Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East [Paperback]

This book investigates the practice of constructing cities in the ancient Near East, bringing together architecture and cultural history.This book investigates the practice of constructing cities in the ancient Near East, as both architectural projects and as aspects of regional politics. City building was an important component of how Assyrian and Syro-Hittite rulers of the Early Iron Age (ca. 1200850 BCE) constructed their political identity. This volume is a unique contribution in its field, bringing together architecture and cultural history with the study of antiquity in the Near East.This book investigates the practice of constructing cities in the ancient Near East, as both architectural projects and as aspects of regional politics. City building was an important component of how Assyrian and Syro-Hittite rulers of the Early Iron Age (ca. 1200850 BCE) constructed their political identity. This volume is a unique contribution in its field, bringing together architecture and cultural history with the study of antiquity in the Near East.This book investigates the founding and building of cities in the ancient Near East. The creation of new cities was imagined as an ideological project or a divine intervention in the political narratives and mythologies of Near Eastern cultures, often masking the complex processes behind the social production of urban space. During the Early Iron Age (ca. 1200850 BCE), Assyrian and Syro-Hittite rulers developed a highly performative official discourse that revolved around constructing cities, cultivating landscapes, building watercourses, erecting monuments, and initiating public festivals. This volume combs through archaeological, epigraphic, visual, architectural, and environmental evidence to tell the story of a region from the perspective of its spatial practices, landscape history, and architectural technologies. It argues that the cultural processes of the making of urban spaces shape collective memory and identity as wel!