Books by Jonathan Valk
Ancient Taxation: The Mechanics of Extraction in Comparative Perspective, 2021
Ancient Taxation is a collection of studies that explores the extractive systems of eleven ancien... more Ancient Taxation is a collection of studies that explores the extractive systems of eleven ancient states and societies from across the ancient world, ranging from Bronze Age China to Anglo-Saxon Britain. The contributors discuss the inherent challenges of taxation in predominantly agro-pastoral societies, including basic tax strategy (e.g., taxing goods vs. labor, in-kind vs. money taxes, etc.); the mechanics of assessment and collection; and the politics of negotiating the cooperation of social, economic, and political élites and other important social groups.
In assembling a broad range of studies, this book sheds new light on the commonalities and differences between ancient taxation systems, and so on the broader fiscal and institutional practices of antiquity. It also provides new impetus for further comparative research into extractive practices across ancient societies and between antiquity and recent historical periods.
Papers by Jonathan Valk
Revue d'assyriologie et d'archéologie orientale, 2024
SAA 4, 321 and 322 are two strange Neo-Assyrian oracular query texts written by women and address... more SAA 4, 321 and 322 are two strange Neo-Assyrian oracular query texts written by women and addressed to an otherwise unknown deity named Manlaharban. We argue that the writer(s) of these texts were high-ranking women close to Assurbanipal, and that this can explain the texts’ unusual elements. We argue further that the divine name Manlaharban is an Aramaic byname for the god Shamash, and that its use indicates the presence of spoken Aramaic at the Assyrian court.
Levant 56(2): , 2024
Recent fieldwork undertaken by the joint Finnish-Jordanian Tell Yaˁmoun Regional Archaeological S... more Recent fieldwork undertaken by the joint Finnish-Jordanian Tell Yaˁmoun Regional Archaeological Survey (TYRAS) in the northern part of the Jordanian plateau explored the unexcavated site of Tell al-Assara. An initial survey of the site and its surface pottery indicates that it was occupied for much of the 1st millennium BCE. The initial survey also found an inscribed Aramaic potsherd, which we present and analyse here. This analysis of the inscription builds both on digital techniques like photogrammetry and traditional philological approaches. Despite its brevity, the al-Assara inscription is an important new datum in the corpus of Transjordanian Iron Age texts and palaeography. It can be dated to the middle of the 1st millennium BCE and links Tell al-Assara to broader regional practices of writing and administration.
Ancient Western Asia beyond the Paradigm of Collapse and Regeneration (1200–900 BCE), 2024
Arameans are first perceptible in the historical record as part of the Bronze to Iron Age transit... more Arameans are first perceptible in the historical record as part of the Bronze to Iron Age transition in the Near East. They emerge as significant actors in Mesopotamian cuneiform sources around 1100 BCE and maintain a continuous presence in the cuneiform record thereafter.1 But who are these early Arameans? What does this new social category describe?2 The earliest Arameans-by which I mean Arameans from their initial appearance at the end of the second millennium BCE through to Cyrus' conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE-have been the subject of extensive study for generations, with a new burst of research over the last decade.3 These studies focus on Arameans in the region of modern Syria, their perceived homeland. Although there are many studies of Arameans, there is actually very little positive evidence for Arameans at all. Outside of the cuneiform record, there are references to a territory or community known as Aram in an 8th-century Aramaic inscription from Sfīre (as-Safīra), a
Material Worlds: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Contacts and Exchange in the Ancient Near East, 2023
Tomaž Erjavec and Maria Eskevich (eds.), Selected papers from the CLARIN Annual Conference 2022, Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 198, pp. 111–119, 2023
We present BabyLemmatizer, a hybrid lemmatizer and POS-tagger for Akkadian, the language of the a... more We present BabyLemmatizer, a hybrid lemmatizer and POS-tagger for Akkadian, the language of the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians, documented from 2350 BCE to 100 CE. In our approach the text is first POS-tagged and lemmatized with TurkuNLP trained with human-verified labels, and then post-corrected with dictionary-based methods to improve the lemmatization quality. The post-correction also assigns labels with confidence scores to flag the most suspicious lemmatizations for manual validation. We demonstrate that the presented tool achieves a Lemma+POS labeling accuracy of 94%, and a lemmatization accuracy of 95% in a held-out test set. We also apply the lemmatizer to a previously unlemmatized text corpus to test it in practice.
CLARIN Annual Conference Proceedings, 2022, Prague, Czechia, 2022
We present a hybrid lemmatizer and POS-tagger for Akkadian, the language of the ancient Assyrians... more We present a hybrid lemmatizer and POS-tagger for Akkadian, the language of the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians, documented from 2350 BCE to 100 CE. In our approach the text is first POS-tagged and lemmatized with TurkuNLP trained with human-verified labels, and then post-corrected with dictionary-based methods to improve the lemmatization quality. The postcorrection also assigns labels with confidence scores to flag the most suspicious lemmatizations for manual validation. We demonstrate that the presented tool achieves a Lemma+POS labeling accuracy of 94%, and a lemmatization accuracy of 95% in a held-out test set.
