Palace Reliefs Research Articles

Drawing Distinctions: Assyrians and Others in the Art of the Neo-Assyrian Empire

Between the ninth and seventh centuries BCE, the Neo-Assyrian Empire became the largest the world had yet seen. In the process of imperial conquest, the Assyrian state incorporated previously foreign territories and people into their world. Landscapes, materials, and the labor of conquered bodies became a part of the Assyrian royal palaces of northern Iraq, both as elements of their construction and as themes emphasized within the extensive visual programs of the palace reliefs. Within and through visual depiction of enemy bodies and foreign landscapes, in the process of being (often violently) reshaped by Assyrian hands, Neo-Assyrian kings brought the farthest reaches of their world into the center of imperial power. This article considers how specific strategies of representation in palace art allowed the Assyrian palace to serve as a microcosm of the empire and a map of its borders. Palace art emphasized the remade, reworked, or recreated, defining “Assyrianness” as that which remakes and has been remade. As a central act of remaking, I examine representations of captive or submissive foreigners, whose presence in the reliefs commemorates their humiliation while compounding and enhancing it in the very ways that these figures are depicted: cringing, deficient, and physiologically incorrect. I pay particular attention to examples from the late King Ashurbanipal’s reign, in which foreign leaders are singled out through representation with distinctive facial features. I argue that this act of (literally) drawing distinctions was an inherently imperial process, one that both expressed and enabled an ideology of expansion and control.

SWORD CARRY IN THE ART OF ASHURNASIRPAL II: DISPLAYS OF DIVINE AUTHORITY

This paper explores the meaning behind the two methods of sword carry depicted in the iconography of Ashurnasirpal II. While the sword is regarded as a prestigious weapon tied to the owner's identity, the implications of how such an understanding of the sword in the Neo-Assyrian Empire might further delineate the underlying messages of the palace reliefs of Ashurnasirpal II remain unaddressed in secondary literature. As a result, through a combination of a cognitive analysis in regards to the significance of the sword's appearance in Neo-Assyrian texts and iconography as well as an analysis of visual formulas in the palace reliefs of Ashurnasirpal II as identified by Mehmet-Ali Ataç, this paper argues that the visual representation of the sword is intended to communicate not only the wielder's power and wealth but also the wielder's exercise or restraint of divine authority based on the carry method displayed.

Эпоха бронзы Казахстана в контексте культурных связей Азии

It seems that there are some events in the history of Ancient Near Eastern civilizations directly related to the Bronze Age of Kazakhstan. Those events have taken place in the first half of the second millennium BC and were associated with the invasion of mobile groups chariot warriors who brought with themselves a cult of a horse, a war chariot, advanced weapons, and some new ideologies to the Ancient Near East. Those chariotry men became the military aristocracy in many new founded states in Ancient Near East They propagated a heroized image of a warrior- king ride in a chariot, which was widely used in the palace reliefs of the countries of the Ancient Near East. During the last fifty years the archeologists discovered many Bronze Age monuments in Kazakhstan, with cultural indicators which coincided with the characteristics of the historical tribes that invaded early agricultural civilizations of Near East at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC and created new dynasties of rulers. The names of those incomers are preserved in the writing sources of the Near Ancient East states. They are mentioned as: Hyksos, Kassites, Amorites, Mariannu. It is known that some part of them were Indo-Aryans by language. For many decades, linguists, historians and archaeologists have been searching for their ancestral home. The purpose of the article is to characterize the main cultural factors of the Bronze Age cultures of Ural-Kazakhstan steppes and to investigate the possibility of the steppe origin of the chariot warriors income to the Near East in the first half of second millennium BC and thus show the contribution of the ancient population of the Kazakhstan steppes to the world historical process.

A STUDY OF IVORY AND BONE PLAQUES FROM ZIWIYE IN THE SANANDAJ MUSEUM

This article introduces a small group of ivories held in the Sanandaj Museum, which were discovered in 1997 during the seventh season of Nasratolah Motamedi's excavations at Ziwiye, northwest Iran. An investigation of the decorative, figurative, and stylistic characteristics of these pieces reveals a strong Neo-Assyrian influence, with close similarities to the palace reliefs of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, as well as the influence of Assyrianizing Urartian art. These extensive cultural influences on Mannaean art can be seen in terms of political and economic relations with the two regions.

