Textiles in imperial landscapes: Tracing the mobility of textile products and craftspeople in first-millennium BCE Assyria

With the unification of the Near Eastern political-economic scenario, the Assyrian empire played a significant role between the 9th and the 7th century BCE in integrating textile production centres and trade networks within a renewed and enlarged economic space. The analysis of cuneiform written sources from the major archives of the Neo-Assyrian period enables scholars to investigate the different mobilities organised by Assyria’s central administration to meet the demands of the imperial elite and the state government sector. The circulation of textiles and textile craftspeople in the First World Empire represents an interesting piece of evidence that helps us study how the state controlled the mobility of objects and people, and how this system of forced mobility shaped economic actors, the practices and spaces of production, exchange and redistribution, as well as the imagery of royal power.