Art/ifacts and ArtWorks in the Ancient World 9781949057126

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Art/ifacts and ArtWorks in the Ancient World

Art/ifacts and ArtWorks in the Ancient World

Edited by Karen Sonik

University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology | Philadelphia

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sonik, Karen, editor. | Pittman, Holly, honouree. Title: Art/ifacts and artworks in the ancient world / edited by Karen Sonik. Other titles: Artifacts and artworks in the ancient world Identifiers: LCCN 2020045509 | ISBN 9781949057119 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781949057126 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Art, Ancient--Middle East. | Art objects, Ancient--Middle East. | Art and society--Middle East--History. | Middle East--Antiquities. Classification: LCC N5345 .A955 2021 | DDC 709.01--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045509

© 2021 by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Philadelphia, PA All rights reserved. Published 2021 Distributed for the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

Contributor Biographies

Paul Delnero, Associate Professor of Assyriology at Johns Hopkins University, is an Assyriologist who specializes in the history, culture, and society of ancient Mesopotamia, with a particular emphasis on Sumerian religion and mythology. His dissertation, “Variation in Sumerian Literary Compositions: A Case Study Based on the Decad,” was written on the subject of textual variation in duplicates of Sumerian literary narratives. The primary aims of this work were to answer fundamental questions pertaining to how and why scribes were trained in antiquity, and to develop a text-critical methodology for editing Sumerian literary compositions that takes into account the means by which the sources for these texts were produced. Specifically, the role of memorization in scribal training and the errors in recall that occurred while copying from memory were identified as one of the most common causes of textual variation in the duplicates of these texts. This topic is treated in the article “Memorization and the Transmission of Sumerian Literature” (Journal of Near Eastern Studies 2012). His other publications include a book, The Textual Criticism of Sumerian Literature (Journal of Cuneiform Studies Supplemental Series 3, 2012), and articles on the topics of the Sumerian verbal elements mu-ni- and mi-ni-, the conjugation prefixes im-maand im-mi-, and the pre-verbal pronominal element /n/, as well as the place of Sumerian literary extract tablets in the training of scribes and the function of the so-called “literary catalogues” in archiving collections of Sumerian texts in antiquity. His current project is a study of Sumerian cultic, liturgical texts and the political and cultural roles of ritual lamenting in Mesopotamia at the beginning of the second millennium BCE. Marian H. Feldman is the W.H. Collins Vickers Chair of Archaeology and a Professor in the History of Art and Near Eastern Studies Departments at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include the role of arts in cultural interactions and issues of style, object agency, and materiality. She is the author of two monographs, Diplomacy by Design: Luxury Arts and an ‘International Style’

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Contributors

in the Ancient Near East, 1400–1200 BCE (Chicago, 2006) and Communities of Style: Portable Luxury Arts, Identity and Collective Memory in the Iron Age Levant (Chicago 2014). Feldman has also co-edited several volumes, including Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art (with Brian A. Brown; De Gruyter 2014), and is the author of several articles and catalogue essays. Marcella Frangipane is Full Professor of Archaeology (Prehistory) and has taught Prehistory and Protohistory of the Near East at the Sapienza University of Rome. She is also a Foreign Associate Member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) and a Corresponding Member of the Italian Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the Deutsches Archäologische Institut in Berlin, and the Archaeological Institute of America. Dr. Frangipane is the editor of two monograph series, Arslantepe and Studi di Preistoria Orientale (SPO), and has also served as editor in chief of the journal Origini, all published by the Sapienza University of Rome. She has participated in field research in Mexico, Italy, Egypt, and Turkey, becoming field vice-director of the Sapienza excavations at the Late Predynastic site of Maadi (Egypt), and, from 1990, the director of the Italian excavation projects at Arslantepe-Malatya and Zeytinli Bahçe, Urfa (Turkey). The Arslantepe Project, where Dr. Frangipane has worked for more than forty years, is the core of her research activity. The results obtained through interdisciplinary investigation at that site have oriented her main research interests toward themes such as the rise and early developments of hierarchical societies; the emergence of inequality; and the rise of centralized economies, bureaucracy, and the state in the ancient Near East, with particular reference to Mesopotamian and Anatolian environments. For her research at Arslantepe, Dr. Frangipane has received the Discovery Award by the Shanghai Archaeology Forum (2015); the Vittorio De Sica Prize for Science (Archaeology) (2015); and Rotondi Prize to Art Saviors (Italy) (2017). She has also received two honorary titles by the President of the Italian Republic and an honorary Ph.D. by the University of Malatya. Barbara Helwing is Director of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin’s Vorderasiatisches Museum. Prior to taking up this position, she was Professor of Middle Eastern Archaeology at the University of Sydney. She also served as Head of the German Archaeological Institute in Tehran, taught at universities in Germany, Turkey, and France; and has directed fieldwork in Iran, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and, most recently, Sri Lanka. As an archaeologist with a focus on the early periods of the ancient Near East, Dr. Helwing’s research explores the developments of early social complexity. She is particularly interested in the role that technical and social innovations, particularly the development of early metallurgy, play in these developments.



Contributors

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Joshua Jeffers is a research specialist on the Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP) Project at the University of Pennsylvania, where he completed his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. He specializes in Middle and Neo-Assyrian textual and historical studies. In addition to co-authoring the RINAP 5 volumes on the inscriptions of Ashurbanipal and his successors Aššur-etel-ilani and Sin-šarra-iškun, he has published articles on Middle Assyrian calendrics, on the editorial history of Ashurbanipal’s Prism F inscription, and on text and image pertaining to the third- and fifth-campaign reliefs from Sennacherib’s palace. He is currently completing a book on the Middle Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser I, reevaluating the historical circumstances of that king’s reign. David Kertai eis curator of the ancient Near East collections at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden. He earned his Ph.D. in Near Eastern archaeology at Heidelberg University and his M.Sc. in architecture at the Technische Universiteit Delft. He has taught and conducted research at universities in England, the United States, and Germany including, most recently, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University and the Freie Universität Berlin. Specializing in Assyria (ca. 1350–600 BCE), Dr. Kertai is the author of The Architecture of Late Assyrian Royal Palaces (Oxford University Press, 2015) and numerous articles on Assyrian art, architecture, and history. He is also the editor of From the Four Corners of the Earth: Studies in the Iconography and Cultures of the Ancient Near East in Honour of F.A.M. Wiggermann (with O. Nieuwenhuyse; Münster, 2017) and New Research on Late Assyrian Palaces (with P. Miglus; Heidelberg, 2013). Since 2005, he has participated in archaeological projects in Syria, Turkey, and Iraq. Kevin M. McGeough is Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Geography at the University of Lethbridge and holds a Tier 1 Board of Governor’s Research Chair in Archaeological Theory and Reception. He has excavated in Israel, Turkey, Jordan, and Egypt. He was the editor of The Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research and ASOR’s Archaeological Report Series and is currently the co-editor of the Alberta Archaeological Review. Kevin has published widely on the Late Bronze Age Syrian site of Ugarit, including two books: Exchange Relationships at Ugarit (2007) and Ugaritic Economic Tablets: Text, Translations and Notes (2011). He is currently researching the reception of Near Eastern Archaeology in a variety of media and has recently published a three-volume book on archaeological reception in the Victorian era, The Ancient Near East in the Nineteenth Century (Sheffield Phoenix Press Ltd, 2015). His book, From Griffith to Grindhouse: Representations of Antiquity in Film, is forthcoming with Equinox. With his wife, Elizabeth Galway, Kevin has received Social Sciences and Humanities Research

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Contributors

Council of Canada (SSHRC) funding for a project studying representations of archaeology and the ancient Near East in children’s literature. Beate Pongratz-Leisten is Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW), New York University. Her recent books include Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism (Eisenbrauns, 2011), Religion and Ideology in Assyria (de Gruyter, 2015) and the co-edited (with K. Sonik) The Materiality of Divine Agency (de Gruyter, 2015). She is also the author of Herrschaftswissen in Mesopotamien: Formen der Kommunikation zwischen Gott und König im 2. und 1. Jahrtausend v. Chr. (State Archives of Assyria,1999); ina šulmi īrub: Die kulttopographische und ideologische Programmatik der aktīu-Prozession in Babylonien und Assyrien im I. Jahrtausend v. Chr. (P. von Zabern, 1994); and numerous articles on topics pertaining to the cultural, intellectual, and religious history of Mesopotamia. Her research interests are extremely broad ranging, as reflected in workshops she has organized during her tenure at ISAW: The Materiality of Divine Agency in Cross-Cultural Perspective (2011); Between Belief and Science: The Contribution of Writing and Law to Ancient Religious Thought (2012); Ancient and Modern Perspectives on Historiography in Mesopotamia (2013); Ancient Near Eastern Literature: Topics, Issues, Approaches (2014); Ritual and Narrative: Texts in Performance in the Ancient Near East (2015); The Formation of Cultural Memory: Ancient Mesopotamian Libraries and Schools and Their Contribution to the Shaping of Tradition and Identity (2016); (with L. d’Alfonso) The Core of a New Age Northern Mesopotamia and Syria in the late Bronze Age (2017); and Text and Image: Transmedial Inquiries into Ancient Near Eastern Cultures (2018). Karen S. Rubinson is a Research Associate at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University. She received her Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology of the Ancient Near East from the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and has excavated in Armenia, Iran, and Turkey. She first investigated the archaeology of the South Caucasus in her doctoral dissertation on the Trialeti Culture (Georgia) in the Middle Bronze Age and has coedited two important volumes on the archaeology of the South Caucasus: Ceramics in Transitions: Chalcolithic Through Iron Age in the Highlands (Peeters, 2008) with Antonio Sagona and Archaeology in the Borderlands: Investigations in Caucasia and Beyond (2003) with Adam T. Smith. Dr. Rubinson has an abiding interest in how artistic imagery, artifact types, and technology of production can inform understanding of cultural contact and interaction; this interest has motivated many of her publications on the South Caucasus and also the Eurasian steppe.



Contributors

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Karen Sonik is Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University and a consulting scholar at the Penn Museum. She earned her Ph.D. in the Art & Archaeology of the Mediterranean World at the University of Pennsylvania and has been a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard; a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University; visiting assistant professor in Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles; and a visiting research scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University. Her research has been supported by the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Louis J. Kolb Foundation. Dr. Sonik specializes in the visual arts, literature, and culture of Mesopotamia, and her work focuses on issues of agency, identity, and materiality. She is the editor of several volumes including Journey to the City: A Companion to the Middle East Galleries at the Penn Museum (with Steve Tinney; University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2019), The Materiality of Divine Agency (with Beate Pongratz-Leisten; de Gruyter, 2015), and A Common Cultural Heritage: Studies in the Mesopotamian & the Biblical World in Honor of Barry L. Eichler (with Grant Frame et al.; CDL Press, 2011). Her recent studies have examined issues of emotional expression and materialization, the authority of the image, and themes in the pictorial and written mythology in the ancient Near East. Christopher P. Thornton is the Director of Research Programs at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the former Senior Director of Cultural Heritage at the National Geographic Society. An expert in the origins of metallurgy and early complex societies in Iran and Arabia, he received his Ph.D. in 2009 from the University of Pennsylvania. As a scholar, Dr. Thornton has co-edited two books, Archaeometallurgy in Global Perspective (Springer, 2014) and The Bronze Age Towers at Bat, Sultanate of Oman (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Press, 2016), and he sits on the scientific board of the journal Iran. In addition to his efforts in grant making and scholarship, Dr. Thornton sits on the U.S. Commission to UNESCO and is Director emeritus of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bat in the Sultanate of Oman. Greta Van Buylaere is an Assyriologist and research associate at the University of Würzburg. She is currently editing the cuneiform documents in the Babylon Collection of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums, and she previously worked on the Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals project. She has also been a research fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Dr. Van Buylaere’s work focuses on the intellectual and political history of Assyria and Babylonia in the first millennium BCE. Her research

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Contributors subjects include witchcraft, gender, emotions, and materiality in Mesopotamia. Among her publications are a number of articles; books including the Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals vols. 2 and 3 (with T. Abusch, D. Schwemer, and M. Luukko; Brill 2016, 2020), the Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals: Glossaries and Indices (with M. Luukko; Brill, 2019), and The Political Correspondence of Esarhaddon (with M. Luukko; SAA 16, Helsinki University Press, 2002); and the edited volume Sources of Evil: Studies in Mesopotamian Exorcistic Lore (with M. Luukko, D. Schwemer, and A. Mertens-Wagschal; Brill 2018).

Matt Waters is Professor of Classics and Ancient History and Chair of the Languages Department at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the ancient Near East and Greece, especially of the first millennium BCE. Waters is the author of A Survey of Neo-Elamite History (State Archives of Assyria Studies XII, 2000), Ancient Persia (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and Ctesias’ Persica and Its Near Eastern Context (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017), as well as several dozen articles and related publications. He is a recipient of the Jonas C. Greenfield Prize from the American Oriental Society and has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Hellenic Studies, the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, UW-Madison’s Institute for Research in the Humanities, and the Institute for Advanced Study. Rita Wright is an anthropological archaeologist and Professor Emerita of Anthropology at New York University. Her research interests include comparative studies of urbanism, state formation, gender, and cycles of change in early societies. Using texts as secondary sources combined with material culture studies, her work focuses on the nature of leadership and the centralization and division of labor in Mesopotamia. As a specialist in ancient technologies, she investigates women’s contributions to history viewed from past economies, religion, and social organization. She has conducted research in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. Her major field work has been in Baluchistan at Mehrgarh and in the Punjab, Pakistan. She directs a landscape and settlement survey along the dry bed of the Beas River, near the Indus city of Harappa, where she has also conducted research, in order to trace the development of rural settlements and their relationship to the larger center. The research also entails reconstructing human interactions with the environment and the resilience of the Indus people as those living in the city of Harappa and in the rural area slowly abandoned their settlements. She is founder and chief editor of the series Case Studies in Early Societies (Cambridge University Press), editor of Gender and Archaeology (University of Pennsylvania Press,



Contributors 1996), co-editor (with Cathy L. Costin) of Craft and Social Identity (American Anthropological Association, 1998), and author of Ancient Indus: Urbanism, Economy, and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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Acknowledgments

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his volume is dedicated to Holly Pittman, who has indelibly shaped the contemporary field of Near Eastern Studies. It could not have been produced without Christopher P. Thornton, who was my partner in planning the volume. Page Selinsky, Director of Publications at the Penn Museum, meticulously oversaw the production of this volume through challenges including but not limited to the coronavirus pandemic. Christopher McNulty and Joyce de Vries have been unstintingly supportive in securing the time and other resources needed to complete this volume. A publication subvention from the College of Liberal Arts and the Department of Art & Art History at Auburn University permitted the printing of color images in this volume. Neither work nor living would be worthwhile without the “souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—”1 before the world stopped, and after. To Barb Bondy, Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Greta Van Buylaere, Luosha Fang, Michael Djupstrom, Mikko Luukko, Sasha Renninger, Sylvestre Pires, Wu Xin, and Xiaoyi Ma, for unlooked-for gifts of wonderful conversation, humor, and unsparing kindness. To Ariel Smith, Kellie Zimmerman, Donald Allison, and David Kertai, for that rarest of rare beasts, understanding: home is wherever you are found. To Chander, Sikander, Neena, and Gary Sonik, Evelyn He, and Sandra Matsuyama—“Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”2 NOTES:

a.1 Tennyson, Ulysses. a.2 J.R.R. Tolkein, The Fellowship of the Ring.

Contents

Contributor Biographies v Acknowledgments xii List of Figures xv Editorial Note xx Dedication xxi Foreword by Christopher P. Thornton xxiii Introduction xxix

I. Art | Artifact 1 Art/ifacts and ArtWorks: De-Colonizing the Study and Museum Display of Ancient and Non-Western Things Karen Sonik 1

II. Representation 2 Beyond Representation: The Role of Affect in Sumerian Lamenting Paul Delnero 83 3 Seeing and Knowing: Cultural Concepts and the Deictic Power of the Image in Mesopotamia Beate Pongratz-Leisten 115

III. Context 4 The Context(ualization) of Art in Non-Literate Societies: Armenian Middle Bronze Age Images and Animal Bones Karen S. Rubinson 139 5 To Be or Not to Be (Divine): The Achaemenid King and Essential Ambiguity in Image, Text, and Historical Context Matt Waters 159

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Contents

IV. Complexity 6 Glyptic Images as Reflecting Social Order: Changes in Seal Iconographies from Egalitarian to Early Centralized Societies in Greater Mesopotamia Marcella Frangipane 183 7 Sealing Practices at Tal-e Bakun A: Revisiting Concepts of Social Organization and Economic Control Barbara Helwing 211

V. Materiality 8 Ephemeral Artifacts: Warlock and Witch Figurines in Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals Greta Van Buylaere 243 9 What Lay Beneath: Queen Puabi’s Garments and Her Passage to the Underworld Rita Wright 265

VI. Space 10 Assyrian Spaces: Surface and Wall as Constitutive Features in Neo-Assyrian Narrative Reliefs Marian H. Feldman 291 11 The Assyrian Propaganda Machine in Text and Image: The Case of Sennacherib at Tyre in 701 BCE Joshua Jeffers 323

VII. Time | Afterlives 12 The News from the East: Assyrian Archaeology, International Politics, and the British Press in the Victorian Age David Kertai 367 13 Assyrian Style and Victorian Materiality: Mesopotamia in British Souvenirs, Political Caricatures, Theatrical Productions, and the Sydenham Crystal Palace Kevin M. McGeough 415

Figures D.1 Holly Pittman at Kani Chaie Drawing Seal Impressions F.1 Holly Pittman, Robert H. Dyson, and Christopher P. Thornton 1.1 Marble Ionic Column from Temple of Artemis at Sardis 1.2 Head of a Sphinx, Possibly Amenemhat I, from Middle Kingdom Egypt 1.3 Ivory Head of Female Wearing Necklace, Neo-Assyrian 1.4 Fountain (1917), Marcel Duchamp 1.5 British Museum: Main Facade (1853), Sir Robert Smirke 1.6 * Silver Arm Reliquary of Saint Fiacre 1.7 Copper Alloy Sculpture of Ganesh 1.8 * Temple of Dendur in Sackler Wing of Metropolitan Museum of Art 1.9 * Watercolor of Temple of Dendur (1874), Frederick Arthur Bridgman 1.10 Stone Votive Figure from Early Dynastic III Mesopotamia 1.11 * Net Piled on Ground Near Coast in Acre, Israel 1.12 Sand Painting, Wind Doctor’s Ceremony—Navaho (1905), Edward S. Curtis 1.13 * a) Lyre of Ur; b) sound box constructed with decorations c) current display of the lyre 1.14 Gypsum Lamassu from Nimrud 1.15 Bituminous Limestone Cylinder Seal with Modern Clay Impression 1.16 * Wood Netsuke from Edo Period Japan 1.17 * Clay Head of a Buddha or Bodhisattva with Garnet 1.18 * Sandstone Head of Shiva 1.19 Bronze Statue of Roman Emperor Trebonianus 1.20 * Painted Plaster Replica of Minoan Ladies in Blue Fresco 1.21 Remounted First Page of Beowulf (Nowell Codex) * Figure also appears on color insert between pages 204 and 205.

xxi xxiv 12 13 13 14 16 18 18 19 20 20 23 26 28 29 30 30 30 31 32 33 35

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Figures

1.22 Cuneiform Tablet with Balag-Lament to the Mother Goddess Aruru 36 1.23 * Werewolves of Ossory in Gerald of Wales’ Topographia Hiberniae 45 1.24 * Noh Robe from Edo Period Japan 49 1.25 Wide-Necked Travertine Cosmetic Jar from New Kingdom Egypt 49 1.26 * “Ram in the Thicket” or Goat in a Tree from Royal Cemetery at Ur 50 3.1 * Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1805–1874), Die von König Ludwig I in Tätigkeit gesetzten Bildhauer (1850) 116 3.2 a) Aerial View of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin; b) Exterior View of Holocaust Tower; c) Interior View of Holocaust Tower 120 3.3 Lion Stamp Seal from Late Chalcolithic Tell Majnuna 122 3.4 Lion Hunt Stele (Löwenjagdstele) from Uruk IV 123 3.5 Sealing and Drawing of “Prisoner Scene” from Uruk IV 124 3.6 Prisoner Statuettes from Uruk IV 124 3.7 Stele of the Vultures, obverse and reverse 126 3.8 Drawing of Stele of Dadusha 128 3.9 Broken Obelisk, Ashur-bel-kala 129 3.10 Drawing of White Obelisk of Ashurnasirpal I, Nineveh 131 3.11 Drawing of Zincirli Stele 132 4.1 * Red Slipped Burnished Jar with Black Paint from Nerkin Naver Tomb 7 142 4.2 Band of Horses; Detail of Nerkin Naver Tomb 7 Jar 143 5.1 Drawing of Stele and Altar of Ashurnasirpal II, Nimrud 165 5.2 Orthostat Relief of Ashurnasirpal II, Northwest Palace at Nimrud 167 5.3 Composite line drawing from impressions of PFS 11 * 168 5.4 Royal Hero in Combat with Hybrid Creature from Palace of Darius 169 5.5 Drawing of Behistun Relief 171 5.6 Early Fourth Century BCE Coin of Samarian(?) Issue 171 5.7 Reconstruction of Stele from Babylon with version of Darius I’s Behistun Relief and Inscription 172 5.8 Drawing of Winged Genius, Gate R, Pasargadae 175 6.1 Seal Designs from the Burnt Village at Sabi Abyad, Syria 187 * Figure also appears on color insert between pages 204 and 205.



Figures

6.2 Seal Images from Tepe Gawra, Late Ubaid and Late Chalcolithic 1–2 6.3 Seal Designs from Arslantepe, Period VIA 6.4 Seal Designs from Arslantepe, Period VIA 6.5 Cretulae with Seal Impressions from Arslantepe, Period VIA 6.6 Seals of Officials Occupying Higher Positions in the Hierarchy, Arslantepe, Period VIA 6.7 Seal Designs from Uruk-Warka 6.8 Seal Designs from Susa 6.9 Lion Hunt from Tell Brak 6.10 Seal Designs from Arslantepe, Period 7.1 Map of Sites with Early Seals and Sealings Mentioned 7.2 Tang-e Bolaghi, Stamp Seals 7.3 Examples of Painted Vessels Showing Dancing Humans 8.1 Fragmentary Figurine Used in (Anti-)Witchcraft Ritual from Tell ed-Dēr 9.1 Penn Museum Reconstruction of Ornaments Sewn to Clothing Worn by Puabi in the Royal Cemetery at Ur 9.2 Clothing Styles Worn by Women Depicted in Statuary and Imagery in the Early Dynastic Period 9.3 Uniform with Super-Structural Elements Worn by a Soldier on the Standard of Ur 9.4 Cylinder Seal with Puabi’s Name Inscribed, Royal Cemetery of Ur 9.5 Puabi’s Clothing: “Cut-Off” Appliquéd with Wool Trim 9.6 Puabi’s Clothing: “Cut-Off” with Appliquéd Ornaments 9.7 Puabi’s Clothing: Linen “Cut-Off” 9.8 Puabi’s Clothing: Linen “Cut-Off” and Appliquéd Wool Trim 10.1 Drawing of Relief Orthostat from Throneroom B, Northwest Palace, Nimrud 10.2 Relief from Reign of Tiglath-Pileser III 10.3 Drawing of Relief from Reign of Sennacherib 10.4 Relief from Reign of Ashurbanipal Depicting Lion Hunt: Slabs 13–15, Room C, North Palace, Nineveh 10.5 Relief from Reign of Ashurbanipal Depicting Lion Hunt, Room S', North Palace, Nineveh

xvii 188 190 192 193 195 198 200 201 202 221 228 230 250 266 271 272 274 281 282 282 283 294 295 298 300 302

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Figures

10.6 Relief from Reign of Ashurbanipal Depicting Campaign Against Arabs, Slab 11, Room L, North Palace, Nineveh 10.7 Drawing of Relief from Reign of Ashurbanipal of a Lion Hunt Along a River, Room S, North Palace, Nineveh 10.8 Relief from Reign of Ashurbanipal with King in His Chariot, Room M, North Palace, Nineveh 10.9 Drawing of Relief from Reign of Sennacherib of Campaign Through Mountains, Southwest Palace, Nineveh 10.10 Drawing of Relief from Reign of Sennacherib Depicting Landscape, Court VI, Southwest Palace, Nineveh 11.1 Slabs 14 and 15 of Sennacherib’s Throneroom (Room I), Southwest Palace at Nineveh 11.2 Slabs 16 and 17 of Sennacherib’s Throneroom (Room I), Southwest Palace at Nineveh 11.3 Portion of Lower Register of Slab 16 of Room I 11.4 Slab 18 of Sennacherib’s Throneroom (Room I), Southwest Palace at Nineveh 11.5 Drawing of Right Side of Slab 15 and Slabs 16 and 17 of Throneroom (Room I) in Southwest Palace at Nineveh 11.6 Drawing of Phoenician City from Slab 2 of Facade n of Sargon II’s Palace at Khorsabad 11.7 Reconstruction of Slabs 14–17 in situ in Throneroom (Room I) in Southwest Palace at Nineveh 11.8 First of a Pair of Bulls in situ in Door d of Throneroom (Room I) in Southwest Palace at Nineveh 11.9 Beginning of G. Smith’s so-called “Bull 4” Inscription 11.10 Detail of Sennacherib’s Throneroom Suite in Southwest Palace at Nineveh 12.1 * Ranunculus asiaticus (buttercup) collected by Botta 12.2 Floor Plan of Northwest Palace at Nineveh 12.3 Drawing of Winged Lion in Door of Room BB, Northwest Palace 12.4 Winged Human-Headed Lion, Door a of the Throneroom, Northwest Palace 12.5 The Standard (June 1, 1846) highlighting Layard’s work 12.6 The Times (June 2, 1846: 7) highlighting Layard’s work 12.7 The Illustrated London News (June 26, 1847: 412) 12.8 * Watercolor, Nineveh from the North-East, 1849, by Frederick Charles Cooper * Figure also appears on color insert between pages 204 and 205.

307 308 312 314 316 332 333 334 335 337 340 343 350 352 359 373 283 385 385 389 390 397 403

12.9 12.10 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6 13.7 * 13.8 *

Figures Punch (May 12, 1855: 187): Layard as Bull Colossus in “Baiting the Nineveh Bull” Punch (May 19, 1855: 202): Layard as Bull Colossus in “Palmerston’s Nightmare” Illustrated News of London (October 26, 1850): “Humanheaded and Eagle-winged Bull from Nimrud” Parian Porcelain Souvenirs for the British Museum Punch (April 7, 1855: 135): “The Member for Nineveh Digs Out the British Bull” The Nineveh Court; Interior view of The Crystal Palace in Sydenham Egyptian House and Assyrian House, 1889 Statue of Gudea, 1889 Design for ‘Sardanapalus’ by F. Lloyds, ca. 1853 Design for ‘Sardanapalus’ by W. Gordon, ca. 1853

xix 406 407 421 422 429 430 436 438 439 440

Editorial Note

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he spelling of place and personal names throughout this volume has been standardized insofar as possible to the most common American normalization. All diacritics, excepting those appearing in direct quotes, citations, and Akkadian and Sumerian transliterations, have been omitted.

Dedication

D.1 Holly Pittman at Kani Chaie Drawing Seal Impressions

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his volume is dedicated to Dr. Holly Pittman, Bok Family Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania and curator of the Near Eastern Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Penn Museum). It was conceived to honor her extraordinary contributions to the field of Near Eastern studies as archaeologist, art historian, mentor, professor, and friend. In 1989, Holly arrived at the University of Pennsylvania from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Over the past thirty years, in her multiple roles as

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Dedication

professor of ancient Near Eastern art, practicing archaeologist, and curator at the Penn Museum, she has played a vital role in shaping both the current status and the future of the field of Near Eastern studies. In addition to her active engagement with practicing Near Eastern scholars from around the globe, Holly has been instrumental in training several generations of Near Eastern scholars, scholars who include (as is clear from this volume) philologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists, as well as art historians. In a field that has long seen sharp and unproductive divisions between disciplines, Holly has built bridges, establishing the foundations for collaboration and richly interdisciplinary approaches to Near Eastern things. To honor the spirit and nature of Holly’s remarkable contributions to the field of Near Eastern studies, this volume is designed not as a traditional festschrift but as a gift in kind, a deliberately and thematically coherent work—if one simultaneously very rich and diverse in the breadth of its approaches, theoretical concerns, and case studies—that looks both to the foundations of the field and to its future. Karen Sonik Philadelphia, PA | October 1, 2020

Foreword Thoughts on the Field of the Future: Holly Pittman and Near Eastern Studies Christopher P. Thornton

I

entered the University of Pennsylvania anthropology department as a doctoral student in the fall of 2002, straight from a wonderful year studying archaeological theory at the University of Cambridge. My undergraduate degree had been in archaeological science, involving many hundreds of hours in laboratories of various kinds, so the year in England was meant to complement my more practical background. I came to Penn expecting to complete this archaeological education with a strong, four-fields anthropology degree focused on Iran and Central Asia. “American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing,” wrote Willey and Phillips in their seminal 1958 volume, Method and Theory in American Archaeology. Fueled by these words, I began my year in Philadelphia confident that I was learning what I needed to know to be the best archaeologist and scholar that I could be. And then I met Holly. It was at an event at the Penn Museum—some speaker or another had come through to give a lecture—and I was mingling afterwards with faculty and students (including, no doubt, our editor Karen Sonik) when someone introduced me to Professor Holly Pittman. A petite, energetic woman with round glasses that made her eyes look bigger than they are—she looked up at my 6’4” lanky self and asked “What do you plan to focus on?” “Iran and Central Asia,” I told her, confident that I had deflected this inquisitive art historian. Her eyes got wider and she leaned forward intensely, giving me a look that I would later learn meant, “Watch Out!” She replied in no uncertain terms: “If you’re going to work on Iran, then you’re going to work with me!” Who was this woman?!

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F.1 Holly Pittman (left), Robert H. Dyson (center), Christopher P. Thornton (right)

Before I continue this story, I should probably explain a bit more about how I became interested in Iran. As an undergraduate at Harvard, I had spent most of my sophomore year working on a stable isotope project looking at the diets of pre-Classic Mayan skeletons from Belize. This was to be my senior thesis project. However, politics intervened and I was thrown off the project. Cast adrift and wondering what I could do instead, I approached a professor whose class on ancient civilizations of the Old World had intrigued me. On the day I approached him and explained my tale of woe, Prof. C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky took me down into the storage rooms of the Peabody Museum and told me to pick a project. I picked Tepe Yahya, a site in Southeastern Iran that Karl had excavated back in the 1960s and 1970s, and the rest is (published) history. Now, given that I was a budding scholar of Southeastern Iran, one would have thought that Dr. Holly Pittman would be well known to me. Indeed, I



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had on my shelf her 1984 volume, “Art of the Bronze Age,” which included numerous examples of what we would later know to be objects of the Halil Rud (“Jiroft”) Civilization (of which Tepe Yahya was a satellite settlement). Truth be told, I hadn’t used her book very much in my undergraduate work because it was an art historical approach to mostly looted artifacts. It was my humble opinion at the time that looted artifacts were useless to an archaeologist—probably fake anyway—and that art history was unscientific, lacking both epistemology and methodology. Luckily, I kept those opinions to myself, but I’m pretty sure that she deduced from my tone that I harbored these thoughts. I have often wondered if Holly saw through this arrogant ignorance at our first meeting, or if she simply hoped to redeem some small part of this wayward graduate student. Either way, I’m pretty sure that I was quite unlikeable, but at least I had one thing going for me: I knew the ceramics of Southeastern Iran. In 2004, Holly began a field project in the Halil Rud at the third millennium site of Konar Sandal in Southeastern Iran. She pulled together a small seminar of graduate students who were planning to work with her at this site. Right from the beginning, Holly made no pretense about the intention of this seminar. This was not a lit-review class about trade and exchange systems or cultural styles and hybridity in the Bronze Age; we all needed to get up-to-speed with the material culture from this region and adjacent regions, and quickly! The seminar was as intense as its creator, full of day-trips to Boston and New York to look at collections, an unbelievable roster of expert guest speakers, as well as hours spent with the unparalleled Penn Museum collections. It felt anachronistic—seminars at Ivy League institutions weren’t supposed to be practical!—as if we were back in the 1930s trying to work out ceramic typologies based on the earliest stratigraphic excavations. The class was thrilling for me—not just for the speed by which we absorbed huge volumes of data, but also because it was my first chance to witness Professor Holly Pittman analyze and synthesize both formal and stylistic traits of various artifacts across a vast geographical and chronological expanse (Egypt to the Indus; Neolithic to historic periods) without a single scientific instrument in hand. This was a revelation. Duly humbled (ish), I signed up for Holly’s “Ancient Iran” class for the next semester, despite the fact that my department felt this was not a good use of my time towards an anthropology degree. As someone who had already studied ancient Iran for many years at this point, I figured that Holly’s

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class would be a “refresher” in which I could breeze through. Wrong again! The class was a magnus opus broken into twice-a-week hour-long lectures, each one a fast sprint through the late prehistory of a particular region. While most of the other student struggled to discern Godin from Geoy, or to understand the difference between Aliabad Ware and Iblis IV pottery (ha!), I struggled with how unfamiliar all the material was to me. These beautiful artifacts from across Iran, as seen and explained through the gaze of Professor Holly Pittman, opened up an entirely new understanding of this region to me, and I could not understand how I had never seen these objects before. It was like going through the looking glass and finding a parallel world in which the symbols and images I had looked at for years suddenly could speak to me, telling me about intercultural contacts, sociopolitical hierarchies, ideological narratives, and trade and exchange systems at the micro-level. The most important part of this course was that Holly always explained how she knew what she knew about each piece, showing comparanda and pointing us towards key indicators. She didn’t expect us to take her analyses at face value merely in deference to her reputation, but instead encouraged us to think critically, question methodologies, and seek alternative hypotheses. I can recall a number of occasions on which I or another student challenged Holly on the interpretation being presented, which inevitably resulted in a flurry of images being shown with other examples of the same trait or feature. I also realize, upon reflection, that Holly showed me and others how to work with looted artifacts—always with a critical eye and a healthy dose of skepticism as to a looted object’s provenance, but with a mind open to the possibility that this one artifact could provide the missing link to an important gap in our understanding of the ancient world. This was arguably the most important lesson that I, and others, learned from Holly. I worked closely with Holly throughout my graduate years at Penn, particularly on the Konar Sandal excavations and on the Cheshmeh Ali material. I relished the long hours spent in her office or at the Penn Museum, pouring over images and artifacts, sharing knowledge with each other (more her-tome, but I digress), discussing various questions that had arisen in our own research. We each approached ancient Iran from different angles; together we found synthesis. That collaboration has continued to this day, and is one of my most precious relationships with any colleague.



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Towards the end of my time at Penn, Holly became embroiled as an expert witness in a repatriation lawsuit to return looted “Jiroft-style” materials back to Iran. Such repatriation cases are very difficult to win, as the onus is on the prosecution to demonstrate without any doubt that the artifacts originated in one specific country. Looking at the corpus of looted artifacts, it was clear that these were made in the Jiroft region, but such artifacts were traded widely in the Bronze Age—indeed, some of the earliest examples known were found during Sir Leonard Woolley’s excavations of the Royal Tombs of Ur in Iraq, the artifacts from which are currently on display in the Penn Museum and the British Museum. Thus, Professor Holly Pittman had been brought in by the prosecution to provide an expert report on the likely provenance of these artifacts, and to demonstrate that such an array of Jiroft-style objects could not have come from anywhere but the Halil Rud of Southeastern Iran. I remember this work in particular because of the hundreds of hours Holly spent pulling together this report. Time for research and writing is precious to any academic, and I was struck by her devotion to getting this right. She was horrified by the consistent looting of the Halil Rud sites that had first brought this civilization to public attention in the early 2000s, and angered that despite years of Iranian and foreign work in this region, looted artifacts were still appearing on the antiquities market and in major museums. Many archaeologists believe that art historians, particularly those with museum backgrounds, are the main supporters of the antiquities market, as they can fill their exhibits and gain access to some of the best material for study. Watching Holly slave over this legal report unraveled my last prejudice about art historians, which to this day shames me, and inspired my own work with cultural heritage preservation in the years to come. Holly Pittman will long be known for her work unveiling the ancient world of Iran and neighboring regions, most notably the surprisingly complexity of the Jiroft Civilization of Southeastern Iran. As others in this volume have noted, she will be remembered by her students as a brilliant lecturer, a tough-love mentor, and a dedicated scholar. But to me, Holly will always be my unofficial Doktormutter, the woman who (im)patiently forced me to confront my ignorance and prejudice. I have learned from Holly that only an art historical approach to the past can draw out the cultural and ideological aspects of symbolic expression, so critical to the formation and maintenance of social cohesion and identity. Furthermore, art historians

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and philologists play an essential role in the fight against looting and the antiquities trade. It is often the case that only the learned and discerning eye of a scholar of the ancient world can make sense of the hundreds of looted artifacts that make their way into the antiquities trade every day, and many (like Holly) dedicate their time and expertise to this cause. I still believe that archaeology must be driven by anthropological questions or it is pointless. Whether looking at broken pottery, examining the images on a stele, translating an ancient text, or running tests in the lab, the goal should be to learn more about our species and the complex ways in which we relate to each other and to the natural world. To reach these new understandings about ourselves, we must utilize, as is demonstrated by the rich and diverse contributions in this volume, a variety of methodologies and perspectives—art historical, anthropological, philological, and otherwise—in tandem to achieve the most complete picture possible. This I learned from Holly Pittman; I hope that’s what she intended by “you’re going to work with me!” Christopher P. Thornton, Washington, DC | October 15, 2020

Introduction The Ancient Near East: Western | Non-Western Karen Sonik

T

he Near East occupies an extraordinary place in human history. It is the region where agriculture first took hold on a broad scale and where the earliest cities and empires arose (e.g., Tinney and Sonik 2019). As the birthplace of urban civilization, it was integrated into the “story of art”—de facto Western art—and, with Egypt, into the narrative of Western history, long before many other non-Western civilizations. And yet, the Near East continues to occupy a strained and uneasy position within these histories because it remains, in many respects, alien and unfamiliar. The material remains of the Near East, no matter how exquisitely rendered and visually satisfying, were not predicated on European conceptions of fine art as they arose during the Enlightenment or Romantic Age. They do not (and there is no reason we should expect them to) conform to European conceptions of what art does or how it works—or doesn’t work—in the world. Indeed, the status of Near Eastern “things” as art, and their incorporation into the Western art canon—albeit in the tacit role of uglier1 and primitive predecessors to the properly Western and civilized ancient arts deriving from Greece and Rome2—was (and is) dependent on their transformation into “objects.” Objects, particularly art objects, are defined here as belonging to and dependent on us, in contrast to things, which do not and are not (in this volume, see Sonik). The metamorphosis of Near Eastern things into legitimate art objects worthy of analysis has permitted the completion of diverse and nuanced studies of Near Eastern visual corpora over the past eighty plus years (e.g., Woolley 1935; Groenewegen-Frankfort 1951; Frankfort 1996 [1954]; Parrot

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1961; Moortgat 1969; Pittman 1994; Porada 1995; Winter 1995, 2002; Thomason 2005; Feldman 2006; Evans 2012; Bahrani 2003, 2014, 2017). But this legitimacy has also come at a price: it has precluded the thorough contextualization of Near Eastern things alongside non-Western arts and artifacts that raise pertinent problems and questions and suggest relevant and productive approaches and modes of consideration (e.g., Winter 2000; Bynum 2012). Such broader contextualization and exploration is vital to the sorts of cognitive dilation that would permit us to look at and think about the ancient Near East and the material things that occupy it in new (to us) or unfamiliar ways.3 The call for Near Eastern art’s broader cross-cultural contextualization among the non-Western arts may be more generally applied to the ancient arts of all regions, even those more firmly emplaced in the Western category. Jean-Pierre Vernant and other scholars of the École de Paris, for example, argued for the “‘desperately foreign’ character of the [ancient] Greeks…[whose characteristic modalities of thought] have more in common with the…[so-called] ‘primitive peoples’ studied by anthropologists such as Levi-Strauss than with those of modern westerners” (Tanner 2006: 15; also Versnel 2011: 10–14).4 Near Eastern things, for their part, occupy a peculiar position as both ancient and non-Western—or, from another perspective, neither. (“Ancient” has long been co-opted by the Greco-Roman world exclusively, while “non-Western” generally excludes the Near East because of the latter’s nominal incorporation into the Western narrative.) If this renders them essentially ambiguous, straddling the boundaries between categories, it also opens them to a broad, rich, and mutually illuminating engagement with the things of other peoples, times, and places. The volume is divided into seven sections addressing topics of contemporary critical concern. The first section, Art | Artifact, elucidates key terms and issues pertaining to the classification of (especially ancient and non-Western) arts and artifacts, and their analysis within art historical, anthropological, archaeological, and related frameworks. The second section, Representation, encompasses a rethinking of how ancient written and pictorial compositions function (or don’t function) as representations. The third section, Context, examines art historical and archaeological concepts of context and the ways in which contextualizing may inform and enrich our understanding of ancient civilizations and their ideological and material productions. The fourth section, Complexity, explores the rise of complex



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pre-literate societies with an emphasis on the ways in which early glyptic participated in, shaped, and reflected developing socioeconomic, ideological, and political structures. The fifth section, Materiality, elucidates issues of presence, absence, and (gendered) ephemerality as they relate to the archaeological record. The sixth section, Space, explores space as socially and culturally mediated, rather than as universal constant, and examines the utilization of architectural spaces of experience. The seventh and final section, Time | Afterlives, explores the rediscovery, reception, and manipulation of the ancient world in the nineteenth century through diverse lenses encompassing politics, mass communication (the media), reproductions, paintings, and performances. Each of these major sectional themes also thread through chapters in other parts of the volume, evoking interesting resonances and diverse perspectives.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE VOLUME Section I, Art | Artifact, contains a chapter by Karen Sonik that addresses key issues relating to the classification, analysis, and (mis-)representation of the types of things (ancient and non-Western) explored throughout the volume. It explores how and why, and through what processes and with what implications, some ancient and non-Western things have been selected as “authentic art” objects and others relegated to “mere artifacts.” It examines the manner and locations in which such things are typically displayed or experienced, as well as the effects of physical and other frameworks on how we reconstruct—or, arguably, construct—the civilizations to which such things belong(ed). It also examines how we define, understand, and apply (and with what consequences) terms such as art and artifact; Western and non-Western; and thing, object, and work. Issues of space, time, and context, and the ways in which these intersect with matter, recur throughout. The chapter concludes by querying whether the locus of a thing’s (and specifically an artwork’s) authenticity and identity must reside in its matter or whether it might reside instead in the thing’s action and use in rather than against time—even to the point of being changed and, ultimately, used up. What if a thing’s identity depends not on removal from or denial of time but rather on the full acceptance of it and its consequences? Section II, Representation, contains contributions by Paul Delnero and Beate Pongratz-Leisten. In the first, Delnero explores how studies of

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Sumerian laments have frequently treated these compositions as disembodied textual artifacts, without considering the ritual contexts in which they would have been recited, sung, and performed. He examines the content of Sumerian laments more directly in relation to their performative function in Mesopotamian rituals of collective lamenting. More specifically, he argues that the content of Sumerian laments directly reflects the primary function of Mesopotamian lamenting, which was to generate a collective expression of grief and sorrow to awaken the pity of the gods in order to prevent foreseeable catastrophes. After presenting the evidence for the use of Sumerian lamenting in generating grief, Delnero concludes with an analysis of the different ways in which the specific poetic devices employed in the laments were used to induce the emotional effects the laments were intended to produce. In the second contribution, Pongratz-Leisten investigates the production of royal imagery—with an emphasis on the image of king as warrior as it developed through close communication between the king, scholars, and craftsmen—as well as its conceptual expression and representation of specific cultural and ideological agendas. She argues that the mental image and Denkform (conceptual metaphor) of cosmic order is the basis of its realization in every medium (including pictorial, textual, and ritual) and explores issues of inner as opposed to exterior visualizations and the relationship between verbal and pictorial expression. Pongratz-Leisten also investigates the variety of effects—cognitive, practical, and affective—of the image and its capacity to presence simultaneous temporalities as a significant aspect of its agency. The repertoire of divine and royal warrior representations in Mesopotamia serves as case study for these theoretical considerations, and Pongratz-Leisten argues that the affect of such images is promoted by the gesturality of human and divine action, which created a powerful Bildakt (effect) on the beholder. Section III, Context, contains contributions by Karen S. Rubinson and Matt Waters. In the first, Rubinson examines Norman Bryson’s discussion of art historical context for its relevance to archaeological context. Her chapter investigates both the art historical and archaeological contexts of a ceramic vessel painted with nine horses that was excavated from tomb 7 at the site of Nerkin Naver in west-central Armenia. Dating to the Middle Bronze Age (last quarter of the third to first half of the second millennium BCE), this tomb contained a single human together with animal



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bones—bull, sheep, and horse—and more than 60 ceramic vessels including the jar painted with horses. Rubinson demonstrates that, without knowledge of its archaeological context, the Nerkin Naver painted jar, with its unique imagery of horses, could not be fully appreciated or understood. A diachronic review of evidence for the presence of horses in the Bronze and Iron Age South Caucasus, combined with an investigation of the places where such evidence occurs, enrich our understanding of the meaning of the horse imagery on the painted jar. The information gleaned from these analyses enable us to understand why the artist responsible for the Nerkin Naver painted jar chose to depict horse imagery; it also raises new questions about other types of imagery and decoration on Middle Bronze Age pottery in the South Caucasus. In the second contribution, Waters explores intentional ambiguity in portrayals of the Achaemenid king and the ways in which this ambiguity (further) blurred an already nebulous line between king and god. The Achaemenid king never explicitly claimed to be divine, but divine elements of king and kingship were incorporated into Achaemenid ideology. There are intimations of the king’s divine essence in the king’s relationship with the winged disk and in the doubling of the king’s image found in monumental sculpture as well as glyptic. Waters discusses some of these intimations, especially as manifest in images, in their wider context with consideration of parallels and inspiration. Section IV, Complexity, contains contributions by Marcella Frangipane and Barbara Helwing. In the first, Frangipane discusses the ways in which glyptic images reflect social order in the wider Mesopotamian world from the seventh to the fourth millennium BCE. She identifies a divergence between northern and southern Mesopotamia in terms of the ideological use of images—in particular the images applied to tools in such widespread use as seals—and links this with a profound difference in the nature and exercise of power and its roots. Frangipane suggests also that the images entrusted to the seals were effective in ideological transmission and examines how they reflected the different socioeconomic and political worlds within which they were created and which they had to affirm and promote. In the second contribution, Helwing focuses on Tal-e Bakun A in southern Iran. Excavated in the 1930s on a comparatively large scale, the site provides some of the best-known evidence for the use of stamp seals in Western Asia during the mid-fifth millennium BCE. Interpreted as markers of early

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administration in a pre-state society, the surviving stamp seals and seal impressions play a significant role in the various and partly conflicting proposals that see the site as a center of early complexity. Helwing challenges those reconstructions of Bakun lifeways—which have typically projected backwards in time various economic models for which there is (textual) evidence only from the late fourth millennium BCE onwards—that have equated seals and sealing practices with economic control in an increasingly connected world of circulating goods. After revisiting the glyptic and pictorial records (the latter as extant on painted vessels) for Bakun Period (ca. 4500–4100 BCE) sites, she concludes that the Bakun communities must be understood on their own terms as largely egalitarian social organizations in which power was based on personal prestige and shared values. Seals in this context arguably played an important role in signaling personal and/ or group status within the framework of those communal activities carried out in prehistoric communities. These prehistoric communities should be regarded as inclusive, allowing all members to participate in collective rituals and feasts and to access various resources that could be consumed or exchanged on the occasion of these events. Section V, Materiality, contains contributions by Greta Van Buylaere and Rita Wright. In the first, Van Buylaere examines the making and functioning of ephemeral artifacts in ancient Mesopotamia. She foregrounds issues of materialization and dematerialization, presence and absence, and enforced transience through a case study focusing on Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft rituals. Anti-witchcraft rituals were performed by exorcists (ritual experts) to free bewitched patients from spells cast and harms inflicted by malevolent warlocks and witches. They often included figurines representing the offending warlock and witch created especially for the duration of the ritual performance: such figurines provided the exorcist with a means to communicate and interact with the world. By the conclusion of the anti-witchcraft ritual, the warlock and witch figurines were destroyed; their existence and significance in the context of ritual performance is known almost exclusively through references to them in the cuneiform texts. The Mesopotamian warlock and witch figurines are striking examples of ancient ephemeral artifacts, possessed of a deliberate transience and yet leaving behind distinct material traces (here in the form of textual references) that illuminate the purposes and consequences of their creation; something of their materiality during their existence; and the circumstances of their demise.



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In the second contribution, Wright brings together studies of gendered labor organization and production of material culture, especially textiles, as windows into the status and role of women in history. Her analysis focuses on the burial of Queen Puabi, one of the few royal tombs that was well preserved in the Royal Cemetery at Ur. This burial offers historians a rare glimpse into the high quality and abundance of precious goods consumed by women of high status in Sumerian society and provides an opportunity to construct a complex narrative of the role of queens and their participation in cultic rituals in the Early Dynastic Period. Wright demonstrates how Puabi’s burial allows us to reconstruct a portrait of a queen who was dedicated to the ideologies of her time, and who served them in a spectacular performance during a moment in history we might otherwise never have known. By gathering together the various threads that pertain to the production and use of cloth, Wright completes a narrative of (and re-materializes missing elements from) Puabi’s funerary performance. Section VI, Space, contains contributions by Marian Feldman and Joshua Jeffers. In the first, Feldman explores the visual rendering of threedimensional space in two-dimensional media. This topic has constituted a central theme in Western art history, which has been told, in particular, through the story of one-point or linear perspective as an invention of the Italian Renaissance. As early as Henriette A. Groenewegen-Frankfort’s Arrest and Movement (1951), and through to more recent studies such as John Russell’s (1991) discussion of “Space and Time” in Sennacherib’s reliefs, this perspectivist narrative has comprised the framework within which the representation of space in Mesopotamian art has been studied. Space, however, as with other concepts previously considered universal, is increasingly understood as socially produced and culturally learned. Thus, we can push our investigations beyond how Mesopotamian renderings of space measure against perspectival space. Focusing on Neo-Assyrian narrative (orthostat) reliefs, in particular those from Ashurbanipal’s North Palace at Nineveh, Feldman asks instead how renderings of space contribute emotive effects that shape the experience of these artworks, emphasizing the physical presence of the palace walls through the material solidity of the stone orthostats. In the second contribution, Jeffers re-situates Neo-Assyrian orthostat reliefs depicting a contested military encounter in their three-dimensional spatial context in Sennacherib’s throneroom to illuminate the knotty

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question of their identification. Military achievements were the primary means through which the Assyrian kings legitimized their reigns to the gods. Given the importance of military success to royal ideology, the kings’ inscriptions were replete with accounts of victories and, during the NeoAssyrian Period, their palace walls were carved with images of martial conquests. In the reign of the Neo-Assyrian king Sennacherib (704–681 BCE), text and image combined to illuminate the details of one particular campaign: Sennacherib’s invasion of Phoenicia in 701 BCE. The written accounts of this campaign in Sennacherib’s royal inscriptions suggest that the king had difficulty in forcing the city of Tyre to submit to his hegemony. This politically unacceptable situation was resolved over the years subsequent to the invasion. As a result, written and pictorial accounts of the Phoenician campaign were deliberately deployed in the throneroom of Sennacherib’s Southwest Palace at Nineveh to tout the Assyrian conquest of the city of Tyre. Jeffers concludes that these later sources were specifically utilized within the space of the king’s throne room to insinuate Tyre’s conquest during the Sennacherib’s Phoenician campaign, thereby obfuscating the king’s initial inability to subdue that city. Section VII, Time | Afterlives contains contributions by David Kertai and Kevin McGeough. In the first, Kertai explores the complex relationship between Britain’s archaeological and political interests during the Victorian era (1840s), taking the Mosul area within the Ottoman Empire and the excavations of Austen Henry Layard in this region as its case study. It highlights the connections between British archaeological exploration, intelligence-gathering activities, and political interests vis-à-vis both the Ottoman Empire and France, as well as the developing public interest in scientific expeditions and in the larger world, which were being shaped and fed by the diverse constituents of the British Press. Layard’s career reveals the potential of archaeological exploration for charting a path for oneself in Victorian Britain. Newspapers, increasingly important in the social landscape of Victorian Britain, were very influential in shaping the reception of Layard’s work. Preceding his widely successful Nineveh and its Remains, published in January 1849, Layard’s reception developed out of and was molded by events and by reporting occurring during Layard’s presence in the Ottoman Empire. Layard understood how newspapers actually gathered the information they published and used different types of professional and personal networks to define the importance of his



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discoveries and, ultimately, advance his archaeological and subsequent political career. In the second contribution, McGeough discusses the ways in which Austen Henry Layard’s discoveries captivated the Victorian public. The removal of the artifacts from the Near East and their installation in the British Museum gave Londoners the opportunity to experience the material culture of the newly discovered civilization (seemingly) directly. Yet the new materialism and consumerism of the Victorian era meant that the reception of ancient Assyrian things was not limited to the confines of the museum. Miniature souvenir porcelains, parodic newspaper images, giant painted canvases, and larger-than-life plaster reproductions allowed the consuming public to experience a manufactured Assyria. Ancient Assyrian artwork thus entered the visual culture of the Victorian world in a manner that both preserved ancient meanings and created entirely new modes of thinking about antiquity in relation to the present. McGeough surveys some of the different popular media in which Neo-Assyrian art was recreated, re-imagined, and re-fashioned in Victorian times and considers the relationship between different visual art genres and Mesopotamia itself as signifier/signified. Addressing Walter Benjamin’s argument that auratic objects lose their power when reproduced in mass media, this paper demonstrates, as has been done for ancient Egyptian materials by Lynn Meskell (2004), that antiquities may come to have different but no less significant meanings when remade into new objects in new contexts—here in the form of museum souvenirs, political satire, public exhibition (world’s fairs), and public performance (theater). In all of these cases, the reception of Assyria through new Victorian things carried some of the contemporary beliefs about the ancient world but allowed those beliefs to be refocused as commentary on the present. As such, Victorian dialogues were facilitated through engagement with ancient Assyrian visual culture. NOTES:

0.1 The adjective “uglier” is deliberately used here to evoke the specter of “beauty,” which continues to haunt our interaction with as well as our scholarship on art and aesthetics in interesting and often problematic ways (e.g., Gaskell 2003, esp. p. 274; Starr 2013; Chatterjee 2014). 0.2 The ongoing use of the term “ancient” by publishers and scholars to refer to exclusively Greek and Roman things is a troubling relic—remaining a common practice if not an excusable one—of this view of the world; see, for example, the so-called Companion to Ancient Aesthetics (Destrée and Murray 2015) published

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by Wiley-Blackwell. This volume, despite its title, concerns itself exclusively with Greece and Rome, leaving the ancient civilizations of the Near East and Egypt, as well as of the rest of the ancient world, entirely out of the picture. The (long discredited) idea that one cannot properly speak of art and aesthetics—or, for that matter, history or civilization or really any other thing—prior to the advent of the Greeks is implicitly propagated by such works. The title of the present volume is an implicit response to such practices. 0.3 The purpose of this broader contextualization is explicitly not to sever Near Eastern art from the Western canon nor to separate it entirely from the traditional art historical approaches that have been applied to it over the past eighty years. Nor is it to identify and compare things from disparate non-Western cultural contexts that look alike in order to elucidate their points of similarity. Bynum (2014: 345, 347), discussing the problem of pseudomorphism in cross-cultural analysis, neatly exploded the assumption that “the comparanda with which one starts are in some way given or obvious” and observed “how misleading it can be to assume, without sophisticated knowledge of context, that shapes or forms are either like or unlike.” Historically and historiographically, the ancient Near East straddles the line dividing Western and non-Western. 0.4 On Vernant and the French structuralists, see, e.g., Stocking 2020. On continuity and difference between us (the contemporary Western we) and the ancient civilizations we study, see further, e.g., Konstan 2006: 5; Sonik 2017: 231. Tanner (2006: 15–16) further notes the contributions of structuralist methodologies to the “sophistication of iconographic studies of Greek vase-painting” as well as poststructuralist contributions to understanding how visual signs might structure “the gender, sexual and political identities of their consumers.” Interestingly, he observes that both new and old Classical art history is characterized by the dominance of philological over archaeological modes of analysis. A similar problem continues to plague Near Eastern scholarship, in which philology reigns supreme and art historical analyses are often dismissed with the verdict non liquet, regardless of their methodologies.

REFERENCES Bahrani, Zainab. 2003. The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bahrani, Zainab. 2014. The Infinite Image: Art, Time, and the Aesthetic Dimension in Antiquity. Reaktion Books. Bahrani, Zainab. 2017. Mesopotamia: Ancient Art and Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson. Bynum, Caroline Walker. 2012. The Sacrality of Things: An Inquiry into Divine Materiality in the Christian Middle Ages. Irish Theological Quarterly 78.1: 3–18. Bynum, Caroline. 2014. Avoiding the Tyranny of Morphology; or, Why Compare? History of Religions 53: 341–368. Chatterjee, Anjan. 2014. The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.



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Destrée, Pierre, and Penelope Murray. 2015. A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Evans, Jean. 2012. The Lives of Sumerian Sculpture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Feldman, Marian. 2006. Diplomacy by Design: Luxury Arts and An “International Style” in the Ancient Near East, 1400–1200 BCE. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Frankfort, Henri. 1996 (1954). The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient. Fifth ed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gaskell, Ivan. 2003. Beauty. Critical Terms for Art History. Second ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Groenewegen-Frankfort, Henriette Antonia. 1951. Arrest and Movement: An Essay on Space and Time in the Representational Art of the Ancient Near East. London: Faber and Faber. Konstan, David. 2006. The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Layard, Austen Henry. 1849a. Nineveh and its Remains: With an Account of a Visit to the Chaldæan Christians of Kurdistan, and the Yezidis, or Devil-Worshippers; and an Inquiry into the Manners and Arts of the Ancient Assyrians, vol. 1. London: John Murray. Layard, Austen Henry. 1849b. Nineveh and its Remains: With an Account of a Visit to the Chaldæan Christians of Kurdistan, and the Yezidis, or Devil-Worshippers; and an Inquiry into the Manners and Arts of the Ancient Assyrians, vol. 2. London: John Murray. Meskell, Lynn. 2004. Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies Past and Present. Oxford: Berg. Moortgat, Anton. 1969. The Art of Mesopotamia: The Classical Art of the Ancient Near East. New York: Phaidon. Parrot, André. 1961. The Arts of Assyria. New York: Golden Press. Pittman, Holly. 1994. The Glazed Steatite Glyptic Style: The Structure and Function of an Image System in the Administration of Protoliterate Mesopotamia. Berlin: Deitrich Reimer Verlag. Porada, Edith. 1995. Man and Images in the Ancient Near East. London: Moyer Bell. Russell, John Malcolm. 1991. Sennacherib’s Palace Without Rival at Nineveh. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sonik, Karen. 2017. Emotion and the Ancient Arts: Visualizing, Materializing, and Producing States of Being. In Visualizing Emotions in the Ancient Near East, ed. Sara

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Starr, G. Gabrielle. 2013. Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience. Boston: MIT Press. Stocking, Charles H. 2020. The “Paris School” and the “Structuralist Invasion” in North America. Cahiers Mondes Anciens 13: https://doi.org/10.4000/mondesanciens.2739 Tanner, Jeremy. 2006. The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece: Religion, Society, and Artistic Rationalisation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomason, Allison Karmel. 2005. Luxury and Legitimation: Royal Collecting in Ancient Mesopotamia. London: Routledge. Tinney, Steve, and Karen Sonik, ed. 2019. Journey to the City: A Companion to the Middle East Galleries at the Penn Museum. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Versnel, Henk. 2011. Coping With the Gods: Wayward Readings in Greek Theology. Leiden: Brill. Winter, Irene J. 1995. Aesthetics in Ancient Mesopotamian Art. In Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, ed. Jack M. Sasson, 2569–2582. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Winter, Irene J. 2000. Opening the Eyes and Opening the Mouth: The Utility of Comparing Images in Worship in India and the Ancient Near East. In Ethnography and Personhood: Notes from the Field, ed. Michael W. Meister, 129–162. Jaipur: Rawat Publications. Winter, Irene J. 2002. Defining ‘Aesthetics’ For Non-Western Studies: The Case of Ancient Mesopotamia. In Art History, Aesthetics: Visual Studies, ed. Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, 3–28. Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Woolley, Charles Leonard. 1935. The Development of Sumerian Art. London: Faber and Faber Limited.

1 Art/ifacts and ArtWorks: De-Colonizing the Study and Museum Display of Ancient and Non-Western Things 1

Karen Sonik Keywords: ancient; non-Western; art; artifact; aesthetics; aura; context; object; thing; institutional theory of art; anthropology of art; space; time

ART BEYOND THE BOUNDARIES: ANCIENT AND NON-WESTERN THINGS IN SPACE AND TIME Art and Artifact: Questions and Issues

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n 1988, at the Center for African Art in New York, Susan Vogel curated ART/artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections, a seminal exhibition exploring the relationships between the display and classification— and the resulting perceptions and receptions—of African things in Western contexts (see also Vogel 1997). This came on the heels of the Museum of Modern Art’s controversial 1984 exhibition, “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, which deliberately juxtaposed non-Western things (primarily from Africa and Oceania) with well-known modern art by European and American artists in order to establish and explore particular relationships or affinities between them (cf. Green and Daehner 2008; Chi and Azara 2015). Taken together, these exhibitions, the volumes based on them (Rubin 1984; Vogel 1988), and the responses to the issues and ideas they foregrounded (e.g., Faris 1988; Townsend-Gault 1992; Dutton 1993; Gell 1996; Hay 2016/2017), exposed striking limitations in the capacity of traditional art historical approaches to elucidate the aesthetics, significance, and functioning of works from the artworld beyond that of Renaissance and

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post-Renaissance Europe and, in later periods, of the so-called Western world more broadly.2 Inasmuch as traditional approaches to art were based in primarily European philosophical discourses and designed to apply to primarily European visual corpora (e.g., Morphy 2007), such limitations are, in retrospect, hardly surprising. These developments in the artworld of the 1980s also stimulated an explicit grappling with more fundamental questions that have become, in our ever more globalized world, critical to art historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, curators, and scholars engaged in material and visual culture studies.3 How might we—the contemporary Western “we”—best define and apply terms such as art, artifact, artist, and aesthetics in cultural contexts that had no native equivalents for our own conceptualizations of these?4 How might the art and aesthetics of non-Western civilizations be productively identified, approached, and understood if explicit oral (or written) discourses on these topics are absent or inaccessible? How and where should non-Western things be displayed or exhibited? And what are the effects of such displays on how we reconstruct—or, arguably, construct— the civilizations to which the things belong? What is the proper place of non-Western things within the traditionally Western canon of art, if such a canon indeed continues to exist?5 On what bases might the authenticity, merit, and value (market and otherwise) of art be assessed and established? To what extent and in what ways does the materiality and agency of art matter? How does art reflect, materialize, or participate in various types of social and other relationships? And to what extent do the very terms we use to discuss such questions themselves arise from and actively contribute to longstanding misconceptions? Many of the above questions and issues have, in recent decades, been particularly intensively explored with respect to non-Western things, especially those once subsumed under the categories of so-called “ethnographic art” or, even less palatably, “primitive” or “tribal art.” This is perhaps unsurprising given that the place of such things within both the canon of art and the discipline of art history remains the subject of both explicit and implicit consideration and negotiation. A significant and positive byproduct of this negotiation is the cogent articulation of key theoretical frameworks not only from art history and archaeology but also from disciplines such as sociology and anthropology, especially the anthropologies of art and aesthetics, within which such things may be analyzed. The works of anthropologist



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Alfred Gell (1992, 1995, 1998) on agency, aesthetics, and the technology of enchantment are particularly well known, but by no means unique, in this regard (e.g., Layton 1991 [1981]; Coote and Shelton 1992; Marcus and Myers 1995; Pinney and Thomas 2001). Such approaches, moreover, have gained broader currency as they have been applied to art objects of all periods and regions—including, importantly, to those Western arts of the past several centuries for which the conceptualization and related philosophies of “fine art” were first designed. Also notable is the renewed emphasis on materiality and other concerns drawn from material culture studies (e.g., Miller 2005; Meskell 2005; Van Dyke 2015; cf. Ingold 2007; Yonan 2011), as well as the use and refinement of the object biography approach, by art historians and other scholars in a range of related disciplines (for theory: Kopytoff 1986; Gosden and Marshall 1999; Hoskins 2006; Joy 2009; Joyce and Gillespie 2015; for application: e.g., Daston 2000; Meskell 2004; Olson et al. 2006; Tythacott 2011). My purpose in this essay has been to explore, directly and indirectly, various aspects of the questions posed above as they pertain to ancient as well as non-Western things that have become art—and often art objects in a specifically Western sense—through a variety of means. It has also been to expose and query the numerous and varied slippages, the peculiar conceptions and misconceptions that color every facet of our engagement with things that are, today, classified and displayed as art. Many such slippages and their consequences have been documented and defined by scholars working on African and other “non-Western” arts; it is imperative, I think, that the same be done for the ancient arts (from all parts of the world), even if many of these belong to civilizations that no longer have living representatives to speak for them.

Art and Artifact: The Terms of Engagement Several terms are used throughout this chapter that are worth defining here in brief, even as they are more fully elucidated through the discussion and case studies below. Primary among these terms are non-Western, artifact, and art. The lattermost of these, art, is notably entangled in this chapter with several additional terms: object, thing, and work. Non-Western is used throughout this chapter. This replaces older and explicitly pejorative designations such as “primitive” and “tribal,” which have rightly fallen into disuse, but it also introduces significant new

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problems (e.g., Dufrene 1994). It falsely implies a homogeneity of the very diverse things subsumed under the category of non-Western art and establishes, equally falsely, a diametric opposition of these things with those classified as Western art (a spuriously homogenizing category in its own right). The binary opposition of Western vs. non-Western art, moreover, asserts the primacy of the former as the standard against which all other arts are judged rather than as only one—and a peculiarly self-conscious and mannered one at that (e.g., Abrams 1985)—among many temporally, geographically, and otherwise bounded and contingent manifestations of a fundamental human behavior of art-making, “artification,” or “making special” (e.g., Dissanayake 2009; Brown and Dissanayake 2009). That the term nonWestern is used in this essay, despite these very significant defects, reflects the absence of a better or at least equally accessible and widely understood word: if non-Western is explicitly problematic, it at least is also expansive enough to encompass a broad diversity of arts, from those of large-scale and literate civilizations such as Mesopotamia and Egypt to those of smallerscale and non-literate cultures, under its rubric. The frequent conjunction of non-Western with ancient in this essay is also worth remarking on and explaining, lest it be misunderstood as implying equivalency between the two terms or suggesting that the non-Western is fundamentally “primitive” (Layton 1991 [1981]: 1ff.). This essay deals with things that are or have been transformed into art objects, a category that encompasses many things that precede the rise of Western conceptions of fine art, as well as many things that were created beyond the geographical and/or ideological reach of such conceptions. The terms ancient and nonWestern together encompass much of the span of the temporal, spatial, and other disjunctions at issue. As this essay opens a volume of case studies on specifically Near Eastern things, which may be classified as both ancient and non-Western (or, from an alternate perspective, as neither),6 the conjunction is also a pertinent one in this context. The terms artifact and art are also worth introducing briefly before their deconstruction in the main discussion. This essay is particularly concerned with art. But many things that have become ancient or non-Western “art”—or, better, many ancient and non-Western things that have become Western art objects—were at one time, and in some contexts may continue to be, artifacts. The art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto (1988: 20), in his response to Vogel’s ART/artifact exhibit, averred that “the line between



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artwork and [mere] artifact” was absolute. The distinction—for him—was not one of outward appearance; the sheer range and variety of things intentionally produced as art by contemporary artists had made this sort of discrimination impossible. Scientific tests and analyses were likewise declared, even where not entirely useless, beside the point. Instead, Danto (1988: 26) took up the Hegelian opposition of the “Realm of Absolute Spirit” (art) with the “Prose of the World” (artifact). Art for Danto—though not for him alone—was the product of the artist-as-genius. It was a vessel of spirit and meaning, made in “the absence of rules of its production,” and the mode of its making was not only unteachable but also unlearnable (Danto 1988: 28–29). He recognized its contemporary status and institutionalization, without regard for whether this was for good or ill, as placeless and useless (in the sense of lacking a use separate from being art), both qualities asserting its status as a self-contained and isolated end in itself. The mere artifact, in contrast, was not only a useful thing, one designed to function, but also an instrumental one: it served an end beyond itself. Danto (1988: 28) invoked, as he elucidated the concept of artifact, Heidegger’s conception of Zeugganze, an inter-referential totality of tools: e.g., a hammer, referring to a nail, referring to a board, referring to a saw, referring to a whetstone. Each participant in this economy of things depended on the existence of the other(s): none would have arisen in splendid isolation or as the product of independent and creative genius. The artifact’s embeddedness within broader networks of relationships sharply contrasted with the purported capacity of art to stand entirely outside of such networks as a creation of original genius—which was itself an invention of eighteenthcentury Europe (e.g., Duff 1767: 35, 48, 1770; Kant 1914 [1790]: 189).7 However, even Danto (1988: 29) acknowledged that the isolation of art and similar concepts of originality and creativity were not necessarily the point for so-called “Primitive cultures,” which existed outside the temporal, spatial, and ideological reach of Enlightenment and Romantic era Europe. There is much that is clarifying and deeply thought-provoking in Danto’s contrast of art and artifact. He was aware that the arts of other cultures— whether temporally or spatially divergent (or both) from the arts of the socalled Western world—could and did have alternate (dual) identities as both objects of use and praxis and vessels of spirit and meaning (e.g., Danto 1988: 29). He realized, similarly, the barriers to engaging with the things of other cultures on their terms (particularly in the absence of knowledge of their

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terms) rather than only our own, and he perceived the peculiar distortions we impose on such things through our focus on opticality, aesthetic qualities, and placelessness (Danto 1988: 29, 32). And yet, Danto’s work was founded on untenable premises: that art possesses and always has possessed a stable identity; that the boundaries of what art is are and always have been fixed and inflexible (so that even things newly attaining the status of art are not transformed but only lately recognized); and that conceptions of art and the artist that were rooted and cultured in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, even if leavened by observations from ancient Greek philosophers and dilated by the experiments of Duchamp and the artists who followed him (Danto 1988: 18ff.), constitute some universal truth. Danto was conscious of some of the distortions his premises introduced into his analysis, addressing these implicitly and explicitly throughout his work, even as he remained unwilling—or, perhaps, unable—to abandon them. But there is no reason to assume, and many reasons to doubt, that the European conception of “fine art”—with all its emphasis on the art object’s isolation, autonomy, imposed uselessness and placelessness, setting it apart from the real world and outside of space and time as an end in itself—is such a universal. If one is seeking fundamental human universals, surely it makes more sense to start not with material outcomes or products, with all their culturally invested or assigned qualities (e.g., Benzel 2015), but rather with common behaviors and actions (e.g., Dissanayake 1992, 2000; Brown and Dissanayake 2009; cf. Chatterjee 2013) that might yield a diverse array of material outcomes possessing not-easily-recognizable things in common.8 Danto (1988: 31), perceiving the problem of seeking the essence of art in its matter or form, attempted to shift his ground by conceptualizing matter as embodiment of meaning. This shift necessitated the imposition of an immutable (and ultimately unpersuasive) boundary between artifacts, which “have no meaning to speak of” (Danto 1988: 24), and art, which is pure meaning materialized (Danto 1988: 29). I am not inclined to fall in with the distinction between elevated and useless art as end in itself and utilitarian “mere” artifact as means to other ends. I would observe, among other things, that the independence of art as Danto articulated it is more pretense than reality. Art objects, as Alois Riegl and Ernst Gombrich demonstrated, depend on us—the beholder. They are, moreover, in a very literal sense, our objects, contemplated, desired, displayed, and otherwise removed from the world and from the flows of space



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and time to be preserved for and acted upon only by us. Artifacts, by way of contrast, have more numerous and expansive potentialities through their existence as things within the world, participants in interactions not only with us but also with diverse spaces or places and times (e.g., Gibson 1977, 1979; Graves-Brown 2000a: 4; in this volume Frangipane; Helwing). They are, as a result, subject to change in the manner of all living and other things in the world, even to the extent of being used up or coming to an end (in this volume, Van Buylaere; Wright). Artifacts are also capable of being transformed into art objects, a metamorphosis that is not an elevation to a higher state of being but only an alteration into a different one. The distinction drawn here between objects (particularly “art objects”) as belonging to and dependent on us, and things, which do and are not (or not only), is one that is maintained throughout this study (see, further, Ingold 2012: 436, 438; Nussbaum 1995).9 The term artwork is one that is deliberately eschewed until the end of this essay as I reserve it for art that works, that is, for things (not objects) that meaningfully act in and on the world. Many of the arts of the world, including those of the ancient Near East, belong to this category and are not diminished thereby. This lengthy discussion of art and artifact has not been offered only to critique conceptions that have been extensively and cogently examined elsewhere (e.g., Dutton 1993; Errington 1994; Gell 1996). Rather, its intention has been to expose the degree to which our culturally inculcated notions of what art is, where it is encountered, and what it does or should do permeate every aspect of how we think about and engage with art objects— even those that were not made within but have only been transformed or appropriated into the modern system of the arts. The following discussion examines the slippages that inevitably result from the collision of our conceptions with things that were not made to conform to our peculiar notions of what art is or should be.

ART BY INSTITUTION: OBJECT/IFYING THINGS Institutional Encounters: Art Objects & the Beholder’s Involvement The traditional Western conceptualization of art as the non-utilitarian object of disinterested aesthetic contemplation, a peculiarly decontextualized end in itself, has been thoroughly exposed as a temporally and

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geographically bounded construct (e.g., Abrams 1985). It is not only inapplicable to the majority of the (explicitly functional) arts produced throughout much of the historical and geographical expanse of the world but also an idealized fiction mostly inapplicable even within the eighteenth and nineteenth century contexts within which it flourished (Carroll 2009; Gell 1996: 36; cf. Davies 2006). Nevertheless, this conceptualization of art continues to linger, due in part to its deep entrenchment in Western thought during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods and in part to its ongoing reinforcement through the specific contexts in which art objects—or things labeled as such—are encountered. If one wants to look at “art,” one almost inevitably goes to a museum or an art gallery, an institution maintained for the purposes of selecting, displaying, and viewing objects.10 The term viewing is here deliberately used to emphasize the unidirectional, individual, and distant nature of the regard directed by the subject at the object. The distinction between viewing and seeing—the former representing an isolated, unidirectional, and long-distance act and the latter a mutual, interactive engagement replete with sensual and material possibilities— and the implications of substituting one for the other, formed the central conceit of The Naked Sun, a 1957 novel by the brilliant speculative writer Isaac Asimov (1957: 63): “‘You’re viewing me right now. You can’t touch me, can you, or smell me, or anything like that. You could if you were seeing me. Right now, I’m two hundred miles away from you at least. So how can it be the same thing?’ Baley grew interested. ‘But I see you with my eyes.’ ‘No, you don’t see me. You see my image. You’re viewing me.’” While Asimov’s observations were addressed to human relationships, their salience for the interactions between humans and things—and specifically the subset of things here explored as art objects—has been amply demonstrated through the material culture and materiality studies of recent decades. The viewing of objects in museum or gallery contexts, moreover, even if it does not take place at a literal distance of hundreds of miles (though it may do that as well through the proliferation of digitized museum collections over the past two decades), is one that is deliberately distanced in other ways. The range and variety of possible physical interactions is sharply and deliberately circumscribed:11 looking is permissible; other types of physical encounter are not. One might contend, of course, that material and sensual engagement in institutional contexts takes place in the mind even if not in the flesh, and that the power of such cognitive and imaginative interaction, far from being



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diminished, may even amplify the effects of the object. An illuminating elaboration of this premise occurs in Dudley’s (2012: 1) account of her encounter with a bronze horse, which she later discovers to have Han Dynasty origins, at the Compton Verney art gallery in Warwickshire: The horse was green, over a metre high, and stood considerably higher still as a result of its plinth. I was utterly spellbound by its majestic form, its power, and, as I began to look at it closely, its material details: its greenish colour, its textured surface, the small areas of damage. I wanted to touch it, though of course I could not - but that did not stop me imagining how it would feel to stroke it, or how it would sound if I could tap the metal, or how heavy it would be if I could try to pick it up. I was, in other words, sensorially exploring the object, even though I had to intuit and imagine rather than directly experience most of the encounter. There was no label at all adjacent to the object…I still knew nothing at all about this artefact…nonetheless, its three-dimensionality, tactility and sheer power had literally moved me to tears. Dudley’s encounter, as described here, is profoundly affective. She offers it to the reader as an example both of the power of art for art’s sake and of the value of traditional institutional displays of art objects as unmediated (or minimally mediated) by information or context. She suggests, indeed, that the provision of such context would actually impede the viewer’s response, “a fundamental, emotional, sensory, even visceral, one to [the art object’s] form, materials, colour, scale and texture” (Dudley 2012: 2; also Moore 1941 [below]). Putting aside the second part of her argument, which is extensively addressed below, we are left with a peculiar but compelling question: what, precisely, did Dudley actually encounter in the account quoted above? Dudley titles her article, “Encounter with a Chinese horse,” referencing the Han Dynasty origins of the object she views. The geographical and chronological origins of the horse are indicated on a hand guide accompanying the horse, along with a reference to its original spatial context and function: “Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220): Heavenly Horse, tian ma. Bronze. This large horse would have been a funerary offering for the tomb of an élite Chinese man, the intention being for the owner of the tomb to use the horse to pull his chariot in the afterlife” (apud Dudley 2012: 2). But Dudley’s actual encounter with the horse takes place in 2010 CE, nearly

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1800 years after the end of the Han Dynasty. It occurs, moreover, not in China, nor in a tomb, nor in the company of the other funerary offerings of the original tomb owner, nor among the other things created by its maker(s), but rather within an avowed art gallery in the midst of England where the horse is carefully displayed as an isolated object. To what extent might such an object actually be regarded, in any uncomplicated sense, as a “Chinese horse”? The various lines cast by this question are followed up below but, even if we put aside for the moment the description of the object, we are left to query the natures of both the encounter that Dudley describes and the participants in this encounter. Dudley intensively views the bronze horse and is struck with the powerful desire to touch it. But, as she (2012: 1) says, “of course [she] could not.” Instead, she takes up the mental image of the horse formed through her intense viewing, which she is free to manipulate as she desires: she imagines the tactile feelings of stroking it, the sound it produces as she taps it, its weight as she tries to pick it up, and other sensations that emerge as she engages with and explores it—intimately and sensually, as well as sensorially. And yet—and crucially—the unrestricted access Dudley has to her mental image of the horse is not access to the object itself.12 Not only is there no guarantee of accuracy in any of Dudley’s imagined details of the horse, regardless of how intensely she experiences them, but also the actual horse differs diametrically from the imagined horse in that it resists the very access she envisions having. The horse itself is not open to being tapped or stroked or picked up; the physical interactions Dudley imagines can never take place. What Dudley (2012: 2) presents as an encounter with “the physical object,” namely, the bronze horse on display in the collection, is more accurately an encounter with a different sort of object entirely: Dudley’s mental image of the horse. This mental image, a type of personal copy that Dudley has constructed of the bronze horse, is wholly accessible and responsive to her desires—utterly objectified—in ways the material horse is not. (This objectification goes well beyond the institutional objectification of the bronze horse, which already renders the horse as art object accessible in ways it would not be in its original spatial and temporal contexts; see below the discussion of aura). It is worth considering here Baxandall’s (1988 [1972]) discussion of the relationship between artist, beholder, and, implicitly, art object (painting) in his elaboration of the period eye, as well as Riegl’s and Gombrich’s elucidation of the beholder’s involvement or share.



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Baxandall (1988 [1972]: 45) described the fifteenth century painter as “a professional visualizer” of holy stories but noted “what we now easily forget is that each of his pious public was liable to be an amateur in the same line…The public mind was not a blank tablet on which the painters’ representations of a story or person could impress themselves; it was an active institution of interior visualization with which every painter had to get along.” Moreover, the pious public was trained in particularizing the stories painted “to the point of perhaps setting them in one’s own city and casting them from one’s own acquaintance” (Baxandall 1988 [1972]: 46). This had material consequences for the painters’ output, which should not compete or interfere with the particulars or intimacy of its beholders’ interior visualizations: the painters “provided a base—firmly concrete and very evocative in its patterns of people—on which the pious beholder could impose his personal detail, more particular but less structured than what the painter offered” (Baxandall 1988 [1972]: 46). Fifteenth century paintings thus functioned as sites of collaboration between painter and public; both their existence and their particular forms and materiality were predicated on the existence not merely of a beholder but of a specific type of beholder—one with the particular experiences, capabilities, and expectations typical of the spatial and temporal milieu in which artist, art, and audience alike were cultured. More generally, the conceptualization of the art object as explicit locus of collaboration between maker and beholder—indeed, of art as completed by the beholder—was established in art historical discourse through the works of Riegl (1999 [1902]; Olin 1989; Kemp W. 1999) and Gombrich (1960: 181–290; see also Kandel 2016: 17–19). This accommodates, to some extent, the contingency introduced by beholders who may diverge from expectation. My purpose in raising the above is not to segue into a discussion of reception aesthetics or methodologies (see, further, Kemp 1998) but rather to illuminate the extent to which the institutional settings in which we encounter art objects demand not merely a beholder but one specifically possessed of particular skills that have been culturally constructed and disseminated. This beholder is one able to transform the fundamentally longdistance and unidirectional act of viewing an object into a type of (potentially) intersubjective interaction, whether intimate and multisensorial or distanced and contemplative—even if, or, more likely, when, this interaction occurs primarily in the mind.13 It is perhaps worth noting that this type of

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interaction with art objects, fostered in the Western world over the past two centuries, is one that has occurred with respect to sacred things in considerably more varied cultural and chronological contexts (Gell 1998, 1992: 40, 42; Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik 2015b).

