Ancient Assyrians: Identity and Society in Antiquity and Beyond

by Jonathan Valk

In this book, Jonathan Valk asks a deceptively simple What did it mean to be Assyrian in the second millennium bce? Extraordinary evidence from Assyrian society across this millennium enables an answer to this question. The evidence includes tens of thousands of letters and legal texts from an Assyrian merchant diaspora in what is now modern Turkey, as well as thousands of administrative documents and bombastic royal inscriptions associated with the Assyrian state. Valk develops a new theory of social categories that facilitates an understanding of how collective identities work. Applying this theoretical framework to the so-called Old and Middle Assyrian periods, he pieces together the contours of Assyrian society in each period, as revealed in the abundance of primary evidence, and explores the evolving construction of Assyrian identity as well. Valk's study demonstrates how changing historical circumstances condition identity and society, and that the meaning we assign to identities is ever in flux.

338 pages, Hardcover

Published October 23, 2025

Reviews

[Jack Naylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Valk is pretty theoretically strong on his theory of social categories and historically well-informed on the Old and Middle Assyrian material. I appreciated his ability to marshal a broad range of primary sources and to adjudicate some of the finer textual debates (this came out quite well when he sought a definition for Assyrian in the MA letters). His judgement that "Assyrianess" was less of a meaningful category in the MA period because it didn't align as well with the capital seams is not one I would wholly endorse, but his definitional work is exemplary nonetheless.

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a refreshingly well-written overview of how to think about social identity that is applied to Assyrians in the Old and Middle Assyrian periods. It includes many citations from primary sources from different genres and really brings to life Assyrian society in those periods. An unexpected treat!