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Reviewed by:
  • The Neo-Assyrian Empire in the Southwest: Imperial Domination and Its Consequences by Avraham Faust
  • Gunnar Lehmann
The Neo-Assyrian Empire in the Southwest: Imperial Domination and Its Consequences. By Avraham Faust.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xiii + 373, illus., maps (some color). Hardback, $115. ISBN: 978-0-19-884163-0.

Recent years have seen the publication of several comprehensive studies regarding the archaeology of the Assyrian Empire. Focusing on the western parts of the empire, I would like to point out only a few of these, such as the volume edited by S. Hasegawa and K. Radner in 2020 on the Reach of the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires; the conference on imperial connections authored by K. Gavagnin and R. Palermo in 2020; B. Düring’s Imperialisation of Assyria (2020); and the study of the Provincial Archaeology of the Assyrian Empire, edited by J. MacGinnis, D. Wicke, and T. Greenfield (2016). Avraham Faust, the author of the publication reviewed here, and S. Z. Aster edited an earlier volume entitled The Southern Levant under Assyrian Domination (2018), which is now followed by Faust’s monograph, The Neo-Assyrian Empire in the Southwest, reviewed here. By use of the term “Southwest” the author aims at a comprehensive discussion of the Assyrian domination of the southern Levant, that is, modern Israel and Palestine.

Avraham Faust is one of the most prolific archaeologists in Israel and a professor at Bar-Ilan University. He has written and edited numerous books and articles on various topics of the archaeology of the southern Levant and is doubtless one of the most influential archaeologists in Israel at the current juncture. Not surprisingly, given the deep political and ideological divides in the modern State of Israel, Faust has become one of its most debated and controversial scholars. Notably, he is one of the few archaeologists in modern Israel who focuses explicitly on anthropological, sociological, and economic questions regarding ancient Israel. While many scholars discuss such questions based on ancient texts, Faust emphasizes the potential of archaeology and material-culture studies to contribute to this discourse. His study on the Assyrian Empire in the southern Levant is the sum of many years of research, some of which was already previously published in a number of articles. As a result of the still quite isolated situation of the State of Israel in the Middle East, Israeli archaeology in general, and this volume in particular, focuses almost exclusively on archaeological research in Israel and the Occupied Territories.

Faust’s book consists of 11 chapters including an introduction (Ch. 1) and an epilogue (Ch. 11). The Introduction sets the stage, placing the book in the context of current research, detailing the periods discussed in it, and laying out the structure of the book. The Introduction includes a discussion of historical forms of imperialism stemming from authors like Sinopoli, Altaweel, or Mann. Discussing the specific historical expressions of Assyrian imperialism, Faust mentions scholars such as Liverani, Parker, Radner, and others. Düring’s (2020) work is not included in this discussion, probably because it was published too recently for Faust to have incorporated it. While Faust accepts Postgate’s (2007) conclusion that the Assyrian administration was essentially not bureaucratic with an almost “invisible hierarchy,” he never discusses in any depth the concept of the patrimonial empire as outlined by Eisenstadt (1969), and Herrmann (2011). Herrmann’s important thesis, and some of her relevant papers, are not even mentioned by Faust. Assyria’s lack of abilities [End Page 299] to control the Mediterranean Sea is mentioned in passing, but this aspect is never fully evaluated and discussed against Faust’s reconstruction of the economy of the southern Levant under Assyrian rule.

The Introduction reviews aspects of the absolute and relative chronology of the Assyrian period in the southern Levant as well. Faust correctly presents one of the main archaeological problems of studying the Assyrians in the southern Levant, the lack of sufficient resolution by which to date relevant archaeological contexts in necessary detail. Despite the many excavations in Israel and the remarkable density of research and research institutions, it remains difficult to distinguish the material culture of the eighth century BCE...

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