The Intellectual Heritage of the Ancient Near East, pp. 783-800, 2023/04/12
Proceedings of the 64th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale and the 12th Melammu Symposium, University of Innsbruck, July 16‒20, 2018
The abundant Assyrian sources, especially the official inscriptions and correspondence, tell us about the vision that the Assyrians had of the subject peoples, at least some of them. On the other hand, we are less well informed about how the peoples they dominated saw them. This article discusses the Phoenicians’ view of the Assyrian occupiers during the various periods of the Assyrian conquest. The Phoenician sources, heterogeneous, scattered in space and in time and limited, on their own provide little information likely to answer our questions. However, the behaviours and the reactions that the Phoenicians showed towards the Assyrians, analysed through all the available non-Phoenician sources previously decrypted, make it possible to get an idea of the vision that they had of them. This vision was not uniform: it was differentiated according to the cities, in particular those of Tyre, Sidon, Byblos and Arwad, according to the individuals or the groups in contact, according to the socio-political contexts and according to the periods considered. It allows us to understand better how the image (images) of the Assyrians which has been transmitted to us through the centuries was constituted.
