Assyrian Cities Research Articles

Irrigation and Cultivation of Nimrud City during the Reign of the King Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 B.C): A Study in the Light of the Cuneiform Texts and the Results of Archaeological Excavations

The Assyrian kings paid great attention to irrigation and cultivation. The irrigation projects were one of the important achievements of the Assyrian kings, which contributed greatly to supporting the population and urban expansion of the Assyrian cities. The water canal established by King Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BC) in the city of Nimrud is an important project. The purpose of this canal was to permanently irrigate the agricultural lands in the Nimrud plain in addition to establishing orchards. This research deals with the details of irrigation and cultivation based on the information from the cuneiform texts as with physical evidence and archaeological surveys.

Cuneiform Inscription on the Brick from King Shalmanassar1stPeriod

The text that we are going to study is considered one of the well-known writings which is usually known as " bricks inauguration " in buildings, palaces and temples and they are in the form of stamp or inscription. This type of cuneiform is codified as memorial models to indicate to the kind of construction and discrimination in terms of inauguration or re- construction and the impact that we are going to study a brick stone its total dimensions 27.2 cm. long , 22.3 cm. wide and 5.5 cm. thickness , written on it the cuneiform text belong to the period of the king, "Shalmaneser I " (1274 - 1245 BC. ) . the text consists of six lines of writing in Akkadian- Assyrian languages. a person found it on an unknown ancient hill which is now represent a cemetery which people of the region buried their dead for decades .it located within the boundaries of a village known as " Bastam " about 20 km to the north of the famous ancient city of Nimrud , on the east bank of the River " Upper Zab" within the boundaries of the city, "Kalak" in Erbil governorate .
 The importance of the text shown on the brick that it revealed to us the location of the important archaeological City for the researchers and those who specialize in archaeology . that is the city of "Kilizi " which was one of the Assyrian cities connected with other Assyrian cities in the northern Mesopotamia and the to discover what they had included contributes to increase information on the Assyrian state during its middle period. So my call is an urgent need to preview this archaeological hill and stand on the discovering archaeological remains and their buildings' foundations.

Assyrian Antiquities Lost in Translation

Europeans who excavated the great Assyrian cities in the mid-nineteenth century discovered colossal alabaster figures, hundreds of wall panels, and innumerable smaller items that they wished to send home. The journey was perilous and much was lost, most notably sculptures from Khorsabad and elsewhere that were on a French convoy attacked near the Tigris-Euphrates confluence in 1855. There has been much uncertainty over what perished on this and other occasions. This paper integrates the relevant sources, identifies antiquities lost during transport from Khorsabad, the Northwest Palace at Nimrud, the Southwest and North Palaces at Nineveh, and other sites, and compares the loss of original photographs, squeezes and paper archives after arrival in Europe.

Old habits die hard: Writing the excavation and dispersal history of Nimrud

ABSTRACTThe archaeological site of Nimrud in northern Iraq is triply famous in the history of Middle Eastern fieldwork: first as one of the places where young explorer Austen Henry Layard uncovered the physical remains of the Biblical city of ‘Nineveh’ in the 1840s; then as the setting for Max Mallowan and Agatha Christie’s large-scale project to uncover the Assyrian city of Kalhu in the 1940s and 50s; and most recently, as one of the high-profile targets of ISIS’ cultural heritage destruction in the region in early 2015.In 2013–15 I ran an AHRC-funded research project on the history of excavations at Nimrud, the dispersal of finds from the site to museums, and the histories that have been written from that evidence for a website (http://oracc.org/nimrud). One major aim was to provide open-licensed material for re-use by museums holding Nimrud artefacts in their collections, but which do not have specialist curatorial staff to research and explain them. In writing that material it proved surprisingly hard to move away from the well-worn anecdotes of popular narratives that constructed unreliable object habits: heroic Layard’s derring-do in discovering Biblical, imperial monuments; doughty Agatha’s improvised cleaning of the Nimrud ivories with her face-cream; ISIS’s barbaric mission to destroy civilisation. In this paper, I explore the strategies we developed to write a deeper history of the site and its finds, and reflect on our relative successes and failures.

