"This book presents a new model for the cluster of ancient kingdoms that clustered around the northeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea during the Iron age, ca. 1200-600 BCE. Rather than presenting them as ancient versions of the modern nation-state, characterized by homogenous ethnolinguistic communities like "the Aramaeans" or "the Luwians" living in neatly bounded territories, this book sees these polities as being fundamentally diverse and variable, distinguished by demographic fluidity and cultural mobility. This conclusion is reached via an examination of a host of evidentiary sources, including site plans, settlement patterns, visual arts, and historical sources. Together, these lines of evidence lead to the awareness that this time and place consists of a complex fusion of cultural traditions that is nevertheless distinctly recognizable unto itself. This book thus proposes a new term to encapsulate that diversity: the Syro-Anatolian Culture Complex"--

The ceremonial centers of the Syro-Hittite city-states (1200-700 BC) were lavishly decorated with large-scale, open-air figurative reliefs – an original and greatly influential artistic tradition that has captivated the imagination of its contemporaries as well as that of modern scholars. This volume explores how Syro-Hittite monumental art was used as a powerful backdrop to important ritual events, and it opens up a new perspective by situating the monumental heritage in the context of large public performances and civic spectacles of great emotional impact. The first part of the volume focuses on the sites of Carchemish and Zincirli, offering a close reading of the relevant archaeological contexts. The second part of the volume discusses the embedment of monumental art in ritual performance and examines how change in art relates to change in ceremonial behavior, and how the latter relates in turn to change in power structures and models of rulership.

What do cities tell us about power? How does power shape cities? These are the main questions answered by a multidisciplinary set of eminent urban scholar in crisp articles on capital cities from around the world, from Buenos Aires to Tokyo, from Jakarta to Moscow. Focus is on contemporary cities and their manifestations and representations of power, though often with a historical grounding, and the collection also includes an example of archaeological urban analysis, from northern Mesopotamia. Through its variety of approaches by leading scholars of the field, and its variety of cities with their different histories and their diverse national contexts and political organization the book gives a uniquely insightful and easily accessible world overview of cities of power. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of Urban Sciences.

This book investigates the founding and building of cities in the ancient Near East. The creation of new cities was imagined as an ideological project or a divine intervention in the political narratives and mythologies of Near Eastern cultures, often masking the complex processes behind the social production of urban space. During the Early Iron Age (c.1200–850 BCE), Assyrian and Syro-Hittite rulers developed a highly performative official discourse that revolved around constructing cities, cultivating landscapes, building watercourses, erecting monuments and initiating public festivals. This volume combs through archaeological, epigraphic, visual, architectural and environmental evidence to tell the story of a region from the perspective of its spatial practices, landscape history and architectural technologies. It argues that the cultural processes of the making of urban spaces shape collective memory and identity as well as sites of political performance and state spectacle.

This book reconsiders the concept of empire and examines the processes of imperial making and undoing in Hittite Anatolia (c. 1600-1180 BCE).

Why does the West rule? In this magnum opus, eminent Stanford polymath Ian Morris answers this provocative question, drawing on 50,000 years of history, archeology, and the methods of social science, to make sense of when, how, and why the paths of development differed in the East and West — and what this portends for the 21st century. There are two broad schools of thought on why the West rules. Proponents of "Long-Term Lock-In" theories such as Jared Diamond suggest that from time immemorial, some critical factor — geography, climate, or culture perhaps — made East and West unalterably different, and determined that the industrial revolution would happen in the West and push it further ahead of the East. But the East led the West between 500 and 1600, so this development can't have been inevitable; and so proponents of "Short-Term Accident" theories argue that Western rule was a temporary aberration that is now coming to an end, with Japan, China, and India resuming their rightful places on the world stage. However, as the West led for 9,000 of the previous 10,000 years, it wasn't just a temporary aberration. So, if we want to know why the West rules, we need a whole new theory. Ian Morris, boldly entering the turf of Jared Diamond and Niall Ferguson, provides the broader approach that is necessary, combining the textual historian's focus on context, the anthropological archaeologist's awareness of the deep past, and the social scientist's comparative methods to make sense of the past, present, and future — in a way no one has ever done before.

An archaeological and art-historical study of the images and monuments of Roman 'client' kings in the Near East from the Taurus to Edom during the transitional period between 100 BC and AD 100. Kropp treats images and monuments as historical documents and aims at uncovering royal identities and ideological aspirations.