Institutional Encounters: Solitude, Isolation, and (the Aesthetic) Attitude Svetlana Alpers (1991: 26) percipiently pursued the experience of objects in an institutional context under the rubric of the museum as a way of seeing, a heightened kind of “attentive looking” at the objects contained therein.14 Such attentive looking is promoted in part by the setting apart or isolation of art objects in a specific (institutional) space separate from the spaces of everyday life and in part by the severance of individual objects from the larger wholes or contexts to which they at one time belonged (Figs. 1.1–1.3) (see further Malraux 1978 [1949]: 14, 27). In such spaces, it is

1.1 Marble Ionic Column from Temple of Artemis at Sardis (26.59.1); Hellenistic Period, ca. 300 BCE. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art



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1.2 Head of a Sphinx, Possibly Amenemhat I (66.99.4); Middle Kingdom Egypt, Dynasty 12, ca. 1981–1952 BCE. From the Levant (Tyre?).Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

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1.3 Ivory Head of Female Wearing Necklace (54.117.2); stone and gold inlays missing. Neo-Assyrian Period, ca. ninth to eighth century BCE. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

not merely the objects that are isolated: so, too, are the viewers. One might visit a museum with friends or family and even regard and discuss (in suitably muted tones) particular objects together; almost inevitably, however, groups or pairs will fragment into individuals who traverse the galleries and regard art objects independently.15 Abrams (1985: 27), commenting on the power of institutional context and cultural conditioning to compel a predetermined response on the part of the museumgoer to a displayed object, referenced an encounter with Duchamp’s Fountain (Fig. 1.4), the “readymade” urinal signed and dated with “R. Mutt 1917” and mounted on a museum wall: “Many of us, once the initial shock or indignation or derisive laughter has worn off, succumb to the institutional compulsion, assume the aesthetic attitude, and begin to contemplate the object as such, in its austerely formal and monochromatic harmony.” More recent manifestations of this phenomenon abound, as in the case of Vogel’s (1991) hunting net from Zaire (discussed below) or a 2016 experiment at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art described in a May 30, 2016 New York Times article (Mele 2016). In the latter, teenagers Kevin Nguyen and TJ Khayatan set a pair of Burberry spectacles on the floor of a gallery and watched as, within several minutes, museum visitors noticed the

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Karen Sonik 1.4 Fountain (1917), Marcel Duchamp. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz at 291 (gallery), 1917

“exhibit” and “regarded” it as a bona fide art object. A photo taken by Nguyen accompanied the article: it shows one such visitor, crouched with knees and elbows on the floor, training his camera lens on the eyeglasses’ lenses: the spectacles are not merely accepted as art object when emplaced within the context of the museum but also deemed worthy of memorializing by the viewer. The aesthetic attitude, a problematic and complex concept, has been characterized as “a psychologically distinctive state of distanced contemplation” (Davies 2000: 201) or disinterested interest (Kant 1914 [1790]: 46ff., 53ff.).16 It is concomitant with one’s consciously attending to (typically looking at) a thing (often but not always an art object) with a peculiar type of focused intensity in order to create an “aesthetic experience,” one distinct from the experience of everyday life (Fry 1927: 1ff.; contra Richards 1930 [1924]: 11–18, 231ff.).17 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the aesthetic attitude has its roots—alongside the definition of fine art (above), the conceptualization of artist as original and creative genius (Kivy 2013),18 and the establishment of the artworld (Iseminger 2004: 72–73; Carroll 2009; discussion below)— in the social, economic, and theological developments that occurred in Europe (particularly in Britain and Germany) from the Enlightenment into the Romantic Period (e.g., Abrams 1985: 11–13; Kristeller 1951, 1952). This era saw the replacement of what Abrams (1985: 13–14) termed the construction model, according to which each of the arts was treated “as a procedure



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for selecting and adapting its distinctive elements to preconceived ends and uses,” with a so-called contemplation model, according to which the “fine arts” (codified as architecture, music, painting, poetry, and sculpture) were treated as isolated and “ready-made things existing simply as objects of rapt [single-minded] attention” by an isolated and individual perceiver. The decontextualization, autonomy, and emphasis on the isolated individual assumed by the contemplation model, all key characteristics of the Enlightenment (e.g., Novitz 2003: 734; Zaretsky 2015: 8–10) during which the model was fostered, are profound. They attend not only the isolated and autonomous (art) object in its typically institutional context but also the subjects/agents involved, the artist-as-individual (genius) and the vieweras-individual (connoisseur)—as well as, I think it worth adding, the viewer’s isolated attention, attitude, and/or experience. Gell (1998: 97), focusing on one aspect of the context within which the aesthetic attitude arose, characterized it as a unique “historical product” of the religious crisis that attended the Enlightenment and the rise of Western science (Lane 2011; Matytsin 2016). He concluded that it had no bearing on those civilizations—e.g., ancient, non-Western, and pre-Enlightenment Western—that did not undergo this crisis and in which aesthetic and religious experience and concerns were (or remained) inextricably intertwined.19 Even in post-Enlightenment Western contexts, the relationship between aesthetics and religion has been far from fully severed: this state of affairs has consequences not only for the discipline of the anthropology of art, which Gell (1998: 97) recognized as inevitably contributing to the anthropology of religion, but also for the public engagement with the arts in the Western world. Gell (1992: 40, 42), indeed, memorably characterized the attitude adopted by the art-loving public towards the objects contained in British art institutions such as the National Gallery as one of “aesthetic awe bordering on the religious,” and persuasively suggested that we have “sacralized art: art really is our religion.”20 This attitude is materially undergirded and encouraged by institutional structures themselves, both by the spaces they enclose and set apart, where visitors engage in circumscribed and even ritualized behaviors centering on the objects therein, and by the architectural edifices (Fig. 1.5) that mark museum space, which implicitly or even explicitly signal their status as temples to art (for a nuanced discussion on the museum as ritual space, see Duncan 2009 [1995]; cf. Branham 1994/1995

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1.5 The British Museum: Main Facade (1853), Sir Robert Smirke. Collotype After Earlier Print. Courtesy Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0)

for a practical articulation, argued on somewhat different grounds, of the essential incompatibility of museum space and sacred space). In the United States, the art museum functioned as both accessory and potential aid to religion during the urban reform movement of the turn of the twentieth century (e.g., Steffensen-Bruce 1998: 126ff.).21 And in Germany, the conceptualization of the public and private museum and gallery (especially the picture gallery) as a “temple of art,” a type of religious or akin-to-religious space, was established, even if not universally realized, already, by the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Thus Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, one of the founders of German Romanticism, regarded art and religion as “similar enterprises” (Sheehan 2000: 47; also Fine 2015) and vexedly observed the commercialized and “annual fair”like atmosphere of contemporary picture galleries “where the new wares are judged, praised, or disdained” (Wackenroder 1984 [1797]: 201; apud Ziolkowski 1987: 373). Such galleries, he thought, ought properly “to be temples, where in still and silent humility and in heartstirring solitude one admires the great artists as the loftiest among mortals and basks through long, undisturbed contemplation of the works in the solar radiance of the most delightful thoughts and sensations” (Wackenroder 1984 [1797]: 201; apud



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Ziolkowski 1987: 373).22 For Wackenroder’s successors, art was not merely like religion; it was, “in and of itself, a religious act, an evocation of sacred beauty, a source of salvation” (Sheehan 2000: 46). Wackenroder’s idea of appropriate behavior in the temple of art, moreover, was disconcertingly close to the conceptualization of proper museum etiquette as ultimately developed and promulgated over the next two centuries.23 A brief article on “The British Museum,” published in the 7 April, 1832 edition of The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (alongside articles on Pompeii and British Animals, as well as advice “On the Choice of a Labouring Man’s Dwelling”) is illuminating on this point: it simultaneously warns the English populace against indulging its propensity for mischief; exhorts this same populace to enjoy “some of the purest gratifications which an instructed mind is capable of receiving”; and encourages it to take its courage in its hands and “knock boldly at the gate” of the museum, where it will be freely admitted by the porter (there is indeed “nothing to pay”) to what is, after all, its own property. The article also takes the opportunity to lay out “a few simple rules” of behavior and interaction with both the objects and other persons in the British Museum,24 which have been and continue to be internalized by subsequent generations of museumgoers so that we now regard them almost as natural rather than culturally specific and deliberately inculcated:25 1st. Touch nothing. The statues, and other curious things, which are in the Museum, are to be seen, not to be handled. If visitors were to be allowed to touch them, to try whether they were hard or soft, to scratch them, to write upon them with their pencils, they would soon be worth very little....2dly. Do not talk loud. Talk, of course, you must…for pleasure is only half pleasure, unless it be shared with those we love. But do not disturb others with your talk…or you will distract the attention of those who derive great enjoyment from an undisturbed contemplation of the wonders in these rooms.…3rdly. Be not obtrusive. You will see many things in the Museum that you do not understand.…do not trouble other visitors with your questions…You must not expect to understand what you see all at once; you must go again and again if you wish to obtain real knowledge, beyond the gratification of passing curiosity. (The Penny Magazine, April 7, 1832)26

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1.6 Silver Arm Reliquary of Saint Fiacre (17.190.353). Medieval France, ca. thirteenth century CE with fifteenth century additions. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art (see also color insert)

1.7 Copper Alloy Sculpture of Ganesh (2015.500.4.12). India (Tamil Nadu), ca. twelfth century CE. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

The explicitly quiet, contemplative, and even reverential attitude of aestheticism, deliberately fostered by the types of institutions within which art objects reside and by now deeply inculcated in the “art-loving public,” is particularly striking when applied to non-Western and ancient (pre-Renaissance) things—including, though not limited to, the once-sacred, devotional, and religious—which are often denuded of every form of prior context and function. Such diverse things as medieval French reliquaries (Fig. 1.6), sculptures of Hindu gods (Fig. 1.7), Egyptian temples (Figs. 1.8–1.9), and Mesopotamian votive figures (Fig. 1.10) have been neutralized and aestheticized in order that they might be re-dedicated and even re-sacralized as art objects in museums (Faure 1998; Gell 1998: 97; MacGaffey 1998: 229–30; Winter 2000; Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik 2015a: 18ff.). This process of de- and



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1.8 Temple of Dendur in Sackler Wing of Metropolitan Museum of Art (68.154). Given to the United States by Egypt in 1965, awarded to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1967, and Installed in the Sackler Wing in 1978. Roman Period Egypt, Reign of Augustus Caesar, ca. 10 BCE. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art (see also color insert)

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1.9 Watercolor of Temple of Dendur, Showing the Pylon and Terrace (1874), in situ. Frederick Arthur Bridgman (2000.597). Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art (see also color insert) 1.10 Stone Votive Figure (50.112.2). Early Dynastic III Period Mesopotamia, ca. 2600–2350 BCE. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

re-contextualization is worth considering in light of Dickie’s (1974a, 1984; cf. Wollheim 1980: 105– 11) institutional theory of art, which identifies as art objects those things that are recognized, coopted, and/or displayed as art by the artworld. Constituting the artworld are the artists, curators, critics, other art professionals, and sufficiently expert members of the public who possess both an awareness sufficient to recognize that what has been presented to them is art and the skills and capacities to distinguish the specific type of art being presented (Dickie 1984: 61–62; also Danto 1964: 580–84; Iseminger 2004: 67–77).27



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Gell (1996), in an article taking up issues raised by Vogel’s 1988 ART/ artifact exhibition, pursued the institutional theory of art to its logical conclusion:28 that the display of various types of things (whether non-Western, the functional, or even explicitly mundane) in a gallery setting alongside relevant and established Western art objects could “immediately ‘enfranchise’” these things as art—or at least as what the West might recognize as such (Gell 1996: 34–35; also Rubin 1984; cf., e.g., Errington 1998: 95ff.). A case of such enfranchisement was, indeed, accomplished through the ART/ artifact exhibit, as described by Vogel (1991: 195–96): A hunting net from Zaire was one nonaesthetic, nonsignifying object that bore a spurious resemblance to some contemporary artworks. It was reverently displayed in a pool of light on a low platform. (Ironically, an unanticipated response demonstrated the success of the trickery in some quarters; I and several African-art dealers received inquiries from art collectors about where they might acquire such a marvelous net.) The “trickery” Vogel refers to is the use of different installation styles throughout the exhibition as a means of exploring how perception is shaped by physical frames and contexts—which signal the status of some things as art (or not art). That some viewers responded by recognizing the hunting net as art, under the circumstances, seems neither particularly ironic nor surprising. But that the net was made to become art by the exhibition’s curators, rather than by the weavers of the net, raises a host of other questions and issues, as of which properties of the net might have made it a particularly fruitful candidate for transformation into or recognition as art (Gell 1996, esp. p. 37; discussed further below). The very fact of a thing’s emplacement in the spaces where art is understood to reside, combined with its acceptance as an art object by the artworld, thus can and often does determine and affirm its status as art. Such enfranchisement could have the positive outcome of breaking the stranglehold of the aesthetic notion of art, one Gell (1992: 42–44, 1996: 35, 1998: 2–5; cf. Morphy 2009) decried throughout his works as inappropriate for use by anthropologists. Those who continued to subscribe to an aesthetic view of art, for their part, were unlikely to be discouraged by this broadened category of art objects. They had only, as Abrams observed (above; see also below on Moore), to adopt the aesthetic attitude towards any object displayed in an

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institutional context and carry on. But if the institutional theory of art outlines one path—perhaps the most expedient and frequently trodden one—by which non-Western things may become (fine) art in the traditional Western sense, this mode of enfranchisement exacts a heavy toll: it flattens a multifaceted thing with a life of its own into an ahistorical (or nearly so) object, immanent only in the moment and the space within which it is regarded by the appropriately distanced viewer.29 In the context of a Western museum or gallery, after all, how else might a member of the art-loving public regard it?

Institutional Encounters: What Becomes an Art Object? If the institutional theory of art has certain benefits, not least its capacity to absorb into the category of art all sorts of things (ancient, non-Western, and other) that were not previously recognized as such, it also has significant consequences for the things so absorbed. These consequences were indicated already in the work of French anthropologist André Malraux (1949) and have since been unsparingly spotlighted and critically refined by scholars such as Alpers (1991), Errington (1994, 1998), Morphy (2000); and Myers (2002). Malraux (1978 [1949]: 65, 127; also Maquet 1986: 18–23, 1979 [1971]) observed that things emplaced into museum or institutional contexts underwent striking and explicit transmutations.30 The resulting (transformed) objects were characterized as “art by metamorphosis,” in contrast to objects that were intentionally made as art, which were termed “art by destination.” In these opposing categories the maker or artist’s intentionality in creating (fine) art objects emerges alongside intended context as a determining criterion for classification. Thus, “genre pictures, nudes and mythological characters, abstractions and nonfigurations…certainly were drawn or painted, carved or cast in order to be art objects” (Maquet 1986: 22). They represent “art by destination.” Standing in contrast were things “hand crafted or industrially produced…[or] made for use in religious ritual, government ceremonial, and family memorial,” that is, things made for contexts “other than art” (Maquet 1986: 22). These could become art objects, “art by metamorphosis,” by being recontextualized and socially identified or claimed as such.31 To an extent, it is clear that almost anything may become art through its display in an institutional context and its acceptance as art by members of the artworld (e.g., Vogel 1991). But are there particular characteristics



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that incline a thing (with an emphasis here on ancient and non-Western things) to become—or that make a thing particularly becoming as—art objects? Reaching the limits of the institutional theory of art, Gell (1996: 37; cf. Lemonnier 2012: 60–62) proposed as natural candidates for co-opting as or transformation into art objects those things possessed of interpret1.11 Net Piled on Ground Near Coast in Acre, Israel; Photograph by K. Sonik, July 5, 2018 (see also color insert)

ability, beset with or functioning as “thought traps”: “Every work of art that works is like this, a trap or a snare that impedes passage; and what is any art gallery but a place of capture, set with what Boyer calls ‘thought-traps’, which hold their victims for a time, in suspension?” A net (Fig. 1.11) materializes the notion of capture in its own right (see, further, Kuchler 1999); the particularity of the hunting net’s display in the ART/artifact exhibition, in which it was itself trapped and bound in a second encompassing net, only underscored this point. Alpers, as Gell, hypothesized that some types of things were natural or appropriate candidates for institutional co-opting as art. But she (1991: 27)

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approached the issue from a different angle, one verging on the aesthetic properties that Gell deliberately eschewed discussing: “it is only when, or insofar as, an object has been made with conscious attention to crafted visibility that museum exhibition is culturally informing: in short, when the cultural aspects of an object are amenable to what museums are best at encouraging…When objects like these [e.g., Romanesque capitals or Renaissance altarpieces] are severed from the ritual site, the invitation to look attentively remains and in certain respects may even be enhanced.” There are several issues with this formulation. Not least is the fact that “conscious attention to crafted visibility” is an awkwardly phrased criterion—though it has the benefit of sidestepping the immediately controversial formulation like “aesthetic properties”—to apply to many ancient things today on display as art objects that were never intended for viewing by (living) human beings (e.g., in this volume, Jeffers). Whether a thing was made with conscious attention to crafted visibility has also been a significantly more subjective determination than is implied here (e.g., Dutton 1993, Morphy 2007). It is certainly the case, too, that many made things were designed, “at least in part, to be visually admired” (Baxandall 1991: 39). Alpers’ (1991: 27) contention is nevertheless worth raising, in part because she recognized that the museum could obscure rather than reveal any cultural information a thing might have the capacity to disseminate: that the museum could, indeed, “make it hard to see.” (A similar obscuring effect, I would note, may result from many other modes of presentation, as through photographs in a volume on art.) The interaction between the inherent properties of a thing and the mode and context of its encounter, touched on (if from different angles) by both Gell and Alpers, is arguably central to the effective transformation of a thing into an art object. In the 2016 experiment described above, in which two teenagers effectively situated Burberry eyeglasses as an art object in the San Francisco Museum of Art, two prior attempts using a jacket and a baseball cap failed; neither of these things, according to the report, attracted the attention or regard drawn by the eyeglasses. It is possible that the eyeglasses were a natural candidate—on conceptual or other grounds—for co-opting as art within an institutional context in a manner that the jacket and baseball cap were not. But the effects of the particular mode of display, the ways in which the display worked to bring out the inherent conceptual properties of the eyeglasses, should not be discounted. In Nguyen’s photograph, which accompanies the article describing the experiment (Mele 2016), the



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eyeglasses are set on the floor as they would be on a face: the earhooks are directed at the wall and the clear lenses are oriented out into the gallery and thus at the viewer. The suggestion of the eyeglasses’ outward gaze, a necessarily blank one (a tabula rasa pregnant with possibilities for inscription by the viewer), might fit within the rubric of Gell’s (1996) “thought-traps.” The display evokes, too, the compulsion created by a direct or frontal gaze for the recipient (the viewer) to look back (Schapiro 1973; Sonik 2013). The museumgoer regarding the eyeglasses in the photo is, notably, bent on knees and elbows so that his camera lens is directed at the glasses’ lenses at near eye level. Baxandall (1991: 36), in a thought piece on the institutional display of “culturally purposeful” objects, identified three significant agents at play, the “makers of objects, exhibitors of made objects, and viewers of exhibited made things,” observing that their activity was “differently and discretely if not incompatibly structured.” To these agents we might add a fourth: the things themselves, with an emphasis on not only their material and visual properties but also the spatial, temporal, and other experiences they have accrued. The discussion below, which explores the transformation of things into art objects, touches on the contributions to metamorphosis made by each of these groups.

METAMORPHOSES: BECOMING ART Traumatic Transformations: The Physical The relatively painless metamorphosis of a thing into art proposed by Malraux was critically examined by cultural anthropologist Shelly Errington in an important 1994 study focusing on non-Western (so-called “primitive”) things. Re-envisioning “art by destination” as “art by intention,” and “art by metamorphosis” as “art by appropriation,”32 Errington (1994: 203) cast the issues of the maker’s intentionality and the trauma of transformation—of becoming art—into high relief. Exploring institutional re-contextualization, possible on a large scale only with the founding of public art museum collections in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—fine art, she (1994: 204) observed, developed simultaneously with commodification, collecting, and display, “and the two are inconceivable without each other”—Errington examined the physical alterations and even mutilations

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undergone by things in the process of their transmutation. Non-Western things selected to become art objects, she noted, were selected for their durability and portability. Where either of these characteristics were lacking, things could be subjected to radical and violent transformations: Objects selected for display are best made of durable materials if they are to last.…Many potential pieces of Primitive Art, made in the mainly tropical climates from which such pieces are drawn, are composed of soft materials or a combination of soft and hard materials: flowers and woven palm-leaf offerings, baskets, bamboo, and bark-cloth. The more ephemeral material aspects of these items tend to disappear before they turn into “art.” Those made of a combination of soft and hard parts are likely to lose the soft one, with profound epistemological and aesthetic consequences. (Errington 1994: 204) The dispossession of existing matter or material properties through fragmentation and even amputation (see further below) was not the only means by which things were altered. Some things saw also the addition or alteration of material or material properties or underwent treatments to

1.12 Sand Painting, Wind Doctor’s Ceremony—Navaho; photography by Edward S. Curtis, January 6, 1905. Courtesy Edward S. Curtis Collection (Library of Congress)



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lengthen their lifespans and heighten their capacities to serve as collectible and display-worthy art objects. Exemplifying some of the traumatic physical alterations attendant on becoming art through appropriation or metamorphosis are the stripping by 1920s art dealers of African things’ “soft and fibrous parts, rendering them starkly ‘modern’ looking and preserving or creating a particular aesthetic” (Errington 1994: 204; Rubin 1984). Radical alteration likewise attended the construction of Navajo “sand paintings” (Fig. 1.12) as visual objects rather than agents or participants in the world: what had been (intentionally) evanescent designs in the sand—created as part of curing ceremonies, meant to be sat upon and rubbed on an afflicted member of the community, and, at the conclusion of the ceremony, to be swept away—were transformed into portable and durable art objects (as by being glued on canvas), becoming paintings in the familiar Western mode (Foster 1963; Errington 1994: 205; Howes 2014: 292). Such traumatic transformations, necessarily, have also attended the metamorphoses of ancient things into art objects. To a great extent, the vicissitudes of time, circumstance, and nature have eliminated the material ephemera and the “soft” parts of things—though not necessarily the material traces of such (in this volume, Van Buylaere; Wright)—originating among ancient cultures, as well as the wholly perishable or deliberately evanescent items of daily life and use. Things made of durable materials such as stone and metal have often, where not broken or melted down for re-use or other purposes, perdured (though typically not unaltered) in ways and over timespans that things made of (unfired) clay, leather, textile, or wood typically have not (Fig. 1.13a–c). But archaeologists, looters, and collectors have also had a hand in selecting ancient things for incorporation into the museum and private collections that serve as sites for their transmutation into art objects. Properties or markers of likely salience or interest in contemporary contexts—such as scale; portability; durability (sufficient to survive being carried away and displayed); rich material composition (gold, silver, bronze, stone); and vivid or elaborate forms, colors, and ornament— have often weighed heavily in such selection. There are exceptions: monumental things (Fig. 1.14), for example, have sometimes made their ways into major collections more or less “intact” through the expenditure of considerable time and expense (e.g., in this volume, Kertai),33 while miniatures have established a place for themselves (Figs. 1.15–1.16) as valued parts of

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1.13 a) Lyre of Ur With Reconstructed Head and Replacement Wood Sound Box and Strings (B17694C). Excavated in 1920s by Sir Leonard Woolley with surviving parts crushed and perishable parts decomposed. Restored and reconstructed several times, including on arrival at Penn Museum in 1929 (head already restored at time of arrival); b) sound box constructed with decorations (following inlay surviving on a different lyre) painted by Mary Louise Baker; in 1976, sound box reconstructed following a 1955 visit by Woolley indicating the dimensions were incorrect; head disassembled, components cleaned, original construction details recorded (Greene 2003); c) current (2019) display of the lyre (B17694B). Early Dynastic III Period Mesopotamia, ca. 2600–2500 BCE. Courtesy Penn Museum; Image nos. 162256, 8272, 250852 respectively. (see also color insert)



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1.14 Gypsum Lamassu from Nimrud (32.143.2). Neo-Assyrian Period, ca. 883– 859 BCE. Height: 3.11 meters. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

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1.15 Bituminous Limestone Cylinder Seal with Modern Clay Impression (1983.314.1). Late Uruk Period Mesopotamia, ca. 3500–3100 BCE. Height: 4.5 cm. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art 1.16 left Wood Netsuke (10.211.2342). Edo Period Japan, ca. eighteenth century CE. Height: 7.3 cm. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art (see also color insert)

1.17 right Clay Head of a Buddha or Bodhisattva with Garnet Eyes (1986.2). Afghanistan, ca. fifth to sixth century CE. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art (see also color insert)



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various public and private collections. But other ancient things have undergone considerable violence in the form of addition, fragmentation, and other alteration in the course of their transformations into art objects. A walk through the Classical galleries of many major European and American museums yields the disquieting and rather repulsive spectacle of three-dimensional sculptural heads mounted on metal spikes (Figs. 1.2–1.3, 1.17–1.18). Such heads, severed from their bodies—sometimes in antiquity but sometimes deliberately by looters or collectors—are displayed as art objects in their own rights. (Heads are typically more valuable and visually salient than other body parts, and certainly more portable than entire bodies.34) In addition to their affliction with head-on-spike syndrome, many of these galleries (the Altes Museum in Berlin is particularly disconcerting in this regard) also contain reminders that the ancient sculptures on display underwent modern (often eighteenth and nineteenth century) “restoration,” namely the replacement of salient missing parts without clear indication of where the original ended and the new began.35 Other displayed objects are relatively modern constructs, made from fragments of things originating in antiquity but mistakenly or deliberately joined together by collectors, restorers, and curators of recent centuries. The resulting art objects are material hybrids incorporating parts that may have originated in two (or more) different places and at two (or more) different times (Fig. 1.19– 1.20), with some or even the majority 1.18 Sandstone Head of Shiva (2014.520). Chams Kingdom, Central of the object filled in by an artist or Vietnam, ca. tenth century CE. conservator. In cases where de-restoCourtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art ration (the stripping of such modern (see also color insert)

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additions) was subsequently undertaken, primarily in post-World War II Munich and Copenhagen, “the removal of these [restored] parts exposed the surfaces where natural breaks in the ancient marble had been cut smooth in order to accommodate the additions. Those visible scars, which were never intended to be seen, made it look as if the missing limbs and other body parts had been intentionally amputated, as indeed they had been” (Daehner 2011: 47). Examples of modern physical alterations to ancient things thus abound. But the process whereby ancient things become (western) art objects is not an exclusively material one. In the sections below, other aspects of the alchemy through which this transmutation is achieved are explored.

Traumatic Transformations: Context and Frame The sculptor Henry Moore (1941: 598; emphasis added),36 speaking of so-called Primitive Art,37 suggested that, while it 1.19 Bronze Statue of Roman Emperor Trebonianus Gallus (05.30). Imperial Rome, might be “a mine of informaca. 251–253 CE. Mantle identified as modern tion for the historian and the restoration; left foot is ancient but may belong anthropologist…to understand to another statue. Courtesy Metropolitan and appreciate it, it is more Museum of Art important to look at it than to learn the history of primitive peoples, their religions and social customs.” He acknowledged that some little knowledge, including the “interesting tidbits” contained in the labels, might “help us to look more sympathetically, and…serve a useful purpose by



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1.20 Painted Plaster Replica of Minoan Ladies in Blue Fresco (27.251), by Emile Gilliéron fils, 1927. This replica clearly copies and demarcates the few excavated fragments of the actual fresco; the remainder represents artistic (re-)construction. Original fragments from Knossos, Crete, ca. 1525–1450 BCE. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art (see also color insert)

giving the mind a needful rest from the concentration of intense looking.” But, Moore also argued that “all that is really needed is response to the carvings themselves, which have a constant life of their own, independent of whenever and however they came to be made…they remain as full of sculptural meaning today to those open and sensitive enough to perceive it as on the day they were finished.” From a fine arts perspective, Moore’s argument seemed unexceptionable: he was, or seemed to be, arguing for our engagement with all art objects— even non-Western ones—on their own terms. They might be, as he acknowledged, rich quarries for historians and anthropologists, but should not be regarded as limited to such; they should not, in other words, be regarded as “mere artifacts,” things possessing only functions or serving ends only beyond themselves. Instead, they are complete and self-contained—ends in themselves—and utterly responsive to intense “looking” or “viewing” by persons (viewers/agents). Dudley (2012) makes a more recent argument along these lines in her description of an encounter with a Chinese horse (above). In a famous 1936 lecture, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” the Anglo-Saxon scholar J.R.R. Tolkien presented an argument superficially

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similar to, if far more extensively developed than, that formulated by Moore. Tolkien’s concern, however, was not with the visual but with the literary arts, specifically the Old English poem Beowulf. The poem, at the time of his lecture, was regarded less as art (poetry is notably one of the five traditional fine arts) than as a historical document (akin to a mere artifact), a “quarry of fact and fancy” (Tolkien 1936: 1–2). While he acknowledged the legitimacy of the historian’s search (1936: 3), the “seeking information wherever it may be found,” Tolkien (1936: 1, 31, 33) asserted the status of Beowulf first and foremost as a poem—as art—and refuted attempts to denigrate it as crude or primitive. Both Moore and Tolkien, then, asserted the primacy of their respective subjects as art and demanded that they be engaged with as such. And yet, for all the superficial similarities of their arguments, distinct and revealing slippages are evident when the two are considered together.38 The most prominent and pertinent of these centers on accessibility, which may be further divided into the critical concerns of materiality, context, and translation. Tolkien was writing about an Old English poem that is today extant as a written text; whether it originated as an oral or written composition remains the subject of debate (e.g., Orchard 2003: 85 n. 101). Old English, despite its name, is not directly accessible to the uninitiated contemporary English speaker in its written or orally performed form. Specialized knowledge, in the form of training in the Old English language and culture or the intervention of a specialist to translate it into modern vernacular and, usually, to provide an explanatory gloss, is required (in this volume, Delnero). What may be directly accessible of the poem—in the manner envisioned by Moore for the “primitive” visual arts—are the material aspects of the sole manuscript within which it survives: the medieval Nowell Codex (Fig. 1.21). This likely dates from the late tenth to early eleventh century CE and is currently housed in the British Library collection. One may look intensely at the Nowell Codex and admire or otherwise sensorially experience—in the mind even if not in the flesh (since the manuscript leaves were badly damaged by a fire in 1731 and are too fragile to handle)—the beautiful script, which is written in two distinct scribal hands; the color of the ink; the texture of the parchment; and even the scorching to the edges of the leaves and their subsequent deterioration with handling. One might alternately, if



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1.21 Remounted First Page of Sole Known Medieval Manuscript of Beowulf (132r) in the Nowell Codex, bound in Cotton Vitellius A.xv, ca. 1000 CE. Damaged in fire, 23 October 1731. Courtesy British Library

one were fortunate enough to hear the poem performed by an expert, be enthralled by the material aspects of its recitation (in this volume, Delnero), even without understanding its words or content. The poet W.H. Auden (1963 [1956]: 41–42) recounted his experience on attending a lecture by Tolkien: “I do not remember a single word he said but at a certain point he recited, and magnificently, a long passage of Beowulf. I was spellbound. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish.” The materiality of Beowulf (as mediated by Tolkien), and the intrinsic, immanent effects of this materiality on Auden are worth considering further. Auden, listening to Tolkien’s recitation of the poem, immediately recognized that it was possessed of enormous power; he did not yet understand its content and so that recognition is predicated solely on the formal aspects of the poem as spoken aloud.39 But however thrilling the encounter with Beowulf’s visual aspects as material text or aural aspects as spoken word, a claim that direct and unmediated access to the poem may be gained merely by looking or even listening (however intense) unless one had also some knowledge of the content—as well as some knowledge of the historical and other contexts within which the poem developed and functioned— would seem a rather peculiar one. Auden (1963 [1956]: 42) himself, notably, continued his recollection of hearing Tolkien’s recitation of Beowulf with the consequences of the encounter: “I became willing, therefore, to work at

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Karen Sonik 1.22 Clay Tablet Inscribed in Cuneiform Writing with Likely Balag-Lament to the Mother Goddess Aruru (86.11.62). Such laments were often written in Emesal, a special dialect of Sumerian (itself a language already dead by the date this tablet was inscribed). Old Babylonian Period Mesopotamia, ca. nineteenth to sixteenth century BCE. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

Anglo-Saxon because, unless I did, I should never be able to read this poetry. I learned enough to read it, however sloppily, and AngloSaxon and Middle English poetry have been one of my strongest, most lasting influences.” Beowulf, then, is not reducible to its (enormously potent) material and formal aspects and Auden, though a poet himself, does not claim that knowledge or even foreknowledge of Beowulf’s content, meaning, or contexts would somehow diminish or occlude his encounter with it. Form and materiality, for poetry and texts in general (Fig. 1.22), are recognizable as carriers for content or meaning; this phrasing, notably, is not to suggest the subjugation of the one to the other as materiality and content together constitute the work of art (in this volume, Delnero). Indeed, Beowulf itself was long denied the status of a work of art, despite its incontrovertible formal and material power, because its content was considered inadequate to such an exalted designation (Tolkien 1936: 8): it was decried as feeble, pagan, and incompetent narrative, a wild folk-tale (Tolkien 1936: 5). It took Tolkien himself, in his famous 1936 lecture on the poem, to successfully challenge the judgment of the prevailing “correct and sober taste” and to reclaim Beowulf as a work of art—not despite but because of its content:



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Beowulf is not a ‘primitive’ poem; it is a late one, using the materials (then still plentiful) preserved from a day already changing and passing, a time that has now for ever vanished, swallowed in oblivion; using them for a new purpose, with a wider sweep of imagination, if with a less bitter and concentrated force.…it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he extended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote. (Tolkien 1936: 33–34) Form and materiality are vital to and even inextricable from the work of art, no less for oral or written poetry than for the visual arts. But they are not the sum of art—or, at least, they are not the sum of much of the art of the world, ancient and otherwise. (One might except some, though certainly not all, of Western art of recent centuries, which was designed to be viewed by a beholder in specific institutional contexts.) Any encounter with art objects in such contexts is, as described above, a necessarily long-distance one even as the beholder’s encounter with his or her mental image is intensely intimate (in this volume, Pongratz-Leisten). It is interesting, then, if not wholly surprising, to find that Moore’s purported access to “primitive” sculptural art is predicated on the capacity for direct, unmediated access to (visual) art objects through the act of intense looking. This capacity relies on a complete denial of difference, with respect not only to the origins, biography,40 and contemporary circumstances of the object but also to the nature and circumstances of the viewer(s). Form or, more generally, materiality (albeit a materiality not dependent on specific matter) is content—or at least content enough for going on with. Moore’s ideas did not arise in a vacuum: they developed within the framework of the decontextualization, isolation, and autonomy that are attributed to the art object, the subject (viewer), and the subject’s attitude both in the model of fine art developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in institutional (specifically museum) space. The fact that Moore was looking at the “primitive” art objects he cited as an artist, and, more specifically, as a sculptor, is also pertinent in this regard. For him, the primacy of form, both in his own artistic practice (his making) as well as in the ways he experienced things in the world, is understandable: an object’s precise original or prior contexts, functions, and meanings, in the context of Moore’s experiences and desires as a sculptor, indeed could only be an obstacle. Vogel (1991: 194), along

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these same lines, wrote of her artist co-curators for the 1987 exhibition Perspectives: Angles on African Art as focusing on the displayed objects as “pure sculptural form” to the exclusion of issues of cultural or historical context: Nancy Graves said, “The art is here for us to appreciate intuitively. One may get more information about it which enhances it, but its strength is here for anyone to see.” Iba N’Diaye makes no reference to meaning in his commentaries, and describes drawing objects as the way he learned to see them. Romare Bearden feels that information can even inhibit perception: “I had to put the books down and just look at how I felt about it. The books get in the way sometimes.” For James Baldwin, the only way to understand is through direct experience. “You want to find out?” he asks. “Go and expose yourself. You can’t find out through a middleman anyway.” He also says, “There’s this curious dichotomy in the West about form and content. The form is the content.”41 (Vogel 1991: 194) Notwithstanding Baldwin’s point, that form may in fact be content in various object-making traditions (and in other contexts also), it is worth asking what precisely one finds out when one views “art by appropriation,” as opposed to “art by intention.” For the span of more than two centuries, a key function of an art museum has been to provide a space that renders possible the sorts of intense looking at and direct encounters with art objects described by both Moore and the artist curators of the Perspectives exhibition. Of course, this does not at all mean that institutional space is neutral or uninflected (e.g., Vogel 1991: 195–201). Curators and other museum personnel intervene not only to select specific objects for display but also to influence countless other aspect of the viewer’s experience with such:42 the placement of and information contained in the label; the lighting in the gallery; perhaps the color and material of the walls and floors; the positioning and design of any furniture; the precise location of the object relative to the eye level of the average viewer; the design and nature of the pedestal, support, base, case, or frame (on the work of physical frames see, especially, Gombrich 1979); the surrounding objects; any promotional materials including photographs licensed for publication in scholarly and trade books and souvenirs sold in the giftshop (in this volume, McGeough); and even, in many cases, the title by which a work is known (e.g., Yeazell 2015). All of these aspects function



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as frames that shape, in myriad and diverse ways, the encounter between subject and object—in the course of which the subject views the object. Moore’s own essay acknowledges that his primary encounters with Primitive Art occurred within the larger frame or context of the British Museum, and he describes traversing, over the course of his career, the galleries containing the various ancient arts. After beginning with the Egyptian and the Assyrian, and then going on to the Archaic Greek, Sumerian, and Palaeolithic, he finally arrives at the “Ethnographical room,” where are housed the Primitive Art objects that finally transfix him. (A vivid account of the room and its organization in the early twentieth century appears in Shelley [1911: 299–325]; the chapter is tellingly titled “Civilization in the Making.”) Moore (1941: 598) describes the contents of the Ethnographical room as “an inexhaustible wealth and variety of sculptural achievement… but overcrowded and jumbled together like junk in a marine stores.” The diverse origins of the objects contained in this room are emphasized alongside their crowded disorder: things from the Americas, Africa, and the Oceanic Islands are all haphazardly packed in here rather than being tidily separated by region and presented with an eye to awing and inspiring the visiting public. That the objects in this gallery nevertheless compel Moore attests perhaps to the universal affective power of art, regardless of where or when it was made or crafted (see further below). But Moore’s (1941: 598) response is telling for another reason: he asserts that Primitive Art generally, regardless of individual culture or region of origin, “makes a straightforward statement, its primary concern is with the elemental, and its simplicity comes from direct and strong feeling, which is a very different thing from that fashionable simplicity-for-its-own-sake which is emptiness.” This homogenization and essentialization of the very diverse non-Western things Moore encounters in the British Museum’s Ethnographical room is surely due in no little part to the manner in which he encounters them. They are deliberately undifferentiated, overcrowded, and jumbled together. If apparently capable of asserting their dense material presence despite this, especially to Moore’s trained sculptural eye, they are clearly of little worth to—perhaps because they possess so little obvious affinity with—those organizing the museum. It is not, then, merely the external framework of an object that inflects the encounter with it: so, too, do the personal circumstances, experiences,

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and abilities of the viewer. The psychologist Robert Solso (1994: 101) observed that art is always experienced within particular contexts or frameworks. Included in this category are not only the physical environments within which art is encountered (e.g., the general location such as a particular museum) and the physical composition of the visual field but also the persons in the viewer’s company at the time of the encounter (e.g., a lover, friend, or relative) and the viewer’s prior cultural experience and knowledge. He emphasized, in other words, that seeing is not only biologically or physiologically determined. While basic perception might be “fixed by physiological structures that are jointly enjoyed by all members of the species.…Both individual psychology and common physiology contribute to the perception of art.”43 Other psychologists and anthropologists have likewise explored the roles of prior cultural, social, and visual experience in shaping what and how we see (e.g., Segall et al. 1966, 1968; Deregowski 1968, 1971, 1972, 1999; Phillips 2011). These concerns were entrenched in the discipline of art history through Baxandall’s (1972, rev. 1988: 29–108) conceptualization and elucidation of the Period Eye, the idea that individuals within a specific cultural and temporal context develop common cognitive skills and something of a common cognitive style influencing the making, mode of attending to or regarding, and interpreting of pictures (or, more generally, of art). This concept has been subsequently critiqued (see summaries in Langdale 1998; Tanner 2010), refined, and variously adapted: the anthropologist Jeremy Coote (1992: 248), for example, posited the concept of a cultural eye encompassing “a society’s way of seeing, its repertoire of visual skills…its visual aesthetic”; the art historian Adrian Randolph (2004) explored gendered viewing—the structuring of visuality by gender—during the Renaissance; and the art historian Mia Mochizuki (2016: 70) recently articulated the concept of a global eye, expanding the focus from sociohistorical conditions to encompass “a multi-sited world canvas wrought by the interaction of cultures brought into engagement by the movement of merchants and missionaries, letters and objects, spices, cloth, and raw resources.” The overall point of all of these studies has been to accentuate both the degree to and ways in which our comprehension of an art object “depends on what we bring to the picture” (Baxandall 1988 [1972]: 35; emphasis added). I want to circle back, then, to the question of the accessibility and translatability of (here especially ancient and non-Western) art objects to the



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contemporary viewer, and to consider a direct challenge to Moore’s homogenizing and essentializing treatment by the curator and anthropologist of art Charlotte Townsend-Gault. In an essay on the 1992 exhibition, Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada, in which works by artists of native ancestry from across North America were displayed, Townsend-Gault explored the relationships between art and cultural knowledge. Addressing Moore’s assertions on Primitive Art, she offered a response from Ron Hamilton’s (1991; apud Townsend-Gault 1992: 86) “Box of Darkness,” which addressed the appropriation (and transformation) of things from First Nations peoples. Hamilton (1991: 62) keenly observed that classifying things as art, with the concomitant injunction not to interpret them, was itself an externally imposed interpretation. Townsend-Gault (1992: 99; see also Bhabha 1984, 1994) further explored the limits of translation and access, the point at which translation stops and something else begins: “a more broadly encompassing, necessarily humbling, appreciation of the knowledge of other cultures—of cultural difference.” She rejected as fallacious the idealist notions “that there can be, should be, or ever has been, a perfect mesh between form and meaning, between signifier and signified,” or that there is a straightforward or easy solution to mistranslation or misunderstanding, “that what is required is simply a peeling away of the distortions created by the lamentable history of misrepresentation to reveal a true, or historically pure, reality” (TownsendGault 1992: 79; cf. Danto 1988: 29, discussing Hegel). In making these arguments, Townsend-Gault (1992: 86, 76) was not asserting that the things of other cultures are wholly inaccessible to us. Rather, she was arguing that there is more than one way or kind of knowing, and that some culturally specific ways of knowing (e.g., of myths, history, language, rules) not only were but also should remain fully comprehensible only to those who lived them: “there exists knowledge that can be shared, knowledge that may be intimated, and knowledge that should be withheld, to control translatability, in respect for the final untranslatability of the essence of cultural difference” (Townsend-Gault 1992: 86). (Cultural knowledge is of course possessed to different degrees even by members internal to a cultural group—e.g., Bryson 1992: 34; Sonik 2014: 284–85—an observation that does not diminish the points made above.) Perhaps more significantly, Townsend-Gault’s essay made clear that the free and open acknowledgment of difference and of the limits of knowing was not a weakness to be overcome but a necessary

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prerequisite to any kind of meaningful understanding and interaction. This point is as valid and significant for dead civilizations—which no longer have anyone to protect, reveal, or delimit the sharing and mediation of their cultural knowledge—as for those still living. Issues of access and understanding, and the point at which knowledge fails, were likewise explored, if from a different angle and to different ends, by Bryson (1992). In an important essay on context, he (1992: 38) problematized the seemingly virtuous conceit of studying art in its “true” context— too often fossilized as the place and year of an object’s first display or exhibition—and exposed context as necessarily multiple and complex rather than singular and homogenous. Two points from his analysis emerge as particularly significant and pertinent. First, Bryson (1992: 19–20; also Bahrani 2003: 79ff.) challenged the severance, opposition, and ranking of context with respect to a (visual or verbal) text, observing the (false) expectation that the former, characterized as a type of natural ground (nature), must explain or control the latter, a made thing (artifice). Second, he challenged the notion of context as any form of given through which a text’s—here specifically a visual art object’s—ambiguities or inconsistencies might be determined or clarified. Historical or other context is itself neither fixed nor objective but subjectively made or produced through interpretive strategies. Following the analysis of Culler (1988), Bryson (1992: 21) suggested that the concept of context might be productively replaced with the concept of frame or framing, which is more explicitly recognized as “something we do, not something we find…it is a process of making” (see also Bal 1999, esp. pp. 246–48; Goffman 1986). Bryson’s discussion, then, emphasizes the need for conscious recognition of exactly what sort of activity we are engaging in when we say we are looking at “art in context.” We might be better served, indeed, by thinking of contextualizing as a type of “dynamic consideration, one that moves back and forth between object(s) as remnant and its world as constructed context.…[Moreover,] defining the assumptions that underlie the constructed context became as important as the object or the evidence used to illuminate it” (Pittman 1996: 9; in this volume, see Delnero; Feldman; Frangipane; Helwing, Jeffers; Pongratz-Leisten; Rubinson; Waters). Moreover, Bryson’s conception of context diverges in important ways from the archaeologist’s— and sometimes, by extension, the ancient historian or art historian’s—applications of the term (in this volume, Rubinson).



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Schiffer (1972: 160), for example, defined archaeological context as “all the materials found in a[n archaeological] site,” whether deliberately discarded or discovered in some stage of manufacture or use. Archaeological context and related terms like “archaeological record” and “in situ” are by no means wholly objective: archaeological sites, objects, and accounts are discovered and recorded (and/or [re-]constructed) by archaeologists subject to the same sorts of subjective biases as any other individual (e.g., Patrik 1985; also, for context vs. in situ with respect to institutional collections of ethnographic objects, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 19–23). There is no guarantee, either, that such archaeological contexts are any more revealing of a thing’s original production or reception or meaning or use than other types of context. But “archaeological context” and “in situ” reference specific material conditions and spatial and temporal relationships distinct from those addressed by Bryson. The terms in archaeological scholarship are not constructed or contingent in the precise ways that he outlines, even if they may be contingent in other ways. The translatability of the things or, more specifically, the arts of other cultures, is thus necessarily critical, contingent, and complex. All this has not been to suggest that the arts of other cultures are fundamentally inaccessible to us from an emotional or any other standpoint (Sonik 2017; in this volume, Delnero): our capacity to appreciate and be affected by these works is grounded in our common humanity, physiology, and experiences (e.g., Dutton 2009: 10–11). On the other hand, it is fallacious to ignore the significant sociocultural mediation of human experience. Access to the arts (or any other aspect or material production) of other cultures, even when one is possessed of some degree of cultural knowledge, cannot be—and perhaps even should not be—immediate, complete, or absolute. The notion that art—and masterpieces of art especially—are universal and immanent, capable of transcending space and time to be immediately compelling and comprehensible to the viewer without any sort of mediation, is “predicated on the irrelevance of contingency. But the ability to stand alone says less about the nature of the object than about our [own] categories and attitudes” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 25). The absence of contingency within the institutional framework is also a myth (see above; also Vogel 1991: 201). Even a museum that strives to create a neutral space for the encounter of subject with (art) object cannot but introduce contingency through the choices made in designing the physical space or frame

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within which the object is emplaced (e.g., Vogel 1991). Nor can it eliminate the “contingency of perception” (Foster 1996: 40): what a subject / agent / viewer sees and how s/he sees it are significantly inflected by social, cultural, and individual experience—as well as by the viewer’s embodied movement through the space within which the object is contained (e.g., Classen 2017: 131–32; Duncan 2009: 428–29). It is not, after all, only through de-contextualization (isolation and fragmentation) that things are transformed into art objects; they are also altered through their re-contextualizations in the physical and psychological spaces in which we encounter them. Riegl foregrounded the observation that art is only completed through the “beholder’s involvement,” his or her emotional and perceptual interaction with the object. This observation was refined and elaborated by Gombrich (1960) as the “beholder’s share” (in this volume, Pongratz-Leisten). But if the artistic is recognized as “a specific form of the relation between creator and contemplators, fixed in the artistic work” (attributed to Bakhtin in Todorov 1984 [1981]: 21), in what way exactly can the art object be said to stand alone?

Traumatic Transformations: Changes in State and Transfixions of Time and Motion Svetlana Alpers (1991: 25) opened her essay on “The Museum as a Way of Seeing” with a description of her arresting encounter with a crab in a glass case at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge: the crab, a purportedly “natural” thing, was transformed within the framework of its deliberately decontextualized museum display into an artifact, a type of “crafted” or made thing. The crab’s alienation from its contexts, history, and agency—its “doing(s)” (Thomas 1998: ix)—permitted Alpers (1991: 25; emphasis added) to attend to it as an object of visual interest. Indeed, it could serve as an object of aesthetic contemplation precisely because “it was still, exposed to view, dead. Its habitat and habits of rest, eating, and moving were absent. I had no idea how it had been caught.” The sections above have addressed several themes pertinent to Alpers’ encounter, specifically those of isolation, re-contextualization, and physical transformation. Related, but as yet only peripherally touched upon, are alterations in states of being, as in the shift from the living to the dead, from that which moves and acts to that which is still(ed) and static, from that which experiences time to that which is removed from time’s flow. It is the



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elucidation of change as it is imposed or denied—and particularly the consequence of metamorphosis as a change not only in physical form or materiality but also in state of being—that is the focus of this section. The conception of metamorphosis, in the Western tradition, has been intimately entwined with that of identity. The medievalist Caroline Walker Bynum (2001: 32), in her perceptive and deeply thoughtful Metamorphosis and Identity, observed the threat that physical transformation posed to identity in Classical works such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. But she also recognized that, “throughout the change of man to wolf, woman to tree, youth to nightingale, something perdures, carried by the changing shape that never completely loses physical or behavioral traces of what it was.” And yet such transformations go in only one direction: those who have undergone metamorphosis, typically through punishment, gift, or mercy from the gods, can never return to what they were before (see further Sonik 2012). Change was thus aptly characterized by Bynum (2001: 19) as “the test, the limit, of all denotations of the term ‘identity.’” What happens when it is things rather than biological persons that are transformed? More specifically, what types of alteration do things, particularly ancient and non-Western things, undergo as they are transformed into art objects? Are these changes likewise irreversible and what, if anything, perdures? And, if the physical aspects of such transformations have been addressed already, what remains to be explored? 1.23 Werewolves of Ossory in Gerald of Wales’ Topographia Hiberniae, Royal MS 13 B VIII f.18r, ca. 1196–1223. Courtesy British Library (see also color insert)

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In the Middle Ages, great interest was taken in different types of mutatio (Fig. 1.23), “inner and outer, nature or substance and appearance, illusion and transformation, metamorphosis and hybrid” (Bynum 2001: 32). If physical transformation is an alteration in the outer, the visible appearance, the crab in Alpers’ encounter offers an example of a different type of mutation, one centered on inner substance and nature even as the external form remains the same. Indeed, the alteration of both substance and nature is required for the preservation of the external form. Alpers notes that she does not know how the crab came to be dead and yet, as an exhibit in a natural history museum, it is clearly so: it has undergone a change in nature from one type of thing (a living one) to another (a dead one). If human intervention in this first metamorphosis is ambiguous, it is clearly evident in the second phase of the crab’s transformation: it is transmuted from a dead thing into a natural history specimen, an object suitable for display that evokes or imitates (or has even become a simulacrum of ) the former living thing. The crab, following its second metamorphosis, acquires at least two new properties: (1) it does not move or do; and (2) it perdures. The decay that attends dead things is retarded even as the continual leak and interchange that characterizes “the bodies of organisms and other things” (Ingold 2013: 95; emphasis added) is plugged: the crab becomes an object rather than an agent. (One might justifiably argue it continues to possess agency despite its objecthood, but this is nevertheless of quite a different order than that possessed by the original crab.) This second transformation also involves an alteration in material substance: in order to preserve the external form in stasis, to prevent it from deteriorating into a (more) “leaky” thing (Ingold 2012, 2013), the perishable inner parts (those capable of rotting) are replaced with those that will better resist the ravages of time. The crab as thing has completed its metamorphosis into the crab as object— an irreversible process. The crab as object may go on to become something else—even perhaps a different sort of thing—but it will never go back to being the thing it once was: a living, breathing, “doing” agent. If the unidirectional nature of the metamorphosis of Alpers’ crab is evident, the situation is perhaps less immediately clear with respect to those ancient and non-Western things selected as and transformed into art objects. And yet both the processes undergone and the outcomes achieved are similar: a thing made into an art object is (typically) “still[ed], exposed to view” (Alpers 1991: 25). Its contexts and modes of being and doing in



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the world are absent. It is, moreover, carefully preserved, “stopped up” and warded against deterioration, damage, and other types of change. MacGaffey (1998: 230; also, from a different perspective, Branham 1994/1995: 33) took the position not only that such a change in state is permanent but also that “once an object has been appropriated as art, preferably by honest means, its original context and visual effect cannot be recovered and may be irrelevant.”44 This does not mean the academic or other study of art in its archaeological, historical, and other contexts ought be abandoned (see above; in this volume, Feldman; Rubinson; Waters), or that scholars should cease to delineate or reconstruct ancient and non-Western systems of aesthetics or aesthetic effects (e.g., Morphy 1989; Ryan 1995; Winter 1995, 2002; Selz 2018; Sonik, forthcoming). But I am persuaded that attempts to restore or return art objects to the ancient and other things they once were are doomed to failure, not least due to the issues of metamorphosis and contingency elucidated in the sections above (see further Fisher 1991: 19; Branham 1994/1995). Things, like persons, may go on; they may not go back. Metamorphoses cannot be reversed—though a thing that has been transformed may change again into something new: indeed, such change is nigh inevitable. This discussion touches lightly on larger issues of temporality, and it is worth pausing a moment to consider the ways in which institutionally accepted, defined, and displayed art objects of the sort under discussion here differ from other sorts of things (including their own previous incarnations) in their relation to time. Things, as persons, experience—as well as accumulate—time. Ingold (2012: 438; emphasis added), in his contrast of “leaky things” with “stopped-up objects,” emphasized the thing’s “interchange of materials across the ever-emergent surfaces by which they differentiate themselves from the surrounding medium.” One of these surfaces, or, perhaps better, planes, is surely the temporal. The words of Ulysses, in Tennyson’s starkly beautiful 1833 poem, encompass this interchange exquisitely: “I am a part of all that I have met;” (l. 18). While often understood as a grandiose assertion of the aged hero’s influence on all that he has encountered, these words suggest another meaning: that a part of Ulysses himself is composed of all that he has “seen and known” (l. 13). The hero, as all things, passed through time and space neither untouched nor untouching; he interacted, amassed experiences, and left his own indelible mark on both—as they did on him in a process of mutual interchange and constitution.

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The consequences of this interchange, then, are neither only materially manifest nor only materially significant. A thing that has been visibly touched by time, revealing traces of damage, deterioration, ruin, repair, or refurbishment may, for example, be precisely copied at a singular moment in time. What distinguishes the original from the copy, or, better, the clone— a term more frequently applied to copied biological persons and, consequently, one for which pertinent issues of temporality, agency, and interaction have been more explicitly foregrounded (e.g., Bujold 1994)—is not only the process through which the two things might achieve their (seemingly) convergent status but also the inevitable subsequent divergence in experiences and interchanges that they materially accumulate over time.45 The original and the clone have neither identical starting points, nor trajectories, nor end points: from different points of origin they may materially converge (in seeming at least) but this convergence cannot last more than an instant. It is interesting, in light of these musings, to consider the nature of the time that flows in institutional space. Germain Bazin (1967: 7–8), who served as chief curator of paintings at the Louvre, described the museum as “a temporal oasis,” a “temple where Time seems suspended.” Such a setting, he reflected, was particularly salubrious for a momentary cultural epiphany, a transcendent instant. (This phrasing is evocative of a particularly intense aesthetic experience.) This suspension of time, importantly, is in operation not only for the viewer entering museum space but also for the objects contained within it. They, like Alpers’ crab, are still(ed); they do not move. This lack of motion is perhaps unremarkable in a painting, which was designed to hang upon a wall; it is both startling and arresting, evoking a like stillness on the part of the viewer, when it is enforced upon a thing like a flowing garment (Fig. 1.24) or a dancer’s garb, which was made to move (e.g., Brittenham 2007: 149–53; MMA 1978.412.1282a; for the jipae festival, see Zegwaard 1993: 33–40). Suspended, frozen, and displayed in stasis, such objects (formerly things) are at once seemingly—a seeming that is deliberately fostered—timeless, as great visual art objects are meant to be, and presented as exemplars of specific time periods. Thus a wide-necked travertine vessel (Fig. 1.25) excavated from a funerary context in Thebes (New Kingdom, ca. 1550–1450 BCE), where it had been placed near the head of a coffin and found to contain a wooden kohl stick and a glass hairpin (the cosmetic itself did not survive), is identified as



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1.24 Noh Robe (Theater Costume) in Compound Twill with Silk and Metallic Thread (1954.40.26). Japan, Edo Period, ca. eighteenth century(?). Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery (see also color insert)

1.25 Wide-Necked Travertine Cosmetic Jar From Burial (16.10.421). New Kingdom Egypt. Original (cosmetic) contents not preserved but jar discovered to contain a wood kohl stick and glass hairpin. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

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an ancient Egyptian cosmetic jar. Pains are taken to preserve it intact (that is, to prevent the damage to or deterioration of its matter), a task happily easier for stone objects than for those of other materials. It is also identified and briefly quantified: ancient Egyptian, sixteenth or fifteenth century BCE. But in what way is the vessel a cosmetic jar if it neither contains cosmetics nor is used as such? And in what way is the vessel ancient Egyptian if it has since traveled nearly six thousand miles in space and 3,500 years in time to fetch up in twenty-first century CE New York? Other objects, similarly presented both as timeless and as exemplars of specific time periods (similarly frozen) are notable not for their preservation but for their restoration—possessing a peculiar trajectory that sees them (again in seeming) traveling back in time to be fixed at some imagined moment of authentic originality.46 The material alterations imposed create a concatenation of temporalities in the restored and subsequently preserved object (Fig. 1.26). These are then fixed and thereafter carefully maintained as the object goes on display—at 1.26 “Ram in the Thicket” or Goat in a Tree from Royal Cemetery at Ur (30-12-702). Early Dynastic III Period Mesopotamia. Excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley by pouring wax on the remains and stabilizing them with waxed muslin strips. Reconstructed by Woolley with tree set too deeply into base and ram’s legs dangling above branches; conserved in 1944, likely involving removal of some of the ram’s fleece; conserved again in 1997 to lower ram’s legs to rest on tree branches. Courtesy Penn Museum; Image no. 250849 (see also color insert)



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least until or unless inaccuracies in reconstruction are discovered or other issues arise requiring the object’s restoration or conservation.47 The information accompanying the displayed object typically privileges (if known) the ancient art object’s production or its (re)discovery—the spatiotemporal context in which the object was made or found anew, representing an instant out of an often inconceivably long span of existence—and deliberately entangles distinct temporalities. What was is presented as what is; identity is frozen, and the prospect of change, of intrinsic mutability, is not merely obscured but explicitly denied.48 The thing’s transformation into an (institutionalized) art object and appropriation into the contemporary Western system and economy of (fine) art is thus often peculiarly belied by the words that accompany it.

WHAT BECAME “AUTHENTIC” ANCIENT ART: “ON THE NATURE OF THINGS” This essay began with an introduction to a specific terminology, one that drew a sharp distinction between the artwork—a type of thing—and the art object. It sought to problematize the concept of “authentic” ancient art (the concept of authentic non-Western art has, of course, already been extensively critiqued), asserting that much of what is categorized under the rubric of such is, in fact, no such thing. The majority of the discussion to this point has elucidated the premise of this assertion, exploring the processes and implications of transforming things into objects, primarily in the context of institutions like museums and galleries but also through photographs in art volumes—in places, in other words, where the majority of what is advertised as authentic ancient art resides and is encountered, both by the art-loving public as well as by scholars. In this concluding section, which explores Walter Benjamin’s conceptualization of aura, the discussion returns to the terms with which this chapter began, and offers some final thoughts on its recurrent themes. Benjamin’s famous essay on aura notably uses the term artwork rather than art object, terminology that has been retained in the discussion below. While his usage and understanding of artwork diverge somewhat from my own, some degree of overlap remains: this is perhaps unsurprising as Benjamin’s formulation of the concept of aura was not developed within the exclusive realm of aesthetics or art theory (e.g., Hansen 2008).

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The Thing Vanishes: Aura, Authenticity, and Access Walter Benjamin (2008 [1936]: 23), in his study on “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,”49 famously developed the concept of the aura of the artwork, a type of presence that distinguishes the original thing from even the most perfect of its technological reproductions. Aura is, on its face, a peculiar notion to apply to a thing, possessed as it is of mystical—even semi-religious—and difficult-to-quantify connotations. But it is in keeping with Benjamin’s (2008 [1936]: 24) conceptualization of the earliest artworks (and, more broadly, of seemingly all original artworks) as based in ritual and, concomitantly, as functioning in the service of religion.50 Benjamin’s definition of aura, moreover, is a strikingly nebulous one: his (2008 [1936]: 23) most concise characterization of the notion is as “a strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.” (The adjective “strange” is here in keeping with the mystical and metaphysical connotations of the term aura.) Contrasting the reproduction with the original, he (2008 [1936]: 21) observed that the former lacks “the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place.” The reproduction likewise lacks the “mark of the history to which the [original] work has been subject,” a concept encompassing both material alterations in physical structure and a tradition or provenance traceable only “from the standpoint of the original in its present location” (Benjamin 2008 [1936]: 21). Despite (or perhaps because of ) its ambiguity, Benjamin’s concept of aura is of ongoing relevance and interest, and its seeming contradictions, limitations, and validity have been extensively explored in relation to numerous and diverse case studies (e.g., McCole 1993; in this volume, McGeough). But what I am primarily interested in here is neither Benjamin’s own explicit attempts to define aura nor the substantial corpus of critical scholarship on the topic. Rather, I want to pursue the very specific verbal images Benjamin (2008 [1936]: 23) used to illustrate and elaborate his conceptualization of aura in his famous essay, as well as the implications of these for the types of art that are being considered here: ancient and/or non-Western (or any other art object created through metamorphosis or appropriation). These verbal images are introduced following Benjamin’s (2008 [1936]: 23) articulation of the question, “What, then, is the aura,” and



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his direct definition of the concept as “a strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be”: To follow with the eye—while resting on a summer afternoon—a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch. (Benjamin 2008 [1936]: 23) That neither of these examples represent artworks or art objects—or crafted things of any sort—is striking, given the intimate entwining of aura with art and aesthetics both in Benjamin’s essay and in subsequent scholarship on the concept. This point becomes rather less surprising if Benjamin’s earlier meditations on aura are taken into account: his first known comment on the topic, written in a posthumously published 1930 account of a hashish experiment, asserted that “genuine aura appears in all things, not just in certain kinds of things, as people imagine” (Benjamin 2006: 58; apud Hansen 2008: 336). But more striking still in the vivid word-picture Benjamin paints is the multisensorial and transient nature of the aura’s experience. The words, “to follow with the eye [emphasis added],” preface the picture and suggest the significance of attentive and active looking;51 the choice of the branch that casts a shadow or the mountain range on the horizon likewise suggests a physical removal adequate for psychologically distanced contemplation. But the framework for the vision described here belies the seeming familiarity of these premises, as does the evocative intimacy of the phrasing. The description of a shadowing branch, for anyone who has enjoyed resting beneath a tree on a summer afternoon, insinuates the inevitable soft rustle and shifting color of leaves in the occasional breeze, the potential brush of a lazily buzzing insect or falling leaf. To “breathe” the aura, likewise evokes a fundamentally sensual and intersubjective engagement, as well as a hint of taking in the scent or the same air, that counters the apparition of distance.52 It is, of course, possible, to imagine that these interactions take place through a window glass, imposing a different (sanitized and nearly clinical) sort of distance between the beholder and the branch and mountains beheld—but as Benjamin does not reference such, there is no reason to assume this type of intervention. All this is not to say that Benjamin’s account of a summer afternoon’s encounter with a branch or mountain cannot or does not represent a true

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aesthetic experience. Indeed, its potent near-tangibility and rich evocative possibilities suggest its canny selection as precisely such an aesthetic experience as would be familiar and accessible to the reader. But the location of the experience—as well as of both subject and objects (the things observed)—in the world rather than in an institutional setting is neither accidental nor incidental to his conceptualization of aura. Both the beholder and the beheld in Benjamin’s account are situated within rather than outside of space and time. His summer’s afternoon will inevitably wane, as will the summer itself: for all its indelibility in the mind and memory, the beholder’s singular experience is inherently fleeting and all the more powerful because it can neither be drawn out nor, more importantly, controlled or precisely replicated. The issues of control and access are, tellingly, those to which Benjamin pivots following his definition and illumination of aura. Aura’s decay, he contends, is due to two contemporary circumstances: the desire of the masses to access what is inaccessible and control what is uncontrollable or, as he characterizes it, to “‘get closer’ to things” and to “overcom[e] each thing’s uniqueness” (Benjamin 2008 [1936]: 23). The democratizing of access (whether for good or for ill) through technological reproduction is explored at much greater length both in Benjamin’s own work and in the critical responses to it. What is pertinent here, however, is not the process of such reproduction but its ramifications: (1) it may bring out and render visible (and thus accessible) aspects of the original that would escape the human eye in the original’s own context; (2) it may place the copy in situations that the original cannot attain, increasing the accessibility of the original; (3) it devalues “the here and now,” the place in space and time, of the original artwork (Benjamin 2008 [1936]: 23; Malraux’s concept of the musée imaginaire offers other perspectives on the possibilities raised by such reproduction). The images Benjamin (2008 [1936]: 22) chooses to illustrate these points are again remarkable: “The cathedral leaves its site to be received in the studio of an art lover; the choral work performed in an auditorium or in the open air is enjoyed in a private room.” In both cases, the modes of accessing and controlling the original are upended through (technological) reproduction. The ability to easily move and re-situate a cathedral into a new space belies the fundamental properties—the essential thingness—of the original: its vast and immoveable materiality; its cold, perduring, and very slowly weathering stone; its



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soaring monumentality. The image of the choral work further fleshes out and complicates the picture: such a work, after all, is seemingly designed to be reproduced. A closer consideration corrects the misconception. While a choral work is meant to be repeatedly performed (repeatedly materialized), each performance is distinct and localized in a particular space and time; it is a singular and non-reproducible event and experience. Benjamin’s envisioned technological reproduction of the work, called up on demand in a private room, lacks the collective interaction of the original, even if one listens in the presence of others rather than alone. Likewise altered is the acoustic environment in which the performance is heard and its new and precise repeatability. The reproduction, even if it is heard at a particular time in a particular space (the private room), is localized neither there nor then; it becomes instead a peculiar temporal and spatial intrusion of a thing whose fundamental nature has been irrevocably altered. The issues outlined above are broadly applicable to things of many different sorts. But the aura of artwork, or so Benjamin argues, is particularly vulnerable because its highly sensitive core, its authenticity, is affected by the severance of the thing (through its reproduction) from its temporal and spatial circumstances, as well as from the conditions of its peculiar materiality (Benjamin 2008 [1936]: 22). The explication of these issues, and the sharp foregrounding of access and control, offers a striking alternate lens through which to examine the processes of fragmentation, isolation, metamorphosis, and hybridization discussed that are foregrounded throughout this essay. The reproductions that Benjamin cites are accessible to and controlled by the beholder in multiple and complex ways that the originals are not. They are, in the terminology adopted here, objects, dependent on and subject to us and to our desires in ways that things (artworks and otherwise) are not. The processes involved in institutionalizing things and/ or artworks—i.e., removing them from their own spaces, extracting them from the flows of time and tradition in which they are embedded, and altering the conditions and even substance of their materiality—irrevocably alter our access to and control over them. They are brought into our spaces, permitting and encouraging our visual examination and other experience of them in ways that, in their original contexts, would be impossible. The thing vanishes; the object appears. Distance may be imposed between the resulting objects and us, as by the interpolation of glass cases and the cultural injunction not to touch or to

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approach too closely, but this distance is of a different order and type than that imposed by the circumstances of the original things. The institutionalized art object, too, may continue to resist us (on access, resistance, and value, see further Gell 1992: 48–49),53 but this resistance is likewise of a very different sort than that offered by the original things. It is worth remarking that Benjamin’s essay, which elucidated the altered circumstances of, access to, and control over the technological reproduction, recognized the reproduction’s circumstances as irrevocably affecting and diminishing the aura, authenticity, and authority of the original. In this essay, it is the original itself that is subject to the processes that Benjamin explored with respect to the reproduction. In an age of the technological reproducibility of a work of art, Benjamin (2008 [1936]: 22) observed, “what withers…is the latter’s aura.” I would suggest that, in an age of the institutionalization of “original” artworks and other types of things—as part of the process of transforming them into “authentic” art objects—what withers is likewise the aura of the original thing.

The Thing Vanishes: Death Comes as the End?54 Some years ago, while on a visit to Russia, I had occasion to view the body of Lenin in Moscow’s Red Square. The memory of that encounter has proved fertile ground for thinking about things. Over the course of writing this essay, such things have included the processes and consequences of objectification and objecthood; the locus and conditions of authenticity and identity; and the ultimate consequences of both the leakiness of things and the stopped-uppedness of objects. I think it fitting, consequently, to circle back to that encounter here as a concluding case study. On January 21, 1924, the Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin (born Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov) died at his dacha in Gorki several miles outside of Moscow. His body was embalmed and, on January 27, 1924, placed in Red Square to be viewed by mourners. It has remained on public display there for close on a century, excepting the period of its evacuation to Siberia during the Second World War and the regular intervals during which it is removed for conservation. But what, precisely, is it that is being conserved—or preserved?55 And, perhaps more to the point, is it—whatever it is—real? Once upon a time, or, more precisely, between 1870–1924, the body on display belonged to the living Lenin: it served as the locus of his identity and was possessed of a capacity for agency (or, at least, was a material means



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through which Lenin exercised agency in the world). This living body was a perpetually leaky and leaking thing (Ingold 2012: 438) “only sustained thanks to continually taking in materials from its surroundings, and in turn discharging into them, in the processes of respiration and metabolism” (Ingold 2013: 94). It was, consequently, subject to change with the passage through time and the motion through space. Still, for all its leaky mutability and throughout its perpetual alterations, this body could be legitimately identified with (or at least described as belonging to) Lenin. On January 21 of 1924, Lenin’s body underwent a more radical change in state when it became a corpse. That which in life had been the material signifier of Lenin’s presence and the material locus of his identity was, in death, transformed into a material signifier of his absence. The nature of the body’s interaction with the world and the nature (though not the ongoing fact) of its leakiness and mutability, were irreversibly altered. The body’s own animation, and its capacity for agency, for “doing” in the world, were likewise altered. January 23rd of 1924 brought fresh change, as the body underwent an autopsy and a basic embalming (which saw incisions cut not only into the flesh but also across the major arteries and blood vessels, as well as the removal of brain and organs) by Alexei Abrikosov so that it would survive—or, at least, not visibly deteriorate—over the three days of public viewing prior to the funeral planned for January 27 and the body’s anticipated burial (Getty 2013: 71; Yurchak 2015, 2017). But the body was never buried.56 Instead, it has been carefully and perpetually preserved—and displayed—for nearly a hundred years. The nature of its display, with the body contained in a bulletproof glass sarcophagus within the tomb,57 and with beholders permitted to enter silently and solemnly to view it (both silence and solemnity are enforced by the guard and photos are not permitted), suggests the body’s objectification, its transformation into an object to be viewed by the beholder much in the manner of an art object. This impression is strengthened by the perpetual process of conservation that the body undergoes to maintain its physical appearance, which is fixed at a single point in time. The focus of this conservation or preservation, interestingly, has not been the body’s biological matter but rather its “dynamic form,” which includes its “look, shape, weight, and color, as well as its dynamic characteristics—its overall suppleness, elasticity of skin, flexibility of joints, internal pressure in muscle tissues, and so on. For decades, scientists have worked on maintaining this dynamic form intact,

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while letting the original biological matter of the body change and even actively substituting it with new materials” (Yurchak 2015: 116–17). Recent estimates of the biological matter of the body remaining after embalming have come in at 23% (Yurchak 2015: 116), by now somewhat less. And yet, the emphasis on the body’s “dynamic form” and capacity for movement, in addition to its overall physical appearance—even if this requires the alteration or explicit substitution of its biological matter—seems simultaneously to suggest, intriguingly, its re-investment to some degree as thing. It is (and must be) “continuously examined, fixed, re-sculpted, and reembalmed” and kept capable of motion (Yurchak 2015: 118). In other words, it “leaks” continuously and participates in a constant even if limited, tightly directed, and very carefully controlled exchange with the world. This thingly potential, however, is simultaneously undermined in that the body’s controlled leaks and exchanges are directed at precluding or even reversing the visibility of the change that marks all living things that exist in time and in the world. The deliberate alteration or even substitution of biological matter is imposed in order that the body remain—or, more precisely, appear to remain—the same. It is unsurprising that the processes outlined above have led some to assert that what is displayed in the mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square is not Lenin at all (e.g., Yurchak 2015: 116): where can its authenticity be understood to inhere if not in its diminishing biological matter? But it is, I think, equally unsurprising, for anyone who has spent much time looking at and thinking about objects in a museum, to find that the scientists who work on Lenin’s body locate its authenticity in its physical form and other aspects of its materiality. Yuri Lopukin, a scientist in the lab tasked with working on Lenin’s body, indeed, identifies the body as a “living sculpture,” a term he coined to convey the paradox of the body’s kinship—following close on a century of embalming and re-embalming, sculpting, and substituting—with a “wholly constructed representation…[rather than] the original, once living man. At the same time, this [the body] is different from external representation, as in sculpture, because it is the actual body itself…this is a sculpture of a body that is constructed out of the body itself” (Yurchak 2015: 128). The emphasis on form over matter, for those charged with preserving and studying original and authentic art objects (particularly in institutional contexts), is often less acute than in the account above. And yet the case study of Lenin’s body throws into stark relief the complexities of the issues,



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and graphically illustrates some of the necessary and messy trade-offs that must be made, when seeking to remove a thing from the flow of time and its place in the world and to transform it into a (seemingly) timeless and changeless art object—or, at least, an object for visual display. But are these the only possibilities? Must authenticity inhere in form and matter, which need then be endlessly preserved (and traded off ) as human skill and technology and other interventions allow? Or have we missed something somewhere? The ax of Terry Pratchett, the British novelist and keen social critic, suggests we have indeed: “This, milord, is my family’s ax. We have owned it for nearly nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation…but is this not the nine-hundred-year-old ax of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good ax. (Pratchett 2000: 400) What if the locus of authenticity for the artwork is not in form or matter but in action—in motion and experience and interaction—not even regardless but because of the changes these bring? What if the artwork’s authenticity depends not on the removal from or denial of time but rather on the full acceptance of it and its consequences—even if these consequences include, someday, its coming to an end? “How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! As tho’ to breathe were life. - Ulysses (ll. 22–24), Alfred, Lord Tennyson58

NOTES:

1.1 This essay is dedicated to Holly Pittman, whose teaching and body of work have indelibly shaped the directions of my own. In a long-ago conversation during a cab ride in Tehran, Holly spoke to me about boxes, those in which we are placed by others and those we construct around ourselves. She has modeled, in her own life and career, a refusal to be boxed in, bypassing boundaries of every sort in the service of intellectual enquiry, and she has sought, so long as I have known her, to aid others in doing the same.

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 This essay was originally titled, following Lucretius, “On the Nature of Things (Ancient | Non-Western).” But the current title more accurately conveys its purpose as an interrogation of the relationship between art and identity as the latter is observed, ascribed, and imposed. 1.2 See, e.g., Sonik (forthcoming); Aamold et al. (2017); Bradley (2009); Halsall et al. (2009); Wiseman (2007); Myers (2006); Westermann (2005); Winter (2002); Moeran (1997); Dutton (2003); Leuthold (1998); Hart (1995); Coote (1989, 1992); Halverson (1987); Geertz (1976); Dark (1967). 1.3 See, e.g., D’Souza (2014) for a consideration of the contemporary ramifications and possibilities of “global art history.” If global art history and the more expansive alternate field of visual culture studies offer significant new possibilities for the analysis and perception of contemporary art, the problem of how to address ancient art, the analysis and reception of which has been shaped for two (or more) centuries by irredeemably Eurocentric ideals, remains. 1.4 The definition of “art” is sometimes dismissed as a twentieth century concern: Carroll, in the important edited volume Theories of Art Today (2000a), noted that the question of “what is art” had already slackened somewhat since its heyday in the 1970s and ’80s. As he observed then, and as continues to be the case today with the advent of approaches to art drawn from neuroscience and evolutionary psychology (e.g., Chatterjee 2014; Huston et al. 2014; Starr 2013; Shimamura 2013; Moxey 2013; Dutton 2003, 2009; Solso 2003; Zeki 1999a, 1999b), “even if the question of the definition of art is no longer the biggest game in town, it is still a very lively one” (Carroll 2000b: 4). On a practical level, it is worth adding that one cannot coherently study, scientifically or otherwise, what one does not define. 1.5 Belting (2003: vii) notably observed a “dissolution of the universal significance of Western art and its historiography” and characterized the canon of art history “as a local Western concern, despite its universal pretensions.” This is, I think, too pessimistic a view. The canon of art is necessarily, if somewhat paradoxically, a perpetual work in progress (Locher 2012: 33) and continues to confront the challenges of adopting a global identity (e.g., Morphy 2000). For the relationship between art history and the concept of canon dating back to the work of Roman naturalist and philosopher Pliny the Elder (ca. 23–79 CE), see Halbertsma 2007: 16–30. 1.6 The term ancient is often reserved for Greco-Roman materials exclusively, even in contemporary publications, and the term non-Western often excludes the Near East, which is linked, no matter how tenuously, to the origins of Western civilization. The term art, moreover, at least as it is elucidated here, encompasses Near Eastern things only very uneasily. 1.7 The term invention is here used in both its senses of origination and fabrication (making something up). 1.8 Danto (1988: 31) is clearly aware of the problem of seeking art in the matter and so attempts to shift his ground to the matter as embodiment of meaning 1.9 The scholarship on thing theory and object theory is by now both broad and deep (e.g., Brown 2001, 2015; Clifford 1985, 1988; Freedberg et al. 1994; Knappett 2004; Miller 2008, 2010; Pearce 1994; van Eck 2015, among many others), though the definition of the objects and things treated is generally dependent on the individual scholar authoring any particular work. My own definition is articulated here in the main text. 1.10 More varied engagements than viewing are increasingly possible within contemporary museum spaces: selfies are encouraged even if selfie sticks are not; multisensorial simulations are sometimes provided (e.g., Dudley 2012: 9–10; Classen



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2017; fn. 14 below); digital technology has proliferated both through integration into exhibits and through guiding visitors’ uses of their own devices to access supplementary information on objects; and virtual and augmented reality technologies are increasingly being applied. But the emphasis (for now) remains on viewing. 1.11 Asimov further recognized the seductiveness of viewing and the potency of the imagined access it granted to the one being viewed, a theme that is worth considering further with respect to art objects on display. He also noted the poverty of viewing as a substitute for actual seeing, given the latter’s attendant material possibilities for interaction: “Without the interplay of human against human, the chief interest in life is gone; most of the intellectual values are gone; most of the reason for living is gone. Viewing is no substitute for seeing…viewing is a longdistance sense” (Asimov 1957: 260). 1.12 On the mental vs. the material image, see, e.g., Carruthers 1998: 73; Elkins and Naef 2011: 67–70; Sonik 2015: 143–44. 1.13 Art objects containing or composed of frontally rendered figures, which possess externally directed gazes that compel our own, hint at the mutual gaze that occurs between two subjects (Schapiro 1973; Argyle and Cook 1976; Sonik 2013). These are particularly powerful in part because of the contradiction they embody as objects that (seem to) look back—evoking an intersubjective encounter and so transcending the boundaries of their objecthood. 1.14 Opportunities to taste or smell are typically absent from art institutions especially; where such access is present, it is often through simulation rather than direct engagement, and in contexts with an ethnographic or historical rather than fine art inflection. Dudley (2012: 10), for example, describes sensory stations established in the Australian Journeys gallery of the National Museum of Australia: “Visitors can, for example, smell sea cucumbers when looking at cauldrons used by Indonesian fishermen, or trace with their finger the stitches on an embroidered map that is a copy of the original displayed adjacent to it.” Hearing has a more established if still limited place within art institutions: film and video installations, for example, often appear in galleries though these are often curtained off or accessible through the use of headphones so the sound does not permeate the spaces of other exhibits and viewers. The use of audio-guides (on one’s own or using the institution’s provided devices) also brings sound into the institution; here again, however, the experience of the sound is restricted to the individual using the guide so that it does not affect a nearby viewer’s experience. Touch is also gradually being brought into the institution, often through the placement of replicas (3D printed or otherwise) of objects in the collection: during a recent visit to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam I came upon (and ran my fingers over) a touchable replica of “Sunflowers.” The museum also offers a more comprehensive interactive program, “Feeling Van Gogh,” for the visually impaired. Still, this experience was and is of a different order than touching a thing itself. On the same trip, I visited the open-air Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park in Berlin, which contains no barriers between the visitor and the sculptural monuments there. I reflected, as I ran my fingers over the foot of “Motherland”—as many others have done before and since—on the intersubjectivity of the experience. I was altered by the encounter but so, too, and materially so—even if only on a molecular and microscopic level—was the sculpture. On this line of thought, see further Knight 2018. 1.15 The (limited) size of many institutionalized art objects contributes to this fragmentation: there is only so much space in the vicinity of each object for viewers to occupy.

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1.16 On the aesthetic attitude, see, further, Langfeld 1920: 44–108; Osborne 1970; Schapiro 1977; Saxena 1978; Stolnitz 1978, 1984; Kemp G. 1999; cf. Dickie 1964; Coleman 1979; Snoeyenbos 1979; Carroll 2001: 5–19. For the question of whether the aesthetic attitude is a cross-cultural conceptualization (or not), see the discussion in Ingold 1996: 201–236; Coleman 2005; cf. also Bourdieu 1987; Gell 1998: 97. For a more recent neuroscientific approach to the aesthetic attitude, suggesting the possibility of “a self-contained reward system” as its neural basis and thus implying a universal human capacity to adopt the aesthetic attitude, see Chatterjee 2011: 399. 1.17 The literature on the “aesthetic experience” is vast, much as the literature on the “aesthetic attitude.” See, further, Dewey 1934; Stolnitz 1960; Beardsley 1969, 1981 (1958), 1982; Dickie 1965, 1974b; Mitias 1982, 1988; Fenner 2003; Hagman 2005; Davies 2005; Carroll 2005, 2012; for anthropological approaches, e.g., Maquet 1986; for neuroscientific approaches, e.g., Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999; Starr 2013; Chatterjee and Vartanian 2014, 2016. 1.18 While the conceptualization of the artist as genius dates back to the Renaissance, it is during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods that the nature of this genius is established as both original and creative (Smith 1925: 91; Engell 1981: vii–viii; also Dupré 2004: 105–107). 1.19 Gell’s characterization of aesthetics in non-Western contexts and specifically in India is not particularly nuanced. He (1998: 97) suggested, for example, that in India, “nobody in their right minds would try to drive a wedge between the beautiful form and religious function of venerated idols. In India aesthetics, as in the ancient world, is subsumed under the philosophy of religion…it is only from a very parochial (blinkered) Western post-Enlightenment point of view that the separation between the beautiful and the holy, between religious experience and aesthetic experience, arises”; cf. some of the scholarship on aesthetics and the “aesthetic attitude” in the context of India, particularly that which addresses rasa, lit. “taste or savor” (e.g., Chaudhury 1965: 145), characterized as the “central category of Sanskrit aesthetics” (Wulff 1986: 674). The extant studies may but do not necessarily examine aesthetics and religion as entangled (e.g., Chaudhury 1965; McCarty 1986; Patnaik 2016; cf. Wulff 1986; Amaladass 2007). 1.20 In his posthumously published Art and Agency, Gell (1998: 97) asserted this point even more explicitly: “art-lovers, it seems to me, actually do worship images in most of the relevant senses, and explain away their de facto idolatry by rationalizing it as aesthetic awe”; see also Denney 2000: 35–39, 222. Gell (1992: 42) called, as an antidote, for (anthropological) scholars of art to adopt instead an attitude of deliberate methodological philistinism, “an attitude of resolute indifference towards the aesthetic value of works of art”; cf. Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik 2015a: 18–20; Morphy 2010: 24 n. 5; Winter 2007; Dutton 1994. Gell’s use of the terms idol and idolatry is somewhat idiosyncratic. I am less sanguine than he that such terms are redeemable; see Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik 2015a: 14–15, n. 30. 1.21 Art museums were not only formally approved (and even blessed, receiving official benedictions) by religious officials but also regarded as appropriate spaces in which to transform “aesthetic feelings into religious ones” and thereby to bolster community religious life; see, further, Steffensen-Bruce 1998: 127–28. 1.22 The exalted status ascribed to the artist in this statement is another telling feature of the period. 1.23 Of course, for some museums, Wackenroder’s ideal has remained—or returned to—a distant aspiration only: anyone who has been to the Louvre on a weekend in July has likely had an experience more akin to that of the “annual fair” decried by Wackenroder than the temple-like ideal that he sought. The Louvre’s helpful



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signposting—including what look like rather startling black and white photocopies on cheap paper (incongruous in the sumptuous surroundings)—directs the crush of visitors to the highlights of the collection where photos and selfies may be taken; this suggests either or both of pragmatic capitalization on the spirit of the times or bowing to inevitability. 1.24 On the history of the British Museum collections, see further Delbourgo 2017; Miller 1974; Shelley 1911. I am indebted to Erle Leichty, who was both a brilliant Assyriologist and very kind friend, for his gift of the volume by Miller. Erle was wonderful company in both the Tablet Room of the Penn Museum and the Middle East Study Room at the British Museum, and he generously shared his memories and knowledge of the histories of both collections. 1.25 Of course, if the circumscribed modes of action promoted by the article were natural, there would be no need to train the public in them in the first place. 1.26 Prior to a recent visit to the Palace of Versailles, I accessed a contemporary list of visitor rules that has striking features in common with those published for the British Museum in 1832: visitors are notified to “dress appropriately,” as well as of sundry other regulations (Article 17) including refraining from (rule 1) “touching works and decorative items”; (2) “crossing barriers and ropes delimiting the areas open to visitors”; (5) “leaving graffiti, inscriptions, marks or other traces anywhere in the museum”; (6) “running, shoving, sliding and climbing”; (12) “smoking and spitting inside the museum”; and (15) “disturbing other visitors with excessive noise” (http://www.chateauversailles.fr/resources/pdf/en/reglements/reglement_musee_en.pdf ). See also Duncan 2009 (1995): 59. 1.27 Cf. Dutton 2006: 372, 2009: 40–41. 1.28 Gell (1996: 17) was drawn to the institutional theory of art in part because it bypassed aesthetics for sociological analysis. 1.29 While the object biography approach notably opposes this flattening, as do the various material culture studies and anthropological approaches to art, these are primarily scholarly approaches rather than those adopted by or known to the art-loving public; see, further, Graves-Brown 2000b; Kopytoff 1986; Gosden and Marshall 1999; and, dealing especially with the ancient Near East, Feldman 2009; Sonik 2014. 1.30 Maquet (1986) specified that “art objects,” whether selected (art by metamorphosis) or designed (art by destination), were made or crafted (i.e., created as a product of deliberate human agency)—presumably in opposition to natural things. But the scope and variety of things that might be encompassed within the category of “made” may be larger than it appears. Alpers’ (1991; main text) crab is ostensibly a natural thing, not a made one, but the fact that it is dead and yet (presumably) not decaying or decayed insinuates deliberate human intervention (a process of “making”) in the crab’s actual state of being—perhaps in the crab’s killing and certainly in its preservation. 1.31 The maker’s intentionality in endowing a work with specific aesthetic qualities was explicitly not considered by Gell (1996: 15–16) in his thought-experiment on the institutional theory of art as he linked the consideration of such intentionality to the aesthetic theory of art: “It may be said that a work of art can be defined as any object that is aesthetically superior, having certain qualities of visual appealingness or beauty. These qualities must have been put there intentionally by an artist, because artists are skilled in activating a capacity…to respond aesthetically to something. This theory is not one I propose to discuss here, although it is still widely held, especially by the general public, who tend to think that visual attractiveness, or beauty, is something they can recognize automatically.”

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1.32 Branham (1994/1995: 35), citing the work of Fisher (1991: 6, 27, 88), offered the alternate scheme of naïve (not created for display) vs. self-conscious (deliberately for display) art. 1.33 Of course, many such monumental things were de- and re-constituted in the process of being moved; others, which were left “intact,” were decontextualized. 1.34 This type of severance has been applied not only to three-dimensional but also to two-dimensional things. On walking through the Near Eastern galleries at the Louvre, for example, one comes across a room in which the heads of various persons, cut out from larger palace reliefs from the site of Khorsabad, are unabashedly displayed. 1.35 This type of restoration, of course, is contrary to contemporary curatorial practice, but other types of restoration, which introduce other types of issues (discussed in the main text) continue to be practiced. 1.36 A more accessible version of this essay appears, combined with two other essays by Moore, in Herbert 1964: 138–49. 1.37 Moore (1941: 598) disliked the term Primitive Art for its unjustified suggestion of crudeness and incompetence. But for all his admiration, Moore himself essentialized and homogenized the various objects traditionally encompassed by the category in ways that are as problematic as those he challenged. 1.38 One of these slippages is that Tolkien (1936: 1) is speaking as a scholar to a scholarly audience—his lecture was delivered to the British Academy, even if it ultimately had a more significant role in the public reassessment of the merits and significance of Beowulf—and criticizing in part the scholarly failure to produce criticism that is “directed to the understanding of a poem as a poem.” Moore is speaking as an artist directly for a broad public audience: The Listener, in which Moore’s essay was published, was the print complement, published weekly, to the radio and television programming of the BBC. While the two different audiences, the one scholarly and the other general, may be expected to have different desires, needs, and concerns, both are concerned with how to approach art. 1.39 Unquestioned here is how much of Auden’s initial “encounter” with Beowulf is due to Tolkien’s (expert) charismatic recitation and how much to the poem itself. Auden’s account of his encounter with Beowulf also bears a striking similarity to Dudley’s encounter with the “Chinese horse,” in that both Auden and Dudley are driven to learn more. But Dudley (2012: 2) explicitly asserts that, had information about the horse been displayed next to it, she feels sure it would have “interfered with, even prevented altogether, the powerful and moving reaction [she] had to the object for its own sake.” She (2012: 3) acknowledges the alignment of this stance with Clifford’s (1988: 229) shrewd suggestion that we ought to restore to (museum) objects “their lost status as fetishes—not specimens of a deviant or exotic “fetishism” but our own fetishes. This tactic…would accord to things in collections the power to fixate rather than simplify the capacity to edify or inform.” This is a canny encapsulation of one of the consequences of transforming things into our objects—the objects of our desires, wonder, curiosity, revulsion, and obsession. Auden does not suggest that knowledge of the context and content of Beowulf, had it come first, would have diminished its potent attraction—but, in all fairness, it is possible he merely didn’t think to say so. 1.40 The word “biography” (fn. 29 above) is used advisedly here in preference to history or itinerary (e.g., Joyce and Gillespie 2015) to describe the lives and experiences of things. 1.41 What and how a sculptor sees when looking at a sculpture is (arguably) different from what the general public sees: the sculptor has a sense of embodied doing, the



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practice of actually making a sculpture, that the lay public mostly lacks. 1.42 For the ways in which the rise of the Western public museum shaped the perception and reception of ancient art (e.g., through valorization of classical Greek materials and subordination of Assyrian, Egyptian, and other non-Western materials), see Sonik and Kertai, forthcoming; Jenkins 1992. 1.43 If perception is recognized as a human behavior, it should be recognized as subject to many of the influences shaping other human behaviors (Segall et al. 1968: 143): “In particular, each individual’s experiences combine in a complex fashion to determine his reaction to a given stimulus situation. To the extent that certain classes of experiences are more likely to occur in some cultures than in others, differences in behavior across cultures, including differences in perceptual tendencies, can be great enough even to surpass the ever-present individual differences within cultural groupings.” 1.44 Branham (1994/1995: 33), discussing attempts to resacralize desacralized art objects within the framework of museum rather than sacred space, observed that “efforts to invest the museum visitor with perceptions and reactions similar to those once experienced by someone from another time and place especially face a logistical and conceptual impasse.” 1.45 In all the denigration of the copy, it is easy to forget that, following the clone’s inception, it attains a life of its own; see, in this volume, McGeough. 1.46 The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has put this process directly in the public eye with its “Operation Night Watch” (begun July 8, 2019): the lengthy restoration of Rembrandt’s 1642 painting, The Night Watch (Schutters van wijk II onder leiding van kapitein Frans Banninck Cocq), is taking place in a glass chamber in the museum, where museum visitors may watch it taking place. The entire process is also being documented online for those who cannot visit it in person: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/nightwatch. This transformation of restoration into public spectacle renders the peculiar time travel undergone by artworks explicitly visible to the viewer and forces confrontation with some of the issues discussed here. 1.47 A distinction between conservation and restoration may be drawn by characterizing the former as intended to stabilize the object and delay deterioration, while the latter is intended to restore the object to its original condition. But in contemporary practice, the two may be used interchangeably or overlap (along with other practices): see, e.g., Rhyne 2003; Maßmann 2003: 249; fn. 55 below. 1.48 This process of objectification denies the myriad and diverse affordances that the original thing might possess, depending on its context. 1.49 This essay draws primarily on the second version of Benjamin’s essay (1936). I am indebted to Jonathan Ben-Dov for the copy of Benjamin’s work I have carried for many years and for his recognition that it would prove—as it has—a constantly challenging and provocative companion. 1.50 Benjamin’s (2008 [1936]: 24) precise words suggested an evolutionary model of development from primitive magic to more sophisticated religion that is not adopted here. 1.51 The word “looking” is deliberately selected here in place of “viewing” as the latter implies a distance that is (arguably) illusory in Benjamin’s work. 1.52 Benjamin’s discussion evokes a scene from Asimov’s The Naked Sun (main text above), in which the contrast between (long-distance) viewing and intersubjective engagement (interacting “face to face”) is thrown again into high relief: “The phrase [face to face] conjured up the most striking picture of the two of us breathing—breathing one another’s breath” (Asimov 1957: 139).

