Social groups dominate public discourse. The news, social media, scientific reports, and everyday conversations all refer to groups of every kind: women, conservatives, Muslims, immigrants, Nigerians, lawyers, and a virtually endless list of others. In their own contexts, each of these categories makes sense. We know, roughly, whom each term describes.

But when we stop and think, we also know that things are never quite so tidy. Around the edges, and sometimes well beyond the edges, these categories fray. What makes a woman? How do we define a conservative? Is an agnostic from a Muslim family also a Muslim? What is the difference between an immigrant and an expat? Are children born to Nigerian migrants in the UK still Nigerian? Is a law school graduate who passed the bar but doesn't practice law a lawyer? We might have an intuitive sense of the answers to some or all of these questions, but we also know that others will have different answers than ours, however much we disagree.

So although social groups dominate public discourse, they are not always easy to work with. This is true in our own time, in contexts with which we are familiar. It is all the more true in the study of the human past, when the contexts are strange and the sources scanty. And the trouble is that nothing stays the same. The answers to the questions we posited above depend not only on whom you ask, but when: at different historical moments, different societies gravitate towards different answers, all of which seem true and obvious in their own time. It is painfully easy to understand social groups in the past through the lens of whatever truism prevails in our days. Painfully easy, and more often than not painfully misleading.

How, then, to grapple with social groups, especially in the ancient past and across broad swaths of time? In my book Ancient Assyrians: Identity and Society in Antiquity and Beyond, I develop a theory of social categories that is designed to make sense of social groups in their own contexts, on their own terms, and across boundaries of time and space. Armed with this theoretical framework, I then set out to explore the social meaning of Assyrianness in the 2nd millennium BCE.

Assyrians are among the best-documented people of the ancient world. In the 2nd millennium BCE, they are attested in tens of thousands of texts divided between two periods in either half of the millennium, known in scholarship as the Old and Middle Assyrian periods. Assyrianness ultimately traces its beginnings to the city of Assur in northern Iraq, which produced two very different societies. In the Old Assyrian period, Assur was a proto-democratic city-state that served as the heart of a complex trade network with permanent expatriate outposts deep in modern Turkey and elsewhere. In the Middle Assyrian period, Assur was the base of an expansionist kingdom that subjugated much of Iraq and Syria, imposing its own social structures on new populations and undertaking a universalizing, imperial project.

Applying the theory of social categories to the rich and multifaceted textual record from the 2nd millennium BCE reveals that the conceptualization and social meaning of Assyrianness changed over time. Whereas in the Old Assyrian period Assyrians constituted a largely endogamous, close-knit, and exclusive community, in the Middle Assyrian period Assyrians were reconceived more broadly as the community of established subjects of the Assyrian king, a community that was constantly expanding along with the kingdom.

Ancient Assyrians thus serve as a proving ground for the theory of social categories. The theory helps us work with and relate to social groups without getting lost in anachronistic truisms or crass generalizations. It also lets us better appreciate variability over time, demonstrating that the construction of identity and society is always in flux. In the Assyrian case, we see very clearly that different social worlds produced different forms of Assyrianness. The value of an Assyrian identity shifted accordingly. Precisely how and why -- well, for that I refer you to the book!