Table Of ContentCulture of Defeat
Gorgias Studies in the Ancient Near East
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This series publishes scholarly research focusing on the societies,
material cultures, technologies, religions, and languages that
emerged from Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant. Gorgias Studies
in the Ancient Near East features studies with both humanistic and
social scientific approaches.
Culture of Defeat
Submission in Written Sources and the
Archaeological Record. Proceedings of a Joint
Seminar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
and the University of Vienna, October 2017
Edited by
Katharina Streit
Marianne Grohmann
gp
2020
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Authors ................................................................................ vii
Introduction ...................................................................................... 1
Katharina Streit – Marianne Grohmann
Lamentations 1 as Response to Defeat .............................................. 7
Marianne Grohmann
Why Was Psalm 79 Composed? ...................................................... 27
Yair Zakovitch
Picturing Defeat to Build Resilience: A Reading of the First Book
of the Hebrew Psalter ............................................................. 43
Danilo Verde
Doomed Prophets: The Function of Cult Officials in Times of
Destruction as a Literary Topic in Ancient Near Eastern
Lament Literature as Well as in the Book of Jeremiah ............. 61
Sarah Köhler
Lost the Battle? Three Case Studies of Military Defeat: Rewrite
History and Claim You Won the War, Ignore the Defeat
and Consolidate Power, or Pray to God ................................. 97
Danʾel Kahn
Defeat Literature in the Cult of the Victorious: Ancient Meso-
potamian Sumerian City Laments .......................................... 121
Uri Gabbay
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vi CULTURE OF DEFEAT
A New Hope: The New Year’s Festival Texts as a Cultural
Reaction to Defeat ................................................................. 139
Céline Debourse
The Sound of Silence: The Destruction of Babylon by Sennacherib
and the Babylonian Chronicles ............................................... 165
Yuval Levavi
Assyria in Egypt: How to Trace Defeat in Ancient Egyptian
Sources ................................................................................... 189
Felix Höflmayer
After the Flames Died Down: Defeat, Destruction, and Forced
Abandonment in the Bronze and Iron Age Levant ............... 229
Igor Kreimerman
After the Storm: Political, Economic and Socio-Demographic
Aspects of the Assyrian Defeat of the Southern Levant ......... 261
Katharina Streit
Indices ............................................................................................287
LIST OF AUTHORS
Céline Debourse
Department of Near Eastern Studies
University of Vienna
[email protected]
Uri Gabbay
Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near East
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
[email protected]
Marianne Grohmann
Institute of Old Testament Research and Biblical Archaeology
University of Vienna
[email protected]
Felix Höflmayer
Institute of Oriental and European Archaeology
Austrian Academy of Sciences
[email protected]
Danʾel Kahn
Department of Biblical Studies
University of Haifa
[email protected]
Sarah Köhler
Department of Old Testament Studies
Friedrich Schiller University Jena
[email protected]
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viii CULTURE OF DEFEAT
Igor Kreimerman
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research
University of Cambridge
[email protected]
Yuval Levavi
Department of Near Eastern Studies
University of Vienna
[email protected]
Katharina Streit
Martin Buber Society of Fellows
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
[email protected]
Danilo Verde
Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies
Catholic University of Leuven
[email protected]
Yair Zakovich
Bible Department
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
[email protected]
INTRODUCTION
KATHARINA STREIT – MARIANNE GROHMANN
War and conquest figure prominently in all disciplines of ancient
Near Eastern studies. They are usually reflected in textual sources as
military campaigns and/or narratives of victory, and are most com-
monly preserved in the archaeological record as destruction layers. In
general, it is the successful agent in a conflict, and his motivations,
strategies and methods that are the focus of analyses (Backer 2013;
O’Brien and Boatright 2013; Fagan and Trundle 2010; Shaw 1999;
Yadin 1963).
To date, little attention has been paid to the defeated parties in
such conflicts. This can be ascribed either to a bias or ambivalence, to
historical and archaeological records in which the responses to defeat
rarely constitute the focus of the source, or to an intrinsically human
preference to emphasise the ‘successful’ side of events. Thus, narra-
tives of conquest, innovation, growth and expansion reinforce or
even skew an historical account towards the successful party.
However, the defeated often experience much more significant,
often traumatic, and enduring impacts. Defeat events have wholesale
effects on societies, simultaneously affecting political, socio-
demographic, economic, and cultural aspects. They are thus what
one might perceive as ‘total social phenomena’ (in reference to
Mauss 1954), and are therefore an ideal means through which to un-
dertake an archaeological-historical analysis of a region. Reconstruct-
ing the agency of the defeated is critical to comprehensively under-
standing the course of history. Different response mechanisms
emerge, depending on the magnitude and type of defeat, and on the
cultural context in which the event is embedded.
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2 KATHARINA STREIT – MARIANNE GROHMANN
Some scholars have explored the responses of defeated societies
in more recent historical periods (the 19th and 20th centuries CE; e.g.
Schivelbusch 2001; Ginio 2016), but a similar approach is still lacking
for ancient Near Eastern studies. Cursory considerations of responses
to catastrophic events have primarily examined natural phenomena
(Berlejung 2012).
In a joint seminar of the Hebrew University and the University
of Vienna, held in Jerusalem on the 22nd and 23rd of October 2017,
delegates from the fields of Near Eastern Archaeology, Hebrew Bible
Studies and Assyriology presented aspects of defeat from the Late
Bronze and Iron Age Near East, up to the Neo-Babylonian period,
exploring (cultural) responses by defeated parties. Their individual
contributions utilised major sources from their fields of expertise,
such as biblical texts, Assyrian administrative records, royal inscrip-
tions and iconographic representations, and the archaeological rec-
ord, that focus on the responses of the vanquished. Seven of these
papers, as well as four invited papers, are presented here in extended
and updated form.
The volume intends to shed new light on the consequences of
and reactions to defeat, in order to ascertain a more nuanced and
complete picture of conflict. It further aims to initiate a more in-
depth dialogue between interconnected disciplines, from Archaeolo-
gy, Assyriology and Bible Studies, which far too often remain isolat-
ed from one another. Altogether, eleven chapters have been collated,
each examining different yet interwoven topics of defeat, be they
historical reconstructions, defeat as a literary motif, biases and mutu-
al influences of and within written sources, or archaeological evi-
dence of defeat.
Biblical texts that reflect defeat are mainly found within the po-
etic books: In her re-examination of Lamentations 1 in Chapter 1,
“Lamentations 1 as Response to Defeat”, Marianne Grohmann ex-
plores the literary composition and socio-historical environment of
this text, which pertains to the historically attested defeat of Judah
and the subsequent destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE. She draws
attention to how the corpus is defined by both the individual and
collective experience of this event, as well as a wider theoretical dis-
cussion of how trauma studies can be applied to the Hebrew Bible.