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1.53 Gell’s 1992 work—which employs terms like alchemy and transubstantiation, discusses the artist as “occult technician,” and evokes the rather ambiguous notion of enchantment in its title, “The Technology of Enchantment”—makes for interesting reading alongside Benjamin’s occult-influenced writings on aura. 1.54 An homage to the first lady of crime, Agatha Christie, seems fitting here: Christie, in addition to being a brilliant and perceptive writer of mystery novels, also participated in numerous excavations in the Middle East over the course of her lengthy marriage to the Near Eastern archaeologist, Max Mallowan. Her thoughts on archaeologists and ancient artifacts thread through not only her fictional work but also her 1946 archaeological memoir, Come, Tell Me How You Live. While writing this section, I happened also to be reading Lucretius’ De rerum natura, “On the Nature of Things,” with its (apt) conclusion that the fear of death is folly. 1.55 The applicability of the terms conservation, preservation, and cultivation to the ongoing work performed on Lenin’s body is discussed by Yurchak (2015: 128); see also fn. 47 above. His recognition of preservation as perpetual process rather than static state is compelling. 1.56 The decision to preserve Lenin’s body in perpetuity was not a decision made at or even soon after Lenin’s death; Yurchak (2015, 2017) recounts the slow process whereby the period of preservation was (repeatedly) extended before it became a long(er)-term goal. 1.57 A series of successful attacks on the sarcophagus prior to the installation of bulletproof glass, some of which damaged but did not destroy Lenin’s body, is recounted in Chadaga 2014: 206. 1.58 Tennyson’s Ulysses has been an old and steadfast companion, one that has come constantly to mind as I was writing this essay. I can think of no more fitting end to this work than its glorious determination to go on—to change, to danger, even unto death—to “drink / Life to the lees:” (ll. 6–7).

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2 Beyond Representation: The Role of Affect in Sumerian Lamenting 1,2

Paul Delnero Keywords: Sumerian lamenting; Mesopotamian ritual; ritual language; affective contagion; the poetics of lamenting; collective grief.

INTRODUCTION

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or much of the short history of Assyriology as a discipline, texts have been privileged over images, particularly by philologists who work primarily with written sources, and who tend to regard Mesopotamian imagery as a secondary source of evidence for illustrating textual content. Mesopotamia’s visual culture, moreover, has frequently been approached like textual sources, reduced to a semiotic system of representation intended to communicate ideas and information through signs and symbols. One of the many shortcomings of this approach—of treating images, like texts, as static carriers of meaning—is that it necessarily precludes an understanding of how texts, like images, have non-representational aspects that are as vital to understanding their cultural function and significance as their semantic content. Among the shared non-representational features of texts and images are their materiality, aesthetic properties, and the bodies of specialized skills required to produce them, all of which contribute substantially to what texts and images do in the social contexts they help create and through which they circulate. Equally important, if as frequently overlooked, are the affective responses that texts generate both through and beyond their representational content. One group of Mesopotamian texts whose cultural meaning and function is likely to have been strongly motivated by the highly affective nature of their content (though there are of

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course many others), are the Sumerian laments. Since the emotional response generated by the laments is critical to understanding their significance, but is almost never taken into consideration when examining their content, these particular compositions—and the role of representation in generating and spreading what I term here “affective contagion,” drawing on Plato’s conceptualization of “emotional contagion”—comprise the focus of this article.

LAMENTING AS A CULTURAL PRACTICE Lamenting the dead is one of the primary means by which collective memories are formed and sustained in most, if not all societies. In performing a ritual, which provides an outlet for those with emotional ties to the deceased to channel their grief, the act of lamenting also keeps an essential element of the grieving community’s past alive in the present. Moreover, when mourning the dead, a fundamental link is established between the person who has passed and the members of the group who grieve, whose identity is shaped, and in some instances even constituted, through the memories of the dead that are brought to life and continually reaffirmed through lamenting. As noted by Jan Assmann, in his study of collective memory: The rupture between yesterday and today, in which the choice to obliterate or preserve must be considered, is experienced in its most basic and, in a sense, primal form in death. Life only assumes the form of the past on which a memory culture can be built through its end, through its irremediable discontinuity. One might even call it the primal scene in memory culture. (Assmann 2011: 15) In early Mesopotamia, mourning the dead was no less important than in other societies. The practice of lamenting, however, also had a cultural significance that extended well beyond families and communities grieving the loss of individuals. In addition to the extensive textual and archaeological evidence for funerary practices from nearly all periods of Mesopotamian history, there is ample documentation in administrative texts, mythological narratives, hymns, and many other types of textual sources that attests to the importance of lamenting not only for individuals and small



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communities, but also in the context of state rituals and for local cults.3 On the basis of administrative texts pertaining to cultic activities during the Ur III period examined by Walther Sallaberger (1993) in his magisterial work, Der kultische Kalender der Ur-III Zeit, occasions when ritual laments were performed included, but were not limited to: — When removing statues of deities from their shrines or repairing the temple — When statues of deities returned from processions — On the last day of the month, before the appearance of the New Moon — Throughout the Tummal and Akitu cultic festivals — During cultic circumambulations around the city — When offerings were made to the Balag-instrument, one of the main instruments played during the performance of ritual laments Lamenting was no less common during the second and first millennia BCE,4 when it was performed not only for such reasons as are known from the end of the third millennium but also on the following occasions: — When temples were built and canals were repaired — Throughout the Ishtar ritual at Mari — Before sunrise and at different points during the Babylonian New Year Ritual — During mouth-washing ceremonies — During eclipses and other ominous periods — In the ritual for covering the kettledrum after the bull was slaughtered and its hide was prepared to cover the drum Laments, moreover, were also regularly performed as part of the daily cult. As observed by Uri Gabbay (2014: 159) in his monumental study of Mesopotamian laments, the daily cultic performance of lamenting is most directly indicated by colophons found on texts from the lamenter’s corpus (kalûtu-texts) copied for the Neo-Assyrian ruler Ashurbanipal, which state that the laments contained on these tablets were to be performed every day.5 By the Neo-Assyrian Period, and likely already much earlier, laments were also being performed regularly as an integral part of nearly every cultic ritual that is known from that time.6

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LAMENTING AND PLATO’S CRITIQUE OF EMOTIONAL CONTAGION7 Books 3 and 10 of The Republic, which contain an extended meditation on what Plato perceived to be the dangers inherent in lamenting and grieving, provide direct evidence that mourning in the ancient world was a widespread practice imbued with substantial cultural meaning, both conceptualized and recognized as significantly more than a natural response to the loss of a valued person. Plato specifically critiques the dramatic enacting and theatrical representation of mourning in Greek tragedy, focusing on the performative dimension of lamenting. His critique, consequently, is directly relevant to a consideration of why laments were performed and how they were able to produce their effects on the participants in their performance. This consideration is not intended to suggest that, because enactments of grieving were common in Greek tragedies, and because representations of mourning in performances of Greek tragedies were considered to have a contagious effect during Plato’s time, mourning must therefore have also had a similar public function and similar effects in ancient Mesopotamia. My purpose in citing Plato’s observations on the affective effects of mourning is intended, rather, to create an analogical framework (as opposed to a historical argument based on a comparative analogy for what is perceived to be a similar practice) for theorizing how and why any enactment and witnessing of a display of grief—intentional or unintentional, private or public, performed in the theater or in a cultic ritual, etc.—generate affective contagion and can be a powerful means of creating groups that are constituted by and through a shared emotion that spreads through the group. Among Plato’s objections to the act of lamenting are the following: (1) Enacting grief involves representation (mimesis), and representations are always inferior to that which they represent:8 “So, imitation is an inferior thing that consorts with another inferior thing to produce inferior offspring” (Plato, Rep. 603b3–4).9 (2) Grieving and mourning are associated with weakness and inferior instincts that are contrary to the strength, courage, and self-control that are essential for a Guardian in Plato’s ideal State: “Since then we claim to care about are men [Lee: “Guardians”], then, and men who must become good, we won’t allow them to imitate a woman, young or old,



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as she abuses her husband, quarrels with the gods, brags because she thinks herself happy, or suffers misfortune and is possessed by sorrows and lamentations [Lee: “or mourning or lamenting in misfortune”]—and still less a woman who is ill, passionately in love, or in labor” (Plato, Rep. 395d5–e2). (3) The act of habitually enacting or dramatically representing lesser emotions like grief can transfer these emotions to the person who repeatedly performs them so that, over time, the actor becomes the type of person he is representing: “On the other hand, they (the Guardians) must not be clever at doing or imitating illiberal or shameful actions, so that they won’t acquire a taste for the real thing from imitating it. Or haven’t you noticed that imitations, if they are practiced much past youth, get established in the habits and nature of body, tones of voice, and mind?” (Plato, Rep. 395c5–d2). (4) Lamenting and mourning have effects extending beyond the person performing them that can spread contagiously to infect even mere witnesses to the performance. Plato’s criticism of the contagious nature of lamenting is stated most forcefully in Book 10 of The Republic and, since it provides a critical framework for understanding how the performative function of lamenting might have been achieved through the performance of laments, the passage is worth citing in full: If you consider that the poet gratifies and indulges the instinctive desires of a part of us, which we forcibly restrain in our private misfortunes, with its hunger for tears and for an uninhibited indulgence in grief. Our better nature, being without adequate intellectual and moral training, relaxes its control over these feelings, on the grounds that it is someone else’s suffering it is watching and that there’s nothing to be ashamed of in praising and pitying another man with some claim to goodness who shows excessive grief; besides, it reckons the pleasure it gets as sheer gain, and would certainly not consent to be deprived of it by condemning the whole poem. For very few people are capable of realizing that what we feel for other people must infect what we feel for ourselves, and that if we let our pity for the misfortunes of others grow too strong it will be difficult to restrain our feelings in our own. (Plato, Rep. 606a3–b8)10

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In summary, Plato singles out three aspects of the act of lamenting that render it unsuitable for his ideal Republic: it involves representation, it weakens the people who perform it, and it has a contagious quality, so that it might spread to those who witness it and are powerless to resist succumbing to it. How then is lamenting able to achieve these effects? For Plato, the answer lies (in part) in the modes of representation utilized in its performance. These modes include (1) the use of the first person or direct speech by the person acting out the lament, which conveys the deceitful impression that the actor is the person he is representing; (2) the use of dialogue, which is equally misleading, because in omitting the words of the narrator between the speeches, the exchange is portrayed as if it were really taking place; and (3) the poetic power of the actual words in the lament, which cast a spell over the audience so that it falls victim to the baser instincts the words evoke. Since the same three modes of representation are equally present in Mesopotamian laments, it is no less probable that these compositions elicited a similar response when they were performed.

LAMENTING IN ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA In ancient Mesopotamia, lamenting belonged to a set of cultural practices deployed to prevent or remove individual and collective misfortune. In an article about the problem of evil in Mesopotamia, Jean Bottéro (1991) proposed several predominant means of responding to catastrophe at different periods in Mesopotamian history. Primarily on the basis of literary narratives, Bottéro (1991: 164) argued that personal misfortune in the third millennium was perceived as caused by malevolent and mostly self-impelled demons rather than by demons sent by or acting on behalf of the gods, which, in his words, “apparently had no motive other than their wickedness or their capacity for being a nuisance.” This demonic nuisance was typically countered by the performance of magical rituals and recitation of incantations designed to expel the undesired demons. In the second millennium, by contrast, misfortune begun to be conceived as the result of personal transgression, of individuals upsetting the gods through their behaviors or actions, and the rituals performed to counter divine anger provoked in this manner assumed the form of a trial in which the plea of the victim was submitted to the gods for judgment in the hope of receiving a favorable verdict (Bottéro



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1991: 165–67). By the first millennium, in the last stage of this development, the perceived causes of suffering were still essentially the same, but the distance between humanity and the gods had grown to such a significant extent that people had become increasingly more dependent on an all-powerful god like Marduk to protect and deliver them from misfortune (Bottéro 1991: 167–71). While the diachronic development of the Mesopotamian response to catastrophe (as well as perception of the actual causes of misfortune or disaster) was probably more complex than Bottéro’s reconstruction suggests, practices like magic and divination were almost certainly used to varying extents in different periods to respond to misfortune. Lamenting, in addition to magic and divination, seems to have been equally important. Although references to gala-“priests,” the cultic official responsible for performing ritual laments, begin to appear around the middle of the third millennium, one of the earliest direct references to the performance of lamenting along with magic and divination in a ritual context appears in the Cylinders of Gudea.11 These texts date to near the end of the third millennium and contain a detailed description of elaborate ritual procedures that were performed before, during, and after the completion of a temple for Ningirsu, the patron deity of Gudea’s city Lagash. Gudea is described as performing a series of cultic acts to ensure that the building of the temple is supported by the gods. Along with at least two forms of divination (dream incubation and extispicy), as well as ritual magic to purify the temple’s foundation and expel demonic entities by banishing unclean people from the city and removing the spittle of sorcerers from the roads, these acts also included lamenting. While Gudea is excavating the clay pit and preparing the first brick for the temple, three different types of drums, including the a2-la2 and si-im-drums (Gudea Cylinder A col. xviii l.18; col. xxviii l.18; and Cylinder B col. xv l.20), both associated with lamenting, are played continuously, suggesting that laments were performed during this act to ensure that it succeeded. There are also a number of references in the text to Gudea’s balaĝ-drum, ušumgal-kalam-ma, ‘Dragon of the Land’ (Gudea Cylinder A col. vi l.24; col. vii l.24; and Cylinder B col. xv l.21). The balaĝdrum, which was the instrument used to accompany Balag-laments, one of the main types of Sumerian laments from the beginning of the second millennium onwards, is described in one passage as the instrument to which Ningirsu “keeps listening” (Gudea Cylinder A col. vii l.24–25), and in another passage as the instrument which heads processions (Gudea Cylinder

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B col. xv l.21–22).12 The intended cultic function of the balaĝ-drum is stated explicitly in the following passage from Gudea Cylinder B: To appease the mind, to appease the body; to cause weeping to ensue and tears to be cried; to remove lamenting from the lamenting heart; (and by so doing to calm Enlil in his rage); (Gudea) introduced Lugaligi-huš—his Balag-instrument—with these duties (to the temple) for lord Ningirsu.13 Lamenting as a cultic practice becomes increasingly important during the Old Babylonian Period (ca. 2000–1595 BCE), when the two main types of liturgical laments, Balags and Ershemmas, were first put into writing. In addition to the compiling of the earliest written versions of laments, there are also numerous references in mythological compositions from this period to the performance of cultic laments in response to catastrophe. In the Sumerian composition, “A Man and His God”, for example, a man who has been inflicted with a severe illness and other forms of misfortune attempts to have his suffering removed by uttering a lament to his personal god. Meanwhile, the sufferer’s sister, who is identified in the text as a balaĝ-singer, is asked to “narrate tearfully” the ills which have befallen him. After a lengthy prayer of supplication, the intended result of the lament is achieved and described as follows: The man’s god, he heard his bitter tears. After the heart of the man’s god had been appeased to him, to the young man—when he had laments performed and wailed out loud—his god accepted the true words, the pure words which he had spoken. The words of prayer which the young man knew how to speak, the pure supplication pleased his god as if it were flowing oil. His god stretched his hand away from the malicious words: the affliction which embraced him, though he was not its spouse, he abolished(?); the despair which stretched out its arms toward him, he banished to the Steppe; the lamenting that struck like the south wind(?), he drove away; the fate demon in his body, he removed.14 The use of lamenting, in direct connection with magic and divination, to appeal to the gods to turn back misfortune is expressed with particular clarity in a passage from the first millennium Akkadian composition “The Poem of



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the Righteous Sufferer.” In this text, the sufferer, who has been afflicted with a life-threatening illness and a multitude of other severe misfortunes, laments that none of the standard ways of reversing his condition have succeeded: My symptoms terrified the incantation priest, while my omens confused the diviner. The exorcist could not identify the nature of my malady, while the diviner could not determine the length of time allotted for my sickness. No god came to help me, nor took me by the hand, while no goddess showed me compassion, nor went by my side. The grave was open (for me) and my grave goods were laid out. Before I had even died, the lamenting for me was already finished.15 Since appeasing the anger of the gods, in part by awakening their pity, is one of the intended functions of lamenting, this passage strongly suggests that consulting an exorcist to identify the demonic agent of affliction, and then consulting a diviner to determine the divine offense that caused it before, finally and perhaps as a last resort, performing a lament to soothe the angry gods into restoring their favor, was the standard sequence of ritual actions undertaken to counter misfortune. Moreover, in the case of “The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer,” which takes the form of an extended lament delivered to the god Marduk, it is arguably the lament itself that ultimately proves most successful, as Marduk heals the sufferer through a dream vision sent in response to his plea. Additional evidence that the primary cultic function of lamenting was to appease the hearts of gods to turn back misfortune has been collected by Uri Gabbay, and includes: (1) Colophons on tablets containing laments copied for Ashurbanipal which read: “The wisdom of Ea, belonging to the corpus of cultic laments (kalûtu), secret of an apkallu sage, which is appropriate for the appeasement of the hearts (nūh libbi) of the great gods” (Gabbay 2014: 17). (2) The meaning of the term, Ershahunga (Sumerian: er2-ša3-hun-ĝa2), the name of a frequently performed class of cultic laments, which means, in Sumerian: “lament for appeasing the heart” (Gabbay 2014: 15). (3) The frequent occurrence in cultic laments of the Sumerian phrases ša3– hun and bar–sud, which mean “to appease the heart” and “to pacify the mind” (Gabbay 2014: 15).

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(4) The presence in texts from all four of the main genres of laments during the first millennium—Balags, Ershemmas, Ershahungas, and Shuillas— of what Gabbay (2014: 10) calls “heart pacification units.”

DOING THINGS WITH WORDS: THE FUNCTION OF TEXTS IN RITUALS What then is the relationship between the content of cultic texts and the function of these texts in ritual performance? If laments were performed to appease angry deities, as one of a set of practices (including magic and divination) that were used to prevent or turn back misfortune, how did the content of cultic laments contribute to accomplishing this function? One particularly productive approach to the use of texts in rituals has been to examine the content of cultic texts not only for its semantic meaning, but also with respect to the pragmatic function of performing it in a ritual context. The relationship between semantics and pragmatics is specifically addressed in speech-act theory, which has influenced numerous subsequent anthropological studies of ritual and performance.16 In his How to Do Things With Words (1975 [1962]), which contains the initial formulation of the ideas undergirding this theory, J.L. Austin made a critical distinction between two different types of linguistic expressions. The first, which he (1975: 3) called “constative statements,” comprise descriptive expressions whose semantic content can generally be evaluated as either true or false. The second, which he (1975: 6–7) labeled “performative utterances,” refers to expressions which are used to perform an action. Unlike constative statements, which communicate semantic meaning, performative utterances move beyond semantics to cause an actual change in an existing state of affairs. The example that Austin gives to illustrate this is the use of the phrase “I do” during a wedding. By uttering these words at the appropriate time the bride and groom do more than just describe what they are doing; they cause themselves to be married through the very act of uttering the phrase. In contrast to descriptive statements like “it is raining,” which describe a fact about a situation, the expression “I do,” when uttered in the context of a wedding, is doing more than describing; it is actively causing something to happen (Austin 1975: 5–7, 12–13). John Searle, working from the same basic distinction between constative statements and performative utterances, later developed this idea into a more complete system in his book Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy



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of Language (1969). In his formulation of the theory, speech acts are conceived as a “total system of communication” in which there is an inseparable connection between what an utterance means semantically, what the speaker intends to accomplish by issuing the utterance, and what the intended recipient interprets the utterance to mean (Searle 1969: 21). Applying this conception of language use to written texts, particularly when they are performed in rituals, the semantic meaning of a text is inseparable from what it is intended to accomplish and what it actually succeeds in accomplishing. As a consequence, texts express their meaning in rituals—and in all other contexts for that matter—not directly or solely through their content, but instead through how their content is used to accomplish the intended effect of the performance as a whole. Specifically addressing the pragmatic use of language in ritual, the anthropologist Stanley Tambiah (1968: 179) distinguished in his study, “The Magical Power of Words,” three different ways in which language can be used in rituals: (1) When language is broadcast, to be heard, but not necessarily understood (2) When language is both broadcast and understood (3) When language is secret, and is not meant to be heard or understood Noting that none of these uses of language are mutually exclusive and that all three uses can be operative at different points in the same ritual, Tambiah analyzed how language is able to achieve its intended ritual function when it is used in each of these three ways. Arguing against the theory proposed by Frazer, that magical language works by applying the laws of sympathy to transfer a property of a word to an object with analogous qualities, Tambiah (1968: 194) proposed instead that magical language uses metaphor to heighten the effect of the ritual procedure and to give the metaphorical transfer it aims to produce “an air of operational reality.”

SOUND IN THE PERFORMANCE OF SUMERIAN LAMENTS Although laments were probably performed in many different ways in many different types of rituals, one particularly well attested form of lamenting involved the singing or recitation of Sumerian cultic laments known as Balags and Ershemmas. The term balaĝ possibly refers to a harp, but more

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likely a drum, while the term er2-šem5-ma, which means “lament of the seminstrument,” refers to an instrument that is also identifiable as a type of drum.17 The instruments identified in the names of these two types of laments were probably played to accompany the performance of the laments associated with each instrument. The earliest written versions of Balags and Ershemmas are first attested during the Old Babylonian Period (ca. 2000–1595), but many of the laments from this period continued to be copied and performed in expanded or modified form in Mesopotamia until at least the Hellenistic Period. Both types of laments are characterized by the consistent use of a special register of Sumerian known as the Emesal dialect, and content in which the mournful themes of destruction and loss are central. Many laments contain long descriptions of the destruction or abandonment of cities and temples, or the disappearance of the gods Dumuzi and Damu to the netherworld. That Sumerian laments were both widely and regularly performed in rituals is evident from the terms identifying the two main types of Sumerian laments, Balags and Ershemmas. It is also apparent, however, from texts describing rituals such as that for the goddess Ishtar at Mari, during which the Balag uru2-am3-ma-i-ra-bi (“That City which has been Plundered”) was performed.18 The performance of Sumerian laments is equally apparent from the relatively large number of copies of laments extant that are written phonetically, instead of in the conventional orthography for the Emesal dialect of Sumerian.19 In the corpus of approximately 460 Old Babylonian sources containing cultic laments, there are at least 162 sources, or nearly 35 percent, which are written in a highly phonetic orthography.20 The main types of phonetic writings which occur in these sources comprise: (1) Homophonous Signs (2) Polysyllabic Words Written with Multiple Signs (3) Writings in Which Consonant Reduplication is Avoided (4) Sandhi Writings (5) The Omission of Determinatives Examples of each of these five types of phonetic writings include: (1) Homophonous Signs:21 — a-ša for a-ša3 (VAT 1420, obv. 7') — am- for am3- (VAT 1417, obv.? 3')



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— ku for ku2 (VAT 1546, rev. 2') — ni for ni2 (VAT 3547, obv. 4'; BM 78983, obv. col. i, 1) — mu-mu for mu2-mu2 (VAT 1442, rev. 11') — e for e2 (BM 78918, obv. 12') — du for du7 (BM 113236, rev. 1) — ku for ku5 (VAT 604+, obv. col. i, 5') — i for i7 (VAT 613+, obv. col. i., 29') (2) Polysyllabic Word Written with Multiple Signs: — tu-ur for tur3 (VAT 1576, rev. 4') — ši-im for šim (VAT 1414, obv. 3'; VAT 3526, obv. 7) — sa-aĝ2 for saĝ (VAT 1509, obv. 7') — su-ku-da for sukud-da (VAT 1420, rev. 4–5) — ab-ka-le for abgal-e (VAT 1416, rev. 11) — ĝa-ar for ĝar (VAT 1546, obv. 8') — su-hu-uš for suhuš (BM 113236, obv. 12') — lu2-gal for lugal (BM 113236, obv. 6'; VAT 613, rev. col. v, 22) — u3-ri-ma for urim5ki-ma (VAT 608+, obv. col. i, 6) (3) Consonant Reduplication Avoided: — ha-ra-na for har-ra-an-na (VAT 1472, obv. 6') — ku-la for gul-la (VAT 1414, obv. 7) — a-še-re for a-še-er-re (VAT 1546, rev. 2') — li-la for lil2-la2 (VAT 3547, obv. 6') — di-ma for dim2-ma (VAT 3548, obv. 5') — a-nu-na for da-nun-na (BM 113236, rev. 1') — tu-ra for tur3-ra (BM 78193, obv. 6') — hu-la for hul-la (BM 113236, obv. 6'; VAT 608+, obv. col. i, l.29) — gu-ba for gub-ba (BM 78198, obv. 18'; VAT 613+, obv. col. ii., 22') (4) Sandhi Writings: — ya-li-lil2 for a-a den-lil2 (VAT 1541, obv. 1) — ga-ša(-)nu-me-a for ga-ša-an nu-me-a (VAT 1509, obv. 9') — ga-ša(-)mu-lu for ga-ša-an mu-lu (VAT 1558, obv. 4') — ga-ša-bi for ga-ša-an-bi (VAT 1556, obv. 6') — ma(-)ya-ba for ma-a a-ba (VAT 1555, obv. 6') — du-bu-ra(-)na for dubur an-na (VAT 1509, obv. 1')

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— e2-gi(-)bi-a for a-gin7 bi2-AK (VAT 1472, obv. 12') — a-ma-sa2-na for amaš-a-na (BM 78193, obv. 7') — ka-ša-mah-di for ga-ša-an mah-di (VAT 604+, obv. col. ii, l.16') — ama-u3-šu-gal-la-na for ama-ušumgal-an-na (VAT 604+, obv. col. i, 1.23') (5) Determinative Omitted: — dumu-zi for ddumu-zi (VAT 1546, obv. 7') — tu for tumušen (VAT 1555, obv. 4') — ha-šu-ra for ĝišhašur (VAT 3580, obv.? 4') — uru2-ze2-eb-ba for uru2-ze2-ebki-ba (VAT 1416, obv. 5') — nu-dim2-mud for dnu-dim2-mud (VAT 1541, obv. 4) — di-li-babbar2 for ddil-im2-babbar (BM 113236, obv. 4') — gu-za for ĝišgu-za (BM 113236, obv. 12'; BM 78983, obv. col. ii, l.7) — u3-ri-ma for urim5ki-ma (VAT 608+, obv. col. i, 6) — zu-en for dsuen (VAT 608+, obv. col. i, 3) — mu-ti-na-na for dmu-tin-an-na (VAT 615+, obv. col. i, 10') These five types of phonetic writings clarify the pronunciation of the words in the lament by using signs to write each syllable in a polysyllabic word—or sandhi writings—to indicate the pronunciation of a sequence of forms, as well as by using homophonous signs or deliberately omitting determinatives and reduplicated consonants to eliminate any ambiguities in pronunciation that might otherwise be introduced by the orthographic complexity of the cuneiform script. Since many of the laments copied phonetically would also have been performed, the phonetic writings in these sources were almost certainly intended to aid in the performance of the compositions, permitting the performer to easily recognize how to pronounce the words in the text when singing or reciting it. More importantly, this privileging of pronunciation over semantic meaning suggests that Sumerian laments were, in at least some instances, performed in the first of the three uses of ritual language noted by Tambiah, of being meant to be heard but not necessarily understood. But while the aural experience of hearing Sumerian laments resound to the accompaniment of thundering drums was undoubtedly one of the more powerful means by which participants would have been drawn into their performance, it would be a mistake to reduce the entire performative



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effect of laments to this dimension. The content of Balags and Ershemmas also had meaning, and since one of the functions of lamenting was to appease angry gods, this meaning was clearly intended to be communicated and must therefore also be taken into account.

THE CONTENT OF SUMERIAN LAMENTS AND EMOTIONAL CONTAGION In the passages from The Republic cited above, one of the reasons Plato gives for mourning being corrupting and undesirable is that it tends to infect the people who perform it and to spread contagiously to the people who observe it. Although the acoustic experience of hearing the laments, the musical instruments which accompanied the performance, and the tonal qualities of the language of the texts would have undoubtedly heightened the affective experience of ritual lamenting and contributed to its contagious effect, the content of the laments and the poetic form in which it is expressed must have also resonated at a deeply emotional level. As noted above, in his critique of the dramatic representation of grieving, Plato identified the use of dialogue and first-person narration, along with the power of the poet to move the audience with poetic language, as three of the main roots of the pernicious effects of lamenting. Since all three modes of representation are also present in Sumerian laments, it is not unlikely that they were intended to have a similar effect. The content of Sumerian ritual laments is frequently dismissed as being uninteresting, formulaic, and monotonous. The Biblical scholar Frederick William Dobbs-Allsopp (1993: 13; apud Gabbay 2014: 1 n.2), for example, has described the texts as being “mechanical, often boring, repetitive, and unimaginative.” Such a characterization, however, is based entirely on the aesthetic experience of scholars reading the laments as static, written texts; it fails entirely to account for the emotional effect these compositions would have had in performance, when their supposedly “boring, repetitive” content was brought to life in a participatory, affectively charged experience that transcended the representational content of the text themselves—even if this content contributed to the overall effect of the performance. While a full poetic analysis of Sumerian laments, examining the formal and structural features of the texts in relation to the affective response they were intended to elicit in performance, is essential to fully understanding

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how the laments’ content contributed to their performative effect, this is too large an undertaking to attempt here. Instead, I would like to turn in the last section of this chapter to an exploration of how specific passages excerpted from the Sumerian laments illustrate or exemplify the three means of dramatically representing mourning that were so emphatically criticized by Plato. In this section, I offer a preliminary case study of one way in which a more detailed study of the relationship between the texts and the performance of Sumerian laments might be carried out. Laments are typically addressed to one or more deities, including Enlil, Ishkur, Nergal, Inana, Ninisina, and numerous others, and concern the destruction of cities or the entire land in the wake of a divine decree commanding their annihilation. Many of these texts, and in particular the Balags, contain one or more sections, identified with the Sumerian term kiru-gu2, in which a female deity intercedes on behalf of the city or land to petition the god who ordered the destruction to turn back his anger and spare the population. Another equally large group of laments have as their theme the mourning either of the god Dumuzi, who has been seized by demons and carried off to the netherworld, leaving his mother, sister, and lover (Inana) to mourn and lament his absence, or of a related god, Damu, who also disappears and is mourned by his family. Laments delivered in the first person by a female deity mourning the loss of Dumuzi or Damu, or pleading on behalf of the city or land, are common to nearly all of these texts. Examples include the following passages, all of which are from laments dating to the Old Babylonian Period. In one section of the composition, “Dumuzi’s Mother’s Lament,” Inana grieves the loss of her lover Dumuzi by crying out: Lamenting flute, my heart is a lamenting flute, playing in the Steppe. I, the mistress of heaven, lady of the Eanna; I, the destroyer of lands, lady of the Eanna; I, the mother of the lord, Ninsun...—my heart is a lamenting flute, playing in the Steppe. At the place where the young man was present, at the place of Dumuzi, in Arali, the ruin hill of the shepherd, in Arali, the hill of suba-stones, my heart is a lamenting flute playing in the Steppe. At the place where the hands of the young man are bound, at the place where the arms of Dumuzi are bound, at the place where the ewe surrenders its lamb, at the place where the goat surrenders its kid, there where its god is, but there is nobody around, where the young



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man said ‘May my mother come to me!’, my heart is a lamenting flute playing in the Steppe.22 Inana’s heart-rending lament, in which the goddess likens the pain of losing her lover to the desperate and primal grief felt by ewes and goats forced to abandon their young to a violent fate, recurs in similar language and form in numerous other texts, including in this passage from “A Lament for Damu,” in which the mother of Damu cries: For him in the far-away land, I wail! For Ususu in the far-away land, I wail! For Umunmuzida in the far-away land, I wail! For my Damu in the far-away land, I wail! For Ishtaran in the far-away land, I wail! For Igishuba in the far-away land, I wail! On account of the pure cedar tree, at the place of the mother who bore me, I wail! To the Eanna, toward the heaven and earth, I wail! This wailing, is it not wailing for the flax which did not grow in the furrow? This wailing, is it not wailing for the barley which did not sprout abundantly? This wailing, is it not for the majestic river which did not yield a great carp flood? Is it not for the dead wife and the dead son who did not produce first-rate things?23 In addition to first person passages, laments also frequently contain dialogues, another literary mode Plato connects directly to the dangerous effects of representing grieving. In Sumerian laments, such dialogue takes place both at the broader level of the structure of the text as whole, when the perspective of who precisely is responding to the tragic event may shift from section to section, as well as within individual sections, when the participants or figures in the text speak directly to each other. One example of a dialogue within a lament appears in this section from an Ershemma to Dumuzi and Inana: here Geshtinanna, sister of Dumuzi, encounters the galla (Sumerian ĝal5-la2)-demons who have just bound her brother. The galla offer to take Geshtinanna to Dumuzi that she might watch helplessly as he is tortured: When his sister went out from the sheepfold, when Geshtinanna, the sister of the lord, went out from the sheepfold, a scout of the gallademons came toward her. He called out to mother-Geštin: ‘Now your brother is becoming a man of tears! Now Dumuzi is becoming a

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Turning lastly to the final point in Plato’s critique of lamenting, which is its power to spread contagiously from the performers to the audience, who are overpowered by the poetic force and imagery of the lament and cannot resist succumbing to the feelings of pity it evokes, the presence of powerful, pity-evoking poetic imagery can be found in nearly every Sumerian lament. One particularly clear example of such imagery appears in the conclusion of “The Death of Dumuzi”: (When Dumuzi was caught in the bewitched threads of the group of seven galla-demons which had surrounded him) a pot of wine shattered in the Steppe—the Steppe swirled like milk; swarms of locusts swirled in the Steppe—the Steppe swirled like milk; and small birds, being without apple trees, swirled in the Steppe—the Steppe swirled like milk....Dogs were lying by (Dumuzi’s) corpse and ravens were dwelling in his shepherd’s hut. The dogs were eating away at him [while lying?] at his feet, and the ravens were eating away at him while hovering above him in the sky.25

BEYOND REPRESENTATION—AFFECTIVE CONTAGION IN TEXT AND IMAGE(RY) As the content and structure of the passages cited in the previous section reveal, Sumerian laments, through the use of emotionally evocative firstperson litanies, dialogues, and passages rendering the full heart-wrenching horror of loss in vivid poetic imagery, provided a highly effective ritual means of both communicating and spreading grief and mourning. With the goal of averting impending misfortune, laments, whose primary purpose was to appease angry deities to prevent them from bringing about the feared catastrophe, fulfilled this aim by mimetically evoking the suffering that the depicted misfortune would inflict on the lamenters were it to occur. Laments used poetic mimesis and dramatic first person and dialogic ritual enactments of mourning to appeal to the pity and compassion of the gods



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by conjuring in vivid and horrendous detail a vision of what would be lost were Dumuzi or Damu to be abandoned to the netherworld forever. That similar practices were still being targeted for criticism in ancient Greece, centuries after they were developed in Mesopotamia, suggests the success of Sumerian laments—through both content and performance—in generating the contagious pity they were intended to evoke. Returning, then, to the question raised at the beginning of this article of the relationship between text and image, and the necessity of moving beyond representation in attempting to understand how either of these media, or both in combination, might have functioned in the situations in which they would have been encountered: Sumerian ritual laments provide a particularly striking example of why it is not sufficient to focus entirely on the representational content of these compositions, without also considering their non-representational aspects, when interpreting their cultural meaning and significance. First, and perhaps most significantly, Sumerian laments, while preserved in writing, are not, or at least not primarily, texts— in the conventional sense of texts as self-contained carriers of verbal messages that outlive the moment of their composition by existing or being reproducible in a form that allows their content to be repeated or experienced in a form that is identical or nearly identically to how it was originally conceived. The written versions of these compositions, and their physical instantiations, existed together with and actively contributed to the performance of the same laments in cultic rituals and were probably never intended to be read (or recited) outside a performative context.26 In other words, the representational content of the laments would not have been experienced without the highly emotionally charged atmosphere engendered by the ritual in which they were performed, an atmosphere reciprocally heightened by the performance of the emotionally charged content of the laments themselves. Lastly, and of almost equal significance, is that even if the representational content of the laments—with their evocative descriptions of terrifying demons violently turning Dumuzi or Damu over to the inexorable hand of fate, and the expressions of horrific grief caused by their untimely loss—contributed to the emotional impact of these compositions, the emotional effect would not have been experienced in isolation. The presence of other people participating in the same ritual and experiencing the same emotions inspired by the performance of the laments (as Plato’s critique of the emotional contagion provoked by dramatic representation

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of grieving suggests) would have greatly enhanced any affective response the representational content of laments might have inspired on their own, causing the public outpouring of grief the laments provoked and intensified to spread contagiously through the crowd of ritual participants. Although the observation that crowds of people behave differently than individuals and are more susceptible to emotional contagion can already be found as early as the 4th century BCE in Plato’s critique of public mourning, one of the first fully developed theories of the phenomenon was proposed in the late 19th century (CE), by Gustave Le Bon, in his highly influential book, La Psychologie des Foules (1895), which was published a year later in English as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Le Bon argued that, in contrast to individuals, crowds of people gathered together in the same place under the right conditions develop a “collective mind” that makes them behave less rationally than any single individual within the crowd might behave when alone. Individuals encompassed within a crowd, consequently, would be especially prone to act impulsively, violently, and less intelligently, and to become more likely to obey blindly the will of a leader indicating how they should act. According to Le Bon (1968 [1895]: 122–23), one of the main reasons for the hypnotic suggestibility of crowds is that they are particularly susceptible to simple and exaggerated emotions, which, once they have taken hold, spread quickly (contagiously) through the group: Ideas, sentiments, emotions, and beliefs possess in crowds a contagious power as intense as that of microbes. This phenomenon is very natural, since it is observed even in animals when they are together in number. Should a horse in a stable take to biting his manger the other horses in the stable will imitate him. A panic that has seized on a few sheep will soon extend to the whole flock. In the case of men collected in a crowd all emotions are very rapidly contagious, which explains the suddenness of panics. The overall effect of this emotional contagion, Le Bon (1968 [1895]: 54–55) argues, is to take over the crowd’s ability to think rationally and, in so doing, to cause its members to elevate appearance over reality, and to become unable to distinguish what is real from what is not. Although many aspects of Le Bon’s theory of emotional contagion in crowds, and in particular its strong conservative, anti-democratic



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undercurrent, have been heavily criticized, his fundamental observation that crowds begin to think and behave less rationally when they are overcome with emotion has had a profound influence on the study of mass psychology. Perhaps most famously, Le Bon’s theory was developed by Freud in Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921), in which Freud adopted Le Bon’s observation that crowds of people behave as if under hypnosis when they are put under the spell of a powerful and charismatic leader. Freud argued that it was libido or desire, motivated by identification with the father-figure leader, that causes members of a crowd to lose their inhibitions and give full vent to their repressed destructive and libidinous impulses. One of the fullest and most profound developments of Le Bon’s theory of crowd contagion was put forward by Elias Canetti in Masse und Macht (1960). Assuming, with Le Bon, that masses are characterized by a feeling of collective unity that is caused by the spreading of a powerful, shared emotion, Canetti also observed that there are many different types of masses, including smaller assemblages of people he identified as “packs” (Meuten),27 all of which have distinct causes, characteristics, and tendencies. Among the many types of crowds and bands Canetti (1960: 112, 169–72) analyzed are “lamenting packs” (Klage-Meuten), which he defines as groups that are formed in response to the death of a member of the group or which form in “lamenting religions” to commemorate, through rituals of lamenting, a deity or a heavily mythologized figure from the group’s past who has died unjustly. One of the primary attributes of such a lamenting pack is its tendency to heighten emotional excitement to intense extremes as a way of identifying with the deceased divinity or past member of the group, thus demonstrating the seriousness of its grief—sometimes even to the point of group members inflicting wounds on themselves to come as close to death as possible, without actually killing themselves (Canetti 1960: 124–25). Of primary importance to the lamenting pack, Canetti argued, is the emotion produced by the lamenting itself, which is engendered most effectively through the full, immersive participation in the dramatic depiction and reenactment of the tragic death of the figure being mourned. He described, for example, the Shiite Muharram Festival, in which the death of Mohammed’s younger son, Husain, is mourned (Canetti 1960: 179–80): Was immer geschehen wird, ist den Zuschauern ohnehin bekannt, es geht nicht um dramatische Spannung in unserem Sinne, es geht

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Paul Delnero um vollkommene Teilnahme (full immersion). Alle Leiden Hussains, die Qualen seines Durstes, da man ihm den Zugang zum Wasser abgeschnitten hat, und die Episoden während der Schlacht und seines Todes werden stark realistisch ausgemalt ... Dann brechen sie während ihrer bösen Worte selbst in Tränen aus. Es gibt keinen Applaus, man weint, stöhnt oder schlägt sich auf den Kopf. Die Aufregung der Zuschauer erreicht eine solche Höhe, dass sie nicht selten die schurkischen Figuren, die Mörder Hussains, zu lynchen versuchen.28

In this description of the dramatic, ritual reenactment of Husain’s death, it is not only the vivid and detailed representation of the death that releases and heightens the emotions of the participants in the ritual, but also the fully immersive emotional participation in the enactment itself that intensifies the affective valency of the participants, spreading the emotional contagion that transforms them into a “lamenting pack.” The lamenting induced by the vivid, emotionally evocative descriptions of the separation of Dumuzi from Inana, or Damu from his family, as those in the passages cited above, might have similarly affected the participants in the rituals in which the laments were performed. It is evident from Le Bon’s, Freud’s, Canetti’s, and many other treatments of mass psychology and emotional contagion that it is not possible to fully understand the content of Sumerian laments without also moving beyond the representational aspects of their content to determine what effect the laments might have had on the audiences participating in their performance, and how their content contributed to this effect. With the so-called “affective turn” in the humanities and the social sciences, increasing attention is being directed to the importance of emotion in human decision making and behavior, with a concomitant move away from identifying reason and logical causality as the sole determinant factors in explaining social, political, and cultural phenomena. While the observations on lamenting presented here are consistent with much of this work, there has also been a tendency in studies of affect to either ignore representation, or to conceptualize it as being antithetical to affect, and argue that it either needs to be eliminated from consideration entirely, or at least subordinated to affect, before we can begin to understand why people think, act, and behave the way they do. The shift from representation to affect is arguably already apparent in the work of the sociologist Gabriel Tarde, who was writing about crowd



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psychology around the same time as Le Bon. This is most notable in his book, L’opinion et la foule (1901), in which Tarde argued that it is not thoughts but sentiments that are experienced subconsciously, as if under hypnosis, to spread contagiously to cause crowds and publics to form. But the strongest case against the sufficiency of representation appears in the works of Gilles Deleuze and the many others whose theories on affect have been influenced by his work. Throughout his work, but particularly in Différence et Répétition (1968), Deleuze made a forceful case against what he identified as the representational bias running through much of Western philosophy. According to Deleuze, modes of inquiry which privilege representation are frequently predicated on the principle of identity, which subordinates Difference to a fundamental Sameness that is thought to ground all meaning and truth, and reduces differences (between phenomena, for example) to being merely that which is not similar, analogous, or in opposition to something else. These orientations fail to conceive Difference as a positive, intensive, and productive force of its own that forms the very ground from which experience, the phenomenal world, and representation emerge: Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse. Difference is not phenomenon but the noumenon closest to the phenomenon.…Every phenomenon refers to an inequality by which it is conditioned. Every diversity and every change refers to a difference which is its sufficient reason. Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of difference: differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity. (Deleuze 1994 [1968]: 222) In Deleuze’s view, in failing to recognize Difference as more fundamental than Sameness as the basis for representation, and instead conceiving difference to be a secondary and subordinate effect of the representational principles of similarity, analogy, and opposition, the critical function of difference as a vital and generative source of meaning—and the processes by which these meanings emerge—is overlooked. Deleuze’s critique of representation and his emphasis instead on the importance of affect and desire, unconstrained or contaminated by the representational principles that block or redirect their vital flow, has been

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adopted in nearly every development and application of affect theory since it has emerged as a dominant paradigm in the past two decades. Brian Massumi (2002), one of the most influential proponents of affect theory, makes a similar point about the significance of movements and flows of affect and sensation in stimulating action before meaning is constituted and perceived through principles of representation. More recently, Tony Sampson (2012) has applied affect theory to explain emotional contagion, combining Tarde’s and Deleuze’s non-representational theories of imitative rays (Tarde) and affect (Deleuze) to argue that emotional contagion operates in an inbetween, non-conscious state, similar to that of Tarde’s state of hypnosis or somnambulism, which is charged with affect and can be manipulated—by marketers and political leaders, in this case—to capture people’s attention, redirect it, and couple it with something else. As essential as it to recognize affect, and non-representational factors more generally, in the perception and the construction of meaning, is it also necessary to assume that affect and representation are in direct opposition to one another? Is there really a dichotomy between affect, on the one hand, and representation, on the other? Or is it not equally probable that affect and representation work together in certain situations, so that each feeds into and transfigures the other, in conjunction with a whole range of other factors, such as rhythm, sound, and repetition, which cannot be reduced to either affect or representation? With respect to mimetic representation, for example, the anthropologist Michael Taussig (1993) has argued convincingly that the power of a copy is derived not only from what is similar between the copy and the model, but also from what is notably different between the two. If this is the case, difference and the principles of representational identity are not mutually exclusive but inseparable, constitutive parts of the powerful and magical effects of mimesis. A similar argument could also be made for the relationship between representation and affect in Sumerian laments, which utilize mimetic principles of representation to generate and heighten the emotional response that emerges from participating in the ritual in which these compositions were recited and performed, but whose overall effect cannot be reduced to, or entirely explained by, the representational aspects of the laments themselves. We return, then, to the question of the relationship between text and image posed at the beginning of the article: is there necessarily a strict dichotomy between text and image, and is it really necessary to assume that



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texts are entirely representational, in contrast to images that are primarily, if not exclusively, non-representational? The analysis I present here of the significant roles of affect and representation in the Sumerian ritual laments suggests a great deal is lost by assuming that text and image perform mutually exclusive functions. To purge all that is non-representational from the study of texts and all that is representational from the study of images obscures or even effaces not only the interplay between the two, but also all of the other factors that contribute to their combined and distinctive effects. Mesopotamian history and its material and textual culture cannot be properly understood without considering the vital and crucial roles of visual imagery and iconography, taken on their own terms and not simply as sources of evidence for illustrating the content of texts. In the spirit of Holly Pittman’s work, then, which has constantly pushed us to extend our limits, a question for the future might be: having moved beyond representation, where do we go from here, and what do we still need to learn to get there? NOTES:

2.1 As a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, I had the great privilege of taking courses with Holly Pittman, who is, in every respect, one of the university’s true treasures for the study of the ancient world. In Holly’s graduate survey course on Ancient Mesopotamian Art, and again in a seminar on Neo-Assyrian Palace Reliefs, I acquired a wealth of knowledge about Mesopotamian material culture, iconography, architecture, royal ideology, political history, and countless other subjects that I continue to draw from in all of my work. Of equal importance to me, however, is what I learned from her about teaching. In addition to offering two of the most intellectually rewarding courses I have ever taken, Holly motivated all of her students to work harder than we thought possible to meet her high expectations, preparing us, in the process, to elevate our own standards to the even higher level required to begin to make meaningful contributions to our fields. Even more importantly, she taught us that it is never sufficient to assume that students (however intelligent and talented) will learn what they need to learn on their own without first being given the fundamental knowledge necessary to move forward, or to expect that they will work as hard as required to acquire such knowledge without also providing them with the incentive needed to do so. In the spirit, then, of the fear of disappointing the honoree with my work, it is my pleasure to dedicate this article to one of the many topics to which Holly has contributed so much throughout her career: the relationship between text and image in ancient Mesopotamia. While the emphasis here is on cognitive, mental imagery, and not the physical, more concretely visual images that have been the subject of much of Holly’s pathbreaking work, it is hoped that these remarks on the role of representation in text and image, and the necessity of moving beyond representation to understand the many ways in which text and image work together, will be of interest to the honoree, and perhaps convince her, at long last, that all of her efforts in opening up the world of Mesopotamian visual culture to me, and to the other “text people” who had the good fortune of taking her courses, were not in vain.

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2.2 Many people have read sections of this paper at different stages of its preparation, and thanks are due to all of them, but I would especially like to thank Marian Feldman and William Connolly for reading the entire paper once it was finished, and making numerous immensely valuable suggestions for improving it. 2.3 In some cultures, mourning is essentially a private response to the loss of somebody close, and lamenting is only performed collectively and publicly when there has been a substantial local, national, or international tragedy that is perceived to have a devastating impact on the community. Lamenting in Mesopotamia was not limited to grieving private or collective loss, but also had a proactive function, and was frequently performed to prevent foreseeable catastrophes. Furthermore, situations that were considered to be potentially catastrophic included not only “real” dangers and threats, such as spreading epidemics, invading armies, and immanent social upheaval, but also cosmological catastrophes, including actions that could arouse the anger of the gods, such as failing to perform offering at the proper time or in the proper manner, removing statues of deities (which were considered to be endowed with the presence of the divinity they “represent”) from their shrines during processions or temple renovations, the installation of a new ruler or cultic official who might not find the favor of the gods, and a dizzying number of other ritually prescribed occasions in the cultic calendar when the cosmic world order was thought to be threatened and needed to be rectified and restored. In all of the situations in which lamenting was ritually performed to prevent a catastrophe, its intended function was to appease the hearts of deities who were, or could easily become, angry so that they would become (or stay) calm, and spare the people from any catastrophe that their anger might provoke them to cause. More fundamentally, a strong case could be made that lamenting was considered to be one of the most essential cultic activities throughout much of Mesopotamian history, and was at the core of the way in which the relationship between the gods and humanity was configured: as servants who were completely dependent on the good will of capricious deities who could at any time turn against the people, actions like lamenting that were thought to prevent the gods from becoming angry were performed persistently and regularly. While the occurrence of private lamenting is not well documented in the surviving written sources, it is certain that, by the first millennium BCE at the latest, state-sponsored ritual lamenting was being performed constantly on a daily, if not hourly, basis to support and maintain the official (state-sanctioned) cult. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to treat this essential function of Mesopotamian lamenting in more detail, the topic has been discussed extensively by others, including, most recently, by Uri Gabbay in his book Pacifying the Hearts of the Gods: Sumerian Emesal Prayers of the First Millennium BC (2014), to which the reader is referred. 2.4 Unless otherwise indicated, all references to dates and periods in this article are to BCE. 2.5 For the full text of this colophon, known as “Ashurbanipal Colophon Type o” (following Hunger 1968: 102), see Gabbay (2014: 276–79). 2.6 For examples of some of the many rituals in which laments were performed, see in particular the list of “ritual attestations” compiled for each of the individual Ershemma-laments edited in Gabbay (2015), as well as the reference to the performance of laments in connection with many of the calendrical rituals discussed in Cohen (2015). 2.7 Special thanks are owed to Nidesh Lawtoo, who suggested I consider the passages from Plato’s The Republic that form the basis for this section. His own work and thoughts on mimesis, and the inspiring conversations we have had on the subject



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(and countless other topics) during his time as a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins, have been essential to developing the theoretical framework presented in this article, as well as a true source of intellectual stimulation and pleasure for me over the past few years. 2.8 Plato’s theory and critique of mimesis, which runs throughout Books 3 and 10 of The Republic and through some of his other works, is also immensely complex, and is by no means limited to representation alone. Representation is one of the words that is often used to translate the term in some but not all of the contexts in which it occurs, and can also mean “to imitate” or to act in such a way that inspires, or is inspired by identification with the source of imitation. Moreover, Plato’s critique of mimesis has a strong ontological component, and is very directly implicated in his theory of the Forms, and the essential role they play in shaping everything from perception to the very essence of the cosmos (in the cosomology he presents in the Timaeus, for example). At the heart of Plato’s conception of mimesis and mimetic representation is the generation and sharing of an affect, which spreads from the source of imitation to the people enacting and/or witnessing it. For the purposes of this paper, it is this specific aspect of mimesis that is pertinent to the framework for conceptualizing lamenting being developed here. For a more detailed discussion of this and other aspects of mimesis in Plato, and the vast body of literature it has generated, see, in particular, the valuable treatment of the topic by Lawtoo (2013). 2.9 Unless otherwise indicated, the translations from The Republic are those of Reeve 2004. In instances in which the translation is more forceful, but essentially the same in meaning, the translation of Lee (1987) is adopted. For this passage, for example, Lee translates: “So representative art is an inferior child born of inferior parents.” 2.10 Translation follows Lee (1987); Reeve translates the critical lines at the end of the passage: “You see, I think only a few people are able to calculate that the enjoyment of other people’s sufferings is inevitably transferred to one’s own, since, when pity is nourished or strengthened by the former, it is not easily suppressed in the case of one’s own sufferings.” 2.11 For a discussion of the role of gala-officials in the performance of Sumerian laments, with references to previous literature, see Gabbay (2014: 63–79). 2.12 For a detailed discussion of the Balag-instrument, see Gabbay (2014: 92–114), with previous literature. 2.13 Gudea Cylinder B col. x l.16: ša3 hun-ĝa2-da bar hun-ĝa2-da // 17: igi er2 pad3-da er2 šex(SIG)-da //18: ša3 a-nir-ta a-nir be4(BA)-da // ... col. xi. l.1: balaĝ-ĝa2-ni lugal-igi-huš-am3 // 2: en dnin-gir2-su-ra me-ni-da mu-na-da-dib-e 2.14 “A Man and His God” (Sources: N1 = UM 29-16-726; N2 = CBS 15205 + Ni 4587 (ISET II, pl.90); N3 = CBS 8321 (STVC 2) + Ni 4137 (ISET II, pl.90) + fragments joined by J. Peterson; N4 = UM 29-15-643: l.120: lu2-ulu3 er2 gig-ga šeš2-a-ni dingir-ra-ni ĝiš ba-an-tuku-am3 // 121: -ra a-nir ĝal2 i-si-iš la2-la2-a-ni / ša3 dingir-ra-na u3-mu-un-na-hun (source N1 - sources N2, N3, and N4 have muun-ši-hun) // 122: inim zi inim ku3-ga du11-ga-ni dingir-ra-ni šu ba-an-ši-in-ti // 123: ?-e inim a-ra-zu-a mi-ni-in-zu-a-ni (N1 and N3; N2 = mi-ni-in-zu; N4 = mi-ni-ib-? […]) // 124: šud3 ku3-ug su dingir-ra-na-ka (N2 and N3; N4 = [dingir]--e-ne-še3) i3 LI-eš-e ši-im- (N3; N2 = i3 LI-eš2 […]; N4 = i3 LI i3-AK) // 125: dingir-ra-ni inim hul-ĝal2-ta šu-ni ba-ra-an-gid2 (N2 and N3; N4 = ba-da-gid2 […]) // 126: ša3 sig3-ge dam-bi nu-me-en-na! gu2 in-dala2-a (N4; N2 = -e) IM A im-ma-ab […] (N4 only) // 127: zarah(SAG.PA.LAGAB)-e a2 mu-ni-tal2-tal-la lil2-še3 im-mi-in-sig3 // 128: a-nir ulu3? AK-gin7 (N2 only)

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mu-un-si3-ga sug-ge4 im-mi-in-ku2 // 129: [nam]-tar-ra su-a-na mu-un-ĝal2-la bu3(KAxŠU) mu-na-an-AK. For a discussion of the content and structure of this composition, with references to previous editions and treatments of the text, see Klein (2006). 2.15 “The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer” (Tablet II) l.108: SA.GIGki-ya iš-hu-ṭu lu2 MAŠ.MAŠ // 109: u3 te-er-ti-ya lu2HAL u2-teš-ši // 110: ul u2-še-pi a-ši-pu ši-kin mur-ṣi-ya (var. GIG-ya) // 111: u3 a-dan-na (var. -nu and -ni) si-li-’-ti-ya lu2HAL ul id-din // 112: ul i-ru-ṣa DINGIR qa-ti ul iṣ-bat // 113: ul i-re-man-ni diš-tar-ri i-daa-a ul il-lik // 114: pi-ti KI.MAHhu er-šu(var. -su)-u2 šu-ka-nu-u-a // 115: a-di la mitu-ti-i-ma bi-qi2-tu4(var. -ti) gam-rat. For an edition and translation of the entire composition see Lambert (1960: 21–62). A composite transliteration and cuneiform copy of the text, with an updated list of sources for the composition, have been published in Annus and Lenzi (2010). 2.16 Although the focus of much of speech-act theory, particularly as formulated by Austin and Searle, is on the representational aspects of language—and specifically the distinction between the semantic content of a linguistic utterance—and the pragmatic effects of such utterances when they are used representationally, one of the primary shortcomings of this approach is that it neglects to take into account the other performative aspects of speech-acts, and in particular, their affective, non-representational dimension. As argued by Jane Bennett and William Connolly, “language is not only a matter of significations and failures of signification. It is also about sound, noise, and differential intensities or affects. Is there not, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari suggested, a ‘sonority’ to language that cannot be ignored as long as humans are animals? Sonority: the aural effectivity that living, moving, snorting, weeping, laughing bodies possess. Sonority does not represent, for it does not operate via images or in the visual mode; it is rather, a ‘block that opposes the visual memory’” (Bennett and Connolly 2002: 252). The sonorous aspects of Mesopotamian laments are briefly considered in the next section; a fuller exposition of the interplay of the pragmatic function of the representational with the non-representational aspects of linguistic utterances like sonority in generating specific performative effects would require another study. 2.17 For a detailed discussion of the use and identification of the Balag-instrument, and the other instruments that were played in conjunction with the performance of laments see Gabbay (2014: 84–154). 2.18 A complete edition of the Old Babylonian and first millennium versions of Uruamairabi based on a preliminary list of sources was published by Cohen (1988: 536– 603), with important corrections and additions by Cavigneaux (1993: 254–57). A revised list of sources for both versions of the text was published by Volk (1989: 5–8), together with a new edition of tablets 18–21 of the first millennium version of the composition, and the sections of the Old Babylonian source H2, which correspond to these tablets. A new edition of the first five Kirugus of Uruamairabi has been published by the author (Delnero 2020: 307–77). For the Ishtar ritual at Mari see Durand and Guichard (1997: 19–78) and Ziegler (2007: 55–64) for a more recent interpretation. The use of Uruamairabi in the Mari Ishtar ritual is also discussed by Löhnert (2009: 63–67). 2.19 Emesal is a register of the Sumerian language used in some Sumerian literary compositions (such as “Inana’s Descent to the Netherworld”) to record the speech of female deities such as Inana. It is most commonly attested in laments, presumably because this was the register of language in which the gala-officials, who performed laments, sang the texts. Emesal is both orthographically and phonologically distinct from the normal dialect of Sumerian, and is characterized by shifts



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such as the pronunciation of /ĝ/ as /m/ and /g/ as /b/. For a detailed discussion of the nature of Emesal and the phonetic and orthographic shifts that it involves, see Schretter (1990). 2.20 The figures cited here are drawn from a catalogue of all the published and unpublished Old Babylonian Period sources containing Sumerian laments that are known to and compiled by the author. This catalogue is published in Delnero (2020: 379–50) . 2.21 For a complete list of all of the sources cited in this section, and where they have been published in copy, see Delnero (2015: 110–11). 2.22 “Dumuzi’s Mother’s Lament” (CBS 11393 + CBS 11389 col. ii 3’-19’; duplicated in source B = NBC 1313 obv. 1–11): l.3’: gi er2-ra ša3-ĝu10 gi er2-ra / edin-na na-muun-ma-al // 4’: kur -gul ga-ša-an e2-an-na men3 // 5’: u3-mu-un-na ga-ša-an-sun2-na men3 // 6’: ĝuruš an-na mu-tin-an-na men3 // 7’: ša3-ĝu10 gi er2-ra edin-na na-mu-ma-al // 8’: a-ka -mu-ma-al […] / [x] ---ka na-mu-ma- [B (obv. 4): ki ĝuruš-a-ka na-mu-ma-al ki d dumu-zi--ka] // 10’ (9’): -ra-li du6! su8-ba-še! // 11’: ša3-ĝu10 gi er2-ra edin-na na-mu-ma- [B (5): a-ra-li du6 ZA.MUŠ3-ka ša3-ĝu10 er2- […]] //12’: ki ĝuruš-a ’’ šu du3-a-še3 // 13’: ki a2 la2-a ddumu-zi-da- // 14’: ki u8-e sila4 ma-an-ze2-eĝ3-ĝa2- // 15’: ša3-ĝu10 gi er2-ra edin-na // 16’: ki ud5-de3 maš2 ba-an-ze2-eĝ3-ĝa2-še3? // 17’: ki-ba dim3-me-er-bi mu-lu bad-ra2- // 18’: -e ama-ĝu10 sa2 hu-mu-e ba-ni-in-du11-ga-še3 // 19’: ša3-ĝu10 gi er2-ra edin-na na-mu [B (11b): ša3-ĝu10 er2-ra edin-na na-mu-ma-al]. For a brief synopsis of this composition, with references to previous literature, including where the text has been published, see Fritz (2003: 117–18). 2.23 A Lament for Damu (AO 5374 [TCL 15, 8], col. ii 20–31; duplicated in Source A = BM 23658 [CT 15, pl. 26–27], obv. 1–13): l.20: ki-bi-da-ke4 i-lu nam-mir-ra [A obv. 1: ki bad-ra2-ke4 i-lu na-aĝ2-ir-ra] // 21: du3-su3-su3 ki-bi-da-ke4 i-lu nammir-ra // 22: du3-mu-un-mu-zi-da!(KALAM) ki-bi-da-ke4 i-lu nam-mir-ra // 23: d da-mu-ĝu10 ki-bi-da-ke4 i-lu nam-mir-ra [A obv. 3: dda-mu-ĝu10 ki BAD-ra2ke4] // 24: dištaran-na ki-bi-da-ke4 i-lu nam-mir-ra // 25: digi-ZA.MUŠ2 ki-bida-ke4 i-lu nam-mir-ra [A obv. 4: gudu4-ĝu10 ki BAD-ra2-ke4] // 26: eri(-)ku3 ki -ma -u4-da-ra i-lu nam-mir-ra [A obv. 5: ĝišeren ku3 ki ama-ni-tuda-ta] // 27: a-a-an!-na an-na-ŠI-ki-eš2-ta i-lu nam-mir-ra [A obv. 6: e2-an-na an-? ki-še3? ta i-lu na-aĝ2-ir-ra] // 28: i-lu-bi i-lu-gu2 na-nam ab2-zi-ni nau3-tu [A obv. 10: i-lu-bi i-lu gu na-nam ab-sin2 na-u3-tu] // 29: i-lu-bi i-lu na-nam šar2-šar2-re na-u3-tu // 30: i-lu-bi a-eštubku6 na-nam kar-ze2-be5(KU) ni2 im-ĝal2 [A obv. 13: i-lu-bi i7 mah-e na-nam a-eštub na-u3-tu] // 31: dam til3-la ti na-nam niĝ-saĝ-e na-u3-tu [A obv. 12: dam til-la dumu til-la na-nam me saĝ-e na-u3-tu]. For a brief synopsis of this composition, with references to previous literature (including where the text has been published), see Fritz (2003: 183–86). 2.24 Ershemma to Dumuzi and Inana (Cohen 1981, Ershemma No. 88) = BM 15795 (CT 15, pl. 20–21) l. 20–29: l.20: nin9-a-ni amaš-ta e3-da-ni // 21: dmu-tin-an-na nin9 u3-mu-un-na-ke4 amaš-ta e3-da-ni // 22: igi-du8 lu2 gal5-la2 gaba-ri gid2-da // 23: ama dmu-tin-ra gu3 mu-un-na-de2-e // 24: ne-še3 šeš-zu lu2 er2-re baan-ku4-ku4 // 25: ne-še3 ddumu-zi lu2 a-nir ba-an-ku4-ku4 // 26: gal5-la2-da kaskal im-ši-DU // 27: ka-ab-gaz-e har-ra-an-na im-da-an-zu!(BA) // 28: lu2 šu-da-a e-ne-ra mu-un-da-ul4-e // 29: lu2 a2-la2-a e-ne-ra mu-un-da-ul4-e. 2.25 The Death of Dumuzi (Kramer 1980) = BM 100046 (CT 58, 42) rev. 31–42 = l.75– 86: rev. 31 (l.75): eden-na dug mu-tin-na ba-e-gaz eden ga- -HUR // 32 (76): buru5mušen-buru5mušen- eden-na mu-un-HUR eden ga- i3-HUR // 33 (77): u3 buru5mušen ĝišhašur nu-me-a eden-na mu-un-HUR eden ga-gin7

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i3-HUR // 34 (78): u3 ki-sikil tur-re su-kuMUŠ2-keš2 ba-ni-in-AKna // 35 (79): ? e2-gi4-a - esir2(LAGABxMU) ba-ni-ib-ku4-ku4 // 36 (80): ĝišmes gu2 ĝišgu […] ba-ni-ib-ku4-ku4 // 37 (81): ĝišasar2 il-lu-ur-bi ba-ab-gul-la ĝissu-bi ba-ni-ib-? […] // 38 (82): mu---gin7 su11-lum dilmunki-gin7 tug2-gin7 ba-e-dul // 39 (83): -da-ni-a ur ba--nu2 // 40 (84): rig7--na uga3(U2.NAGA.GA) ?-[e-tuš] // 41 (85): ur mu-un-da-ab-ku2 me-rini-še3 ba […] // 42 (86): ugamušen mu-un-da-ab-ku2 an-na ba-e-e11?e […] 2.26 For a more detailed argument for the written copies of Sumerian laments being used primarily, if not exclusively, as aids to the oral performance of these compositions, see Delnero (2015). 2.27 Unless otherwise indicated, English translations of Canetti’s terms and concepts are adapted from Carol Stewart’s 1984 translation of Masse und Macht, Crowds and Power (Canetti 1960). 2.28 “In any case, everything that is going to happen is known to the spectators. There is no question of dramatic tension in our sense of the word; what matters is complete participation. The sufferings of Husain, the torments of his thirst when he was cut off from water, and all the episodes of the battle and his death are presented in a strongly realistic manner.…Then they burst into tears during their wicked speeches. There is no applause. The spectators weep, groan and beat themselves on the head. Their excitement reaches such a pitch that often they try to lynch the villains of the piece, the murderers of Husain.” (Canetti 1984: 152).

REFERENCES Annus, Amar and Alan Lenzi. 2010. Ludlul bēl nēmeqi: The Standard Babylonian Poem of the Righteous Sufferer. State Archives of Assyria Cuneiform Texts 7. Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project. Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Austin, John L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words, second edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bennett, Jane and William Connolly. 2002. Mouths, Bodies, and the State. In Skepticism, Individuality, and Freedom: The Reluctant Liberalism of Richard Flathman, ed. Bonnie Honig and David R. Mapel, 244–264. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bottéro, Jean. 1991. The Problem of Evil in Mesopotamian Mythology and Theology. In Mythologies: A Restructured Translation of Dictionnaire des mythologies et des religions des sociétés traditionnelles et du monde antique (1981), ed. Yves Bonnefoy and Wendy Doniger, 162–171. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cassetti, Elias. 1984 (1960). Masse und Macht. Trans. Carol Stewart. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Canetti, Elias. 1960. Masse und Macht, 32nd edition (2011). Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag.



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Cavigneaux, Antoine. 1993. Review of Cohen 1988. Journal of the American Oriental Society 113: 254–257. Cohen, Mark E. 1981. Sumerian Hymnology: The Eršemma. Hebrew Union College Annual Supplements 2. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College. Cohen, Mark E. 1988. The Canonical Lamentations of Ancient Mesopotamia. Potomac: Capital Decisions Limited. Cohen, Mark E. 2015. Festivals and Calendars of the Ancient Near East. Bethesda: CDL Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994 (1968). Difference and Repetition. Translated by P. Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. Delnero, Paul. 2015. Texts and Performance: The Materiality and Function of the Sumerian Liturgical Corpus. In Texts and Contexts: The Circulation and Transmission of Cuneiform Texts in Social Space, ed. Paul Delnero and Jacob Lauinger, 87–118. Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records 9. Berlin: de Gruyter. Delnero, Paul. 2020. How To Do Things With Tears: Ritual Lamenting in Ancient Mesopotamia. Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records 26. Berlin: de Gruyter. Dobbs-Allsopp, F.W. “Chip.” 1993. Weep, O Daughter of Zion: A Study of the City-Lament Genre in the Hebrew Bible. Biblica et Orientalia 44. Rome: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum. Durand, Jean-Marie and Michel Guichard. 1997. Les rituals de Mari. In Recueil d’études à la mémoire de Marie-Thérèse Barrelet, ed. Dominique Charpin and Jean-Marie Durand, 19–78. Florilegium Marianum 3 and Mémoires de N.A.B.U. 4. Paris: SÉPOA. Freud, Sigmund. 1923. Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse. Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. Fritz, Michael M. 2003. ‘...und weinten um Tammuz’: Die Götter Dumuzi-Ama‘ušumgal‘anna und Damu. Alter Orient und Altes Testament 307. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag. Gabbay, Uri. 2014. Pacifying the Hearts of the Gods: Sumerian Emesal Prayers of the First Millennium BC. Heidelberger Emesal-Studien 1. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Gabbay, Uri. 2015. The Eršema Prayers of the First Millennium BC. Heidelberger Emesal-Studien 2. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Hunger, Hermann. 1968. Babylonische und assyrische Kolophone. Alter Orient und Altes Testament (AOAT) 2. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag des Erziehungsvereins. Klein, Jacob. 2006. Man and His God: A Wisdom Poem or a Cultic Lament?. In Approaches to Sumerian Literature: Studies in Honor of Stip (H.L.J. Vanstiphout), ed. Piotr Michalowski and Niek Veldhuis, 123–143. Cuneiform Monographs 35. Leiden: Brill.

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Lambert, Wilfred G. 1960. Babylonian Wisdom Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kramer, Samuel Noah. 1980. The Death of Dumuzi: A New Sumerian Version. Anatolian Studies 30: 5–13. Lawtoo, Nidesh. 2013. The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Le Bon, Gustave. 1968. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Dunwoody, Georgia: Norman S. Berg, Publisher ‘Sellanraa’ - Translation of La Psychologie des Foules (1895). Lee, Desmond. 1987. Plato: The Republic, 2nd edition (revised). Translation. London: Penguin Books. Löhnert, Anne. 2009. ‘Wie die Sonne tritt heraus!’: Eine Klage zum Auszug Enlils mit einer Untersuchung zu Komposition und Tradition sumerischer Klagelieder in altbabylonischer Zeit. Alter Orient und Altes Testament 365. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Reeve, C.D.C. 2004. Plato: The Republic. Translation. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Sallaberger, Walther. 1993. Der kultische Kalender der Ur III-Zeit. Untersuchungen zur Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie (UAVA) 7/1. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Sampson, Tony. 2012. Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schretter, Manfred. 1990. Emesal-Studien. Sprach- und literaturgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur sogennanten Frauensprache des Sumerischen. Innsbruck: Verlag des Instituts für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck. Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tambiah, Stanley J. 1968. The Magical Power of Words. Man 3: 175–208. Tarde, Gabriel. 1901. L’opinion et la foule. Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. Volk, Konrad. 1989. Die Balaĝ-Komposition Uru2 am3-ma-ir-ra-bi: Rekonstruktion und Bearbeitungder Tafeln 18 (19’ff.), 19, 20 und 21 der späten, kanonischen Version. Freiburger Altorientalische Studien 18. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Ziegler, Nele. 2007. Les Musiciens et la musique d’après les archives de Mari. Florilegium Marianum 9 and Mémoires de N.A.B.U. 10. Paris: SÉPOA.

3 Seeing and Knowing: Cultural Concepts and the Deictic Power of the Image in Mesopotamia 1

Beate Pongratz-Leisten Keywords: Bildakt; conceptual metaphor; deixis; Denkform; gesturality; mental image

INTRODUCTION

W

hen King Ludwig I of Bavaria founded the New Pinakothek in Munich in 1853, in order to provide a home for art collections of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he commissioned the young artist Wilhelm von Kaulbach to create several murals and paintings that showcased his role as patron of the arts. The contexts with which he desired to be associated did not much differ from those chosen for the public image of the Neo-Assyrian kings: he had depicted, in addition to landscape- and genrepainting, important historical events and battle scenes; his royal image was presented in public statuary (Fig. 3.1); and he was associated with monumental buildings. And, just as King Ludwig I was in constant communication with his various artists, so, too, was the Neo-Assyrian king. The intimate and detailed nature of such communication in the NeoAssyrian Period (911–612 BCE) is rendered especially evident in a letter from a certain Nabu-ashared to King Sargon II (722–705 BCE). Nabu-ashared reports that he has drawn an image of the king and that others have fashioned an alternative image in the round (Winter 1997). The king is asked to make his choice and to pay particular attention to the hands, the chin, and the hair. Moreover, the artist expresses his discontent with the choice of pose in which the king is represented:

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3.1 Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1805–1874), Die von König Ludwig I in Tätigkeit gesetzten Bildhauer (1850). Courtesy Neue Pinakothek, Munich (CC BY-SA 4.0) (see also color insert)

SAA 13 34 11–rev. 11 (Cole and Machinist 1998: 36f.) We have now sent two ro[yal im]ages to the king. I myself sketched the royal image which is an outline. They fashioned the royal image which is in the round. The king should examine them, and whichever the king finds acceptable we will execute accordingly. Let the king pay attention to the hands, the chin, and the hair. As for the royal image which they are making, the scepter is lying across his arm and his arm is resting on his thighs. I myself do not agree with this and I will not fashion (it so). I could speak with them about features—about anything whatever—but they would not listen to me. A similar letter was written by a priest from Babylon to the Neo-Assyrian king Esarhaddon (680–669 BCE): SAA 13 178 10–25 (Cole and Machinist 1998: 147ff.) The statues of the king which Mar-Issar brought here, saying: “Inspect (them), and let the one which is perfect stand”—when the scholars and I, (all) servants of the king, inspected (them) together, the very statue which I sent to the king, my lord, was perfect in that the king, my lord, is girding himself, and you(!) are entering before Marduk, your god; (this) is the very statue which I sent to the king my lord. The arrangement of the clothing of the king, my lord, is just like that (of the statues) which they are setting up in Assur upon the dais of Bel (and) I have set



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up in Esaggil and the temples of Babylon. Let the king have a look; and if it pleases the king, my lord, let one exactly like this stand, or if it does not please the king, my lord, let the very statue of the king, my lord, which I sent, stand. Both letters ask the king to review the options available for the rendering of the royal image and to indicate his approval, demonstrating the king’s direct involvement in and exercise of significant control over the visual display of his image. Royal artwork in Mesopotamia was exclusive and, in most cases, intended for an audience comprising the gods, contemporary elites, and future kings (Jeffers, this volume). Only in the case of the outer walls of the palaces and the stelae were programmatic visual statements accessible to the larger public, designed either to arrest the public gaze in awe and admiration (ana tabrâti) or to deter the enemy in horror. Artworks made in the service of the king were highly conceptual and intended as expression and representation of specific cultural and ideological agendas (e.g., Winter 1981, 1985, 1997). Consequently, it is our task as cultural historians to explicitly elucidate their particular significations. This process, in my view, must acknowledge that, in the ancient Near East, many cultural concepts and ideas found their expression across a broad spectrum of media: textual records including myth and historiography, visual and material culture including monumental architecture, and ritual performance. As each individual medium follows its own inner logic, it does not necessarily precisely match or overlap any other; rather, the various expressions of concepts across different media informed and complemented each other. Their interface or complementarity functioned to intensify the experience of any particular signifier or carrier of meaning, ensuring the success of its reception.2

THE MENTAL IMAGE AND CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR If, in the following discussion, my investigation is concerned with the pictorial repertoire, that does not mean that primacy is given to the image. Rather, in the vein of the cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980), primacy is given to the conceptual metaphor or mental image, which is materially realized in either pictorial or monumental construction, the textual record, or (ritual) performance. The conceptual is not to

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be equated with text or narrative. In using Johnson’s and Lakoff’s notion of the conceptual metaphor or mental image, I do not mean to reduce the image to some external pre-text modeled after a linguistic syntax. But how does the pictorial relate to the conceptual? With the iconic or pictorial turn there has been intense discussion and investigation of visual culture, visual literacy, image science, and iconology, as well as the relationship between text and image. Philosophical theories of depiction moved from the concept of mimesis to emphasizing what Gombrich (1982: 145) called “the beholder’s share,” which is generated by the art producer’s competence and ability to captivate the interest and stimulate the imagination of the beholder’s interior visualization of certain concepts and ideas acquired through cultural learning and experience (Gombrich 1960: 293). Similarly, Michael Baxandall (1972: 40), elucidating his conceptualization of the Period Eye, asserted that “the public’s visual capacity is the medium of the art producer.” In other words, “the stress was shifted from the objects depicted to human activities” such as “‘experiencing resemblance,’ ‘symbolic interpretation,’ or the perceptual capacity to ‘recognize’” (Krois 2011: 3 with reference to Kulvicki 2003; Lopez 1996; Peacocke 1987; Schier 1986; and Goodman 1976). In recent decades, the semiotic approach represented by Gombrich, Baxandall, and others has been subordinated to new anthropologically influenced analyses of the materiality and agency of objects as artworks. Such approaches entered the art historical discourse of the ancient Near East primarily through the works of Irene Winter, who has played a significant role in the development of the field of the anthropology of art overall (Morphy 2009: 5, 14). Recent studies have continued to pursue these issues and approaches with respect to Near Eastern art. Crawford (2014: 259), in an analysis of the co-presence of image and text in the Idrimi statue, emphasizes the material and ontological dimensions of the artwork, exploring the manner in which the statue’s imagetext instantiated, constituted, and embodied its authority, presence, and history. Emphasis is placed on the materiality, presence, and agency of the artwork rather than on semiotic and logocentric approaches that attempt to decode a particular message communicated and broadcasted in the visual medium. Sonik (2014: 265), taking up the issue of the “striking mismatch between text and image” in mythological representation in Mesopotamia, explores the iconic forms of the images that do appear in pictorial myth.



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As has been argued by Gottfried Boehm and W.J.T. Mitchell (2009: 105), the iconic turn cannot be seen in fundamental opposition to the linguistic turn because “the turn towards the image is a consequence of the turn towards language.” Media, moreover, “are always mixtures of sensory and semiotic elements, and all the so-called visual media are mixed or hybrid formations, combining sound and sight, text and image” (Mitchell 2008: 15, also 1994). Understanding the image as a meaning-generating process and as a nonverbal iconic logos does not imply a “withdrawal from language, but…rather a difference vis à vis language” (Boehm and Mitchell 2009: 107) in its realization of the conceptual. While what Boehm (2015) called “pictorial logic” and Elkins (2008) coined as “visual literacy” might not be explicable on the model of textuality (Mitchell 1994: 18), and while text and image might exist as parallel to each other and the “totality of images” in a monument might create its own narrative space (Winter 1981: 1), the notion of a concept that is linguistically articulated remains. Whether looking at artworks commissioned by the Neo-Assyrian king and intended to convey his image as warrior, shepherd of his people, and patron of the cult; whether we deal with Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin attempting to capture the experience of horror and despair in his axis towards the dead end, the Holocaust Tower (Figs. 3.2a–c); or whether we encounter Andy Warhol’s ironic take on Pollock’s totality of pathos in his Camouflage (1986) and Oxidation Paintings (1977–1978), it is the conceptual that guides the creative process. Winter’s (2007: 61–62) axiom, consequently, that it is necessary “to see art both as a system of meaning encoding propositions about the world and as a system of action intended to change the world,” requires not only that we ask how text and image relate to each other but also that we identify the conceptual ideas to which they relate,3 and the strategies and logic deployed in the various media of image, text, and (ritual) performance. Even if we do not reduce a picture to an external pre-text as extant in word, writing, and signs, we have to ask, with Boehm and Mitchell, how do pictures function? How do they differ in their function from the linguistic and the ritual, and how do pictures relate to a conceptual idea? When and why do we need a picture and what can it do that language cannot do? Pictures possess a logic that is exclusively their own; this logic is not formed after the model of a sentence. It is not spoken; its realization is instead anchored in perception (Boehm 2015: 34).

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3.2 a) Aerial View of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. The Axis of the Holocaust, evoking horror and despair, leads to the Dead End of the Holocaust Tower; (Architecture New Building); Guenter Schneider (photography), 2008; courtesy Studio Daniel Libeskind; b) Exterior View of Holocaust Tower; courtesy Wikimedia Commons; c) Interior View of Holocaust Tower; courtesy Studio Daniel Libeskind, 1999



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BILDWISSENSCHAFT, DEIXIS, AND PICTURE ART As reflected in the title of the 1998 edited volume Picturing Science, Producing Art of Caroline Jones and Peter Galison, Bildwissenschaft (image or visual studies), which investigates the role of the image and of perception, has promoted the cooperation between the natural sciences—cognitive studies, neurology, and psychology, in particular—and the humanities. Recent art theory has focused on distinguishing pictures from texts and understanding both “how pictures are able to enactively produce their affective content” (Krois 2011: 9) and “the extent to which they embody meanings in themselves” (Krois 2011: 16). Recourse has been made to image-schemas, i.e., graphic forms such as inclusion, exclusion, opposition, and directionality that characterize “the dynamic, situated organization of embodied, enactive intelligence” (Krois 2011: 19). Moreover, Boehm (2015: 28–29, 39) has emphasized the capacity of the image to show simultaneous realities and to point to something that is absent, thus adding the phenomenon of deixis, the fact that pictures show something that might otherwise not be visible at all. He thus ascribes agency to the picture that might lead to a variety of effects, cognitive, practical, or affective. This shifts the focus from what people do with pictures to what pictures do. In the process, this shift has engendered what the German art historian Horst Bredekamp (2010) identified as the Picture Act: “Such picture-centered conceptions differ from the tendency among semioticians to compare pictures with conventional signs such as language that depend upon the knowledge of cultural codes” (Krois 2011: 4).

Cosmic Order: A Sumero-Babylonian Cultural Metaphor In order to illustrate such cognitive schematic and conceptual operations I will focus on the Sumero-Babylonian cultural concept of the cosmic order. This cultural metaphor, elaborated in such compositions as the Sumerian myth Enki and the World Order, implied that everything and everyone had its/his/her divinely assigned place in the cosmos and functioned to maintain the whole. The king played a central role in the maintenance and re-establishment of social order through ensuring the proper functioning of the cult. The office of kingship, as recounted in the Akkadian Etana Myth, was established by the gods—following the initial emergence of Heaven and Earth, the creation of the gods, and the founding of the cities—to control the

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teeming masses of humans and to productively direct their labor to build and care for the cultic centers of the gods. The emphasis on the persistent maintenance and re-establishment of cosmic order is one that responded to contemporary urban conditions in Mesopotamia: cities and city life were constantly threatened by migrating and invading people from the mountains and by wild animals from the steppe. The conceptual metaphor or Denkform (Blumenberg 1985; Pongratz-Leisten 2015) of the cosmic order linked with the notion of social order consequently assumed a prominent place in royal discourse. Deployed across a variety of themes or allegories mediated in the pictorial, textual, and ritual repertoires, it included the representation of king as victorious warrior, as hunter, and as temple builder and caretaker of the cult (see Pongratz-Leisten 2018). In the pictorial repertoire, the iconic image of the king as hunter first emerges in the fourth millennium BCE, appearing on a ca. 3800 BCE stamp seal (Fig. 3.3) from Tell Majnuna in Northern Syria (McMahon 2009) and subsequently on the ca. 3200 BCE Lion Hunt Stele (Fig. 3.4) from

3.3 Lion Stamp Seal from Tell Majnuna, Late Chalcolithic Period, ca. 3800 BCE (McMahon 2009: fig. 1)



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3.4 Lion Hunt Stele (Löwenjagdstele) from Uruk IV, ca. 3200 BCE. Courtesy Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Vorderasiatisches Museum, Foto Olaf M. Teissmer, VAG 1028, Birg. in Iraq Museum IM 23477

Uruk. On the latter monument, the ruler is depicted confronting a lion with bow and arrow (below) and with spear (above). Through these gestures the ruler embodied the extraordinary degree of risk and danger he assumed on behalf of his subjects. Another theme emphasizing royal control over life and death is manifested in so-called prisoner-scenes from Mesopotamia (Fig. 3.5), which

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3.5 Sealing and Drawing of “Prisoner Scene” from Uruk IV, ca. 3200 BCE (Brandes 1979 [Part II]: pl. 3)

depict the ruler as possessing the power of life or death over his subdued enemy (Brandes 1979: 159–66). Several Late Uruk sealings, which take up this theme in miniature, appeared concurrently with small statues presenting the maltreatment and humiliation of prisoners in various bodily expressions (Fig. 3.6). These statues (like the sealings) were all found in the filling of the Eanna terrace (Becker 1992: nos. 945–951). In the subsequent Early Dynastic Period (ca. 2900–2350 BCE), the imagery as it was developed in late fourth millennium BCE prisoner scenes from Uruk rapidly penetrated various political centers across northern Mesopotamia and northern Syria—including Ebla, Mari, Kish, and Ur. This

3.6 Prisoner Statuettes from Uruk IV, ca. 3200 (after Becker 1992: nos. 945–951)



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penetration attests to the cultural emergence of a fully developed royal discourse aimed at effectuating power hierarchies in materialized and concretized imagery. In this imagery, incorporated into furniture inlays as well as panel inlays on palace walls, the body of the enemy is transformed into a social product of power relations (Vogel 2009: IX), revealing thereby his utter helplessness, humiliation, and dependence on the will of the victorious ruler. Independent of local style, the pictorial repertoire of these inlays is very similar in its representation of the abuse and maltreatment of the enemy, and so may be considered iconic in its intentionality. Decontextualized and generalized, rather than representing a particular historical reality, its iconic gesturality creates knowledge about social power relations and, thereby, (re-)creates or (re-)constitutes reality. As the iconic image exemplifies what is socially and ideologically significant, it creates a visual consensus among the art producers and the audience. By the Early Dynastic Period, the Denkform or mythic notion of the interplay of cosmic and social order was established in its major thematic and pictorial framework. Eannatum’s Stele of the Vultures (ca. 2400 BCE) from Lagash on the Tigris River, for example, combines depictions of the ruler engaged in victorious battle with a mythologizing icon of victory (Fig. 3.7), the latter comprising the warrior god Ningirsu gripping a net filled with enemy captives. By this date, the explicit merging of the royal with the divine or mythic spheres had been accomplished. The complexity of the Stele of the Vultures as a monument and its pictorial power are breathtaking: both obverse and reverse, in their iconic representations, combine multiple layers of time in myth and reality. Each pictorial unit singles out a particular moment, which in its emblematic effect functions as an iconic and deictic reference to either the cruel experience of warfare and/or the ideological and mythic representation of it. The powerful effect and dramatic Bildakt of the stele lies in its presencing of simultaneous temporalities (Boehm 2015: 29). As revealed by the emblematic use of the net and the gesture of spearing in hunting as well as in battle, the parallelism of hunting and warfare was established (at latest) by the late Early Dynastic Period. The image of the king as warrior possessed a powerful affective character that functioned on at least two levels: (1) the image acted directly on the sensation of the beholder by stimulating “memory through visual or emotional shock” (Bennett 2001: 3); (2) the affective power operated through recognition, and the ability to recollect a shared repertoire of knowledge

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3.7 Stele of the Vultures, obverse above and reverse on facing page (courtesy Zainab Bahrani; after drawing by Elizabeth Simpson)

and schemata related to the experience of warfare. In the pictorial construction, affect and recognition are promoted by the gesturality of human and divine action, which by means of referencing specific moments of the total humiliation and destruction of the enemy, as well as of the celebration of victory, created a powerful dramatic Bildakt or effect on the beholder (Bredekamp 2010).