Aleksi Sahala, Tero Alstola, Jonathan Valk, and Krister Lindén. 2022. “BabyLemmatizer: A Lemmatizer and POS-tagger for Akkadian.” Pages 14–18 in CLARIN Annual Conference Proceedings, 2022, Prague, Czechia. Edited by Tomaž Erjavec and Maria Eskevich. https://office.clarin.eu/v/CE-2022-2118-CLARIN2022_ConferenceProceedings.pdf.
Ancient Taxation: The Mechanics of Extraction in Comparative Perspective, 2021
An overview of taxation in ancient states.
Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2020
Much of the surviving text of the Epic of Etana tells the story of an eagle and a snake. The eagl... more Much of the surviving text of the Epic of Etana tells the story of an eagle and a snake. The eagle and snake are extraordinary creatures, and their story abounds with mythological subtext. This paper argues that the Neo-Assyrian recension of Etana was amended to include explicit references to the eagle and the snake by the names of their mythological counterparts, anzû and bašmu. These references occur in two analogous contexts and serve the same narrative purpose: to dehumanize the other when the eagle and the snake seek to do each other harm. The deliberate character of these changes and their symmetry suggest that they are the product of a conscientious scribe with a developed literary sensibility.
BASOR, 2020
Assyrian imperialism is closely associated with the practice of mass deportation. This practice h... more Assyrian imperialism is closely associated with the practice of mass deportation. This practice has been explained by recourse to many different motivations. But can we hope to pinpoint the logic informing deportation rather than merely identifying its advantages? This paper surveys the evidence of deportation in the Levant in the period 745–620 b.c.e. Focusing on deportation in this circumscribed time and place enables a more concentrated account of its use. Deportation is generally argued to have served three broad ends: bolstering the supply of human resources in the Assyrian heartland, meeting particular strategic needs, and dealing with dissent. This paper finds that despite the many uses of deportation, it was first and foremost a punitive instrument intended to curb resistance to Assyrian hegemony. This punitive dimension constituted the foundation of Assyrian deportation in the Levant in the age of Assyrian hegemony.
The Assyrian King List (AKL) is central to the reconstruction of Assyrian and broader Near Easter... more The Assyrian King List (AKL) is central to the reconstruction of Assyrian and broader Near Eastern history and chronology. Because of AKL's significance, locating its original moment of composition has far-reaching his-toriographical implications. There is no scholarly consensus on the dating of AKL, but a closer look at the internal evidence of AKL indicates a firm, fifteenth century terminus post quem for the creation of AKL, while the bilingual tablet fragment BM 98,496 establishes the thirteenth century reign of Tukulti-Ninurta I as a secure terminus ante quem. Within this temporal range, it is possible to trace the genesis of AKL to the reign of Aššur-uballiṭ I. This period witnessed great change in Assyria, and the nature of this change provides an ideal historical, political, and ideological context for the production of AKL. No other moment in Assyrian history offers so compelling a conjunction of political motives and historical circumstances for AKL's composition.
The present study draws on interdisciplinary research to establish an interpretative framework fo... more The present study draws on interdisciplinary research to establish an interpretative framework for an analysis of the material and textual evidence concerning infant loss in ancient Mesopotamia (c. 3000-500 BCE). This approach rejects the notion that high infant mortality rates result in widespread parental indifference to infant loss, arguing instead that underlying biological and transcultural realities inform human responses to this phenomenon. With this conclusion in mind, a review of ancient Mesopotamian archaeological evidence reveals patterns of differential infant burial; while the interpretation of these patterns is uncertain, the broader contexts of infant burials in ancient Mesopotamia do not point to parental indifference, but rather the opposite. The available textual evidence in turn indicates that ancient Mesopotamians valued their infants, sought actively to protect them from harm, and mourned deeply when they died, a conclusion that is not controverted by evidence of infant exposure.
Reviews by Jonathan Valk
Current World Archaeology 126, 2024
his new book from William Kelso is in the tradition of popularised portrayals of archaeological d... more his new book from William Kelso is in the tradition of popularised portrayals of archaeological discoveries linked to the 'Virginia adventure'. Beginning in the 1960s, Ivor Noel Hume published several evocative, book-length accounts of studies of the 'Tidewater' -that is the north Atlantic Plain -region. Just as Hume's stories did, this new work will captivate readers seeking to understand the story of Jamestown's founding, its legacy, and how knowledge of it has improved with the advent of new research since the 1990s. In essence, it is a thoughtfully conceived series of short stories from the archaeologist who spearheaded the 'rediscovery' of James Fort and oversaw most of its two-decade period of renewed study. The book unfolds through eight chapters organised largely as a historical chronicle. Essential context is set in the first of them. Biographies of the principal figures who influenced the path of the colony's early decades are detailed. The chapter also recounts the backdrop of the Virginia Company's ambitions and plans, and the trials and tribulations of the settlement's initial years. Chapters 2 to 5 describe new perspectives on the creation of the fortified settlement, an improved sense of Native American engagements with the colony -including the fate of Pocahontas, the growth of the initial settlement into a fledgling
Bibliotheca Orientalis 80 (5/6), 2023
Conclusion From the brief summary above it becomes apparent that the authors of the Handbook have... more Conclusion From the brief summary above it becomes apparent that the authors of the Handbook have tried to illustrate that emotions in the ancient Near East can and should be studied as this will lead to fascinating insights into ancient human dynamics and systems of thought. Of course the Handbook is not able to discuss the whole "complex worlds of feelings" that lay behind ancient Near Eastern texts and artefacts, but it does a great and inspirational job of illustrating the potential of the subject. The Handbook, overwhelming as it is at times, provides a great point of departure for further research that can fill in the gaps in our knowledge about ancient Near Eastern emotions.
