The rebirth of the Assyrian empire after the dark days of ‘the Interval’ is the main theme during the period covered by this chapter. Tiglathpileser III devoted his entire career to fighting on foreign campaigns and, after a brief interlude under Shalmaneser V, Tiglath-pileser's mantle fell upon Sargon II, who not only continued the extensive offensive but also began to find time for non-military matters. By the end of the era with which this chapter is concerned the Assyrian empire had become the largest political power the world had ever seen, and the conquest of Egypt was a tantalizing possibility.

TIGLATH-PILESER III (744–727 B.C.)

The eclipse of Assyria during the Interval came to an end with the accession of Tiglath-pileser III, who achieved his goal of restoring Assyrian fortunes by a series of campaigns of exceptional intensity; the west was reconquered, Urartu was intimidated, and the Babylonian crown was placed on the Assyrian king's head. Sources for the reign are more numerous than for the preceding decades and consist of royal inscriptions, chronographic texts, letters, legal and administrative documents, and sculptured reliefs found at Calah (below, pp. 83–4). The annals of Tiglath-pileser are in a very bad state of preservation and there are many problems and gaps in our knowledge, although a study being prepared by Tadmor is making great strides forward with this material. A curious feature of the chronology is that Tiglath-pileser's annalists numbered the years of his reign (palû) according to his campaigns, and thus the first palû is actually his accession year, since he campaigned in Babylonia that year.

SETTING AND HISTORY

‘Phoenicia’ in the widest sense was the name given by the Greeks to the coasts of what is now Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. (For the name ‘Phoenicia’ see CAH II. 2,520.) In a narrower sense it was interpreted as the coast from about Dor in the south, northwards to about present-day Tripoli (an area referred to as Metropolitan Phoenicia in this chapter). It consisted of a chain of towns situated in a narrow coastal strip of land seldom more than 3 km in width backed by the Lebanon mountains and the Carmel range. Of these Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos, all flourishing towns in the Late Bronze Age, remained important throughout most of the first millennium B.C.; they were the Phoenician towns best known to ancient writers and have provided the bulk of Phoenician inscriptions of any historical importance. Together with Arados (modern Arvad or Ruad), the island town off the Syrian coast (Pls. Vol., pl. 129), these three issued the main Phoenician coinages during the fifth century. From these inscriptions and coins certain broad historical and cultural information may be gleaned. All other direct sources of Phoenician history have been lost; even the Phoenician inscriptions are not noted for the historical information they contain. Tyre at least kept historical records, written down probably in annalistic form. We gather from the Wen-Amun story that Byblos also had chronicles. Josephus, the Jewish historian of the first century A.D., made use of the Hellenistic historian Menander of Ephesus (Contra Apionem, 116ff; Ant. Jud. VIII.144; IX.283), who had derived from Tyrian chronicles a list of the kings of Tyre together with their individual lengths of reign and other details, some of which Josephus reproduced.

The reign of Ashurbanipal begins in what appears to be the hey-day of Assyrian imperialism and ends in a dark period of confusion, followed shortly by the fall of Assyria itself. It is the task of the present chapter both to describe the great days of Ashurbanipal's reign and briefly to reflect upon the reasons for the catastrophe which brought to an end one of the great empires of the ancient world. The end of the reign of Ashurbanipal is part and parcel of the history of the foundation of the Neo-Babylonian empire which will be treated in the next chapter.

Sources and chronology

The reign of Ashurbanipal is the best attested of all periods in the history of Assyria in terms of quantity of material, but it is extremely difficult to use much of this documentation to write history because of its unusual nature and because of the lack of a chronology. Chief among the sources are Ashurbanipal's royal inscriptions; these are more numerous and lengthier than those preserved for any earlier monarch, and include a group of texts which are commonly called ‘annals’ but which are really a curious combination of the annalistic form and the ‘display’ form. They are rather like small historical novels and have behind them a complex textual history. Considerable care must be exercised in studying these to unravel the true course of events. Turning to the other sources, as with Ashurbanipal's immediate predecessors, there are a large number of state letters, astrological reports, and legal and administrative documents.

THE PHRYGIAN LANGUAGE

The Greeks had undoubtedly known of the Phrygians for an extremely long time. Certain writers, such as Herodotus and Hipponax, have left us some indication of the nature of their language, and Hesychius' Lexicon has provided us with glosses of unequal value. It is, however, largely from epigraphic sources that our knowledge of Phrygian is derived. These texts may be divided into two groups, separated in time by several centuries and originating from relatively different geographical regions. There can, however, be no doubt that we are dealing with two successive stages – separated by (for us) a long interruption – in the development of one and the same language.

The ancient, or Palaeo-Phrygian, texts are distributed over a vast area: Phrygia proper, including in particular Midas City (1 F etc.; Pls. Vol., pl. 241); Bithynia, where we have the longest extant text, that of Germanos; central Galatia, with Gordium, and eastern Galatia, with Bogazköy, Kalehisar, etc.; and Cappadocia, with the black stone of Tyana (19 F). For the most part, these are texts carved on some rock-cut facades of cult-places (in the west) and various graffiti on vases, the latter being particularly interesting on account of the script used (Fig. 48). There are, in all, close on 50 inscriptions on stone and over 170 graffiti. It is mainly for the graffiti that it has been possible to establish a chronological sequence. Many of the Gordium texts date from the fifth and fourth centuries, some even from the third; one of them, however, can be dated as far back as 750 B.C. (or even before), and the specimens from the Great Tumulus around 720.