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As noted above, the other powerful effect of the pictorial repertoire of Eannatum’s stele lies in its capacity to presence simultaneous temporalities (Boehm 2015: 29). This capability for immediate simultaneity is something exclusively owned by pictorial logic. In combining human battle scenes with the iconic representation of the divine victory, the historical and the mythical are merged, and so the image in its deictic power renders the absent, the cultural concept of the warrior god and king sharing in the task of creating social and cosmic order, both present and visible.

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This iconic difference, as realized in its visual and nonverbal logic, which operates by means of simultaneity in its fusion of the mythic, the cultic, and the historical, is carried on into later periods: an exemplar from the Old Babylonian Period (ca. 2000– 1600 BCE) is Dadusha’s early eighteenth century BCE Victory Stele, which presents the king in adoration in front of the god Adad (Fig. 3.8). Adad strikes the enemy with his club in the upper register, while scenes of the maltreatment and abuse of the enemy occupy the lower registers. In its co-presencing of various temporalities and realities—i.e., the mythologizing of the battle and the cultic context—the stele points to human and divine action in the service of cosmic and social order. In the centuries that followed the early second millennium, new choices were made for standing monuments such as Assyrian obelisks and steles. The mythologizing aspect of royal imagery, and specifically of representations of the divine warrior or king treading on the

3.8 Drawing of Stele of Dadusha (after Miglus 2003)



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3.9 Broken Obelisk, Ashur-bel-kala (1073–1056 BCE), BM 118898, Courtesy British Museum

enemy, disappeared. Instead, while the king was understood to be at the command and could be depicted in company of the gods, military action was pictorially represented as undertaken by the king alone. It is only in the textual record that the mythologizing aspect might remain, and the king may be presented in the role of the warrior god Ninurta battling the forces of disorder. The other cultural theme moving into the foreground in both text and image is that which highlights the king’s close communication with the gods. The Broken Obelisk of Ashur-bel-kala (1073–1056 BCE) (Fig. 3.9), so called because its lower half is missing, is the earliest Assyrian monument to experiment with the pictorial realization of the above themes (Reade 2005: 373; Ornan 2007). A shallow, square niche centered in the upper part of the Obelisk contains a damaged but extremely significant depiction of the Assyrian king in interaction with the gods. The king leads prisoners of war, who are tied by the lead-rope to his belt, before the gods, who are represented by their emblems: the horned mitre representing either Anu or Enlil; the crescent for Sin; the winged disk for either Assur or Shamash; the lightning bolt for Adad; and the rosette or star for Ishtar. The king’s hands are outstretched

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to receive a bow handed to him by a pair of hands emerging from the winged disk, a gesture indexing both his close communication with the divine world and his functioning under divine command and with divine consent. This pictorial representation, which combines the notion of divine and human accord in action with the fictive cultic context of communication, is, to my knowledge, unique among the Neo-Assyrian obelisks and steles. It refers to the mythical and yet is not a representation of mythic temporality; rather, this multilayered image offers a sophisticated reference to the mythic in order to express a theological statement. Ashur-bel-kala’s iconic gesture of holding the enemy by the lead-rope is a variation of Ningirsu’s emblematic gesture of victory on the Stele of the Vultures, on which he holds the net full of captured enemies, and so depicts the king as having fulfilled his role as the warrior god. The gesture of the divinity in the winged disk above handing the bow to the king epitomizes the concordance of divine and royal will and action and so situates the overall composition within a specific theological framework: this explicitly emphasizes the religious-political function of the office of kingship in Assyrian ideology, which includes the king’s functioning in the role of warrior deity (among various other roles). The slightly later White Obelisk (Fig. 3.10), probably to be attributed to Ashurnasirpal I (1046–1033 BCE), possesses a completely different pictorial layout (Unger 1932; Reade 1975; Pittman 1996): this focuses exclusively on ongoing royal action and is characterized by a preference for narration, a feature specifically characteristic of the later Neo-Assyrian reliefs (Winter 1997; Gillmann 2015). The upper and lowermost registers represent the king in his roles as warrior and hunter respectively. The pictorial parallelism of warfare and hunting as depicted on the White Obelisk is in keeping with longstanding earlier (and later) visual and textual parallels established between the two acts: one need only consider, for example, earlier pictorial gesturality in which the king spears wild animals in a manner very much akin to the way in which he slays human enemies (e.g., the Lion Hunt Stele from Uruk). In royal inscriptions such as that of Tiglath-Pileser I (1114–1076 BCE) during the late Middle Assyrian Period, the acts of hunting wild animals and battling human enemies are also explicitly paralleled (Pongratz-Leisten 2015: 250–54). The middle registers of the White Obelisk are devoted to tribute processions, and to ceremonial and ritual performances of the military victory. These various scenes wrap in continuous horizontal registers around the shaft of the obelisk: “the



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3.10 Drawing of White Obelisk, Ashurnasirpal I (1046–1033 BCE), Nineveh, British Museum 118807 (after Reade 1975: fig. 1)

choice of horizontal organization, fundamental to comprehending the monument, is remarkable because it is not particularly effective. In fact, The White Obelisk is the only Mesopotamian monument of its size that is so organized” (Pittman 1996: 339). While the military scenes are generic in nature and lack any historical reference, the cultic scene showing Ishtar enthroned in her shrine and faced by the king, who is pouring a libation in front of her, seems to specifically refer to Ishtar’s temple in Nineveh. This

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scene is intriguingly referenced in a caption on Side A of the White Obelisk: “The bīt nathi of the city of Nineveh: I performed the wine (libation) and offering of the temple of the august goddess.” The caption consequently provides the name of her shrine: it is called by its Hurrian name, bīt nathi, and reflects the Hurrian origin of the Ninevite Ishtar. The martial scenes chosen by the image producers, including the pursuit and defeat of the enemy and the siege of and attack on the city, all recur in the Neo-Assyrian palace reliefs, where they represent and reference actual historical episodes from the king’s endeavors to conquer the universe at Assur’s command. During the Neo-Assyrian Period (911–609 BCE), the image producers responsible for royal stelae demonstrated a marked preference for depicting a single pictorial element: the king as supplicant in never-ending communication with the gods, relating to them his military victories. In fulfilling

3.11 Drawing of Zincirli Stele (after Börker-Klähn 1982: fig. 21; redrawn by David Kertai)



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this cosmic task, and thus responding to the cultural expectations linked with his office, the ruler gained the right to depict himself in this particular iconic image. The king’s role as warrior, at least on the stelae—excepting Esarhaddon’s stelae from Zincirli and Til Barsip (Fig. 3.11), on which the icon of the king with his captives on a lead-rope recurs—is now relegated to the textual medium spreading across his body. For pictorial renderings of the king as warrior in the Neo-Assyrian Period, one must look instead primarily to the narrative compositions depicted on the orthostat reliefs lining the walls of the royal palaces (Feldman; Jeffers, this volume).

CONCLUSION The foregoing discussion has demonstrated that the vitality of the artifact as representation of a cultural or ideological agenda, its ontological power to directly affect its audience through its physical properties in its specific mode of presencing and its capacity to compel attention, and its nonverbal, deictic, and iconic pictorial power that is both distinct from and goes beyond language need not be exclusive. Even if one were not to regard language as “the privileged medium through which we come to know ourselves and the world” (Moxey 2013: 56) and consider the image as an agent with performative function in the production of meaning, affects, as Keith Moxey (2013: 56) rightly states, “can only be appreciated in retrospect when they are attributed signification by means of linguistic representation.” Pictorial representations of cultural concepts operate in material systems of signifiers (textual, pictorial, and ritual) that acquire their meaning from the constellation of other signifiers (Hilgert 2009: 286).4 Within this system of signifiers, representations never just mimic reality. Rather the referenced concept or idea and its material representation intervene, invent, and create reality (Hilgert 2009: 287; DeMarrais et al. 1996). In this interface between concept and material representation, as discussed in my case study of the gesturality of god and king in their roles as warrior, the material representation has an instrumental function. Specific gestures must be considered in their contextual framework. Their success depends on whether they can be integrated in further experimental contexts in order to create new configurations and meanings, a process akin to the experimental process occurring in research into the natural sciences. In both domains, text and image, and as may be further refined to accord with genre and medium,

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the authors or producers operate with generic concepts and icons, abbreviations that stand in for larger narratives or ideas—including culminating scenes that might acquire an iconic nature (Wickhoff 1900; Perkins 1957; Winter 1985; Sonik 2014: 280ff.; Watanabe 2014). On the part of its producer, this epistemic practice presupposes knowledge of the existing reservoir and stream of tradition in order to be able to create a message that is relevant for its audience in a particular historical context. In addition to the deictic and affective power and agency of the image effecting social consequences (Feldman 2014), then, Panofsky’s (1939: 11) iconological approach (e.g., Lamprichs 1999)—which deals with images and allegories instead of motifs and so requires intimate familiarity with the themes and concepts of a particular culture as expressed in other media such as ritual and literature—remains significant, despite its limitations, to the analysis of Mesopotamian imagery (see also Baxandall 1972: 61–81). It is the conceptual and thematic that guides the design and construction of particular imageries in Mesopotamia and that resulted in some kind of interpictoriality5 and intermediality in both synchronic and diachronic expression.

NOTES:

3.1 I am honored to dedicate this essay to Holly Pittman, in expression of my admiration of her breadth of research and her generosity in sharing her knowledge. 3.2  Extensive work has been done on multimediality and multimodality. Important insights are offered by Bateman (2014) and Royce and Bowcher (2007). 3.3  Already in 1949, the German art historian Anton Moortgat suggested the notion of the Bildgedanke, the pictorial thought, which, in his view, dominated the choice of motives in ancient Near Eastern art. In his much-contested work on Tammuz, Der Unsterblichkeits-glaube in der Altorientalischen Bildkunst (Berlin: de Gruyter 1949), Moortgat tried to resurrect the ancient worldview and religion from a multiplicity of diverse pictorial motives; he completely ignored the textual record but emphasized also the Eigenwert, the independent value, of archaeology as a means in recognizing spiritual interrelations. His claim that the Bildgedanke of immortality dominated nearly every pictorial motif appearing in ancient Near Eastern imagery evoked severe criticism among his colleagues: see reviews by Parrot (1949); Frankfort (1950); Porada (1951); and Kraus (1953/55: 55). 3.4  Markus Hilgert, in his article, is primarily concerned with the Listenwissenschaft. As he states himself, however, this approach can also be applied to any artifact or object of knowledge. 3.5  A concept introduced by Sonik during her discussion of copies and Mesopotamian art at the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale in Philadelphia, 2016.



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REFERENCES Bahrani, Zainab. 2008. Rituals of War: The Body and Violence in Mesopotamia. New York: Zone Books. Bateman, John A. 2014. Text and Image: A Critical Introduction to the Visual/Verbal Divide. London: Routledge. Baxandall. Michael. 1972. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Becker, Andrea. 1992. Uruk: Kleinfunde. AUWE 6. Mainz. Philipp von Zabern. Bennett, Jill. 2001. Stigmata and Sense Memory: St Francis and the Affective Image. Art History 24: 1–16. Blumenberg, Hans. 1985. Work on Myth. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Boehm, Gottfried. 1995. Bildbeschreibung. Über die Grenzen von Bild und Sprache. In Beschreibungskunst – Kunstbeschreibung. Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Gottfried Boehm and Helmut Pfotenhauer, 23–40. München: Fink. Boehm, Gottfried. 2015. Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen – Die Macht des Zeigens. Berlin: Berlin University Press. Boehm, Gottfried and William J.T. Mitchell. 2009. Pictorial versus Iconic Turn: Two Letters. Culture, Theory and Critique 50: 103–121. Börker-Klähn, Jutta. 1982. Altvorderasiatische Bildstelen und vergleichbare Felsrefiefs II. Mainz am Rhein: Philipp van Zabern. Brandes, Mark A. 1979. Siegelabrollungen aus den archaischen Bauschichten in UrukWarka. Wiesbaden: Steiner. Bredekamp, Horst. 2010. Theorie des Bildakts. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Cole, Steven W., and Peter Machinist, ed. 1998. Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Priests to King Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal. State Archives of Assyria XIII (SAA 13). Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. Crawford, Cory D. 2014. Relating Image and Word in Ancient Mesopotamia. In Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art, ed. Brian A. Brown and Marian H. Feldman, 241–264. Berlin: de Gruyter. DeMarrais, Elizabeth, Luis Jaime Castillo, and Timothy Earle. 1996. Ideology, Materialization, and Power Strategies. Current Anthropology 37.1: 15–31. Elkins, James, ed. 2008. Visual Literacy. New York: Routledge. Feldman, Marian H. 2014. Object Agency? Spatial Perspective, Social Relations, and the Stele of Hammurabi. In Agency and Identity in the Ancient Near East. New Paths Forward, ed. Sharon R. Steadman and Jennifer C. Ross, 148–165. New York: Routledge.

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Frankfort, Henri. 1950. Review of Anton Moortgat, Tammuz, Der Unsterblichkeitsglaube in der Altorientalischen Bildkunst. Berlin: de Gruyter. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 9: 189–191. Gillmann, Nicolas. 2015. Tradition and Innovation in the Neo-Assyrian Reliefs. In Tradition and Innovation in the Ancient Near East. Proceedings of the 57th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale at Rome 4–8 July 2011, ed. Alfonso Archi in coll. with Armando Bramanti, 267–276. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Gombrich, Ernst H. 1960. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Pictorial Style of Representation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gombrich, Ernst H. 1982. The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages of Art. An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Hilgert, Markus. 2009. Von ‘Listenwissenschaft’ und ‘epistemischen Dingen.’ Konzeptuelle Annäherungen an altorientalische Wissenspraktiken/Of ‘Listenwissenschaft’ and ‘Epistemic Things.’ Conceptual Approaches to Ancient Mesopotamian Epistemic Practices. Journal for General Philosophy of Science/Zeitschrift für allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 40.2: 277–309. Jones, Caroline A., and Peter Galison, ed. 1998. Picturing Science and Producing Art. Abingdon: Routledge, 1998. Kraus, Franz R. 1953/55. Review of Anton Moortgat, Tammuz, Der Unsterblichkeitsglaube in der Altorientalischen Bildkunst. Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 52: 36–80. Krois, John, M. 2011. Enactivism and Embodiment in Picture Acts. The Chirality of Images. In Sehen und Handeln, ed. Horst Bredekamp and John Michael Krois, 3–19. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Kulvicki, John. 2003. Image Structure. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 61: 323–340. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Lamprichs, Roland. 1999. Ikonographie und Ikonologie. Gedanken zur Theorie Erwin Panofskys. In Fluchtpunkt Uruk: Archäologische Einheit aus methodischer Vielfalt. Schriften für Hans Jörg Nissen, ed. Hartmut Kühne, Reinhard Bernbeck, and Karin Bartl, 38–46. Rhaden: Verlag Marie Leidorf GmbH. Lopes, Dominic. 1996. Understanding Pictures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McMahon, Augusta. 2009. The King and the Cage: Late Chalcolithic Iconography and Ideology in Northern Mesopotamia. Iraq 71: 115–124.



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Miglus, Peter A. 2003. Die Siegesstele des Königs Dāduša von Ešnunna und ihre Stellung in der Kunst Mesopotamiens und der Nachbargebiete. In Altertumswissenschaften im Dialog. Festschrift für Wolfram Nagel zur Vollendung seines 80. Lebensjahres, ed. Reinhard Dittmann, Christian Eder, Bruno Jacobs, 397–419. Alter Orient und Altes Testament 306. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag. Mitchell, William J.T. 1994. Picture Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, William J.T. 2008. Visual Literacy or Literary Visualcy? In Visual Literacy, ed. James Elkin, 11–29. New York: Routledge. Morphy, Howard. 2009. Art as a Mode of Action: Some Problems with Gell’s Art and Agency. Journal of Material Culture 14: 5–27. Moortgat, Anton. 1949. Tammuz, Der Unsterblichkeits-glaube in der Altorientalischen Bildkunst. Berlin: de Gruyter, Moxey, Keith. 2013. Visual Time. The Image in History. Durham: Duke University Press. Ornan, Tallay. 2007. Who is Holding the Lead Rope? The Relief of the Broken Obelisk. Iraq 69: 59–72. Panofsky, Erwin. 1939. Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. New York: Harper & Row. Parrot, André. 1949. Review of Anton Moortgat, Tammuz, Der Unsterblichkeitsglaube in der Altorientalischen Bildkunst. Berlin: de Gruyter. Bibliotheca Orientalis 6: 176–179. Peacocke, Christopher. 1987. Depiction. The Philosophical Review 96: 383–410. Perkins, Ann. 1957. Narration in Babylonian Art. American Journal of Archaeology 61.1: 54–62. Pittman, Holly. 1996. The White Obelisk and the Problem of Historical Narrative in the Art of Assyria. The Art Bulletin 78.2: 334–355. Pongratz-Leisten, Beate. 2015. Religion and Ideology in Assyria. Berlin: de Gruyter. Pongratz-Leisten, Beate. 2018. Ideology. In A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Art, ed. Ann Gunter, 283–308. Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, Ltd. Porada, Edith. 1951. Review of Anton Moortgat, Tammuz, Der Unsterblichkeitsglaube in der Altorientalischen Bildkunst (Berlin: de Gruyter). Journal of the American Oriental Society 71.3: 178–180. Porter, Barbara. 2003. Trees, Kings, and Politics: Studies in Assyrian Iconography. Fribourg: Academic Press. Reade, Julian. 1975. Aššurnasirpal I and the White Obelisk. Iraq 37: 129–150. Reade, Julian. 2005. The Ishtar Temples at Nineveh. Papers of the 69e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, London, 7–11 July 2003, ed. Dominique Collon and Andrew George. Iraq 67: 347–390. Royce, Terry D. and Wendy L. Bowcher, ed. 2007. New Directions in the Analysis of

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Multimodal Discourse. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. Schier, Flint. 1986. Deeper into Pictures. An Essay on Pictorial Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sonik, Karen. 2014. Pictorial Mythology and Narrative in the Ancient Near East. In Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art, ed. Brian A. Brown and Marian H. Feldman, 265–293. Berlin: de Gruyter. Unger, Ernst A. 1932. Der Obelisk des Königs Assurnasirpal I aus Ninive. Mitteilungen der Altorientalischen Gesellschaft 6.1–2. Vogel, Helga. 2009. Wie man Macht macht. Eine Macht- und Genderkritische Untersuchung der frühesten Repräsentationen von Staatlichkeit. Ph.D. Dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin. Watanabe, Chikako. 2014. Styles of Pictorial Narrative in Assurbanipal’s Reliefs. In Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art, ed. Brian A. Brown and Marian H. Feldman, 345–367. Berlin: de Gruyter. Wickhoff, Franz. 1900. Roman Art: Some of Its Principles and Their Application to Early Christian Painting. Trans. Mrs. S. Arthur Strong. London: William Heinemann. Winter, Irene J. 1981. Royal Rhetoric and the Development of Historical Narrative in Neo-Assyrian Reliefs. Studies in Visual Communication 7: 1–38. Winter, Irene J. 1985. After the Battle Is Over: The “Stele of the Vultures” and the Beginning of Historical Narrative in the Art of the Ancient Near East. Studies in the History of Art 16 (Symposium Papers IV: Pictorial Narrative in Antiquity and the Middle Ages): 11–32. Winter, Irene J. 1997. Art in Empire: The Royal Image and the Visual Dimensions of Assyrian ideology. In Assyria 1995, ed. Simo Parpola and Robert M. Whiting, 359–381. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. Winter, Irene J. 2007. Agency Marked, Agency Ascribed: The Affective Object in Ancient Mesopotamia. In Art’s Agency and Art History, ed. Robin Osborne and Jeremy Tanner, 42–69. Malden: Blackwell.

4 The Context(ualization) of Art in Non-Literate Societies: Armenian Middle Bronze Age Images and Animal Bones

Karen S. Rubinson Keywords: South Caucasus; Armenia; Middle Bronze Age; painted ceramics; horses; art historical context; archaeological context

INTRODUCTION

T

he art historian and archaeologist Holly Pittman (1996: 9), discussing the contextualization of a work of art from pre-dynastic Egypt, wrote that “[w]hile seemingly straightforward, contextualization demands a particular kind of interpretive approach to works of art, one that considers typological, stylistic, iconographic, and aesthetic issues within larger and historical frames.…a more dynamic consideration, one that moves back and forth between objects(s) as remnant and its world as constructed context.” Art historian and critical theorist Norman Bryson, in an important 1992 essay, sought to problematize and reformulate “context” as a “central and continual activity within the discipline” of art history (1992: 19; Sonik, this volume). In this contribution, building on Pittman’s observations, I undertake to gloss a few of Bryson’s points from the vantage of the study of artifacts created within non-literate societies, a topic I have addressed in other fora (Rubinson 2006). In particular, I examine Bryson’s (1992: 21) arguments, developed within a framework that is essentially literate and, at least to a prehistorian, relatively recent in time, that context is not fixed but needs to be interpreted; that context should not be understood as having an active role that affects a passive work of art; and that context “is something we make” (1992: 39). These arguments pertain to archaeological as well as art historical context, although it

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seems to me that the greater and more detailed knowledge of periods and places from which texts survive to illuminate an object’s sociocultural milieu often requires little, if any, input from the kinds of detailed data extracted from analyzing an archaeological context. For objects from prehistoric, early historic, or non-literate societies, however, the archaeological context—that is, the matrices from which an object is excavated and the regional and temporal comparative data within which an object is understood—is critical to identifying the meaning, value, and function of an artifact. The practice of archaeology has, at least since the later nineteenth century CE, paid increasing attention to the physical context from which archaeological artifacts are retrieved.1 As an archaeological site is excavated, it is effectively destroyed. Thus, archaeologists document the horizontal and vertical locations of architectural elements and artifacts, colors of soil, shapes of stones and other types of matrices, and any other visual and material distinctions at the same time that they are retrieving artifacts, bones, seeds, and other remains of past life. This meticulous record-keeping builds the “archaeological record,” which, aggregated, is the local archaeological context. However, even the apparently scientific and mechanical description and recording of an excavation, which simultaneously create an archaeological record, “is not simply a case of a solid objective recording used to construct more tentative subjective interpretations; most archaeologists today recognise that subjectivity enters into even these basic descriptions and that the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity is hard, if impossible, to identify” (Lucas 2001: 151–52). Although he doesn’t call it such, Bryson (1992: 23) argues for a kind of reflexivity in determining the causal explanations of a work of art, bemoaning the “containment of complexity” (1992: 21). On this point, art history and archaeology can be said to be on the same page; as Lucas (2001: 169) highlights, specifically with reference to the recording of archaeological data, “without reflexivity, without a concern for how our concepts and practices affect interpretation, the routinized methodologies usually employed in the field can become very constraining.”2 Specific types of context and contextualization are crucial to understanding an object of study in archaeology. However imperfectly preserved, retrieved, and recorded, the archaeological record speaks to the actions that produced that record (Lucas 2001: 147), allowing scholars at least the possibility of composing explanations of the past. Without this type of context



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(the archaeological record and the broader regional and temporal data), the individual object of study is an “isolated relic” (Lucas 2001: 146) and reconstructing the life of the object in all of its ramifications, both before archaeological deposition and afterwards, would necessarily be highly speculative. In this chapter, I will approach a painted jar from the Middle Bronze cemetery Nerkin Naver (located in modern-day Armenia) with this larger discourse in mind.

THE JAR FROM NERKIN NAVER TOMB 7 Description and Comparanda The jar that is the focus of the subsequent discussion comes from tomb 7 at Nerkin Naver, a Bronze and Iron Age cemetery located in west-central Armenia. The burial dates to the Middle Bronze Age (last quarter of the third to first half of the second millennium BCE) and was, as burials generally are in this period in the South Caucasus, a kurgan burial, that is, a burial under a stone mound. The burial pit was rectangular, oriented eastwest, and contained a single body placed upon a textile. Accompanying the deceased were the bones of sacrificed bulls, sheep, and horse. Among the artifacts were small stone sculptures in human form. This tomb contained more than 60 ceramic vessels, both black polished and red-slipped and black painted, of which 50 were characterized by the excavator as “richly decorated” (Simonyan and Manaseryan 2013: 175–83). The jar, with a pear-shaped body and a tall flaring neck, is slipped a reddish-orange and painted with black decoration (Simonyan 2013: 34 [top and two top inset images]; Simonyan and Manaseryan 2013: fig. 14) and the vessel, uniquely, is decorated with images of horses (Figs. 4.1 and 4.2; see also color insert).3 Otherwise, its shape and painted decoration are typical of large jars from the Middle Bronze Age characterized as belonging to the Trialeti-Vanadzor culture.4 Like other vessels of this period and type, the surface is slightly polished. The jar’s neck is decorated with groups of vertical lines (there are five lines in each group) and its lip is marked with short lines at right angles to its mouth. At and below the widest part of the jar’s belly is a band consisting of hanging cross-hatched triangles bordered by two bands of hatched zigzags, the lower of which has circles suspended from the triangle points. A narrow space separates this lower band from the band above,

4.1 Red Slipped and Burnished Jar with Black Paint from Nerkin Naver Tomb 7. Figure from Karen Rubinson; drawn by Iris Fernandez (adapted from Simonyan 2013: 34 and Simonyan and Manaseryan 2013: fig. 14). Photograph courtesy of Dr. Hakob Simonyan (see also color insert)

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4.2 Band of Horses; Detail of Nerkin Naver Tomb 7 Painted Jar. Figure from Karen Rubinson; drawn by Iris Fernandez (adapted from Simonyan and Manaseryan 2013: fig. 14)

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which consists of large downward-pointing cross-hatched triangles that are attached at the triangles’ bases alternating with smaller upward-pointing cross-hatched triangles that are spaced along the lower bordering line. Just below the jar’s neck and above the alternating triangle band is the band containing horses.5 Bound at the bottom by a straight line and above by a wavy one, the horses are shown standing above upward-pointing hatched triangles and separated from each other by similar triangles; downward-hanging and somewhat rounded hatched triangles are suspended over the area of the horses’ necks. The one exception to this pattern is the small horse inserted above the ground line between two of the larger animals. As noted above, the overall composition of the painted decoration conforms to the general arrangement of ornament of jars of this period; this general arrangement and the types of ornament depicted are used more specifically to assign these vessels to the Trialeti-Vanadzor culture. The vertical lines emphasize the extent of the jar’s neck; the three horizontal bands of ground between the pairs of horizontal painted lines help define the ovoid shape of its body. The small circles at the apices of the hanging triangles join the painted upper part of the vessel to the unpainted bottom like drops of water flowing into the orange expanse. The eight large horses in the band at the shoulder have cross-hatched bodies, reflecting the fill of the triangles, and spiky manes that extend almost to the animals’ tails. The upright ears, each painted as a “V,” stand between the manes and the slightly elongated heads. The legs stand on the ground line and broaden slightly at the top (especially the rear legs), and the tails are shown as tufted, defined by a series of V-shaped lines. Inserted between two of the large horses is a single small horse that does not stand on the ground line. Examination of the jar in the fall of 20186 made clear that the small horse was the last figure painted, inserted for formal reasons to fill in a gap between the larger horses in front and behind (since these are placed so that the rear horse is not overlapping the front horse, as in the other cases, leaving open space between them). The extra triangles inserted in front of and behind the large horse on the ground line situated below the small horse indicate the artist’s other efforts to fill the open space.

Art Historical Context If the Nerkin Naver jar were an “isolated relic” (Lucas 2001: 146), robbed from a burial and placed in a museum (or in some other way retrieved besides through meticulously documented excavation), what could



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we say about the vessel and how could we contextualize it? We could examine the decoration and, based on the definition of the form, ornament, and method of manufacture that distinguishes the Trialeti-Vanadzor “culture,” assign the jar to this Middle Bronze phase. In fact, although it isn’t generally thought of in this way, that would essentially be an art historical attribution. The shape of the vessel, the surface finish, and the decoration are aesthetic qualities that art historians consider, together with the materials and means of manufacture, to construct or reconstruct art historical context. To pursue this line of thought further, what would we make of the horse imagery? We could describe it, as above, and look at its formal properties. However, since images of horses, whether on pottery or in other media, are generally absent from the material culture of South Caucasus in the Middle Bronze Age, any interpretation of the imagery would be highly speculative and unconvincing. Without the evidence from the excavation of the jar, the archaeological context, there would be no way to propose a sociocultural meaning for the painted images.

THE JAR WITH PAINTED HORSES FROM NERKIN NAVER TOMB 7: AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND ART HISTORICAL CONTEXTUALIZATION The Site of Nerkin Naver: The Archaeological Context of Tomb 7 The cemetery of Nerkin Naver, located approximately 5 km west of Ashtarak, Armenia, contained a series of Middle Bronze Age tombs, many of which were kurgan burials with rich inventories, ascribed to societal elites. The tombs range in date from the latter part of the third millennium BCE through the early second millennium BCE (Simonyan and Manaseryan 2013; Simonyan 2013: 33–37). Excavated from 2002–2008, the rich tombs numbered 1 through 5 lay in a straight north-south line (Simonyan and Manaseryan 2013: 175 and fig. 2). Tomb 7, the burial containing the jar that is the focus of our discussion, lay about 300 meters north of the first group; it was excavated in 2007–2008. With the exception of tomb 5, which contained three individuals, the tombs each contained a single deceased individual. The tombs yielded Middle Bronze Age pottery, weapons of bronze and obsidian, and beads and other objects made from precious materials including gold, silver, and semiprecious stones. Extensive animal remains

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were recovered, including those of domestic animals (bull, sheep, goat, pig, dog, and horse); wild animals (wolf, leopard, lion, fox, and bird); and also marine creatures (fish and crab). Detailed information about most of the faunal remains and their deposition is not published. However, Uerpmann and Uerpmann (2010: 241) do describe at least part of one pile of animal bones found at the bottom of tomb 1: the ribs and lower leg bones of one adult and one young horse and one adult and one young cow/bull were deposited in the same locations. Horse remains were found in tombs 1, 3, 5, and 7 at Nerkin Naver (Simonyan and Manaseryan 2013: 183, fig. 11), though the precise details of these remain unpublished. Based on the published information, horse remains from this site were very fragmentary and appear to include only ribs and legs. No horse skulls are reported. An iron horse bit was part of tomb 1’s burial inventory (Simonyan and Manaseryan 2013: 187, fig. 13).7 Also found in tomb 1 was excrement from an herbivorous animal, proposed to have been a horse (Simonyan and Manaseryan 2013: 187, fig. 15). In addition to these remains, there is the black-painted red jar described above, which bears the unique representation of nine horses around its shoulder (Simonyan and Manaseryan 2013: fig. 14; Simonyan 2013: 34).

Horse Remains in the South Caucasus There has long been discussion of the mobility of peoples of the Middle Bronze Age in the South Caucasus (ca. 2350–1550 BCE) and adjacent areas, like eastern Turkey and northwestern Iran, based on the evidence of generally fugitive settlements and a multitude of tombs. Although horses have long been thought to have played a role in this mobility, actual evidence of their presence has been limited. The site of Nerkin Naver presents a group of tombs containing horse bones, one of which also contains the painted jar with a group of horses depicted on its shoulder, discussed above (Simonyan and Manaseryan 2013). The discovery of bones and vessel together provides a unique opportunity to examine a specific object (the painted jar) as a remnant of its contextual world and to propose that other figural vessels from this period might be similarly informative about the socioeconomic environment of this time. Horses were not new to the South Caucasus in the Middle Bronze Age. They appear in domesticated form already in Early Bronze Age (ca. midfourth to mid-third millennium BCE) trash deposits at Gegharot (Monahan



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2008: 91–92, 2007: 383) and, apparently, also at other similarly dated sites in Armenia and Georgia, especially in the region of the Araxes and its tributaries (Vila 2001: 466, table 2, and map 3).8 In addition, two breeds of domesticated, or at least tamed, horses are reported from the site of Alikemektepe in the Imishli district of Azerbaijan, dating to the early fourth millennium BCE; the horse bones constitute 7.5% of the faunal assemblage (Guliyev 2008: 23, 232, 279). Horse bones have also been found in settlement contexts in the Middle Bronze Age. Of the animal bones at Uzerlik Tepe in the Agdam region of what is today Azerbaijan, 4.2% belonged to horses (Kushnareva 1997: 209). Horse bones were also found at llto9 (Kushnareva 1997: 210) and Tqisbolo Gora in Georgia (Uerpmann and Uerpmann 2010: 242).10 New in the Middle Bronze Age South Caucasus, at least insofar as current evidence shows, is the discovery of horse bones in mortuary contexts.11 The earliest of the mortuary Middle Bronze Age horse remains from the South Caucasus seem to derive from tomb 1 of Nerkin Naver, where a carbon-dated horse tibia is attributed to the last quarter of the third millennium BCE (cal 2285–2070 cal BC) (Uerpmann and Uerpmann 2010: 241). The next earliest direct date available for a horse in these mortuary contexts comes from tomb 77 at Lori Berd in Armenia, which contained a horse leg bone dated by C14 to cal 1880–1745 BC (Devedjian 2006: 285, 361). Lori Berd tombs 6 and 79, later than tomb 77 but still dated to the Middle Bronze Age (i.e., likely before ca. 1500 BCE [Devedjian 2006: 360]), also contained horse bones. Tomb 6, the most recent of this Lori Berd burial group, yielded not only a horse phalange, found with the vertebrae of a calf or deer in a metal cauldron, but also the heads and limbs of two horses, their skulls located in the corners of the short wall on the southeast (Devedzhian 1981: 20, Devedjian 2006: 278, 292). At Nerkin Naver, in addition to the carbon-dated horse bone found in tomb 1, there are three other Middle Bronze Age burials that contained horse bones. Reported by Simonyan and Manaseryan (2013: 183) were at least one rib in tomb 1, at least one tibia in tomb 3, at least one articulated set of hind leg bones of one limb from burial 5B, and some unspecified horse remains from tomb 7.12 The precise numbers and nature of all of the horse bones from the Middle Bronze Age tombs at Nerkin Naver is uncertain. Uerpmann and Uerpmann (2010: 241) report in detail on osteological remains from tomb 1 at Nerkin Naver, which included the ribs and lower leg

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bones from two horses, one at least four years old while one was a juvenile, under two years in age; this is more than the lone rib bone reported in this burial by Simonyan and Manaseryan (2013: 183, fig. 11 [top left]). Burials dating from the beginning of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500–1400 BCE) yield horse bones, including from Lchashen on the northwestern shore of Lake Sevan, containing “head and hoof” (Burney and Lang 1971: 106; Piggott 1974: 17; Pogrebova 2003: 403), and Aparan II, in north-central Armenia, where the heads and limbs of two horses were buried alone in tomb 1 (Badalyan and Avetisyan 2007: 52, pl. V, 5).13 At Gegharot in north-central Armenia, two kurgan burials containing horse remains have been excavated: kurgans 1 and 3. Kurgan 1, which included a horse skull together with anatomically articulated forelimbs, as well as a second horse skull,14 is dated to the end of the sixteenth or early fifteenth century BCE, the transition from the Middle to Late Bronze Age (Badalyan et al. 2008: 59–61 [for burial]; Badalyan and Smith 2017: 18–19). Kurgan burial 3, later than kurgan burial 1, contained the skulls and long bones of two horses; the horses are estimated to have been between 6 and 11 years old. Both horses were found with bits in their mouths. Also in the tomb were remains of a bronze-trimmed wooden yoke that the excavators associate with a horse-drawn vehicle. Kurgan burial 3 is dated to the fifteenth to fourteenth century BCE, based on the results of AMS dating together with the ceramics of the Lchashen-Metsamor I/II group, which represents the initial Late Bronze Age (Badalyan and Smith, 2017: 22, 25). If the assigned Middle Bronze Age date of Lori Berd’s burial 6 is correct,15 this would be the first known burial containing the paired skulls and long-bones of horses in Armenia, with perhaps, kurgan burial 1 at Gegharot, in the transition between Middle and Late Bronze Age, slightly later, followed perhaps by those at Late Bronze Age Aparan II. In the following period, we see the appearance of pairs of horses associated with wheeled vehicles and the necessary equipment to draw them, as Gegharot kurgan burial 3. At Shirakavan (northern Armenia near the Turkish border) in tomb 44, assigned to phase 2 of the Late Bronze Age (ca. late fifteenth to midthirteenth century BCE), the remains of two horses16 were found together with elements of a wagon, together with a yoke and bronze bits (Badalyan and Avetisyan 2007: 233–35; Badalyan and Smith 2017: fn 22). The phenomenon is not restricted to the territory of modern Armenia. Among other examples, four tombs at Garajemirly, in central-western



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Azerbaijan, also contained remains of horses and wheeled vehicles. They are dated to the fifteenth century BCE, based on their similarity in remains and ceramics to the burials at Lchashen in Armenia (Guliyev 2008: 82, 120, 242–246, 286; for Lchashen, Burney and Lang 1971: 106). In Georgia, also dated to the Late Bronze Age, this same combination is found at SaparKharaba and Berikldeebi, among other sites (Narimanishvili 2010: 326).17 These animals and vehicle equipment are found in tombs of elite individuals and do not occur frequently. Although horses clearly played a role in Middle Bronze society in the South Caucasus, as evidenced by the fragmentary remains found in both settlements and burials, pictorial representations of horses are very rare.18 While Bendukidze (2010: 267) cites the gold-sheathed wood animal figurine from Trialeti tomb V as a horse, Kuftin (1941: 94), the original excavator, identified the animal as a goat or deer; views of the top of the figurine’s head show holes in places more likely to have held antlers or horns than ears (Zhorzhikashvili and Gogadze 1974: pl. 58). The black-painted red jar with horse imagery from Nerkin Naver tomb 7 seems to represent the earliest image of horses in the South Caucasus. A polychrome sherd from Haftavan in Iran, dating to the very end of the Middle Bronze Age or beginning of the Late Bronze Age, and in a ceramic style related to South Caucasian ceramics, also illustrates horses; in this case, the horses are yoked as if drawing a vehicle. The fact that the horses are shown yoked points to a later date than the Nerkin Naver example, as seen in the burials practices described above, as does the coloration of the painted decoration. A second polychrome sherd from Haftavan, dating to the late Middle Bronze or beginning of the Late Bronze Age, also appears to represent a horse, based on the arched neck and upright ears, but the sherd is too fragmentary to be certain (Edwards 1981: 108, fig. 21: 3,6, 1983: 143–44, fig. 138, 3,6, pl. c).19

Why Contextualize the Painted Vessel with Horses at Nerkin Naver? The extensive literature on human burials and what they and their contents represent need not be rehearsed here (e.g., McHugh 1999; Parker Pearson 2000). Suffice to say that tombs and the things they contain speak both to the life of the deceased and to the community—in all of its aspects— that buries the deceased. In the case of the Nerkin Naver tombs, without detailed reporting of the contents of each tomb, our investigation of context

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cannot be complete. In these tombs, too, the presence of horse bones, together with the vessel with the images of horses, embedded in the sociohistorical framework of the Middle Bronze South Caucasus, raise some interesting questions about the interrelationship of art historical and archaeological contexts. The Nerkin Naver cemetery yielded four tombs containing horse bones, at least one of which, tomb 1, contained the remains of two horses. Only one of these burials, tomb 7, also contained horse imagery, a singular phenomenon in this period in the South Caucasus. As noted above, it is only at this time that horse bones appear in tombs in the South Caucasus, and the burials in which they occur belonged to elite members of the society. The presence of horse bones together with the jar bearing a depiction of painted horses raises some interesting questions. Does the jar enhance in our eyes the value of the horse bones in this context, since the bones are very rare occurrences, recovered in small numbers and very fragmentary form (the leg is the largest element here), and not the only animal bones found in the burials? If we didn’t have the jar, what would we think about the horse bones? If we didn’t have the horse bones, what would we think about the horse jar?

Constructing Art Historical and Archaeological Contexts In exploring the art historical context of the vessel from tomb 7, if the jar were an “isolated relic” (discussed above) robbed from a burial and placed in a museum (or in some other way retrieved besides excavated and meticulously documented), what could we say about the vessel? One might be able to establish that it is authentic, even though unique in decoration, through a combination of connoisseurship and technical study. We might then conclude that it had originated in the South Caucasus in the Middle Bronze Age. But what would we make of the image of horses? In general, vessels of this type are ornamented with geometric decoration. Sometimes the geometric decoration is augmented with birds (the most common type of zoomorphic representation on such vessels). On occasion, goats or other horned animals may be depicted. In fact, both of these figural types are found on vessels in tomb 7 at Nerkin Naver (Manaseryan et al. 2011). In the past, these animals have often been characterized as “decorative.” So might we, if examining the Nerkin Naver painted vessel with horses without any knowledge of its archaeological context, have concluded that the



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horses were merely decorative, just another animal form that sometimes appears on this category of painted jar? And would the fact that the animals depicted were horses tell us anything more about the art historical context or the world in which the jar was painted? We might conclude that the painter of the vessel had seen horses or horse representations, even though no other images of horses survive. But without the archaeological context, in this case beginning with a review of the zooarchaeological literature, we would have little more to say. The construction or reconstruction of archaeological context is vital to further analysis. An initial zooarchaeological review at least reveals the presence of horse bones in the period and general region to which painted vessels of the type found at Nerkin Naver belong. We might conclude on this basis that the artist painted horses on the Nerkin Naver vessel under discussion here because horses were present in the region as early as the Early Bronze Age—even if horse bones of that period are known only from trash deposits of settlements, much as horse bones in settlements in the Middle Bronze Age. The bones found in settlements give no indication of the horse as a marker of status or other social signaling; they indicate only that horses were present, clearly eaten, and employed in some way(s) within socioeconomic life. In my view, it is really the fact that the Middle Bronze Age—for the first time—yields horse bones deliberately situated in tombs, and in elite tombs at that, which provides the most significant context(ualization) for the interpretation of the Nerkin Naver painted vessel with horses. Such archaeological context suggests that horses were not only known but also had clear social value at this time, since only the richest tombs contained horse remains. Knowing this, we might with some justification propose the artist painted horses on the Nerkin Naver vessel to demonstrate the wealth, importance, or other significance of the deceased in life (presumably), and certainly in death; such a proposal could not be made on the basis of art historical context alone. The vessel might thus have been included in the tomb to signal that the deceased had access to the horse in its role as a status symbol rather than as a quotidian source of food or labor. Given the trajectory of horse remains in South Caucasus tombs—where, in the succeeding Late Bronze Age, pairs of horses were buried with wheeled vehicles in socially important tombs20—the growing role of horses in signaling social importance and power seems indisputable.

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CONCLUSION This study demonstrates the value, for both archaeologists and art historians, of investigating the interplay of archaeological and art historical contexts. The story of the horse in Middle Bronze South Caucasus, as it is presented here, is more complete because both kinds of context were interrogated. The social significance of the horse (as bone deposits) for the individual buried in tomb 7 at Nerkin Naver is amplified by the painted image of horses on the vessel also contained within the grave—particularly when both are considered within the larger context of the changing deposits of horse bones and associated artifacts recovered from settlements and burials in the whole of the Bronze Age South Caucasus. The investigation conducted here also raises interesting questions for future research in the Middle Bronze Age South Caucasus. The study of ceramics, which has primarily focused on chronological analysis and development, has often been separated from the analysis of socioeconomic life.21 It might be productive to study the Middle Bronze Age ceramics, at least those with figural imagery, within both their art historical and archaeological contexts, to learn, for example, why water birds are so prevalent, and to look at the vessels, as Holly Pittman (1996: 9) suggested in her discussion of contextualization, within their larger frameworks. As can be seen from the above discourse, although Bryson’s problematizing and reformulation of the term “context” in art historical theory represents a significant advance, context has nevertheless been and continues to be a crucial component of the archaeological investigation of material culture for more than a century. Moreover, art historical contexts, as defined by Bryson, and archaeological contexts, as discussed above, share important characteristics. In both art history and archaeology, context is not fixed but needs to be interpreted and is defined by the interpreters. Even though archaeological context appears to be more fixed, since the archaeological record is a scientific and objective (to the degree possible) recording of data recovered in the process of excavation, it has to be interpreted in light of new data, new excavations, and new understandings and constructions of the broader geographical and temporal matrices. And certainly, although the archaeological context plays an active and critical role in our understanding of the meaning of the vessel painted with horses found in Nerkin Naver tomb 7, the vessel itself is not a passive player. The material



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fact of its existence, and the questions the jar’s decoration evokes about why it was created, are the foundation of this investigation. NOTES:

4.1 Hodder (1989) makes the case for a start in the eighteenth century CE. 4.2 See also Hodder 1997. 4.3 Since the images are schematized, it is not absolutely certain that the equids are horses. In the absence of comparanda, I am assuming that the vessel’s painter intended to represent horses. 4.4 I am using the term “culture” here because that is the traditional term assigned to this material, although it more properly should be termed “complex.” There are regional variations of the name, with both Trialeti and Trialeti-Vanadzor used. Because the latter is employed in Armenia, where Nerkin Naver is located, it is used here. 4.5 Although the painted image might seem ambiguous as to the type of equid it represents, Uerpmann and Uerpmann (2010) have examined the bones from one of the Nerkin Naver tombs and definitively identify them as belonging to horses. It is on the basis of those and other Middle Bronze bone identifications from other sites that I see this image as definitively a depiction of horses. See further discussion below. 4.6 My thanks to Dr. Sona Hovsepyan, Curator, History Museum of Armenia, for making this examination possible. 4.7 Given the C14 date reported from the tomb, it would be surprising if this bit were part of the Middle Bronze deposition. 4.8 Subsequent research indicates the information cited by Vila that horse bones were found in Early Bronze Age levels at Shengavit (a site in Armenia that was occupied beginning in the Early Bronze Age) may not be accurate. Horse bones from more recent excavations at Shengavit were apparently from disturbed contexts; these may have been from Middle Bronze graves. Uerpmann and Uerpmann (2010: 241, n. 18) report that horse bones from Shengavit once dated to the Early Bronze Age are in fact C14 dated to the first millennium BCE. Pamela Crabtree has examined the equid bones from the Early Bronze Shengavit excavations carried out in the 2010s and has identified them as onager (Mitchell Rothman, personal communication, April 2016). There is also a clay figurine of a horse head and neck from Shengavit of uncertain but apparently Bronze Age date (Manaseryan 2010: 234 and fig. 23.3 c). Shirakavan is another Armenian site that was at one time published with possible Early Bronze horse remains, although the evidence Manaseryan presents (eight metacarpals) is scanty; the general context suggested for these remains, too, although starting in the Early Bronze Age, continues through the early first millennium BCE (Manaseryan 2006: 271–72). Elsewhere, the equid bones from the site are identified as either horse or donkey (Badalyan and Avetisyan 2007: 229). In fact, Manaseryan (e-mail communication, April 2016) states that the horse remains of Shirakavan date to 895–795 BCE. Uerpmann and Uerpmann (2010: 241) discount other horse remains previously identified as Early Bronze Age at other sites in Armenia. 4.9 The dating of the Ilto horse remains is questioned by Bendukidze (2010: 267). 4.10 Horse bones have also been reported from the Beshkenasheni (Beshtasheni) Late Bronze Age settlement in Georgia (Narimanishvili 2010: 317). 4.11 Horse remains have been reported in an Early Bronze Age burial at Didube (Koridze 1955). My thanks for this information to Mikheil Abramishvili (personal communication May 2016), who suggests the bones may have been those of

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another species of equid. Uerpmann and Uerpmann (2010: 242) confirm Abramishvili’s observation. 4.12 A complete horse skeleton was found in burial 9 at Nerkin Naver but this seems to have been an intrusive later burial since the human skeleton in the burial has C14 dates 1886–1730 cal BC while the horse is dated to the Hellenistic Period, cal 119 BC–26 AD (Simonyan and Manaseryan 2013: 192 and table 1). Whole horses do not appear to be found in burials in the South Caucasus until well after the Middle Bronze Age. To be further investigated is the statement by Kushnareva (1997: 146) that a “horse skeleton” was found in a burial at Kizyl-vank, which contained 28 grey-ware ceramic vessels and one with polychrome decoration, thus dating it to the Late Bronze Age. 4.13 The Aparan II burial is at a site which has only one occupation period (fifteenth to fourteenth centuries BCE), and the Late Bronze Age burials with datable materials range from the first half of the fifteenth century through the fourteenth to thirteenth centuries BCE (Badalyan and Avetisyan 2007: 51). It is therefore probable that the burial with the horses belong to this phase, as noted by Badalyan and Avetisyan (2007: 49–50), although there are a few Middle Bronze Age burials in the same cemetery. 4.14 It should be noted that the heads and limbs are the parts of the animal with the least meat and so likely these remains also indicate the remains of horse as part of the burial feast in addition to other symbolic values. 4.15 Smith et al. (2009: 55) include Lori Berd tombs 77 and 79 in the Middle Bronze II Period but omit Lori Berd tomb 6. Devedjian (2006: 360) notes that tomb 6 is the most recent of the group; tomb 6 was reused in the Iron Age and had been robbed (Devedzhian 1981: 20). There were no chariot elements reported there as in the Late Bronze Age burials. It is possible, based on the incomplete evidence, to suggest that Lori Berd tomb 6 dates to a transitional time between an era when horses were buried as remains of ritual meals and when horses were buried with elements of the chariot, marking elite and possibly military status. 4.16 From the drawing of the burial it appears that at least one skull and long bones of both horses were found in tomb 44 (Badalyan and Avetisyan 2007: 234, pl. V). 4.17 Further examples are cited in Badalyan and Smith (2017: n. 21–25). 4.18 For example, Manaseryan (2010), in a review of animal imagery in the ancient art of Armenia, details primarily wild animals and domestic sheep, goats, and cattle. See also Manaseryan et al. (2011), where, in Nerkin Naver tomb 7, most of the painted vessels with animal representations show goats and/or birds. 4.19 Guliyev (2008: 284) notes a polychrome vessel from Kultepe II Nakhchivan that has the image of a horse. Images of horses appear on later ceramic vessels as well, as, for example, a pot from Garajemirly in Azerbaijan (Guliyev 2008: 120). 4.20 These were often only emblematically represented, as at Gegherot kurgan 3 (discussed in the main text above), where there were skulls and limbs of the horses and elements of harness and yoke (Badalyan and Smith 2017: 25). 4.21 This is not true across the board. Both technical studies and art historical/archaeological analyses of ceramics have been undertaken, particularly in the last decade, but primarily for periods before and after the Middle Bronze Age.

REFERENCES Badalyan, Ruben S. and Pavel S. Avetisyan. 2007. Bronze and Early Iron Age Archaeological Sites in Armenia I; Mt. Aragats and its Surrounding Region. BAR International



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Series 1697. Oxford: Archaeopress. Badalyan, Ruben S. and Adam T. Smith 2017. The Kurgans of Gegharot: A Preliminary Report on the Results of the 2013–14 Excavations of Project ArAGATS. In Bridging Times and Spaces: Papers in Ancient Near Eastern, Mediterranean and Armenian Studies: Honouring Gregory E. Areshian on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, 11–28. Oxford: Archaeopress Archaeology. Badalyan, Ruben S., Adam T. Smith, and Lori Khatchadourian. 2010. Project ArAGATS: 10 Years of Investigations into Bronze and Iron Age Sites in the Tsaghkahovit Plain, Republic of Armenia. TÜBA-AR 13: 263–276. Badalyan, Ruben, Adam T. Smith, Ian Lindsay, Lori Khatchadourian, and Pavel Avetisyan, with appendices by Belinda Monahan and Roman Avetisyan. 2008. Village, Fortress, and Town in Bronze and Iron Age Southern Caucasia: A Preliminary Report on the 2003–2006 Investigations of Project ArAGATS on the Tsaghkahovit Plain, Republic of Armenia. Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran und Turan 40: 45–105. Bendukidze, Oleg. 2010. The Jinisi Horse: And Some Thoughts on the Role of the Onager in the Bronze Age. In Rescue Archaeology in Georgia: the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan South Caucasian Pipelines, ed. Gela Gamkrelidze, 266–274. Tbilisi: Georgian National Museum. Bryson, Norman. 1992. Art in Context. In Studies in Historical Change, ed. Ralph Cohen, 18–42. Charlottesville: University of Virginia. Burney, Charles and David Marshall Lang. 1971. The Peoples of the Hills: Ancient Ararat and Caucasus. New York: Praeger Publishers. Devedjian, Seda Grantovna. 2006. Lori Berd II (Bronze Moyen). Yerevan: Editions “Guitoutiun” National Academy of Sciences, Republic of Armenia. Devedzhian, Seda Grantovna. 1981. Lori-Berd 1: Rezul’taty Raskopok 1969–1973 gg. Yerevan: Akademia Nauk Armianskoi SSSR, Institut Arkheologii I Ethnografii. Edwards, Michael R. 1981. The Pottery of Haftavan VIB (Urmia Ware). Iran 19: 101–140. Edwards, Michael R. 1983. Excavations in Azerbaijan (North-Western Iran) I. Haftavan, Period VI. BAR International Series 182. Oxford: B.A.R. Guliyev, Farhad E. 2008. Barrows with Horse Burials in Azerbaijan [in Azerbaijani with Russian and English summaries]. Baku: Elm. Hodder, Ian. 1989. Writing Archaeology: Site Reports in Context. Antiquity 63.239: 268–274. Hodder, Ian. 1997. Always Momentary, Fluid and Flexible: Towards a Reflexive Excavation Methodology. Antiquity 71.273: 691–700. Koridze, D. 1955. Tbilisis Arkeologiuri Dzeglebi (Tbilisi Archaeological Sites) 1. Tbilisi.

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Kuftin, Boris A. 1941. Arkheologicheskiye Raskopki v Trialeti (Archaeological Excavations at Trialeti). Tbilisi: Akademii Nauk Gruzinskoi SSSR. Kushnareva, Karine Khristoforovna. 1997. The Southern Caucasus in Prehistory: Stages of Cultural and Socioeconomic Development from the Eighth to the Second Millennium B.C. Trans. H. N. Michael. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Lucas, Gavin. 2001. Critical Approaches to Fieldwork: Contemporary and Historical Archaeological Practice. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Manaseryan, Ninna H. 2006. The Stature of Horses in Armenian Bronze and Early Iron Age Burials. In Horses and Humans: The Evolution of Human-Equine Relationships, ed. Sandra L Olsen, Susan Grant, Alice M. Choyke, and László Bartosiewicz, 271–274. BAR International Series 1560. Oxford: Archaeopress. Manaseryan, Ninna H. 2010. The Birds and Animals in Ancient Armenian Art. In Anthropological Approaches to Zooarchaeology: Colonialism, Complexity and Animal Transformation, ed. Douglas V. Campana, Pamela Crabtree, Susan D. deFrance, Justin Lev-Tov, and Alice M. Choyke, 233–236. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Manaseryan, Ninna H., M.G. Ghasabian, and Hakob E. Simonyan. 2011. Drawing with Zoomorphic Themes on Ceramic Vessels from the Burial no. 7 of the Necropolis at Nerkin Naver Belonging to the Bronze Age (XIX–XVIII Century BC) [in Russian]. In Proceedings of the International Conference Biological Diversity and Conservation: Problems of the Fauna of the Caucasus, 192–195. Yerevan: Asogik. McHugh, Feldore. 1999. Theoretical and Quantitative Approaches to the Study of Mortuary Practice. BAR International Series 785. Oxford: Archaeopress. Monahan, Belinda H. 2007. Nomadism in the Early Bronze Age Southern Caucasus: the faunal perspective. In Social orders and social landscape: proceedings of the 2nd University of Chicago Conference of Eurasian Archaeology, ed. Laura M. Popova, Charles W. Hartley, and Adam T. Smith, 379–392. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Monahan, Belinda H. 2008. The Faunal Remains. Appendix 1, in Village, Fortress, and Town in Bronze and Iron Age Southern Caucasia by Ruben Badalyan, Adam T. Smith, Ian Lindsay, Lori Khatchadourian and Pavel Avetisyan. Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran und Turan 40: 90–97. Monahan, Belinda H. 2015. Beastly Goods: Pastoral Production in the Late Bronze Age Tsaghkahovit Plain. In The Archaeology of Power and Politics in Eurasia: Regimes and Revolutions, ed. Charles. W. Hartley, G. Bike Yazıcıoğlu, Adam T. Smith, 337– 347. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Narimanishvili, Goderdzi. 2010. Trialeti in the 15th and 14th centuries BC. In Rescue



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Archaeology in Georgia: The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan and South Caucasian Pipelines, ed. Gela Gamkrelidze, 312–369. Tbilisi: Georgian National Museum. Parker Pearson, Mike. 2000. The Archaeology of Death and Burial. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Piggott, Stuart. 1974. Chariots in the Caucasus and in China. Antiquity 48.189: 16–24. Pittman, Holly. 1996. Constructing Context: The Gebel el-Arak Knife: Greater Mesopotamian and Egyptian Interaction in the Late Fourth Millennium B.C.E. In The Study of the Ancient Near East in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jerrold S. Cooper and Glenn M. Schwartz, 9–32. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns Pogrebova, Maria. 2003. The Emergence of Chariots and Riding in the South Caucasus. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 22.4: 397–409. Rubinson, Karen S. 2006. Over the Mountains and Through the Grass: Visual Information as ‘Text’ for the ‘Textless’. In Beyond the Steppe and the Sown: Proceedings of the 2002 University of Chicago Conference on Eurasian Archaeology, ed. David L. Peterson, Laura M. Popova, Adam T. Smith, 247–267. Colloquia Pontica 13. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Simonyan, Hakob, ed. 2013. Archaeological Heritage of Armenia. Yerevan: Hushardzan. Simonyan, Hakob and Ninna Manaseryan. 2013. Royal Tombs with Horse Sacrifices in Nerkin Naver, Armenia (Middle Bronze Age). In Archaeozoology of the Near East X: Proceedings of the Tenth International Symposium on the Archaeozoology of South-Western Asia and Adjacent Areas, ed. Bea De Cupere, Veerle Linsecee, and Sheila Hamilton-Dyer, 173–208. Ancient Near Eastern Studies Supplement 44. Leuven: Peeters. Smith, Adam T., Ruben S. Badalyan, Pavel Avetisyan, Alan Greene, and Leah Minc. 2009. The Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies, Volume 1. The Foundations of Research and Regional Survey in the Tsaghkahovit Plain, Armenia. Oriental Institute Publications 134. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Uerpmann, Margarethe and Hans-Peter Uerpmann. 2010. Zug- und Lasttiere szwischen Majkop und Trialeti. In Von Majkop bis Trialeti: Gewinnung und Verbreitung von Metallen und Obsidian in Kaukasien im 4-2. Jt. V. Chr., ed. Svend Hansen, Andreas Hauptmann, Ingo Motzenbäcker, and Ernst Pernicka, 237–251. Bonn: Dr. Rudolf Habelt GmbH. Vila, Emmanuelle. 2001. Comparaison entre les données ostéologiques de Transcaucasie et de ses abords méridionaux du Néolithique final au Bronze ancien. In Beiträge zur Vorderasiatischen Archäologie: Winfried Orthmann gewidmet, ed. Jan-Waalke Meyer, Mirko Novák, and Alexander Pruss, 464–477. Frankfurt am Main: Johann

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Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Archäologisches Institut. Zhorzhikashvili, L. and E. Gogadze. 1974. Pamyatniki Trialeti epokhi rannei I Srednei Bronzy (raskopki 1936–40, 1947–48 gg.) (Monuments of Early and Middle Bronze Age Trialeti [excavations of 1936–40, 1947–48]). Tbilisi: Metsniereba.

5 To Be or Not to Be (Divine): The Achaemenid King and Essential Ambiguity in Image, Text, and Historical Context 1

Matt Waters Keywords: Darius I; Cyrus; ideology; Ashurnasirpal II; divinity; ambiguity; kingship; Behistun; Pasargadae; winged disk; Herodotus

INTRODUCTION

T

he dual natures of king and kingship, as situated in the human as well as in the divine realms, remain subjects of ongoing discussion in the context of the ancient Near East and elsewhere (e.g., Frankfort 1948; Kantorowicz 1957; Klein 2006; Ornan 2007; Suter 2007; and contributions in Brisch 2008; Hill et al. 2013). The discussion is unlikely to achieve any absolute resolution, as the very nature of the evidence and its interpretation involves a high degree of subjective ambivalence, inevitable in dealing with issues of ambiguity. Despite this, the arc of Mesopotamian history provides several, if sporadic, episodes of royal divinization or metaphorical (at least) identification of kings with divine essence. Similar if more subtle instances may be traced in the Achaemenid Period, especially in the reign of Darius I, 522–486 BCE (for a companion study, see Waters: forthcoming; cf. Almagor 2016). This chapter concerns itself with ideological expressions or, better, intimations of royal divinity during the Achaemenid Period (559–330 BCE). It is a foray into not only art historical matters but also subjects that have their own well-developed methodologies beyond their application in Near Eastern studies, particularly ideology and ambiguity (e.g., Eagleton 1991; Kaplan and Kris 1948; Zeki 2004). It takes as its case study a series of deliberately ambiguous portrayals of the Achaemenid king, primarily from the

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reign of Darius I, that blur the already vague line between king and god, and it briefly considers the impetus and implications for these. The nature of the Achaemenid king’s essence could be—and arguably was—enhanced by deliberately ambiguous portrayals of him along the human-divine spectrum: these portrayals did not always occupy the same position along this spectrum, but they (not infrequently) situated him as closer to the divine. In other words, intentionally applied and deliberately evoked ambiguity in the king’s portrayals further blurred an already nebulous line between king and god. While such experimentation with the divine elements of king and kingship was not explicitly codified into Achaemenid ideology—and while it was by no means a formal part of that ideology—there are intimations, primarily expressed in works of visual art, of the Achaemenid king’s essence as something more than human, and these are prominent enough to be more than a curiosity. Such intimations of the Achaemenid king’s divine essence never moved beyond the suggestive: there is nothing in the Achaemenid model of kingship akin to the outright divinization of a few earlier rulers in Mesopotamia or to the explicitly divine Egyptian pharaohs (see below). The Achaemenid king’s precise status vis-à-vis the divine, and the reasons for the at times ambiguous representation of his essence, are even more difficult to discern. The concern in this chapter, consequently, is to articulate and identify examples of the phenomenon itself. Possible motivations behind the phenomenon, whether associated with the sacral functions of kingship, purposes of legitimization, extensions of an individual king’s personality, or other factors, are briefly considered below but are primarily topics for future study. The art historian Irene Winter (2008: 88), discussing specifically Mesopotamian kingship, has articulated a distinction between the exercise of sacral kingship on the one hand and the few outright expressions of divine kingship within Mesopotamian history on the other. Such a distinction is to be considered for each individual king, in association with a full consideration of the historical context of his reign. When certain kings are represented in closer ontological proximity to the gods than seems the norm, a historical contextualization often reveals fraught contemporaneous circumstances: extreme situations may have been one factor driving a foregrounding of the divine to the forefront of ideological expression (cf. Pongratz-Leisten 2015: ch. 3 for a long-term historical overview in Assyrian contexts). For the Achaemenid Period, the accession of the usurper Darius I in the war-torn year of



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522 is one such fraught circumstance. In light of the Achaemenids’ rich debt to earlier Assyrian modes of kingship and ideology, several analogs of the latter will be referenced not only as illustrative but also as potential models.

GLORIFIED KING IN INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL CONTEXTS The Official Line A trite but foundational reference point for the portrayal of Achaemenid kingship is that the king is inevitably set apart, glorified, in some way. In images he is the largest, the central, or in some other way rendered a, even if not the, focal point of any composition (see Fig. 5.5). He is the focus in textual references as well, the fulcrum around which the message is built: he is literally the ego, the I reiterated time and again. Achaemenid royal inscriptions especially emphasize the centrality of the king, sometimes in unique ways, and at other times drawing on centuries of Assyrian, Babylonian, and Elamite traditions. The following examples illustrate some of the main themes evident in a variety of formulations in Achaemenid royal inscriptions, disseminated—and not only by monumental inscriptions in cuneiform scripts—as the “official line” throughout the empire (translations slightly modified, after Kuhrt 2007). (1) The re-establishment, or re-creation, of order from chaos The kingdom which had been taken away from our family, I re-established it, I put it back in its place. In accordance with what had been done previously, I (re-)built the cult-centers that Gaumata the magus had destroyed.…In accordance with what had been done previously, I restored what had been taken away. (DB §14) Darius the King proclaims: Much had been done wrong that I put right; the lands were in turmoil, one battling the other. That which I have done, all that I did by the favor of Auramazda, that one no longer battles the other, each one is in its place. (DSe §4) (2) Title and lineage I am Darius the great king, king of kings, king of countries containing all kinds of men, king in this great earth far and wide, son of Hystaspes,

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an Achaemenid, a Persian, son of a Persian, an Iranian, having Iranian lineage. (DNa §2) (3) Divine favor and selection A great god is Auramazda, who created this excellence that one sees, who created happiness for man, who bestowed wisdom and ability upon Darius the King (DNb §1) At no point in the official line disseminated by Achaemenid royal inscriptions is royal legitimacy explicitly predicated on the king’s divinity. Divine favor conjoined with royal lineage and—at least as explicit in a few inscriptions—military success represent traditional markers of right-torule. There is no Achaemenid “god-king” here.

External Context: Negative Glorification in Greek Sources If no Achaemenid “god-king” existed in official Achaemenid sources, such a portrayal did nevertheless exist, beyond the official Achaemenid line and beyond the expected place (Egypt). An extreme (and typically negative) representation of the king as divine, or the king aspiring to divine status, is often evident in Greek literature, not least in the works of the fifth century BCE historian Herodotus, who is our main source for the early Achaemenids. These portrayals—purposely exaggerated—admittedly tell us a lot more about Greek viewpoints than they do about Persian ideological messaging. The king-god conjunction in Greek literature is characterized by exceptional hubris. While the goal of such Greek portrayals is quite different than the official, ideological expressions of Achaemenid kingship, a fundamental question remains: to what extent are the Greek sources actually informed, directly or indirectly, by Achaemenid ideological messaging? While the precise degree of influence is debated, the phenomenon itself is well established (e.g., Harrison 2011, 2015). Instances of “negative glorification” in the Greek sources are legion. These are cases in which the Persian kings are portrayed as more than human but in a distinctly negative way: arrogating powers and prerogatives that belong exclusively to the gods. These include transgressions against the natural world, and particularly against bodies of water, a well-studied Herodotean motif: examples include descriptions of Cyrus the Great (559– 530 BCE) splitting the Diyala River into 360 channels, his diversion of the Euphrates to take Babylon, and his subjugation (the verb used is ζευγνύναι,



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“to yoke”) of the Araxes; of Darius I bridging the Bosporus; and of Xerxes (486–465 BCE) bridging and punishing the Hellespont. In these portrayals, the Achaemenid kings assume the divine prerogatives of redistributing space and reconfiguring the order of the natural world (Darbo-Peschanski 2013: 99–100). Darius himself, indeed, might proclaim that he undertook these actions as an agent of, or perhaps (for purposes of discussion herein) even a manifestation of, the creator god, Auramazda. Darius commemorated his pontoon bridge with inscriptions, Herodotus (4.87) tells us, which have not been recovered. From a Persian perspective, these actions were not testimony to hubris but practical monuments to the king’s ingenuity, his command of vast resources, and his might, attributes that placed him beyond the realm of ordinary human and—where else to go?—within the sphere of the implicitly divine. To the Greeks, however, the Persian kings were (in English idiom) “playing god,” and the Greek literary portrayals play with that notion regardless of the intent of the Persian messaging. It is notable that Herodotus also recounts instances in which a direct equivalence is made between the Achaemenid king and the divine: a witness to the Hellespont crossing addressed Xerxes outright as Zeus (7.56.2), and Cyrus has a dream of Darius as the winged disk—an enormously important symbol in Achaemenid ideology, and one arguably associated with Auramazda (see below)—with one wing stretching over Asia and the other over Europe (1.209).

Models of Kingship from Mesopotamian Contexts A clear distinction between king and god in Mesopotamian traditions has been accepted as a given for a long time: this is despite (or perhaps because of ) the existence of a handful of exceptions in which that distinction was blurred in the late third and early second millennia BCE. Naram-Sin of Akkad (ca. 2260–2223 BCE) is the most prominent of these exceptions. His divinity was clearly expressed both in image, on his famous victory stele from Sippar (discovered by archaeologists in Susa, where it had been taken by the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte I), and in text, as expressed in an inscription from Bassetki in northern Mesopotamia: Because he protected the foundations of his city from danger, the citizens of his city requested from Ishtar in Eanna, Enlil in Nippur, Dagan in Tuttul, Ninhursag in Kish, Ea in Eridu, Sin in Ur, Shamash in Sippar, and

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Through a combination of divine accoutrements, divine determinative, and literal temple and cult, Naram-Sin obscured the line between king and god. By the early second millennium BCE, that line is generally understood as having been re-established. Thereafter, explicit claims of divinity of the sort put forth by Naram-Sin are sporadic at best, with scattered evidence for such from the Ur III Period (ca. 2112–2004 BCE), Old Babylonian Period (ca. 2000–1600 BCE), and contemporaneous Shimashkian Elam. The phenomenon of divine kingship in Mesopotamia had, in other words, a “short shelf life” (Michalowski, 2008: 41; see also Cooper 2008). From the Middle Assyrian Period (ca. 1365–1056 BCE) onward, while the king-god conjunction manifests in different forms, it (usually) manifests in a more subtle and varied form than it took during the reign of Naram-Sin. One such nuance is the differentiation established between the cult of the king and cult of the king’s (divine) statue; such a differentiation may be considered analogous to the Hellenistic world’s isotheoi timai, the “equal to divine” honors (rather than divine honors) bestowed on Hellenistic kings (Holloway 2002: 180–93, also ch. 2 [for the divinization of battle standards]). During the Neo-Assyrian Period (911–612 BCE) in Mesopotamia, numerous intimations of the king’s divine essence are known, with varying interpretations as to the ramifications for the king’s status. Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BCE) was a forerunner in this context, as he was in many other respects pertaining to the developing Assyrian ideology. His famous stele and accompanying altar from Nimrud (Fig. 5.1) emphasized, depending on one’s interpretation, the king as intermediary with the divine—or the king as operative in both the human and divine spheres with his image functioning, in the words of Peter Machinist (2006: 182), both as votive and venerated (cf. Radner 2010 and Liverani 2017: chs. 1–2). Holloway (2002: 181–82), in his thorough study on Assyrian kingship, strictly demarcates king and god but simultaneously notes their “unique proximity” and, using even more evocative phrasing, describes the Assyrian king as having “closer physical and ontological proximity to the gods than any other mortals.” Not infrequently, there is also a degree of literal equivalency between king and god in the extant sources: the king is variously described as having been created of divine material, as the offspring of Ishtar, as elevated to a rank just below that of the



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5.1 Drawing of Stele and Altar of Ashurnasirpal II from Nimrud (Layard 1853: pl. 4). Currently in the British Museum (BM 118805)

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warrior god Ninurta, and as the image of the great god Enlil and/or Marduk (Machinist 2006). These last descriptors are unambiguous: if there is inconsistency in modern assessments of them, it is because there is inconsistency in the ancient corpus, wherein different facets of the king and kingship were apparently accorded—or demanded—a divine aspect or divine respect. To be a complete being, and to fulfill all his various roles, it was necessary for the Neo-Assyrian king to be something more than human. Assyrian terminology and several specific features of pictorial representations in Mesopotamia reinforced aspects of the royal-divine relationship. Examples include the terms ṣalmu, an image that is sometimes described as participating in the essence of the divine; tamšīlu, the semblance of the god, a word that carries connotations of shared physical and possibly other properties; and muššulu, “mirror,” which may be taken to mean mirroring the god in the king’s body and/or the mirroring of the royal image (see, inter alia, Westenholz 2000: 110–11; Machinist 2006: 162, 175; Winter 2008: 85–88; Frahm 2013: 113; and cf. Liverani 2017: 11). The so-called mirroring or, perhaps better, “doubling” of the king’s image continues to draw scholarly attention. The most frequently cited Assyrian example is an orthostat relief from the reign of Ashurnasirpal II found at the Northwest Palace of Nimrud (Fig. 5.2). This portrays the socalled Sacred Tree surmounted by a winged disk with figure (presumably the god Ashur) and flanked on either side by an image of the king, each flanked in turn by a guardian genius. The royal doubling is understood not only as relaying the king’s communication with the divine but also as signaling his activity in and belonging to the divine sphere—at least for certain functions of the office of kingship. The ambiguity of the king’s status, if not his essence, in this and other representations and descriptors seems to have been deliberate, potentially intended and understood as an actualization of the textual descriptions of literal divinity. Recognition of this ambiguity would, of course, depend on the viewer’s cultural knowledge and/or iconic literacy. The question remains, however: are we dealing with a metaphor, or something more? How are we to—and, for that matter, how did the ancient audience— process seemingly contradictory representations? In other words, how did they deal with ambiguous or directly contradictory messages? Functioning as a god’s main representative (e.g., a chief priest, šangu) and primary conduit of divine will is not the same thing as partaking in that god’s literal

5.2 Orthostat Relief of Ashurnasirpal II (BM 124531), Northwest Palace at Nimrud, Room B Panel 23. Courtesy Trustees of the British Museum

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essence or being an offspring of the divine, engendered by and of the same substance as the gods themselves. One way to reconcile such questions is to emphasize that these alternate representations were not necessarily eitheror propositions.

CASE STUDY: DARIUS I AND IMAGES OF INTENTIONAL AMBIGUITY Doubled and Mirror Images of the Achaemenid King

5.3 Composite line drawing from impressions of PFS 11*. Courtesy of M.B. Garrison, M.C. Root, and the Persepolis Seal Project

A close parallel in conceptualization and symmetrical composition to Ashurnasirpal’s orthostat relief from Nimrud (Fig. 5.2) appears on Persepolis Fortification Seal PFS 11* (Fig. 5.3), a clearly Assyrianizing cylinder seal (ca. 500 BCE) that orients the questions posed above to specifically Achaemenid royal representation. The central scene of PFS 11* portrays doubled figures, each wearing a crown and the Persian court robe, on either side of a tower-like structure. The central scene of king-structure-king is framed by date palms, whose symmetry (mirror or axial) cannot be determined. A trilingual royal-name inscription occurs only once in the actual scene, but in theory could also be doubled by an extended roll of the cylinder seal (Fig. 5.3), thus serving to frame the whole of the tableau (Garrison 2011: 63–65, 2017: 349–66).



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5.4 Royal Hero in Combat with Hybrid Creature from Palace of Darius: South Doorway, West Wall, South and North Jambs (Schmitt 1953: pl. 145)

Another manifestation of such mirroring or doubling occurs with the king’s image at Persepolis (Fig. 5.4): here, the king as royal hero grappling with a monstrous figure occupies facing doorjambs of the Palace of Darius from the late sixth century BCE. The doubling of the king’s image heightens the numinous quality of the representation. Almost everything about the king in Achaemenid imagery—even the Persepolis terrace itself—involves elevation, which also imbues the elevated image or figure with a numinous quality. Margaret Cool Root (2013: 60) has posited a “concerted divine nature for the Achaemenid king” based on assessment of the evidence that is “increasingly revealing a mirroring between images of the royal person and images of Auramazda” (see also Garrison 2011: 63 citing Root 1979: 77–82). A key component of such panoptic viewing is the composite ambiguity—deliberately evoked—of the king’s status, an actualizing component of the king in the divine sphere. One caveat must be emphasized here: a fundamental part of the issues under discussion here is methodological or, even more to the point, definitional. How we define a god, or how we demarcate different levels or hierarchy of divinity, impacts both approach and interpretation (e.g., Sonik 2015: 157).

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The Winged Disk In approaching the question of whether and to what extent intentional ambiguity was a part of Darius I’s ideological messaging, it is necessary to discuss the king’s relationship with the winged disk, especially as rendered in monumental sculpture. The winged disk is a symbol with a long history in the ancient Near East, one much older than the Achaemenid Period and one subject to intense scrutiny (e.g., Ornan 2005). The first extant Achaemenid manifestation of it appears on the Behistun relief (Fig. 5.5), though it subsequently becomes common in both monumental and miniature (glyptic) contexts. In Achaemenid glyptic contexts, the winged disk appears both with and without a figure inside the disk—and with the figure shown at different scales. The debate over who or what the figure within the Achaemenid winged disk was meant to represent shows little sign of abating. With regard to its deployment at Behistun, Naqsh-i Rustam, and on related court-style sealings, I follow the interpretation that the figure is the creator god Auramazda. Other interpretations for the figure have been proposed, including the anachronistic but clearly related concepts of fravashi, the spirit of the king, and the Avestan xvarnah, the king’s glory (inter alia Gnoli 1999; Battesti 2011). For the specific purposes of this discussion, which examines the Achaemenid king-god dynamic, the figure in the winged disk is interpreted as Auramazda. That there is a connection—perhaps even “identification”—of Darius with Auramazda in these instances (e.g., Fig. 5.4) has been observed by Mark Garrison (2009: 38/79): “It cannot have escaped the planners (nor, one assumes, troubled them) that many viewers of, e.g., the reliefs at Behistun and Naqsh-i Rustam might have made the logical (visual) inference that Darius and the figure in the winged disk were one and the same.” Garrison (2011: 65) notes, further, “that emblematic imagery [sc. of the royal figure] consistently stresses/articulates an ideology of kingship that seeks to blur the distinction between the king and the numinous/divine.” In addition to the physical resemblance between king (Darius) and god (Auramazda), the reciprocating gestures also link the two main figures (Fig. 5.5), a point elucidated further below. A curious representation from the fourth century BCE is also worth mentioning here: it appears on a Samarian(?) coin and seems to be a portrayal of the Achaemenid king himself as the winged disk, shown underneath an additional winged disk (Fig. 5.6). This is a remarkable, if not



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5.5 Drawing of Behistun Relief (King and Campbell 1907: pl. XIII)

unique, portrayal: it either depicts “the king with cosmic symbols implying his superhuman, nearly divine status, or it is a representation of a god wearing the jagged crown; in either case, the distinction between the human and divine spheres is blurred” (Gitler 2011: 112–13; Meshorer and Qedar 1999: 50–53). It recalls the vision of Darius as winged disk that was dreamt by Cyrus and reported by Herodotus (1.209), and it raises questions about the degree to which such ambiguous imagery was disseminated, the modes of its dissemination, and its impact during the Achaemenid Period. While these questions cannot currently be answered with any degree of certainty, it at least seems clear that the Samarian(?) coin and the description recorded by Herodotus were not isolated examples of this phenomenon. 5.6 Early Fourth Century BCE Coin of Samarian(?) Issue, obverse (Drawing from Meshorer and Qedar 1999: IC-2, p. 125 and pl. 31; used with permission of publisher; redrawn by Ardeth Anderson)

The Eight-Pointed Star At Behistun, the crowns of Darius and Auramazda, though clearly of different types, share a common symbol: an eight-pointed star. Auramazda’s tall headdress is wrapped

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by bull horns topped by an encircled eight-pointed star, specifically inserted (or perhaps modified) after the fact by a plug, a notable feature in its own right. The symbols on Darius’ crown have been re-examined by Root (2013: 37–42), using George Cameron’s 1948 squeezes of the relief, and she discerned the presence not of rosettes, as has been often assumed, but of a “chain of encircled 8-pointed stars.” The eight-pointed star symbol, a longstanding marker of divinity—appearing in the earliest Mesopotamian sculpture as well as, of course, among the earliest cuneiform signs (such as the dingir determinative, the cuneiform sign marking divinity)—is often but not exclusively associated with the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar.

5.7 Reconstruction of a Stele from Babylon with Babylonian version of Darius I’s Behistun Relief and Inscription (Drawing by Tessa Rickards, used with permission of illustrator)



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Darius I appreciated the symbol, as is evident from the surviving relief fragments of a free-standing stele from Babylon, a condensed version of the Behistun relief and inscription, that was located along the Sacred Way (Fig. 5.7) (Seidl 1999a, 1999b). The eight-pointed star appears here as the one extant divine symbol in the field facing the king; this is the same star that appears on Auramazda’s and Darius’ crowns at Behistun. What did Darius intend by his depiction of this symbol? Was it meant to emphasize the connection or, on a deeper level, to foster a subtle identification with divinity? The implicit connections—which on the Behistun relief include the similar gesture, visage, and divine symbol borne by both Darius and Auramazda—were all deliberate and purposeful rather than coincidental, reinforcing the identification of king with god. The textual record admittedly contains no explicit identification of Darius as divine but the extant images, which more easily express subjective possibilities, leave it up to the viewer to make (or not) a leap from the king as divine representative on earth to the king as a manifestation of the divine itself. A subtle (or, rather, deliberately ambiguous) fostering of the idea of the king’s divine connection and, in at least some instances, sharing in the divine essence was no doubt a useful tool that—if not formally applicable in or explicable following the official Achaemenid line—may yet have encouraged other manifestations of it.

A View from the Southwest: The Pharaoh in Egypt In considering the relationship between Achaemenid king and god, it may be useful to look further to the southwest and take a cue from Egyptological studies: to focus on the office of kingship rather than any individual king. In Egypt, the Persian king was recognized as manifestly divine—or, more precisely, the office of kingship (the king as pharaoh) was at least recognized as divine. In Egypt, this recognition was culturally, cultically, and politically determined; still, demarcating the human from the divine in the person of the pharaoh required some finesse. In Egypt, kingship was: A divine institution, in a way itself a god, or at least an image of the divine and capable of becoming its manifestation; each incumbent, each pharaoh, is fundamentally a human being, subject to humankind’s limitations. When the king took part in the roles of his office, especially in rituals and ceremonies, his being became suffused with the same divinity manifest in his office and the gods themselves.…pharaoh would

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The Egyptian model of kingship offered useful object lessons to Darius in the last years of his predecessor Cambyses’ (530–522 BCE) reign, just before he had to come to terms with (and to present the terms of ) his own kingship. He did so in the typically Egyptian manner at Suez, Hibis in the Kharga Oasis of Egypt (see Davies 1953: 31, pl. 58; cf. Lloyd 2007: 107–11), as well as in other places in Egypt. It is, moreover, hard to believe that the Achaemenids compartmentalized various subject traditions, such as that of Egypt, exclusively within their own contexts. There were certainly times and places (such as the place of origin) where such compartmentalization may have been necessary but, from a broader view, the evidence points otherwise. The Achaemenids developed an ideology of a universal empire based on the centrality of the king: expressions of this ideology would have been balanced both locally and globally.

The Guardian Genius from Pasargadae It is important, prior to leaving this discussion of ambiguous images, to consider what is perhaps one of the most significant and enigmatic pieces of evidence from the early Achaemenid Period: the guardian genius from Pasargadae (Fig. 5.8). Only a single portrayal of this genius (out of an original four or even more) survives from the eastern door jamb of the northeast doorway of Gate R at Pasargadae (Stronach 1978: 44–50). This figure, while well published and frequently cited, remains mysterious: who and what is the guardian figure meant to represent? Integrating, as it does, Assyrian elements (the wings) with an Elamite robe and hairstyle and an Egyptian crown, the genius is a hybrid figure, an internationalizing construct of a sort otherwise not extensively known (but note the similar winged atlantid figure of the sealing on BM 108963 [see Collon 2005: 81; Garrison et al. 2018: 11]). If it was intended as an amalgam of a young empire, the fact that similar representations are not widely known is striking: is the dearth of similar imagery an accident of archaeological preservation or was the figure itself an experiment that failed to take elsewhere? Or was the figure itself representative of something unique to Cyrus or to his capital, Pasargadae? The dating of the genius figure also remains a subject of debate: whether one assigns it to the reign of Cyrus,



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5.8 Drawing of Winged Genius, Gate R, Pasargadae (Stronach 1978: 49, fig. 25, courtesy David Stronach)

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Cambyses, Bardiya (during his six-month rule in 522 BCE), or Darius has major ramifications for its interpretation. The inscription above the figure, as it was recorded by various nineteenth century travelers, is attributed, with few exceptions, to the reign of Darius; it is labeled CMa (occasionally DMa) by modern scholars and reads “I am Cyrus the king, an Achaemenid.” CMa is typically understood in the context of Darius’ not-so-subtle attempts to link himself to the family of Cyrus the Great—Darius was, after all, a usurper—or, more accurately, to co-opt Cyrus into Darius’ own family. It is an odd inscription in a number of ways beyond its placement: scholars have (rightly) hesitated to characterize it as a label for the genius figure shown, particularly since the same inscription, in five extant and several additional presumed copies, was found elsewhere at Pasargadae. Putting aside the issues pertaining to the inscription CMa, one cannot help but wonder to what extent the genius figure’s placement at Gate R was deliberately suggestive, if not explicitly significant or signifying. Root’s (1979: 303) seminal assessment of its possibilities—whether as a representation of “a syncretic deity, some metaphorical vision of an abstract idea of imperial domain, or a vision of Cyrus himself in a mythical aspect of ideal kingship”—still resonates. The functioning of the figure as a “mythologized Cyrus” is, I would argue, a distinct possibility, not just from the perspective of its placement at the gate or of cult offered to deceased kings but as a literally larger-than-life representation of an Achaemenid king as something more akin to the divine than to the human. If Darius even briefly experimented with a blurring of the line dividing king and god, he could do worse than lionizing his famed predecessor, with whom he claimed familial kinship. This interpretation is admittedly speculative, though it is notable the Pasargadae figure uses a similar hand gesture as Darius does in his physical address to Auramazda (and vice versa) at Behistun and Naqsh-i-Rustam. This seems unlikely to be a coincidence, regardless of whether the Pasargarade genius was commissioned by Darius or whether Darius repurposed and adopted the gesture for his own primary relief sculptures at Behistun and Naqsh-i Rustam. Though the full significance of any shared symbolism among these images remains to be discerned, it is possible that the genius (alongside the other imagery discussed in this chapter) represents yet another instance of a deliberately evoked ambiguity mediating the space—and at times when there was no



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space—between royal and divine (see Sonik 2015: 158 on Old Babylonian examples of behavioral anthropomorphism).

