Center for Ancient Studies

Speaker: Dr. Karen Radner, Alexander von Humboldt Chair for the Ancient History of the Near and Middle East, LMU Munich 

The 19th Annual Leon Levy Lecture is presented by the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU. It will be held on Monday, December 1st 2025 from 5:30pm to 8pm in the ISAW Lecture Hall. Registration for this event is required (Link Here).

Abstract:

“In the 10th century BCE, the formerly grand kingdom of Assyria consisted only of what is today northern Iraq and centered on the three cities Assur, Nineveh (modern Mosul) and Arbela (modern Erbil). The loss of its much more extensive territories a century earlier was keenly felt by king and court, and this lecture focuses on the political discourse of that time and in the decades of conquest that followed. We analyse how that conquest was deliberately framed as the moral obligation to deliver the “tired Assyrians” from oppressive foreign rule. In doing so, we not only encounter Assyria in its widely acknowledged role as a pathfinder empire, but also as a nascent nation state. The kingdom must be seen as an early example of a political project that combines both these two elements: it is an “empire-state”, to use the term coined by distinguished NYU historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper.”