Why do you study the Assyrian Empire? The Assyrian Empire once dominated the ancient Near East. It was the first empire that instigated a number of policies that really focused on controlling wide areas of the ancient Near East. And so, I'm very interested in the kinds of social repercussions of these changes and policies. What kind of changes do we see in the landscape, and settlements, in policy by the governments, as well as economic changes. All these had major changes not only for the Assyrian Empire, but people who lived in the ancient Near East. And so, we see major transformations happening not only during the time of the Neo-Assyrians but even after. And so, it makes the Neo-Assyrian period a very interesting period to me. Well, of all the great empires of the ancient world, the Assyrian Empire is by far the least well-known, I mean, least well-known by people in general. I mean, there's so little about it. And that, of course, means is there's huge archaeological possibilities, and it's particularly fascinating with the intricacies of the cuneiform writing system. Because it's an interesting aspect of ancient history, not so well known as the classical world, and open to many surprises and discoveries. I started studying ancient Assyria sort of by accident because I knew always very interested in the ancient world and I started off studying ancient history. And I saw listed a course about the ancient Near East and I thought it looked strange- I didn't know very much about it. I discovered that its an area that I think, in contrast to a certain degree to many other areas of study in the ancient world, it's quite a new area of study and therefore it has a lot of space for new discoveries and new contributions, which I think its very exciting. Also my mom used to take me to British Museum when I was small and I really liked the Assyrian palace reliefs, the Kalhu reliefs and the Assurbanipal lion hunt reliefs so I think maybe subconsciously that had an influence. To know more about the individual personalities of the Assyrian kings: Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, Assurbanipal and their adversaries. For example, the arrogant Elamite King Teumman, who was beheaded in the heat of battle. I want to know as much as possible about these long dead Assyrian kings and their contemporaries. Well, I fell in love with ancient history when I was a child and my parents took me to England. I fell in love with ruined castles and knights in shining armour. And over time, I read about the classical world and then the Near Eastern world and I found Mesopotamia, in particular it's cuneiform writing system, which is sort of a mystery. It looks very peculiar and it sort of became a challenge to try and understand it. I like murder mysteries and so this was a different type of mystery. And then I found the Neo-Assyrian Period. And there's just so many documents. there's fabulous arts, there's a lot of archaeological material. There’s such a vast amount of material and very few people working on it. So that's where I ended up. So I study the Assyrian Empire because I am primarily interested in Assyrian literature, in the literature from the Assyrian Empire. It's one of the most important literary corpus from antiquity. The most interesting thing about it is that we're still reconstructing it. And so, I suppose the corpus of Greek texts or Latin texts that are pretty much frozen since they were recovered in the renaissance. We are still reconstructing little by little the corpus of literary text from the Assyrian Empire. I grew up not far from here in Salzburg in one of the most important Iron Age sites in Central Europe and that’s Hallein with the Dürnberg where Celtic noblemen were buried in tumuli with lots and lots of luxury goods, including things that they really didn't need like chariots and wine sets. And that was because at that time in the sixth and fifth century, the Persian Empire dominated, basically, the world and even in far-away Austria, the people who could afford it, modelled their lifestyle according to a court protocol in far away Persia. And when it came to looking for what to study, I always knew I wanted to do something to do with antiquity. And I had visited Syria for the first time when I was 17 and saw my first sights - mud, mud every where- and stories about what beautiful important cities those once used to be, and I found it very intriguing. So I decided to focus on the Middle East at university. I've studied the Assyrian Empire basically since I was 18 years old, and that had to do a lot with the fact that many of my teachers studied ancient Assyria in different ways. And I was so exposed to Assyria in my first year of university that in a sense, I was brainwashed into thinking it's the most exciting topic in the world. And I still do. My Latin and Greek teachers awakened my interest in ancient history at school. When I decided to study antiquity, history beyond the well known Roman and Greek past as well as field archaeology fascinated me. My first far-away excavation took me to an Assyrian site, where I excavated for many more years. The evaluation of the results got me around to study the Assyrian empire. As every assyriologist dealing with literary texts, I have studied texts from the so-called Library of Ashurbanipal from the tablet collection of the last important Assyrian king at Nineveh. I have dealt rather with Babylonian culture but we find pertinent manuscripts also in Nineveh. Specifically Assyria? I have dealt with the ritual of the substitute king. So when there was a bad omen which meant the king was going to die the king called himself a farmer - another guy was put on the throne and called king and this guy was put to death and the real king continued to reign because the king was dead. I also studied eunuchs at the Assyrian court so there are many interesting features which you can do studying the Assyrian empire. I'm interested in the neo-Assyrian Empire more from the point of view of the outside world than from the perspective of Assyria itself. Which is to say that I have done a lot of work on the peoples of the Zagros Mountains to the east of Assyria, who had intense interactions with the Assyrians - sometimes peaceful, sometimes under treaty obligation, sometimes being attacked by them. And also with the people of Northern Arabia who had similar experiences. So my perspective is more of that of the peoples, who were not necessarily subject to, but interacted with, the Assyrians on the margins of the empire. It wasn't that I had this intention when I was in second grade, I just want to be sportscaster. But once I had started to learn Hebrew, I realised that there was a whole world behind Greek and the Bible, and that of ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia. And Assyria turned out to be a particularly interesting area for, I would say, two reasons. One is that, in many ways, the Assyrian empire really shaped the world in all sorts different ways, including the fact that the political structures it implemented became the model for later empires such as Babylonian, the Persian, up to the Abbasid, and even the Ottoman empire. And the other one for me, as a scholar, was there’s such a vast variety of sources and so many of them. And it is an exciting challenge to deal with them and to try to turn them into history. So, for example, from the last 100 years of the Assyrian empire, you have royal inscriptions that give you accounts of the deeds of the Assyrian kings. And those, of course, are in many, many ways reflecting a rather ideological stance. But you also have the state archives of these very kings and letters written by spies, provincial governors, and all sorts of other people, to those very kings. And they give you a much more realistic picture of what was really going on. I fell in love with the lions, which are depicted in Ashurbanipal's reliefs of the lion hunt. That was my first year at the university when a lecturer showed us slides of Assyrian reliefs, which he photographed himself in the British Museum.
