The caliphs of Anshar

I was alerted to Eckart Frahm's Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire last weekend. Kyle Harper has a review in the WSJ which is sort-of paywalled, sort-of not. The book itself was on the new-books stand at the Barnes and Noble downtown so I peeked into it.

Warnings against climate change, sneers against our forefathers first for not being able to read cuneiform (the ignorant bible-thumpers!) then for treating them as despots (the Orientalists!!)... sigh. It being the COLONIALISM's fault that ISIS looted the north, because as we all know Ay-rabs have no agency and no pride in their heritage: double-sigh.

Frahm is aware that once the people of the Ashur region became Assyrians, and their leaders flitted between Nineveh, Calah, and Dar-Sharrukin: the god Ashur then became the guiding spirit of the court, therefore of the empire. Frahm is further aware of Anshar as a synonym for this god, which he tracks from the "seventh century". But Frahm doesn't even mention this until the Babylonian period, after this empire had fallen!

From what I find of Frahm's earlier material, he used to publish his work in German. I suppose he could have looked up the article by "Cis Scum": "Meet the New Semites, Same as the Old Semites". This went further, blaming the cult of Anshar as harbinger of (Semitic) universalism. But it is unhealthy for a German to be reading therightstuff.biz... or at least to be caught doing that.

One interesting point is that Ashur, at least, started out as a... republic. The head guy didn't take the title sharru. To the extent there was a head guy he tended to call himself the "steward of Ashur" - back when Ashur was the city itself, or maybe the reified spirit of the city.

One point which Frahm might have scored is if he'd followed up the old sociological meme that culture moves westward. Frahm uses this to mock nineteenth-century Orientalism (although I am unaware he uses the exact word), which considered Assyrians the first despots, eventually to transfer their poison to the Persians and then to the Macedonians, finally to Rome. Frahm might (rather) consider Assyria the first of commercial republics. This system would pass to Canaan, thence to Ionia and Athens (and to Carthage, don't forget them), and ultimately to the Etruscans and the Roman Republic. As Frahm points out, absent an Atlantic crossing, Spain and Morocco were the last stop; the Canary and British Isles, pretty-much the end of the world.

That guy on RightStuff in 2016 didn't see daylight between "Steward of Anshar" and a universal caliph, an ideal still powerful around Nineveh at the time, and I must agree with him, despite mine own Semitic heritage. The alternate concept of "steward of the national-genius" is at least localised but to my ear sounds Robespierrean. I don't think they had a major-domo concept like the Merovings had, but perhaps that's just as well, given how the Merovings ended up.

Rome used to have consuls (to execute the Senate's will) and tribunes (to represent the tribes of the people). I wonder if Assyria would have been happier if they'd experimented with these ideas, leaving the stewardship concept to the temples.