ABSTRACT
The Iranian Book of Kings traditions will be discussed here. Primordialist accounts of Assyrian not to mention Iranian ethnicity, which presume biological continuity from antiquity to modernity, remain prominent. Histories produced at provincial and imperial levels suggest that the categories of locality and nobility were at least as important determinants of status as ethnicity and religion. Here it was Ninus, son of Belos, not Nimrod who built the cities enumerated in Genesis 10, so completely was Nimrod subsumed into the Eusebian Assyrian genealogy. The mobilization of antiquity in late Sasanian Northern Mesopotamia served to promote identities civic and aristocratic within the representation of Christian community to which references to ancient kings were subordinate. This chapter attempts to account for the emergence and perdurance of particular religious and ethnic communal identities in the late antique Near East, the complex interaction, or imbrication, of such identities with the solidarities of locality, social status, region and office-holding, among others, would repay our attention.