DARSTELLUNGEN DER SUḪÄER UND WEITERER NACHBARN DER ASSYRER IM 9. JH. 1. TEIL

Representations of foreigners in their strange attire have a long tradition in the Ancient Near East. While the Assyrian Empire was expanding during the early first millennium BC, the Assyrian kings ‒ with the help of skilled and even inspired craftsmen – attached a growing importance to the differentiation of their near neighbours and people further away. The palace reliefs of Assurnaṣirpal were of excellent craftsmanship, the garments, the hair-styles, the beards and the surrounding landscape were carefully rendered, quite often in every minute detail. Through these details the meaning of the ‘images’ became fully understandable to the well informed Assyrian viewer. Foreign people were not merely enemies, they were people in their own right.

Insights from Archaeology

Insights from Archaeology

The Horizontal Forearm Harp: Assyria's National Instrument

A horizontal harp, strung with seven to nine strings and usually decorated with a finial in the shape of a human forearm, is likely to have been a symbol of the Neo-Assyrian state. Various features distinguish this musical instrument from contemporary Elamite harps, and from other harps in Mesopotamian history. The horizontal forearm harp was the most frequently depicted musical instrument on Neo-Assyrian palace reliefs and bronze doors; pairs of male Assyrians play the harp for the king in official duties of state or cult. The decorative forearm sometimes wears the rosette bracelet associated with royalty. Consideration of the iconographic significance of the forearm suggests possible Neo-Assyrian attitudes toward music.

Texts Quoting Artworks: The Banquet Stele and the Palace Reliefs of Assurnasirpal II

Résumé Une nouvelle interprétation du terme zagindurû dans l’inscription de la stèle du banquet d’Assurnasirpal II permet des progrès dans l’interprétation de problèmes d’histoire de l’art tels que la chronologie des sculptures narratives du palais ainsi que dans l’étude de la pétrologie ancienne.

Fifth-campaign Reliefs in Sennacherib's “Palace without Rival” at Nineveh

Scholars had once assumed that all of the relief programmes in Sennacherib's “Palace Without Rival” at Nineveh depicted events solely from his first three military campaigns. In 1994, however, E. Frahm successfully reconstructed a heavily damaged epigraph from the throne room specifically identifying the city of Ukku as the topic of the relief programme on Slabs 1–4 of this room's western wall. We know from Sennacherib's annals that Ukku was a target of the king's fifth campaign, aimed at enemies to the north of the Assyrian heartland in the Zagros mountain range. I have therefore re-examined the palace reliefs in order to identify other fifth-campaign programmes that have previously been overlooked. In this article, I argue that Rooms XXXVIII and XLVIII, in addition to the images on the western wall of the throne room, contain representations of Sennacherib's fifth campaign. With this identification substantiated, I then explore the typological aspects of these fifth-campaign programmes to classify their visual features.

Representations of Archers in the Relief of Tiglath-Pileser III

Modern scholarship has tended to focus on the concepts of ideology and propaganda in Assyrian palace reliefs. This paper wrestles with the presence of artistic conventions and their level of stability throughout the Neo-Assyrian period My aim is to draw attention to specific examples of accepted principles that were followed in the reliefs of Ashurnasirpal II and measure their stability throughout the centuries, with particular emphasis on reliefs of Tiglath-Pileser III. To do so, I have selected a relief from the Central Palace of Tiglath-Pileser III which illustrates an Assyrian officer preparing to shoot an arrow in a leftward direction. It is concluded that the violation of illusionistic perspective in this relief can be explained by accepting the presence of Assyrian artistic conventions.

The Assyrian Army in Zamua

The article of Manitius published in 1910 has never really been superseded: that is because it was based on the Assyrian royal inscriptions, which were well understood at the time and to which there have been few major additions (and those principally from before the reign of Assur-naṣirapli II). With new texts from Nimrud and new editions from Helsinki of the Kouyunjik archives, the time is overdue for a reassessment of the textual evidence for the composition of the Neo-Assyrian army. In any case Manitius only covered some aspects of military organization and he himself wrote that he hoped to publish a work which “would present the development of the whole military world of the Assyrians, exploiting the entire available material in literature and sculpture”. No doubt the Great War foiled these plans, and indeed there is still no comprehensive study of the Assyrian army which pulls together the evidence from both the texts and the reliefs. Two recent books on the Assyrian army have no illustrations (Malbran-Labat 1982; Mayer 1995). Yet the palace reliefs are an inexhaustibly rich mine of information which is always susceptible of further interpretation. The most important initiative in exploiting this resource and achieving Manitius's goal has been Reade's article of 1972, but the textual sources have improved significantly since then. This present article is thus a partial and belated response to his plea of a quarter of a century ago that “the epigraphists who are at present rewriting and re-interpreting” the administrative documents “will bear the evidence of the sculptures in mind” (p. 108).