Negative spaces: Terrorist attempts to erase cultural history and the critical media coverage

The recent annihilation of the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud by ISIS represents a disturbing trend in how some terrorist groups are trying to erase historical sites for the cultures they communicate. This study explores how one of these devastated spaces is still expressed in the media years after its destruction by examining another act of iconoclasm that occurred in 2001 when the Taliban annihilated the 1,500-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan statues. The research explores the conception of negative spaces in communication and the means by which they are created through warfare and terrorism. A frame and critical analysis of popular magazines then assesses how the Bamiyan Buddhas’ identity has been transformed over time, and some of the journalistic practices that have enabled these renderings. The results reveal how the Buddhas have gradually become journalism’s touchstone for modern cultural terrorism, while in 70 percent of the coverage the site’s actual history has been replaced by the narrative of its destruction.

ISIS and illicit trafficking in cultural property: Funding terrorism through art

The self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) recently shocked the world by destroying a number of archaeological sites throughout the region under its control, among which were the ancient Assyrian cities of Nineveh and Nimrud. Determined to impose its culture as the dominant one in the region, Daesh – the Arabic equivalent of ISIS – calls for the destruction of all cultural property of other religious groups, as well as Islamic artefacts it considers haram or forbidden in Islam, such as religious shrines and art depicting human faces. In reality, the trade in looted artefacts from Syria and Iraq to the rest of the world represents a major source of income for the terrorist group.

Bronze bands on the wooden doors of Assyrian palaces and temples (selected models)

Archaeological excavations revealed many wooden doors covered with bronze tapes, on which various subjects of artistic scenes were executed. These gates were discovered in various Assyrian cities dating back to the Neo-Assyrian era. Examples of this were also found in Haddad hill in the Hamrin Basin area. These tapes express an important civilizational stage that has a clear impact on the later arts in terms of implementation and continuous experience.

Austen Henry Layard's Nineveh: The Bible and Archaeology in Victorian Britain

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Austen Henry Layard uncovered parts of several ancient, buried Assyrian cities, including the capital, Nineveh, and dragged sizeable bits of them back to the British Museum. His book, Nineveh and Its Remains (1849), was a Victorian sensation. This article explores some aspects of Layard's book and discoveries that captured the Victorian imagination. Many were fascinated with Assyrian remains as they related to the history of art. Layard's work was also received as having helped to illuminate or even confirm the Bible. Although some statements by Layard had helped to fuel this interest, he was not personally an orthodox Christian. Despite having been standardly portrayed this way by scholars, these early archaeologists were not Christian apologists who exaggerated the scriptural connections of their discoveries. To the contrary, subsequent developments, particular the deciphering of the cuneiform writing, revealed that Layard and his follow pioneering Assyriologist, Henry Rawlinson, had underestimated the extent to which these findings related to stories in the Bible.

Locating the “People Without History” in Histories of the Ancient Near East

Three books discussed here illustrate multidisciplinary approaches to studying ancient civilizations and a range of methodological and theoretical perspectives. They suggest that in addition to the traditional focus on elites and urban origins, we should analyze nonelites and smaller scale communities. I concur that focusing on elites gives an incomplete and inaccurate picture of life and culture in the ancient Near East. Instead, these books shed light on the “people without history” in the ancient Near East. This “social history” must be integrated into economic and political models of past cultures to fully understand ancient civilizations. LYNN RAINVILLE is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Sweet Briar College. She is the Assistant Director of Ziyaret Tepe (an ancient Assyrian city in southeastern Turkey) and studies Mesopotamian households and cities. She is the author of Investigating Upper Mesopotamian Households Using Micro-Archaeological Techniques (Archaeopress, 2005).

Recent Evidence from Assyrian Sources for Judaean History from Uzziah to Manasseh

A late eighth-century BCE tomb has been found at the Assyrian city of Kalhu (Nimrud) in northern Iraq, containing the bodies of two Assyrian queens identified from inscribed grave-goods. Their names Yabâ and Atalya are almost certainly Hebrew. Assyrian letters and administrative texts also found at Nimrud, and palace sculpture from Nineveh, contain evidence for a close relationship between Judah and Assyria, from the reign of Uzziah contemporary with Tiglath-pileser III, to that of Manasseh, contemporary with Esarhaddon. In this article Hezekiah’s short-lived attempt to reject the alliance is re-examined using contemporary Assyrian sources. Judah’s vital position facilitating trade from Egypt through Philistia to Assyria is deduced from Assyrian royal inscriptions recently edited, and from a recent study of Judaean weights.

