Military Tactic

After reading through Chapter 1 and Chapter 6, you get a sense of the vicious military tactics that the Assyrian armies, as well as other ancient Near Eastern armies, deployed in order to conquer their enemies. As mentioned by Joannes and during lecture, we see the Assyrian army committing several acts of atrocity, such as the beheading of entire groups and placing their heads on stakes for their enemies to see in their fear campaign. Likewise, Bahrani shows us the depictions within the art of the ancient Near East, which contains not only pictures of fearsome decapitations, but also the abduction and destruction of sacred monuments during wars. After wars were fought, the Assyrians would deport statues of the city gods back to Assyria in order to ultimately destroy the moral and identity of the conquered city. The identities of the city states were continually reconstructed according to the monuments, images, public rituals, and architectural structures (Bahrani 160).

Some wars are even fought over the abduction of monuments of Gods, such as Marduk. According to Bahrani, these statues were the manifestation of the gods in the realm of the human beings (Bahrani 165). Furthermore, he infers through the architectural sculptures depicting the careful deportation of monuments that the Assyrians did indeed believe in the cult statues' efficacy (Bahrani 170). An interesting point that I noted was the fact that people believed that when the statues were deported they were exiled from their land. Furthermore, texts from Nineveh and Assur comment on rituals where Marduk is seized and imprisoned (Bahrani 170). Even though Marduk was worshipped as the "king of the gods," he was so easily exiled and imprisoned by humans. There seems to be some discrepancy between worship and how humans view their relations with the gods.