Forced Migration in the Assyrian Empire, on the Periphery and in the Heartland

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From Households to Empires: Papers Presented in Honor of Bradley J. Parker" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Premodern states could and did reorganize the spatial demography of their domains. In the ancient Near East, the kings of the Assyrian Empire (ca. 900-600 BC) made grandiose claims in propagandistic inscriptions to have relocated entire kingdoms, and many thousands of persons, with their realm. The research of Bradley Parker demonstrated the spatial effects of these policies along the northern fringe of the empire, revealing them to have been more than just boasts. Because of political instability within the Republic of Iraq, these landscape questions have been impossible to address in the former imperial core. With the stability and openness of the autonomous Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq, Parker’s demographic models are now being tested in the Assyrian Heartland by the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey. Results since 2012 show a complex combination of top-down imperial landscape transformation and bottom-up local changes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From Households to Empires: Papers Presented in Honor of Bradley J. Parker   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22987