grain and new wine.”^24 The deportation of many, though, was simply a form of
punishment, and their experience was of “hardship and bare subsistence.”^25
But it is possible to “trace the process of their assimilation into Assyrian
culture.”^26
Overall, the story of the Israelite deportation is not at all exceptional for the
period, which was characterized by a dizzying series of forced population
movements. The Israelite deportation, in historical context, was just one
among many such events and certainly not a standout story of the exile and
eradication of an entire people. No one was truly lost, no one was sent to the
ends of the earth. Like hosts of others, the Israelites—or rather, some subpor-
tion of them—were shunted from one zone to another as part of a broader
imperial political plan.
AssyrianOikoumeneand the Edges of the Earth
The geographical context within which the deportation of the Israelites
occurred, and was understood and recorded, shaped the story as one of
irrevocable exile. The story would come to be embedded in Assyrian geo-
graphy, ideology, and historiography as disseminated by Assyrian imperial
propaganda.
Imperial communications and propaganda were important tools in the
service of the Assyrian war machine. Assyrian rulers used these tools effective-
ly to present a view of control and homogeneity within their dominions greater
than what in fact prevailed. The Assyrian Empire was among the first to
employ such tools. The world to which the biblical authors reacted, and
which they largely reproduced, was the world of Assyrian propaganda, in
which Assyrian dominion and primacy were complete and unquestioned,
and it lasted long after the empire that created it was gone. Indeed, this
propaganda has misled a number of Assyria’s students. Earlier scholarly
perceptions of the Assyrian Empire as having effective administrative control
have undergone serious revision since the late twentieth century, and this
scholarship notes that the empire was not, in fact, particularly efficient in its
rule.^27 Yet all contemporary scholars agree on the effectiveness of its propa-
ganda, which succeeded over millennia in conveying an overly rosy view of
Assyrian dominance. The Assyrian claim to world dominance was “expressed
openly and clearly in titles, epithets, phrases, statements, and hymns.”^28 Most
famously, Assyrian rulers made use of the visual arts, erecting huge monu-
ments intended to convey the empire’s messages.^29 Assyrian ideology was
targeted at all and sundry in the empire’s orbit and beyond, for all residents