History of Assyria

A. T. Olmstead was Professor of Oriental History at the Oriental Institute (today’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, West Asia and North Africa) of the University of Chicago, one of the main American centers for the study of ancient West Asia. This book is his synthesis of Assyrian history as understood in the early 1920s. One notable feature of the work is Olmstead’s desire to distinguish the particular history and culture of Assyria, in northern Iraq, from that of its southern neighbor, Babylonia: the two shared many cultural and religious features and used different dialects of the same main language, Akkadian, and so had generally been treated together by historians. By Olmstead’s time such disentangling was possible: Akkadian was deciphered in the 1850s, and since that time a combination of archaeology and translation of ancient texts had radically increased modern knowledge of ancient Mesopotamia.