"I Undertook Great Works"

Download or read book "I Undertook Great Works" written by Douglas J. Green and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2010 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditionally, scholars study ancient Near Eastern royal inscriptions to reconstruct the events they narrate. In recent decades, however, a new approach has analyzed these inscriptions as products of royal ideology and has delineated the way that ideology has shaped their narration of historical events. This ideologically-sensitive approach has focused on kings' accounts of their military campaigns. This study applies this approach to the narration of royal domestic achievements, first in the Neo-Assyrian inscriptional tradition, but especially in nine West Semitic inscriptions from the 10th to 7th centuries B.C.E. and describes how these accounts also function as the products of royal ideology.