The God Aššur

Considerable mystery surrounds the state god of Assyria, Assur. Though this country was a little removed from the centres of Sumero-Babylonian culture and had distinctive traits of its own, compared with Syria and Elam it was definitely within the cultural milieu of Mesopotamia. This applies to religion also, where Adad and Istar, for example, as worshipped in Assyria, are clearly the counterparts of the Adad and Istar known from southern Mesopotamia. But the state god Assur is different. He was peculiarly an Assyrian god without other cult centres, except when Assyrians established them, and he is not fully a deus persona. One seeks in vain for his identity. First, he lacks the family connections which are characteristic of all the major gods and goddesses of the Babylonians and Sumerians, uniting them in one big clan. Who was his wife? He sometimes is named with Istar as though they were husband and wife, but this is not expressly stated, and one may wonder if the pre-eminence of Istar in Nineveh does not explain this. They were the chief deities of the two main Assyrian cities. After a while Ninlil begins to appear as his wife, but this merely reflects his identification with the old Sumerian chief god—he is called “Assyrian Enlil”—and this use of Enlil's wife Ninlil merely underlines the lack of any native Assyrian wife of his. The same applies to the rare mentions of Ninurta and Zababa as his sons: they were long before sons of the Sumero-Babylonian Enlil. The only relative not clearly borrowed from southern Mesopotamia is Seru'a, who, despite a little confusion, is not the same as Eru'a, a title of Zarpānītum, Marduk's wife. Yet even in Neo-Assyrian theological texts it is openly disputed whether she is Assur's wife or daughter!

Fragments of Assyrian Monuments

Several Assyrian cities contained free-standing obelisks or other monuments of stone with registers of carved decoration. This article presents fragments of such monuments now in the British Museum Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities, with references to others known to me.Layard (1849: II, 53, 58) records that, during his brief soundings at Assur in 1847, one of his workmen “also picked up, amongst the rubbish, … several bits of black stone with small figures in relief, which appeared to have belonged to an obelisk, like that dug up at Nimroud”, and that his trenches, somewhere on the mound, produced “bits of basalt, with small figures in relief”. The British Museum has the following two fragments, from this period of Layard's work in Assyria, which are indeed entered in the original acquisitions register of the then Department of Antiquities as coming from Kalah Shergat, i.e. from Assur.

The Tale of the Poor Man of Nippur and Its Folktale Parallels

Three years after taking office as Director of our Institute Seton Lloyd was collaborating with the late Nuri Gokce, Director of the Archaeological Museum at Ankara, in the excavation of sites in the plain of Harran. One week's work at Sultantepe–now generally accepted as the site of an Assyrian city named Huzirina–proved memorable for the discovery of a small library of cuneiform tablets and especially of one particular tablet which introduced to Assyriology an entirely new genre: the Tale of the Poor Man of Nippur. It is fifteen years since this entertaining text was first translated in the volume in honour of the Institute's founder and first Director. In the intervening years significant contributions have been made, especially by V. Julow of Debrecen, Hungary, and J. Farago of Cluj, Rumania, to the study of the tale in its comparative aspects. Some of these publications may not be easily accessible, and as the authors have had the kindness to send offprints to the present writer, it may be of interest, not least to the excavator of the tablet, to show in greater detail, in a volume in his honour, how the tale compares with similar tales from various times and places.

Minoan Fayence in Mesopotamia

In my forthcoming publication of the Rhind Lectures, 1923, on The Civilization of Greece in the Bronze Age I have briefly referred (pp. 225–6) to the remarkable discovery by Dr. Walter Andrae for the Deutsche Orient Gesellschaft, at Ḳala'at Sharḳat, the site of the ancient Assyrian city of Ashur, on the Tigris, of a series of objects in fayence not only of precisely the same type as the remarkable fayence vases and other objects found by the British Museum excavators at Enkomi and Maroni in Cyprus, but some of them, one would think, made by the same hand. These Assyrian objects were among those brought back to England from Mesopotamia after the war, and finally assigned to the British Museum, when eventually a division-was made of the whole between London and Berlin. Before this division was effected I had recognized these particular fayence objects as the counterparts of those already in the British Museum from Enkomi, and Dr. Andrae and I, after I had pointed out the fact to him on a visit made by him to London, agreed that we should publish them separately, he as their discoverer in their context in his full publication of his finds, I in order to emphasize their identity with the Enkomi finds and their Minoan character.