Archiv für Orientforschung, 2022
Bibliotheca Orientalis, 2021
Review of Jan Dušek and Jana Mynářová (eds.), Aramaean Borders: Defining Aramaean Territories in ... more Review of Jan Dušek and Jana Mynářová (eds.), Aramaean Borders: Defining Aramaean Territories in the 10th–8th Centuries B.C.E.
Review of Biblical Literature, 2020
Bibliotheca Orientalis, 2019
Conferences Organized by Jonathan Valk
Do empires simply collapse, or do they remain embedded in the sociocultural imaginations of their... more Do empires simply collapse, or do they remain embedded in the sociocultural imaginations of their subjects long after their mechanisms of control have dissolved? In recent years there has been a growing recognition among scholars of antiquity that negotiations with and concessions to local elites were integral to the functioning of ancient empires. Such dynamics challenge our conceptions of imperial control and regional subordination, as well as of agency and autonomy, and therefore reshape scholarly views on political instability, crisis, and fragmentation. These conceptual shifts have a significant impact on our understanding of the rise and fall of ancient empires. It is no longer tenable to view the rise of local polities as discontinuous with empire. In important respects, old empires enjoyed long afterlives in new states. Imperial institutions, ideologies, and modes of social organization persisted even after empires dissolved. Our mapping of post-imperial political orders should thus reconsider the former imperial
framework as the context for the emergence of new local groups that distinguished themselves according to the power dynamics of empire.
By organizing an interdisciplinary symposium entitled “The Many Ends of Ancient Empires: Local and Imperial Elites at the Threshold of a New Order” we will launch a research network that will seek to offer alternative models for imperial integration and distinction in the ancient world. While top-down imperial processes have been well-studied, local reactions to and interactions with the imperial center have been largely ignored. The time has come to reexamine social, cultural, economic, and religious developments in
periods of imperial disintegration on both the micro and macro levels and viewed both from the perspective of imperial and local elites. Only in this way can we begin to do justice to the many afterlives of empire. This symposium thus aims to (a) map imperial and local elite agents and their interactions with empire, peers, and subordinates; (b) to bridge methodological and conceptual gaps between independence and subordination in the context of ancient empires; (c) identify and discuss regional responses and
strategies for elite circulation in ancient empires.
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Books by Jonathan Valk
In assembling a broad range of studies, this book sheds new light on the commonalities and differences between ancient taxation systems, and so on the broader fiscal and institutional practices of antiquity. It also provides new impetus for further comparative research into extractive practices across ancient societies and between antiquity and recent historical periods.
Papers by Jonathan Valk
Aleksi Sahala, Tero Alstola, Jonathan Valk, and Krister Lindén. 2022. “BabyLemmatizer: A Lemmatizer and POS-tagger for Akkadian.” Pages 14–18 in CLARIN Annual Conference Proceedings, 2022, Prague, Czechia. Edited by Tomaž Erjavec and Maria Eskevich. https://office.clarin.eu/v/CE-2022-2118-CLARIN2022_ConferenceProceedings.pdf.
Reviews by Jonathan Valk
Conferences Organized by Jonathan Valk
framework as the context for the emergence of new local groups that distinguished themselves according to the power dynamics of empire.
By organizing an interdisciplinary symposium entitled “The Many Ends of Ancient Empires: Local and Imperial Elites at the Threshold of a New Order” we will launch a research network that will seek to offer alternative models for imperial integration and distinction in the ancient world. While top-down imperial processes have been well-studied, local reactions to and interactions with the imperial center have been largely ignored. The time has come to reexamine social, cultural, economic, and religious developments in
periods of imperial disintegration on both the micro and macro levels and viewed both from the perspective of imperial and local elites. Only in this way can we begin to do justice to the many afterlives of empire. This symposium thus aims to (a) map imperial and local elite agents and their interactions with empire, peers, and subordinates; (b) to bridge methodological and conceptual gaps between independence and subordination in the context of ancient empires; (c) identify and discuss regional responses and
strategies for elite circulation in ancient empires.