This scholarly anthology looks at the historical details of a minor event that became a major story; the siege of Jerusalem by the Assyrian emperor Sennacherib in 701 BCE. As the editor points
out, there was no actual fighting involved, but the ripples of the event affected all the major powers of the Middle East, western Asia, and northeast Africa and so the course of world history.
In addition, the story of the siege became an important part of the Hebrew Bible, Aramaic folklore, Greek and Roman ideas of the East, Arabic and Syrian ideas of history, and the cultural
politics of Europe and the United States more than 2500 years later. The authors come from a miscellany of fields, and their essays range from psychoanalysis of the emperor to military strategy
in the campaign to historiography about the event in various Western historical and political traditions. A final essay looks at the idea of the siege as the first ?world event? in history. The
tone of the whole is strongly influenced by the field of Assyriology in particular and Ancient Near Eastern studies in general. Annotation ©2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
