"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown." "Their skeletons would later be sold as Halloween decorations at Home Depot."
What about all the "Handbooks" whose goal is primarily to summarize the current state of knowledge on a topic?
Has the quality of ambitious edited volumes improved since the 1990s?
Of course, one could argue that the centralization of power in the person of the king in the late Assyrian period is why so many new palaces were being built and renovated and why archives were centralized in the capital, where they could be discarded into these layers.
I think that depends on a number of variables. Assyriologists have long made the mistake of thinking that lots of tablets from the final 133 years of the empire = this was the imperial pinnacle. But I argue that's more a result of tablets being discarded in fill layers where they were preserved.
Thoughts prompted by a student's question today: Unlike many ancient empires (Rome for example), we really have no evidence for the Assyrians memorializing their war dead. Why is this?
Thought experiment: what would a textbook of ANE art look like if it only used artifacts held in museums in the country where they were found? Not that I actually wish such a book to exist, but I think it's useful to examine how western museum collections shaped ideas of 'canonical' ANE art.
I am truly heartbroken to say that the great Peter Green just passed away this morning at age 99 here in Iowa City. He truly was one of the greatest classicists to have lived and was finishing a Herodotus translation until his last days. S·T·T·L