160 Geoff Emberling
these are part of Assyrian royal archives. Because our data come largely from the
imperial center, the largest gaps in our understanding are knowledge of identity and its
politics at local levels, both within the Assyrian heartland, in the provinces, and beyond
imperial boundaries. Sustained archaeological study of these issues has begun only
relatively recently.
From City to Empire: The Growth
of Assyrian Identity
The early history of Assyrian identity is closely tied to the city of Ashur, located on a
promontory on the west bank of the Tigris River. Poorly situated for agriculture, it was
on a route leading east into the Zagros Mountains and west across the rain-fed agricul-
tural plains of northern Mesopotamia. The site was certainly inhabited during the third
millenniumBC, when a significant temple to the goddess Ishtar was constructed, con-
necting the city to ritual practices throughout Mesopotamia. The city had political and
economic relations with the Akkadian and Ur III empires (ca. 2200–2000BC), but the
extent of these connections is not yet fully understood (Neumann 1997; Michalowski
2009).
As an independent city after the fall of the Ur III Empire, Ashur had its own kings
and city government, and its merchant families began to establish trading outposts in
the cities of Anatolia (Larsen 2000; Veenhof 2008). As in other Mesopotamian cities,
kings of Ashur referred to themselves as “governors” ruling on behalf of the city’s god
Ashur, whose main temple was in the city itself. During this Old Assyrian period, to be
Assyrian was to be a resident of the city, and while this carried an implication of speaking
the Assyrian dialect (rather than the Babylonian of southern Mesopotamia or languages
such as Amorite to the west), it was not an ethnic identity.
The city was conquered by the Amorite king Samsi-Addu around 1800BCand was a
part of his kingdom of northern Mesopotamia extending from the Tigris to the Euphrates
(Grayson 1987: 59). Ideologically, Samsi-Addu portrayed himself as a ruler carrying on
long-standing Mesopotamian traditions. His building inscriptions in the temple of Ashur
are dedicated to the southern god Enlil, suggesting that Samsi-Addu attempted to replace
the city’s god with the traditional chief god of Sumer. Scribes of Samsi-Addu also com-
posed the Assyrian King List, a genealogy of Assyrian kings that originates with “kings
living in tents,” as Samsi-Addu’s Amorite ancestors would have done (Yamada 1994).
The Amorite roots of Assyrian kingship were contested by Puzur-Sin, who took the
throne of Ashur several generations after Samsi-Addu, and who claimed to destroy the
buildings of Samsi-Addu, who was not “of the flesh of the city Ashur” (Grayson 1987:
78). Nonetheless, the Assyrian king list with its Amorite roots became a legitimating
charter for Assyrian kings and was updated and maintained for more than 1,000 years.
It was not, however, until more than 400 years later, during the Middle Assyrian period
(Tenu 2009), that Ashur was identified as a territory rather than a city. In the intervening