieved.

We both also participated in a live broadcast of Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time on Radio 4 in May 2008, on the subject of the Assyrian library of Nineveh, resulting in a sharp spike in the website's access figures.

In summary, this project has not only enabled our teaching to grow, but has considerably raised the profile of our discipline, and our particular approaches to it, in the academic world and far beyond.

Future Directions

Karen and Eleanor will continue to use the website in their undergraduate teaching. All team members agreed at a meeting in May 2008 that the project should be continued and the website developed. We are currently exploring further funding options, which will to some extent shape future work.

Finally, we'd like to thank Costas Athanasopoulos for all the support he's given us this year, and for suggesting sources of further funding.