Sennacherib's Palace without Rival at Nineveh

Best known today from biblical accounts of his exploits and ignominious end, the Assyrian king Sennacherib (704-681 B.C.) was once the ruler of all western Asia. In his capital at Nineveh, in what is now northern Iraq, he built what he called the Palace without Rival. Though only scattered traces of this magnificent structure are visible today, contemporary written descriptions and surviving wall reliefs permit a remarkably detailed reconstruction of the appearance and significance of the palace. An art historian trained in ancient Near East philology, archaeology, and history, John Malcolm Russell marshals these resources to investigate the meaning and political function of the palace of Sennacherib. He contends that the meaning of the monument cannot be found in images or texts alone; nor can these be divorced from architectural context. Thus his study combines discussions of the context of inscriptions in Sennacherib's palace with reconstructions of its physical appearance and analyses of the principles by which the subjects of Sennacherib's reliefs were organized to express meaning. Many of the illustrations are published here for the first time, notably drawings of palace reliefs made by nineteenth-century excavators and photographs taken in the course of the author's own excavations at Nineveh. John Malcolm Russell is assistant professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.

Epigraphs and Assyrian Palace Reliefs: The Development of the Epigraphic Text

Previous articleNext article No AccessEpigraphs and Assyrian Palace Reliefs: The Development of the Epigraphic TextPamela GerardiPamela Gerardi Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Cuneiform Studies Volume 40, Number 1Spring 1988 A journal of ASOR Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/1359704 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1988 American Schools of Oriental ResearchPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Sound Holes and Geometrical Figures. Clues to the Terminology of Ancient Mesopotamian Harps

On the sides of the vertical harps on the Assyrian Palace reliefs in the British Museum one observes a characteristic geometrical figure inscribed in a consistent manner. The figure resembles a rectangle the sides of which are concave (Plate Xa). The oldest (653 B.C.) vertical harps shown on these reliefs ' are played by seven members of King Teumman's Elamite orchestra (S. W. Palace at Nineveh, BM 124802, detail here, Plate Xb). Most of these harps are marked with a pair of concave-sided rectangles. There are six clear marks, five places are too eroded to show distinct marks and three places seem to lack marks. The sculptor's skill and care varies from harp to harp and the workmanship seems generally poor for the instruments where the rectangles are missing. In Assurbanipal's North Palace at Nineveh (645-635 B.C.) there are two meticulously carved musical scenes (BM 124920, 124922) where vertical harps (Plate Xc) are marked with pairs of concave rectangles. Each mark is framed by a narrow border and its centre is gouged deeply into the side of the instruments as if representing a hole through the side of the body (Plate Xa). On the other hand, in the Elamite harps the interior of each concave rectangle is flush with the surrounding. However, in view of their poorer workmanship, these rectangles are probably also meant to represent holes. Vertical harps also existed in Egypt during this time. They closely resemble the Assyrian harps but lack the concave rectangles. Some extant Egyptian harps are known 2 and their construction indicates that the harp body was made from a single piece of wood hollowed out to form a U-shaped cross section. The body was completely wrapped in thin leather, closing the top of the U where it formed the sound board. The thickness of the wooden sides (i.e. the verticals of the U) is about 15 mm in one Egyptian harp. The gouged centres in the concave rectangles, mentioned above, would most likely have penetrated such relatively thin sides. Holes of the type found in the sides of Mesopotamian harps seem to have had a long history prior to the 7th century. Well preserved relief plaques (1950-1530 B.C.)