CONCLUSION: PICTORIAL AMBIGUITY AND THE ACHAEMENID KING-GOD DIVIDE While Darius made no explicit claims to divinity in text, images could be used to portray—or at least suggest—things that texts could not, or should not, explicitly express. The evidence for intentional ambiguity in the royal imagery of the Achaemenid Empire, and particularly in the images of Darius I, which intimated—or at minimum left open the possibility of the viewer’s interpretation of—(limited) divine kingship, is ultimately very suggestive but not absolutely definitive. In dealing with the topic of ambiguity, how could it be otherwise? NOTES:

5.1 This chapter is offered in appreciation and in gratitude to Professor Holly Pittman for her efforts in guiding a historian and philologist to remain cognizant of the power of the image, even while immersed in texts. Thanks are due to Karen Sonik for her editorial work and suggestions to improve the article.

ABBREVIATIONS CMa = Cyrus, Murghab (i.e., Pasargadae), inscription a DB = Darius, Bisitun DSe = Darius I, Susa, inscription e RIM = Frayne, 1993

REFERENCES Almagor, Erran. 2016. The Political and the Divine in Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions. In Ancient Historiography on War and Empire, ed. Timothy Howe, Sabine Müller, and Richard Stoneman, 26–54. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Battesti, Teresa. 2011. Lumière de glorie et rouyauté en Iran. In Regalia: Emblèmes et rites du pouvoir, ed. Bernard Dupaigne et Yves Vadé, 165–186. Paris: L’Harmattan. Brisch, Nicole, ed. 2008. Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond. Chicago: Oriental Institute. Cooper, Jerrold S. 2008. Divine Kingship in Mesopotamia: A Fleeting Phenomenon.

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In Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond, ed. Nicole Brisch, 261–266. Chicago: Oriental Institute. Collon, Dominique. 2005. Addendum. In Catalogue of the Western Asiatic Seals in the British Museum. V.1, Pt. 6: Cylinder Seals: Pre-Achaemenid and Achaemenid Periods by Parvine H. Merrillees, 81. London: Trustees of the British Museum. Darbo-Peschanski, Catherine. 2013. Herodotus and historia. In Herodotus: Vol. 2: Herodotus and the World, ed. Rosario Vignolo Munson, 78–105. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, Norman de Garis. 1953. The Temple of Hibis in El Khargeh Oasis, Part III: The Decoration. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Eagleton, Terry. 1991. Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso. Frahm, Eckhart. 2013. Rising Suns and Falling Stars: Assyrian Kings and the Cosmos. In Experiencing Power, Generating Authority: Cosmos, Politics, and the Ideology of Kingship in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, ed. Jane Hill, Philip Jones, and Antonio Morales, 97–120. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Frankfort, Henri. 1948. Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society & Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frayne, Douglas. 1993. Sargonic and Gutian Periods (2334–2113 BC). Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Early Periods 2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Garrison, Mark B. 2009. Visual Representation of the Divine and Numinous in Early Achaemenid Iran: Old Problems, New Directions. In Iconography of Deities and Demons: Electronic Pre-Publication, IDD web site: http://www.religionswissenschaft.unizh.ch/idd. Garrison, Mark B. 2011. By the Favor of Auramazdā: Kingship and the Divine in the Early Achaemenid Period. In More than Men, Less than Gods: Studies on Royal Cult and Imperial Worship. Studies on Royal Cult and Imperial Worship. Proceedings of the international colloquium organized by the Belgian school at Athens (November 1–2, 2007), ed. Panagiotis P. Iossif, Andrzej S. Chankowski, and Catherine C. Lorber, 15–105. Leuven: Peeters. Garrison, Mark B. 2017. The Ritual Landscape at Persepolis: Glyptic Imagery from the Persepolis Fortification and Treasury Archives. Chicago: Oriental Institute. Garrison, Mark B., Charles E. Jones, and Matthew W. Stolper. 2018. Achaemenid Elamite Administrative Tablets, 4: BM 108963. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 77: 1–14. Gitler, Haim. 2011. Identities of the Indigenous Coinage of Palestine under Achaemenid Rule: The Dissemination of the Image of the Great King. In More than Men,



To Be or Not to Be (Divine): Achaemenid King 179 Less than Gods: Studies on Royal Cult and Imperial Worship. Studies on Royal Cult and Imperial Worship. Proceedings of the international colloquium organized by the Belgian school at Athens (November 1–2, 2007), ed. Panagiotis P. Iossif, Andrzej S. Chankowski, and Catherine C. Lorber, 105–119. Leuven: Peeters.

Gnoli, Gherardo. 1999. Farr(ah). In Encyclopaedia Iranica online, accessed 20 June, 2018 http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/farrah. Harrison, Thomas. 2011. Writing Ancient Persia. London: Bristol Classical Press. Harrison, Thomas. 2015. Herodotus on the Character of Persian Imperialism. In Assessing Biblical and Classical Sources for the Reconstruction of Persian Influence, History, and Culture, ed. Anne Fitzpatrick-McKinley, 9–45. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Hill, Jane, Philip Jones, and Antonio Morales, ed. Experiencing Power, Generating Authority: Cosmos, Politics, and the Ideology of Kingship in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Holloway, Steven W. 2002. Aššur is King! Aššur is King! Religion in the Exercise of Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Leiden: Brill. Kantorowicz, Ernst. 1957. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kaplan, Abraham and Ernst Kris. 1948. Esthetic Ambiguity. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. 8.3: 415–435. King, Leonard William and Reginald Campbell Thompson. 1907. Sculptures and Inscription of Darius the Great, on the rock of Behistûn in Persia, London: Trustees of the British Museum. Klein, Jacob. 2006. Sumerian Kingship and the Gods. In Text, Artifact, and Image: Revealing Ancient Israelite Religion, ed. Gary Beckman and Theodore Lewis, 115–131. Providence: Brown Judaic Studies. Kuhrt, Amélie. 2007. The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period. London: Routledge. Layard, Austen Henry. 1853. A Second Series of the Monuments of Nineveh Including Bas-Reliefs from the Palace of Sennacherib and Bronzes from the Ruins of Nimroud. From Drawings Made on the Spot, During a Second Expedition to Assyria. London: John Murray. Liverani, Mario. 2017. Assyria: The Imperial Mission, trans. A. Trameri and J. Valk. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Lloyd, Alan B. 2007. Darius I in Egypt: Suez and Hibis. In Persian Responses: Political and Cultural Interactions with(in) the Achaemenid Empire, ed. Christopher Tuplin, 99–116. Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales.

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Machinist, Peter. 2006. Kingship and Divinity in Imperial Assyria. In Text, Artifact, and Image: Revealing Ancient Israelite Religion, ed. Gary Beckman and Theodore Lewis, 152–188. Providence: Brown Judaic Studies. Meshorer, Ya’akov and Shraga Qedar. 1999. Samarian Coinage. Numismatic Studies and Researches 9. Jerusalem: Israel Numismatic Society. Michalowski, Piotr. 2008. The Mortal Kings of Ur: A Short Century of Divine Rule in Ancient Mesopotamia. In Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond, ed. Nicole Brisch, 33–46. Chicago: Oriental Institute. O’Connor, David and David Silverman. 1995. Ancient Egyptian Kingship. Leiden: Brill. Ornan, Tallay. 2005. A Complex System of Religious Symbols: The Case of the Winged Disc in Near Eastern Imagery in the First Millennium BCE. In Crafts and Images in Contact, ed. Claudia Suter and Christoph Uehlinger, 207–241. Göttingen: Academic Press Fribourg. Ornan, Tallay. 2007. The Godlike Semblance of a King: The Case of Sennacherib’s Rock Reliefs. In Ancient Near Eastern Art in Context: Studies in Honor of Irene J. Winter by Her Students, ed. Jack Cheng and Marian Feldman, 161–178. Leiden, Brill. Pongratz-Leisten, Beate. 2015. Religion and Ideology in Assyria. Boston: De Gruyter. Radner, Karen. 2010. Assyrian and Non-Assyrian Kingship in the First Millennium BC. In Concepts of Kingship in Antiquity, ed. Giovanni B. Lanfranchi and Robert Rollinger, 25–34. Padova: S.A.R.G.O.N. Root, Margaret Cool. 1979. The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art. Leiden: Brill. Root, Margaret Cool. 2013. Defining the Divine in Achaemenid Persian Kingship: The View from Bisitun. In Every Inch a King: Comparative Studies on Kings and Kingship in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds, ed. Lynette Mitchell and Charles Melville, 23–65. Leiden: Brill. Schmidt, Erich Friedrich. 1953. Persepolis I: Structures, Reliefs, Inscriptions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Seidl, Ursula. 1999a. Ein Monument Darius’ 1 aus Babylon. Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie 89: 101–114 Seidl, Ursula. 1999b. Eine Triumphstele Darius’ I aus Babylon. In Babylon: Focus Mesopotamischer Geschichte, wiege früher Gelehrsamkeit, Mythos in der Moderne, ed. Johannes Renger, 297–306. Berlin: Saarbrücker Druckerei und Verlag. Sonik, Karen. 2015. Divine (Re-)Presentation: Authoritative Images and a Pictorial Stream of Tradition in Mesopotamia. In The Materiality of Divine Agency, ed. Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Karen Sonik, 142–193. Berlin: De Gruyter. Stronach, David. 1978. Pasargadae. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Suter, Claudia. 2007. Between Human and Divine: High Priestesses in Images from



To Be or Not to Be (Divine): Achaemenid King 181 the Akkad to the Isin-Larsa Period. In Ancient Near Eastern Art in Context: Studies in Honor of Irene J. Winter by Her Students, ed. Jack Cheng and Marian Feldman, 317–361. Leiden: Brill.

Waters, Matt. Forthcoming. Centrality and Shared Essence, the Achaemenid King and God. Westenholz, Joan Goodnick. 2000. The King, the Emperor, and the Empire: Continuity and Discontinuity of Royal Representation in Text and Image. In The Heirs of Assyria, ed. Sanno Arno and Robert M. Whiting, 99–125. Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project. Winter, Irene J. 2008. Touched by the Gods: Visual Evidence for the Divine Status of Rulers in the Ancient Near East. In Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond, ed. Nicole Brisch, 75–101. Chicago: Oriental Institute. Zeki, Semir. 2004. The Neurology of Ambiguity. Consciousness and Cognition 13: 173–196.

6 Glyptic Images as Reflecting Social Order: Changes in Seal Iconographies from Egalitarian to Early Centralized Societies in Greater Mesopotamia 1

Marcella Frangipane Keywords: Seal imagery; ideology; iconography of power; Mesopotamia; Arslantepe; Neolithic; Chalcolithic

INTRODUCTION

I

n the wider Mesopotamian world, different types of image repertoires appear to have been expressed on seals in different types of societies and administrative systems. Significant changes occur between the earliest glyptic repertoires, used by egalitarian Neolithic communities (Akkermans and Duistermaat 1996), and the more highly codified and complex imagery found in centralized administration systems that emerged by the fourth millennium BCE. These image repertoires, distinguished by both the contents of the images and repertoire-specific levels of standardization and homogeneity, seem to have been related to the different social and political function of glyptic imagery within widely differing socioeconomic contexts and political systems. The messages communicated by glyptic imagery used in important economic transactions were not only functional, serving to identify the authors of specific administrative operations, but must also have had an ideological component: they participated in the establishment of new social orders and, in some cases, also buttressed and reflected aspects of existing power relations. Some of the distinctive features of the glyptic repertoires were consistent with the social and political systems that produced them, as well as with the nature and perhaps different origins of the authority displayed

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and functioning in these political systems. The fourth millennium glyptic imagery, moreover, reveals that some figures and motifs belonging to Mesopotamia’s early urban and early state contexts, especially those of the major urban centers in the south, acquired a “universal” symbolic value, and were subsequently adopted in other contexts and circulated as iconographies of power in a wide-ranging geographic sphere. In using the term iconographies of power, I refer to the use of images by the ruling class—here in archaic states and early centralized political systems—as “propaganda to impress their subjects and their contemporaries” (Marcus 1974: 83) and ideologically affirm and impose their power and social order. In this chapter, I briefly examine thematic differences in the images depicted on seals and their significance in different societies and sociopolitical systems in the wider Mesopotamian world, so-called Greater Mesopotamia, from the seventh to the fourth millennium BCE. I consider two main types of imagery, which highlight the variety of functions performed by the iconography represented on seals: conventional symbols related to the main seal function, that of identifying individuals and/or social entities operating in an administrative system; and complex and sometimes narrative images, which have also been used to express and spread ideological messages and impose a vision of the world created by the ruling classes. The deep changes that occurred in glyptic imageries are examined through case studies drawing on several different contexts: (1) the beginning of administration in one of the first village communities of the Neolithic in Upper Mesopotamia, the so-called Burnt Village at Sabi Abyad; (2) the Late Ubaid and early Late Chalcolithic societies (LC1–2) of the fifth millennium BCE, well represented at the site of Tepe Gawra, which demonstrate new and more widespread evidence of seal use; and (3) the emergent early state societies in the fourth millennium BCE—exemplified by UrukWarka and Susa in southern Mesopotamia and Elam respectively, by Tell Brak in northern Mesopotamia, and by Arslantepe in southeast Anatolia— which evince differing uses of seal imagery.

THE SUBSTANCE OF THE GLYPTIC IMAGERY The repertoires of motifs shown on seals changed substantially across time, from the earliest known glyptic imagery that appeared on stamp seals in northern Mesopotamia in the Early Neolithic Period (seventh



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millennium BCE), to the richer iconographic repertoire used in contexts dating to the Ubaid period (fifth millennium BCE), to the new narrative patterns introduced in the fourth millennium BCE, when complex administrative systems arose in connection with new power structures and the socioeconomic and political function of sealing procedures changed radically (Frangipane 2000).

Conventional Images: The Formation of Identity Markers Markers of Social Identity in the Neolithic: The Case of Sabi Abyad Neolithic seal designs are the best representatives of the category of conventional images. They almost exclusively comprised geometric motifs and depictions of individual animal figures, mainly caprids; they were generally quite simple in design although they could vary in complexity according to different cases and needs. They may have essentially functioned to identify individuals and/or groups of seal-holders, with the seal itself acting as a tangible means of marking an “economic” action by leaving behind a recognizable identity indicator. In other words, the seal designs must have served as identity markers, and they likely had no particular significance beyond identifying their holders; the repertoire of motifs utilized expanded as the number of operators with administrative responsibilities increased. At least some of these early images may have adopted identity markers of groups or families that were in use before they were transferred onto the seals and used for “administrative” purposes (Fiandra 2000). It is perhaps precisely their adoption and codification on seals that ensured the glyptic iconographic repertoires, together with pottery decorative repertoires, became an integral part of the system of signs and symbols defining the spheres of Neolithic material culture and identifying the different communities interacting with one another over vast territories (Verhoeven 2002; Nieuwenhuyse 2007, 2013). The widespread circulation of images and objects characterizing Mesopotamian communities of the Neolithic may, indeed, have resulted from intense interaction between different communities over a vast geographical area in the course of the seventh and sixth millennia BCE, which created a common substrate throughout these extensive territories. The widespread establishment of the so-called Halaf culture over vast regions in the sixth millennium BCE was probably the most evident outcome of this kind of widespread and multifaceted interaction processes.

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This inter-community relation system was typical of the Jezirah societies, which were (I believe) characterized by a particular type of socioeconomic organization based on differentiation and specialization in subsistence activities, perhaps conducted by groups or sectors of the communities and accompanied by very close integration based on the circulation and systematic redistribution of goods (Akkermans 1993; Frangipane 2007, 2013; Bernbeck 2013). The paleobotanical and archaeozoological evidence has revealed the existence, in both the Proto-Hassuna/Hassuna (6700–6200 BCE) and the Halaf (6200–5300 BCE) periods, of specialized hunting activities carried out at small sites in contexts with fully integrated agricultural and pastoral economies (Akkermans 1993). It was in these contexts that evidence has been found of large stores, which certainly did not belong to individual families or household units (Kirkbride 1975; Merpert and Munchaev 1993; Akkermans 1996; Forest 1996; Frangipane 2009). The appearance of the first rich assemblage of cretulae and the rise of the earliest administrative system, wholly unexpected for such an early period even until a few decades ago, occurred precisely in a society of this kind, in a large complex of storerooms in the Burnt Village at Sabi Abyad on the Balikh. This storage complex must have been associated with a suprafamily and characterized by the collective organization of goods storage and distribution, made necessary by an economic system such as the one I have hypothesized (Akkermans 1996; Frangipane 2000, 2016a). The most plausible reason for this sharing of goods is that certain sectors or members of the community had to absent themselves from the village for a certain period of time to engage in other activities such as pastoralism or hunting, as Akkermans and Duistermaat (1996; also Frangipane 2000, 2016a: 10–12) have suggested, leaving the harvest in safekeeping and guaranteeing regulated access to it on their return. Against this background, the iconography of the numerous seals impressed on the cretulae from Sabi Abyad takes on particular significance. Geometric motifs, stylized plants, and the image of a goat were reproduced on a number of seals, creating series or sets of nearly identical images, with only tiny differences to distinguish between individual designs in any one set (Fig. 6.1) (Duistermaat 1996). This is a very peculiar feature of this complex of cretulae, so far unknown (at least in such clear form) from later contexts and periods. Considering the egalitarian structure of the Sabi Abyad society, and hence the type and beneficiaries of the food redistribution practiced there,



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6.1 Groups of Seal Designs from the Burnt Village at Sabi Abyad, Syria (from Duistermaat 1996: figs. 5.3 and 5.4)

and assuming a group-based organization of subsistence activities, I think the sets of similar seal images may refer to related social groups involved in the store activities. These social groups almost certainly constituted the people withdrawing the goods. If the seal designs were, indeed, conventional identity markers, the set or series of similar motifs might have been used to identify extended household group or clan members, while individual motifs differentiated by one or more small details within the whole set might have identified the individuals or the household heads (nuclear family heads?) operating the withdrawals. If this reconstruction is correct, every set of motifs would refer to specific social entities, which perhaps adopted images already traditionally associated with them or created new images for themselves. Markers of Social Identity in Complex Societies: The Case of Arslantepe The northern Mesopotamian glyptic tradition, essentially based on conventional images, was greatly enriched around the end of the fifth and the early fourth millennia BCE by more complex figures with repetitive

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iconographic schemes and subjects. Because of their repetitive nature, these images seem to have taken on the value of a clearly-defined symbolic language. Evidence of this comes from the seals found at Tepe Gawra from phases XII to VIII. Here, the usual geometric motifs and individual animal images, mostly goats, are joined by new animals (such as snakes, scorpions, vultures) that would become increasingly prevalent in northern Mesopotamian glyptic; the animals also appear in complex and often more or less codified positions (e.g., superimposed animals, animals rotating in the stamp space, animals in movement, etc.) according to clearly defined aesthetic patterns. These combinations sometimes appear as schematic representations of actions or suggest movements with symbolic meanings, as in the case of the quadruped whose neck is being attacked by a snake (Tobler 1950: pl. 167-135; Rothman 2002: pl. 45-1681). This type of more complex subject matter, which is to an extent narrative in character, is most clearly evident in those few compositions that include a human figure. The human figure is almost always depicted alone with animals, plants, and/or objects, sometimes in a hieratic attitude and sometimes poised to perform an action such as leading or dominating the animals accompanying it (Fig. 6.2a–b) (Rothman 2002: pls. 36–38, 40). Even more rarely, more than one human figure is depicted fully dominating the whole scene; the composition, although schematized and compacted

6.2 Seal Images from Tepe Gawra, Late Ubaid and Late Chalcolithic 1–2 (fifth millennium BCE) (redrawn from Tobler 1950 and Rothman 2002 by A. Siracusano): a: Gawra XIII (Tobler 1950: pl. CLXIV-102); b: Gawra XII (Tobler 1950: pl. CLXIV-99; Rothman 2002: pl. 24-434); c: Gawra XII/XIA (Tobler 1950: pl. CLXIII-91; Rothman 2002: pl. 49-1843); d: Gawra XIA (Tobler 1950: pl. CLXIII-86; Rothman 2002: pl. 37-1077); e: Gawra VIIIA (Rothman 2002: pl. 59-2960)



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within the narrow confines of the stamp, still constitutes a narrative (Fig. 6.2c–e) (Rothman 2002: pls. 36-1061, 38-1019, 38-993, 46-1674, 47-1688, 491843). But in these cases, too, the images are highly codified and sometimes repetitive, as in the case of the copulation scenes that were repeated even in different levels, from XIA to VIIIA, of the archaeological sequence at Tepe Gawra (Fig. 6.2d–e) (Rothman 2002: pls. 37-1077, 59-2960). All this suggests that new symbolic meanings had been codified and incorporated into the glyptic images, which, in view of the identifying function of seals, must have been associated with certain specific social figures. Perhaps this reflected the gradual diversification in the types of content and images used to identify individuals and entities having administrative responsibilities, paralleling an increased social complexity and internal differentiation, as well as the concomitant diversification of the activities and functions connected with sealing procedures. Despite this enrichment in the variety of imagery, the style, decorative patterns, and ways of representing the figures depicted on the seals were nevertheless very homogenous. This is true not only of the glyptic of Tepe Gawra but also of the seals from the whole of central-eastern Jezirah, from the Khabur to the Tigris, as well as from the surrounding or culturally linked areas up to the Upper Euphrates region in southeastern Anatolia, as indicated by the recent findings at Tell Brak and Tell Hamoukar (Gibson et al. 2002; McMahon and Oates 2007; McMahon 2016; Pittman 2003) and by the Final Ubaid glyptics of Değirmentepe in the Malatya region (Esin 1994). Contrasting with the trends discussed above, which are observed in the glyptic arts of the early fourth millennium BCE in northern Mesopotamia, are some typical features of the glyptic arts from Arslantepe Period VIA, dating to the second half of the fourth millennium BCE (Late Chalcolithic 5). This is despite the fact that Arslantepe VIA can be included, in general terms, within the larger context of the northern glyptic traditions (Pittman 2007). The first aspect of the Arslantepe assemblage’s peculiarity has already been highlighted and vividly described by Pittman (2007) in the publication of the vast assemblages of Arslantepe cretulae (Frangipane et al. 2007)— namely, the extraordinary variety of different styles, incision techniques, compositions, and ways of representing the figures, which, according to Pittman, are without parallel in any other Near Eastern context. Some of the animals in the Arslantepe imagery—particularly lions but also, to a lesser degree, cattle, caprids, and snakes—are depicted with broad

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6.3 Seal Designs from Arslantepe, Period VIA (Late Chalcolithic 5, ca. 3400–3100 BCE): a–d, f–j: from dump A206; e: from dump A77 in Temple A (Frangipane et al. 2007: 243– 79). Courtesy M.A.I.A.O. (Italian Archeological Expedition in Eastern Anatolia), Sapienza University of Rome



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and solid figures, in a naturalistic style, and with some physical details such as claws and ears, or, in snakes, a peculiar representation of shiny scales (Figs. 6.3, 6.5c,e–f ). These physical details, however, are mostly limited to the figural outlines; they never show the internal details of the body or of the face—such as the eyes, mouth, or hair—or of garments worn. The only known exception appears on a seal bearing a lion from Temple A, which depicts the hairs of the lion’s mane (Fig. 6.3e, 6.5e); this seal was peculiar also in its material composition since it was made of wood, as shown from the microscopic analysis of the impressions left on the clay (Cristiani et al. 2007). This is not to say that all the glyptic designs were stylistically homogenous: even in the case of naturalistic images, some of the depicted figures are soft and sinuous (Fig. 6.3a–c) while others are more rigid and tend towards geometric outlines (Fig. 6.3d–e,g-h). Some also were clearly carved with a rounded tool while others were carved with a squared instrument (Fig. 6.3c,e) (Pittman 2007; Cristiani et al. 2007). In addition to the naturalistic images, a very large number of Arslantepe VIA seal designs show extremely simplified and threadlike stylized figures (Figs. 6.4, 6.5b,d), sometimes schematized to the point of becoming decorative and nearly geometric elements. In some cases, these figures created complex (but not narrative) compositions, in which the arrangement of the figures and their graphic forms seem to have been solely or primarily dictated by aesthetic criteria pursuing symmetry and the filling of space. Even when the figures were depicted in such a manner as to create the impression of movement, this movement, excepting a few rare cases on cylinder seals, often formed part of the decorative composition without any reference to the real movement of bodies in a particular action. Sometimes, the bodies of two opposite animals were also overlapped to form a single body, creating a mirror-image fantastic figure, which look in both directions and in which the horns become hooves and vice-versa (Fig. 6.4b,d, 6.5d). The taste for symmetry was sometimes also evidenced in more naturalistic seal designs, which were naturalistic in the rendering of the figures but lacking in any narrative purpose. The figures, which were almost all animals, were static and emblematic in character and arranged within the space of the seal according to specific aesthetic rules. They very rarely describe or suggest actions such as walking, which, conversely, is frequently found in southern Mesopotamian glyptics. Even the few scenes of animals

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6.4 Seal Designs from Arslantepe, Period VIA (Late Chalcolithic 5, ca. 3400–3100 BCE): a–c, e–g: from dump A206; d: from room A430 (Frangipane et al. 2007: 243–82). Courtesy M.A.I.A.O. (Italian Archeological Expedition in Eastern Anatolia), Sapienza University of Rome

standing in a row that appear on cylinder seals from Arslantepe are, in some cases, characterized by the alternating of animals in an upside-down position, thus mimicking the pattern of the opposing animals on the stamp seals and demonstrating that the intention was essentially decorative rather than narrative (Fig. 6.3i–j). Seal 9 (Fig. 6.3j), which depicts lions and deer, is particularly interesting since it takes up a narrative element, with a snake attacking the throat of the lion, which was probably southern in origin (Amiet 1972: n. 471) but depicts the animals alternately upside-down, thereby again precluding any narrative character of the image. Some of these rules governing the seal composition in the Arslantepe glyptic, regardless of the different iconographic styles evident at the site, echo generally shared northern glyptic traditions (Pittman 2007). But they also have features that are specific to Arslantepe. Among these, we can include the peculiar arrangement of têtê-bêche animals, which are always opposed by their paws; the use of certain filling features; and the use of well-established pictorial conventions to represent details identifying the



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6.5 Cretulae with Seal Impressions from Arslantepe, Period VIA (Late Chalcolithic 5, ca. 3400–3100 BCE). a: cylinder seal with leading figure on threshing sledge car (tribulum); b, d: stamp seals with animals in schematic style; c, e–f: stamp seals with animals in more naturalistic style (photo R. Ceccacci). Courtesy M.A.I.A.O. (Italian Archeological Expedition in Eastern Anatolia), Sapienza University of Rome

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various animals. These conventions include a groove incised along the body of snakes, perhaps to represent the shiny scales; the two-finger hooves of caprids; the three-finger paws of canids; and the clawed paws of felines. These rules made up a common substrate linking all the different types and styles of seals at Arslantepe, suggesting that the various seal engravers, even if they were working independently and not directly on behalf of the palace institutions, must have shared some basic conventions and must have identified their products as related to the palace environment at the site. They are also perhaps an indication of links between the workshops that produced these seals for various customers. All of this said, the specific iconographies deployed, the aesthetic tastes evidenced, and the styles in which motifs were represented still varied widely (as stressed above). Even though the Arslantepe VIA glyptics as a whole reference a northern tradition dating back to much earlier periods, as Pittman (2007) has pointed out, this pronounced diversification of iconographies and styles seems to me to be consistent with the multiform and perhaps also multiethnic features of a society that, at the end of the fourth millennium BCE, appears to have centered on the palace (Frangipane 2012, 2015). Considering the extremely conventional and schematized features of the imagery on seals from Arslantepe VIA, we can infer that the main objective of the seal designs was to express and identify family or group membership and traditions rather than to represent new bureaucratic and social functions performed by individuals with administrative responsibilities. This inference is supported by the results of a detailed study of the occurrences and associations of seals and sealed objects in the layers of dump A 206 in the palace. This study reveals that there was no relationship whatsoever between the complexity of the images represented on the seals and the duties or levels of responsibility of the seal-holding officials (Frangipane et al. 2007: 469–75). Indeed, the official apparently vested with the greatest responsibilities, and presumably the highest-ranking administrator working in the palace, possessed the simplest and the most schematic and traditional seal of all (Fig. 6.6 [seal 28]). This variety of iconographies and styles may therefore have been less indicative of the complex internal organization of and differentiation between official functions, and more indicative of the variety of social and economic—and perhaps also cultural/ethnic—groups operating in the palace



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6.6 Seals of Officials Occupying Higher Positions in the Hierarchy, Arslantepe, Period VIA (Late Chalcolithic 5, ca. 3400–3100 BCE). Seals reconstructed on the basis of operations performed by them, as recognized from the thousands of cretulae found in the “discarded archive” A206 (Frangipane et al. 2007: fig. VIII.2). Courtesy M.A.I.A.O. (Italian Archeological Expedition in Eastern Anatolia), Sapienza University of Rome

administration (Frangipane 2015). These groups may have commissioned the seals according to their own traditions and their own family, clan, or personal emblems. This type of functioning would also have been consistent with the structure of the type of early state without urbanism that is documented at Arslantepe. At this site, the population was dominated by the palace but did not occupy an urban space and, so, did not create a social, political, or economic unitary or organic community, as would have been the case with a

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full-fledged city. In urban settlements, the crafts and social units were usually closely linked by intense structural interactions and by physical proximity. The Arslantepe settlement, differently from the contemporary large sites in Mesopotamia, seems actually to have shrunk in size in period VIA, when it was probably mostly occupied by public buildings and elite residences (Frangipane 2016b, 2018). The population governed by the palace must therefore have consisted mainly of rural villages or household units scattered in the Malatya plain and, perhaps, also of itinerant pastoralist groups which assiduously frequented the Upper Euphrates Valley and actively interacted with the central institutions. This is also suggested by certain classes of materials found on the site in the palace period, such as red-black ware and metals—closely related to materials from other cultural horizons documented in the northern Anatolian mountain regions—that were probably brought by pastoralist groups moving across those areas (Palumbi 2010; Frangipane 2010, 2012). This is also supported by the events that immediately followed the destruction of the palace and the collapse of the centralized system. At the very end of the fourth millennium BCE (Arslantepe Period VIB1), groups of pastoralists settled directly on the ruins of the palace: their material culture showed links both with the multi-faceted Kura-Araxes South Caucasian/Northeastern Anatolian world and with the earlier Late Chalcolithic local traditions, especially as far as metal objects are concerned, pointing to longstanding relations between these groups and the Euphrates valley communities (Palumbi 2012; Frangipane 2014). The new VIB1 settlers somehow also maintained the memory of and ideological reference to the power system expressed in the palace during the earlier Period VIA (Frangipane 2014). The conventions of the glyptic imagery at Arslantepe, though it was an early state society, seem mainly to have been traditional expressions of the various different group identities operative in the new power system. By referring to symbols, styles, and iconographies that had perhaps belonged to these various entities in previous periods, the glyptic does not seem to have been aimed at representing or affirming the new social order. While some images with a stronger symbolic significance—perhaps referencing iconographies of power—have also been found at Arslantepe, they are very rare and limited to only certain types of content. This content, in some cases, comprises nothing more than copies of images rooted in the southern



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societies (Fig. 6.10a–c)—probably considered models to emulate—while in other cases they appear to refer to agricultural practices (Fig. 6.10d,f ), an aspect of real importance to the political economy of the ruling classes. But in no cases do the holders of these seals seem to have played a prominent administrative role, and these images do not appear to have been aimed at affirming and ideologically imposing the new power relations in the administrative environment.

Symbolic and Narrative Images in the Glyptics of the Fourth Millennium BCE New iconographies connected with the ideological and symbolic affirmation of power, explicitly marking out the social role and the political and economic functions of the emerging and growing authorities, became established in fourth millennium BCE Mesopotamian glyptics, especially in the southern alluvium (Schmandt-Besserat 1993; Pittman 1994, 2001; Boehmer 1999). Some of these images spread widely across the entire Mesopotamian world and beyond as images of power with a strong symbolic value, and reached as far as the northern Mesopotamian cities, such as Tell Brak, where they were adopted alongside local repertoires within a mixed and hybrid assemblage of seal designs (Pittman 2003: 19–21). New images, probably also linked to the representation of power, can be recognized in the local glyptics of northern regions but these do not appear to have borne the same ideologically explicit and complex messages as those originating in the south, and they were profoundly different in terms of their contents: they did not have the same narrative intent and there were no representations explicitly referring to the central institutions or to the sacred sphere. What I would like to emphasize is that these different forms of symbolic and iconographic expression were perfectly in keeping with the different natures, and perhaps also the different origins, of the ruling authorities in the various regions of Greater Mesopotamia, and that together they reflect the different types of social and political relations in the societies involved. Symbolism in the Southern Societies The Southern Mesopotamian Late Uruk glyptics, at least judging from what has been documented by the cretulae and the seals found in large public areas such as the Eanna district at Uruk-Warka, have clearly

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6.7 Seal Designs from Uruk-Warka (Late Uruk Period, Late Chalcolithic 5). Redrawn by A. Siracusano (after Amiet 1961, Brandes 1979, and Boehmer 1999): a–b (Amiet 1961: pl. 13 bis, D and E); c (Brandes 1979: Taf. 30); d (Boehmer 1999: Taf. 17)

narrative and strongly ideological contents. These were intended to express and affirm ideologies of power based in the sacred-religious legitimation of the leaders. Most of the images are real scenes—favored by the elongated rectangular shape of the predominant cylinder seal impressions—which, at Warka, consistently emphasize the sacred character of actions, including economic ones, performed in public places. Numerous scenes reproduce images of individuals bearing food offerings to the temple. The temple itself is also frequently present in various different situations connected with either sacred performances or economic activities or both (Fig. 6.7a,c). A good example of this may be the representation of the boat moving to the temple: the boat is obviously linked to fishing, a very important activity in the daily life of southern Mesopotamia; at the same time, it appears as an element fraught with symbolic meanings in that very particular environment (Fig. 6.7b).



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Another pictorial theme frequently represented in the southern Mesopotamian Uruk world is the exercise of power by use of force. This is explicitly depicted through images of individuals in a submissive posture, generally bound and kneeling, with the figure of the priest-king holding a spear and standing over them (Fig. 6.7d). In some cases, figures of intermediaries (officials? soldiers?) are shown imposing themselves (e.g., by wielding a whip) on prisoners, thus suggesting the enforcement of “orders from above.” This varied and rich imagery not only encompasses symbols with ideological meaning but also expresses a clear and imperative ideological message, in which the new social order is represented and imposed. It also confers a sacred, and hence “positive,” character on the actions considered to be the leaders’ prerogatives, so that these actions seem in some way to be encouraged. It is no coincidence that, among the economic transactions intensively performed in the public sphere, which consisted of both the income and outcome of goods through substantial redistribution practices, the offerings—that is to say incoming goods—were the only represented activities. The images, in other words, legitimated and encouraged the performance of this type of action. The stylistic uniformity of the subject matter, the individual motifs, and the forms of representation were also fully consistent with the probable existence of craft workshops operating on commission in an urban environment. The southern Mesopotamian Late Uruk glyptic, then, reflects the existence of a very powerful and ideologically legitimated political authority, one whose religious and social legitimation probably dated back to the very foundation of the southern societies in the Ubaid period (Frangipane 2007). Although we have insufficient data on the specific features of the Uruk Period societies in Susiana (a region in southwestern Iran immediately to the east of Mesopotamia), the extraordinary wealth of the glyptic output there reveals both a very close kinship with the Mesopotamian glyptics, with which it shares styles and motifs (Pittman 2001), and a somewhat different trend in its representation of most scenes of ordinary everyday work: farming, pastoralism, storage activities, and crafts are all depicted, with a concomitant reduced emphasis on the sacred (Fig. 6.8) (Amiet 1961, 1972; Boehmer 1999). This divergence in subject matter, however, may potentially also result from a divergence in the types of archaeological contexts from which the glyptics were recovered in Susiana as opposed to Uruk-Warka in southern Mesopotamia.

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6.8 Seal Designs from Susa (Late Uruk period, Late Chalcolithic 5). Redrawn by A. Siracusano (after Amiet 1972). a–b (Amiet 1972: pls. 15-621, 15-614); c (Amiet 1972: pl. 16646)

Symbolism in the Northern Societies One marked difference in northern as opposed to southern glyptics is the generally more “decorative” and less narrative purpose of the images, as well as a much more significant presence of stamp (rather than only cylinder) seals. These differences were perhaps largely due to the early origin of many of these images, which were profoundly rooted in local traditions of the Neolithic Period onwards. The recurrent representation of caprids and wild animals such as lions and snakes, which were widely used everywhere including in the south, was frequently accompanied by the depiction of animals such as deer, vultures, and scorpions, which were more rarely represented in the early southern glyptic and were conversely well documented in the older tradition of northern Mesopotamia and neighboring regions. But the most significant distinction between the southern and northern glyptic imagery is the infrequent presence and different roles of human figures in the north: human figures in this latter context played a much less important and less explicit role as channels of ideological communication.



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With the development of powerful political and, in some cases, also urban centers such as Tell Brak, the emergent government elites and hierarchies of northern Mesopotamia certainly used new images and symbols. These seem, however, to have largely retained their original function as identifying devices, expressing only to a limited extent complex narration stressing the new social and political order. The cylinder seals that reproduced images emulating those from southern Mesopotamia are exceptions from this observation. It is possible that the presence of the human figure at Tell Brak en6.9 Lion Hunt from Tell Brak. Redrawn gaged in actions expressing courby A. Siracusano (after McMahon 2009: age and strength, as in the lion hunt fig. 1) (Fig. 6.9), referred to high-ranking personages but this is by no means certain (cf. Pongratz-Leisten, this volume). Even if this was so, such images would have made reference to the “heroic” figure of the leader but would have carried a much less explicit message with respect to the public functions of the ruling classes than the southern Mesopotamian glyptics. Symbolism in the Arslantepe Glyptics At Arslantepe, in the period of the palatial centralized system (phase VIA), a few very rare but clear references to southern glyptic images are recognizable for the first time; this is in addition to the vast majority of the images just described, which comprise animal compositions of various styles and different patterns on stamp seals, that refer to a northern tradition, albeit with specific local features (Pittman 2007). Altogether, four images out of 220 seal designs, all depicted on cylinder seals—themselves very rare at Arslantepe, not exceeding 10% of the total seals found—clearly emulate southern iconographies (Fig. 6.10a–d). These were selected from the vast and rich southern repertoire and adapted to comply with the local taste and style, as particularly evidenced on one of these seals, which depicts rampant lions with intertwined tails (Fig. 6.10b). Moreover, at least in

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6.10 Seal Designs from Arslantepe, Period VIA (Late Chalcolithic 5): a–c motifs recalling Uruk glyptics; d well-known cylinder seal showing the transport of a leader figure on a sledge car, probably a tribulum), followed by individuals with pitchforks; e–g stamp seals with human figures and scenes related to agriculture, animal breeding, and daily life. Courtesy M.A.I.A.O. (Italian Archeological Expedition in Eastern Anatolia), Sapienza University of Rome

three of these four cases, the iconographies chosen and adopted did not include human figures and narrative scenes. These three designs were simply a generic reference to images typical of the southern society, which may have been perceived as a model for the north and with which the Arslantepe rulers must have been in contact. They should probably be understood, consequently, as a classic case of emulation between elites. The fourth seal design, nevertheless, is a unique and interesting example in which the emulated image is the depiction of a scene that was also very rare at Uruk but still evidently very meaningful at Arslantepe: this is the well-known depiction of a leader carried on a sledge car for harvesting (tribulum) and followed by a procession of individuals carrying pitchforks (Fig.



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6.10d) (Littauer and Crouwel 1990; Frangipane 1997). This scene probably represented a focal aspect of the ideology of power at Arslantepe, in which the control of agriculture or agricultural produce played a very important role. It also defined the prerogatives of the central institutions and the ruling classes, emphasizing the centrality of staple products in the accumulation and redistribution of goods (Frangipane 2010, 2016b). A similar scene was also depicted, albeit in a totally different style, in the wall decorations of the most internal sector of the corridor in the palace at Arslantepe (Frangipane 2012; D’Anna 2015), the one leading to the main seat of power: the building and the courtyard in which the chief authority must have received the public in a non-religious ceremonial context (Frangipane 2016b). Symbolic references to agriculture and related activities are also found on the few stamp seals depicting human figures at Arslantepe (Fig. 6.10e–g) (D’Anna 2015). The scene depicting the transport of a leader figure on the sledge car appears on a seal used only a few times at Arslantepe. As evidenced by the thorough study carried out on the associations and links between seals (the authors of the transactions), sealed objects (the type of goods involved), and the layers in the dump where cretulae were discarded (indicating the recurrence of the operations), the person who used this seal did not perform important or hierarchically preeminent tasks in the bureaucratic system (Frangipane et al. 2007: 469–75). Therefore, it is difficult to figure out the identity of the holder of this seal and the nature of his precise role and position in the Arslantepe power system. What is evident is that this image makes clear reference to the important symbolic relationship between leaders and agricultural activities. Conversely, no seals at all have been found at Arslantepe that depict scenes referencing the sacred sphere: this is another important feature of the Arslantepe glyptics that deserves to be emphasized.

A FEW CONCLUDING REMARKS The divergence between northern and southern Mesopotamia in terms of the ideological use of images, and in particular the images applied to tools in such widespread use as seals, clearly marks a profound difference in the nature and exercise of power and its roots between northern Mesopotamian and southeastern Anatolian societies on the one hand and southern Mesopotamian societies on the other. There are three lines of evidence for this:

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(1) In the south, power appears to have been solidly based on the hierarchical structure of society and founded on a powerful ideological legitimation and pronounced sacralization. This, combined with a developed urbanization process, gave it a fundamentally stable character. (2) In the north, power seems to have been less embedded in the original social structure of the communities and less in harmony with the shape of society, which also seems to have been less hierarchical and stratified in character and more internally diversified (in terms of productive and cultural components) than southern society. The relationship between pastoral/mobile and agricultural/sedentary units, for instance, may have been more intense and served to structurally shape “mixed” societies in the northern regions. Here, although to varying degrees in different areas, both the heightening of tensions between the various social components and the lesser degree of ideologically determined legitimation of power must have made it more fragile. In a region like the Khabur basin, the intense ongoing urbanization process must have partly mitigated these contradictions by enabling better control over the territory and enhancing the stability of the system. (3) Political fragility was conversely more marked in the Upper Euphrates Valley and in a non-urban center such as Arslantepe, which encompassed a wide variety of different groups and economic and social components; here, the vertical and increasingly top-down growth of the ruling class precociously hastened the secularization of power (Frangipane 2016b) and ultimately brought it to collapse. The images entrusted to the seals, which both widely circulated in various social contexts and were at the same time perceived as closely related to public activities and the power sphere, were a very effective tool of ideological transmission. They seem to have perfectly reflected the different socioeconomic and political worlds within which they were created and which they had to affirm and promote. NOTES:

6.1 This paper topic developed out of years of research conducted, together with Holly Pittman, into the rich assemblage of fourth millennium BCE cretulae (clay objects impressed with seals) from Arslantepe (Frangipane et al. 2007). Some thoughts expressed here were refined in the course of our long conversations and inspired by her expert understanding of the materials and her wide-ranging historical

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1.6 Silver Arm Reliquary of Saint Fiacre (17.190.353). Medieval France, ca. thirteenth century CE with fifteenth century additions. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

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1.8 Temple of Dendur in Sackler Wing of Metropolitan Museum of Art (68.154). Given to the United States by Egypt in 1965, awarded to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1967, and Installed in the Sackler Wing in 1978. Roman Period Egypt, Reign of Augustus Caesar, ca. 10 BCE. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

1.9 Watercolor of Temple of Dendur, Showing the Pylon and Terrace (1874), in situ. Frederick Arthur Bridgman (2000.597). Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

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1.11 Net Piled on Ground Near Coast in Acre, Israel; Photograph by K. Sonik, July 5, 2018

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1.13 a) Lyre of Ur With Reconstructed Head and Replacement Wood Sound Box and Strings (B17694C). Excavated in 1920s by Sir Leonard Woolley with surviving parts crushed and perishable parts decomposed. Restored and reconstructed several times, including on arrival at Penn Museum in 1929 (head already restored at time of arrival); b) sound box constructed with decorations (following inlay surviving on a different lyre) painted by Mary Louise Baker; in 1976, sound box reconstructed following a 1955 visit by Woolley indicating the dimensions were incorrect; head disassembled, components cleaned, original construction details recorded (Greene 2003); c) current (2019) display of the lyre (B17694B). Early Dynastic III Period Mesopotamia, ca. 2600–2500 BCE. Courtesy Penn Museum; Image nos. 162256, 250852, 8272 respectively.

C-6 1.16 Wood Netsuke (10.211.2342). Edo Period Japan, ca. eighteenth century CE. Height: 7.3 cm. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

1.17 Clay Head of a Buddha or Bodhisattva with Garnet Eyes (1986.2). Afghanistan, ca. fifth to sixth century CE. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

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1.18 Sandstone Head of Shiva (2014.520). Chams Kingdom, Central Vietnam, ca. tenth century CE. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

1.20 Painted Plaster Replica of Minoan Ladies in Blue Fresco (27.251), by Emile Gilliéron fils, 1927. This replica clearly copies and demarcates the few excavated fragments of the actual fresco; the remainder represents artistic (re-)construction. Original fragments from Knossos, Crete, ca. 1525–1450 BCE. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

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1.23 Werewolves of Ossory in Gerald of Wales’ Topographia Hiberniae, Royal MS 13 B VIII f.18r, ca. 1196–1223. Courtesy British Library

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1.24 Noh Robe (Theater Costume) in Compound Twill with Silk and Metallic Thread (1954.40.26). Japan, Edo Period, ca. eighteenth century(?). Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery

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1.26 “Ram in the Thicket” or Goat in a Tree from Royal Cemetery at Ur (30-12-702). Early Dynastic III Period Mesopotamia. Excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley by pouring wax on the remains and stabilizing them with waxed muslin strips. Reconstructed by Woolley with tree set too deeply into base and ram’s legs dangling above branches; conserved in 1944, likely involving removal of some of the ram’s fleece; conserved again in 1997 to lower ram’s legs to rest on tree branches. Courtesy Penn Museum; Image no. 250849

3.1 Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1805–1874), Die von König Ludwig I in Tätigkeit gesetzten Bildhauer (1850). Courtesy Neue Pinakothek, Munich (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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4.1 Red Slipped and Burnished Jar with Black Paint from Nerkin Naver Tomb 7. Photograph courtesy of Dr. Hakob Simonyan

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12.1 Ranunculus asiaticus (buttercup) collected by Botta near Mosul. Courtesy Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris (MNHN-P-P00164998)

12.8 Watercolor, Nineveh from the North-East, 1849, by Frederick Charles Cooper (SD.255). Courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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13.7 Design for Scenery for ‘Sardanapalus’ by F. Lloyds, ca. 1853 (V&A D. 1447-1901). Courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum, London

13.8 Design for Scenery for ‘Sardanapalus’ by W. Gordon, ca. 1853 (V&A D.1446-1901). Courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum, London



Glyptic Images as Social Order: Mesopotamia 205 approach to glyptic art and to ancient art history in general. Holly also taught me how “artistic” images could be used not only to identify cultural environments and interregional relations, but also as a means of expressing aspects linked to the underlying structure of societies. I am therefore dedicating this contribution to Holly and to our scientific and personal friendship.

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Duistermaat, Kim. 1996. The Seals and Sealings. In Tell Sabi Abyad: The Late Neolithic Settlement, ed. Peter M.M.G. Akkermans, 339–401. Istanbul: Nederlands historisch-archaeologisch instituut in het Nabije Oosten. Esin, Ufuk. 1994. The Functional Evidence of Seals and Sealings of Değirmentepe. In Archives before Writing, ed. Piera Ferioli, Enrica Fiandra, Gian Giacomo Fissore, and Marcella Frangipane, 59–81. Rome: Edizioni CIRAAS. Forest, Jean Daniel. 1996. Mésopotamie. L’Apparition de l’Etat VIIe-IIIe Millénaires. Paris: Ed. Méditerranée. Fiandra, Enrica. 2000. Before Seals. In Proceedings of the First International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, Rome, May 18th–23rd 1998, ed. Paolo Matthiae, Alessandra Enea, and Luca Peyronel, 437–441. Rome: Herder. Frangipane, Marcella. 1997. A 4th Millennium Temple/Palace Complex at ArslantepeMalatya. North-South Relations and the Formation of Early State Societies in the Northern Regions of Greater Mesopotamia. Paléorient 23.1: 45–73. Frangipane, Marcella. 2000. The Development of Administration from Collective to Centralized Economies in the Mesopotamian World. The Transformation of an Institution from ‘System-Serving’ to ‘Self-Serving.’ In Cultural Evolution. Contemporary Viewpoints, ed. Gary Feinman and Linda Manzanilla, 215–232. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. Frangipane, Marcella. 2007. Different Types of Egalitarian Societies and the Development of Inequality in Early Mesopotamia. World Archaeology 39.2: 151–176. Frangipane, Marcella. 2009. Rise and Collapse of the Late Uruk Centres in Upper Mesopotamia and Eastern Anatolia. Scienze dell’Antichità 15: 15–31. Frangipane, Marcella. 2010. The Political Economy of the Early Central Institution at Arslantepe. Concluding Remarks. In Economic Centralisation in Formative States. The Archaeological Reconstruction of the Economic System in 4th Millennium Arslantepe, ed. Marcella Frangipane, 289–307. Studi di preistoria orientale 3. Rome: Sapienza University of Rome. Frangipane, Marcella. 2012. Fourth Millennium Arslantepe: The Development of a Centralised Society without Urbanisation. Origini 34: 19–40. Frangipane, Marcella. 2013. Societies Without Boundaries. Interpreting Late Neolithic Patterns of Wide Interaction and Sharing of Cultural Traits: The Case of the Halaf Communities. In Interpreting the Late Neolithic of Upper Mesopotamia, ed. Olivier Nieuwenhuyse, Reinhard Bernbeck, Peter M.M.G. Akkermans, and Jana Rogasch, 89–99. Turnhout: Brepols. Frangipane, Marcella. 2014. After Collapse: Continuity and Disruption in the Settlement by Kura-Araxes-linked Pastoral Groups at Arslantepe-Malatya (Turkey).



Glyptic Images as Social Order: Mesopotamia 207 New Data. Paléorient 40.2: 169–182.

Frangipane, Marcella. 2015. Different Types of “Multiethnic” Societies and Different Patterns of Development and Change in Prehistoric Near East. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112.30: 9182–9189. Frangipane, Marcella. 2016a. The Origins of Administrative Practices and Their Developments in Greater Mesopotamia. The Evidence from Arslantepe, Archéo-Nil 26: 9–32. Frangipane, Marcella. 2016b. The Development of Centralised Societies in Greater Mesopotamia and the Foundation of Economic Inequality. In Rich and Poor: Competing for Resources in Prehistoric Societies, ed. Harald Meller, Hans Peter Hahn, Reinhard Jung, and Roberto Risch, 469–489. Tagungendes Landesmuseums für Vorgeschichte Halle Band 14/II. Halle: Landesmuseums für Vorgeschichte. Frangipane, Marcella. 2018. Different Trajectories in State Formation in Greater Mesopotamia: A view from Arslantepe (Turkey), Journal of Archaeological Research, 26.1: 3–63. Frangipane, Marcella, Piera Ferioli, Enrica Fiandra, Romina Laurito, and Holly Pittman, ed. 2007. Arslantepe Cretulae. An Early Centralised Administrative System Before Writing. Arslantepe V. Rome: Sapienza University, Dip. di Scienze dell’Antichità. Gibson, McGuire, Muhammed Maktesh, Judith A. Franke, Amr Al-Azm, John C. Sanders, Tony Wilkinson, Clemens Reichel, Jason Ur, Peggy Sanders, Abdulillah Salameh, Carrie Hritz, Brigitte Watkins, and Mahmoud Kattab. 2002. First Season of Syrian-American Investigations at Hamoukar, Hasekeh Province. Iraq 64: 45–68. Kirkbride, Diane. 1975. Umm Dabaghiyah 1974: A Fourth Preliminary Report. Iraq 37: 3–10. Littauer, Mary A. and Joost H. Crouwel. 1990. Ceremonial Threshing in the Ancient Near East. Archaeological Evidence. Iraq 52: 15–19. Marcus, Joyce. 1974. The Iconography of Power among the Classic Maya. World Archaeology 6.1: 83–94. McMahon, Augusta. 2009. The Lion, the King and the Cage: Late Chalcolithic Iconography and Ideology in Northern Mesopotamia. Iraq 71: 115–124. McMahon, Augusta. 2016. The Encultured Vulture: Late Chalcolithic Sealing Images and the Challenges of Urbanism in 4th Millennium BC Northern Mesopotamia. Paléorient 42.1: 169–183. McMahon, Augusta and Joan Oates. 2007. Excavations at Tell Brak 2006–2007. Iraq 69: 145–171. Merpert, Nikolay Y. and Rauf Munchaev. 1993. Yarimtepe I. In Early Stages in the Evolution of Mesopotamian Civilization, ed. Norman Yoffee and Jeffery Clark, 73–114.

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Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Nieuwenhuyse, Olivier. 2007. Plain and Painted Pottery. The Rise of Neolithic Ceramic Styles on the Syrian and Northern Mesopotamian Plains. Turnhout: Brepols. Nieuwenhuyse, Olivier. 2013. The Social Use of Decorated Ceramics in Late Neolithic Upper Mesopotamia. In Interpreting the Late Neolithic of Upper Mesopotamia, ed. Olivier Nieuwenhuyse, Reinhard Bernbeck, Peter M.M.G. Akkermans, and Jana Rogasch, 135–159. Turnhout: Brepols. Palumbi, Giulio. 2010. Pastoral Models and Centralised Animal Husbandry. The Case of Arslantepe. In Economic Centralisation in Formative States. The Archaeological Reconstruction of the Economic System in 4th Millennium Arslantepe, ed. Marcella Frangipane, 149–163. Studi di Preistoria Orientale 3. Rome: Sapienza University, Dip. di Scienze dell’Antichità. Palumbi, Giulio. 2012. Bridging the Frontiers. Pastoral Groups in the Upper Euphrates Region in the Early Third Millennium BCE. Origini 34: 261–278. Pittman, Holly. 1994. Towards an Understanding of the Role of Glyphic Imagery in the Administrative Systems of Proto-Literate Greater Mesopotamia. In Archives before Writing: Proceedings of the International Colloquium, Oriolo Romano, October 23–25, 1991, ed. Piera Ferioli, Enrica Fiandra, Gian Giacomo Fissore, and Marcella Frangipane, 177–203. Roma: Edizioni CIRAAS. Pittman, Holly. 2001. Mesopotamian Intraregional Relations Reflected through Glyptic Evidence in the Late Chalcolithic 1–5 Periods. In Uruk Mesopotamia and Its Neighbors: Cross Cultural Interactions in the Era of State Formation, ed. Mitchell Rothman, 403–444. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Pittman, Holly. 2003. Seals and Seal Impressions from Fourth-Millennium Brak: 2001– 2002 seasons. In Excavations at Tell Brak 2001–2002: Preliminary Report by Geoff Emberling and Helen McDonald. Iraq 65: 14–22. Pittman, Holly. 2007. The Glyptic Art of Arslantepe Period VIA: A Consideration of Intraregional Relations as Seen through Style and Iconography. In Arslantepe Cretulae. An Early Centralised Administrative System Before Writing, ed. Marcella Frangipane, 284–338. Arslantepe V. Rome: Sapienza University, Dip. di Scienze dell’Antichità. Rothman, Mitchell S. 2002. Tepe Gawra: The Evolution of a Small Prehistoric Center in Northern Iraq. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. 1993. Images of Enship. In Between the Rivers and over the Mountains: Archaeologica Anatolica et Mesopotamica Alba Palmieri Dedicata, ed. Marcella Frangipane, Harald Hauptmann, Mario Liverani, Paolo Matthiae, and Machteld Mellink, 201–219. Rome: Sapienza University of Rome, Dip. di Scienze



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Tobler, Arthur J. 1950. Excavations at Tepe Gawra. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Verhoeven, Marc. 2002. Transformation of Society: The Changing Role of Ritual and Symbolism in the PPNB and the PN in the Levant, Syria and South-East Anatolia, Paléorient 28.1: 5–12.

7 Sealing Practices at Tal-e Bakun A: Revisiting Concepts of Social Organization and Economic Control 1

Barbara Helwing Keywords: Seal; stamp; social complexity; economic control; prehistoric Iran

INTRODUCTION Social Complexity in the Fifth Millennium BCE Near East

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he emergence of social complexity is a much discussed topic in the archaeology of the ancient Near East, where the type site of Uruk, with its mid-fourth millennium monumental buildings, its representative imagery, and the earliest known textual sources, was occupied by a society organized around a notion of centralized and institutionalized social and economic control (Algaze 2013). The periods preceding this sudden conjunction, the fifth millennium BCE Ubaid Period in Mesopotamia and the Bakun Period in the highlands of southern Iran, are hence often regarded as transitional or mere predecessor periods. In this respect, researchers interpreting the remains of fifth millennium BCE sites approach these through a distorted lens that subjugates their unique material remains to models informed by the later and better known Uruk models. Such an approach obscures the fact that fifth millennium BCE communities developed highly original lifeways in their own rights that differ in many aspects from the later developments and their institutions and that deserve an independent study. Although many recent approaches have taken these problems into consideration (for example, Stein 2010 with a focus on Northern Mesopotamia), such issues remain to be pursued with respect to highland Iran.

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Understanding early complexity has, since the days of V. Gordon Childe, often been linked to concepts of economic advantages and the creation of surplus wealth as the major trigger for the formation of institutions (Childe 1935, 1950; e.g., Algaze 2008). In this perspective, controlling the flow of trade goods is a crucial capability, made possible through the use of seals to mark and control the content of containers and houses. The use of seals is prominently presented as evidence for fifth millennium BCE social complexity, and it has successfully been used as such in the case of the highland Iran at the important site of Tal-e Bakun A (Alizadeh 1988, 2006). While economic monopolization is certainly a valid argument to explain the emergence of hierarchies, it has more recently also been noted that specific social practices, summarized as “commensality” (Pollock 2012; D’Anna 2012), also played a decisive role in the formation and maintenance of social order by providing a stage where social relations could be negotiated and transformed. Commensality describes ways of sharing food both in daily life and on exceptional occasions. Such exceptional occasions would be feasts (Dietler and Hayden 2001; Dietrich et al. 2012; Helwing 2003; Hodder and Meskell 2012; Spielmann 2002; Twiss 2008), collective events held at recurrent special occasions that often have a ritual character. Feasts comprised not only the consumption of an overabundance of foodstuff, drinks, and drugs, but also performative actions like music, dancing, and other activities that enhanced the personal experience of such remarkable events. The (ritual) exchange of gifts and prestige items would be another remarkable aspect of the feast. Altogether, feasting events potentially leave material traces in the archaeological record that can be used to reconstruct this specific social practice (cf. Helwing 2003). In prehistoric highland Iran, the archaeological evidence remains scanty, but can be enhanced by pictorial evidence for dancing, a specific feasting activity (Garfinkel 2003: 161–203). Series of images of dancing people are preserved on painted pottery, which allow us to consider this important social practice from a fresh angle. It is the purpose of this paper to tie the two strands of glyptic and pictorial evidence together in a meaningful way by linking them to significant patterns of social communication that culminated at specific occasions in ritual feasting. As I will argue below, images of people preserved on painted vessels provide insights into recurrent social practices that constituted the communities inhabiting highland Iran in the fifth millennium BCE, and also allow glimpses into the internal organization of these communities.



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With this goal in mind, a new understanding of fifth millennium sealing practices and their meanings can be achieved.

Seals, Sealings, and Painted Vessels from Tal-e Bakun Seals form one of the most fascinating object categories in the field of study of the ancient Near East. As such, they have been addressed by scholars from a multitude of different angles: as carriers of images and works of art; as signs within systems of visual communication; as markers of authenticity; as evidence for trade relations and bureaucracy; and as tools used within hierarchical social systems to exert control over goods and labor (Pittman 2013; Katchadourian 2005). Crucial for the understanding of seals as tools of control over goods and labor is the assumption that the presence of seals and sealings in the archaeological record signifies the operation of complex systems of economic administration, and hence the existence of a complex or hierarchical social organization. In other words, a community using seals must be socially complex. A key site for this type of argument is Tal-e Bakun A in the Fars Province of southern Iran, where a rich assemblage of seals and sealings dating from the mid-fifth millennium BCE has been documented (Langsdorff and McCown 1942; Alizadeh 1988). In this chapter, I use the evidence from Tal-e Bakun A to challenge the equation between the use of seals and the rise of socially complex communities, and to argue that this equation is based on models derived from later periods. Furthermore, such an association between the use of seals and social complexity regards the development of economic administration as a drawn-out but largely continuous concept, and assumes a similar conception of property and value was in existence throughout prehistory. While scholars agree that Greater Mesopotamia was home to communities that engaged in trade and centralized bureaucratic control over goods and labor from the fourth millennium BCE onwards, we understand these organizational innovations to be part of major social transformations affecting the whole region along variable pathways towards urbanization and centralization. But as these transformations led to profound changes in the overall social fabric, we have no reason to extrapolate from fourth millennium BCE examples onto earlier concepts of economic value and control. To reconstruct fifth millennium BCE Bakun Period society, I combine pictorial evidence (from painted vessels of this period) with the available archaeological data and argue that Bakun Period society was based on a strong egalitarian

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ideology expressed in collective rituals and feasts. Within this framework, stamp seals and their impressions, which are the primary types of evidence adduced for reconstructions of economic and social control in this period, provide a means of expressing the identity of groups or individuals in the interaction of family- or lineage-based communities. Once established, these identity markers would lend themselves readily to an emergent value economy—as is reconstructed for the later fourth millennium BCE. In the following discussion, I first introduce the fifth millennium BCE communities in highland Iran that are encompassed under that name “Bakun Period” and that form the core of this study. The extraordinary evidence from Tal-e Bakun A on sealing practice and its various interpretations is presented in detail, and subsequently framed within a review of prehistoric sealing practice in a larger geographical and chronological perspective. In a second step, the social interpretation of the Bakun A period is revisited and some new concepts are introduced, in particular the notion that feasting events function as a type of culmination point where social order and relations are open to negotiation. This interpretation draws on Bakun Period imagery that provides strong arguments for an egalitarian ideology prevalent among these societies, an argument that contradicts the notion that Bakun Period communities had already established strong hierarchies and hence social complexity.

BAKUN COMMUNITIES IN WESTERN ASIA Prehistoric communities that settled in the fertile valleys of the ancient Near East from the early Holocene (ca. 8000 BCE) had their roots in mobile forager populations, organized in small egalitarian units, that roamed the landscape before and during the Epipalaeolithic (ca. 12,000–8000 BCE). These groups maintained long distance networks of contact that are archaeologically visible through the circulation of source-specific materials like shells or obsidian. Some of these networks persisted through the subsequent periods of increased sedentism, and exotic materials continued to circulate despite the decrease in individual personal mobility among parts of the population. These networks were still in existence when the fifth millennium BCE Bakun communities populated the south of Iran and engaged in exchange with distant acquaintances, as evident from their use of various kinds of exotic materials, such as turquoise and lapis lazuli, that were not available in their direct neighborhoods.



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The hallmark of the Bakun communities of fifth millennium BCE southern Iran was a highly elaborate painted pottery with black paint on light ground (black-on-buff ), part of a large koiné of shared styles of pottery that depended on the rapid spreading of a new pottery kiln technology (Weeks et al. 2010; Petrie 2011). The distribution of specific painted motifs into the mountain regions of southern Iran seems to follow historically documented nomadic trails (Alizadeh 2003). This may reflect how geographical constraints contributed to the transmission of pottery styles and technological knowledge along the most convenient pathways through a high mountain landscape.

Research at Tal-e Bakun A Tal-e Bakun A was the first Chalcolithic site in highland Fars to be excavated in a systematic manner after its discovery in the 1920s by the team working at nearby Persepolis under the direction of Ernst Herzfeld (1929, 1932). During the first season in 1928, painted pottery was recorded from two major trenches that approached the site from its northwest and southeast edges. The excavated material later served to define a first key assemblage for Chalcolithic Fars, a period subsequently labeled the “Bakun Period” (ca. 4500–4100 BCE) after the site of Bakun A. Only one stamp seal was found during this season, a flat incised turquoise with a piercing called a pendant by Herzfeld (1932: pl. XXIX [middle and lower image]). Following initial soundings in Prehistoric Persepolis (as it was then called), the site was subsequently excavated on a large scale over two major seasons, 1932 (Langsdorff and McCown 1942) and 1937, yielding a four-level stratigraphic sequence (Alizadeh 1988: fig. 2 [plan]). The 1932 excavation proceeded with two long trenches crosscutting the mound and opened a large area in the northern part of the site where a series of multi-roomed buildings were uncovered in the major occupation level III. While these structures were densely spaced and shared walls, each also held its own storage rooms in a well-protected location at the interior of the building (Langsdorff and McCown 1942: 10): the structures, consequently, at least seem to represent independent economic units. Traces of wall paintings were observed in some rooms, indicating that the buildings served also as living spaces—essentially houses—and not only as warehouses. A number of pottery kilns were also found, now known to be typical of most Bakun Period sites (Helwing and Seyedin 2010). The 1937 excavations were conducted in

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smaller units and targeted a central area of the mound. These works yielded rectilinear architecture, but house plans remained incomplete; a group of parallel walls might have belonged to the substructure of a storeroom. In 1956, a Japanese expedition embarked on a new phase of research by opening a sounding in the western half of the site. They uncovered residues of a small rectilinear building that was probably part of a larger unit (Egami and Masuda 1962). Further small-scale investigations were conducted in 2004 by Abbas Alizadeh (2006). However, not much of the formerly uncovered remains was preserved at this moment, so a direct connection to the earlier discoveries was difficult to establish.

Reconstructing Bakun Social Organization The reconstruction of the Bakun Period as one in which a pre-state complex society developed in highland Iran is based on a number of pieces of evidence that are outlined and detailed below: (1) Settlement patterns, as indicated by surveys, indicate a two-level hierarchy: one group of sites, the majority of those surveyed, are spread over less than one hectare; a second group of slightly larger settlements reaches approximately 3 hectares in size. This pattern has been interpreted as evidence for an emerging trend towards centralization (Alizadeh 1988, 2006), organized around a few larger central places. The idea that these centers served as base stations for mobile pastoralist groups who became the predominant power factor over the remaining sedentary population, as proposed by Alizadeh (2003, 2006, 2010), is a muchcontested hypothesis (for a contrary view, see Fraser 2008; Potts 2014: 21–27) that I will not pursue here. (2) Architectural plans have been recovered from Bakun A, Tal-e Gap (Egami and Sono 1962), Tepe Jari A (Egami et al. 1977) and Tepe Rahmatabad (Bernbeck et al. 2005) that indicate a typical Bakun Period settlement comprised houses with agglutinated multiple rooms. The placement of individual house units, nested closely together and sharing walls with neighboring units, seems to point to the existence of individual family or lineage-based groups. In Bakun A, spatial zoning has also been observed with respect to buildings predominantly used as workshops and store houses: specific valuable goods such as stones and metal, as well as tools like spindle whorls and scrapers, were stored in five different houses.



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An important caveat to the evidence adduced above should be presented here: we do not know if this reconstruction of the Bakun Period settlement architecture is fully tenable. Herzfeld argued that Bakun people lived not in individual house units but rather in a large communal construction that formed the center of the settlement.2 Additional questions remain, regardless of precise habitation arrangements: how did people commute between the houses? Might the roofs have been a space for traffic and communication? Did the houses remain a place of “privacy”? These questions unfortunately remain open as the upper parts of those walls recovered during excavation are not preserved. (3) Burial practices are too scarcely known for generalizations, but it is important to note that multiple and multiple stage burials exist alongside individual burials (Vanden Berghe 1952: 214–15 XLIX; L, a; Helwing et al. 2012). The state of the multiple burials in Bolaghi indicates successive stages of handling and manipulation of the bodies, as these were neither complete nor in anatomical order, and as bundles of bones were deposited together. This type of burial practice is thought to emphasize group identity over individual achievement and status, and to be intended to incorporate the dead ancestors into the living world. Such conceptualizations are known mostly from Neolithic communities (Brereton 2016: 196) but also occur in later periods. For example, in southwestern Iran, the Susa “high terrace” with its numerous secondary burials forms a comparable unit (Canal 1978; Hole 1990, 1992). Better documented evidence of collective and possibly secondary burial has recently been brought to light in late fifth millennium BCE Chogha Sofla in south Iran (Moghaddam 2016). Hence, the Bakun Period burials do not indicate much internal social differentiation but seem rather to emphasize continuity with more ancient (Neolithic) practices. (4) Bakun Period communities had access to a multitude of special raw materials, local and exotic: copper and lapis lazuli, silex, shell, and semiprecious stone. In Bakun, such goods were placed inside storerooms in individual houses, and they are often associated with stamp seals. (5) Technological evidence relates mostly to the production of pottery. Double-chambered updraft pottery kilns were adopted from the middle Bakun Period onwards, allowed higher firing temperatures, but were seemingly difficult to control. The extraordinary number of kilns together with ample evidence for experiments gone wrong indicate a craft

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in transition and not (yet) a fully specialized trade, but the sophisticated and canonized imagery painted on the Bakun vessels is certainly not the work of laypersons. Other fields, such as metallurgy, also remain in an incipient, low-output stage although some interesting objects, such as copper seals and a dagger, are produced (Alizadeh 2006: fig. 70; pl. 20, E). (6) Stamps made of stone, clay, or metal form a distinct and highly significant find group: they have been frequently used to argue for the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of few individuals, as we will see below. Stamps have been found at a number of sites, while stamp seal impressions are so far only known in southern Iran from Tal-e Bakun A. The typical ways in which this limited glyptic record has been interpreted stands at the heart of those reconstructions characterizing Bakun Period society as an emerging hierarchical society: it is these reconstructions that I wish to revisit and directly challenge below. (7) Lastly, we must acknowledge that many types of data—as, for example, on the subsistence economy, on the general health of the population, and on many other leads that cannot now be reconstructed from the old excavation records—are still lacking, precluding any truly comprehensive reconstruction of Bakun Period lifeways. And there also remains to be examined, as a type of evidence that exists but has not yet been fully exploited, the pictorial record in the form of painted Bakun Period vessels, which offer some important information on the behavior of Bakun Period populations (elaborated below).

SEALS AND SEALINGS IN BAKUN A According to the available documentation, 24 stamps and numerous sealings were found during the first excavation season (1932) investigating the houses of the northern area at Tal-e Bakun A (Alizadeh 1988 is based on 140 sealings from these excavations). One further stamp derives from the small-scale Japanese excavations further to the west (Egami and Masuda 1962: fig. 20, 2). The 1937 individual trenches in the southern half of the site yielded no seals, indicating that these areas had a different function than the northern houses. The Bakun A seals recovered all show geometric patterns on the sealing side: these patterns were organized according to principles of axial symmetry and were executed with linear incisions.



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Ownership... Herzfeld, who travelled widely, acquired (among other artifacts) a collection of stamp seals from the neighborhood of Tepe Giyan in Luristan. He immediately identified the Bakun A material as stamp seals. According to him, these seals, referred to as “buttons,” would have been items worn on the person, and only unintentionally have been turned into (signaturelike) devices used to mark ownership (Herzfeld 1933, 1941: 13–15). In the reports on the 1932 season, Alexander Langsdorff and Donald McCown refer to these “buttons” as seals and link them to stamped clay lumps that they labelled “jar stoppers”; these stamped clay lumps were found in clearly delimited concentrations within some rooms, and were, following Herzfeld, interpreted as designating ownership (Langsdorff and McCown 1942: 23).

...and Control? The exhaustive analysis of the Bakun A sealing evidence by Abbas Alizadeh (1988, 1994) is based on the rich documentation and materials from the 1932 and 1937 seasons. He used the sealing evidence, together with the recovered architecture, ceramics, and small finds to argue for a Chalcolithic Period complex society in Bakun, with an administrative compound located in the northern part of the site. The spatial distribution of seals and sealings in the northern buildings was uneven and restricted to only some houses, which were consequently designated “warehouses.” Furthermore, Alizadeh recognized that many clay sealings may have served to close doors: 104 out of 140 sealings are considered door sealings (Alizadeh 1994: 43; for such systems in modern context, see Ferioli and Fiandra 1993, esp. 284–86). This important observation would indicate that access to some rooms was restricted and controlled by specific seal holders. Concentrations of sealings recovered during excavation often contained pieces that had been deliberately baked to make them durable, pointing to their use in record-keeping. Moreover, these findings (seals and sealings) were (as detailed above) often correlated with concentrations of tools, raw materials, or processed goods in small storage rooms. The houses in which these storage rooms were located seem also to have comprised workshops used by craft specialists who were engaged in the production of prestige and staple goods. The combined evidence indicating the presence of craft specialists (as attested by the presence of specialized tools and raw materials) and access

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control (as attested by the presence of door sealings) forms the basis for the reconstruction of the Bakun community as an example of a “pre-state complex society” (Alizadeh 1988: 17). At the time of his first writing, Alizadeh explicitly referred to ongoing research into proto-literate levels in Susa in southwestern Iran, where door sealings had just been detected in Susa A contexts (Amiet 1986). These were considered an important part of administrative technology in Khuzistan on the path towards the formation of early states (Wright and Johnson 1975: 270–72). In this regard, it was notable that the Bakun sealings pre-dated the proto-literate examples from Susa; Bakun could thus be presented as an early prototype of a settlement possessed of a complex, hierarchical structure despite its limited size, anticipating subsequent developments towards complexity. But, as I intend to show in the following discussion, we have no definitive means of demonstrating the existence of concepts of private or collective property or control during the fifth millennium BCE. Rather, Bakun Period societies could have functioned very well as collective units with egalitarian ideologies.

On the Function of Early Stamp Seals As mentioned above, Herzfeld drew an immediate connection between the stamp seals he had collected and the act of authenticating identity, only subsequently linking the seals to a concept of personal ownership. The field excavators at Bakun also drew this link and presented the stamp seals as evidence for ownership of goods. This initial association with ownership was then significantly elaborated by Alizadeh in his reconstruction of the stamp seals as economic and administrative control devices. Other early excavators, alongside those working at Bakun, similarly emphasized the association of stamp seals with functions pertaining both to authentication (for Tepe Giyan, Contenau and Ghirshman 1935: 48) and ownership (for Gawra, Tobler 1950: 177). Buchanan (1967: 535) already cautiously pointed out the potential of sealings as a source of information on ancient social organization. That seals can have more than one meaning was implicitly suggested by Denyse Homès-Frédéricq (1970: 3–10), who pointed to their find contexts in temples and graves. This, according to her, corroborated the conception of early stamps as “valuable[s],” that possibly also functioned as labels and apotropaic objects. The amulet character of seals has also been emphasized by Collon (1987: 119). Indeed, the original function of the stamp seal might well have been that of a personal

7.1 Map Showing Sites with Early Seals and Sealings Mentioned in the Text (Inset shows sites in the neighborhood of Bakun where seals were recorded)

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ornament or amulet, prior to its assuming the role of authentication device (von Wickede 1990: 38). Apparently, some button-shaped seals display traces of having been worn on a string (Root 2005: 6). Also, Wright and Johnson (1975: 271) discussed fourth millennium BCE seals in Susa and Sharafabad as clear signifiers of authorization and control. At the occasion of a conference in Chicago in 1975 (Gibson et al. 1977), the function of seals in administration was brought systematically to the fore, but only one paper focused on early seal use: Nissen (1977: 15, and passim) discussed the origin of cylinder seals from stamp seals and left no doubt that the predecessors of cylinder seals already possessed an economic function. He proposed two possible options to explain the shift from stamps to cylinders: (1) either a complex economic administration system was already in place and only the sealing surface and practice was altered; or (2) the economy as such changed, necessitating a concomitant change in the sealing system. Shortly after the Chicago conference, David H. Caldwell (1976) undertook the first exploration of the use of stamps within prehistoric long-distance trade systems (Moorey in Buchanan and Moorey 1984: 6), though his argument was challenged in Henrickson’s (1988) publication of a small corpus from Seh Gabi, which asserted that the geographic location of the site limited its access to trade routes—consequently also limiting the necessity of owning seals. An edited volume by Piera Ferioli et al. (1994), inspired by the discovery of seal impressions at fourth millennium BCE Arslantepe, was highly influential as it brought together contributions by eminent scholars to discuss the functional and social implications of early stamp seals. On this occasion, the relevant assemblages for fifth millennium BCE seal use, including those from Degirmentepe in Anatolia and Tepe Gawra in Mesopotamia, were discussed. Degirmentepe, located on the Upper Euphrates in modern-day Turkey, yielded a rich fifth millennium BCE glyptic assemblage of 24 seals and some 450 seal impressions (Esin 1994) at a site characterized by densely packed tripartite houses and a precocious copper metallurgy. The types of containers sealed in Degirmentepe were largely moveable; only one possible door sealing is mentioned in this report. As in Bakun, the seal impressions were concentrated in a few rooms. Ufuk Esin (1994: 66), the excavator of Degirmentepe, proposed three different possible functions for these seals: (1) as identifiers of goods; (2) as signifiers of ownership; and (3) as “common



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property in the name of worshipped deities,” a concept that she connected with the beginnings of a theocratic state organization. Tepe Gawra, situated in the Mosul region of modern-day Iraq, yielded an enormous trove of seals and sealings. On the basis of a sample of these, Mitchell Rothman (1994) developed and presented his ideas on vertical and horizontal differentiation among the ancient inhabitants of the site, contending this differentiation was expressed also in the seal imagery (more fully elaborated in Rothman 2002). Using function and distribution, he was able to reconstruct diachronic oscillations between periods of more and less centralization in craft production and in the “packing” of goods to be sealed. As in Bakun A, door sealings were also observed in Gawra. These occurred alongside sealed containers and pots, and seem to have locked off specific rooms within the larger settlement; therefore, a system of centralized access control seemed likely. The Gawra findings corroborate Alizadeh’s notion that door sealings represented a major innovation in the fifth millennium BCE. It is important to note that these studies on early seals take as their point of departure an understanding of glyptic assemblages gleaned from later historical periods, extrapolating back from these in order to formulate analogies and hypotheses. By drawing on fourth to third millennium BCE analogies (e.g., Lamberg-Karlovsky 1975; Alizadeh 1994: 47 refers to Fiandra’a works on Festos and Kish; Rothman [1994: 99–100] uses examples from Ur III administration, and from Arslantepe), the economic structure of later state societies is implied to already have existed, at least in nascent form, by the fifth millennium BCE. And yet classical typologies of emerging economies as proposed by economists and anthropologists (Polanyi 1968; Sahlins 1963, 1974) draw a boundary between earlier phases of reciprocal exchange and the Uruk Period emergence of a redistributive economy on the verge of the fourth millennium BCE.3 While no anthropological case studies can be directly translated into a model for Bakun’s economy, they remain inspiring insofar as they emphasize that the conceptions underlying prehistoric exchange relations are largely not “wealth”-related in an accumulative sense but instead regard source-specific and exotic goods as desirable prestige-related items. Exchange among Bakun communities seems to have concentrated on small-scale goods of often exotic origin; these were hoarded in some houses, while the stamps were applied to containers and rooms holding staple goods and raw material within the settlement.

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Earlier (Pre-Bakun) Sealings It is instructive to follow the development of early seals in chronological order (see also Duistermaat 2012 for a diachronic study). In the beginning, only the stamps themselves are known and no stamped materials occur. Early Neolithic stamps have mostly been recorded at Levantine sites like Byblos, Ras Shamra, and in the Amuq (Homès-Fredericq 1970; compiled by von Wickede 1990; Rashad 1990). These Neolithic stamps often come in the shape of incised pebbles or pendants, so that they can probably be understood also as personal ornaments. Large stamps formed from clay— so-called pintaderas—form a discrete object category, distinguished by the large size of the stamp, which may measure 5 to 10 cm in length. They are attested in the ancient Near East but also at Neolithic sites in southeastern Europe and in Anatolia (Skeates 2007). Their precise function remains unknown, but proposals have been put forth linking pintaderas to the application of paint (Skeates 2007: 185). This could be a valid argument, as pintaderas from Neolithic Tell el-Kerkh reveal traces of color among the residues (Duistermaat 2012). As no stampings of pintaderas are known, the types of media on which the color was ultimately stamped remains unknown: textiles, leather, walls, or even human bodies may have been stamped. The earliest stamp impressions known appear on gypsum plaster and were discovered at late Pre-Pottery Neolithic (ca. late eighth millennium BCE) Tell Bouqras (Akkermans et al. 1983: pl. 42b–c) and el-Kowm (after von Wickede 1990: cat no. 9–13) in Syria, and in slightly later Neolithic Tell es-Sawwan (Wahida 1967: 9.3; Abu al-Soof 1968: pl. XVI.2; Yasin 1970: pl. XIX.33) in modern-day Iraq. These imprints were set on flat gypsum plates and may have served a decorative or other type of marking function; one such plate at least seems to be a lid closing a container. Imprints were also recorded at Neolithic Tepe Sumaki on clay lumps of variable shapes (Erim-Özdoğan 2011). Evidence for the sealing of closed containers comes from Tell Sabi Abyad in Syria: both seals and sealings, which represent the oldest known clay sealings, were found in clear concentrations in the Late Neolithic Burnt Village (ca. 6300–6200 BCE). The clay in question has been identified as local (Duistermaat and Schneider 1998) and seems to have been applied to close portable containers; no door sealings are (yet) attested. Within the context of Neolithic communities, to which a strong egalitarian ideology is ascribed (Frangipane 2013) and which seem to have



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retained a high level of mobility (Akkermans 2013; Bernbeck 2013), this evidence has nevertheless been interpreted through a dual economy model involving sedentary and mobile populations alike, comparable to the interpretation proposed for Bakun A (Akkermans and Duistermaat 1997). Both hypotheses assume that populations even temporarily on the move needed to mark (and secure?) the staple goods they left in their home bases. There are at least two immediate objections to the model detailed above: (1) it is predicated on the existence of a concept of property; and (2) it seems to require a system capable of enforcing sanctions in response to violations of said property (also mentioned in Alizadeh 1994: 45). But how would a community on the move have assured property rights if not by threatening sanctions? While the necessity of identifying storage objects left behind might be a valid concern, I argue that we have no good reasons to assume that (1) such a concept of personal property existed, and that (2) a system of legal sanctions could be maintained in cases in which concerned parties were absent: this understanding of personal property would require a state-like structure (for which there is little other evidence) to establish and enforce such legal concepts. More sealings were subsequently found at Sabi Abyad, and other places also yielded evidence for sealing practice. Two sealings from Boueid II are closely comparable to the Sabi Abyad examples (Duistermaat 2002): one had been used to close a basket container, and one was found next to a concentration of obsidian. The Neolithic site Shir in western Syria also yielded some sealings (Duistermaat 2012: fig. 3, reference to pers. comm. K. Bartl). Six sealings recovered from Tell el-Kerkh had similarly been applied to baskets. This site also yielded about 100 seals proper, many of which were deposited within graves as personal property (Tsuneki 2013: 86–87). These findings instigated the formulation of a more nuanced model for the interpretation of the discoveries at Sabi Abyad and the other Neolithic sites, one which integrated the symbolic and apotropaic qualities of the seals, while at the same time maintaining that a concept of property would have been in place in the Late Neolithic (Duistermaat 2000, 2010, 2013). The nature of this concept of property, according to Duistermaat’s formulation, is briefly elucidated below. To summarize, stamps were known from the beginning of sedentary settlement onwards, with evidence extant for the use of pintaderas in relation with color pigments. The Sabi Abyad sealings indicate there was a

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need for the specific marking of portable containers, and a similar function is likely for the Neolithic sealings from Tell el-Kerkh, Boueid II, and Shir. Duistermaat (2010, 2013) suggests the marking of containers be situated within a conceptual framework of private property necessitated through an increased reliance on primary agricultural staple goods, though she maintains at the same time that no notion of hierarchy or social control is necessarily implied in this interpretation. The use of stamps would consequently represent part of an overall strategy for reconciling notions of specific identity with a predominant ideology of group egalitarianism. Whether this translates into a model of private property marking, as proposed by Duistermaat, remains a question for debate. In the wake of this early prelude to the use of stamp seals in the PrePottery Neolithic B (ca. 8800–7000 BCE) to early ceramic Neolithic, stamps seemingly enter common use in the late Neolithic, although stamp impressions from this period remain rare as yet. This scarcity leaves the Sabi Abyad evidence largely isolated, with the exception of three Halaf Period (ca. 5900–5300 BCE) clay bullae from Arpachiyah that seem to have enclosed a string and that were covered with numerous stamp impressions in the shape of a hand (Mallowan and Cruikshank Rose 1935: pl. 9b). While these remarkable examples indicate that sealing practices known from later periods were already fully established by the Halaf Period (Pittman 2001: 412), they do not necessarily indicate that these carried a meaning of economic control. Stone stamps appear in a variety of shapes and motifs at most Halaf sites all over the Near East; many of these have shapes that suggest their use as personal decorations or amulets, to be worn like pendants on a necklace. This suggests already a direct personal link between the stamps and the individuals who wore them. This, then, was the situation when the fifth millennium BCE Chalcolithic communities in Iran and Mesopotamia began to use stamps. Seals by this point had become commonplace, but only a few sites—in particular Degirmentepe in Anatolia and Tepe Gawra in Mesopotamia—complement the Tal-e Bakun A evidence on sealing practices. The questions that remain, consequently, are as follows: Can and should we reconstruct fifth millennium BCE Fars populations as communities well on the way towards an economically grounded social inequality, as the various models outlined above imply? Does the available evidence support the existence of a system of private property and control over staple goods at



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sites such as Tal-e Bakun during the fifth millennium BCE? And to what extent can we extrapolate social conditions from the evidence of sealings on door locks? We may gain some additional insights from revisiting the archaeological evidence used to reconstruct Bakun lifeways, as well as by examining the frequently disregarded pictorial evidence of the painted vessels from sites of this period.

