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Further Reading
There is no one volume that discusses the history and archaeology of the third millennium BCE. Recent archaeological information can be found in Akkermans and Schwartz 2003, Cooper 2006, Ur 2010, and Lebeau 2011, while Kuhrt 1995 and Van de Mieroop 2007 provide further historical information. Several o
f the articles in Sasson 1995 elaborate on a number of subjects introduced here.
Notes
1 A similar rejection of religious ideology has been hypothesized for Southern Mesopotamia and may be illustrated by the abandonment of the Uruk IV Eanna Temple complex (Staubwasser and Weiss 2006).
2 Subartu is a geographical term that is used both generally for the area to the “North” (of Sumer and Akkad) and more narrowly, to refer to the area of the East Tigris in the dry‐farming region. For discussion, see Sallaberger 2007, fn. 24, Steinkeller 1993: 77, Weiss 1986, and Michalowski 1986.
CHAPTER 3
The Old Assyrian Period (20th–18th Century BCE)
Klaas R. Veenhof
The Old Assyrian Period began when Ashur, around 2025 BCE, became independent after the empire of the Third Dynasty of Ur had lost control of its “periphery,” in the northwestern edge of which Ashur was located. The local elite presumably took control, somehow a local ruler emerged, and the city‐state Ashur was born; Assyria as a territorial state only took shape centuries later. How long this period lasted depends on the definition of “Old Assyrian.” If one equates it with the period during which the “native,” so‐called Old Assyrian “Puzur‐Aššur dynasty” ruled, it lasted until 1809 BCE, when the Amorite king Šamši‐Adad took the city. But we may include the 18th century BCE, because the essence of Ashur’s cultural identity and political institutions, described below, somehow survived this conquest, although in recognition of certain differences and developments we may call it the “Later Old Assyrian Period.” The basis for such distinctions, however, also with regard to what this volume calls the “Transition Period” (17th–16th century BCE), is weak because we do not really know what happened after 1760 BCE.
Sources, Rulers, and Chronology