DEFINITION AND TRADITION

We do not know what literature was composed in first-millennium Babylonia; we know only what literary works were kept in royal and private libraries of that period. Some works may merely have found a repository there; others were very much in use, on religious occasions, to be recited or to serve as guides for ritual and magic performances. Still others were copied again and again, and the scholarly literature was extensively commented upon.

At the outset it has to be stated that the word ‘literature’ is here used in a broad sense, to include not only belles-lettres but also the standardized works of various experts – in divination, magic, ritual, and linguistic scholarship. That is to say, we will be considering that body of texts that has been termed by Oppenheim the ‘stream of tradition’.

The material to be considered is that kept at the royal library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, to which may be added such provincial libraries as Sultantepe, and, at the very end of the era of cuneiform writing altogether, the libraries of scholars in southern Babylonia, mostly from Uruk, dating to the Seleucid period, which to a large measure duplicate the texts from Nineveh and thus can serve to illustrate the literature of the period in question, 747–539B.C.

TIGLATH-PILESER III AND THE ASSYRIAN THREAT

In the first half of the eighth century B.C. the independent kingdoms of Israel and Judah enjoyed a period of prosperity which had not been known since the time of Solomon in the tenth century. A new situation began to develop, however, with the accession of Tiglath-pileser III to the throne of Assyria in 744 B.C. At that time Uzziah (767–740) was still in power in Judah, while Menahem (752–742), the founder of the fifth dynasty of Israelite kings since the death of Solomon, was ruling in Samaria. Very little is said about Menahem in the Old Testament. He seems to have been violent and ruthless (II Ki. 15:16); when there was a threat from the power of Assyria he was quick to collect treasure from the wealthy men of Israel in order to pay substantial tribute in silver (II Ki. 15:19–20). This passage names ‘Pul, King of Assyria’ as the recipient of the tribute, Pul being another name for Tiglath-pileser III, as stated in I Chron. 5 : 26, and indeed in his annals the latter boasts that he received tribute from ‘Menahem the Samarian’. The date at which Menahem paid this tribute is uncertain.

During the eighteen years of his reign Tiglath-pileser established the power of Assyria in the west, but while his own inscriptions supply a considerable amount of information about his conquests, they have been preserved in such a form as to make it very difficult to assign the military activities narrated in them to exact years in his reign.

Adolf Griinbaum's provocative book, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, was quickly accorded an impressive reception. His earlier critical pieces on the subject caused a stir among their audiences, audiences that included philosophers, psychoanalysts, and other interested persons. As was expected, some of the pieces were incorporated in the book; indeed, because of them, its appearance had been anticipated with feelings that ranged from glee to dismay. Neither of those extreme feelings, however, has obtruded on the respectful tone of most of the book's wide notice. There are several reasons for that tone. Among them is Griinbaum's familiarity with important phases of Freud's work, especially those leading up to the public inception of psychoanalysis at the beginning of the century. Griinbaum's book also displays an acquaintance with a variety of Freud's later writings and with post-Freudian psychoanalytic developments. In addition it furnishes a compendium of the criticisms Freud's thought has evoked. Also, for interesting but disproportionate measure, a third of the book indicts hermeneutic construals of Freud, notably those of Habermas and Ricoeur. Finally, but surely not least, Griinbaum brings to those topics and related ones a rare discursive and polemical tirelessness.

How can the insights into individual psychology gained through the techniques of psychoanalysis illuminate the cultural, collective life of people in society? Freud returned to this question throughout his career in a series of works sometimes referred to as the “cultural books” ; these include Totem and Taboo (1912-13); Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c); Civilization and Its Discontents (1930a); and Moses and Monotheism (1939a). In this essay, I give an exposition of these works in which I stress their unity, their evolution as psychoanalytic theory itself developed, and what I take to be their central argument. I also intend to show how vital aspects to this central argument may, despite the many difficulties these books present to the contemporary student of society and culture, contribute in powerful ways to our understanding of human social existence.

Before turning to the cultural books themselves, however, I want to begin by drawing attention to the fact that Freud was, from the first, concerned with ordinary cultural life. Of the book-length projects to which he applied himself as soon as he had completed the self-analysis which played so crucial a role in his intellectual development, three were nonclinical accounts of normal phenomena in which are visible the workings of unconscious thought processes, namely, dreams (1900a), slips of the tongue (1901b), and jokes (1905c). The effect of these works is to undermine the very distinction between normal and neurotic and to show that something other than rational, secondary process thought is a normal and essential aspect of all human life.

The Oedipus complex lies at the heart of Freud's dynamic developmental theory. In the evolvement of psychoanalytic theory, this complex is associated with the entire range of feelings the child may experience in relation to his parents and interactions he or she may have with them. The love and hate of the Oedipus complex, the conflict, and the way in which the complex is resolved become at certain points the basis for the understanding not only of child development, personality trends, and psychopathology, but also of broader phenomena, such as the development of social institutions, religion, and morality.

Freud's ideas on the Oedipus complex emerge gradually; they change, the terminology is changed, the scope of what is to be considered oedipal is constricted and expanded. These developments and vicissitudes were influenced by a variety of factors. Freud's attempts to conceptualize intrapsychic material emerging from analyses of some of his patients, as well as from his self-analysis, his attempt to deal with opposing theories and their proponents, and the interaction of the oedipal complex with other focal theoretical issues, are among the major influential factors.

In the first section an outline of the basic stages in the evolution of Freud's ideas on the Oedipus complex is presented. In the second section we present some conjectures about events in Freud's personal and professional life that influenced the course of development of his ideas on the Oedipus complex.