19th Annual Leon Levy Lecture

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW.

Registration is required at THIS LINK.

The Leon Levy Lecture is supported by the Peter Jay Sharp Foundation and the Leon Levy Foundation.

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. 

Karen Radner holds the Alexander von Humboldt Chair for the Ancient History of the Near and Middle East at LMU Munich. Her research focuses on the Assyrian Empire. Her numerous books include accessible volumes like "Ancient Assyria: A Very Short Introduction" (OUP 2015) and "A Short History of Babylon" (Bloomsbury 2020) as well as first editions of cuneiform archives from Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Together with Nadine Moeller and ISAW's Dan Potts, she edited the five-volume "Oxford History of the Ancient Near East" (OUP 2020-2023), which received the Frank Moore Cross Award of the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR) in 2024. A member of the German Archaeological Institute, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and of Academia Europaea, she was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 2022 and used the funds to resume the archaeological exploration of Assyria's capital Assur. The results so far are published in the first two volumes of the series "Exploring Assur".