Learned Viziers and the Role of Multilingualism in Fashioning New Images of Power in Syro-Anatolian Polities in the Late 9th-8th Centuries BC

This article aims to analyse the role of multilingualism to shore up the legitimacy of a number of Assyrian and Syro-Anatolian governors and regents who rose to power between the end of the ninth and the beginning of the eighth century BC. Interestingly, the royal inscriptions composed by the four rulers under analysis deal with the use of multiple languages. While Yarri of Karkemish states to know 12 languages, Azatiwada of Karatepe, Ninurta-bēlu-uṣur of Kar-Shalmaneser and Adad-it-’I of Guzana produced multilingual inscriptions. Within the unstable political frame and the multiethnic composition of the Syro-Anatolian Iron Age polities, the choice of the languages for the inscriptions is interpreted as a tool to reaching out different elites with reassuring messages. At a methodological level, in this article, I attempt to offer an interpretation of the purposes of the epigraphic inscriptions under analysis taking into consideration not only their content, but also their relationship with the monuments and their location. As a result, it is argued that multilingualism was strategically used by these rulers for gaining internal and international political consensus.