“…In this case, however, the lower town appears to be an unambiguously Assyrian settlement, as indicated by, for example, courtyard buildings with pebbled mosaics (e.g. Matney et al 2009), similar to those found at Tell Ahmar.…”
“…In this case, however, the lower town appears to be an unambiguously Assyrian settlement, as indicated by, for example, courtyard buildings with pebbled mosaics (e.g. Matney et al 2009), similar to those found at Tell Ahmar.…”
“…The tell of Ziyaret Tepe contains multiple occupation levels, beginning in the late third millennium BCE and culminating in the Ottoman period (Matney et al. , 84). As the Neo‐Assyrian provincial capital of Tušhan, the settlement reached its zenith and spread to encompass the expanse of the mound, with habitation distributed across both the upper and lower towns.…”
Section: Case Study: Tušhan (Ziyaret Tepe)mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…These objects include Neo‐Assyrian ceramic forms of palace and cooking wares; administrative technologies like cylinder seals, stamp seals, and cuneiform tablets; and luxury items such as bronze vessels, semi‐precious jewelry, and carved ivories (Matney et al. , 41–49).…”
Section: Case Study: Tušhan (Ziyaret Tepe)mentioning
In this paper, political ecology informs a study of agriculture under the Neo‐Assyrian empire. Rather than examining cultivation solely as an economy of subsistence practices, this work considers agrarian laborers, activities, and resources as participants in wider political processes of empire‐building. Both material and discursive manipulations of agriculture are discussed in order to demonstrate the ways in which rulers of Neo‐Assyria instituted agricultural colonization in Upper Mesopotamia for political gain. An archaeobotanical case study from the provincial capital of Tušhan is then presented to provide a closer look at the impact of these agro‐politics on the people and lands in the provinces of the empire. Plant use studies from Tušhan capture the flow of power through agricultural practice, emphasize the Neo‐Assyrian monarchy's rhetorical use of agriculture in strategies of imperialism, and, significantly, reveal the shortcomings of the empire's agrarian program.
“…Settlement at Ziyaret Tepe began in the Early Bronze Age (ca. 2600 BCE) and stretched into the Ottoman period (Matney et al., 2009), but the site reached its zenith in the Neo-Assyrian period as the imperial provincial capital Tušhan (ca. 900–600 BCE).…”
Section: Tušhan a Neo-assyrian Provincial Capitalmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…These fields and pastures were the primary loci for agricultural production of the supplies to Tušhan’s treasury. Four phases of gate construction (Figure 3(b)) indicate that inhabitants used the Khabur Gate for the duration of Neo-Assyrian occupation (Matney et al., 2009: 61), up until residents abandoned the city in the face of potential attack by Babylonian and Median armies around 611 BCE (Grayson, 1975: 95, 53–55). Figure 3.(a) Plan of the Phase III Khabur Gate in Operation Q.…”
Section: Tušhan a Neo-assyrian Provincial Capitalmentioning
This article, which centers upon the Neo-Assyrian empire of the early first millennium BCE, presents agriculture as a field of political intervention and transformation in the creation of imperial subjectivities. As part of the expansion process into territories of Upper Mesopotamia, Neo-Assyrian rulers (ca. 900–600 BCE) relied on settled agriculture to produce and promote imperial subjects bound to the authorities for whom they tilled and toiled. However, archaeobotanical data from Tušhan, a provincial capital of the empire, reveals that people under Neo-Assyria’s control did not fully conform to the idealized agrarian lifeways construed by officials to uphold Assyrian power and dictate subject conduct. Evidence for semi-nomadic pastoralism at Tušhan exposes the slippage between ideal agrarian subject and actual agrarian practice in the Neo-Assyrian empire, wherein lies the contestation over politically oriented subjectivities and their instantiation through land-use.
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