In this book, Jonathan Valk asks a deceptively simple question: 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.