Stamps and Seals as Personal Markers? In her discussions of Neolithic sealing evidence, Kim Duistermaat (2010, 2012, 2013) has rightly pointed to the multivocal functions of stamps: to leave a mark on an object or a wall; to apply color to skin or textile; to fulfill, possibly, a symbolic or apotropaic function. The use of a stamp for marking is specifically regarded as an expression of identity or a statement of belonging to a specific group or community. This must have been a personal and individual issue: in the Neolithic Tell el-Kerkh graveyard, several burials held seals and even a child was buried with a personal seal. These seals appear to express personal identity rather than economic control, and we might extrapolate from their use as grave goods that the act of stamping was in this context more an expression of identity than of property control. Sealing leaves a personal mark like a signature, either on a container to be delivered, or on a wall of a building visited at any occasion. In this framework, signing a container might indicate the mark of a sender or supplier rather than a claim to control access to property. In the fifth millennium BCE, the use of stamp seals was expanded beyond their inclusion in burials to include their application (as evidenced by sealings) on door locks and containers. The evidence from Tal-e Bakun A in southern Iran, as well as from Tepe Gawra in Mesopotamia and Degirmentepe in Anatolia, seems to indicate that door sealings occurred in spatial concentrations and in specific rooms within the settlements. It remains possible that a use of seals to secure doors would occur in central places in a hierarchically organized society but, with the exception of Tal-e Bakun A, no contemporary site in the region has yielded any sealings, rendering it very difficult to test this assumption. If sealings in the Bakun Period are known primarily from Tal-e Bakun, stamps themselves are not similarly restricted. Several Bakun sites yielded stamps: one clay stamp is known from Tal-e Nokhodi (Goff 1963: 50, fig. 7.5); four stamps were collected from the surface of the mound at Dehbid (Stein

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1936: pl. XXX 24–26; Goff 1963: 50, fig. 7.4); two stone stamps were found during excavations at Tepe Jari A (Egami et al. 1977: pl. I 3–4); and, located further to the south, the sites of Kanakan A (Stein 1936: 150, pl. XXX 29), Tal-e Regi near Kamalabad (Stein 1936: 128, pl. XXX 27–28, 30), Vakilabad and Seh Tali (Stein 1936: 149, 156 plan 8; Rashad 1990: 185–86), as well as Tal-e Pir (Stein 1937: 218–19, 221 [plan 18]; Rashad 1990: 186), have yielded small collections.

7.2 Tang-e Bolaghi, Stamp Seals: a TB91.115.06-4, Dm. 33 mm, clay; b TB91.306-04, measurements: 12 x 13 mm, stone; c Surface find from TB 91, clay, collected in Spring 2005, no scale

Three more stamps, one made of stone and two of clay (Fig. 7.2a–c), were retrieved in 2005 from the small site TB 91 during rescue work in the Bolaghi Valley in Fars (Helwing and Seyedin 2006). One of the clay seals, which was found during preliminary survey, is a round disc with a convex, bulging section. It is pierced in the middle and incised with a geometric pattern centered around a cross (Fig. 7.2c). The second clay seal, also only partly preserved, has a round disc-shaped stamp and a high handle on the back. The incised pattern is complex but also based on a central point and probably a cross that is formed from leaf-shaped contours (Fig. 7.2a). The third seal, small and made of stone, has a high eyelet on its back; the stamping side bears a pattern of cross-hatched lozenges (Fig. 7.2b). The distribution of stamps not only in central sites such as Tal-e Bakun A but also in such minor and sometimes remote sites like Bolaghi 91 is an argument against the exclusive association of stamps with central (or, for that matter, necessarily centralized) places. While there remains the possibility



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that people living in remote sites would have sealed packages to be sent to central sites, the distribution of stamps as known today does not corroborate an association of stamps with an exclusive elite. While the types of stamps recovered during excavation may have been used to sign deliveries, thereby serving as markers of identity, we have no evidence of any centralized control beyond that.

BAKUN IMAGES: THE EVIDENCE OF THE PAINTED VESSELS In what sorts of context would the inhabitants of Tal-e Bakun A have felt the need to imprint their identities onto lumps of clay? To reconstruct ancient practices of identity marking in Chalcolithic Fars, I propose to look next at evidence for social practices as documented in Bakun Period images that we know largely from the elaborate pottery painting characteristic of the period. Bakun Period imagery is rich and complex, and it is organized according to principles of symmetry based around a central point, as is the case for the stamp seals from Bakun A. Motifs circle around the vessel’s center or are organized in separate consecutive geometric fields. The style varies from fully naturalistic to strongly stylized with fantastic imagery; some motifs are highly abstracted from the natural world referents to which they relate. A minor portion of the painted wares show naturalistic scenes that include human figures. These are depicted on a small but significant group of vessels. One famous example of such a vessel is a high-stemmed bowl recovered from the burial of an individual deposited in a flexed position at the site of Tepe Jari A (Fig 7.3a) (Vanden Berghe 1952: 215, pl. XLIX, L a). The hollow foot has round openings that are each encircled by a line of paint, while the interior side of the bowl bears a row of dancing men painted in dark color on light ground. The dancing male figures are depicted in profile, one behind the other; each places his hands on the shoulder of his predecessor and movement is indicated through the figures’ bent legs. The repetition and rhythm of the scene allow the viewer to recognize here the representation of a group dance. One other painted sherd recovered from Tepe Jari A shows a dancer with raised hands (Egami et al. 1977: pl. III 5). Such fully naturalistic dancing scenes are rare but are known also from Bakun A (Fig. 7.3c) (Herzfeld 1941: 39, fig. 59c), with the painted figures interpreted by Herzfeld as

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7.3 Examples of Painted Vessels Showing Dancing Humans: a Tepe Jari A; b–c Tal-a Bakun A; d Cheshmeh Ali; e Tepe Sabz (not to scale; figs. 7.3b–d respectively after Herzfeld 1941: pl. V [lower]; fig. 59c; fig. 195 [upper left])



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dancers. An exceptional bowl from Tal-e Bakun A (Fig. 7.3b), bearing the image of a stylized standing human shown frontally with his two hands raised and with his head indicated by a hook (Herzfeld 1941: pl. V [lower]), was characterized by Herzfeld as a demon but might also depict a dancer in a ritual scene. Tal-e Gap has also yielded one sherd bearing what seems to be a dancing figure (Egami and Sono 1962: pl. XXXVI B1). Some of the more stylized motifs included on the Bakun Period painted vessels seem also to represent rows of human bodies, perhaps also to be identified as dancers (Langsdorff and McCown 1942: pl. 50, 12). As proposed by Garfinkel (2005), even some of the fully geometric patterns on Bakun ceramics could represent stylized dancers. Dancing scenes occur also in fifth millennium BCE sites in southwestern Iran: human representations from Tepe Khazineh and Musiyan in Deh Luran were originally interpreted as cultic scenes (Gautier and Lampre 1905: 131– 36, NaN-265) but subsequently described as typical of a sort of stylized dancing scene termed “Khazineh style” (Garfinkel 2000). More such fragments were found in the Deh Luran Expedition at Tepe Sabz (Fig. 7.3e) (Hole et al. 1969: 157, fig. 62c [reconstruction based on Gautier and Lampre 1905: fig. 264], interpreted as dancing scene; see also 63n; here re-photographed as fig. 7.3e), and in Chogha Mish (Delougaz et al. 1996: pl. 171d, G) and Tepe Jafarabad (Dollfus 1971: 9.1) in Susiana. One bowl from the Susa cemetery shows schematic figures with a strange looped hairstyle (de Mecquenem 1912: pl. II; Bridey 2011: 96, fig. 78a–d, 98). Some rather naturalistic examples come from Chigha Sabz in the Luristan Mountains (van Loon 1989a, 199b: 75–76, pl. 67a). Lastly, dancing scenes are also attested from fifth and fourth millennium BCE sites on the Iranian Plateau, like Cheshmeh Ali (Fig. 7.3d) and Tepe Hissar (Herzfeld 1941: 99, fig. 195, interpreted as a “war dance”). These fifth millennium BCE dancing scenes from Bakun Period sites in southern Iran and from contemporary sites in southwestern and Central Iran share some characteristic features: they depict rows or groups of dancers who are holding on to each other and who move together in unison; sometimes individual figures are even stacked atop each other. The compositions indicate movement, repetition, and rhythm. Groups can be unisex or mixed, but all individuals are allocated the same space in the image and no individual stands out from the group. Unlike in the imagery of fourth millennium BCE Uruk, we observe no evidence for an elite or leader personality within the pictorial record of fifth millennium BCE

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Bakun Period society. These observations suggest that Bakun Period society maintained an ideology of egalitarian access to important rituals and events to all its members. Collective dancing in the fifth millennium BCE must have been part of performative behavior (Hole 1983: 326 calls these “give-away feasts,” in the context of the essentially acephalous society that he reconstructs for Susa I) in which all members of the society participated. We would expect this recurrent behavior at the occasion of feasts that form a crystallization point for the negotiation of social relations and political power and are characterized by the transforming experience of collective performance.

COMBINING GLYPTIC AND PICTORIAL EVIDENCE In the case of the Bakun Period communities, the vast amount of pottery produced at some sites (as in the case of the Bolaghi workshops); the careful signature on stored goods that were collected and kept in the so-called warehouses; and the concentrations of exotic materials documented in some rooms could all very well be explained within the framework of regularly occurring collective feasting events that are reconstructed here on the basis of the pictorial record. Families possibly collected and stored foodstuffs in preparation for such collective events, while the full containers that were supplied for a collective event were stamped with a “signature” in order to gain the merit linked to their provision. Furthermore, the accumulations of exotic materials could have served to demonstrate personal status, either through being worn as personal ornament or otherwise prepared for gifting in the context of a ritualized exchange. In such a context, stamps would have served to identify who provided what to the collective event—they might thus be characterized as identity markers, a type of signature, but not as control mechanisms. If we expand our use of the archaeological data at our disposal to reconstruct Bakun society—drawing on settlement patterns and architecture, burial customs and residues from craft production, sealings and their distribution—the record itself gains a different quality and texture: we literally see people engaging in collective events and shared experiences. Importantly, however, no one individual is singled out as outstanding or special. Altogether, the evidence of the pictorial representations from the painted vessels especially suggests Bakun society was organized along principles of participation, sharing, and egalitarian access rather than resembling the



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sort of pre-state context in which an emerging elite appropriated labor and controlled the flow of and access to commodities (for a comparable argument for Susa I, see Hole 1983: 319–22).

CONCLUSION In the middle of the fifth millennium BCE, Bakun society seems still (at least on the basis of the pictorial evidence of the painted vessels) to have been organized in a predominantly egalitarian way that allowed its members to participate in collective events and to share experiences, food, and commodities. In this setting, stamps could have functioned to impress personal marks onto labels and locks, more in the sense of signature than in the sense of ownership and control. As a practice serving to impress and confirm identity, the moment of sealing may furthermore have lent credibility and authenticity to ongoing communications and exchanges between members of the communities, as well as between them and outsiders like guests. In this context, the preparation of collective ritual events was certainly an important event. With all the sealing assets readily present, sealing practice could be easily translated into a mechanism of elite control only half a millennium later in the nascent state societies. However, as long as we restrict our view to the Bakun world and its neighbors, this later model cannot be projected backwards in time without eliding the peculiarities of these thriving Chalcolithic communities. NOTES:

7.1 The Bolaghi excavations were carried out as a joint project by the Iranian Center for Archaeological Research and the German Archaeological Institute Tehran within the framework of the Bolaghi Valley Rescue Project in two seasons in 2005 and 2006. I wish to thank the late Dr. M. Azarnoush for his support throughout the project, and Dr. Mojgan Seyedin, director of the Iranian team, for this wonderful collaboration. Thanks are also due to Mr. Mohammad Ata’i who kindly showed me the region and pointed out some of the prehistoric sites that we later investigated, on which occasion we collected the stamp Fig. 7.2c from the surface of TB91. Lastly, I wish to thank Karen Sonik and Christopher Thornton for their thorough reading and suggestions that helped to improve this paper.

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7.2 See Herzfeld et al. 1967 [1938]: 47–48 for this assertion, no doubt also under the influence of poor observations during the first explorative seasons at the site before 1932; this was still maintained in Herzfeld 1941: 10 despite the much clearer results of the 1932 season. 7.3 While these early models have been much further elaborated in their application to archaeological data through the integration of political economy perspectives, these elaborations do not significantly alter the overall model (Earle 1997; Earle and Spriggs 2015; Frangipane 2007); for a principal criticism of these substantivist models, cf. Lamberg-Karlovsky 1975, and comments to Zagarell (1986; see in particular comments by Stone, Knapp, Wright).

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Corpus der minoischen und mykenischen Siegel, Supplementum 8, 167–182. Mainz am Rhein: von Zabern. Duistermaat, Kim 2012. Which Came First, the Bureaucrat or the Seal? Some Thoughts on the Non-Administrative Origins of Seals in Neolithic Syria. In Seals and Sealing Practices in the Near East: Developments in Administration and Magic from Prehistory to the Islamic Period; Proceedings of an International Workshop at the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo on December 2–3, 2009, ed. Ilona Regulski, Kim Duistermaat, and Peter Verkinderen. Orientalia Lovaniensia analecta, 1–15. Leuven: Peeters. Duistermaat, Kim 2013. Private Matters: The Emergence of Sealing Practices in Neolithic Syria. In Interpreting the Late Neolithic of Upper Mesopotamia, ed. Olivier P. Nieuwenhuyse, Reinhard Bernbeck, Peter M.M.G. Akkermans, and Jana Rogasch. Papers on Archaeology from The Leiden Museum of Antiquities (PALMA 9), 315– 322. Turnhout: Brepols. Duistermaat, Kim, and Gerwulf Schneider. 1998. Chemical Analyses of Seal Clays and the Use of Administrative Artefacts at Late Neolithic Tell Sabi Abyad (Syria). Paléorient 24.1: 89–106. Earle, Timothy. 1997. How Chiefs Come to Power. The Political Economy in Prehistory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Earle, Timothy, and Matthew Spriggs. 2015. Political Economy in Prehistory: A Marxist Approach to Pacific Sequences. Current Anthropology 56.4: 515–544. Egami, Namio, and Seiichi Masuda. 1962. Marv-Dasht I. The Excavation at Tall-i Bakun 1956. Tokyo: The Yamakawa Publishing Co., Ltd. Egami, Namio, and Toshihiko Sono. 1962. Marv-Dasht II. The Excavation at Tall-i Gap 1959. Tokyo: The Yamakawa Publishing Co., Ltd. Egami, Namio, Seiichi Masuda, and Takeshi Gotoh. 1977. Tal-i Jarri A: A Preliminary Report of the Excavations in Marv Dasht, 1961 and 1971. Orient 13: 1–14. Erim-Özdoğan, Aslı. 2011 Sumaki Höyük. A New Neolithic Settlement in the Upper Tigris Basin. In The Tigris Basin, ed. Mehmet Özdoğan, Nezih Başgelen, and Peter Kuniholm, 19–60. The Neolithic in Turkey. New Excavations & New Research 1. Istanbul: Archaeology & Art Publications. Esin, Ufuk 1994. The Functional Evidence of Seals and Sealings of Degirmentepe. In Archives Before Writing, ed. Piera Feriole, Enrica Fiandra, Gian Giacomo Fissore, and Marcella Frangipane. Pubblicazioni degli Archivi di Stato, 59–82. Torino: Sargraf. Ferioli, Piera, and Enrica Fiandra. 1993. Arslantepe Locks and the Samas ‘Key.’ In Between the Rivers and Over the Mountains. Archaeologica Anatolica et Mesopotamica

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Alba Palmieri Dedicata, ed. Marcella Frangipane, Harald Hauptmann, Mario Liverani, Paolo Matthiae, and Machteld J. Mellink, 269–287. Rome: Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche Archeologiche e Antropologiche Dell Antichita Universita di Roma ‘La Sapienza’. Ferioli, Piera, Enrica Fiandra, Gian Giacomo Fissore, and Marcella Frangipane, ed. 1994. Archives Before Writing. Torino: Sargraf. Frangipane, Marcella. 2007. Different Types of Egalitarian Societies and the Development of Inequality in Early Mesopotamia. World Archaeology 39.2: 151–176. Frangipane, Marcella. 2013. Societies Without Boundaries: Interpreting Late Neolithic Patterns of Wide Interaction and Sharing of Cultural Traits: The Case of the Halaf Communities. In Interpreting the Late Neolithic of Upper Mesopotamia, ed. Olivier P. Nieuwenhuyse, Reinhard Bernbeck, Peter M.M.G. Akkermans, and Jana Rogasch. Papers on Archaeology from The Leiden Museum of Antiquities (PALMA 9), 89–100. Turnhout: Brepols. Fraser, James A. 2008. An Alternate View of Complexity at Tall-e Bakun A. Iran 46: 1–20. Garfinkel, Yosef. 2000. The Khazineh Painted Style of Western Iran. Iran 38: 57–70. Garfinkel, Yosef. 2003. Dancing at the Dawn of Agriculture. Austin: The University of Texas Press. Garfinkel, Yosef. 2005. Dancing Diamonds. Iran 43: 117–133. Gautier, Joseph-Étienne, and Georges Lampre. 1905. Fouilles de Moussian. In Recherches archéologiques, ed. Jacques Jean Marie de Morgan. Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse 8, 59–147. Paris: Ernest Leroux. Gibson, McGuire, and Robert D. Biggs. 1977. Seals and Sealing in the Ancient Near East. Bibliotheca Mesopotamica 6. Malibu: Undena Publications. Goff, Claire. 1963. Excavations at Tall-i Nokhodi. Iran 1: 43–70. Helwing, Barbara 2003. Feasts as a Social Dynamic in Prehistoric Western Asia - Three Case Studies from Syria and Anatolia. Paléorient 29.2: 63–85. Helwing, Barbara, and Mojgan Seyedin. 2006. Prehistoric Settlements in Bulaghi Valley: Iranian/German Rescue Excavations at Sites DB91 and DB119. In Abstarcts [sic]. Symposium on the Archaeological Rescue Excavations in the Bolaghi Valley, 13–17. Tehran: Iranian Center for Archaeological Research. Helwing, Barbara, and Mojgan Seyedin. 2010. Bakun-Period Sites in Darre-ye Bolāghi, Fars. In Beyond the Ubaid: Transformation and Integration in the Late Prehistoric Societies of the Middle East, ed. Robert A. Carter and Graham Philip. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 63, 277–292. Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.



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Helwing, Barbara, Kirsi O. Lorentz, and Mojgan Seyedin. 2012. The Dead in 5th Millennium BC Darre-ye Bolaghi: First Evidence on Bakun-Period Burial Rites from Southern Iran. In Nāmvarnāmeh. Papers in Honour of Massoud Azarnoush, ed. Hamid Fahimi and Karim Alizadeh, 69–78. Tehran: Iran Negar. Henrickson, Elizabeth F. 1988. Chalcolithic Seals and Sealings from Seh Gabi, Central Western Iran. Iranica Antiqua 23: 1–22. Herzfeld, Ernst E. 1929. Prehistoric Persia I. A Neolithic Settlement at Persepolis. Remarkable New Discoveries. Illustrated London News 174 (4701, 25.05.1929): 892–893. Herzfeld, Ernst E. 1932. Iranische Denkmäler 1. Vorgeschichtliche Denkmäler A. Steinzeitlicher Hügel bei Persepolis - B. Niphauanda. Berlin: Reimer. Herzfeld, Ernst E. 1933. Aufsätze zur altorientalischen Archäologie II. Stempelsiegel. Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran 5: 49–124. Herzfeld, Ernst E. 1941. Iran in the Ancient East. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herzfeld, Ernst E., and Arthur Keith. 1967. Iran as a Prehistoric Centre. In Introductory Essays, Pre-Achaemenid, Achaemenid and Parthian Periods, ed. Arthur U. Pope and Phyllis Ackerman. A Survey of Persian Art 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Present, 42–58. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hodder, Ian, and Lynn Meskell. 2012. Symbolism, Feasting, and Power at Çatalhöyük: A Response to Sutliff and to Hayden. Current Anthropology 53.1: 128–129. Hole, Frank. 1983. Symbols of Religion and Social Organization at Susa. In The Hilly Flanks and Beyond. Essays in the Prehistory of Southwestern Asia, Presented to Robert J. Braidwood, November 15, 1982, ed. T. Cuyler Young, Philip E.L. Smith, and Peder Mortensen. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 36, 315–344. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Hole, Frank. 1990. Cemetery or Mass Grave: Reflections on Susa I. In Contribution à l’histoire de l’Iran. Mélanges offerts à Jean Perrot, ed. François Vallat, 1–14. Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations. Hole, Frank. 1992. The Cemetery of Susa: An Interpretation. In The Royal City of Susa: Ancient Near Eastern Treasures in the Louvre, ed. Prudence O. Harper and Joan Aruz, 26–31. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hole, Frank, Kent Flannery, and James A. Neely. 1969. Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Deh Luran Plain. An Early Village Sequence from Khuzistan, Iran. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Homès-Fredericq, Denyse. 1970. Les cachets Mésopotamiens protohistoriques. Leiden: Brill. Katchadourian, Lori. 2005. Seals and Sealing: Archaeological Perspectives. In This

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Fertile Land: Signs + Symbols in the Early Arts of Iran and Iraq, ed. Margaret Cool Root. Kelsey Museum Publication, 19–34. Ann Arbor: Kelsey Museum. Lamberg-Karlovsky, Clifford Charles. 1975. Third Millennium Modes of Exchange and Modes of Production. In Ancient Civilization and Trade, ed. Jerry A. Sabloff and Clifford Charles Lamberg-Karlovsky, 341–368. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Langsdorff, Alexander, and Donald E. McCown. 1942. Tall-i Bakun A: Season of 1932. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. van Loon, Maurits. 1989. Chiga Sabz. In The Holmes Expeditions to Luristan, ed. Erich F. Schmidt, Maurits van Loon, and Hans H. Curvers. Oriental Institute Publications 108, 23–29. Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. van Loon, Maurits. 1989. The Finds. In The Holmes Expeditions to Luristan, ed. Erich F. Schmidt, Maurits van Loon, and Hans H. Curvers. Oriental Institute Publications 108, 67–74. Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Mallowan, Max E. L., and John Cruikshank Rose. 1935. Expeditions at Tall Arpachiyah, 1933. Iraq 2: 1–178. de Mecquenem, Roland. 1912. Catalogue de la céramique peinte susienne conserve au Musée du Louvre. In Ceramique peinte de Suse et petits monuments de l’époque archaique, ed. Jacques de Morgan. Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse, 105–158. Paris: Ernest Leroux. Moghaddam, Abbas. 2016. A Fifth-Millennium BC Cemetery in the North Persian Gulf: The Zohreh Prehistoric Project. Antiquity 90 (353): 1–6. https://doi.org/10.15184/ aqy.2016.166. Nissen, Hans J. 1977. Aspects of the Development of Early Cylinder Seals. In Seals and Sealing in the Ancient Near East, ed. McGuire Gibson and Robert D. Biggs. Bibliotheca Mesopotamica 6, 15–23. Malibu: Undena. Petrie, Cameron A. 2011. ‘Culture,’ Innovation and Interaction Across Southern Iran from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age (c. 6500–3000 BC). In Investigating Archaeological Cultures: Material Culture, Variability, and Transmission, ed. Benjamin W. Roberts and Marc Vander Linden, 151–182. New York: Springer. Pittman, Holly. 2001. Mesopotamian Intraregional Relations Reflected through Glyptic Evidence in the Late Chalcolithic 1–5 Periods. In Uruk Mesopotamia and its Neighbors: Cross-Cultural Interaction and its Consequences in the Era of State Formation, ed. Mitchell S. Rothman. School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series, 403–443. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Pittman, Holly. 2013. Seals and Sealings in the Sumerian World. In The Sumerian World, ed. Harriet E.W. Crawford. The Routledge Worlds. London: Routledge.



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Polanyi, Karl. 1968. Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies. Garden City: Doubleday. Potts, Daniel T. 2014. Nomadism in Iran: From Antiquity to the Modern Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pollock, Susan, ed. 2012. Between Feasts and Daily Meals. Towards an Archaeology of Commensal Spaces. eTopoi. Journal for Ancient Studies, Special Volume 2. Excellenzcluster 264 Topoi, Berlin. http://www.topoi.org/publication/19015/. Rashad, Mahmoud. 1990. Die Entwicklung der vor-und frühgeschichtlichen Stempelsiegel in Iran im Vergleich mit Mesopotamien, Syrien und Kleinasien. Von ihren Anfängen bis zum Beginn des 3. Jahrtausends v. Chr. Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran, Supplementum 13. Berlin: Reimer. Root, Margaret Cool. 2005. This Fertile Land. In This Fertile Land: Signs + Symbols in the Early Arts of Iran and Iraq, ed. Margaret Cool Root. Kelsey Museum Publication, 3–11. Ann Arbor: Kelsey Museum Rothman, Mitchell S. 1994. Seal and Sealing Findspot, Design, Audience, and Function: Monitoring Changes in Administrative Oversight and Structure at Tepe Gawra During the Fourth Millennium B.C. In Archives before Writing, ed. Piera Feriole, Enrica Fiandra, Gian Giacomo Fissore, and Marcella Frangipane. Pubblicazioni degli Archivi di Stato, 97–119. Torino: Sargraf. Rothman, Mitchell S. 2002. Tepe Gawra: The Evolution of a Small Prehistoric Center in Northern Iraq. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Sahlins, Marshall D. 1963. Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia. Comparative Studies in Society and History 5.3: 285–303. Sahlins, Marshall D. 1974. Stone Age Economics. London: Tavistock. Skeates, Robin. 2007. Neolithic Stamps: Cultural Patterns, Processes and Potencies. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 17.2: 183–198. Spielmann, Katherine A. 2002. Feasting, Craft Specialization, and the Ritual Mode of Production in Small-Scale Societies. American Anthropologist 104.1: 195–207. Stein, Aurel. 1936. An Archaeological Tour in the Ancient Persis. Iraq 3: 112–225. Stein, Aurel. 1937. Archaeological Reconnaissances in North-Western India and SouthEastern Iran, Carried Out and Recorded with the Support of Harvard University and the British Museum. London: Macmillan and Sons. Stein, Gil J. 2010. Local Identities and Interaction Spheres: Modeling Regional Variation in the Ubaid Horizon. In Beyond the Ubaid: Transformation and Integration in the Late Prehistoric Societies of the Middle East, ed. Robert A. Carter and Graham Philip, 23–44. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 63. Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

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8 Ephemeral Artifacts: Warlock and Witch Figurines in Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals 1

Greta Van Buylaere Keywords: Witchcraft; figurines; ephemeral artifacts; (de)materialization; materiality; ritual performance; Maqlû; Mesopotamia

INTRODUCTION All the world’s a stage; And all the men and women merely players. -As You Like It, William Shakespeare (1599)

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any anti-witchcraft rituals from second and first millennium BCE Mesopotamia read like theater scripts with limited instructions about the stage, actors and props, actions, and speeches. The stage director is the ritual expert, the exorcist (āšipu or mašmaššu), who not only oversees and orchestrates the performance but also plays a leading role within it. In big productions, he may be assisted by other ritual experts or helpers. The second real-life protagonist is the victim affected by witchcraft. The real-life antagonists in this construct, however, the offending Mesopotamian warlocks and witches, tend to be elusive and immaterial. To rectify this absence, the anti-witchcraft scripts regularly instruct the expert to create warlock and witch figurines, which he may then manipulate like a puppeteer. This chapter explores the materiality of these figurines and their status as ephemeral artifacts (Federman 2004) that are mentioned in the texts but (almost completely) absent from the archaeological record.

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Ephemeral artifacts are materialized for only a moment of time; they are not meant to last but rather to be dismantled, used up, or destroyed once they have served their purpose (in this volume, Sonik). They have no permanence. Because of their intrinsic nature, ephemeral artifacts typically leave little trace in the archaeological record; it is (generally) as if they never existed. Where material traces do exist of these artifacts, these typically take the form of textual references (as in the case study pursued here) or alterations induced or evoked in artifacts or other things that have survived. In the context of Mesopotamia’s anti-witchcraft rituals, the warlock and witch figurines are ephemeral artifacts created especially for the duration of the ritual, at the end of which they are ritually destroyed. Despite the transience of their existence, such figurines were essential to the ritual performance: they provided the ritual expert with a means of communicating and interacting with the world and guaranteed the efficacy of the ritual.

MESOPOTAMIAN WARLOCKS AND WITCHES The anti-witchcraft ritual corpus represents the majority of our information on Mesopotamian witchcraft. Outside this corpus, references to witches and witchcraft are scarce, though laws, letters, and literary sources do occasionally mention witches (Schwemer 2007a: 118–27). According to the laws, the practice of witchcraft was a capital offence; false accusations were harshly punished (Schwemer 2007a: 118–19). This may explain, at least in part, why the description of warlocks and witches (in Akkadian mostly kaššāpu and kaššāptu) in cuneiform sources is hazy: practitioners of witchcraft may be male or female, local or foreign, alive or dead; their identity is rarely precisely specified. They are also not portrayed on reliefs or other media. Nevertheless, the image we get from the descriptions in the anti-witchcraft corpus is rather different than that of the typical fairytale wicked old woman with warts on her nose. In various incantations, the warlock/witch is usually represented as a fellow human who uses sorcerous skills against another person. S/he sometimes acts on behalf of other people, causing all sorts of ailments, especially illnesses affecting the upper abdomen, stomach and lungs (Schwemer 2007a: 195). While the witch is sometimes described as a demonic being capable of striking even the gods, “an identification of the witch with one of the prominent Mesopotamian female demons (Lamaštu, Lilītu, Ardat-lilî) is rarely attested in the texts.



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Where sources describe the nonhuman witches in more detail, they appear as a group of seven heavenly girls that are associated with Ištar [Ishtar] and her circle, in particular the goddess Kanisurra” (Schwemer 2018: 174–75, also 2007: 110–18). According to the anti-witchcraft texts, witches regularly resorted to figurine magic to harm their victim: figurines of the victim, identified by name and/or materials that had been in contact with him/her, could be used to manipulate the victim’s fate. Witches are repeatedly described as having bound the body of the victim’s figurine, tying its limbs and twisting its sinews. Victim figurines were allegedly soiled, pierced, burned, and dissolved; they were enclosed in a wall, buried under a threshold, in the steppe, at crossroads, in the river bank, or the like (Schwemer 2007a: 90– 100). In some cases, they were reportedly fed to a dog, a pig, a bird, or a fish (CMAwR 1, text 8.3). Depositing figurines in bustling places, much as feeding them to animals, ensured they came into contact with countless impurities; this was recognized as an effective way of harming the patient (see Schwemer 2007a: 99–100). The victim in the anti-witchcraft rituals typically claims not to know the identity of the one who has performed witchcraft against him; this ostensible ignorance makes it impossible for him to seek justice in court. Instead, he applies to the divine authorities with the help of an exorcist. Since the gods do know the identity of the evildoer, the witch/warlock will not escape justice.

ARTIFACTS: PERFORMATIVE AND EPHEMERAL The fact that the identity of the witch is apparently unknown to patient and exorcist has a real advantage from the viewpoint of anti-witchcraft methodology: the anonymous witch can readily be depersonalized, making it easier for the exorcist to deal with the evildoer and to exercise a certain control over him/her. Indeed, the exorcist can now materialize the (unknown) enemy in the form of a figurine, physically perform the correct ritual procedures to undo the evil, and, subsequently, dematerialize the foe (destroy the figurine), thus exorcizing the threat from the patient. There is no need for a living and breathing personal enemy to be present; the materialized enemy is entirely sufficient. To achieve materialization so that the subsequent exorcism or dematerialization may be performed, the exorcist

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may in turn rely on figurine magic, often accompanied by purification rites and offerings (see further Schwemer 2007a: 199–202). The use of figurines, alan or nu in Sumerian and ṣalmu in Akkadian, renders the immaterial— here the witches and sometimes the gods and/or the patient—“material, accessible, and relatable,” a process Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik (2015: 10) abbreviate to presencing. The ṣalmu in Mesopotamia, notably, is not a passive representation, “but the essence of that which it represents: it is concerned less with capturing physical form and more with substance” (Sonik 2015: 181 [emphasis added]; also Bonatz 2003: 13). In the performative enactment of an anti-witchcraft ritual, the figurines become doubles of the warlocks and witches, their identities made unmistakable. Derrida (1982: 322) defined the term performative as a “communication which does not essentially limit itself to transporting an already constituted semantic content.” Bahrani (2001: 138) further elaborated the concept in a Near Eastern context in her description of the sacred marriage on the (uppermost register of the) Warka Vase as “a depiction of a ritual of substitution. Such substitution required that the priestess did not simply signify the goddess or the king signify the god. Through the performative enactment they were to become substitutes. In other words, the ritual was more than a play. It was a ritual process of transformation that depended on representation.” Bahrani’s (2001: 139) observation on the blurring of identities on the Warka Vase—of “priestess into goddess and god into king”—is plausibly applicable also to the figurines used in anti-witchcraft rituals. Using figurine magic, the exorcist is able to create and materialize all the characters needed for the ritual release of the patient from the witch or warlock’s spell. The small figurines do not merely represent the witches, but also “produce presence,” i.e., they put the inimical entities or forces “into reach so that they can be touched” (Gumbrecht 1999: 355, apud Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik 2015: 10). But it is not presence alone, as PongratzLeisten and Sonik (2015: 11) note, “but also an individual beholder’s (physical and intellectual) experience and cultural memory that allows for the construction of meaning on the one hand and the recognition or identification of meaning on the other.” The figurines, in addition to presencing specific witches and warlocks, also form handy material things to which evil substances and illnesses can be transferred (Schwemer 2007a: 200). The scene, then, is set and the actors are either present or presenced— though none of the anti-witchcraft rituals records the “activation/animation”



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of the figurines of warlock and witch by means of a specific ritual; the figurine gains its (limited agency) only through performative action (its treatment as agent) and, in some cases, through inscription of a name (discussed further below). This is in contrast to the treatment of cult images, which were purified from human contamination through a “washing of the mouth” and then activated or enabled to function through an “opening of the mouth” (Walker and Dick 2001: 14). While there is evidence that apotropaic figurines could have their mouths opened in order to activate them as proper substitutes (Walker and Dick 2001: 13) this practice seems not to carry over to figurines of inimical forces like those of warlock and witch; on the contrary, such figurines could have their mouths sealed or otherwise incapacitated (see below). Returning to the witchcraft ritual, once the various actors are materialized or presenced (to the degree possible or wise), the exorcist becomes capable of manipulating and controlling the hostile witch or warlock in ways he would not otherwise have been able to do. Reciting incantations, the exorcist moves the figurines about, making the witch/warlock act as he pleases in his quest to rid the patient of witchcraft. Acts performed against the figurines are understood to be felt by the actual evildoers, and capable of ultimately destroying them. Equally, even this limited presencing of the hostile entities in the warlock and witch figurines likely involved a degree of danger, as they could now presumably act through their figurines.

EPHEMERAL FIGURINES OF WARLOCK AND WITCH: MATERIALITY AND PRESENCE Materializing Warlock and Witch Rituals will typically refer to a duo—male warlock and female witch— highlighting the fact that their identities are unknown to the victim. For some rituals, one pair of figurines (warlock and witch) is created (e.g., in the namburbi-ritual CMAwR 2, 11.3, 1.: 1–30.); more elaborate rituals may necessitate several sets of figurines of warlock and witch made of various materials.2 In the following account, for example, eight sets of figurines are made: (You make) two figurines of cedar wood, two figurines of tamarisk wood, [two figurines of d]ough, two figurines of clay, two figurines of tallow, two figurines of wax, two figurines of bitum[en, two figurines of

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p]omace. You recite the incantation ‘She is evil, the witch’ (CMAwR 1, text 7.6.3: 26’’–28’’). Instructions for creating such figurines from clay are very common. In most cases, the clay source is not specified, but sometimes a clay pit or the river banks are noted. The use of clay for figurines is not accidental: clay is ubiquitous in the land of the Twin Rivers and easily shaped into the desired form. Clay, moreover, is potent symbolically loaded magical matter, being the material used by the gods to create human beings. Something of this significance is indicated in an anti-witchcraft incantation of the Marduk-Ea type, in which Enki instructs his son Asalluhi (Marduk) to take clay from the Apsu, the subterranean ocean—i.e., the same clay the gods used to create mankind according to Mesopotamian mythology—to form warlock and witch figurines (CMAwR 2, text 7.12: 17–18). Other figurines were modelled or sculpted from sheep tallow, beeswax, different kinds of dough, various sorts of wood, bitumen, or sesame pomace; materials like gypsum, reed, copper, tin, bronze, beer mash and beer bread, ṭūru-resin and even axle grease could be prescribed. Two incantations of the most extensive anti-witchcraft ritual, which is known as Maqlû or “Burning” (Abusch 2016; Schwemer 2017: 5–22), are accompanied by flour drawings of warlock and witch in the washbasin. These include the Maqlû incantations Attimannu kaššāptu ša īpuša ṣalmī, “Whoever you are, O witch, who has made a figurine of me” (Maqlû VII 55–79; MRT 140’), and Bāʾertu ša bāʾirāti, “Huntress of huntresses,” (Maqlû VII 80–100; MRT 143’). The witch’s portrayal is described as follows: And before Šamaš [Shamash] I draw your likeness— I look at your form and create your image, I see your bearing And give rich detail to your physical build, I comprehend your appearance And reproduce your features with pure flour (lit.: Nisaba), I bind your body, I tie your limbs together, (var.: I bind your limbs, I tie your body) I twist your sinews. (Maqlû VII 63–68; translation Abusch 2016: 353) The texts do not specify what these figurines exactly looked like, nor does the archaeological record give us much information. Since the goal



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of the performative enactment of the ritual was the definitive destruction of the witches, chances of finding complete or even broken figurines are slim. The figurines were explicitly created as ephemeral artifacts; they were not meant to endure—indeed, such endurance would be deeply problematic as the figurines materialize a harmful presence within the framework of the civilized world. So far, only one fragmentarily preserved figurine has been found (Fig. 8.1a–b): this might represent either the remains of a witch’s figurine used in an anti-witchcraft ritual or a victim’s figurine made by an alleged warlock or witch (Schwemer 2007a: 213 n. 96). The dearth of figurines is perhaps partially explained by the raw materials used for the figures, which may not easily survive, and partially by the fact that the figurines of inimical figures were thoroughly destroyed (Schwemer 2007a: 214). Schwemer (2007a: 200) assumes the figurines were about hand sized and that the female figurines were marked with a pubic triangle. One might further assume that the male figurines had a penis (cf. the use of “voodoo dolls” in ancient Greek witchcraft practices).3

Identifying the Figurines In cases in which the identity of the evildoer(s) is unknown to the victim, s/he cannot simply reproduce the witch/warlock’s physical features when producing figurines of the antagonist(s); neither can he take their proper measurements, or use dirt touched by their feet, spittle, hair, or pieces of their clothing in order to link the figurines unmistakably to their target. The witch/warlock, on the other hand, could resort to these means when making figurines of the victim. Maqlû VII 55–59 provides a nice example of this:4 Whoever you are, O witch, who has made a figurine of me— Who has looked at my form and created my image, Who has seen my bearing and given rich detail to my physical build, Who has comprehended [my] appearance And reproduced my features. The victim figurines in question would thus be rendered recognizable by “ ‘signature elements’ that signal salient aspects of the individual and are tied to his or her person, while still retaining an overall idealized general form of face or body” (Winter 2010: 176 n. 14). While such identifying

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8.1 Fragmentary Figurine Used in (Anti-)Witchcraft Ritual from Tell ed-Dēr (after Gasche 1994, Taf. XIII; also Schwemer 2007: 213)

features were not available to the exorcist helping the victim or patient against the warlock or witch, it was important to make sure that warlock and witch figurines were not confused with those of the gods or the patient: one would not want to accidentally give the gods or the victim the



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treatment reserved for the evildoers. The cuneiform documents record two ways to ascertain the witches’ identification: identifiers might be inscribed on their left shoulders and/or the figurines might be explicitly identified as the evildoers in the accompanying incantations. Identification on the Left Shoulder Generally, the text does not specify what kind of identifying inscription is written, but simply states: “You write their names (šumšunu) on their [the warlock and witch’s] left shoulder,” with left indicating the ominous, threatening side.5 The word šumu, “name,” can designate a proper name: In CMAwR 2, text 8.29: 39–40, for example, the figurine of the patient is inscribed with “[N.N. son of ] N.N., whose god is N.N. (and) whose goddess is N.N.” on his right and positive side. However, when the victim knew his opponent and was certain of his right, he could as well sue him at court instead of appealing for divine justice. Thus, as the identity of the evildoer in anti-witchcraft rituals is apparently unknown, another type of identification may be meant here. The following examples make this kind of alternative identification more concrete. In a ritual against depression, the exorcist is instructed as follows: You make two figurines embracing each other. On the shoulder of the first you write thus: ‘De[se]rter, runaway, who does not keep to his u[n]it.’ On the shoulder of the second you write thus: ‘Clamor, wailer, who does not...[...]’ (CMAwR 1, text 7.7, 1.: 3–7) The two figurines identified in this way are to bring a figurine of the afflicted to the netherworld, thus taking the illness away from the patient (see also Schwemer apud Maul and Strauß 2011: 16 [text 35]). In a war ritual countering the enemy’s attempt to smash and bind the weapons of the king and his army, a figurine with a hatchet in its right hand is inscribed with “[…] of men” on its left shoulder blade (CMAwR 2, text 4.42: 44’’). These identifying patterns suggest that something generic like “my warlock/witch” may have been written on the witches’ shoulder.6 Graff’s (2014: 380) observation on the Sumerian inscription munus written on a mold to create terracotta plaques is interesting in this respect. She considers it as “a performative sign, rather than a communication that conveys informative content. Inscribing the mold with

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the sign for ‘woman’ can be seen as an act analogous to consecration, through which the image and the word work together to transform the raw material of clay into an object that literally embodies femininity…[Graff ultimately suggests that] the image functioned not primarily as a sign, but as an index, with an extensive set of associations clustering around femininity, reproduction, and desire.” Regardless of precisely how it functioned, the written identification on the material figurine secured the presence of the evildoer. Oral Identification in Ritual Performance A great number of anti-witchcraft incantations include an introductory presentation of the witches to the god(s) beginning with Shamash, the sungod and lord of justice, whose judgment is requested in the case of victim vs. warlock and witch. Various incantation incipits are known: Šamaš annû ēpišī Ša[maš annītu ēpištī(?)], “Šamaš [Shamash], this is my sorcerer, Ša[maš, this is my sorceress]” (CMAwR 2, text 8.34); Šamaš annûti šunu (var.: ēpišūʾa) annûti ṣalmūšunu, “Šamaš, these are they (var.: my sorcerers), these are their figurines!” (‘Šamaš 66’; CMAwR 1, text 8.2: 106); Šamaš annûtu ēpišūʾa Šamaš annûtu muštēpišūʾa, “Šamaš, these are my sorcerers, Šamaš, these are they who have had me bewitched!” (‘Šamaš 102’; CMAwR 1, text 8.3, 1.: 11; abridged version: CMAwR 1, text 8.3, 2.: 15); Šamaš annûtu ṣalmū ēpišīya, “Šamaš, these are the figurines of my sorcerers” (‘Šamaš 99’; CMAwR 1, texts 7.6.5.: 12, 9.2: 39); Šamaš ṣalmī annûti ša kaššāpīya u kaššāptīya, “Šamaš, these figurines are those of my warlock and witch” (‘Šamaš 53’; CMAwR 1, text 8.4: 68). All of these clearly stress the importance of the explicit identification of the figurines as the evildoers in the trial. In CMAwR 1, text 7.6.5: 10–12, the figurines of the sorcerers are not only inscribed with their names on the left shoulder but also identified as such in the subsequent incantation. Of course, not all incantations start with this kind of identification: often the greatness of the addressed god and his brilliant characteristics are praised first. One such incantation is CMAwR 1, text 8.4, where a lengthy adoration of Shamash is followed by an even lengthier accusation of the witch/warlock, summing up all their crimes against the patient. The figurines of the witch/warlock are identified as follows: Šamaš [Shamash], these [figurine]s that I am holding up in the presence of your great divinity— Šamaš, you know (them), I do not know (them):



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(these are) the figurines of the male and female who are furious with me, the figurines of my male and female enemy, the figurines of my male and female persecutor, who have performed sortilege, rebellion (and) evil word(s) against me, … Šamaš, these are they, these are their figurines, since they are not present, I am holding up their figurines. (CMAwR 1, text 8.4: 26–29, 54–55) Likewise, the flour drawings can be explicitly identified as those of the evildoers in incantations, as in CMAwR 1, text 8.5, 1. (cf. CMAwR 1, text 9.1, 1.: 4–8.): Before you (i.e., Shamash) I have drawn those who performed witchcraft, magic (and) ((evil)) sorcery, with the pure Nissaba I have created their image, (the image of those) who have performed witchcraft ((against me)), have plotted vicious (plans) ((against me)), whose heart is cross so that they are full of malicious talk. (CMAwR 1, text 8.5, 1.: 87’’–90’’) As Bahrani (2003: 134) states, “after the addition of the name, and the utterance,…the word ṣalmu is no longer used to refer to the substitute thing, neither to the organic body double nor to the stone monument. The valid representation is essentially the same as the person just as šumu (name) is essentially an extension and taxonomically the same as offspring. Ṣalmu is not simply image as in statue since its material can also be flesh and blood, shadow, or reflection.” The witches are now explicitly presenced in their figurines. Dressing the Figurines Whereas divine figurines figuring in anti-witchcraft rituals could be made magnificent with garments, colored pastes, and props, the figurines of warlocks and witches are seldom given such attire. In CMAwR 2, text 8.29 (ll. 19–37), the embellished figurine of Ishtar is coated with a red paste and that of Dumuzi with yellow ochre paint, and the eyes of the figurine of the netherworld’s Bidu are made up with kohl; even the figurine of the patient is wrapped in a cloth of red wool (l. 82). In an extensive ritual to banish

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evildoers to the netherworld (CMAwR 2, text 8.25), the figurine of Gilgamesh is decorated with a golden tiara, red garment, belt, silver dagger, and jewelry (ll. 6–11); the one cubit tall clay figurine of Namtar has the head of a lion and human feet, his face and body are painted red, his right eye yellow and his left one green (ll. 23–26) and the figurine of the demonic “Any Evil” is clothed with a garment and a cloak for one day, given funerary offerings, a ransom, belt, sandals, and water skin (CMAwR 2, text 8.25: 27–32, 140–146). The clay figurines of warlock and witch, on the other hand, are simply “adorned” with their names on their left shoulder (ll. 33–34). As the culprits of the patient’s suffering, the ritual aims to send “Any Evil” and the witches to the netherworld, with the exile of the demon not only releasing the patient from the “Any Evil” illness, but also forcefully accompanying witch and warlock to the netherworld. In a similar ritual (CMAwR 2, text 8.26), clay figurines of “Any Evil,” the sorcerer and the sorceress seem to be clothed with garments for one day and anointed with fine oil. This last case is exceptional, however. When the figurines of warlock and witch are provided with “clothing” (if one can call it such) or “pastes,” these are normally of the unpleasant kind: combed-out hair, cobwebs, naphtha, hot bitumen, fish oil, tanning fluid or rancid oil, sulfur, sheep bile, or sweepings.7 Instead of a golden tiara or jewelry, they could be garnished with the thorn of a date palm thrust into the head (cf. Schwemer 2007a: 209–14; e.g., CMAwR 1, texts 7.6.4: 7; 7.6.5: 11; 8.7.1 ms. A3 obv. ii 6’; 8.7.2: 19). In CMAwR 1, text 8.14: 8’–11’, the sorceress’s figurine is adorned with human hair on her head and lion and dog hair on her vulva, anointed with fish oil, clothed in a soiled rag, and covered with boiling water and some lamb substance.

Restraining Warlock and Witch The purpose of anti-witchcraft rituals involving figurine magic is the restraining of and gaining of control over warlock and witch. Since the creation of warlock and witch figurines serves both to materialize and presence the hostile and potentially dangerous entities, immobilizing them in preparation for their divine condemnation may be a good idea. The exorcist thus exerts his power over the witch/warlock pair and starts suppressing them. A popular and often attested method is the binding of the arms of the figurines behind their backs.8 A figurine’s mouth can be seized “so that it cannot speak evil against me (i.e., the petitioner),” and his/her lips sealed with seals “[so that] they cannot utter my name” (CMAwR 1, text 7.6.6:



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42–44). In Maqlû III 92–101a, the petitioner first seizes the mouth, tongue, eyes, feet, knees, and arms of the witch’s clay figurine and then ties her arms behind her back and seals her mouth with a yellow seal.9 In a similar vein, salt may be placed in a figurine of tallow at the start of the Maqlû enactment; the figurine is then placed on a burning torch where it melts and dissolves. The accompanying incantation explains this symbolic act as follows: Her mouth be tallow, her tongue be salt: May that (i.e., the witch’s mouth) which uttered an evil word against me drip ever away like tallow, May that (i.e., the witch’s tongue) which performed witchcraft against me dissolve like salt. (Maqlû I 31–33; translation Abusch 2016: 286; see also MRT 9’–10’) In this case, the witch was believed to have spoken a spell or spat spittle (i.e., performed witchcraft) against the victim; incapacitating the witch’s mouth and tongue would make future spells impossible (Abusch 1987: 108– 10). In a ritual against an adversary, the enemy figurine’s right hand is made to seize its mouth, and its left hand its anus: the intention is to not only silence the opponent embodied in the figurine but also prevent him, literally and figuratively, from “shitting on” the petitioner (CMAwR 1, text 8.12: 7–8, also CMAwR 2, text 8.18: 10’).

Condemnation of Warlock and Witch At an early stage of the ritual performance, the exorcist brought offerings before the gods, Shamash first of all, to ensure their attendance during the divine trial and their goodwill toward the petitioner (Schwemer 2007a: 240): Shamash, the sun god, is in this context “both an omniscient judge and a relentless executioner, a god who is able not only to identify but also to locate and destroy the culprit who has taken refuge outside the bounds of the settled community” (Abusch 2015: 8). After the presentation of the witches’ figurines, the petitioner reciting the following incantation to Shamash explicitly calls upon these aspects of the god: I have had figurines of my warlock and my witch made and I have placed them before you. I have smeared their faces with [bla]ck [paste], I have twi[sted] their arms behind them [and] I have bound (their arms)

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with the sinew of a dead cow. Their feet I have bound with the sinew of a dead cow, crossing (them) over each other. Be present for my trial so that I may not be treated unjustly, but that my trial go well! Provide a decision for my trial, keep me safe! (CMAwR 1, text 8.1: 41’’–45’’) The two conflicting parties in the trial now stand before Shamash, the all-knowing sun-god and supreme god of justice: on the one side is the petitioner, the victim of witchcraft, and on the other are the witch and warlock, as presenced in their figurines. The subsequent proceedings are at the heart of the ritual. The petitioner bemoans his witchcraft-induced misfortune and pleads to the god(s) to reverse his fate and punish the evildoers instead. Without divine approval, the anti-witchcraft ritual has no chance of success; only Shamash’s judgement, which is beyond reproach, can offer the petitioner salvation. The god’s tacit verdict in favor of the petitioner and his condemnation of the witch/warlock are a given in these texts. The ritual instructions to the exorcist may summarize this as ina/ana maḫar Šamaš tadânšu(nūti), “You convict him/them before Shamash” (Schwemer 2007a: 207, cf. Maul 1994: 60–71 on the “Rechtsstreit vor Šamaš” in namburbi-rituals).

The Ritual Reversal of the Petitioner’s Misfortune Shamash’s redemption of the petitioner implicitly involves redirecting the misfortune directed at the victim by the warlock and witch at its originators in a mirror-imaging way. To achieve this outcome, the petitioner is cleansed and purified, while his impurities are transferred upon his evildoers. The patient’s purification mostly takes the form of a washing rite undertaken with water and possibly also other purifying substances like soda ash and gypsum; the washing may be actually carried out over the warlock/witch figurines, physically contaminating them with the petitioner’s ill fortune through contact with the dirty, polluted wash water (see Schwemer 2007a: 199, n. 24). I wash myself over her, I bat[he] with water over her. Just as the water (washing) my body runs off and flows over her head and her body, ( just as) I cast my guilt (and) my sin upon her, let any evil, (([anything not good])), that is present in my body, my flesh (and)



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my sinews, (([the evil of dreams, of evil, ba]d [sig]ns (and) omen[s, of witch]craft, magic, sorcery (and) [evil] mach[inations])) run off like the water of my body and go to her head and her body. I have washed (var. wash) myself over her, I bathe over her with water, I am returning the dirt to her, let her receive it from me (var.: let her receive the dirt of my body from me). Just as the water (washing) my body runs off and flows over her, let any evil that is present in my body, my flesh (and) my sinews run off like the water (washing) my body and depart from my body for good! (CMAwR 1, text 9.1, 1.: 39–43, 53–57) Similarly, warlocks and witches may be accused of having bathed the petitioner with dirty wash water in their attempts to harm their victims (e.g., CMAwR 1, text 8.4, 1.: 73a; CMAwR 2, text 7.11, 2.: 4; Maqlû I 105; cf. Ea’s instructions to Asalluḫi in CMAwR 2, text 7.12).

Destroying, Dematerializing, and Disposing of Warlock and Witch The warlock and witch could be hurt and humiliated in numerous ways beyond being contaminated by dirty water. The exorcist could, for example, beat their figurines with a stick of ēru-wood or an iron spike or place them into a disposable pot:10 [When] you have recited (the incantation), you throw these figurines into the pot. You stir (or: beat) them [with a stick] of ēru-wood. When you have recited (it), you break (her) [ne]ck, you tear her skin, you tear out her [...]. [You say]: ‘My sorceress, my enchantress, I calm your heart with water!’ (Then) you throw (it) [into the ri]ver. You recite the incantation ‘May the mountain cover you!’ You bury [...] either under a (washer’s) mat or in a washroom. (CMAwR 1, text 7.6.3: 29’’–34’’) More permanent types of harm were devised for the final destruction and dematerialization of warlock and witch, with burning and/or burying their figurines representing the most frequently employed methods to ritually destroy and kill them (see also Schwemer 2007a: 97–100 for alternative ways in which the exorcist could destroy the witches). As the figurines could

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be made from different materials, some would, “when set on fire, present the observer with a striking demonstration of what it meant to annihilate someone; other materials, like clay or dough would burst or be charred.… the destruction of their original form was regarded as a sufficient symbol of their obliteration” (Schwemer 2010: 64). In a number of texts, the raw material used to make the figurines determines the manner of their destruction. In CMAwR 1, text 8.7.1, for example, several ovens, a brazier, and a crucible are set up in a row before Shamash. The figurines made of wood, reed, tin, or copper are destined for the brazier; clay and gypsum figurines for the potter’s kiln; dough figurines for the bread oven; figurines of ṭūru-resin and beer bread for the brewer’s oven; figurines of sesame pomace for the crucible; figurines of tallow mixed with cress for the roasting oven; and, finally, figurines of tallow, wax, or bitumen for the melting oven (cf. CMAwR 1, text 8.7.2). Any figurines that failed to completely lose their forms after burning, as those made of clay and dough, could be further manipulated: “He crushes the figurines of clay (and) the figurines of dough with his feet in (the wash) water (of his feet); you bury (the remains) in wasteland” (CMAwR 1, text 8.4: 61). At the end of the burning ritual, it was necessary to properly dispose of the figurines’ remains. Their final destination was usually the river or the uninhabited steppe; by burying the remains in the steppe, the evil influence of warlock and witch is returned to where it properly belongs, the savage and chaotic wilderness that lies outside the civilized city. The annihilation of warlock and witch would then be complete: their human forms destroyed, the hostile entities were transformed into non-corporeal beings.

CONCLUSION: WARLOCK AND WITCH FIGURINES AS EPHEMERAL ARTIFACTS The process of materializing and dematerializing warlock and witch in Mesopotamia is an instructive and illuminating one. With respect to materialization, it requires that the exorcist first identify a patient’s misfortune and calamities as the result of witchcraft, and then that he initiate the necessary procedures to reverse the harm. As the Mesopotamian warlock(s)/witch(es) responsible for inducing the harm were apparently not identifiable by the patient, the performance of an anti-witchcraft ritual often included figurine magic; the materialization of the inimical entities as figurines gave the exorcist a concrete handle on them, and a way to physically manipulate and



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ultimately destroy them. The figurines, even if technically anonymous, were yet identified as witches through the written inscriptions placed on their left shoulders and/or the oral recitation of appropriate incantations that would present them as such to the god(s), Shamash especially. As the gods turned clay into living beings, these ritual acts transformed the figurines into actual presences of their prototypes and permitted the exorcist to set about reversing the witchcraft to redound upon warlock and witch. The figurines’ limbs were restrained, ritually immobilizing the witches, and their mouths and lips were sealed, so they could no longer utter any harmful incantations. In many anti-witchcraft rituals, the release of the patient took the form of a ritual lawsuit before Shamash, the sun-god and god of justice. The god guaranteed a just and, for the patient, favorable verdict, and the condemnation of warlock and witch. A washing rite over the figurines not only purified the patient, but also polluted the figurines (and, through them, their prototypes), effectively sending back the patient’s misfortune to the evildoers. Once the patient was free of witchcraft, the final destruction of warlock and witch was ensured by their dematerialization by burning or burying or the like. For the performance of an anti-witchcraft ritual, the exorcist may thus create a number of figurines of warlock and witch that he manipulates as puppets during the performance and ritually destroys once he has freed the patient from this bewitchment. These temporary figurines are by their very nature ephemeral artifacts. For a fleeting moment, they presence warlock and witch and provide the exorcist with an important tool to drive out evil. Their proper annihilation and the (perishable) raw materials from which the figurines were made explains their absence from the archaeological record. It is only due to their descriptions in the cuneiform record that we can imagine what they looked like, how they were rendered recognizable, how they were treated, manipulated and destroyed. NOTES:

8.1 This article is dedicated to Dr. Holly Pittman, who has trained several interdisciplinary scholars with whom I have had the pleasure of working. It was written within the framework of the DFG-project “Corpus babylonischer Rituale und Beschwörungen gegen Schadenzauber: Edition, lexikalische Erschließung, historische und literarische Analyse.” I am grateful to Karen Sonik and Mikko Luukko for their invaluable comments, which greatly improved this article. 8.2 Alternatively, as in CMAwR 2, text 8.23, clay models of tongues can represent the witch’s slanderous tongue; here the body part may stand for the whole (PongratzLeisten and Sonik 2015: 21). 8.3 Faraone (1991: 200) defines such a voodoo doll as a figurine possessed of two or

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more of the following characteristics: 1) arms (and sometimes legs) bound or twisted behind the back as if bound; 2) nails hammered into the doll; 3) an unnaturally twisted head, feet, and sometimes entire upper torso, so chin, toes, and buttocks may all point in the same direction; 4) a figure placed in a container with tight-fitting cover; 5) a figure inscribed with the victim’s name; 6) discovery of the figure in a grave, a sanctuary, or a body of water. The Greek voodoo dolls measure between 2.9 and 18 cm tall and tend to be made of lead, bronze, clay, or wax. While some were inscribed with one or more names and/or a spell, at no point is there any attempt at realism: “these images were never meant to be portraits.…the sympathetic action of the doll was directed by the inscriptions that appear on some of them, or by the formulas that were undoubtedly uttered over them in the process of the rite” (Faraone 1991: 190, 200; see also Eidinow 2007). 8.4 See also, e.g., CMAwR 2, text 8.21: 7’ and Maqlû I 96, 131; and, for material links, e.g., CMAwR 1, texts 8.3, 1.: 32–33; 8.4, 1.: 30–33; 8.7.1: 49’–51’; 9.1, 1.: 16–19; CMAwR 2, texts 7.25: 23–27, 8.28, 1.: 54–55; Maqlû I 131–33. 8.5 See Schwemer 2007a: 201–202. e.g., CMAwR 1, texts 7.6.2: 16’; 7.6.4: 8; 7.6.5: 10; 8.12: 10; CMAwR 2, texts 8.25: 34; 11.3, 1: 33; exceptionally, CMAwR 1, text 2.2, 1.: 47’’–48’’ instructs the exorcist to “write their names on their sides”; two broken references include CMAwR 1, text 8.3, 2: 11–12 (restored with sides); CMAwR 2, text 8.36: 12–13 (restored with left side). 8.6 As a Hittite text and several Greek “voodoo dolls” show (Faraone 1991), figurines with the names of actual persons were used in order to harm those people (see Schwemer 2007a: 262 [about KUB 40, 83]; Eidinow 2007). Schwemer (2007: 201) does not exclude that also in anti-witchcraft rituals actual names were used “auch wenn gerade bei den paarweise hergestellten Figürchen in der optionalen Berücksichtigung beider Geschlechter dem Ritualarrangement selbst ein Moment der Unbestimmtheit innezuwohnen scheint.” Two rituals mention the possibility that the victim knew the perpetrator of witchcraft against him—possibly a personal enemy or prosecutor. In a fragmentary incantation, CMAwR 3, text F.9: 12’–13’ (KAL 2, 57) knowing or not knowing the perpetrator’s name may have led to varying tactics; CMAwR 2, text 8.33: 15’–17’ gives alternative instructions depending on whether the identity of the one who performed sorceries against the patient is known or not. Note that the incantation following these instructions in the latter text assumes that Shamash knows the identity of the evildoers, while the patient does not know them (line 19’). But if the victim knew the perpetrator, why would he opt for the performance of an anti-witchcraft ritual instead of court proceedings? Moreover, the anti-witchcraft rituals often mention that they were performed openly, not secretly; thus, using the proper name of the alleged warlock/witch would have been a witchcraft accusation—a charge not to be taken lightly. As false witchcraft accusations were punished harshly, I believe cases of unmistaken identity to be exceptional, rather than the rule. Alternatively, one could understand these ritual instructions in the light of the typical Mesopotamian practice of covering all eventualities. 8.7 E.g., combed-out hair (CMAwR 1, texts 2.2, 1: 50’’; 8.7.1 ms. A3 obv. ii 6’; 11.3, 1.: 41); cobwebs (CMAwR 1, texts 7.8, 2.: 27’, 43’; 8.7.2: 18); naphtha (CMAwR 1, text 7.6.6: 6*); hot bitumen (CMAwR 1, texts 7.6.7: 36; 8.2: 118; 8.7.1: 98’’; 8.7.2: 16; 8.8: 5’); fish oil (CMAwR 1, texts 8.1: 57’’; 8.4, 1.: 59; CMAwR 2, text 11.3, 1.: 42); tanning fluid or rancid oil (CMAwR 1, text 2.2, 1.: 51’’); sulfur (CMAwR 1, text 8.3, 2.: 12); sheep bile (CMAwR 1, texts 7.8, 2.: 42; 8.7.1 ms. A3 obv. ii 7’; 8.7.2: 18); or sweepings (CMAwR 2, text 8.17: 15’–16’). 8.8 E.g., CMAwR 1, texts 2.2, 1.: 49’’; 7.6.4: 7; 7.6.6: 36; 8.2: 30; 8.3, 1.: 111 (simply binding);



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8.3, 2.: 10–11 (with fetters); CMAwR 2, texts 8.17: 13’–14’ (arms and legs); 8.29: 32; 11.3, 1.: 33–34 (arms and feet); 7.6.5: 11 (hands and feet). 8.9 For other examples of the sealing of the figurine’s mouth, see CMAwR 1, text 7.6.6: 37; 7.6.6: 11* (figurine of the adversary); 7.8, 4.: 36’–37’; 8.7.1 ms. A3 obv. ii 7’. 8.10 For examples of beating with ēru-wood or an iron stick, see, e.g,, MRT 147’, 168’; CMAwR 1, texts 7.6.3: 30’’; 7.6.7: 36; 8.12: 9; CMAwR 2, text 7.15: 11’; for placing figurines into a disposable pot, see, e.g., CMAwR 1, text 1.5, 1.: 15’; 7.18: 35’’; 8.4: 58; 8.12: 11; 8.18: 12’; 11.3, 1.: 42; 11.5: 5–6.

ABBREVIATIONS CMAwR 1 = Abusch and Schwemer, 2011 CMAwR 2 = Abusch, Schwemer, Luukko, and Van Buylaere, 2016 CMAwR 3 = Abusch, Schwemer, Luukko, and Van Buylaere, 2020 KAL 2 = Schwemer 2007b Maqlû = Abusch 2016 MRT = Maqlû Ritual Tablet

REFERENCES Abusch, Tzvi. 1987. Babylonian Witchcraft Literature: Case Studies. Brown Judaic Studies 132. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Abusch, Tzvi. 2015. The Witchcraft Series Maqlû. Writings from the Ancient World Atlanta: SBL Press. Abusch, Tzvi. 2016. The Magical Ceremony Maqlû: A Critical Edition. Ancient Magic and Divination 10. Leiden: Brill. Abusch, Tzvi and Daniel Schwemer. 2011. Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals, vol. 1. Ancient Magic and Divination 8/1. Leiden: Brill = CMAwR 1. The texts can also be consulted online at: http://oracc.org /cmawro/corpus. Abusch, Tzvi, Daniel Schwemer, Mikko Luukko and Greta Van Buylaere. 2016. Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals, vol. 2. Ancient Magic and Divination 8/2. Leiden: Brill = CMAwR 2. The texts can also be consulted online at: http://oracc. org /cmawro/corpus. Abusch, Tzvi, Daniel Schwemer, Mikko Luukko and Greta Van Buylaere. 2020. Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals, vol. 3. Ancient Magic and Divination 8/3. Leiden: Brill = CMAwR 3. The texts can also be consulted online at: http://oracc. org /cmawro/corpus. Bahrani, Zainab. 2001. Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia. London: Routledge.

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Bahrani, Zainab. 2003. The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bonatz, Dominik. 2003. Was ist ein Bild im Alten Orient? Aspekte bildlicher Darstellung aus altorientalischer Sicht. In Bild—Macht—Geschichte. Visuelle Kommunikation im Alten Orient, ed. Marlies Heinz and Dominik Bonatz. Berlin: Reimer, 9–20. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Eidinow, Esther. 2007. Oracles, Curses, and Risk among the Ancient Greeks. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Faraone, Christopher A. 1991. Binding and Burying the Forces of Evil: The Defensive Use of “Voodoo Dolls” in Ancient Greece, Classical Antiquity 10: 165–205, 207–220. Federman, Mark. 2004. The Ephemeral Artefact: Visions of Cultural Experience. Keynote Presentation presented at eCulture Horizons: From Digitisation to Creating Cultural Experience(s), Salzburg. Available from: http://individual.utoronto.ca/ markfederman/EphemeralArtefact.pdf (last accessed 21 May 2018). Gasche, Hermann. 1994. Une figurine d’envoûtement paléo-babylonienne. In Beiträge zur Altorientalischen Archäologie und Altertumskunde: Festschrift für Barthel Hrouda zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Peter Calmeyer, 97–101, XIII. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Graff, Sarah B. 2014. Sexuality, Reproduction and Gender in Terracotta Plaques from the Late Third-Early Second Millennia BCE. In Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art, ed. Brian A. Brown and Marian H. Feldman, 371–390. Boston: de Gruyter. Gumbrecht, Hans U. 1999. Epiphany of Form: On the Beauty of Team Sports. New Literary History 30: 351–372. Maul, Stefan M. 1994. Zukunftsbewältigung: Eine Untersuchung altorientalischen Denkens anhand der babylonisch-assyrischen Löserituale (Namburbi). Baghdader Forschungen 18. Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern. Maul, Stefan M. 2004. Die ‘Lösung vom Bann’: Überlegungen zu altorientalischen Konzeptionen von Krankheit und Heilkunst. In Magic and Rationality in Ancient Near Eastern and Graeco-Roman Medicine, ed. Herman F. L. Horstmanshoff and Marten Stol, 79–95. Leiden: Brill. Maul, Stefan M. and Rita Strauß (mit Beiträgen von Daniel Schwemer). 2011. Ritualbeschreibungen und Gebete I. Keilschrifttexte aus Assur literarischen Inhalts 4/ Wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichung der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 133. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Pongratz-Leisten, Beate and Karen Sonik. 2015. Between Cognition and Culture:



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Theorizing the Materiality of Divine Agency in Cross-Cultural Perspective. In The Materiality of Divine Agency, ed. Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Karen Sonik, 3–69. Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records 8. Berlin: de Gruyter. Schwemer, Daniel. 2007a. Abwehrzauber und Behexung. Studien zum Schadenzauberglauben im alten Mesopotamien. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Schwemer, Daniel. 2007b. Rituale und Beschwörungen gegen Schadenzauber. Keilschrifttexte aus Assur literarischen Inhalts 2/Wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichung der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 117. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Schwemer, Daniel. 2010. Entrusting the Witches to Ḫumuṭ-tabal: The ušburruda Ritual BM 47806+. Iraq 72: 63–78. Schwemer, Daniel. 2017. The Anti-Witchcraft Ritual Maqlû: The Cuneiform Sources of a Magic Ceremony from Ancient Mesopotamia. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Schwemer, Daniel. 2018. Evil Helpers: Instrumentalizing Agents of Evil in Anti-Witchcraft Rituals. In Sources of Evil, ed. Greta Van Buylaere, Mikko Luukko, Daniel Schwemer and A. Mertens-Wagschal, 173–191. Leiden: Brill. Sonik, Karen. 2015. Divine (Re-)Presentation: Authoritative Images and a Pictorial Stream of Tradition in Mesopotamia. In The Materiality of Divine Agency. Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records 8, ed. Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Karen Sonik, 142–193. Berlin: de Gruyter. Walker, Christopher B.F. and Michael Dick. 2001. The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mesopotamian Mis Pî Ritual. State Archives of Assyria Literary Texts 1. Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project. Winter, Irene J. 2010. ‘Idols of the King’: Royal Images as Recipients of Ritual Action in Ancient Mesopotamia. In On Art in the Ancient Near East, vol. II, ed. Irene J. Winter. Leiden: Brill, 167–195.

9 What Lay Beneath: Queen Puabi’s Garments and Her Passage to the Underworld 1

Rita Wright Keywords: burial; Early Dynastic Period; flax; linen; Mesopotamia; Puabi; Royal Cemetery; Ur

INTRODUCTION

T

he Royal Cemetery at Ur contains a spectacular group of elite burials that take us close to power and privilege in the Early Dynastic IIIa period (ca. 2600–2400 BCE) (Baadsgaard 2016; Pollock 1985; Moorey 1977). The burial of Queen Puabi is one of the few royal tombs that was well preserved (Baadsgaard 2016: 148), and it offers historians a rare glimpse into the high quality and abundance of precious goods consumed by women of high status in Sumerian society. Additionally, Puabi’s tomb and its contents provide an opportunity to construct a complex narrative of the role of queens and their participation in cultic rituals in the Early Dynastic Period. While Inana, a goddess revered from the earlier Uruk Period (ca. 4000– 3100 BCE), and Enheduanna, a priestess and daughter of the ruler Sargon in the following Old Akkadian Period (ca. 2350–2150 BCE), are well known, our knowledge of them is based primarily on written legends and poetry from which only limited portraits of women’s place in Sumerian society can be created.2 It is Queen Puabi’s material remains that are the focus of this essay. Their study fills an important gap in understanding the strong symbolic role they played in signifying status (gender, rank, or class) at an important moment in antiquity. There is a general agreement that the elaborate headdresses and body ornaments of gold, lapis lazuli, and other precious stones discovered in

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Rita Wright 9.1 Penn Museum Reconstruction of Ornaments Sewn to Clothing Worn by Puabi in the Royal Cemetery at Ur. Haircomb (B16693), Wreaths (B17709, B17710-11), Hair Ribbons (B17711A), Earrings (B17712A–B), Rosette Necklace (16694), Necklace and Cloak (83-71.9), Belt (B17063). Hafford 2019: fig. 8S4.1; also Hafford 2018. Courtesy Penn Museum; Image no. 299835



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Puabi’s tomb were commensurate with her status, gender, rank, or class (Fig. 9.1). However, little has been said about the textiles that lay beneath these sumptuous goods.3 For example, Aubrey Baadsgaard (2016) quantified the variety of precious stones interred with Puabi’s burial and compared them to other elite burials in the cemetery and elsewhere; those in Puabi’s grave far outweigh those in other burials and are considered to have been designed with “specifically feminine forms” in mind (Baadsgaard 2016: 152). Another indicator of the distinctive quality of the assemblage is the specialized workmanship and technical quality of the accessories. Kim Benzel (2013: 11) notes that their value is beyond the commodification because they convey a “magical” presence commensurate with the divine by virtue of what Irene Winter (1999: 53) refers to as their “sacred properties.” One could say they are transcendent in the sense of conveying the presence of the divine itself. Missing from these interpretations of the material remains in Puabi’s tomb is the study of the clothing styles and fabric that served as a background to the ornamentation. Partially due to the poor preservation of textiles in Mesopotamia, only a few bits and pieces of fabric have been preserved with which to inform us about preferred types of cloth used in the Ur III Period (ca. 2150–2000 BCE). In order to reconstruct the clothing worn by Puabi in her tomb, I rely on texts, statuary and two seals that were discovered at or near her tomb in order to unravel the significance of the cloth she wore in the context of an early period Mesopotamian history.

QUEENS IN THE EARLY DYNASTIC PERIOD Puabi lived in the city of Ur on the alluvial plain in southern Mesopotamia sometime during the Early Dynastic Period (ca. 2900–2350 BCE). Ur was one of the major cities during this period (Adams 1981). Each city worshipped its patron deity but shared in a common religious ideology in which a pantheon of gods was believed to be responsible for the well-being of the entire society. This divine sphere was sustained by cult institutions that were led by kings and royal ideology instantiated by queens who acted on behalf of the king. Our knowledge of this ideology is partially due to the translation of an archive from the city of Lagash dated to the latter part of the Early Dynastic Period IIIa (ca. 2400–2350 BCE) (Beld 2002). Recorded in the archive are extensive travels that queens undertook to major cities and the countryside, where they participated in rituals and

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royal ideologies that were among the integrative strategies designed to unite the city states into a symbolic system. The symbolism extended the court’s royal status and kinship to local elites and lower ranking persons. Scott Beld (2002) refers to these arrangements as a ritual economy. The grave of Puabi, though earlier than the Lagash texts, brings together a rich material culture relevant to the development of these early Mesopotamian ideologies. The rituals in Lagash took place during a twenty-year period when queens played a central role (Beld 2002). Approximately 250 years separate Puabi’s burial at Ur and the rituals performed by the Lagash queens. I hypothesize that the concepts and ideologies governing the Lagash rituals were a later manifestation of similar ceremonies carried out in Puabi’s time. As Beld (2002: 229) argues, the Lagash rituals were a “cult institution” that was widely known throughout the “pan-Sumerian cultural area.” Serving in the capacity of representatives of the king, the Lagash queens— not unlike other notable women in the Ur III Period (Wright 2013)—traveled with a large entourage and moved about the countryside to the capital at Girsu and elsewhere in Lagash throughout the year in order to perform the rituals. The archives in which the Lagash queens’ activities were recorded are from a cult-institution in the Emunusa (“House of the Lady”), which was dedicated to the goddess Baba, and where the queens maintained a substantial household. This household included “women, their dependent children, and orphans” (Beld 2002: 15). Household personnel performed services for the institution, among which are listed linen, wool, mat, and reed weaving; other crafts; and domestic, maintenance, and agricultural activities. Also noted as part of the household were scribes, lamentation priests, jewelers and statue makers or sculptors. Some personnel are described as “people who take subsistence fields”; they were granted land and received rations during “four to six months of the year” (Beld 2002: 16), when they participated in cult and labor obligations. Individuals occupied with festival and ritual activities brewed barley beer, and supplied bread, sheep and goat during festivals. Festival-related distributions in the various rituals included dates, figs, apples, wine, fish, sheep, goats, and other ritual commodities (oils, perfumes, milk, and malts). These were distributed to local lower ranking personnel and to elites and royal family members whose participation won them membership into the king’s royal family. At some festivals,



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wool and linen cloth were given to priests and officials as offerings to the gods (Beld 2002: 13, 14, 17). An important ritual known from the Lagash archive was performed in honor of the ancestors. It was participated in by people who were believed to be family members of the dead and of divine beings. Foods were distributed along with offerings of bowls, crowns, necklaces, fleeces, cloth, and garments (Beld 2002: 159, 165). The ancestral ritual served to connect the wife of the ruler to the sources of power and the “former rulers” in the underworld (Beld 2002: 181). It was a powerful legitimation of the queen’s status and ability to cement a royal connection to the divine ancestral sphere (Beld 2002: 165). The material remains discovered in Puabi’s ritual burial provisioned her with all of the necessary accoutrements for admission into the world of the ancestors, and I propose here that her burial was an enactment of the ancestral ritual. It is not farfetched to imagine that the Early Dynastic kings (and queens) in the Early Dynastic IIIa Period may have initiated the rituals known later in the Early Dynastic IIIb Period in Lagash, by serving as representatives of state kingship and cementing the king’s social control. In fact, Puabi was conceivably intimately involved in the creation of the cultic practices that are recorded in the later Lagash archive. Subsequently, I will return to the specifics of Queen Puabi’s burial and the clothes she wore, but first I will describe the textiles and clothing styles worn by women in the third millennium BCE and the relationship between the queen’s attire and female garments in general. In a later section, I use texts, archaeological evidence, and the circumstances of the production of wool and linen in order to provide a framework for the use of these materials for the female garments produced for royal (queens’) and divine statuary.

CLOTHING STYLES WORN BY WOMEN Textile fabrics and clothing styles reflect important divisions within Mesopotamian society. Specific garments and grades of cloth were reserved for royal and temple personnel and for wearing at public displays in rituals and feasts. People belonging to lower social strata wore coarser varieties of cloth of inferior quality. Some fabrics were hand-loomed, plaited, fleeced, or shaggy wool garments. They were referred to as sumptuous, best, or third

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and fourth grade (as described below). Sizes of garments were categorized as small, middle, and large (Kang 1973: 297ff.; Wright 1996). In assessing “style,” I have considered three attributes. Certain clothes were for everyday wear, and others were reserved for special people and occasions. They came in different shapes, including cloaks or wraps, and some were adorned with super-structural elements (Oppenheim 1949) such as appliqué, embroidery, ornaments, hems, and bonding of other raw edges. Drawing on statuary from the Early Dynastic Temple at Khafajeh, other representations of women, and textual sources, the following figures illustrate the available clothing styles that I have considered in this study. They include: (1) Multi-layered flounced woolen clothing that was “fleecy or tiered” in multiple layers (Foster 2010: 123). This garment style is worn by a female worshiper (Fig. 9.2a) carved in gypsum and found at Khafajeh, Nintu Temple VII (OI A11441). This Sumerian worshiper statue is dated to the Early Dynastic Period (ca. 2600–2500 BCE). (2) Cloth woven in a single piece that was wrapped around the body and draped over the left shoulder (Fig. 9.2b–c). This style was worn by royalty, priestesses, and elite women. (3) A garment with fleece fringes at the hemline (Fig. 9.2d). One style includes a cloak that may have been an extension of the wrap-around cloth; another was plain with a simple fringe (Fig. 9.2f ). (4) A garment extending to the neck and not draped. The right arm may be exposed but the left one is not. This style of garment is worn by Inana on the Warka Vase (Fig. 9.2e). (5) A garment described by Sir Leonard Woolley (1934) in his excavation notes a “cape” or “cloak” (Fig. 9.2d). This perhaps refers to a garment that is listed in texts as a cape or shawl that was worn over full length garments (Baadsgaard 2008: 293; Wright 2013). It is described in administrative documents from regional centers that record clothing worn by women of high status for ritual performances (Foster 2010: 129). A related style is a “cut-off,” a shoulder garment referred to as a wrap and “outer” garment. This was worn during the third and second millennia BCE and may actually be the style that Woolley alluded to in his excavation notes. The “cut-off” is discussed further below.



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9.2 Clothing Styles Worn by Women Depicted in Statuary and Imagery in the Early Dynastic Period. Redrawn by R. Wright and G. Gallo: a redrawn from photo of gypsum female worshiper from Khafajeh, Nintu Temple VII, ca. 2600–2500 BCE. Oriental Institute A11441; b redrawn from photo of statuettes of two worshipers from the Square Temple at Eshnunna (Tell Asmar), Iraq, ca. 2700 BCE. National Museum of Iraq, Baghdad; c redrawn from photo of statuary from Sin Temple at Khafajeh; d redrawn from attendant clothing on Puabi’s seal (Fig. 9.4); e redrawn from attendant clothing on Puabi’s seal (Fig. 9.4); f redrawn from image of Inana on the Warka Vase. National Museum of Iraq, Baghdad

Some garment styles were decorated with super-structural additions designed to break up the monotony of the mostly plain fabrics that were worn. The appliqué technique, for example, is known from the Uruk period at Tepe Gawra and the middle of the second millennium at Susa (Oppenheim 1949: 187). The only garment with super-structural elements known from the Early Dynastic Period, outside of Puabi’s cloth (discussed further below), is worn by one of the soldiers on the Standard of Ur (ca. 2500 BCE); the garment in question is a cape with circular elements on its surface. The circular elements may represent metal that served as clasps; these may simply have been decorative (Fig. 9.3) or may have designated the function or role of the soldier within the military establishment. The cape is smooth and could be linen but, more likely, in view of the wearer’s occupation, it was leather. The metal additions appear as innovations and demonstrate the beginning of a convention in which objects were added to cloth either for

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Rita Wright 9.3 Depiction on the Standard of Ur of a Uniform with Super-Structural Elements Worn by a Soldier. Redrawn (from Oppenheim 1949: 184, fig. 15)

a decorative or functional purpose. In a much later period, Oppenheim noted the use of these “bracteates” on cultic and ruler garments in which different types of golden ornaments (“rosettes, stars, disks, rings”) were added to cloth (Oppenheim 1949). They were removed for cleaning and storage. Excluding the soldier’s uniform, other structural elements on the earliest garments are sewn or rolled hems and appliqués. The simple tunic style that wrapped around the body (Fig. 9.2b,c) has unfinished edges that Foster (2010: 129) believes were rolled. Another possibility is that they were folded over and sewn in order to hold the edges in place. Some of these garments have a double folded selvedge along the vertical edges of the garment and across its top edge. It is shown with a darker outline along the edges of the tunic on Fig. 9.2b,c. As noted, some garments are fringed, a conceit found on many articles of female clothing (Fig. 9.2d,f ).

TEXTILES PRODUCED FOR SPECIFIC GARMENTS There are early references to the quality of cloth in the Early Dynastic and Ur III periods. In the Early Dynastic Period, fabrics are listed in the distribution of rations, where they are referenced as first-, second-, and third-class cloth (Maekawa 1980; Waetzoldt 1987; Wright 1996). In the Ur III Period, records detailing cloth quality and the standards applied for different types of garment provide a longer-term understanding of the significance of fabric and garment styles. Quality standards were applied to specific garments including, for example, “best,” used for the wraparound garments and capes or shawls that were placed over the shoulders



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(Waetzoldt 2010; Wright 2013). These “best” fabrics are described by Waetzoldt (2010; see also Wright 2013) as wool in a plain weave with a warp to weft ratio produced in an approximately 1 to 2 ratio of warp to weft and having various sizes that ranged from 3.5 to 6 meters. Other fabrics for wrap-around garments were ranked as “very good” and were woven in a twill pattern with a ratio of 1 to 1.5 up to 1 to 4 warp to weft. These were used for wrap-around garments, capes, or shawls for the shoulder. It took 480–960 days to produce a first quality cloth; 240 days to produce a second quality cloth; and 7 days to produce a fourth quality cloth. A fourth type of wrap-around garment, cape, or shawl for the shoulders was produced at Ur and Garshana. At 1.25 to 2.9 meters in size, it was smaller than the other clothes recorded, some of which reached 7.5 m in length. The material from which this fairly fine, warp-faced cloth was produced is not recorded but it appears to have been a specialized production, perhaps linen. Textiles were produced in a limited number of colors, some of which were designated for individuals of a specific rank and class, while others were for the general population. Divinities specifically preferred black, white, and multicolors (Waetzoldt 2010: 203). The black and multicolored garments worn by Inana were thought to have “numinous powers” (Waetzoldt 2010: 203). A preferred color for royalty was “shiny yellow” produced from the finest quality fabric, although royal figures also wore white, as recorded in the myth describing the sacred marriage of Inana. In the myth, the king, acting in the role of Dumuzi, is described as wearing a multicolored cape or garment. Elite and other high-ranking individuals preferred multicolored wool woven of third and fourth quality fabrics. Fabrics produced for the general population were in a light or white color, or dark or black; the lowest quality of the latter was used for male and female slaves and for lower deities. A reddish-brown color was for shoes, sandals, and belts, and multicolored, black, yellow, and yellowish and greenish were used for ribbons (Waetzoldt 2010; Wright 2013: 401). Some of the colors were available from the natural coats of sheep or goat. Woven wool straight from the fleece of sheep or goat hair was black or white. Multicolored fabrics likely were produced by combining naturally colored yarns. Natural linen fibers range in color from yellow, a flaxen or golden color, that could have been the shiny yellow preferred by royalty, especially for special ritual occasions (Fig. 9.4). However, raw flax ranges from yellow to a medium and darker yellow-brown and grey (O Ecotextiles,

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9.4 Lapis Lazuli Cylinder Seal (BM 121544) from Royal Cemetery of Ur with Puabi’s Name Inscribed; Early Dynastic III Period (ca. 2600 BCE). Courtesy British Museum

2015: 1, 2). Therefore, linen could be bleached to achieve white, a process already known from a third millennium BCE account referred to as The Bridal Sheet. This text, published by Thorkild Jacobsen (1987: 13–15), gives a full account of the steps involved in the production of linen cloth, including details for dyeing linen and bleaching it. Quillien (2014: 285) reports textual sources from the first millennium that record the delivery of a large quantity of dye and alum, a mordant, to linen bleachers, suggesting that bleaching continued long after the third millennium. This review of the fabrics and styles of women’s garments in Mesopotamia indicates the existence of several different fabrics and garment styles for royalty, cultic rituals, and ordinary wear. Linen was the preferred cloth for royalty and fabrics for divine statuary, but other fabrics were worn depending on specific occasions. The color of different garment styles ranged from the natural shade of sheep wool, which, depending on breed, would be either black or white, to one of the dyed shades referred to above.

