The attempt at a semiotic analysis of Ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts first was attempted within the discipline of Assyriology. In a 1980 symposium on the literary, historical, and ideological aspects of the Assyrian Royal Inscriptions8 F.M. Fales argued that before the Assyrian Royal Inscriptions can be used as historical sources, the texts themselves must be subjected to a rigorous rhetorical analysis to come to terms with its ideological and compositional foundations, breaking it down into the complex of ideas (as indicated by lexical items) and into the literary structures (as indicated by the organisation of words into syntagms, etc.)9 Similar narrative features are identified between individual episodes from the level of the syntagm to larger elements of discourse, including generalized patterns of events, such as the enemy disregards the treaties, the enemy hears of Assyrian kings coming, the enemy flees, etc. In this way, syntagmic analysis of Assyrian Royal Inscriptions can be shown to be composed along the lines of a literary code in which the constituent elements of composition may vary between episodes but as a whole exhibit a highly stylized composition to posit an ideological message.10 This type of stylized composition utilizes repetitive elements between episodes in order to create an iterative scheme, and ultimately from this the outcome of each episode becomes expected and reinforces the ideological message to be delivered in what literary critic Umberto Eco describes as a high-redundance message.11 Taking this into consideration, K.L. Younger applied this approach in a survey of conquest literature from across the Ancient Near East in order to show the affinities of Ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts to those in Joshua. As a result, Younger concludes that Joshua was written within a common Ancient Near Eastern conquest account transmission code which was common from 1300-600 BC.12 This specific transmission code, as he argues, is common to this episodic formula in order to transmit ideology via a high-redundance message, in the sense invested in it by Eco.13 Although detailed syntagmic and linguistic analysis is beyond the scope of this paper it is important to understand that this compositional technique is often at work and has been shown to exist across the spectrum of Ancient Near Eastern historiography. Hence evidence is posited towards a commonly accepted conquest account formula that was certainly used by the Assyrians and by the author of Joshua, but certainly not unique to them. Therefore, the conquest account in the book of Joshua stands as an accessible case study in Ancient Near Eastern Conquest accounts. When compared against neighbouring literatures, one finds that the conquest account in the book of Joshua is different from the literature of its neighbours in some ways, but justifiably in order to tie it in with the larger biblical narrative and with the ideologies which it is intended to espouse.
