Esarhaddon's glazed bricks from Nimrud: The Egyptian campaign depicted

Abstract

During his excavations “in the south-east corner of the mound” at Nimrud, ancient Kalhu, A. H. Layard discovered some fragments of painted bricks (1853b: 164–7; 1867: 52–7). These can be dated to Esarhaddon on the basis of both iconographic style and subject matter. Thanks to the name “Tell of Athur” reported in Layard's accounts, we can plausibly identify the location as the site of Fort Shalmaneser; unfortunately, Layard does not give a more precise location. Although we can assert that the fragments belong to Fort Shalmaneser at the time of its renovation by Esarhaddon in the seventh century BC, we are not able to define exactly the rooms or outer façade that these fragments originally decorated.Some hypotheses have been suggested as to the original location of the glazed bricks, either in the south-east corner of the inner south-east courtyard (Oates 1959: 111, fn. 20; Nunn 1988: 183) or in Courtyard T (Postgate and Reade 1976–80: 317; Oates and Oates 2001: 183–4) (Fig. 1), where they seem to have adorned an outer façade, either the façade of Throne Room T1 or that of Courtyard T, where Shalmaneser's glazed-brick panel was found lying in front of the doorway of ante-chamber T3 (Reade 1963: 38–47; Dayton 1978: PL 24,1).