A Glazed-Brick Panel from Nimrud

Abstract

Over three hundred glazed bricks were last year discovered in Courtyard T of Fort Shalmaneser. They were lying between the buttresses that flanked the entrance to T 3 and must originally have formed a panel set into the wall above. Though most of them had been broken into several separate fragments, few had fallen clear and the most important of these was in fact discovered from the fill of a nineteenth-century trench on top of the mound. The bricks were taken to Baghdad where it eventually proved possible to reconstruct their entire design.An inscription dates the bricks to the reign of Shalmaneser III; they were found resting on a confused mass of mud-brick and charcoal, and had clearly collapsed during one of the sacks of Calah, when the wooden fittings of the door below were set on fire and its east jamb demolished. The bricks, whose total weight must have exceeded three tons, fell immediately, but since only mud mortar can have bound them to the wall behind, brought down at the same time very little mud-brick. When the main body of the wall did fall shortly afterwards, it sealed them in what was still an extremely loose heap. This process of destruction, while serving its purpose at the time, saved the bricks from the dangers of exposure, and even the fire only damaged those which came to rest face down on the smouldering wood. Two of them, however, which carried a representation of the god Assur, were split into an unusually large number of fragments and must have been cracked before the panel fell.