A Note on the Assyrian "Goat-Fish", "Fish-Man" and "Fish-Woman"

In their recent edition of inscribed material from Fort Shalmaneser at Nimrud, Dalley and Postgate (1984: No. 95, pp. 159 ff., Pl. 22) have published and discussed a text recording the measurements, apparently in preparation for their covering in gold leaf, of statues for a temple of Nabu, probably the Nabu Temple at Kalḫu itself. As extant, “face B” begins with the dimensions for the statue or statues of the uridimmu (UR.ID[IM?]), which is probably to be identified as an upright figure with human head, arms and torso but the lower body and legs of lion, a type known in the Assyrian period on the palace reliefs and among the apotropaic foundation figurines (Wiggermann, in press: § VII C 5; cf. Green 1985: 77, with Fig. 1 and Pls. XIIIb, XIVa, b). The next section (ll. 10 ff.) concerns statues of the suḫurmāsu, or “Goat-fish” (literally “Carp-goat”), and kulullu, “Fish-man”. As Dr. Dalley points out, these creatures are known among the apotropaic figurines and named in the appropriate rituals (Dalley and Postgate 1984: 162, n. to ll. 15–19; citing Rittig 1977 for the figurines). An example of the Goat-fish omitted from Rittig's catalogue is shown on Plate V; its inscription (er-ba tas-mu u ma-ga-ru), corresponding to the form prescribed in KAR, no. 298, rev. line 5 (Gurney 1935: 70 f.; Rittig 1977: 157, 167) proves the identity as the suḫurmāsu(cf. Rittig 1977: 188 f., § Ib.2; 206; Green 1983: 93, n. 54; Wiggermann, in press: § VII C 10 b). The mention of statues of the type in the Nimrud text is a significant testimony to their original presence in the repertoire of Assyrian monumental art, for which no examples are now known (notice their absence in the review by Kolbe 1981), although an example is to be found on one face of a ninth(?)-century smaller-scale stone altar from Nineveh (Plate VIa), and statues of the creature appear to be depicted on a Middle Assyrian (Fig. 1 ) and post-Assyrian (Plate Xc) seals. This fact further supports the apparent identical, or at least very close, repertoires of apotropaic figures as foundation figurines and in monumental sculpture (Green 1983).

Neo-Assyrian Apotropaic Figures: Figurines, Rituals and Monumental Art, with Special Reference to the Figurines from the Excavations of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq at Nimrud

From Assyria and Babylonia in the first half of the first millennium B.C. comes a series of small figurines in the round and relief plaques, which are usually found beneath the floors of buildings within receptacles of baked or unbaked brick or (at Nineveh) stone slabs or (so far restricted to Assur) pottery jars; the figurines themselves are almost invariably of sun-dried clay, very occasionally, perhaps, of terracotta or metal. Their purpose, as texts prescribing the rituals involved attest, was to avert evil from the buildings and sickness from the inhabitants. The British School's Nimrud complement comprises at least 136 relevant pieces from 66 separate deposits discovered in three buildings: the Burnt Palace, the Acropolis Palace (AB) and Fort Shalmaneser, and dating possibly from the reign of Shalmaneser III (?) or, at least, Adad-nirari III down to the fall of the Assyrian Empire in 613 B.C.In this paper I shall deal with just one, but perhaps the most important, area on which the series sheds light, namely the question of the identification of the creatures represented by the various iconographic types. It can hardly be denied that the study of apotropaic figurines is of somewhat limited importance in itself. Where it succeeds is rather in the light which it throws upon other matters of more general and basic interest. It is vital here to recognize the official nature of the ritual and practice, and the consequent position of the iconography of the figurines in the official religion of the Assyrian state. And while there are no apparent documentary sources directly concerning, for example, the subjects of the apotropaic palace reliefs, there are texts ordaining procedures for apotropaic rituals involving figurines, which often enable identifications of analogous types.

Assyrian Palace Reliefs in the British Museum. R. D. Barnett and W. Forman.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsAssyrian Palace Reliefs in the British Museum. R. D. Barnett and W. Forman.Edward F. CampbellEdward F. Campbell Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 39, Number 2May 1976 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/3209355 Views: 1Total views on this site Journal History This article was published in The Biblical Archaeologist (1938-1997), which is continued by Near Eastern Archaeology (1998-present). Copyright 1976 American Schools of Oriental ResearchPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

ASSYRIAN PALACE RELIEFS and their Influence on the Sculptures of Babylonia and Persia. Text by R. D. Barnett, photographs by Werner Forman. London: Butchworth Press Ltd., 1960. pp. 36, 173 plates, 23 colour plates. 42s.

ASSYRIAN PALACE RELIEFS and their Influence on the Sculptures of Babylonia and Persia. Text by R. D. Barnett, photographs by Werner Forman. London: Butchworth Press Ltd., 1960. pp. 36, 173 plates, 23 colour plates. 42s. - Volume 35 Issue 137