Wool and Linen Production Based on lower percentages of linen (10%) compared to wool (90%) in texts, it is widely believed that a decline in linen production occurred early in the settlements of the south. Linen was after all associated with cloth worn and used by royalty and for divine statuary. Even if it was restricted to such uses, the question arises of why there is such a dearth of references



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to the cultivation of flax, to the processing of its fiber for cloth, and linen weaving. In an important paper, Joy McCorriston (1997) noted several factors that could account for the apparent preference for wool in southern Mesopotamia. Especially important is that wool production was economically efficient and practical when compared to linen since processing wool required less labor. A ready labor force in the form of prisoners of war, slaves, or local village women, many of whom had produced wool in their homes for generations, were compensated with low rations (Waetzoldt 1972; Maekawa 1980; Wright 1996, 2016). Linen weavers clearly matched the skills of the wool weavers, but they were of a different sort. The production of linen cloth was known in the Near East well before the third millennium BCE. Cultivation most likely was on a small scale, undertaken and processed by household producers intimately familiar with specific grades of flax needed to produce fine linen cloth. Today, linen is produced industrially and by small-scale producers who typically cultivate flax gardens in plots in small gardens near their dwellings or in small fields. If the selection of sheep breeds and fleece for woven textiles is a highly specialized craft, the production of high-quality linen cloth requires comparable skills in assessing qualities of flax seed, optimal times for harvest and processing in order to maintain quality control. For example, the proper harvesting of flax requires removing the plant from the ground at a time when the stalk is intact and possesses long fibers (Bolley and Marcy 1907: 27), and special seeds may be used in order to produce desired colors. Although the bleaching of linen to white was carried out during the Uruk Period (Jacobsen 1987) and later (Quillien 2014), careful selection during the cultivation process itself would have enhanced the possibility of achieving the desirable flaxen or “yellow luster” (O Ecotextiles 2015: 1, 2) that was favored by royalty. Another point noted by McCorriston is that flax would have made use of land that was otherwise suitable for growing wheat and barley. This is not supported by recent evidence. Agronomists have documented the cultivation of flax under conditions that do not compete with wheat and barley yields. Harvest yields are in fact favorable when flax is grown in rotation with cereals like wheat and barley. Good yields are also produced when grain is cultivated on flax stubble. Under the reverse conditions, when flax is grown after cereal harvests, good yields are also documented

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(Flax Council of Canada: chs. 1 and 2). Flax cultivation is equally compatible with the growth of various garden-variety vegetables and is actually most favorable when grown in soil under rotation with other crops (Bolley and Marcy 1907). These modern conditions are similar to those recorded in Mesopotamia, where flax cultivation occurred in small gardens and irrigated fields and was rotated with cereals and other crops (Quillien 2014) in what appears to have been long-standing practice. Finally, Mesopotamian imagery depicts plant forms on the Warka Vase that have been interpreted as date palms and flax grown together in irrigated fields (Miller et al. 2015). The practice of growing date palms and flax together continues in Iraq in modern contexts. Administering Linen Production in the Third Millennium The earliest record in which the term “linen weaver” is recorded appears in the Emunusa archive in the state of Lagash at the end of the late Early Dynastic Period (Beld 2002: 15). The term, linen weaver (ki-gu), appears among a list of workers who were engaged in a variety of occupations and to whom rations were distributed. Texts also list flax in “arrears” in an account; this suggests that harvested fibers were received on a set basis. At Lagash, the records note that finished linen cloth was brought to administrative personnel (Beld 2002: 15). This practice is not surprising given that linen was a productive resource that possessed highly symbolic value and would be administered under different conditions from wool production. Other details reveal an intimate association between cultivators and weavers. Although flax was grown either on land controlled by the temple or on other “well-drained garden plots” (Hruška 1995: 69; Waetzoldt 1983; Beld 2002: 31), it may have been under the charge of a weaver. According to Beld (2002: 31), the accounts in the Lagash archive do not necessarily represent activities conducted in the household but are simply records of obligations that were fulfilled by people who “provided labor to the cult.” During the reign of Gudea (ca. 2150–2125 BCE), texts from Girsu record the distribution of raw wool and bundles of flax from a “palace administrative center.” Top quality garments produced in workshops were for royal women (Firth 2014: 64); these were issued by weight to workshops for the production of specific textiles (Firth 2014: 59). The surviving texts speak of weaving teams that specialized in either linen or wool, although in one group that specialized in woolen textiles, linen also was produced (Firth



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2014: 61). Finally, overseers in places where linen was produced supervised, in at least one instance, both a weaving and fulling establishment (Waetzoldt 1972). The only similarity to the slightly later Ur III workshops devoted to the production of cloth woven from wool was the provision of increased rations for some women, who may have been supervisors (Wright 1996). With the exception of the rations for these “senior women,” other compensation was based on age grades (Wright 1996) and at a lower rate than in the Ur III Period (Firth 2014: 64). These various references to the organization of the production and distribution of wool and linen in the third millennium suggest important differences between flax cultivation and linen production on the one hand and wool production on the other. The specialized skills of sheep farming and wool production appear at the top of a work pyramid that was tightly controlled under industrialized conditions. In contrast, the dispersed division of labor among linen personnel suggests that linen production was less dependent on the type of centralization employed in wool production. The cultivation of linen in gardens and small plots and its special harvesting requirements indicates that linen production required the hands of a range of different types of specialists. These differences between wool and flax were essentially technical features of the two crafts. Wool required specialization in breeding and managing sheep and materials that lent themselves to industrialized production. Flax cultivation, the processing of its fiber, and the weaving of linen instead materialized according to different standards and availability of land and expertise in each community. In fact, flax and linen cloth may have been produced outside of the institutionalized workshops that are known for wool and a few other crafts. Administering Linen Production after the Third Millennium The administration of linen production after the third millennium follows from my description of the agricultural skills required to nurture flax in the field and produce a fine linen cloth. My argument has been that the management of linen production by the state took into account the technical differences between the keeping of sheep and cultivation of flax. Textual sources after the Ur III Period are more numerous and document the official understanding of “flax culture,” and how this was taken into account in managing its production.

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After the Ur III Period, in the Old Babylonian Period (ca. 2000–1600 BCE) and subsequently, a “fragmentation of power” and administrative changes occurred that affected craft organization (Van De Mieroop 1992: 70). The extent to which these changes influenced the reorganization of linen production is unknown. In any event, there are many references to the cultivation of flax and the production and distribution of linen that provide useful insights into the ways in which technical factors influenced the processing and farming of linen in Mesopotamia. In these well-documented contexts, Quillien (2014: 278) notes references to the profession of “linen weaver,” though there is no indication that the weaver resided on temple grounds. Linen producers provide services that reflect different stages in linen’s production. Some workers supplied raw flax to the administration, while others received combed flax and were responsible for delivering linen cloth after it was spun or woven (Quillien 2014). At Sippar, linen weavers worked in teams but a specific individual managed the dispersal of silver for purchases of flax, stages of processing such as the spinning and weaving of curtains and tunics. The weaver’s work also included bleaching, washing, and making repairs of raw flax and linen thread. Even here there is variation as some bleachers are not among the teams of linen weavers (Quillien 2014: 279). At Uruk, bleachers during the same period performed all of the tasks associated with linen weavers at Sippar, except that non-weavers mended the fabric and thread (Quillien 2014: 279). A separate category of individuals who worked with fine cloth in temples was granted a prebend. Such individuals were alone responsible for preparing materials for religious ceremonies but were not located on temple grounds (Quillien 2014). Other first millennium records kept by temples at Sippar and Uruk and studied by Quillien (2014) record the procurement of flax from fields, some of which were located at some distance from the city. In Sippar, weavers procured flax from a palm garden owned by the temple. A portion of the flax was taken as a tax, while the remainder was “bought” with silver and in a transaction involving dates (Quillien 2014: 272). A different system was recorded by a temple in the city of Uruk, in which a “bleacher” procured flax from the “steppe” or other location near the city and was paid in silver (Quillien 2014: 273). Other transactions reference irrigated lands in which relatives of a “bleacher” procured flax grown along with “cereals, vegetables, and onions.” Farmers paid rents for the flax in exchange for their use of canals (Quillien 2014: 273).



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In view of the restrictions on the use of linen cloth and cultivation methods that differed from those used by the grain industry or for sheep farming, and the relatively small number of texts for which we have current evidence, it appears that flax cultivation, processing, and cloth weaving materialized according to the needs of available land in each community. Flax cultivation and processing seems to have been structured following a division of labor in which farmers, producers, processors, and weavers independently carried out their shares of the linen production process. Results were coordinated by individuals in the large institutions with no apparent knowledge of the total process. This could account for the lack of elaborate records of input and output, in which only the end products (flax bundles, spun flax, and cloth) were recorded separately. To conclude this section, then, this review of texts and agro-economics offers a new perspective on linen and its place in Mesopotamia society. Linen continued to be a viable product in the Early Dynastic and later periods but its production and distribution developed following a management strategy that was more commensurate with the farm methods, water requirements, rotation regimes, and processing of “flax culture” (Bolley and Marcy 1907). In addition, the restriction in linen’s use to garments for royalty and divinities sets it apart from wool with its more industrialized production, a factor that partially explains the lower percentages of texts devoted to its production and distribution.

PUABI’S BURIAL AND PASSAGE TO THE UNDERWORLD In reconstructing or, as some might say, in creating, Queen Puabi’s outfit, I carefully noted the details of her garment as depicted on two surviving cylinder seals, object 30-12-2 (Penn Museum; see online database of the Penn Museum) and BM 121544 (British Museum; pictured here in Fig. 9.4), from the Royal Cemetery at Ur. The images created in this essay (Figs. 9.5–9.8) emphasize the contours of the clothing engraved on these two seals and are in keeping with contemporary Mesopotamian cultural norms pertaining to color, fabric, and super-structural features of Mesopotamian clothing. The fabric choice was either leather, flounced wool, or finely woven linen, possibly selected and harvested with the goal of achieving black, white, and yellow in the finished garment. I have also considered here the likely texture of the finished cloth.

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As discussed earlier, the ornaments worn by Puabi are not depicted on the seals buried in the Royal Cemetery.4 It is likely that the artisans responsible for carving the two seals cited here were not present at the funerary ceremony itself. In reconstructing the style of female dress that Puabi wore to her grave, they (the artisans) relied on cultural norms or a knowledgeable specialist. I drew especially on imagery from the seal BM 121544 (Fig. 9.4), a seal found on or near Puabi’s remains and inscribed with her name. The styles represented here in Figure 9.2 show third millennium female clothing represented in other imagery, and attributes associated with her status and the cult ritual in which she performed. The reconstructed garments may not be absolutely identical to the clothes that Puabi actually wore to her death but they are in keeping with the available evidence described earlier in this chapter. In third millennium BCE Mesopotamia, royal and elite figures wore linen and wool fabrics produced exclusively for persons of their ranks. While linen was exclusively reserved for royalty, who also wore wool garments, less finely woven (wool) fabrics were worn by people of other classes. In a seal from her tomb (Fig. 9.4), Queen Puabi is shown seated at a banquet. Her garments here are smooth rather than flounced and layered as shown in other forms of classic Sumerian dress (Fig. 9.2a), though her garment does include an elaborate fringe at the hemline. Her clothing style, instead of following the wrap-around type (Figs. 9.2b,c), combines the fringed garment and a dress that hugs her neck, a style similar to that worn by Inana on the Warka Vase (Fig. 9.2e). A distinctive addition to Puabi’s attire is the short garment that covers her shoulder and bodice. In the records reported by Waetzoldt (2010), capes were woven in a plain weave of wool or linen. The short garment with super-structural attachments shown on Puabi’s seal (Fig. 9.4) may represent a “cut-off” (Foster 2010: 129) or cape, a garment worn only by high-status women on ceremonial occasions. I have paid particular attention to the super-structural additions to this cut-off (Fig. 9.4) and designed several different interpretations of fabrics. On Figure 9.5, I have shown Puabi’s dress and “cut-off” in black, though white wool could also have been used. The appliqué is trimmed with black and white strips made of wool. The cut-off could also be designed with appliquéd ornaments, perhaps lapis lazuli and gold, that also would be in keeping with the emphasis on adding texture and color to the fabric (this visualization is not shown here).



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9.5 Visualization of Puabi’s Clothing Modeled after Fig. 9.4. Black dress and “cut-off” appliquéd with wool trim. Created by R. Wright and G. Gallo

I have also created a different visualization of the positioning of the ornaments on Puabi’s garments (Fig. 9.6) that follows Woolley’s (1934) initial description of the location of the beads in his excavation notes, discussed at length by Kim Benzel (2013). Working directly from Woolley’s original notes (now in the British Museum), Benzel “unpacks” his texts and observations in a comprehensive interpretation of techniques and designs employed. Based on its location at Puabi’s neckline, Woolley interpreted surviving “jewelry,” later identified by other scholars as choker-like ornaments, as a decorative collar on what he referred to as a cape (what I have identified as a “cut-off”). Similarly, instead of identifying the jewels at the bottom of the cloak as a belt, Woolley believed they were actually attached to the cloak (Benzel 2013: 141–49). In Benzel’s (2013: 213) words, Woolley believed it was “possible that the so-called belt might have been the lower border of the cloak much like the collar might have been the upper border.” Although Woolley later reconstructed the lower jewelry as more likely representing a belt rather than the lower border of a cloak, my reconstructions include a version of Puabi’s attire that follow his original observations in his

9.6 Visualization of Puabi’s Clothing Modeled after Figure 9.4. Black Dress and “CutOff” with Appliquéd Ornaments. Created by R. Wright and G. Gallo

9.7 Visualization of Puabi’s Clothing Modeled after Figure 9.4 (after Woolley’s Interpretation). Black Dress with Linen “Cut-Off.” Created by R. Wright and G. Gallo



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9.8 Puabi’s Clothing Modeled after Figure 9.4. Black Dress with Linen “Cut-Off” and appliquéd wool trim. Created by R. Wright, G. Gallo

excavation notes (Woolley 1934). In Figure 9.7, I have created a visualization of the same image shown with a linen “cut-off.” In Figure 9.8, I have depicted clothing styles, ornaments, and fabrics in line with color preferences for royalty and divinities noted in the texts, and I have maintained the position of the beads shown in Figure 9.1. I believe that this version of her garment most closely follows the cultural norms described in this chapter. Puabi’s dress is shown in black wool with a high neck and fringe, as they are shown in the seal BM 121544 (Fig. 9.4). The color white would have been less appropriate for a funerary performance since it is more typical of bridal dress. I have used a light linen fabric, a shiny yellow in color, for the small “cut-off” that extends from the shoulder to the bottom of Puabi’s bodice. I selected alternating black and white wool trim for the appliqué to enliven the plainness of the cloth and draw attention to the “cut-off” as a ceremonial badge of royalty. If made of linen, the very fine and loosely woven threads would have endowed the “cut-off” with a transparent quality, so that all of the beads worn beneath the “cut-off” would be visible (this possible outcome is not reproduced).

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CONCLUSION All life must end in death, but the significance of Puabi’s funerary performance remains with us thanks to the surviving material culture from her grave. Forensic studies of her skeletal remains are also providing some understanding of the circumstances of her death (e.g., Hafford 2019). These have led historians to reconstruct a portrait of a queen who was dedicated to the ideologies of her time and who served them in a spectacular performance in a moment in history we might otherwise never have known. Investigation of the cloth opened our vision to the symbolic nature of fabric and the more mundane concerns of cultivation practices and practical concerns of a bureaucracy; it also has filled other important gaps in Mesopotamian history. While the actions of kings were celebrated in literary texts, administrative accounts, imagery, and ideology, women have remained on the margins of history. The more detailed circumstances of Puabi’s death, as they have been reconstructed, move her to the forefront of history. Although the visualizations I have created here of the clothes she wore to her death are based on images fashioned by an artisan and on evidence from surviving texts, we cannot be sure that it is a true portrait of how Puabi looked and what she wore. Still, complemented by her grave’s rich material culture and the numerous analyses of its significance, we at least glimpse something of the symbols of her office. The sumptuous nature of the materials and resources in Puabi’s grave overshadow those of any other burials during the period. The reconstruction of Puabi fully adorned provides insights into the fabric that lay beneath the sumptuous ornaments. The queen’s spectacular accessories, though important, have diverted our attention away from the cloth that lay beneath the eye-catching ornaments, which deteriorated (or de-materialized) long ago and so has been mostly invisible to us in the present day. My attempts in this paper have been to gather together the various threads that pertain to the production and use of cloth in order to complete a narrative of (and to re-materialize missing elements from) Puabi’s signature funerary performance. NOTES:

9.1 This paper was inspired by an exhibition of Near Eastern holdings from the Royal Cemetery at the Penn Museum and a lecture delivered by Holly Pittman to my undergraduate students in an installation in one of the galleries. She walked us



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through the placement of the queen’s magnificent ornaments, toggle pins, and meticulously reconstructed bead work that was sewn on to the queen’s garment that were appropriate to a woman of Puabi’s status, cultural norms, and connections to a world beyond Mesopotamia. Holly and I first met at Tal-i Malyan, ancient Anshan. Holly was our seal expert; working in a trench next to one she was excavating, we stood in wonder as she found seal after seal throughout the season. Over the years Holly has helped me to understand seals and their significance in Mesopotamia and in the regions between Mesopotamia and the Indus civilization, where I spent most of my field experience. I will always treasure her generosity and friendship. 9.2 Recent studies on women in Mesopotamia include multifaceted treatments of women not only in literary and religious but also social, economic, and legal spheres (among numerous others: Asher-Greve 2013; Asher-Greve and Westenholz 2013; Crawford 2014; Couto-Ferreira 2016). 9.3 There is an extensive literature on the headdresses, earrings, and other ornamentation worn by Puabi. They are not included here, since they are not shown on the seals discussed in the main text below. Of note are the various fruits and plants represented that captured the richness of the fruits of the land: pomegranates (Woolley 1934: 89); apples (Miller 2000: 154); dates (Ellison et al. 1978; Postgate 1987); golden leaves of willow (Tengberg et al. 2008); Indus Sissoo (Tengberg et al. 2008: 927); and date palm. For an extensive list of types and discussion of production technologies, see Benzel (2013). 9.4 This omission is not unlike Sir Leonard Woolley’s reaction to his discovery of the Royal Cemetery at Ur overall. Rather than excavating immediately, Woolley returned to the British Museum and secured the funds needed to conduct a full-scale excavation of his “royal” burials before beginning to dig. Woolley’s announcement of the finds and early art put the Royal Cemetery and perhaps even Near Eastern art and archaeology generally on the map (Chi and Azara 2015). What immediately caught Woolley’s own eye and the public interest was the display of mineral resources that showcased the vast exchange networks within which the early Sumerian cities were embedded.

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Weaving and Pottery Technology among Mobile Pastoralists of Central Eurasia. Antiquity 86.332: 368–382. Ellison, Rosemary, Jane Renfrew, Don Brothwell, and Nigel Seeley. 1978. Some food offerings from Ur, Excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley, and Previously Unpublished. Journal of Archaeological Science 5: 167–177. Firth, Richard. 2014. Textile Texts of the Lagaš II Period. In Prehistoric, Ancient Near Eastern and Aegean Textiles and Dress, ed. Mary Harlow, Cécile Michel, and MarieLouise Nosch, 57–73. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Frifelt, Karen. 1991. The Island of Umm an-Nar, Vol. 1: Third Millennium Graves. Aarhus: Jutland Archaeological Society Publication 26:1. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Foster, Benjamin. 2010. Clothing in Sargonic Mesopotamia: Visual and Written Evidence. In Textile Terminologies in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean from the Third to the First Millennia BC, ed. Cécile Michel and Marie-Louise Nosch, 110–145. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Garcia-Ventura, Agnès. 2008. Neo-Sumerian Textile Wrappings. Visiting Figurines from Nippur. Zeitschrift für Orient Archäologie 1: 246–254. Garcia-Ventura, Agnès. 2012. The Emperor’s New Clothes: Textiles, Gender and Mesopotamian Foundation Figures. Altorientalische Forschungen 39.2: 235–253. Hafford, William B. 2018. A Spectacular Discovery: Burials Simple and Splendid. Expedition Magazine 60.1: 58–65. Hafford, William B. 2019. The Royal Cemetery of Ur. In Journey to the City: A Companion to the Middle East Galleries at the Penn Museum, ed. Steve Tinney and Karen Sonik, 195–234. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Helbaek, Hans. 1959. Notes on the Evolution and History of Linum. KUML 1959: 103–120. Helbaek, Hans. 1965. Samarran Irrigation Agriculture at Choga Mami in Iraq. Iraq 34: 35–38. Hruška, Blahoslav. 1995. Sumerian Agriculture. New Findings. Preprint 26. Berlin: MaxPlanck- Institute für Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Jacobsen, Thorkild. 1987. The Harps that Once…Sumerian Poetry in Translation. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kang, Shin T. 1973. Sumerian Economic Texts from the Umma Archive. Sumerian and Akkadian Cuneiform Texts in the Collection of the World Heritage Museum of the University of Illinois II. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Keith, Kathryn. 1998. Spindle Whorls, Gender, and Ethnicity at Late Chalcolithic Hacinebi Tepe. Journal of Field Archaeology 25.4: 497–515. Kimbrough, Keith, C.K. 2006. Spindle Whorls, Ethnoarchaeology, and the Study of

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Textile Production in Third Millennium BCE Northern Mesopotamia: A Methodological Approach. Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University. McCorriston, Joy. 1997. The Fiber Revolution: Textile Extensification. Current Anthropology 38.4: 527–549. Maekawa, Kazuya. 1980. Female Weavers and Their Children. Acta Sumerologica 2: 81–125. Maekawa, Kazuya. 1987. Collective Labor Service in Girsu-Lagash: The Pre-Sargonic and Ur III Periods. In Labor in the Ancient Near East, ed. Marvin A. Powell, 49–72. New Haven: American Oriental Society. Miller, Naomi F. 2000. Plant Forms in Jewellery from the Royal Cemetery at Ur. Iraq 62: 149–155. Miller, Naomi F. 2013. Symbols of Fertility and Abundance in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, Iraq. American Journal of Archaeology 117: 127–133. Miller, Naomi F., Philip Jones, and Holly Pittman. 2015. Sign and Image: Representations of Plants on the Warka Vase of Early Mesopotamia. Origini 39 (Preistoria e protostoria delle civiltà antiche): 53–73. Moorey, Peter R.S. 1977. What Do We know About the People Buried in the Royal Cemetery? Expedition 20.1: 24–40. Nuttall, N. 1993. Oldest Stitch in Time. The Times, 13 July, 1993. O Ecotextiles, n.d. 2015, 1, 2. https://oecotextiles.wordpress.com/?s=linen. Oppenheim, A. Leo. 1949. The Golden Garments of the Gods. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 8.3: 172–193. Pittman, Holly. 1998. Cylinder Seals. In Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur, ed. Richard L. Zettler and Lee Horne, pp. 75–84. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Pollock, Susan. 1985. Chronology of the Royal Cemetery of Ur. Iraq 47: 129–158. Pollock, Susan. 1991. Of Priestesses, Princes and Poor Relations: The Dead in the Royal Cemetery at Ur. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 1.2: 171–189. Postgate, J. Nicholas. 1987. Notes on Fruit in the Cuneiform Sources. Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture 3: 115–144. Postgate, J. Nicholas. 1992. Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History. London: Routledge. Prentice, Rosemary J. 2010. The Exchange of Goods and Services in Pre-Sargonic Lagash. Munster: Ugarit-Verlag. Potts, Daniel T. and Wendy J. Reade. 1993. New Evidence for Third Millennium Linen from Umm al-Qaiwain, UAE. Paléorient 9.22: 99–106. Quillien, Louise. 2014. Flax and Linen in the First Millennium Babylonia BC: The



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10 Assyrian Spaces: Surface and Wall as Constitutive Features in Neo-Assyrian Narrative Reliefs 1

Marian H. Feldman Keywords: Ashurbanipal; Assyria; narrative; Nineveh; North Palace; orthostat; perspective; relief; space; spatiality

INTRODUCTION

D

iscussions of space in Neo-Assyrian art have tended to focus on whether and how three-dimensional “real” space has been rendered in the two-dimensional format of low-relief carved orthostats.2 This is, however, only one way in which to think about space and spatiality in NeoAssyrian art. Indeed, we should not think in terms of just one type of space (typically understood as “real” perceived space); rather, considered as both a term and a concept, there are many multiplicities of spaces. Space is not just something that exists “out there” (as if glimpsed through a window) that needs to be represented “in here” (on a two-dimensional surface) by means of representational modes. Space is also an affective presence, operating on the human body’s senses (e.g., Soja 1996; Pallasmaa 2012). It is the affective nature of space that this chapter specifically explores, as generated both through representational elements (compositional devices deployed within the scenes of Neo-Assyrian reliefs) and through material presence (the stone orthostats themselves).3 In particular, I argue that the illusionistic rendering of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface, such that the surface appears to be transparent or vanish, was never a primary goal of Assyrian artists and was in fact antithetical to their aims. Instead, I propose that the integrity of the surface, and therefore of the walls

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and physical reality of the royal palace, both literally and metaphorically underlay Neo-Assyrian relief carving, so that the awe and wonder of the palace always remained present for the beholder. Considerations of space in Neo-Assyrian reliefs have tended to proceed within the paradigm of what can be termed “perspectivism”—the systemic scholarly internalization of Renaissance one-point perspective as the “true” method of accurately (that is, illusionistically) rendering real, outside space on a two-dimensional surface (Elkins 1994: 11; also Russell 1991: 191). In addition, studies of spatial rendering typically assume a developmental sequence that progresses either toward or away from a “better” (more illusionistically convincing) rendering of space. In contrast, this contribution draws on the significantly expanded understanding of spatiality (beyond that of rendering “real” space) that has developed in the scholarship of the past two decades. It considers the meaningful and significant use of space within the representational depictions on the Neo-Assyrian orthostat reliefs (primarily those of Ashurbanipal), as well as how the orthostats themselves, the stone slabs bearing these representational depictions, relate to their architectural spaces of experience. The article, thus, also departs from teleological narratives of progress toward a better ability to render real space, in order to consider space—in its multiple manifestations—as itself a powerful and active contributor to meaning and affect. Such thinking about spatiality in Neo-Assyrian art is not, in fact, entirely new—strains have existed throughout scholarship on the subject, as will be discussed below—yet this expanded and enriched understanding of space(s) remains underemphasized and, too often, undervalued.

THE DEPICTION OF SPACE IN ASSYRIAN RELIEFS Studies of space in Assyrian art have developed out of larger evolutionary narratives in art historical scholarship and have typically sought to construct a single trajectory along which Assyrian artists gradually develop increasingly illusionistic techniques for capturing the visual perception of three-dimensional space.4 This trajectory is punctuated by those kings from whose reigns especially representative monuments survive, so that each such reign is associated with a new step toward depicting “real” space (Reade 1979b: 52). Thus, Groenewegen-Frankfort (1987 [1951]: 174), one of the most influential scholars to have explored space in ancient Mesopotamian



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representation, sees a progressive move forward in the shift to depicting figures in true profile during the reign of Shalmaneser III (858–824 BCE), a feature not evident in the representations of his predecessor Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BCE). Sennacherib’s reign (704–681 BCE) has been hailed as the apogee of experimentation in the rendering of “real” space, with a regression of sorts, sometimes understood as a rejection of Sennacherib’s innovations, occurring during the reign of Ashurbanipal (668–630/627 BCE; see, e.g., Groenewegen-Frankfort 1987 [1951]: 178). Such narratives, however, consider almost exclusively the illusionistic depiction of depth (understood as recession within a coherent, unified “scene”), assumed to be the primary or even only reason for rendering spatial relationships (e.g., GroenewegenFrankfort 1987 [1951]: 177; Frankfort 1996 [1954]: 176).5 Because the reliefs from Ashurbanipal’s reign complicate this narrative, I have chosen to focus on them in this article, though I conclude with a brief discussion of Sennacherib’s reliefs in order to argue for the applicability of my conclusions for the entire Neo-Assyrian orthostat relief tradition. First, however, I briefly sketch the outlines of the dominant narrative, also noting some of the divergent opinions expressed in earlier scholarship. Starting with the earliest preserved carved wall reliefs of the ninthcentury king Ashurnasirpal II in the Northwest Palace at Nimrud, and through to the reliefs of Tiglath-Pileser III (744–727 BCE), also at Nimrud, and those of Sargon II (721–705 BCE) at Khorsabad, the feature most often identified as constraining the illusionistic qualities of spatial rendering is the horizontal division of the orthostat slabs into two registers, separated by a band of inscribed text (Fig. 10.1). Because most of the figures depicted on the orthostat reliefs stand on the same groundline and typically stand the full height of the register, scholars have regarded the register as a compositional device impinging on the illusionistic depiction of space: “The artist sees this register not as a window through which to view an approximation of three-dimensional space, but rather as a field to be filled.…the problem with these images is that they are spatially incoherent” (Russell 1991: 192–93). Nonetheless, even within this ninth and eighth century BCE sequence, scholars have identified small steps toward illusionistic rendering from one reign to the next, such as Groenewegen-Frankfort’s opinion on the use of the true profile in Shalmaneser III’s reign cited above (1987 [1951]: 174).6 Shalmaneser III, however, did not leave behind carved relief orthostats;7 it

10.1 Drawing of Relief Orthostat from Throneroom B, Northwest Palace, Nimrud (After Meuszynski 1981: pl. 2)

10.2 Relief from Reign of Tiglath-Pileser III, Showing the Inhabitants and Their Possessions Leaving a Captured City. 99 cm h, 290 cm w. 1849,0502.6+ 1848,1104.5. British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum

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is not until the mid-eighth century reign of Tiglath-Pileser III that the next large group of carved orthostats appears. Although Tiglath-Pileser III’s reliefs “still” divide the orthostat into two horizontal registers, the central band containing a cuneiform inscription shrinks in height, while the upper and lower figural registers grow. These slightly taller registers occasionally accommodate a more open field with smaller figures arranged throughout, instead of anchored to the register’s groundline, as in a procession of defeated enemies from a conquered Babylonian city or the sloping progression of a flock of animals (Fig. 10.2) (Groenewegen-Frankfort 1987 [1951]: 175).8 In addition, figures and elements now cut across two different orthostats, concealing the underlying vertical edge of the stone slabs (Reade 1979b: 73; Moortgat 1969: 144). While several of the scenes in Ashurnasirpal II’s throneroom already spanned two or more orthostats, figures and elements depicted on those reliefs remained on one side or the other of the orthostat’s edge (Reade 1979b: 62). Opinions diverge regarding the degree of achievement in spatial rendering for Tiglath-Pileser III’s reliefs. For Russell (1991: 197) “the perspective of Tiglath-pileser’s reliefs still isn’t completely convincing,” while Anton Moortgat (1969: 144) sees “a radical freedom of movement…within the structure of the picture,” which he attributes to the desire to create a more historically accurate image. Writing in 1954, Henri Frankfort (1996 [1954]: 168) identifies “one innovation which was to have great consequences. In some reliefs the surface exceeds the height of a single figure considerably and this compels the designer to consider the disposition of his figures more carefully…there will be a tendency to increase the verisimilitude of the representations by rendering more elaborately the interrelations of the figures in space.” The next major corpus of Neo-Assyrian reliefs extant was recovered from Sargon II’s new palace at Khorsabad. Although these reliefs have been seen to “regress” from those of Tiglath-Pileser III’s, returning to narrower register bands that maintain a tight adherence to the register’s groundline, two sets of reliefs from Sargon’s palace have been singled out and heralded as significant progress forward in the pursuit of depicting “real” space. One relief series shows a hunting scene in a forest. While the figures all stand on the ground line of the orthostat’s lower register, they differ in height as do the surrounding trees, suggesting to Moortgat (1969: 150) a sense of recession in space with shorter elements meant to indicate greater depth in



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the pictorial plane.9 The other relief series renders the transport of wooden logs across a seascape.10 A new compositional device, in which the orthostat slab is no longer divided into horizontal registers but rather covered with a single scene from bottom to top filled with small figures, has been praised as innovative for conveying deep space—that is, a recession back into space—thereby more accurately representing “real” space. Russell (1991: 202) lauds the Khorsabad seascape scene: “this was the most consistent and most convincing representation of deep space yet to appear in an Assyrian palace.” Similarly, Moortgat (1969: 150) writes: “And although too the true vanishing line of perspective was still far from being found, yet the pictorial surface at Dur-Sharrukin [Khorsabad] is no longer an absolute aesthetic space with laws of its own, but is itself a substitute for real threedimensional space, a copy.” While the seascape reliefs contrast strikingly with the other reliefs in the palace at Khorsabad, they appear closely aligned in their compositional and thematic aspects with the reliefs of Sargon’s successor, Sennacherib, in the Southwest Palace at his new royal capital at Nineveh. Sennacherib’s reliefs consistently employ the unified orthostat device, with small-scale figures spread over a patterned surface to provide the sense of a high vantage point (Fig. 10.3).11 Likewise, as Julian Reade (1979b: 94) explains, “the vertical divisions between orthostats no longer have any significant effect on the arrangement of the compositions.” One of the compositional devices seen as particularly innovative for the reign is the so-called horizon line, usually in the form of a rolling hill set high up on the orthostat, a device I return to at the end of this chapter (Frankfort 1996 [1954]: 176; Russell 1991: 203). The overall effect of Sennacherib’s reliefs has been judged to render “movement through both time and space…united in one coherent composition” (Reade 1979b: 94). If the scholarly narrative of progress toward greater perspectival competency seems so far to have hung together, the reliefs of Ashurbanipal, Sennacherib’s grandson and the last Neo-Assyrian ruler to produce significant wall reliefs, serve to confound this narrative. Ashurbanipal reigned first from Sennacherib’s Southwest Palace at Nineveh, where he erected a series of his own reliefs.12 These are generally placed relatively early in his reign and have been seen as continuing many of the pictorial devices established by Sennacherib, particularly the complex three-slab relief devoted to the Battle of Til Tuba in Elam. The lion hunt reliefs found in Room C of

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10.3 Drawing of Relief from Reign of Sennacherib, Showing “Bird’s Eye” View of Battle in a Mountainous Landscape. Slab 13, Throneroom I (B), Southwest Palace, Nineveh (Barnett et al. 1998: pl. 36; Layard 1849: pl. 70). Or.Dr.IV.6. British Museum, London. After Layard 1849: pl. 70. Special Collections, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University



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the North Palace at Nineveh, built later in Ashurbanipal’s reign, serve as the culmination of the teleology, the agonized bodies of the dying lions strewn across the empty space of the entire orthostat (Fig. 10.4). Yet, Ashurbanipal’s reliefs have also been viewed as a return to earlier (“conservative”) modes of representation, particularly in the use of multiple registers to bisect the orthostat surface (Nagel 1967: 48).13 Even the Room C lion hunts subvert the representational illusion of an open expansive field because of the royal chariots set firmly on the groundline at the bottom of the orthostats and the problematic scalar relationship between the scene of the actual hunt and that of the gathering spectators on a hill. In sum, the scholarly discussion of spatial rendering in Neo-Assyrian reliefs has focused almost exclusively on the accuracy or legibility (by modern scholars) of their depiction of receding depth on the surface of the orthostat slab. The degree to which these depictions have been considered convincing varies quite significantly from scholar to scholar; yet, all concentrate on assessing this as one of the—if not the—most significant aspects of the reliefs. In these discussions, depictions of space are measured against a notion of perceived “real” outside space. Yet at the same time, responding to what the reliefs themselves present, scholars have also always evinced an awareness of, at least intuitively if not explicitly, alternate currents that push against this narrative and cut across the grain of the teleological unfolding of artistic will (Riegl’s Kunstwollen) toward a culmination in onepoint perspective. These alternate currents emerge in notions such as dramatic space, significant voids, and the primacy of the surface, explored in the following section.

SIGNIFICANT VOIDS & THE PRIMACY OF THE SURFACE Although rarely followed to their logical conclusion because of the paradigm of perspectivism, alternate senses of spatial representation contrary to illusionistic perspective have been identified by earlier scholars and offer tantalizing insights into the affective aspects of space in Assyrian art. Groenewegen-Frankfort was perhaps one of the most perceptive of these scholars. She (1987 [1951]: 1) begins her influential 1951 discussion of space and time in Near Eastern art by asserting that “the problem of space in pictorial art is a problem of relation. It arises wherever points, lines, or surfaces are intentionally related to each other: the interval which separates

10.4 Relief from Reign of Ashurbanipal Depicting Lion Hunt. Slabs 13–15, Room C, North Palace, Nineveh (Barnett 1976: pls VIII, IX). BM 1856,0909.16 (124866–124868). British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum

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them is then a significant void.” She (1987 [1951]: 1) continues by contrasting those voids that suggest depth, and thus “real” space, from those of geometric design, which she calls a “field” of “rhythm, balance, or proportion” that “represents a spatial world unlike our own.” For Groenewegen-Frankfort, space is intimately linked to the movement of related figures within a pictorial space. These spaces, depicted on two-dimensional surfaces, derive their sense of either realism or decorativeness from the corporeality of bodies depicted within them (Groenewegen-Frankfort 1987 [1951]: 3). While Groenewegen-Frankfort acutely perceives multiple senses of space in Assyrian art—for example, “real” and “decorative”—ultimately, “a true functional rendering of figures in their setting means that the fluidity of viewpoint must be reduced to the pin-point precision of scientific perspective” (Groenewegen-Frankfort 1987 [1951]: 5), something seen by these scholars as not achieved by the Assyrians. Despite writing firmly within the perspectivist paradigm, Groenewegen-Frankfort offers significant insights regarding the rendering of space in Neo-Assyrian reliefs. In describing the rejection of topographic scenes and their attempt at illusionistic recession during the reign of Ashurbanipal, for example, she notes that the artists of this king’s reign “also were great innovators in the matter of rendering space but not recession: dramatic space was what they aimed at” (Groenewegen-Frankfort 1987 [1951]: 179). In supporting this claim, Groenewegen-Frankfort focuses almost exclusively on hunting scenes and emphasizes scenic coherence even in the absence of topographic detail. Describing one such scene from a series of lion hunts from Room S′ of the North Palace at Nineveh, she writes (1987 [1951]: 181): “a crouching lion and the terrified horse and his rider are separated by the most dramatic of ‘significant voids’ ever achieved in Near Eastern art” (Fig. 10.5). While Groenewegen-Frankfort does not pursue this line of thought much further, this concept of “dramatic significant voids” opens up alternative ways of thinking about space and spatial rendering in Assyrian reliefs that I consider further in the discussion below. Space in this sense—as dramatic—can be emotive and affective rather than simply illusionistic. In addition to drawing upon Groenewegen-Frankfort’s 1951 notion of “dramatic significant voids,” I also turn to an even earlier piece of scholarship addressing the representation of space in Near Eastern art: an article by an early twentieth-century art historian, Valentin Müller, published in 1928–29. Müller (1928–29: 199) immediately reveals his perspectivist

10.5 Relief from Reign of Ashurbanipal Depicting Lion Hunt. Room S′, North Palace, Nineveh. BM 124886; 1856,0909.51. British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum

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intellectual milieu, asserting the lack of scientific perspective in Near Eastern art (that is, the depiction of a subject from a particular point of view).14 He continues, however, by arguing that the primary principle underlying the rendering of space in the ancient Near East is a kind of conservation of the surface (die Bewahrung der Fläche)—a primacy of the surface.15 For Müller, the conservation of the surface is most evident in the lack of depth or recession depicted in the picture plane—the antithesis of Renaissance perspective, which was theorized by scholars such as Alberti as a transparent plane (or window) through which the viewer could gaze upon a world beyond.16 He notes, for instance, that the impression of the strength of the wall would have been undermined if the reliefs had created the illusion of depth along the lower parts of the walls where the orthostats were placed (Müller 1928–29: 206). In other words, in contrast to typically accepted perspectival rendering, in which the surface upon which the image is depicted seems to disappear and become transparent, the surface for NeoAssyrian art remains not only visibly present, but an active force within the depiction itself—a notion not dissimilar to Groenewegen-Frankfort’s “significant voids.” When these observations are de-coupled from evaluative judgments measured against a benchmark of illusionistic spatial recession (that is, released from perspectivism), they can provide an effective means for assessing the affective properties of Neo-Assyrian reliefs and can be productively paired with a consideration of the orthostat as a material entity in its own right.

THE SYMBOLIC VALUE OF THE ORTHOSTAT Moortgat (1969: 135) noted in his discussion of Neo-Assyrian reliefs that the orthostat technique provided “the format and sequence of these wall slabs.” While Moortgat specifically referenced reliefs from the earlier part of the Neo-Assyrian period, the ninth century, his observation echoes Müller’s characterization of Near Eastern art as bound to the preservation of the surface. Nonetheless, there continues to be a general lack of scholarly attention paid to the material aspects of the stone orthostat in preference for consideration of the representational and iconographic aspects of what was depicted upon the orthostats (Harmanşah 2007: 70, 2013: 160–61). These stone slabs served as a revetment for the lower courses of mudbricks constituting the palace walls, protecting them from weathering and use

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damage (Harmanşah 2007: 73, 2013: 157–58). Harmanşah (2007: 88, 2013: 161) in fact argues that the construction materials and techniques contributed as much to the symbolic resonance of the orthostats as did the pictorial representation carved upon them; the Neo-Assyrian orthostats, derived from centuries of tradition in the areas to the west of the Assyrian Empire— the northern Levant and southeastern Turkey—physically embodied skilled technical knowledge and long-distance knowledge (Harmanşah 2013: 168– 83). “The configuration of the relief representations on upright stones, with a complex mixture of historical commemorations, ritual ceremonies and state spectacles that continuously refer to a mytho-poetical past, constituted building narratives in the social space and effectively shaped the collective imagination” (Harmanşah 2007: 90). Before continuing along this line of argument, it is worth considering how the presence of paint, both on the orthostats themselves and above them on the plastered mudbrick walls, might have affected the visual and physical appreciation of the stone slabs by visitors in the Neo-Assyrian palaces. A limited palette of pigments, generally black, white, red, yellow/ brown, and blue (occasionally green), was used to highlight features of the reliefs (Reade 1979a: 18; Verri et al. 2009; Guralnick 2011: 82; Thavapalan et al. 2016). To date, no evidence for paint on the background areas has been discovered (Reade 1979a: 18; Sou 2015), though it cannot be conclusively ruled out.17 If indeed the backgrounds were unpainted, then significant expanses of the stone itself would have remained visible, especially in those compositions that included large areas of undecorated background around the figures. Paint applied directly on plaster appears to have commonly ornamented the walls above the orthostats and also the ceilings (Reade 1979a: 19; Tomabechi 1986; Nunn 1988: 123–28; Albenda 2005). The bestpreserved examples of painted upper walls come from Ashurnasirpal II’s ninth-century BCE Northwest Palace at Nimrud (Tomabechi 1986; Albenda 2005: 10–14).18 These include both ornamental designs, such as vegetal and animal motifs, and what appear to be parts of historical narratives of which only fragments of a rushing chariot and an Assyrian official from Throneroom B survive (Tomabechi 1986). Likewise, Sargon’s palace at Khorsabad boasted painted walls above the carved orthostats, but only small fragments were preserved (Nunn 1988: 130–31). Because of the violence of the sack of Nineveh in 612 BCE, the upper parts of the palace walls at the site rarely survived to any extent, and many of the orthostats themselves were extremely



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damaged along their upper parts. Nonetheless, Hormuzd Rassam, excavating Ashurbanipal’s North Palace in the nineteenth century CE, noted the presence of painting, including “hunting or war scenes” above some of the better-preserved reliefs (cited in Nunn 1988: 132–33). Thus, while the evidence remains incomplete, it appears that the orthostats themselves would have been highlighted by pigments, but with background spaces remaining unpainted as exposed stone. The walls above would have contrasted with the orthostats in both texture, being completely flat rather than rendered in relief, and totality of coloration (including background), although the background of the wall paintings was often simply the white of the prepared plaster. Such a juxtaposition would have had the effect of highlighting the underlying stone surface of the orthostats, calling attention to it and reinforcing its latent symbolic associations. This highlighting of the orthostats seems to be directed at their role in cladding the walls as a whole—that is, wrapping around all four sides of a room— rather than as individual cut stone slabs. This interest in the orthostats as wrapping the walls of the palace rooms is evident in, first, the varying widths of orthostat slabs in contrast to a consistent height within any one room, and second, from the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III on, the disregard for the vertical edges of reliefs with figures spanning two slabs. The orthostats thus formed a kind of internal protective skin or envelope, emphasizing the structural space of each room. With Harmanşah’s analysis of the technical and symbolic value of orthostat slabs, perhaps reinforced by the painted highlights, we circle back to the observations by Müller and Moortgat regarding the primacy of the surface underlying the representative elements. At the same time, Harmanşah’s emphasis on the symbolic, metaphorical, and material weightiness of the orthostat tradition offers an explanation for this primacy, an explanation that does not require an evaluation or assessment of the Neo-Assyrians’ competency to produce “naturalistic” depictions of space (understood as illusionistic rendering of recession and depth on a two-dimensional surface). Rather, the physical presence of the royal palace was made materially manifest through the stone orthostat slabs that substantiated the walls. Moreover, the orthostat cladding carried added symbolic weight in Mesopotamia due to the durability and permanence of the stone. Once the primacy of the stone surface is acknowledged, we can assess the rendering of space on the reliefs in a similar way; their representational images had always to defer

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to the structural primacy of the wall and, as such, the rendering of space in these images served purposes other than that of illusionistic depiction, instead tapping into the affective features of the experience of space.

ASHURBANIPAL’S ORTHOSTATS A particularly productive set of reliefs with which to pursue the above considerations is that of Ashurbanipal’s from the North Palace, because these reliefs have traditionally been seen as “returning” or “regressing” to earlier, less illusionistically accurate renderings of space/spatial recession. Such regression is noted especially in the consistent, if not exclusive, use of registers forming horizontal bands across the orthostats, which, however, no longer occur in association with a dividing band of cuneiform inscription. Looking over the entire corpus of preserved reliefs from the North Palace, as published by Barnett (1976), one is struck by not only the widespread use of registers, but also the variety of ways in which the registers are used in conjunction with blank spaces (dramatic, significant voids) and other material properties of the orthostat itself, in particular its height. Diverse compositional strategies involving registers and varying heights of orthostats established both representational and architectural spatial experiences of an emotive/affective (rather than illusionistic) nature. There are difficulties in trying to assess the precise roles that registers and height play in the North Palace reliefs because of the poor preservation of many of the stone slabs. However, enough evidence remains to provide a general sense of these two features. While much has been written about Ashurbanipal’s North Palace reliefs, especially the lion hunt scenes from Rooms C, S, and S1, here, I concentrate on reliefs that have received less attention in the scholarly literature.

Registers as Compositional Strategy in the North Palace Reliefs Early scholars such as Frankfort (1996 [1954]: 178) observed already that, although Ashurbanipal’s North Palace reliefs revisit the use of registers as the dominant compositional device, they do so in a new way that directly relates compositional elements from one register to those of the other registers. 19 This characteristic appears to have been aided, or perhaps even inspired, by the new formulation of the orthostat into multiple roughly equal-sized friezes without any intervening band of carved inscription.

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10.6 Relief from Reign of Ashurbanipal Depicting Campaign Against Arabs. Slab 11, Room L, North Palace, Nineveh. BM 124926; 1856,0909.31-32. British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum

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One especially trenchant example of the affective deployment of registers in the North Palace reliefs is the series depicting campaigns against Arabs in Room L (Fig. 10.6). The depicted action of Arabs on galloping camels being pursued by Assyrian cavalry takes place in three equally sized registers, with the individual figures filling the entire height of the register, effectively precluding any illusion of recession in space (Barnett 1976: pl. XXXIII). The three registers interact with one another by means of the repeated motifs of camels and horses: “the main motifs are spaced diagonally across the three strips and suggest the forward urge of the pursuit: the galloping camel in the upper right-hand corner recurs a little more towards the left in the middle strip and yet farther towards the left in the lowest” (Frankfort 1996 [1954]: 179). The diagonal movement of the camel, from upper right to lower left, is countered by the opposite movement of Assyrian solders on galloping horses that move across the bottom register from the right, up to the left side of the middle register and, while now no longer

10.7 Drawing of Relief from Reign of Ashurbanipal Showing Lion Hunt Along Banks of a River. Slabs 4-3, Room S, North Palace, Nineveh. Or.Dr.V.22 (by William Boutcher); 2007,6024.472. British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum



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preserved, one can imagine a third rider farther to the left in the upper register. The interrelationship of the three registers, which are separated by relatively wide register lines, is further indicated through the numerous elements that cross these lines, such as the drawn bow of an Arab on the back of a camel in the bottom register or the end of the spear of an Assyrian rider in the middle register. The series is now missing at least two full orthostats, but we may reconstruct an extended tableau in which the three registers pulse with a leftward movement of Assyrian cavalry chasing Arabs on camels, with a concomitant undulation of galloping horses and camels, diagonally crisscrossing the three registers.20 A similar kind of rhythm is established in the lower three registers of the slabs from Room H, which show Elamite soldiers on the march (Barnett 1976: pl. XXIII), and in the hunting reliefs from Rooms S and S1 (Barnett 1976: pls. LII, LVII). The interrelated nature of the registers finds its fullest expression in those reliefs that, on the one hand, create a unified topographic scene over the entire extent of the orthostat while, on the other hand, retaining the underlying structure of three horizontal registers. Such orthostats can be seen, for example, in Slabs 5–3 of Room S (Fig. 10.7) (Barnett 1976: pl. LIV).21 The three slabs show a lion hunt taking place along the banks of a river, which runs wide and straight through the middle section of the orthostat, asserting itself as the middle register. Above and below the river run registers depicting trees and Assyrian soldiers. A lion, pursued by a hunting dog, is the sole element to cross the register line, jumping from the uppermost register (or river bank) into the middle register (or river). These slabs are compositionally reminiscent of reliefs from Court XIX of the Southwest Palace, which have also been attributed to Ashurbanipal (Barnett et al. 1998: 80, 84 n. 1, pls. 187 and 188). The Court XIX reliefs show military campaigns in Babylonia, dividing the orthostats into three equal friezes, of which the central one depicts a river full of aquatic life, and, on at least two slabs (20 and 21), also Assyrian soldiers crossing the river on inflated animal skins. The often-discussed Battle of Til Tuba relief series from Room XXXIII of the Southwest Palace also evinces a creative use of registers and their interrelatedness (Barnett et al. 1998: pl. 286). Due to the complexity of this relief series, its analysis would require more space than is available here; nonetheless, the Til Tuba reliefs further add to the corpus of diverse compositional effects for which registers were employed in Ashurbanipal’s reliefs.

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In the above reliefs, then, the “return” to a system of registers appears to be less a rejection of illusionistic spatial rendering and more a manipulation of spatial relations on an insistently two-dimensional surface for expressive/emotive purposes. The varying ways in which registers are employed signals the intended affectiveness of their use.

Orthostat Height and Architectural Experience in the North Palace The height of the orthostats used in the North Palace also varies considerably from room to room, establishing a formal diversity akin to that of the compositional use of registers.22 I would suggest that, just as the registers generated emotive effects, so too did the orthostats’ height. A few rooms preserve quite tall slabs, such as Room H, Slabs 8, 9, and 10(?) (Barnett 1976: pl. XXIII). Slab 8, depicting a well-illustrated aqueduct and garden scene in its upper part and Elamites mustering for battle in three registers in the lower part, survives to 208 cm in height (82 inches) and is possibly not complete. Likewise, in Room M—the probable throneroom—in reliefs showing the defeat of Ashurbanipal’s brother and ruler of Babylonia, Shamash-shumukin, at least one slab, Slab 13, survives to 213 cm (84 inches) in height (Barnett 1976: pl. XXXV). This also is probably not the original height, which may have been as much as 40 cm (16 inches) taller, if we take the main scene divider between the upper and lower parts to have divided the slab into roughly equal parts. Even without the hypothetical added height, the orthostat slabs in the throneroom would have risen over seven feet tall, certainly well over the heads of the viewers. Similarly tall orthostats were recovered from Room F (“The Susiana Room”; Barnett 1976: pls. XVI–XIX), nine of which survive intact, measuring around 228 cm in height (90 inches; about seven and a half feet). In contrast, in corridors and corridor-like rooms— Room A (“Ascending Passage A”), Room R (“Ascending Passage R”), Room C (with lion hunt scenes), and Room E (fragments of tame lions with musicians in a garden)—where the entire height of the slab tends to be used with minimal if any registers, the slabs are shorter, ranging from 152 cm to 168 cm in height (60–66 inches, or approximately five feet tall). Shorter orthostats also exist in some of the rooms of the reception suites. For example, the scenes of campaigns against Arabs from Room L reach only 137 cm (54 inches) and 142 cm (56 inches) for Slab 9 and Slab 12 respectively (Barnett 1976: pls. XXXII–XXXIII). Room L was the secondary retiring room of the standard throneroom suite, situated between the



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throneroom (Room M) and the inner courtyard (J) (Kertai 2015: 173–75). Given the discussion above regarding the rhythmic patterning of the cavalry and camels in the Arab battle scene, one wonders if the shorter orthostats were purposely chosen to accentuate the horizontal thrust of the movement. Even if the upper walls of the rooms were painted, as we know from elsewhere, the contrast between the towering orthostats of Throneroom M with the lower, horizontally oriented orthostats in the adjacent Room L would have been striking. This contrast contributes to the overall experience of each room, imbuing the different battle scenes with contrasting sensorial effects. The Throneroom M reliefs depict complex scenes of campaigns in Babylonia and Egypt (Barnett 1976: pls. XXXVI and D). In contrast to the almost streamlined, horizontal thrust of the Arab campaigns, the tall orthostats in Room M are divided into two main scenes, each of which is subsequently divided into smaller registers. Within the main scenes, the subsidiary registers vary in height: three equal registers divide some orthostats, while elsewhere an important motif (such as the king in his chariot or a besieged city) occupies a double-high register with a third register below. In the lower half of one set of orthostats, there are battle and deportation scenes set against patterned hilly backgrounds with high horizon lines, similar to those seen in Sennacherib’s reliefs of the Southwest Palace (Barnett 1976: pl. XXXIV). Although these reliefs are quite poorly preserved, with none surviving to original height, the overall effect produced by the smaller registers filled with figures of varying sizes is that of busyness, even a hint of chaos—a plethora of details and activity surrounding the actual physical being of the enthroned king. In comparison, the movement and dynamism of the Arab campaigns in Room L may be more conducive to a space where people are primarily passing through to get to the throne room. In a similar way, corridor spaces may have used shorter orthostats to quicken the sense of movement along the passage.23

Dramatic Space in the North Palace Orthostats In conjunction with a reconsideration of the effects of the scale of the North Palace orthostats, we might return to Groenewegen-Frankfort’s notion of dramatic space, which she highlights as an achievement of Ashurbanipal’s relief carvers. She (1987 [1951]: 181) identifies such spaces primarily in the lion hunt reliefs, such as the charged space between a horse and a

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10.8 Relief from Reign of Ashurbanipal with King in His Chariot. Slab 13, Room M, North Palace, Nineveh. BM 124946; 1856,0909.34. British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum

crouching lion from the central register of an orthostat from Room S′, cited above (Barnett 1976: pl. LVII). In the Room M reliefs we see somewhat different yet equally effective types of dramatic spaces and significant voids, used to encircle and thereby highlight the figure of Ashurbanipal in his chariot (Fig. 10.8). The large harnessed horses standing at attention create



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empty spaces below and above them, while empty spaces cosset the area surrounding the king’s sunshade and back. While the king’s face could have been emphasized by a similar empty space, instead a cuneiform inscription, neatly carved into the relief (in contrast to the raised relief of the rest of the carving) and encased in an incised box, fills this role.24 This compositional device of creating busyness of activity while the king is larger and set apart from that activity recurs in several of the other relief series in the North Palace (e.g., Rooms F, S1, and V1/T1[?]; Barnett 1976: pls. XVI–XXI, LXVII, LXVIII–LXIX, B, and D), as well as in Slabs 4–6 of Ashurbanipal’s Elamite campaigns from Room XXXIII of the Southwest Palace (but not the famous Battle of Til Tuba relief series; Barnett et al. 1998: pl. 286). The “halo” of empty or distinctive space around the king serves to elevate him on an emotive level above and outside the chaos of the rest of the reliefs, effectively monumentalizing him. The dramatic spaces and significant voids in Ashurbanipal’s North Palace reliefs point to a playing with, even manipulation of, representational space as an emotional and affective element, rather than as an illusionistic device. They work hand-in-hand with other spatial manipulations, such as the varying heights of the orthostats from room to room and the patterned compositional structures seen, for example, in the reliefs depicting the Arab campaigns. Together, these features of the North Palace reliefs reinforced the physicality and presence of the stone slabs demarcating the space of any given room and called attention to the material solidity of the palace walls.

CONCLUSION While I have concentrated in this chapter on reliefs from one NeoAssyrian king’s reign—Ashurbanipal—that do not fit well within the teleological narrative of illusionistic progression, even within the repertoire of Sennacherib’s purportedly most illusionistically innovative palace reliefs, we find “perspectives” (or perhaps in less freighted terms, “compositional devices for rendering space”) that appear to actively counter illusionistic rendering of “real” space. In conclusion, then, I would like to suggest that these select examples from Sennacherib’s reliefs indicate that the characteristics of surface primacy, dramatic voids, and materiality are not limited to Ashurbanipal’s reign, but rather run throughout the three centuries of Neo-Assyrian relief production.

10.9 Drawing of Relief from Reign of Sennacherib Showing Campaign Through Mountains. Slabs 8–9, Room XXXVIII, Southwest Palace, Nineveh (Barnett et al. 1998: pl. 357). Or.Dr.I.42; BM 2007,6024.44. British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum

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One series from Room XXXVIII of the Southwest Palace (Fig. 10.9) mirrors the high “horizon” line of the undulating mountainous terrain with a similarly undulating mountainous “horizon” line oriented downward on the bottom edge of the orthostats (Barnett et al. 1998: pl. 353). Russell (1991: 209) has interpreted this compositional device as effectively conveying a subject-centered perspective in relation to the beholder: From the vantage point of the viewer, standing outside looking in, this is not a very convincing perspective, but it is a remarkably accurate approximation of the view experienced by the figure of the king in the composition, who is marching down in the valley by the river. In other words, the perspective presented here is subject-centered, instead of being viewer-centered, the subject here being the king, and the view is the one experienced by the principal figure within the composition itself. While the idea of a subject-oriented perspective is appealing, various details of the relief counter Russell’s hypothesis. For example, small tributaries extend from the main river area at several points (Barnett et al. 1998: pls. 354, 356–59). These are flanked both above (facing upwards) and below (facing downwards) by vegetation, yet appear to have no relationship to the king or his entourage moving along the main river. The presence in these reliefs of an inverted horizon line calls into question whether we should in fact consider this device as analogous to representational horizon lines known from later European painting. “Horizon” lines in other Sennacherib reliefs also operate in non-horizontal/non-horizon-line-like ways, such as in a relief from Court VI (Fig. 10.10), where the hilly horizon line seen at the bottom right turns vertically to form an undulating vertical edge on the left side (Barnett et al. 1998: pl. 80). However, rather than read these perspectival inconsistencies as failures in illusionistic rendering of spatial recession, I suggest they served, throughout the Neo-Assyrian orthostat tradition and as much in Sennacherib’s as well as in Ashurbanipal’s reliefs, affective functions, functions that worked in tandem with—not in opposition to—the reality of the solidity of the wall on which they appear.25 These affective aspects varied in their specifics, but consideration of the dramatic spaces, significant voids, and rhythmic patterning explored above points to some of them. In Ashurbanipal’s reliefs, the manipulation of space, the blurring and playing around with the actual space of

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10.10 Drawing of Relief from Reign of Sennacherib Depicting Landscape. Slab 1, Court VI, Southwest Palace, Nineveh (Barnett et al. 1998: pl. 80; Layard 1849: pl. 81). Or.Dr. IV.43; BM 2007,6024,388. British Museum, London. After Layard 1849: pl. 81. Special Collections, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University

the orthostat surface as a hard, flat, perpendicular surface, existing in both tension and harmony with the elements carved onto it, generated an emotionally charged experience of the palatial space.26 The non-horizon-like



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terrain of Sennacherib’s reliefs suggests a similar acknowledgment of the underlying stone orthostats supporting these very depictions. The centrality of the stone orthostat itself, as the protective skin of the Neo-Assyrian palace walls, takes on a resonance and symbolism imbued by the massive physical presence of the architecture itself.27 The varying heights of the orthostats as one moved from room to room likewise emphasize their presence. The visitor to the palace was not meant to feel the walls dissolve away into an illusion of an exterior world. Rather, he or she would have been continually reminded and aware of moving through a structure—the palace—that embodied and constituted royal authority (Winter 1993). We might even read the great bull lamassu quarrying and transport scenes from Court VI of Sennacherib’s Southwest Palace—his self-proclaimed “Palace Without Rival”—as conveying through their representational imagery not just control over natural and human resources (Russell 1987), but, further, a harnessing of these resources precisely by and for the palace, metonymically signified by the guardian gate figure itself. The palace, in turn, has been characterized as a “metonym for the ruler” (Winter 1993: 36). This entity— “palace = ruler”—encompassed a complex of both cooperating and competing groups, including scholars and various courtly advisors, engaged in dynamic processes of shaping and manifesting royal authority (Collins 2014: 635; Radner 2011). We might understand the depiction of the creation of a bull lamassu in Sennacherib’s Southwest Palace orthostat reliefs as a concatenation of conflated concepts of kingship, all manifested in the physicality of the palace. The Neo-Assyrian stone orthostats themselves constituted yet another element in this constellation: the viewer, beholding the wide diversity and dynamism of the spatial renderings was, nevertheless, always aware of their material presence made possible by the institution of kingship. NOTES:

10.1 It is with great pleasure that I dedicate this article to Holly Pittman, who early in my graduate training taught me to look closely at, and to investigate all the physical properties of, Near Eastern art. I remain deeply indebted to her for this and much more. 10.2 Harmanşah (2007: 72) provides the following etymology and definition of orthostat as “an architectural term borrowed from classical Greek [ὀρθοστάτης = orthostatês] to refer to upright stone slabs in Near Eastern wall construction.” 10.3 In this chapter, I use the terms affect/affective and emotion/emotive interchangeably, although some scholarship makes a distinction between them, contrasting the collective entanglements involved in affect with the individual and psychological aspects of emotion (for discussion and references, see Hamilakis 2014: 125).

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10.4 The notion of a developmental trajectory, as part of general art historical theories of artistic progress, underlies most discussions of the depiction of “real” space in Neo-Assyrian art, although diverse opinions have been expressed on the effectiveness of the various specific modes of rendering space (Russell 1991: 192–215; Reade 1980; Reade 1979b; Groenewegen-Frankfort 1987 [1951]: 170–81; Moortgat 1969: 134–57; Frankfort 1996 [1954]: 156–94). 10.5 Scholars have identified a variety of compositional devices that are assumed to contribute to illusions of receding space, including the use of the true profile for human figures, the overlapping of figures, the stacking or dispersing of figures across the surface, and the use of horizon lines. 10.6 Reade (1979b: 70) also sees progress from the reign of Ashurnasirpal II to that of his son and successor Shalmaneser III in the bronze door bands from Balawat, which he describes as depicting “increased fluidity of time and space” through “experimentations in the unification of different compositions.” 10.7 No orthostat reliefs survive from Shalmaneser III’s reign; the identification of true profile as an innovation of his reign relies primarily on the representations depicted on bronze relief bands that ornamented a set of wooden doors from the site of Balawat. 10.8 Ashurnasirpal II’s reliefs also have smaller figures existing in the field without a foothold on the groundline; however, the more densely filled fields of Ashurnasirpal’s reliefs in contrast to more open areas of the field in Tiglath-Pileser’s reliefs has led scholars to identify Tiglath-Pileser’s open fields as a major step forward in the depiction of illusionist perspective (see, e.g., Frankfort 1996 [1954]: 169). 10.9 However, Frankfort (1996 [1954]: 174) views this set of reliefs as denying “realism,” describing the “regular alternation in the size of both the figures and the trees” as “a harmonious disposition of the design at the cost of verisimilitude; the effect resembles that of a richly figured tapestry.” 10.10 Scholars debate the nature of the water depicted, whether referring to the Mediterranean or some other sea, or to a river. I will use the conventional designation as a “seascape” for ease of reference in this article. 10.11 Groenewegen-Frankfort (1987 [1951]: 177) argues this device should not be considered as a form of bird’s eye or cavalier perspective due to the lack of a single fixed relation to the viewer. 10.12 For discussion of which reliefs in the Southwest Palace should be dated to Sennacherib’s reign and which to Ashurbanipal’s, see Russell (1991: 117–51). 10.13 Moortgat (1969: 157) sees this “regression” in a positive light: “they regained something of the rhythmic poetic pictorial language of the period of Ashurnasirpal.” Frankfort (1996 [1954]: 179) also regards the three-register reliefs of battles against Arabs as novel, noting how the depicted actions relate to each other across all three friezes (see below). 10.14 While Müller talks about “ancient Near Eastern art” (altorientalische Kunst), he primarily draws upon examples from the corpus of Assyrian reliefs. 10.15 Subsequent scholars also note, in different ways, the primacy of the orthostat surface. For example, with respect to Ashurnasirpal II’s reliefs, Frankfort (1996 [1954]: 157), writes, “It is clear that no attempt has been made to account for the actual disposition of these various groups and figures in space. The events are translated into the autonomous world of the reliefs, and the background is ingeniously used to indicate, in a general way, the setting of the main action.” 10.16 For an overview of art historical discussions and critiques of Renaissance perspective, see Feldman 2010: 154. 10.17 Tomabechi (1986: 48–49) argues that the backgrounds of the reliefs would have



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been painted blue, based on fragments of painted plaster from the Northwest Palace that preserve a chariot scene against a blue background. 10.18 The best-preserved wall paintings as a whole are from the Assyrian provincial capital at Til Barsip (Nunn 1988: 102–23; Albenda 2005: 27, 33–74). Wall paintings without orthostats also survive at Fort Shalmaneser and elsewhere at Nimrud (Nunn 1988: 124–28). 10.19 Note, however, that Frankfort (1996 [1954]: fig. 203), discussing reliefs found in the Southwest Palace in which there appears to be a return to the two-register orthostat format, but with a new twist in that a river scene separates the two registers in the place where a cuneiform inscription had been in earlier reliefs (= reliefs from Court XIX), attributes them to Sennacherib’s reign; these reliefs are now assigned to Ashurbanipal’s reign or even to that of his successor, Sin-shar-ishkun (Reade 1979b: 109–10; Russell 1991: 150; Barnett et al. 1998: 80, 84 n. 1). 10.20 Several other orthostats from Room L that showed battles against Arabs with Assyrian cavalry and camels are recorded in the early excavation reports but were among those lost by the French excavators in a series of accidents in 1854 (see Barnett 1976: 20–21, and for Boutcher’s drawings of the Room L reliefs, Barnett 1976: pl. XXXII). 10.21 These reliefs were also lost in the accident of 1854 and are only preserved today in Boutcher’s drawings. 10.22 See Harmanşah (2013: 166) for discussion of how orthostat slabs were cut down by early excavators. 10.23 For related ideas about the sensory experiences of moving through corridor spaces in Assyrian palaces, see Thomason 2016: 250; McMahon 2013: 175. 10.24 In similar reliefs elsewhere the cuneiform box is absent, creating a starkly empty space; for example, Slab 2, Room F of the North Palace, in a relief of the Elamite city of Hamanu (Barnett 1976: pl. XVI). 10.25 This is not to say that historical narratives, rendered with rich topographical and scenic details to enhance a sense of their historicity, were not also important aspects of the reliefs. However, the historical narratives could not dissolve the surface entirely without undermining the solidity of the palace (cf. Thomason 2016: 258). 10.26 This experience would have, of course, been part of a much broader and entangled set of sensory experiences, including portable and organic furnishings, sounds and scents, and visual encounters of different types; see, for example, Thomason 2016; Neumann 2015; McMahon 2013. 10.27 While there is evidence for the use of orthostats in non-palatial buildings, in particular, the Ninurta and Sharrat-niphi temples at Nimrud (Harmanşah 2013: 167), their use occurs primarily in the royal palaces of the three major Assyrian capitals. Within important state-sponsored temples, their symbolic weightiness may have been similar to that of the palace reliefs.

REFERENCES Albenda, Pauline. 2005. Ornamental Wall Painting in the Art of the Assyrian Empire. Leiden and Boston: Brill-Styx. Barnett, Richard D. 1976. Sculptures from the North Palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh (668–627 B.C.). London: British Museum Publications.

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Barnett, Richard D., Erika Bleibtreu, and Geoffrey Turner. 1998. Sculptures from the Southwest Palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh. 2 volumes. London: British Museum Press. Collins, Paul. 2014. Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Violence: Warfare in Neo-Assyrian Art. In Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art, ed. Brian A. Brown and Marian H. Feldman, 619–644. Berlin: De Gruyter. Elkins, James. 1994. The Poetics of Perspective. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Feldman, Marian H. 2010. Object Agency? Spatial Perspective, Social Relations, and the Stele of Hammurabi. In Agency and Identity in the Ancient Near East: New Paths Forward, ed. Sharon R. Steadman and Jennifer C. Ross, 148–165. London and Oakville, CT: Equinox. Frankfort, Henri. 1996. The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. [First published by Penguin Books, 1954.] Groenewegen-Frankfort, Henriette A. 1987. Arrest and Movement: An Essay on Space and Time in the Representational Art of the Ancient Near East. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. [First published by Faber and Faber Ltd., 1951.] Guralnick, Eleanor. 2011. Khorsabad Relief Fragment Project. Oriental Institute 2010– 2011 Annual Report, 81–85. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2011. Hamilakis, Yannis. 2014. Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Harmanşah, Ömür. 2007. Upright Stones and Building Narratives: Formation of a Shared Architectural Practice in the Ancient Near East. In Ancient Near Eastern Art in Context: Studies in Honor of Irene J. Winter by Her Students, ed. Jack Cheng and Marian H. Feldman, 69–99. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Harmanşah, Ömür. 2013. Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Kertai, David. 2015. The Architecture of Late Assyrian Royal Palaces. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Layard, Austen Henry. 1849. The Monuments of Nineveh. London: John Murray. McMahon, Augusta. 2013. Space, Sound, and Light: Toward a Sensory Experience of Ancient Monumental Architecture. American Journal of Archaeology 117: 163–179. Meuszyński, Janusz. 1981. Die Rekonstruktion der Reliefdarstellungen und ihrer Anordnung im Nordwestpalast von Kalḫu (Nimrūd). Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern. Moortgat, Anton. 1969. The Art of Ancient Mesopotamia: The Classical Art of the Near East, trans. Judith Filson. London and New York: Phaidon. [First published in



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German by M. DuMont Schauberg, Cologne, 1967.] Müller, Valentin. 1928–29. Die Raumdarstellung der altorientalischen Kunst. Archiv für Orientforschung 5: 199–206. Nagel, Wolfram. 1967. Die neuassyrischen Reliefstile unter Sanherib und Assurbanaplu. Berlin: Verlag Bruno Hessling. Neumann, Kiersten. 2015. In the Eyes of the Other: The Mythological Wall Reliefs in the Southwest Palace at Nineveh. Archaeological Review from Cambridge 30.1: 85–93. Nunn, Astrid. 1988. Die Wandmalerai und der glasierte Wandschmuck im Alten Orient. Leiden, New York, Copenhagen, and Cologne: E.J. Brill. Pallasmaa, Juhani. 2012. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Third Edition. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Radner, Karen. 2011. Royal Decision-Making: Kings, Magnates, and Scholars. In The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture, ed. Karen Radner and Eleanor Robson, 358–379. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reade, Julian E. 1979a. Assyrian Architectural Decoration: Techniques and SubjectMatter. Baghdader Mitteilungen 10: 17–45. Reade, Julian E. 1979b. Narrative Composition in Assyrian Sculpture. Baghdader Mitteilungen 10: 52–110. Reade, Julian E. 1980. Space, Scale, and Significance in Assyrian Art. Baghdader Mitteilungen 11: 71–74. Russell, John Malcolm. 1987. Bulls for the Palace and Order in the Empire: The Sculptural Program of Sennacherib’s Court VI at Nineveh. The Art Bulletin 69, no. 4: 520–539. Russell, John Malcolm. 1991. Sennacherib’s Palace Without Rival at Nineveh. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Sou, Li. 2015. Digital Recolourisation and the Effects of Light on Neo-Assyrian Reliefs. Antiquity 89, no. 348: http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/sou348 (accessed June 6, 2016). Thavapalan, Shiyanthi, Jens Stenger, and Carol Snow. 2016. Color and Meaning in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Case of Egyptian Blue. Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 106: 198–214. Thomason, Allison Karmel. 2016. The Sense-scapes of Neo-Assyrian Capital Cities: Royal Authority and Bodily Experience. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 26: 243–264.

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Tomabechi, Yoko. 1986. Wall Paintings from the Northwest Palace at Nimrud. Archiv für Orientforschung 33: 43–54. Verri, Giovanni, Paul Collins, Janet Ambers, Tracey Sweek, and St John Simpson. 2009. Assyrian Colours: Pigments on a Neo-Assyrian Relief of a Parade Horse. The British Museum Technical Research Bulletin 3: 57–62. Winter, Irene J. 1993. “Seat of Kingship”/“A Wonder to Behold”: The Palace as Construct in the Ancient Near East. Ars Orientalis 23: 27–55.

11 The Assyrian Propaganda Machine in Text and Image: The Case of Sennacherib at Tyre in 701 BCE 1

Joshua Jeffers Keywords: Luli, Palace Reliefs; Phoenicia; Propaganda; Royal Inscriptions; Sennacherib; Southwest Palace; Tyre

INTRODUCTION

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ssyria rose to prominence in the mid-second millennium BCE when it established a small but powerful kingdom stretching from the Euphrates River in the west to the borders of Babylonia in the south and the Zagros mountains in the north and east. After a period of decline during the late eleventh and early tenth centuries BCE, Assyria re-asserted its control over this territory and, by the eighth and seventh centuries, ultimately expanded its borders to encompass Babylonia as well as the area along the Mediterranean coast, including even Egypt for a short time. This revitalized Assyrian polity—now an empire—was built upon the brutal subjugation of its enemies and was maintained through the threat of military retaliation for any resistance to Assyrian authority. Two of the primary extant sources elucidating the history and ideology of the Neo-Assyrian Period (934–609 BCE) are royal inscriptions and royal art. The Assyrian royal inscriptions, written on media ranging from clay and stone to metal, are replete with accounts of the Assyrian kings’ military victories and martial prowess, revealing a core component of Assyrian royal ideology (Liverani 1979; Tadmor 1997). Continuing the themes established in the inscriptions of the Middle Assyrian Period, the king was portrayed as an invincible warrior who surpassed any and all obstacles and

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natural boundaries in order to strike at the heart of his enemies—wherever they may be. In these heroic representations, he consistently and valiantly led his troops into combat (even though historically this was not necessarily accurate, Fuchs 2011: 382–83), mercilessly slaughtering any who resisted him. Subjugated regions were treated harshly, their populations massacred or deported to Assyria to be used as forced labor on the king’s building projects. Only unconditional surrender at Assyria’s approach could possibly spare a population from these unpleasant fates. The might of Assyria was also visually depicted on the walls of the Neo-Assyrian royal palaces, which bore orthostat reliefs carved with images of the kings’ military expeditions (Reade 1979; Collins 2014). These reliefs depict the enemy, frequently in the most gruesome of terms, as incapable of stopping the king’s advance: enemy soldiers are variously beheaded, flayed, mutilated or dismembered, and impaled on spikes. Cities are set ablaze as captives are removed and stripped naked to be presented to the king as plunder. Text and image are powerfully complementary (Winter 1997: 359–63). Together, they paint a fearsome portrait of the price of resisting Assyria and its king. For the modern scholar, it is only through the study and consideration of both the written and visual records that one comes to understand fully the extensive efforts put forward by Assyrian scribes and artisans to advance the picture of Assyria propagated by the Assyrian kings and royal court.

ASSYRIAN IDEOLOGY AND PROPAGANDA Royal Inscriptions and Visual Programs Despite the wealth of information yielded by word and image, the function of the visual and textual sources and the nature of their respective audiences within the Neo-Assyrian state have given rise to significant scholarly contention. Both text and image have frequently been deemed “propaganda” intended to promote Assyrian royal ideology and to legitimize the king. Scholars have identified and elucidated numerous themes (militaristic, heroic, mythological, and religious to name only a few) deployed within the extant sources to craft the royal ideology (Pongratz-Leisten 2015), but there is significant disagreement as to the sources’ intended audiences (Holloway 2002: 74–76; Frame 2006: 65–66; Fales 2009: 279–84), an issue



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that directly affects how one envisions the dissemination and effectuation of their propaganda. Generally speaking, scholars view the Assyrian people as the recipients of the propaganda (Liverani 1979: 299–300), though there may also be more specific audiences—such as foreign dignitaries or others visiting the capital city and viewing the relief program of the palace (Reade 1979: 335–36)—who might encounter and be affected by it. Some scholars have gone so far as to argue that the royal inscriptions themselves were read aloud (Oppenheim 1960: 143–47; Sano 2016: 226–31) but there is no definitive evidence for this practice. Given the inaccessibility of many of the written and visual sources, however, one might legitimately question their actual value as “propaganda.” A majority of the royal inscriptions were buried as foundation documents and so rendered inaccessible. Even if these texts could have been seen, cuneiform literacy levels were so low—especially with the widespread use of Aramaic in the first millennium (Veldhuis 2011: 73)—that it is unlikely that any but a very limited audience (scribes and perhaps other elites) would have actually been able to read them. Similarly, rock reliefs and steles were often placed in such remote locations that they too were frequently inaccessible (in any close or intimate respect) to viewers. Even the famous Neo-Assyrian orthostat reliefs (Feldman, this volume), which lined the walls of the royal palaces, were mostly located in parts of the palace such that only the palace staff or the royal family might encounter them (Kertai 2015: 127–28); the ability of even this limited audience to view the reliefs would further have been contingent on the reliefs being properly illuminated. The above factors would seem to severely limit the propagandistic value of the extant sources, leading some scholars to suggest that, with respect to the palace reliefs outside the public audience halls, it was primarily the king and possibly also his royal court that were the intended audience (Russell 1991: 251; Nadali 2016: 85–86). In the absence of a substantial audience, some have even argued that the Assyrian written and visual sources described above cannot be classified as “propaganda” at all (Bagg 2016). Other scholars have (rightly) identified future rulers as a possible audience given that these individuals are specifically mentioned in the extant written documents themselves as part of the concluding curse formulae (Tadmor 1997: 331). But if future rulers were a presumed audience, they were not necessarily a target of the propaganda itself: the curse formulae at the end of the inscriptions explicitly function as protective mechanisms, written to

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ensure the inscribed objects’ survival by addressing the one audience that had the power and bore the responsibility to protect them. Any interpretation asserting that the genres of royal inscription and artistic representation in the Neo-Assyrian empire are propaganda must first account for the wide range of media and objects on which such propaganda is or might be encoded, delineate the varying functions of such (Feldman, this volume), and identify an appropriate audience capable of receiving and being affected by the messages contained in these disparate sources as a whole. Although scholars will often briefly touch on the suggestion that it is the gods who are the most natural audience for Assyrian propaganda, this option is usually dismissed in the final analysis (e.g., Fales 2009: 284). But such a dismissal is unwarranted: the gods are—or at least may reasonably be viewed as—the main audience of the Assyrian royal propaganda (Tadmor 1997: 331–32), and all other potential consumers are likely secondary recipients. A remarkable passage in a handful of Sennacherib’s foundation deposits reads: O foundation inscription, speak favorable things to (the god) Aššur about Sennacherib, king of Assyria, the one who loves correct behavior, the one who fashioned the image of his god, (and) the one who built (this) temple, so that his offspring, his sons, (and) his grandsons may flourish together with Baltil (Aššur) and Ešarra (and) endure forever with the black-headed (people). (Grayson and Novotny 2012: text no. 10 lines 20–22, Grayson and Novotny 2014: text no. 166 lines 30b–33a and text no. 168 lines 55b–60a) Although such a statement is not explicitly included in other royal inscriptions, the role of crafted objects in directly addressing the god Ashur to advocate on behalf of the king appears to have been a primary function of said objects, regardless of whether they bear writing or images. The recognition of the gods as the primary audience of these objects becomes even more salient when one explores the significance of military achievement in the formulation of Assyrian royal ideology. Martial success was the primary means by which the Assyrian elites legitimized the king and his reign to the gods, especially given that Assyria’s chief god Ashur had issued a divine mandate that specifically ordered the king to expand the territory of Assyria (Tadmor 1999: 55; Liverani 2017: 10–24).



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Militarism and Royal Legitimation in Neo-Assyrian Ideology Unlike the Babylonian royal inscriptions, which often lack military narrative altogether and focus solely on the king’s responsibilities to build and maintain the kingdom’s structures, the Assyrian inscriptions incorporate military narrative as a prerequisite for engaging in such building projects. It was the military achievements of the Assyrian king that both garnered and confirmed divine approval for his royal position, and success on the battlefield gave a ruler the authority to build or renovate temples and other structures of the state that ultimately fell under the auspices of the deities themselves. Beginning with the reign of Adad-nirari I (1305–1274 BCE), scribes introduced military narrative into the royal inscriptions; over the course of the next two centuries and beyond, they expanded and refined its presentation (Grayson 1981; Tadmor 1981: 14–25), fusing the concept of legitimation through combat with the official state ideology. The emphasis on militarism for the purpose of legitimization is also echoed in the royal epithets, as exemplified in Adad-nirari I’s inscriptions: “(he is the) scatterer of all enemies above and below, trampler of their lands…, conquerer of the cities…, capturer of all people, extender of borders and boundaries, the king at whose feet the gods Anu, Aššur, Šamaš, Adad, and Ištar made all rulers and princes bow down” (Grayson 1987: A.0.76.1 lines 14b–17). The significance of royal accomplishment in battle was especially crystallized in Assyrian ideology at the end of the Middle Assyrian period. In the Middle Assyrian coronation ritual, contained on a single tablet likely dating to the twelfth or eleventh century BCE (Müller 1937: 5–6), the priest, speaking on behalf of the god Ashur, declares to the king: “Enlar[ge] your land with your just scepter!” (i-na e-šar-te gišGIDRU-ka KUR-ka ra-pi[š], Müller 1937: 12 ii 34b–35a). Here, the responsibility of the king to expand the territory of Assyria through conflict is expressed as a divine imperative from the god Ashur. Such rhetoric is vividly expressed in one of the inscriptions of the late Middle Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser I (1114–1076 BCE). The royal inscriptions from his reign are the first to incorporate an invocation to the gods at their beginning, before the listing of the king’s epithets. After said epithets, a statement about the king’s fulfillment of the divine command to expand the borders of Assyria through combat precedes the military narrative of his inscription:

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The god Aššur (and) the great gods who magnify my sovereignty, who granted as my lot power and strength, commanded me to extend the border of their land. They placed in my hands their mighty weapons, deluge in battle. I gained control over lands, mountains, towns, and princes who were hostile to Aššur and I subdued their districts. I vied with 60 crowned heads and achieved victory over them in battle. I have neither rival nor equal in conflict. I added territory to Assyria (and) people to its population. I extended the border of my land and ruled over all their lands. (Grayson 1991: A.0.87.1 i 46–61) The royal ideology embedded in this passage directly mirrors that of the coronation ritual cited above and specifies that a militaristic king is the only type of ruler capable of procuring the support of the gods (Jeffers 2013: 277–78; Liverani 2017: 15). Divine patronage, in turn, supplied the king with the authorization necessary to engage in building projects and govern Assyria. Thus, Tiglath-pileser’s short preface to the subsequent military narrative makes clear that the primary purpose of such narrative is to legitimize his reign to the gods. It is interesting to note that the king’s genealogy appears after the military narrative, indicating his status as ruler was not automatically sustained due to his lineage, but secured only after he demonstrated his ability to satisfy the gods’ command for conquest. In this way, divinely mandated war and conquest were conceptualized as prerequisites for the establishment of order, and they provided the king with the political space needed to bring about peace and effectuate proper governance in Assyria (Pongratz-Leisten 2015: 435–41). The focus on militarism as a mechanism for legitimation became the core component of the royal ideology, such that the scribal elites of the Neo-Assyrian state were intimately focused on developing and expanding the verbal and visual means by which they could materialize this specific image of the king in both written and visual sources.

Propaganda for the Gods: Presenting the Assyrian King The most important function of the Assyrian royal inscriptions and the visual programs lining the walls of Neo-Assyrian palaces and located on steles and rock faces, then, was to demonstrate to the gods the king’s ability to expand and govern Assyrian lands. This function was also served by texts or images of the king engaging in royal hunts to subdue



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nature, performing cultic functions to appease the gods, and gathering resources for building projects—all of which are extensions of his ability to properly manage Assyria. In essence, the Assyrian king could not be a legitimate ruler unless he demonstrated this ability. Given the absolute necessity for the king to justify his reign in the eyes of the gods—especially the chief god, Ashur, who issued the divine command for conquest in the coronation ritual—the royal inscriptions and royal art may indeed be classified as propaganda. The scribes created them to advocate for the king’s legitimacy to the singular audience that was the ultimate source of the king’s authority and that had the power to terminate his reign at any time. This interpretation repositions the Assyrian royal inscriptions and visual arts, taken together, as something akin to a modern-day curriculum vitae. Created by the scholarly elite to define the persona of the king and to delineate the qualifications allowing him to occupy said office, textual and visual sources were regularly edited and updated as the king accomplished new feats. This endeavor was never intended to create a complete account of historical events but only to record relevant royal successes in order to legitimize the king before the gods: it always painted the king in the most favorable light, naturally eschewing any mention of setbacks or failures that would tarnish the king’s credentials. Furthermore, much like a curriculum vitae, the visual and textual corpus (or any of its parts) could be shared with others to impress (the Assyrian population), to intimidate (foreign guests and other non-Assyrians), or to preserve one’s legacy (for future Assyrian kings), even if these functions were not the primary one. As sources of legitimation, then, regardless of whether the royal inscriptions were buried, dug up by future rulers, or put on display, or whether they were read aloud to a public audience or never read at all, they fulfilled their purpose simply by existing. Whether reliefs, similarly, were hidden away in rooms of the palace or displayed to visiting dignitaries, whether steles or rock reliefs were set up in inaccessible places or situated in plain sight, they also fulfilled their purpose. The very existence of text and image and the messages they contained were effectual in that they presented the state of the kingdom to the gods. By underscoring his own role in both maintaining and expanding Assyria, a ruler could convey his accomplishments to the gods through these sources, thus promoting the credentials that substantiated his tenure as king.

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SENNACHERIB AT TYRE IN THE ROYAL INSCRIPTIONS AND PALACE RELIEFS The above discussion of the function of royal inscriptions and visual programs in Assyrian ideology is essential for understanding a particular episode that took place during Sennacherib’s reign over Assyria (704–681 BCE) and for analyzing its representation in the verbal and visual sources that must together be unraveled to understand the nature of the propaganda embedded therein. Upon the death of his predecessor, Sargon II, in 705 BCE, Sennacherib set out on several military campaigns to secure the empire that he had inherited. He marched first to Babylonia in the southeast, second to tribal groups living in the Zagros Mountains in the east, and, for a third campaign in 701 BCE, led his army westward to the critical regions in Syro-Palestine. During this third expedition, he invaded Phoenicia, moved south to Philistia, and concluded his campaign by marching into the territory of Judah. In the discussion below, the Phoenician phase of this third campaign is of primary interest. Phoenicia, a relatively small but important region situated along the Mediterranean coast of modern-day Lebanon, was significant to Assyria both for economic and strategic reasons. Phoenicia’s vast trade network, which Assyria taxed and attempted to regulate, brought substantial resources and revenue into the Assyrian core (Frankenstein 1979). The most prominent city in Phoenicia was Tyre, an economic powerhouse that possessed a lucrative network extending across the entire Mediterranean Sea and whose resources naturally drew Assyria’s attention. In the royal inscriptions, Sennacherib’s account of his invasion appears fairly straightforward. The Assyrian king is described as marching against the entire region of Phoenicia, though his primary enemy was apparently Luli, identified in the inscriptions as the king of Sidon. Sennacherib’s approach reportedly caused the Phoenician cities to surrender, and Luli himself to flee—according to one account, this flight was from Tyre to Cyprus—from the Assyrian onslaught. The discussion below closely examines the extant written accounts of Sennacherib’s invasion in combination with the pictorial rendering of a particular scene in Sennacherib’s palace reliefs that likely pertains to this event; it demonstrates that the scribal elites responsible for crafting both written and visual sources carefully devised a piece of propaganda that distorted the “actual” military achievements of the campaign.



