War, Peace and Empire: Justifications for War in Assyrian Royal Inscriptions

This monograph aims to present the reasons for going to war as proclaimed in the Assyrian royal inscriptions. The investigation is based on the presumption that we can distill from the professes "casus belli" the basic religious and moral ideas as well as the political ideology of Assyrian kingship and empire. In addition, this study tries to determine the literary conventions employed in presenting the causes for war. This monograph is only the first part of a comprehensive and comparative study on "causus belli" in the royal inscriptions from the Ancient Near East.