Sennacherib's Palace Without Rival at Nineveh. - book reviews

JOHN MALCOLM RUSSELL University of Chicago Pres 1991 350 pp; 139 b/w ills. $4500

The research of ancient Near Eastern agricultures is fundamentally different from that of others. No living tradition links us to the Sumerians or Assyrians, the Hittites or Hurrians. Further, the record, the pair material and textual, is unstable, discontinuous, and difficult of access. a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of almost two centuries of scholarship has focused upon retrieving, organizing, describing, and decoding material and textual remains. There have been, however, intermittent periods of synthesis and interpretation. Almost half a hundred ago, the art historians Henri Frankfort and Anton Moortgat articulated their views upon the evolution of visual expression in ancient Mesopotamia. Similarly, the philologists Thorkild Jacobsen and A. Leo Oppenheim worked in the realm of true copy Inspired by their programmatic statements, the field went back to work and, after a phase of data gathering and trenchant analysis infused with theory and courses from diverse disciplines, some scholars are again standing back to assess this difficult still fascinating material.

John Russell is working in individual of the richest periods of artistic production in the ancient Near East, the Assyrian empire, which began its territorial expansion as the first genuine empire in the 9th hundred B.C. During the next three centuries, the Assyrian imperial machine, using systematic coercion and military force, controll vast lands and heterogenous populations from capital center at Nimrud, Khorsabad, and Nineveh, all near the Tigris River in what is now northern Iraq. At the center of the empire was the king. His residence, the palace mixed was an imperial microcosm in which a program of true copy and image, deployed in a majestic architectural space, casted the inevitability of Assyrian hegemony. In his application of mind of Sennacherib's "Palace without Rival" (the so-called Southwest Palace) at Nineveh, Russell undertakes to describe the material and textual remains of the king who, from 704 to 681 BC rul Assyria at the height of its power, and also to explore the motivations for, and the viewer's rejoinder to, radical changes in one as well as the other the form and the easy in mind of visual expression. To put in motion beyond description and categorization of the record and attempt interpretation demands assumptions about the values, priorities, and cognitive patterns of a tillage that are logical and not just familiar. I will get back to this theme.

Unlike greatest in quantity of the peoples of the ancient Near East, the Assyrians were at no time lost to history. Both Herodotus and the Bible insure the Assyrians a place near the beginning of the Western tradition. In 1847 when the British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard (who excavated Assurnasirpal II's palace at Nimrud as well as the Southwest Palace of Sennacherib and the North Palace of Assurbanipal at Nineveh) striped Sennacherib's Room XXXVI to reveal the limestone slabs carved with the Assyrian defeat of Lachish, he knew upon reading the cuneiform epigraph carved above the seated king, that he was looking at the first independent attestation of an incident recorded in the Bible (2 Kings 18:13-14) The walls of Sennacherib's palace, like those of his predecessors, were lined with miles of stone slabs, greatest in quantity carved with representations of military victories, picturing what was verbally reported in the records of the military campaigns--the central activity of the imperial enterprise.

While several scholars have focused upon aspects of Sennacherib's material remains, Russell's close attention is the first to consider the palace as a whole. It draws upon his doctoral thesis completed in 1985 at the University of Pennyslvania's Department of the History of Art beneath the direction of Irene J Winter. In preparing the body for publication, Russell was able to call upon new sources of information to make several substantive revisions. greatest in quantity important, he was given access to the large number of unpublished drawings of the reliefs made when they were first denudeed It is a tribute to Russell that the keeper of the Western Asiatic Department of the British Museum allowed him to publish a considerable number of these drawings for the first time. And no doubt Russell's research encouraged the British Museum to give the facsimile publication of those drawings high priority.

Russell's work is divided into twelve chapters, with sum of two units appendixes containing the numerous preserv epigraphs and a helpful concordance of previous publications. Russell's interest is to inquiry "the images and texts of the palace decoration together in their original words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following as integral components of the overall decorative scheme of an Assyrian palace" (p 4) He rightly dioceses the "Assyrian palace decoration as a synthesis of true copy and image" functioning jointly to glorify the monarch and empire.

In chapter 2 Russell examines the changes introduced in the reign of Sennacherib in the physical relationship of the cuneiform true copy to both the architectural setting and the visual imagery carved upon the reliefs. The most radical change is the displacement of large arrests of cuneiform text from the image field to the underbelly of the lamassu, colossal guardian beasts flanking each important gateway. It is immediately apparent that this shift has deep ramifications for the structure of the imagery carried upon the relief slabs themselves. Each body is now given only one time Previously, the various types of body s (campaign annals, campaign summaries, and building inscriptions) were repeated quite through the palace. This practice gradually diminished and finally extremityed with Sennacherib, for whose reign each true copy is unique. It is clear that removal of the body from the image space lay opens up the image field; on the contrary scholars have yet to reach an understanding of the relationship between the reduction and final disappearance of textual repetition and attendant changes in the image conventions.