The Topography of Remembrance Quotes

“In the first part of the first millennium the surrounding lands, including Babylonia, were terrorized by the Assyrians. Their diplomatic policy of 'peace' involved deportation and demolition. ...Deportations totally disrupted life in the inhabited world in the first millennium. It was not enough for the conquerors to raze every sign of human habitation to the ground, not enough to cut down the trees and burn the crops in what today would be described as a scorched-earth policy; they disinterred the dead and denuded the earth by removing the fertile topsoil, loading it on to carts and taking it back home with the expressed aim of ensuring that, '...their name and that of the descendants, their remains and those of their offspring, should no longer be on the lips of humanity.' We know of 157 mass deportations undertaken by Assyrian dictators, by means of which they intended to do their utmost to eradicate any traces of the memory of their opponents; they were not content 'until nothing remained.' (pp. 47-48)”
― Gerdien Jonker, The Topography of Remembrance: The Dead, Tradition and Collective Memory in Mesopotamia