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=> Parpola speaks....

Parpola speaks....

Posted by Tiglath (Guest) davidchibo@hotmail.com - Tuesday, August 24 2004, 0:56:22 (CEST)
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"The traditional picture that, I for one studied, is that of a brutal power which ruthlessly subjugated its subjects and neighboring countries. Assyrian culture is not a word usually mentioned in this context. In the recent years we are witnessing a change. I would say that the traditional position which is based on Assyrian royal annals and Assyrian palace reliefs was not totally wrong because it was conveyed to us by the Assyrians themselves, but it was awfully one sided and misleading. It's as if our own notion of the United States were founded based on the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War or its police function in South America. Today, we see Assyria in a more complicated and more many sided light. It emerges to us, above all, a country of nations, a multi national empire whose power, economic power played a decisive role, if not a more decisive role as military aspects. We know now that the empire did fight many wars, but most of them were very small scale, the army was not that big and most of the conflicts were solved by police forces, not by large scale interventions...The image of the Assyrians themselves has also changed. It has been known for a long time that the Assyrian king was the representative of God on earth. My own research indicates that this view was not limited to the king but also to the government, so that the Assyrian government portrayed itself or was pictured as the symbol of the heavens on earth. Reflecting this, the Assyrian high officials wore stamp seals which throughout display religious motifs, we see the tree of life, emblems of God etc., depicted on the seals. Most important of all, our picture has not under done a change only in terms of royal ideology, but we can see also a serious commercial power as archeological excavations carried out in Israel, for instance, have shown Assyrian economic involvement had dimensions that resemble notions that we have from modern powers that were not projected upon Assyrians previously." (Assyria 1995 - The Video, Dr. Simo Parpola, University of Helsinki)

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