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The Palace Reliefs: The City on the Seashore With respect to Assyria’s pictorial propaganda, the primary issue under consideration here is the identification of a specific scene that unfolds across five orthostats (Slabs 14–18) located in the throneroom (Room I) of Sennacherib’s Southwest Palace at Nineveh. These slabs depict a large fleet of ships fleeing from a city on the shore due to the advance of the Assyrian army. Unfortunately, Slabs 14–18 of this visual program are no longer extant due either to decay following exposure or possible later destruction (Russell 1998: 46–47; note Layard’s Slabs 14–18 are Russell’s Slabs 20a–d and 21). Slabs 14–15 (Fig. 11.1) are primarily known through A.H. Layard’s drawing of the orthostats, though a handful of photographs taken by L.W. King during his re-excavation of the throneroom in 1903–04 show the bottom half of Slab 14 and the lower left quadrant of Slab 15 (Barnett, Bleibtreu, and Turner 1998: pl. 37 no. 29b, pls. 39–41 nos. 30b–d; Russell 1998: 73 pl. 25, 96 pls. 56–57). Slabs 14–15 picture nine vessels moving away from a walled city, with one boat remaining docked at the harbor so that the only man still on land next to the rear exit of the city could load a child into that boat. The upper galleys of these ships are filled with men and women—apparently citizens of the city—who are attempting to escape the Assyrian attack. Two boats on the left side of Slab 14 are heading toward the shoreline; these boats have only a handful of men in them and are presumably going to the city in order to rescue more people from this dire situation. With respect to the city itself, it is depicted with a wall bearing round shields on the battlement and three equally spaced towers that have three windows each. A large building is pictured above the wall; only two of its doors and two columns to support the roof remain visible, though it is clear that the building would have continued onto the adjacent slab given that both the door on the right and the roof line are incomplete. Unlike the previous two slabs, Slabs 16–18 were never drawn by Layard and are known only through photographs taken during King’s re-excavation (Figs. 11.2 and 11.4) and through a section of the lower register of Slab 16 that Layard cut out of the orthostat (Fig. 11.3), which is now housed in the British Museum. Slabs 16–18 picture the actions of the Assyrian army. The bottom register of Slab 16 and the second register of Slab 18 show Assyrian troops moving toward the left, while the bottom register on the right

11.1 Slabs 14 and 15 of Sennacherib’s Throneroom (Room I) in the Southwest Palace at Nineveh. Slab 14 is Or. Dr. IV, 7 as published in Layard 1853a: pl. 71; Slab 15 is Or. Dr. IV, 8. Courtesy Trustees of the British Museum

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11.2 Slabs 16 and 17 of Sennacherib’s Throneroom (Room I) in the Southwest Palace at Nineveh. Photo from L.W. King’s re-excavation of the palace in 1903–4. Courtesy Trustees of the British Museum

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11.3 Portion of Lower Register of Slab 16 of Room I (cut out by A.H. Layard). Now housed in the British Museum. Courtesy Trustees of the British Museum

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11.4 Slab 18 of Sennacherib’s Throneroom (Room I) in Southwest Palace at Nineveh. Photo from L.W. King’s reexcavation of the palace in 1903–4. King is standing on top of Slab 17 on the left. Courtesy Trustees of the British Museum

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side of Slab 16 and Slabs 17–18 depict the removal of captives toward the right. Interestingly, the legs of the Assyrian troops and prisoners of Slabs 16–17, from just below the knees down, appear a second time underneath the bottom register of the slabs, showing that these orthostats had to be re-carved presumably when the floor level of the room was raised (Barnett, Bleibtreu, and Turner 1998: 53, no. 32b). Due to the damaged state of Slabs 16–17, which was even noted by Layard (1849: 129) during his initial viewing of them, scholars have made no further observations about the narrative action of this scene, only offering the general comment that Assyrians are attacking the city on Slab 15 and removing prisoners from it. However, the description and interpretation of this scene can be significantly improved through an analysis of the additional evidence that Slab 16 can provide. The City on the Seashore: A Closer Look Looking at King’s photograph of Slab 16 (Fig. 11.2), it is true that the orthostat is heavily damaged above the bottom register, but a close examination of the left side of the photo reveals several elements of the scene that have gone unnoticed (see the drawing of this slab in Fig. 11.5). As mentioned earlier, Slab 15 contains the left side of the city on the seashore, while its right side would have been located on Slab 16. Indeed, the latter is visible in King’s photo, despite the heavy damage. On the ground line of the slab between its left edge and the edge of the hole cut into it by Layard, the lower portion of two legs—one in front of the other—is visible, matching the style of the back legs of the Assyrian soldiers seen in the lower register. Just to the left of those legs, though lacking any detail due to damage, traces corresponding to the left legs of the soldiers can be seen. This would place another representation of a group of Assyrian troops on the second register of the slab. Above and to the left of the location where these two soldiers are stationed, the upper portion of one of the wall’s towers is clearly visible. The tower battlement is well defined, including its crenellated top line, as well as the upper part of the tower’s adjoining base. Although faint or damaged, three windows can be seen on the tower in the places they are expected: two on the tower battlement and one just underneath the battlement in the center of the tower’s base. Also, abutting the left side of this tower just below its battlement, a shield is faint, but visible on the wall battlement. Another readily visible element in the photo is the presence of a siege ramp. At the point where the ground line of the second register meets the

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11.5 Drawing of Right Side of Slab 15 and Slabs 16 and 17 (Fig. 2) of Throneroom (Room I) in Southwest Palace at Nineveh. Portion of lower register of Slab 16 cut out by A.H. Layard (Fig. 3) restored by author. (Drawing by Kevin Cahail in consultation with the author)

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hole created by Layard’s cutting out a portion of the slab and continuing along about a quarter of the arc of that hole, a siege ramp extends at an approximate 48-degree angle toward the left side of the slab where the rest of the city is located. This siege ramp is made up of about a dozen thin layers of debris as part of its construction, and it even contains one completely visible branch, with traces of several others, placed inside the ramp (compare the similarly depicted siege ramp on Slabs 13–14 of Room XII [Barnett, Bleibtreu, and Turner 1998: pls. 151–53 nos. 227–28]). In addition, it appears that there should yet be one more tower to the right of the one described above, whose top is located where the siege ramp would meet the city wall if the wall continued farther right. As a specific convention of Sennacherib’s artisans, the two other times in the palace that a siege ramp extends above an enemy city’s wall and abuts the buildings above that wall, the siege ramp is depicted as going behind the top half of the outer tower of the wall in order to give it the appearance of leaning against both that wall and the upper buildings (see the siege ramps on Slabs 13–14 of Room XII and on two of the unnumbered slabs of Room XLIII [Barnett, Bleibtreu, and Turner 1998: pls. 374–75 nos. 481–82]). Part of a second tower is visible in King’s photo. The bottom of its base is discernible where it meets the ground line of the register behind the feet of the advancing Assyrian troops. This identification is supported by the fact that the spacing between this base and the first tower on Slab 16 is consistent with what one would expect in the relief since it matches the spacing between the wall’s towers on Slab 15. There are also traces of what look to be parts of the tower battlement in the photo, but these are likely chance patterns in the damage to the slab since they appear too far to the left of the preserved base. The presence of this second tower might also be confirmed by two additional factors. First, the building above the city wall appears to extend beyond the first tower on the left, necessitating the presence of a final tower to the right. Second, a jagged horizontal element appears to protrude from the lower right portion of the first tower’s battlement; this may represent trace remains of crenellations atop the wall that joined the two towers. Sennacherib’s relief programs, at least insofar as they are preserved, are consistent in that, if one part of a structure is crenellated—be it tower or the wall joining those towers—then all parts of the structure are crenellated. The presence of this element on Slab 16 unfortunately cannot be confirmed, as it does not appear on the wall joining the towers on Slab 15 as drawn by Layard, who is generally a careful



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copyist; it consequently remains possible these traces are merely part of the damage to the slab. Finally, very little can said about the representation of the building above the city wall on Slab 16 given that the slab’s upper section is blurry in King’s photograph. There are visible traces of the right half of the door continued from Slab 15, and of the ground line under that door. The lower roofline appears to be continued also, if one follows it from Slab 15 onto Slab 16. Reconstructing the remainder of the structure is more challenging, as the building’s symmetry seems not to be maintained and the photo itself is unclear. The right edge of the building seems to be located immediately before the left side of the final tower of the city’s wall. It is also impossible to tell if there is a wide column on this side of the building that matches the two on the left side, though there does appear to be a thin post to the right of the doorway. Although no additional definitive elements are identifiable in the damaged section of Slab 16, the city depicted on Sennacherib’s Slab 16 has a likely parallel with one depicted on the wall reliefs of Sargon II’s palace at Khorsabad; the latter may provide a clue as to how to reconstruct the former. In Sargon’s palace, Slab 2 of the southeastern wall of Facade n—a large courtyard on the eastern side of the palace—presents a scene in which numerous boats are transporting logs across a seascape and in which a city is depicted on an island surrounded by water on all sides in the upper left corner of the slab (Fig. 11.6). The city is portrayed with five equidistant towers situated on a level ground line, and the tops of those towers and the city wall are crenellated. A second structure is depicted above the city wall that possesses features similar to that of the city carved on Sennacherib’s reliefs. Although the structure’s left side is not preserved, its roof appears supported by a few wide columns, and a thin post stands between the two rightmost columns. The building is also depicted with an entrance extending outward from its right side. The most remarkable feature of the building—one that likely connects it to the building in Sennacherib’s reliefs—is its roof, which extends beyond the wall of the structure below, at which point the roof’s bottom line curves upward to meet its top line. This unusual roof exactly matches that of the building on Slab 15 of Sennacherib’s throneroom. Given that this distinctive architectural feature, which is unique in the corpus of both Sargon and Sennacherib’s palace reliefs, is shared only here, it seems very likely these two depictions are of the same city. As a result, the reconstruction of the scene on Sennacherib’s Slabs 16–17 (Fig.

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11.6 Drawing of Phoenician City from Slab 2 of Facade n of Sargon II’s Palace at Khorsabad (Botta and Flandin 1849: pl. 33)

11.5) follows the representation of this building in Sargon’s reliefs in including an entrance attached to the right side of the structure above the city wall; this might explain why the symmetry of the building in Sennacherib’s reliefs is not maintained. While this reconstruction remains tentative, King’s photo of Slab 16 appears to show traces supporting this restoration. Such a feature is also already attested elsewhere in Sennacherib’s palace (an entrance adjoins the right side of a building above a fortification wall on Slabs 11–12 of Room XLVIII of Sennacherib’s palace [Barnett, Bleibtreu, and Turner 1988: pl. 410 nos. 523a–524a]). A New Interpretation of Slabs 14–18 in Sennacherib’s Throneroom With a description of the visible elements on Slab 16’s second register complete, a new and more complete reconstruction emerges that can be used to explicate the unique narrative elements that the Assyrian artisans



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incorporated into the scene pictured on Slabs 14–18 of Sennacherib’s throneroom. Although scholars have long known that the city on the seashore was under assault by Assyrian forces, the new reconstruction demonstrates that this enemy city was actually besieged by the Assyrians, who employed a siege ramp against it. The siege ramp especially is critical to any interpretation of the narrative depicted as it reveals a visual program distinct from those preserved elsewhere in the palace. All of the other siege ramps attested on Sennacherib’s orthostats are situated on the ground lines of the lowest register of the relief, permitting the entire Assyrian army to proceed up the ramp in order to engage the enemy (see Slabs 13–14 of Room XII; Slabs 6–8 of Room XXXVI [Barnett, Bleibtreu, and Turner 1998: pls. 327–35 and 437 nos. 429b–31]; two unnumbered slabs of Room XLIII; and an unnumbered slab of Room LXX [Barnett, Bleibtreu, and Turner 1988: pl. 471 no. 652]). On Slab 16 of the throneroom, however, the siege ramp is situated on the ground line of the second register only: this placement is likely because the Assyrian assault has two distinct objectives. All of the Assyrian troops marching left on the second register of Slabs 16 and 18 are focused on one goal: to besiege the enemy city and bring it under Assyrian control. This mission appears to be less difficult than in other siege scenes presented in Sennacherib’s palace since the city that the Assyrians are attacking is depicted as empty. The people of the city are in the process of fleeing, and there appears to be little enemy resistance to the Assyrian advance in their effort to capture the city. The Assyrians depicted in the lower register of the relief program have a different goal. In this narrative sequence, the Assyrian soldiers advancing to the left are not attacking the walled city: the archers on Slab 16 aim their bows to the left, not upward in the direction of the city. These troops are clearly tasked with pursuing and capturing the enemy population as it flees the city. This interpretation is supported by the fact that the lower register is the only one in these slabs to contain enemy captives being escorted away from the battle. As the Assyrian army moves left in pursuit of the fleeing population, they capture and remove said prisoners to the right. This narrative program is materialized through two visual tactics employed by the Assyrian artists. On Slab 15, the individual standing on land next to the exit of the city is bending down to lower a child into the boat so that the boat and all its occupants can flee. This portrayal allowed the artist to place the boat and its passengers in the lower register of the relief,

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so that they are situated immediately to the left of the Assyrians soldiers in the bottom register of Slab 16. This use of space creates the appearance that the Assyrians troops in the lower register are racing around the city in the register above as they head toward the empty shoreline in an effort to chase down and capture as many people as possible. A second tactic undertaken by Sennacherib’s artists expertly utilizes the architecture of the throneroom to support this narrative (Fig. 11.7). Slab 15 was located in the northeastern corner of the throneroom, and the room’s corner vertically bisected this slab slightly left of where the rear exit of the city adjoined the city’s wall so that the room’s corner is flush with the leftmost tower of the city’s wall (see King’s photo in Barnett, Bleibtreu, and Turner 1998: pl. 41 no. 30d). The city on the right side of Slab 15 and on Slab 16 was therefore depicted on the same two-dimensional plane as the soldiers in the second register of Slabs 16–18 who are attacking it. This spatial arrangement of the slabs and their registers also positioned the enemy boat and its occupants on the left side of Slab 15 perpendicular to the Assyrian solders in the lower register of Slab 16. Through this inventive use of three-dimensional space, the Assyrian soldiers chasing after the enemy in the lower register are marching and launching their projectiles—quite literally—directly at the city’s fleeing citizens. The City on the Seashore: Tyre or Sidon? The visual narrative recorded on Slabs 14–18 is exceptional among Sennacherib’s palace reliefs. It was carefully created so that it would correlate to a specific event during Sennacherib’s reign—but what was this event? The portrayal of the city and its fleeing population certainly associate this relief program with Sennacherib’s military campaign of 701 BCE. The city is shown surrounded by a wall with shields on its battlement and three windows on each of its towers, features consistent with visual conventions deployed in orthostat reliefs depicting locations conquered during Sennacherib’s campaign to the west (Jeffers 2011: 104–106). The more specifically Phoenician nature of the city is indicated by the tall polos caps worn by the women in the boats and by the depictions of the boats themselves, which are rendered in Phoenician style (Wäfler 1975: 112–15; Russell 1991: 161–62). In his description of the reliefs from the Southwest Palace, Layard (1849: 129, 400–401) was the first scholar to suggest this scene probably

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11.7 Reconstruction of Slabs 14–17 in situ in Northeastern Corner of Throneroom (Room I) in Southwest Palace at Nineveh. (Drawing by Kevin Cahail in consultation with the author)

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depicted the “conquest of the Tyrians,” though Paterson (1912–13: 4) later identified the city as Sidon. However, it was Olmstead (1923: 298) who specifically identified the reliefs as depicting Luli fleeing from Tyre following Sennacherib’s invasion of Phoenicia. Art historians, since Olmstead’s identification, have generally accepted that the city in the orthostat reliefs is Tyre based on the similarity between the visual representation and the statement made concerning Luli’s flight from that city in Sennacherib’s royal inscriptions (Barnett 1956: 91, 1969: 6; Wäfler 1975: 98–101; Jacoby 1991: 119–20). This longstanding identification is not without its issues. During Sennacherib’s time, the city of Tyre was situated in the Mediterranean Sea on a small island approximately 700–800 meters from the mainland. If this city is Tyre, one might expect Sennacherib’s palace reliefs to depict the city surrounded with water on all sides—as in Sargon II’s reliefs (see above)—but this is not how it is actually portrayed on Slab 16 of Sennacherib’s relief program. Other difficulties also arise in identifying the city as Tyre when evidence from the written sources is considered. Several details included in the Phoenician episode in Sennacherib’s royal inscriptions suggest something unusual was happening in the city of Tyre that prompted the royal scribes to report on its relationship with the Assyrian empire in a peculiar way. The reconstruction of Sennacherib’s historical encounter with Tyre is rendered difficult due to the limited source material available: the only certain sources illuminating this encounter are the Assyrian royal inscriptions, which are by no means unbiased historical documents. A central issue with respect to this encounter is whether Luli was even the king of Tyre: the inscriptions refer to him only as the “king of Sidon.” Moreover, several clues within the official accounts seem to reveal that the Assyrians were not entirely successful in conquering Tyre during the Phoenician invasion, an outcome that would have been problematic for the scribal elites when it came time to memorialize the king’s military accomplishments in the written inscriptions and palace visual program. The discussion below incorporates several of the arguments put forth by Gallagher (1999: 91–112; see also Frahm 2001: 668–69), who expands on the initial suggestion of Katzenstein (1973: 248–52) that Tyre was not actually conquered in 701, and that this failure is reflected in how Sennacherib’s royal inscriptions treat the city in accounts of the invasion. Important for the purposes of this study is that, if Sennacherib did



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not defeat Tyre during his invasion of 701 BCE, the “city on the seashore” in Slabs 14–18 of the Southwest Palace may not, in fact, depict Tyre.

The Royal Inscriptions: The Curious Case of the Missing Tyre Initial Accounts of Sennacherib’s Invasion of Phoenicia The earliest royal inscriptions dealing with Sennacherib’s campaign to the west were written at Nineveh in 700 BCE, the year after the king’s invasion. They record the events of the Phoenician episode as follows: On my third campaign, I marched to the land Ḫatti. Fear of my lordly brilliance overwhelmed Lulî, the king of the city Sidon, and he fled afar into the midst of the sea. The awesome terror of the weapon of the god Aššur, my lord, overwhelmed the cities Great Sidon, Lesser Sidon, BītZitti, Ṣarepta, Maḫalliba, Ušû, Akzibu, (and) Acco, his fortified cities (and) fortresses, an area of pasture(s) and water-place(s), resources upon which he relied, and they bowed down at my feet. I placed TuBa’lu on his royal throne over them and imposed upon him tribute (and) payment (in recognition) of my overlordship (to be delivered) yearly (and) without interruption. (Grayson and Novotny 2012: text no. 4 lines 32–35) Conspicuously missing from this account is any mention of Tyre. As stated earlier, the city of Tyre at this time was on a small island located approximately 700–800 meters from the mainland, making it virtually impossible to capture. In fact, the city was not truly conquered until 332 BCE, when Alexander the Great laid siege to the city and then constructed a causeway stretching from the mainland to the island, allowing him to capture and raze it to the ground. In Assyrian times, then, the city was well situated to resist any invasion, and Tyre could have only been made to yield to the Assyrians through surrender or an agreement to cooperate. This political (and geographical) reality is reflected in the royal inscriptions of Sennacherib’s two successors, Esarhaddon (680–669 BCE) and Ashurbanipal (668–631 BCE). During Esarhaddon’s reign, Tyre was initially cooperative with the Assyrians, and Baal (Akk. Ba’alu), the king of Tyre, sent resources to the Assyrian capital for Esarhaddon’s building projects (Leichty 2011: text no. 1 v 54–vi 1). Baal is also reported to have concluded a treaty with Esarhaddon that established parameters for Tyre’s sea trade and salvage

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rites (Parpola and Watanabe 1988: 24–27). However, during Esarhaddon’s second campaign to Egypt in 671, Baal of Tyre appears to have allied himself with the Egyptian king Taharqa (690–664 BCE), and Esarhaddon’s only recourse against Tyre was to blockade the city and cut off its food and water supply until it relented (Leichty 2011: text no. 34 obv. 12′–14′). During the reign of Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian royal inscriptions similarly report on that king’s blockading of all land and sea routes to Tyre following Baal’s rebellion against Assyrian authority in order to force Baal’s submission (Novotny and Jeffers 2018: text no. 3 ii 38–62). Considered within this context, Sennacherib’s inscription above also hints at resistance on the part of Tyre at the time when the Assyrians invaded Phoenicia in 701 BCE. The inscription, in referring to Luli as king of Sidon and not king of Tyre, seems purposefully to omit the troublesome city from the report altogether. In effect, by shifting focus from Tyre to Sidon, the inscription allowed Sennacherib to assert his defeat of Luli. The inscription reports that Sennacherib placed Tu-Baal (Akk. Tu-Ba’lu) on the throne of Sidon—a city that the Assyrian king controlled—once Luli had fled, which circumvented Tyre’s authority and nicely covered up Sennacherib’s inability to make Tyre, likely the true seat of Luli’s power, submit to his rule. The fact that Tyre was probably a target of Sennacherib’s advance might be seen in the inscription’s reference to Ushu as one of the locations that submitted to Sennacherib. Ushu is the Akkadian name given to the portion of Tyre that was situated on the mainland itself, located east of the island fortification of the city proper. The inscription, by explicitly including Ushu while omitting Tyre, strongly suggests that Sennacherib was able to make every part of Phoenicia acquiesce to Assyrian hegemony right up to the edge of Tyre, but that the island city itself remained unvanquished. In fact, Sennacherib’s inability to conquer Tyre may also be reflected in the unusual designations provided by the scribal elites for the first two locations mentioned in the list, namely “Great Sidon” and “Lesser Sidon.” The designations “Great Sidon” (urusi-du-un-nu GAL-ú) and “Lesser Sidon” (urusi-du-un-nu ṣe-eḫ-ru and urusi-du-un-nu TUR) only appear in this one episode of the Assyrian royal inscriptions. Scholars have offered various suggestions as to how to interpret this geographical pairing, but no conclusive explanation has yet emerged (see the discussion and literature cited in Bagg 2007: 229–31). Some suggest that these designations refer to



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separate districts in Sidon, i.e., with “Great Sidon” referring to the mainland portion of the city and “Lesser Sidon” referring to the segment of the city located on a very small island just off the coast. Others assert that “Great Sidon” refers to the city of Sidon while “Lesser Sidon” refers to a smaller satellite settlement located a short distance away. However, none of the Phoenician texts themselves use this terminology, making it difficult to ascertain the meaning of these designations. Given the ideological and political difficulties that would have been created by Sennacherib’s failure to secure Tyre’s submission, it is possible that the designation of “Great Sidon” may have functioned as a veiled reference to Tyre. Luli, who is called the “king of Sidon,” would thus very cleverly have been ascribed kingship over both Tyre, called “Great Sidon,” and Sidon, called “Lesser Sidon,” through this coded language. If this interpretation is correct, Sennacherib’s scribes subtly but successfully crafted a narrative in which Sennacherib was presented as subduing the entire land of Phoenicia by omitting Tyre’s problematic resistance to Assyrian authority. Possible confirmation of Luli’s kingship of both Tyre and Sidon might appear in the only non-Assyrian source that can shed light on Tyre’s situation at the end of the eighth century BCE. In the Jewish Antiquities (IX 283–287; Begg and Spilsbury 2005: 201–202), Josephus quotes the Greek historian Menander, who recounts an episode taken from the archives of Tyre in which Tyre and other Phoenician cities revolted against Assyrian control. The text states that, during the reign of Eloulaios, king of Tyre, an Assyrian king invaded Phoenicia and made peace with its inhabitants. However, once the Assyrians returned home, Tyre and several cities revolted and the Assyrian king had to return to Phoenicia. After a naval battle, which the Assyrians lost, the Assyrian king withdrew, though he left behind a contingent of guards to block Tyre’s water supply. The city withstood this siege for five years by obtaining water from wells that had been dug. Josephus attributes Menander’s narrative to the reign of Shalmaneser V (726–722 BCE) but there is some question about whether the name Shalmaneser can actually be read in Menander’s account. If the text does not mention Shalmaneser, it is possible the Tyrian king Eloulaios is to be identified as the king Luli of the Assyrian inscriptions, supporting the identification of Luli as king of Tyre in addition to king of Sidon. But even if Josephus’ attribution of this episode to the reign of Shalmaneser V is accurate—and this has been the traditional historical understanding

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(Katzenstein 1973: 220–32)—then this narrative still provides another example of Tyre rebelling against Assyria (this time prior to Sennacherib’s reign), and Luli may be cast as (quite effectively) resisting two different Assyrian kings, Shalmaneser V and Sennacherib. Unfortunately, neither of these interpretations is firmly established, and it is difficult to assess the historical value and accuracy of the text. Given the numerous difficulties in reading the text (for example, Menander’s claim that Eloulaios was also named Puas), Na’aman (2006: 5–6 n. 6) has argued that Menander misunderstood his source materials, and that a possible confusion over the names of the Assyrian kings led him to an erroneous attribution of the name Ululai—argued by Radner (2003–2004: 95–104) to have been the birth name of Shalmaneser V—to the king of Tyre. If correct, this interpretation would render Menander’s account irrelevant to the question of Luli’s status (or not) as king of Tyre. Even if Menander’s report is accurate, other issues arise with respect to reconstructing the historical events surrounding Luli’s reign and status. Na’aman (1998: 239–47, 2001: 357–63) has restored a heavily damaged line in the annals of Sargon II (721–705 BCE) to read that a certain Shilta was the king of Tyre against whom the kings of Cyprus rebelled toward the end of Sargon’s reign. If his reading stands, it is difficult to reconcile the idea that Luli was king of Tyre only a few years later at the beginning of Sennacherib’s reign. But, given that there is little information provided for these events in the sources, any number of unreported occurrences could have easily changed the political landscape so that Luli was (again?) in power at Tyre before Sennacherib’s invasion of Phoenicia in 701 BCE; alternately, a second ruler by that name could also have seized control of the city. Returning to the Assyrian sources, it is notable that by about four years after Sennacherib’s invasion of Phoenicia, the royal inscriptions appear to reflect a shift in their treatment of Tyre. Sennacherib’s royal inscriptions now contain a slight alteration in the account of the Phoenician campaign: they state that Luli not only fled from the king’s onslaught but also disappeared (KUR-šú / šad-da-šú e-mid; Grayson and Novotny 2012: text no. 15 iii 5 [697 BCE]; no. 16 iii 2 [696/965 BCE]; no. 17 ii 61 [694 BCE]; no. 22 ii 40 [691/689 BCE]; and no. 23 ii 38 [691 BCE]). Both of the principal Akkadian dictionaries translate the idiom šadâ(šu) emēdu as “to disappear forever” (The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary E [140], and the Akkadisches Handwörterbuch [211]). Yet it is clear from parallel passages in the inscriptions of



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Ashurbanipal that this enigmatic phrase can additionally refer to an individual’s death (Gallagher 1999: 94). It appears that the texts are not merely reporting on Luli’s death but also emphasizing his complete disappearance from history—he undergoes, essentially, a divinely ordained obliteration for daring to resist Assyria. This interpretation of Luli’s erasure from the historical record is bolstered by the inscriptions carved on some of the bull colossi placed in the entrances of various rooms of Sennacherib’s Southwest Palace, which had been under construction for some time, but which was likely finally finished sometime shortly after 693 BCE. Later Accounts of Sennacherib’s Invasion of Phoenicia Inscriptions written on pairs of bulls flanking doors d (Fig. 11.8) and e of Sennacherib’s throneroom (Grayson and Novotny 2014: text no. 42), as well as on bulls placed along the outer facade of the palace on the western side of Court H (Grayson and Novotny 2014: text no. 44), state that Luli fled to Cyprus in order to find refuge, but that the weapon of Ashur then made him disappear, likely indicating his death through divine means: Moreover, Lulî, the king of the city Sidon, became frightened of doing battle with me, fled to Iadnana (Cyprus), which is in the midst of the sea, and took refuge (there). In that same land, he disappeared on account of the awesome terror of the weapon of the god Aššur, my lord. (Grayson and Novotny 2014: text no. 42 lines 7b–9a [695/694 BCE]; no. 44 lines 17–19a [694/693 BCE]; and no. 45 lines 1′a–5′ [695/694/693 BCE]) Luli’s death had more significant implications than just his subsequent erasure from history. It also functioned to alter the political landscape; it would have imposed new pressures on Tyre, now without a king, to reach an accommodation with the much larger (and now hostile) Assyria in order to relieve the negative economic and other effects of its isolation from the rest of the Phoenician cities, which had already submitted to Assyria. In fact, the inscriptions on the bull colossi seem to indicate that the situation had already begun to change. These inscriptions are the first texts to state Luli’s destination on his flight: the island of Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. The revelation of Luli’s destination, importantly, is the first indication in Sennacherib’s inscriptions of Luli’s connection with Tyre.

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11.8 First of a Pair of Bulls in situ in Door d of Throneroom (Room I) in Southwest Palace at Nineveh. Door d connects the throneroom with Room III. This bull was carved with a short summary inscription of Sennacherib’s first five campaigns, and is the first inscription to mention Luli fleeing to Cyprus (Grayson and Novotny 2014: text no. 42). Photo taken during L.W. King’s re-excavation of the palace in 1903–4. Courtesy Trustees of the British Museum



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Cyprus had very close ties with Tyre; indeed it was, in whole or in part, under Tyre’s hegemony (Radner 2010: 435–38). Luli’s flight to Cyprus to find a safe haven from Assyrian forces thus hints strongly at his relationship with Tyre, even if this is not explicitly stated. From a political standpoint, Luli’s flight may also have been a means by which he could retain control over a region he was in danger of losing following his abandonment of Tyre. After Luli’s death, it may well be the case that Tyre’s relationship with Cyprus fractured, and the Assyrians, for the first time, could include the detail that Luli’s trust in Cyprus for security was a vain one, as the power of the gods could reach even there in order to punish Luli’s rebellion. Finally, after the death of Luli and the possible subsequent weakening of Tyre’s influence abroad, it appears that Tyre was forced to acquiesce and to accept Assyrian hegemony once again. Evidence for this accommodation between Tyre and Assyria appears in George Smith’s so-called “Bull 4” inscription (ca. late 694 to early 693 BCE). Inscribed on a pair of bull colossi just as construction of the Southwest Palace of Sennacherib was entering its final phases, this text contains a most remarkably altered account of Sennacherib’s conquest of Phoenicia (Fig. 11.9). The inscription now specifically states that Luli fled from the city of Tyre itself: On my third campaign, I marched to the land Ḫatti. Fear of my brilliance overwhelmed Lulî, the king of the city Sidon, and he fled from the city Tyre to Iadnana (Cyprus), which is in the midst of the sea, and disappeared. I placed Tu-Ba’lu on the royal throne and imposed upon him payment (in recognition) of my overlordship. In the plain of the city Ušû, the kings of the land Amurru brought their substantial tribute before me. (Grayson and Novotny 2014: text no. 46 lines 18–20a [694/693 BCE]) This is the first and only mention of Tyre itself in Sennacherib’s royal inscriptions pertaining to the Phoenician campaign, and it represents a striking revision of the historical record in that Tyre is now explicitly identified as being overwhelmed by Sennacherib’s military advance in 701 BCE. For the scribes who composed the Bull 4 inscription, which dates about seven years after the initial invasion, it was immaterial that Tyre’s submission had not actually occurred in 701 BCE. Once the city had submitted,

11.9 Beginning of G. Smith’s so-called “Bull 4” Inscription (Grayson and Novotny 2014: text no. 46). Originally located beneath the belly of the first of a pair of bulls stationed in door a of Court H, the main entrance to Sennacherib’s throneroom (Room I). This part of the inscription, which mentions Luli fleeing Tyre, was cut out from the bull in two pieces by H.C. Rawlinson and taken to the British Museum, where it is now housed. Courtesy Trustees of the British Museum

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it was integrated into the narrative as one of the locations consolidated under Assyrian hegemony in the campaign of 701, just in time to be incorporated into Sennacherib’s (soon to be completed) Southwest Palace through the Bull 4 inscription. This inscription is the strongest evidence that Luli was indeed king over Tyre since his flight from that specific city probably indicates that his royal residence was located there rather than at Sidon. This interpretation may be confirmed by a final element that is lacking in all previous inscriptions but introduced in the Bull 4 inscription. At the conclusion of the Phoenician episode contained in the first version of Sennacherib’s inscriptions, which were written in 700 BCE (immediately after Sennacherib’s third campaign), the text lists eight kings of the land Amurru who brought their gifts to Sennacherib and kissed his feet (Grayson and Novotny 2012: text no. 4 lines 36–38). In the Bull 4 inscription dating to 694/693 BCE, however, the end of the Phoenician episode references Sennacherib’s use of the city of Ushu as the location to which all of the subjugated western kings brought their tribute payments. As mentioned previously, Ushu is the name given to the mainland portion of the city of Tyre, situated across the channel from the island fortification. In this way, the royal scribes writing in 694/693 BCE connected Luli’s flight from Tyre and its implied capitulation to Assyria with Sennacherib’s stationing himself at Tyre and collecting there all the tribute brought by the kings of the conquered western cities— of which Tyre itself would now presumably be a part. Interestingly, the tension between Tyre and Assyria is also evident in the few other places that Tyre is named in Sennacherib’s royal inscriptions. While the reference to Tyre in the Bull 4 inscription is the first and only mention of that city in the military narrative that recounts the activity of the king’s invasion to Phoenicia, Tyre is also referenced in the inscriptions’ building accounts, beginning already with the first version of Sennacherib’s royal inscriptions written in 700 BCE. These building reports, found at the end of the royal inscriptions, detail the construction work being carried out on Sennacherib’s palace. In these reports, captives from various regions subjugated by Sennacherib during his military campaigns are recorded as providing labor for the project. Tyre is named in the list of subjugated regions, though the name of the city is written with the determinative for “land” (KUR), so that it is clear that the captives are coming from the “land of Tyre” and not the city itself (Grayson and

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Novotny 2012: text no. 4 line 69 [700 BCE], though exemplar 2 of this inscription omits the determinative before Tyre entirely; no. 15 v 45 [697 BCE]; and no. 17 v 53 [694 BCE]). Given the context of this reference, in which Tyre appears in a list of people taken from different regions, the “Land of Tyre” is possibly being used synecdochically to indicate “Phoenicia” generally, suggesting that Tyre was the primary city in Phoenicia from the Assyrian perspective. It is significant that, in a later version of Sennacherib’s inscriptions dating to 696 and 695 BCE, the reference to Tyre in the building accounts is altered, supporting the interpretation for a change in the political relationship between Tyre and Assyria that is outlined above. Instead of referring to captives taken from the “land” (KUR) of Tyre, as in previous inscriptions, the determinative for “city” (URU) appears before Tyre, suggesting the captives were taken specifically from the actual city of Tyre (Grayson and Novotny 2012: text no. 16 v 68). Tyre is similarly referenced as a city rather than a land in Sennacherib’s account of his sixth campaign of 694 BCE, during which he went to Elam to attack the Bit-Yakin exiles living there. The Bull 4 inscription (Grayson and Novotny 2014: text no. 46 lines 59b–62a) and a heavily damaged clay prism fragment (Grayson and Novotny 2012: text no. 21 i′ 6–11a) report that Sennacherib used sailors captured from the city of Tyre, the city of Sidon, and the land of Ionia to pilot his ships down the Tigris River on the way to Elam. Here, Tyre is used as a gentilic (“Tyrian sailors”) and is preceded by the determinative URU. Although the Assyrian inscriptions are far from explicit, a close reading of the extant texts uncovers clear hints of a troubled but evolving relationship between Tyre and Assyria, one that the scribal community had to navigate carefully in the various accounts written between 701 and 693 BCE. To summarize what can be gleaned from an analysis of the Sennacherib’s royal inscriptions (see Gallagher 1999: 102–104), it appears that Tyre—regardless of whether Luli may be definitively identified as king of Tyre and Sidon or of Sidon alone—did not initially submit to Assyria during the invasion of 701 BCE, but was isolated when the other Phoenician cities surrendered to Sennacherib and Luli was forced to flee (from Tyre) to Cyprus. Through unknown means, Luli died while in exile, likely causing Tyre to re-think its resistance to Assyria. Ultimately, the city seems to have come to an arrangement with Assyria and submitted to the latter’s authority by the mid690s BCE.



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SENNACHERIB AND TYRE: COORDINATING TEXT AND IMAGE IN SPACE AND TIME Propaganda and Presentation in Sennacherib’s Southwest Palace With the above detailed analysis of the evolving treatment of Tyre in Sennacherib’s royal inscriptions, it is useful to return to the representation of the Phoenician city carved on Slabs 15–16 of Sennacherib’s throneroom orthostats. Slabs 14–16 depict a fleet of Phoenician ships leaving a walled city with five towers and shields on its battlement while a lone figure stands on the dock and loads a child into a ship stationed in the city’s harbor. As stated previously, art historians have generally identified this scene as a depiction of Luli fleeing from Tyre at Sennacherib’s approach. However, Gallagher (1999: 128, also 1997: 52–53 n. 56) dissents from this interpretation: People assert that this city is Tyre, but Layard’s descriptions make this identification impossible. The continuation of the scene showed the city under attack; captives were taken from it, and the general setting was mountains covered with pines. Since Tyre was not attacked and captured in 701, nor was it on a mountain with pines, we clearly have to look elsewhere to identify the city. He then suggests that the city depicted on Slabs 15–16 may be Jaffa based on the fact that this is the sole coastal city mentioned in Sennacherib’s royal inscriptions as being forcibly conquered in 701 BCE, and that Jaffa’s location on a hill looking out onto the Mediterranean Sea is topographically consistent with the portrayal of the city in the pertinent reliefs (Gallagher 1999: 128). But Gallagher’s objections to the identification of the city on Slabs 15–16 as Tyre rest on incorrect assumptions. While the upper portion of Slab 18 indeed portrays a wooded mountainous setting, this does not necessarily reflect anything of the specific location of the city depicted. In a 2011 article, I demonstrate that the mountainous background employed in depictions of Sennacherib’s third campaign is a visual convention used to denote the topography of the west in general (Jeffers 2011: 94–96). Various mountain ranges run parallel to the Mediterranean coastline of Syro-Palestine several miles inland from the shore. On the various reliefs depicting this region, the

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action is presented in multiple registers with the mountains appearing only at the tops of the slabs. All of the Assyrian military operations would have occurred in the wide-open spaces of the low-lying valleys of Syro-Palestine, which is visually depicted through the use of multiple registers in the reliefs. The mountains themselves, however, are a distant feature of the terrain in third-campaign relief depictions and are used as a convention for indicating Syro-Palestinian geography generally. Gallagher’s second assertion, that Tyre was not captured in 701 and that the city depicted in the reliefs cannot therefore be Tyre, is more interesting. Certainly, Gallagher is a staunch proponent of the historical reconstruction presented above that Tyre did not capitulate when Sennacherib invaded Phoenicia, but his argument is myopically focused on the historical reality of what “actually” happened during the invasion. He ignores entirely the manner in which the Assyrians themselves treated the events of that year in the combined corpora of the inscriptions and the palace reliefs. The correct identification of the Phoenician city depicted on Sennacherib’s palace reliefs becomes clear when the royal inscriptions are correlated with the visual program of the Southwest Palace. The analysis presented above describes three subtle but significant changes that occur in Sennacherib’s accounts of his attack on Phoenicia over several years. The initial account simply states that Luli fled into the midst of the sea, after which the royal inscriptions add that he disappeared, that he fled to Cyprus, and finally that he fled from Tyre. Although these changes to the record of events are revealing with regard to the historical evolution of Assyria’s relationship with Tyre, there is a marked distinction in which types of royal inscriptions contain these modifications: this difference reveals the scribes’ propagandistic intentions in carving the relief program of the palace. The royal inscriptions in the form of foundation documents, which were written on prisms and cylinders intended for burial, only contain the update that Luli disappeared after he fled into the sea. Even after the situation with Tyre had changed and other inscriptions mention Luli’s flight from Tyre to Cyprus, the later foundation documents are never revised to include this information. References to Luli’s flight to Cyprus, and then to his flight from Tyre, in fact appear only in the royal inscriptions inscribed on the bull colossi of the palace. This update to the Phoenician account on the bull colossi alone suggests an intentional attempt to coordinate the bull colossi text with the visual program of the palace within which they were situated.



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The above interpretation is supported by the placement of these colossi in the palace. The first pairs of bull colossi to mention Luli’s flight to Cyprus (Grayson and Novotny 2014 text no. 42) were emplaced in doors d (Fig. 11.8) and e of Room I (the throneroom) of the palace, and these two doorways connect Room I with Rooms III and V respectively (Fig. 11.10). Scholars have noted that the topics of the reliefs in these rooms were purposefully chosen to promote Sennacherib as “king of the four corners of the world.” Together, they contain depictions of his first five campaigns, which encompassed the geographical extent of Assyria at that time: Room III has depictions of Sennacherib’s first campaign to Babylonia; Room V contains his second campaign to the eastern Zagros; and Room I contains his third campaign to the west and his fifth campaign to the north (Frahm 1997: 125; Russell 1998: 43; Nadali 2008: 480–83). In their spatial situation within the palace, the inscriptions on the bulls are vital to the ideological program of the throneroom suite in that they connect and coordinate all of the visual representations of these rooms with the written propaganda. The bulls in doors d and e of Room I contain a summary of the first five campaigns of Sennacherib, matching the visual topics of all three rooms. Moreover, the summary inscription of the five campaigns recorded on the bull colossi is quite short; all five campaigns are together described in a total of ten lines. It seems the scribes specifically selected the king’s major accomplishments from the campaigns so that this inscription would correlate directly to the relief programs, though a full exploration of this possibility is unfortunately rendered impossible by damage to and the loss of a majority of the reliefs’ epigraphs. It can be no coincidence that the summary inscription on these two pairs of bulls highlights both Sennacherib’s defeat of Ukku during Sennacherib’s fifth campaign and his assault on Luli, forcing the latter’s flight to Cyprus, and that both of these visual programs appear in Sennacherib’s throneroom. Slabs 1–4 show the defeat of Ukku, an interpretation confirmed by an epigraph, and Slabs 14–18 depict Phoenicians fleeing en masse from a city on the shore, leaving little doubt that this is a representation of Luli escaping Sennacherib’s onslaught, even though there is no epigraph for confirmation. The identification of the city on Slabs 15–16 is directly linked to the account of Luli fleeing to Cyprus, a city that was under the hegemony of Tyre, in the bull inscriptions. The city on the seashore, then, is in fact Tyre. This identification is also buttressed by the account of the Bull 4 inscription (Fig.

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11.9). This inscription, which has a significantly longer historical narrative than that of the other bulls, is the first and only royal inscription to mention Tyre by name in Sennacherib’s account of his campaign to Phoenicia in 701 BCE. It is no accident that the pair of bulls bearing this inscription—written about a year after the bulls in doors d and e and recording Sennacherib’s first six campaigns—was placed in one of the most prominent locations in the palace: the two bulls flank the grand entrance to the throneroom itself (Fig. 11.10). As with the other bulls, the emplacement of the Bull 4 inscription in Sennacherib’s Southwest Palace directly connects the textual account of Luli fleeing from Tyre to the Phoenician scene depicted on Slabs 14–18 of the palace reliefs (briefly noted already in Jeffers 2011: 96 n. 24). The inscriptions on these pairs of bulls thus provide examples of text and image working together within the confines of a particular space to assert a powerful propagandistic message. With the strong evidence provided by the correlation of textual and visual sources that the city depicted in this relief program is Tyre, the representation of that scene takes on a striking new significance. The historical reconstruction presented in the previous section makes it unlikely that Sennacherib attacked Tyre in 701 BCE. But, even if he had, he could not have besieged the city and conquered it in the same manner as other locations in the west since Tyre was a fortified island city on an island in the Mediterranean, making it impervious to such assaults. And yet the Assyrian artists employed the same visual conventions used throughout thirdcampaign reliefs in order to visually associate Tyre’s submission to Assyria with that of the cities he had actually conquered in his 701 invasion. Strict historical accuracy was not the goal for the depiction of the city or the Assyrian engagement with it. Still, while the city itself is not depicted as being surrounded by water, the artisans expertly utilized the architecture of the palace to convey that Assyrian troops were indeed on an island. Slabs 14–18 were located in the northeastern corner of Sennacherib’s throneroom, and were separated from the other relief programs by doorway d to the left of Slab 14 and doorway c to the right of Slab 18. Architecturally and spatially, then, these reliefs occupied an “island” within the throneroom, and so represented a fitting location for the depiction of events at Tyre. It is clear in the photograph of Slab 18 that the registers containing Assyrian troops and captives only occupy the left two-thirds of the slab, leaving a gap from the end of those registers to the point where the slab abuts the bull colossus in

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11.10 Detail of Sennacherib’s Throneroom Suite in Southwest Palace at Nineveh. Following Layard’s ground plan (1853b: pl. 71) with additions by author indicating locations of Slabs 14–18 of throneroom and bull colossi bearing pertinent historical inscriptions

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the doorway. This space appears to be filled with numerous vertical lines that could be a representation of water (compare the vertical river on Russell’s Slab 23 of the throneroom; Russell 1998: 47 fig. 29; 100–101 pl. 63), though this identification must remain uncertain due to the distance of the slab from the photographer and the perspective of the photo. If correct, the scene on the reliefs would have been encapsulated by water on Slab 14 to the left and by water on Slab 18 to the right, thus visually situating the entire program on an island. However, even if this is not the case, the negative space created by doorway c to the right of Slab 18 functions as a visual divider, separating this scene from the other third-campaign depictions on the eastern wall by “water.” Either way, the artisans isolated Tyre’s visual program in order to portray the city on an island, even if they also employed standard third-campaign conventions of Assyrian troops besieging the city as a ploy to visually subsume Tyre’s “conquest” within the narrative of Sennacherib’s 701 BCE victories. Given the likelihood that Tyre ultimately yielded, however belatedly, to Assyria, the royal scribes appear to have seized this opportunity to essentially rewrite history and include Tyre as a target of Sennacherib’s conquest in 701, projecting Tyre’s submission to the Assyrian king back into the year in which he had conquered all the other areas along the Mediterranean coast. The Assyrian (re-)construction of Sennacherib’s campaign to Phoenicia was thus pictorially as well as verbally materialized in the same space: the palace artisans carved a scene of Sennacherib forcing Luli to flee Tyre during his 701 BCE western campaign in the very same room in which the scribes situated the only inscriptions that associate Tyre with the military activities carried out during that campaign. The fact that the Assyrians did not actually subjugate the city in 701, at the time the other Phoenician cities were conquered, is irrelevant. It was the state’s ideological imperative to present the singular narrative that every military advance of the king into Phoenicia was successful, even if this narrative was historically inaccurate and Tyre, in reality, remained defiant for several years after the 701 invasion.

The Assyrian Conquest of History Through Text and Image The case study presented in this chapter is important in that it reveals some of the strategies employed by the scribal elite to maintain a favorable image of the king. In the earliest royal inscriptions dealing with Sennacherib’s invasion of Phoenicia, the scribes pretended that the embarrassment



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of Tyre’s resistance to Assyrian authority did not exist, leaving this episode out of the official record of the king’s military activities. Then, after the situation changed and Tyre was likely once again under Assyrian control, the scribes pretended that the embarrassing Tyre episode had never happened and reported its submission as a historical component of the 701 campaign. In this way, the Assyrians ignored historical “reality” to gloss over the Tyre escapade in the inscriptions until Tyre’s status vis-à-vis the Assyrian empire was properly realigned with the latter’s interests and was once again congruent with its political ideology of unmitigated domination. At that point, both text and image were deployed in the center of Assyria’s power base— the king’s throneroom itself, where the largest number of potential audiences, both primary and secondary, for the propaganda would converge (Winter 1983: 27–28)—in order to project Tyre’s current standing with Assyria back into the 701 campaign, thus updating the king’s “curriculum vitae” and reinforcing the carefully crafted propaganda of Sennacherib’s absolute victory. The import of this case study does not lie in the addition of yet another city to the long list of locales conquered by Sennacherib, despite Tyre’s significance as such. It represents instead something greater, a type of conquest of history, undertaken for the sole purpose of preserving Assyria’s image of invulnerability against the rebellious enemy and presenting the king in the most favorable light to the gods. The message: Sennacherib made Tyre submit in 701 BCE during his third campaign, along with all the other cities he conquered, and there never was any successful resistance to Assyrian might. This is the true power of the Assyrian propaganda machine. Truth could be and was successfully obfuscated, and history itself bent and conformed to its will. Text and image were intertwined subtly but purposefully in order to create an irrefutable portrayal of military supremacy. In this way, the elites presented Assyria as a paragon of power, achieving this status through military dominance and the instillation of fear into its opponents. The enemy’s only options were surrender or subjugation: its defeat, regardless of its choice, was inevitable. And the greatness of Assyria’s empire was ultimately manifest in a single figure: the king. He was the invincible leader who was dauntless in battle and quick to rush into the fray, though his person always remained physically unscathed. Operating under divine command and divine protection, he was the agent who transformed all the peoples of

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Mesopotamia into his subjects as he expanded the borders of the empire to the greatest extent possible. He was the embodiment of authority, power, and victory—everything that represented the might that was Assyria. NOTES:

11.1 This exploration of text and image is dedicated to Holly Pittman, who has played a central role in training several generations of philologists (I among them) in the value of looking closely and carefully at the visual arts and artifacts of the ancient Near East.

REFERENCES Bagg, Ariel. 2007. Die Orts- und Gewässernamen der neuassyrischen Zeit. Teil 1: Die Levante. Répertoire Géographique des Textes Cunéiformes, Band 7/1. Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag. Bagg, Ariel. 2016. Where is the Public? A New Look at the Brutality Scenes in Neo-Assyrian Royal Inscriptions and Art. In Making Pictures of War: Realia et Imaginaria in the Iconology of the Ancient Near East, ed. Laura Battini, 57–82. Archaeopress Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology 1. Oxford: Archaeopress Publishing. Barnett, Richard. 1956. Phoenicia and the Ivory Trade. Archaeology 9/2: 87–97. Barnett, Richard. 1969. Ezekiel and Tyre. Eretz-Israel 9: 6–13. Barnett, Richard, Erika Bleibtreu, and Geoffrey Turner. 1998. Sculptures from the Southwest Palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh. 2 vols. London: British Museum Press. Begg, Christopher and Paul Spilsbury. 2005. Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary. Vol. 5. Judean Antiquities Books 8–10. Leiden: Brill. Botta, Paul Emile, and Eugène Flandin. 1849. Monument de Ninive I. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale. Collins, Paul. 2014. Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Violence: Warfare in Neo-Assyrian Art. In Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art, ed. Brian Brown and Marian Feldman, 619–644. Boston: De Gruyter. Fales, Frederick Mario. 2009. Art, Performativity, Mimesis, Narrative, Ideology, and Audience: Reflections on Assyrian Palace Reliefs in the Light of Recent Studies. KASKAL 6: 237–295. Frahm, Eckart. 1997. Einleitung in die Sanherib-Inschriften. Archiv für Orientforschung, Beiheft 26. Wien: Instituts für Orientalisktik der Universität. Frahm, Eckart. 2001. Lulî. In The Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Vol. 2, Part II: L-N, ed. Heather Baker, 668–669. Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project.



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Frame, Grant. 2006. The Tell ʿAcharneh Stela of Sargon II of Assyria. In Tell ʿAcharneh 1988–2004: Rapports Préliminaires sur les Campagnes de Fouilles et Saison d’Études, ed. Michel Fortin, 49–68. Subartu 18. Turnhout: Brepols. Frankenstein, Susan. 1979. The Phoenicians in the Far West: A Function of Neo-Assyrian Imperialism. In Power and Propaganda: A Symposium on Ancient Empires, ed. Mogens Larsen, 263–294. Mesopotamia 7. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. Fuchs, Andreas. 2011. Assyria at War: Strategy and Conduct. In The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture, ed. Karen Radner and Eleanor Robson, 380–401. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gallagher, William. 1997. Room I, Slabs 14–18 of Sennacherib’s Palace: Not a Depiction of Tyre. Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires 1997/2: 52–53, note 56. Gallagher, William. 1999. Sennacherib’s Campaign to Judah: New Studies. Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East 18. Leiden: Brill. Grayson, Albert Kirk. 1981. Assyrian Royal Inscriptions: Literary Characteristics. In Assyrian Royal Inscriptions: New Horizons in Literary, Ideological, and Historical Analysis. Papers of a Symposium Held in Cetona (Siena) June 26–28, 1980, ed. Frederick Mario Fales, 35–47. Orientis Antiqui Collectio 17. Rome: Centro per le Antichità e la Storia dell’Arte del Vicino Oriente. Grayson, Albert Kirk. 1987. Assyrian Rulers of the Third and Second Millennia BC (to 1115 BC). The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Assyrian Periods 1. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Grayson, Albert Kirk. 1991. Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC I (1114–859 BC). The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Assyrian Periods 2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Grayson, Albert Kirk, and Jamie Novotny. 2012. The Royal Inscriptions of Sennacherib, King of Assyria (704–681 BC), Part 1. The Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period 3/1. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Grayson, Albert Kirk, and Jamie Novotny. 2014. The Royal Inscriptions of Sennacherib, King of Assyria (704–681 BC), Part 2. The Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period 3/2. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Holloway, Steven. 2002. Aššur is King! Aššur is King! Religion in the Exercise of Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 10. Leiden: Brill. Jacoby, Ruth. 1991. The Representation and Identification of Cities on Assyrian Reliefs. Israel Exploration Journal 41: 112–131. Jeffers, Joshua. 2011. Fifth-campaign Reliefs in Sennachierb’s “Palace Without Rival” at Nineveh. Iraq 73: 87–116.

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Jeffers, Joshua. 2013. Tiglath-pileser I: A Light in a “Dark Age.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania. Katzenstein, H. Jacob. 1973. The History of Tyre: From the Beginning of the Second Millennium B.C.E. until the Fall of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 538 B.C.E. Jerusalem: The Schocken Institute for Jewish Research of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Kertai, David. 2015. The Architecture of Late Assyrian Royal Palaces. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Layard, Austen Henry. 1849. Nineveh and its Remains. Vol. 2. Third Edition. London: J. Murray. Layard, Austen Henry. 1853a. The Monuments of Nineveh. From Drawings Made on the Spot. First Series. London: John Murray. Layard, Austen Henry. 1853b. The Monuments of Nineveh; Including Bas-Reliefs from the Palace of Sennacherib and Bronzes from the Ruins of Nimroud. From Drawings Made on the Spot, During a Second Expedition to Assyria. Second Series. London: John Murray. Leichty, Erle. 2011. The Royal Inscriptions of Esarhaddon, King of Assyria (680–669 BC). The Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period 4. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Liverani, Mario. 1979. The Ideology of the Assyrian Empire. In Power and Propaganda: A Symposium on Ancient Empires, ed. Mogens Larsen, 297–317. Mesopotamia 7. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. Liverani, Mario. 2017. Assyria: The Imperial Mission. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Müller, Karl. 1937. Das assyrische Ritual. Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatisch-aegyptischen Gesellschaft 41/3. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs Verlag. Na’aman, Nadav. 1998. Sargon II and the Rebellion of the Cypriote Kings Against Shilṭa of Tyre. Orientalia, New Series 67: 239–247. Na’aman, Nadav. 2001. The Conquest of Yadnana According to the Inscriptions of Sargon II. In Historiography in the Cuneiform World. Proceedings of the XLVe Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Part 1, ed. Tzvi Abusch, Carol Noyes, William W. Hallo, and Irene Winter, 357–363. Bethesda: CDL Press. Na’aman, Nadav. 2006. Eloulaios/Ululaiu in Josephus, Antiquities IX, 284. Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires 2006/1: 5–6, note 6. Nadali, Davide. 2008. The Role of the Image of the King in the Organizational and Compositional Principles of Sennacherib’s Throne Room: A Guide to the Historical Narrative and Meaning of a Specified Message. In Proceedings of the 4th International Congress of the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East. 29 March–3 April



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2004, Frei Universität Berling. Vol. 1. The Reconstruction of Environment: Natural Resources and Human Interrelations Through Time. Art History: Visual Communication, ed. Hartmut Kühne, Rainer Czichon, and Florian Kreppner, 473–493. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Nadali, Davide. 2016. Images of War in the Assyrian Period: What They Show and What They Hide. In Making Pictures of War: Realia et Imaginaria in the Iconology of the Ancient Near East, ed. Laura Battini, 83–88. Archaeopress Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology 1. Oxford: Archaeopress Publishing. Novotny, Jamie, and Joshua Jeffers. 2018. The Royal Inscriptions of Ashurbanipal (668– 631 BC), Aššur-etel-ilāni (630–627 BC), and Sîn-šarra-iškun (626–612 BC), Kings of Assyria, Part 1. The Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period 5/1. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Olmstead, Albert. 1923. History of Assyria. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Oppenheim, A. Leo. 1960. The City of Assur in 714 B.C. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 19: 133–147. Parpola, Simo and Kazuko Watanabe. 1988. Neo-Assyrian Treaties and Loyalty Oaths. State Archives of Assyria 2. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. Paterson, Archibald. 1912–1913. Assyrian Sculptures: Palace of Sinacherib. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Pongratz-Leisten, Beate. 2015. Religion and Ideology in Assyria. Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records 6. Boston: De Gruyter. Radner, Karen. 2003–2004. Salmanassar V. in den Nimrud Letters. Archiv für Orientforschung 50: 95–104. Radner, Karen. 2010. The Stele of Sargon II of Assyria at Kition: A Focus for an Emerging Cypriot Identity?. In Interkulturalität in der Alten Welt: Vorderasien, Hellas, Ägypten und die vielfältigen Ebenen des Kontakts, ed. Robert Rollinger, Birgit Gufler, Martin Lang, and Irene Madreiter, 429–449. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Reade. Julian. 1979. Ideology and Propaganda in Assyrian Art. In Power and Propaganda: A Symposium on Ancient Empires, ed. Mogens Larsen, 329–343. Mesopotamia 7. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. Russell, John Malcolm. 1991. Sennacherib’s Palace Without Rival at Nineveh. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Russell, John Malcolm. 1998. The Final Sack of Nineveh: The Discovery, Documentaiton, and Destruction of King Sennacherib’s Throne Room at Nineveh, Iraq. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sano, Katsuji. 2016. Die Repräsentation der Königsherrschaft in neuassyrischer Zeit: Ideologie, Propaganda und Adressaten der Königsinschriften. Studia

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Mesopotamica 3: 215–236. Tadmor, Hayim. 1981. History and Ideology in the Assyrian Royal Inscriptions. In Assyrian Royal Inscriptions: New Horizons in Literary, Ideological, and Historical Analysis. Papers of a Symposium Held in Cetona (Siena) June 26–28, 1980, ed. Frederick Mario Fales, 13–33. Orientis Antiqui Collectio 17. Rome: Centro per le Antichità e la Storia dell’Arte del Vicino Oriente. Tadmor, Hayim. 1997. Propaganda, Literature, Historiography: Cracking the Code of the Assyrian Royal Inscriptions. In Assyria 1995. Proceedings of the 10th Anniversary Symposium of the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, Helsinki, September 7–11, 1995, ed. Simo Parpola and Robert Whiting, 325–338. Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project. Tadmor, Hayim. 1999. World Dominion: The Expanding Horizon of the Assyrian Empire. In Landscapes: Territories, Frontiers and Horizons in the Ancient Near East. Papers Presented at the XLIV Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Venezia 7–11 July 1997. Part I: Invited Lectures, ed. Lucio Milano, Stefano de Martino, Frederick Mario Fales, and Giovanni B. Lanfranchi, 55–62. Padova: Sargon. Veldhuis, Niek. 2011. Levels of Literacy. In The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture, ed. Karen Radner and Eleanor Robson, 68–89. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wäfler, Markus. 1975. Nicht-Assyrer neuassyrischer Darstellungen. Alter Orient und Altes Testament 26. Kevelaer: Butzon und Bercker Verlag; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag. Winter, Irene J. 1983. The Program of the Throneroom of Assurnasirpal II. In Essays on Near Eastern Art and Archaeology in Honor of Charles Kyrle Wilkinson, ed. Prudence Harper and Holly Pittman, 15–32. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Winter, Irene J. 1997. Art in Empire: The Royal Image and the Visual Dimensions of Assyrian Ideology. In Assyria 1995. Proceedings of the 10th Anniversary Symposium of the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, Helsinki, September 7–11, 1995, ed. Simo Parpola and Robert Whiting, 359–381. Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project.

12 The News from the East: Assyrian Archaeology, International Politics, and the British Press in the Victorian Age 1

David Kertai

Keywords: Austen Henry Layard; Assyria; Near Eastern archaeology; British Museum; Ottoman Empire; Mosul; Victorian Britain

INTRODUCTION

T

he book Nineveh and its Remains, published in January 1849 by the English archaeologist and traveler Austen Henry Layard, was an instant commercial and critical success. It offered British readers not only an arresting account of Layard’s first archaeological campaign in the Middle East, where he had been excavating the ancient Assyrian cities of Nineveh (Kuyunjik) and Kalhu (Nimrud), but also an introduction to the material remains of the vast Assyrian empire. This empire had spanned most of the Middle East (the ancient Near East) by the 7th century BCE but hitherto seemed to have left little material trace of its glories. The capital cities of Assyria were mostly located in the vicinity of Mosul, situated on the Tigris River in the north of modern-day Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia); during the nineteenth century, this region was part of Ottoman territory and of considerable political as well as archaeological interest for European powers including Britain and France. The majority of the objects excavated by Layard would ultimately be transported to London and put on public display in the British Museum, where they aroused much popular interest, imitation, and acclaim (McGeough, this volume).

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Layard’s book is rightly considered an archaeological classic, even if it is only partially about his actual excavations. Its very lengthy subtitle, With an Account of a Visit to the Chaldæan Christians of Kurdistan, and the Yezidis, or Devil-Worshippers; and an Inquiry into the Manners and Arts of the Ancient Assyrians, highlights the broader interests of the volume and places it in the wider context of Victorian travel literature. The book is also usefully contextualized within the larger sociopolitical and individual forces at play in Victorian era Britain. Archaeological pursuits such as those of Layard, in addition to illuminating something of long-forgotten historical contexts, functioned as “an important tool for gathering intelligence and establishing and defending English interest in the eastern Ottoman Empire” (Malley 2011: 100). England generally supported the Ottoman Empire’s becoming a modernizing European state while fighting the influence of other nations, such as Russia and Persia, sometimes through military means. Various individuals also used archaeology to foster their own agendas and careers. Class mobility in Victorian Britain was possible but the class into which one was born, one’s connections, and one’s patronage were all significant to furthering one’s prospects. As Layard’s career shows, archaeological exploration could similarly be used to chart a path for oneself. Newspapers also played an increasingly important role in the social landscape of Victorian Britain, with new papers being incessantly founded for specific groups and goals. This thriving public sphere (Habermas 1962) was very influential in shaping the reception of Layard’s work (Bohrer 2003; Malley 2012; McGeough 2015). Important to note, however, is that this reception was not actually initiated upon the publication of his 1849 book, but developed out of and was molded by events and by reporting occurring during the preceding years. This chapter explores the complex relationship between Britain’s archaeological and political interests during the Victorian era (1840s), taking the Mosul area within the Ottoman Empire and the excavations of Austen Henry Layard in this region as its case study. It highlights the connections between British archaeological exploration, intelligence-gathering activities, and political interests vis-à-vis both the Ottoman Empire and France, as well as the developing public interest in scientific expeditions and in the larger world, which were being shaped and fed by the diverse constituents of the British Press.



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The News from the East in Victorian Britain The flow of information in the 1840s was, unsurprisingly, considerably different than it is in our current age. Still, foreign news, including that on the excavations around Mosul, could reach a British readership in a number of different ways. One important source of news was the specialized journal, a category including such publications as The Athenaeum, a literary magazine, and The Builder, a professional journal. While these published some letters directly received from Layard and others, they more often reported on such letters after they had been read at the meetings of learned societies such as the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). The bigger newspapers of the day, which included the Morning Post, The Times, The Standard, and The Daily News, had their own correspondents in locations such as Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul). These correspondents reported on the varied information that had been collected at their stations. They also gleaned information less officially from carefully nurtured networks of informants: letters of all sorts written in Mosul generally passed through Constantinople, which was therefore an important collection point of news. While communication was (arguably) somewhat less incessant than it is nowadays, it was still relentless: people were constantly writing and receiving letters from or to friends, family, and other individuals. With specific respect to Layard’s archaeological doings, it was indeed letters such as these that brought information directly to his patrons, friends, and family in Britain, creating a network of interested and knowledgeable individuals. Both types of report (those written by correspondents as well as various letters) were published, republished, and reported on, leading to a cascade of articles in newspapers throughout the country in the days and weeks following the appearance of an original article. Most British newspapers, indeed, did not have their own correspondents, and simply copied reports published elsewhere.

Antiquarians, Naturalists, and Politicians in Mosul and Constantinople Modern-day Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia) was part of the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century. Ruled from Constantinople, the empire was divided into a number of provinces, each overseen by a pasha

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appointed by the sultan. By the 1840s, the Ottoman Empire was both slowly losing territories and centralizing its rule. Baghdad was generally the most powerful center in the eastern part of the empire, with Basra in the south and Mosul in the north forming two important provincial centers of their own. An era of powerful local governors had already come to an end: the Mamluk rulers in Baghdad and the local Jalili family in Mosul were both supplanted, in 1831 and 1835 respectively, in favor of more direct Ottoman rule (Ceylan 2011; Hanioğlu 2008; Khoury 1997; Shields 2000). In 1798, a permanent British Residency was established in Baghdad by the British East India Company. The timing was related to Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in the same year, as fears had arisen that Napoleon might use a land route through the Ottoman Empire to attack British interests in India. In 1802, the Baghdad office was given consular status (Lloyd 1947: 4). It is worth noting that the political and the archaeological were already starting to become entangled during this time, and that Near Eastern (and specifically Assyrian) archaeology would emerge in an age in which scientific expeditions and politics were deeply and inextricably intertwined. While Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt resulted in the removal of Egyptian antiquities to the Louvre, the treaty signed after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 stipulated that France’s Arabic collectibles would form part of its war repatriations to Britain (Bazzaz 2016: 135). The Egyptian antiquities that had come to the Louvre via Napoleon’s campaign, including the Rosetta Stone, were taken to the British Museum in London, where they remain to this day. During the same period, in 1816, sculptural reliefs from the Parthenon in Athens, then still situated in Ottoman territory, were sold to the British State by Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin, the British ambassador at Constantinople from 1799–1803, who had acquired them around the turn of the century (Anderson 2015; Eldem 2011).2 These reliefs came to be known as the Elgin Marbles, highlighting the personal prestige that could be attained by acquiring or being associated with prominent antiquities. The Elgin Marbles were widely regarded as the pinnacle of art, and it was against these that the Assyrian antiquities would come to be measured. In the early nineteenth century, the highest British official in the Ottoman realm was the ambassador in Constantinople (the post held by Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin, from 1799–1803). During most of the relevant period, this post was occupied by Stratford Canning (1786–1880), who was first appointed to the position in 1809–1812, returning for stints in 1825–1827 and



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1841–1858. Canning “came to dominate the Ottoman political scene, eventually acquiring more influence than the grand viziers and foreign ministers with whom he dealt” (Hanioğlu 2008: 83–84). As ambassador, Canning was similarly (to Bruce) interested and successful in acquiring and transferring antiquities to Britain: his name came to be attached to the fragments from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the world (and considered to be another epitome of ancient art). In 1846, Canning presented the reliefs to the British Museum (Larsen 1996: 67–68), where the Elgin Marbles had been deposited as well. The British Museum, established in 1759, was at this time in the midst of constructing its new (and contemporary) accommodation. Of the British Residents at Baghdad, several, including Claudius James Rich (1786–1821) and Henry Rawlinson (1810–1895), would also come to play very prominent roles in the archaeological history of Mesopotamia. Rich was a prodigious learner of (mostly Middle Eastern) languages as a child. His talents were discovered when he applied with the East India Company at the age of seventeen, resulting in an appointment to Cairo. The story of this appointment made it into the January 13, 1804, issue of The Times, which described how “merit does not always go unrewarded.” In 1808, at the age of 22, Rich was appointed as the East India Company’s Resident at Baghdad, a position he retained until his untimely death from cholera in 1821 (Lloyd 1947: 6–16). While in Baghdad, he explored the ruins of Babylon; these were located some 85 km south of Baghdad but were not easy to reach due to political instability in the region. Rich’s explorations were first published in the Viennese journal Mines de l’Orient (Rich 1813) and republished as book in 1815 (Galter 2013: 854). Rich also engaged in explorations in the area around Mosul during four months from October 1820 onwards (Bohrer 2003: 64; Mühl 2013: 11–12; Pallis 1956: 47, 267; Reade 2016: fig. 1), the results of which were posthumously published (Rich 1836). The varied collection of Mesopotamian artifacts Rich acquired over the course of these explorations were bought by the British Museum in 1825, constituting its first collection of ancient Near Eastern artifacts (Gadd 1936: 11; Pallis 1956: 66). Henry Rawlinson, as Rich, entered the service of the East India Company at the age of seventeen, but spent the years thereafter undertaking a variety of different military roles and assignments. These assignments would eventually bring him to Persia, where he became deeply involved with the decipherment of the cuneiforms scripts (Larsen 1996: 177–88, 239–305; Pallis

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1956: 94–187). In 1843, Rawlinson became the Resident at Baghdad and in 1856–1858, he would act as the East India Company’s director. Around the start of 1840, the British appointed Christian Rassam, a member of a prosperous local Christian merchant family (Khoury 1997: 147–48), as vice-consul in Mosul. Son of the local archdeacon of the Chaldean Christians, he was married to the British Matilda Badger, sister of a chaplain of the East India Company (Brackman 1978: 66). His younger brother, Hormuzd, ultimately became Layard’s main partner during his excavations, studied at Oxford, and became a leading archaeologist in his own right (Rassam 1897). Despite Hormuzd Rassam’s important achievements, prejudice meant that his reputation was frequently attacked in his adopted England and many subsequent accounts of the beginnings of Assyrian archaeology downplayed his accomplishments (Reade 1993). The British were by no means the only European power interested in the area of Mosul, nor were they the only power for which archaeological and political interests were entwined (as already rendered apparent by the fate of Napoleon’s antiquities). In 1842, the French appointed their own vice-consul at Mosul, choosing Paul Émile Botta for the job. Botta, born in 1802 in Turin, was the son of a famous historian, studied medicine, and was trained as a naturalist. Between 1826–1829 he was the doctor on the scientific ship Héros as it explored the Americas, the Atlantic, and China (Knowlton 1984; McGovern and McGovern 1986); in 1830, he defended his Ph.D. thesis on the effects of opium, of which he was a lifelong user; and from 1836–1839, he travelled to Ottoman Yemen on behalf of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris (Bazzaz 2016). He continued collecting botanical samples while at Mosul (Fig. 12.1), but it was in his role as the first person to undertake largescale archaeological explorations of an Assyrian site that he became famous. These explorations led to the rediscovering of Khorsabad (ancient DurSharrukin), the capital of the Neo-Assyrian king Sargon II (722–705 BCE).3 Many of the Assyrian material remains recovered by Botta from Khorsabad made their way to the Louvre, where they remain on display to this day.

Nineveh in European Memory, Imagination, and Encounter The city of Nineveh was well known among educated Europeans of the nineteenth century due to Nineveh’s mention in the Bible. As the last capital of the Assyrian Empire, whose kings had conquered Israel in the seventh century BCE, Nineveh was portrayed as remarkable but also as a symbol of



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12.1 Ranunculus asiaticus (buttercup) collected by Botta near Mosul. Courtesy Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris (MNHNP-P00164998) (see also color insert)

decadence. The city was described in the Book of Jonah (3:3) as “a threeday journey in extent.” Also according to the Biblical accounts, Nineveh had been destroyed by the wrath of god. This resulted in the assumption “that the great edifices and monuments which had rendered Nineveh one of the most famous and magnificent cities of the ancient world had perished with her people, and like them had left no wreck behind.” (Layard 1903a: 306). This assumption seemed supported by the dearth of known Assyrian antiquities, or indeed of significant material remains of any sort. Most archaeological sites known in the early 1800s, including Greek temples, Egyptian pyramids, and the Achaemenid remains at Persepolis, were made of stone and could be seen, interacted with, and otherwise

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recorded by any visitor. Such remains were, however, mostly unknown from ancient Mesopotamia. Instead, ancient place names were associated with the hills dotting the landscape. With the arrival of Europeans interested in acquiring antiquities, the pace of objects emerging from these hills increased, leading to speculation that significant antiquities from the ancient cultures that had once occupied this region had survived. Among the ancient place names that had survived was Nineveh, which was associated with the mounds opposite Mosul. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the location of Nineveh was widely known locally, had been mentioned in several Islamic accounts, and was even occasionally mentioned in the accounts of early European travelers (Bahrani 2011: 147– 48; Pallis 1956: 41–43). The area consisted of two major mounds: Kuyunjik and Nebi Yunus. Given the widespread assumption that Nineveh had been destroyed, one early visitor, James Silk Buckingham (1786–1855), marveled at the surviving mounds: “it [was a] matter of wonder that its [Nineveh’s] ruins are still to be seen” (Buckingham 1827: 307). Besides being a traveler, Buckingham was also a serial founder of journals (among them The Athenaeum in 1828, which he sold after a few weeks), and resident of India until his expulsion for criticizing the East India Company. Kuyunjik had indeed already been described as Kalla Niniya, “Castle of Nineveh,” by Carsten Niebuhr, who visited the site in March 1766 and who was the only one of six members to return from the Danish Arabia Expedition (1761–1767). Kalla Niniya included the village of Koindsjug, described by Layard as the Turkish name for what the Arabs called Armousheeah (Layard 1849a: xxiv). This seems to be the same mound known to Buckingham (1827: 309, 299) as Tal Hermoosh, which he described as a large mound located along the Khosr River between Nebbé Yunus and Tal Ninoa.4 A Mill of Armush appears on Jones’ map of 1852 (Reade 2016: fig. 2-35) on the plain east of the mound along the Khosr River. Niebuhr described the second mound (modern Nebi Yunus) as the location of the village of Nuniya, which was already renowned as the site of the tomb of Jonah. The village of Nuniya was elsewhere referred to as Nunia (Kinneir 1813: 258) and as Jonous Neb, Ninive, and Jonas (Aucher-Éloy 1843: 115, 207), and its tomb referenced as an important Jewish pilgrimage site (Kinneir 1818: 462). Ultimately, both the mounds of Kuyunjik and Nebi Yunus would turn out to belong to the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh. Proof of Nineveh’s



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identification, however, still awaited both significant archaeological excavations at the site and the decipherment of cuneiform. The region of Mosul, after all, was full of large ancient mounds that similarly vied for identification as Nineveh. The two other Neo-Assyrian capital cities of Dur-Sharrukin (Khorsabad), some 20 km northeast of Mosul, and Kalhu (Nimrud), some 35 km south of Mosul, for example, were also excavated early on, and both were conflated with Nineveh in early publications. Botta, the excavator of Khorsabad, famously named his publication Monument de Ninive to signal his (mistaken) assumption that Khorsabad represented Nineveh. And Layard’s own first publication, Nineveh and its Remains, was in fact mostly about his excavations at Nimrud, reflecting his mistaken assumption that ancient Nineveh had encompassed Nimrud, Mosul, and Khorsabad. Only a city of such massive size, after all, could conceivably have spanned the extent of a three-day journey, as described in Jonah 3:3, or fit the European conceptualization of it as “the largest city that ever existed in the world” (Buckingham 1827: 300).

AUSTEN HENRY LAYARD: THE PRESS, ARCHAEOLOGY, AND POLITICS Early Life and First Visits to Mosul Layard was born in Paris in 1817 and spent much of his youth in Italy. He was later taken into the orbit of his wealthy uncle Benjamin Austen, who had a law practice in Gray’s Inn (one of London’s main law offices), and was a member of the Tory establishment. Layard would incorporate his uncle’s surname into his own name and, in 1834, become an apprentice in the latter’s law firm. Henry Crabb Robinson, a lawyer and German scholar known primarily for his diaries containing vivid descriptions of the intellectual circle in which he moved, knew the Austens and would prove to be another significant influence in Layard’s life. Robinson lived on 30 Russell Square, one block from where the British Museum was being built and close to London University (now University College London), the secular alternative to Cambridge and Oxford, of which he had been a founding member. Robinson (1849) described young Layard as “a boisterous attorneys clerk, full of monkey tricks & practical jokes which I tolerated on account of his good humour & a certain strong headed plain sense.” Robinson’s

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influence on the young clerk, introducing Layard to people such as the poet Wordsworth and encouraging him to make use of his extensive library (Layard 1903a: 54–58), led Benjamin Austen to accuse Robinson of scuppering Layard’s law career (Robinson 1869: 423): [Benjamin Austen] was afterwards wont to accuse Mr Crabb Robinson of having unsettled my mind, and of having encouraged in me pursuits and tastes entirely opposed to the serious study of the law, and which led me to abandon it for a life of travel and adventure. The charge was perhaps well founded. I have no reason to regret that it was so. (Layard 1903a: 56) This accusation, if not without foundation, was also not wholly fair: Layard’s uncle was also coming to his own realization that Layard’s temperament was ill suited to a life of law. He wrote to Layard: I saw this in you from a boy…A little spice of vanity also, with much confidence in your own powers, and self-conceit in your own position (you will excuse my being frank with you), all tended to generate in you a strong desire to become more known, and a more public man that a seat in Gray’s Inn could make you. (Waterfield 1963: 92) In 1839, another uncle, Charles Layard, on a visit to London from Ceylon where he resided, suggested Layard might undertake to practice law in Ceylon and recommended one Charles Edward Mitford, who wished to start a coffee plantation in Ceylon (Layard 1903a: 99–102), as a travel partner. It was Mitford, wishing to avoid seasickness, who decided the pair would take the longer land route passing through the Ottoman Empire (Waterfield 1963: 25) rather than traveling by sea. The two travelers inquired with the Royal Geographical Society, which frequently published relevant reports of both scientific and political importance, on the best route to acquire new information on unexplored regions (Layard 1903a: 104). It was in the course of this incidental journey, then, that Layard first visited Mosul and Nimrud. The travelers arrived in Mosul on April 10, 1840, some five and a half years before Layard began his first excavations in the region (Layard 1849a: 3), and stayed only a few days before continuing towards Baghdad. Layard (1849a: 9) would later note that it was during a brief



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stop at nearby Nimrud that he first “formed the design of thoroughly examining, whenever it might be in my power, these singular ruins.” Layard would never actually reach Ceylon. He parted ways with Mitford in Persia, the vizier of which refused to give them permission to travel on their preferred route, suspecting the pair was looking for ways for the British army to march into Persia from India (Larsen 1996: 50). Instead, Layard spent almost two years with the Bahtiyari in the mountains west of Isfahan in the borderlands between the Persian and Ottoman Empires (Layard 1887). He sent a short letter on his travels to the Royal Geographical Society on December 31, 1840; the letter, which includes a discussion on the location of ancient Susa, a famous Achaemenid city, was read in one of the Society’s meetings and published in its journal in 1842.6 Amidst growing tensions between the Persian and Ottoman Empires, Layard’s knowledge of local conditions was of considerable political value, and he was dispatched to the British embassy in Constantinople. While en route, Layard passed through Mosul once more in June 1842. Here, he encountered Paul Émile Botta, who had meanwhile arrived as the French viceconsul in Mosul (Pallis 1956: 268), and Layard and Botta together explored the surrounding mounds and discussed what might be buried within them (Waterfield 1963: 88–89); the two men, one English and one French, would come to play a seminal role in the foundation of Assyrian archaeology. On July 9, 1842, Layard arrived in Constantinople and in August, he began working for Stratford Canning, the British ambassador, in an unofficial capacity (Larsen 1996: 62–64): “Canning found in the sunburned, travelworn figure [of Layard] a useful tool for dirty work unbecoming to the diplomatic aristocracy” (Malley 2011: 105). Layard’s subsequent career would demonstrate that personal talent, effort, and risk could open doors in Victorian Britain, but it also highlighted the obstacles faced by those born without aristocratic or other “proper” backgrounds: Layard, himself, despite the popular acclaim he would eventually win, continued to be regarded with suspicion and derision in institutions such as the British Museum.

Archaeological and Political Models for Layard Paul Émile Botta and Other Early Excavators in Mosul Inspired by the publications of Claudius James Rich, Jules Mohl, a German who had moved to Paris, saw opportunities for France to commence excavations in the area of Mosul (Bohrer 2003: 70–72; Larsen 1996:

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21–22; Pallis 1956: 268). Mohl’s influence in these matters stemmed from his role as the secretary of the Société Asiatique, which published the widely read Journal Asiatique. His call for excavations was incorporated into the French government’s plan to place a diplomatic post in Mosul and its selection of Paul Émile Botta for the job. Although Botta is probably the first to have excavated at Nineveh, the presence of ancient remains at the site was by no means unknown, even to Europeans. Rich (1836: 30–33, 37–45), on his visit in 1821, described antiquities found by the inhabitants of Nebi Yunus; large stones taken from the site for construction throughout the area; and the presence of architectural fragments and antiquities on Kuyunjik. Buckingham (1827: 307) also described the “many antique gems, intaglios [engraved objects], and hieroglyphic devices on stone” that had been dug up among the ruins of Nineveh, and described the search for building materials in both Tal Hermoosh (Kuyunjik?) and Nebi Yunus (Buckingham 1827: 309). And the French botanist Rémi Aucher-Éloy (1843: 202), who visited Mosul in 1834 and 1835, noted that digging at Nineveh [Nebi Yunus] by locals—already alluded to by Rich—easily led to the foundations of ancient buildings. Despite this early awareness and these earlier finds, Botta’s own excavations, begun in December 1842, proved unsuccessful (Pallis 1956: 341). A fundamental difficulty of Assyrian archaeology (and, indeed, of Mesopotamian archaeology generally) is the nature of its remains. Throughout Mesopotamia’s history, most buildings were constructed of sundried mudbricks, which weathered into mere heaps of mud over time; new mudbrick constructions were simply built atop old structures, leading to a gradual rise in longstanding occupations above the surrounding landscape. The artificial hills or tells arising from long-inhabited cities were used by successive peoples as bases for their own settlements. Unfortunately for the early history of archaeology in Mesopotamia, the recognition of original mudbrick architecture within these tells was beyond the capacity of the earliest archaeologists.7 Early excavations, as mining operations, instead used tunnels to penetrate the tells at an elevation where interesting remains were expected. In the context of the Neo-Assyrian cities, archaeological success was measured by the discovery of stone sculptural monuments, either in the round (as the palace colossi, monumental winged lion and bull sculptures [McGeough, this volume]) or in relief (as the alabaster orthostat reliefs bearing pictorial compositions and affixed to the walls of mudbrick palaces [Jeffers;



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Feldman, this volume]). Important Mesopotamian sites such as the Assyrian cultic center of Ashur and the southern Mesopotamian city of Babylon, had to await advances in archaeological technique occurring at the end of the nineteenth century before sense could be made of their mudbrick architecture. Having failed to uncover anything of note at Nineveh, Botta shifted his excavations to the site of Khorsabad, where he began digging on March 20, 1843 (Bohrer 2003: 71). At Khorsabad, he achieved immediate success in discovering an Assyrian palace lavishly decorated with stone orthostat reliefs, which had been fixed to the interior walls of the Neo-Assyrian palaces and were easy to follow once found. Such reliefs also occurred at Nineveh (where they would be discovered by Layard) but were significantly easier to find at Khorsabad as they were there located immediately below the surface of the site due to a lack of later occupation layers; the palace was abandoned after the death of Sargon II, the Neo-Assyrian king who had been responsible for Khorsabad’s foundation. Botta described his results in letters sent to Mohl. These were published in the Journal Asiatique and read at the meetings of the Académie des Belles Lettres in Paris. From April 1843 to October 1843, letters were received on a monthly basis (excepting May); a last letter was read on January 1844.8 As Botta lacked the services of an artist to document the finds he was making, he was left to complete his own rudimentary sketches, which he sent out along with his letters. Botta’s letters appear to have been picked up in the British press for the first time in 1843: The Athenaeum publishing a short report on June 25, 1843 following an article in the Parisian English language newspaper Galignani’s Messenger. While only one paragraph long, it mentioned Botta’s success in finding a palace with reliefs and inscriptions and the French government’s sending of money to Botta. Typical for such reports was their republishing by other papers over a span of weeks. The Derbyshire Courier, for instance, was still publishing the same short report seven weeks later on August 12. In its July 8, 1843, issue, The Athenaeum published a translation of Botta’s first letter, sent on April 5 from Mosul. Botta’s second letter was published in the July 29 issue of The Athenaeum, which added, “we are happy to know…that he [Botta] has overcome the prejudices of the people.” The basis for this assessment remains unclear, as Botta’s excavations were still plagued by problems at least partially of his own making (he was working

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without official permission [firman]). Unsurprisingly, given these conditions, the Pasha of Mosul forced Botta to stop his work in early October, 1843. Mohammed Pasha argued that Botta’s excavation house at Khorsabad was in fact a fortress, with the archaeological trenches comprising part of a fortification system. Botta wrote to the French ambassador in Constantinople, who tried to pressure the Ottoman government into ameliorating the situation, and a firman was finally given in late 1843, allowing Botta to continue excavations. Bell’s Weekly Messenger (December 23, 1843) added that a Turkish officer was to be present in case treasures were found. This was not unlike the previous situation in which Mohammed Pasha had sent his own men to supervise the excavation. The firman’s arrival, fortunately for the documentation of Botta’s work, was accompanied by that of the artist Eugène Flandin in May 1844 (Larsen 1996: 28–29). Flandin, born in Naples in 1809, was already well known for his monumental six-volume Voyage en Perse, his travel account to Persia (Flandin and Coste 1840–1841). Articles on Botta’s work continued to be published in the British press in the following years. Layard, through his own interests in archaeology and his connections with the British Embassy at Constantinople, played an important role in the dissemination of news on this work; he had indeed been given permission from Botta both to read and report on the latter’s letters, which passed through Constantinople on their way to France (Layard 1903b: 107–108). Layard’s varied tasks at Constantinople, in service of Stratford Canning’s political and diplomatic ends and his own, included functioning as a correspondent, writing for newspapers such as the Morning Chronicle and the Malta Times (Layard 1903b: 55, 102). The Malta Times, notably, had been “specifically designed and founded by Canning to foster British interests in the Eastern Mediterranean” (Bohrer 2003: 100). This information highlights, in a way that has not always been so evident, the close relationship between Layard’s work and Canning’s diplomatic interests. Layard and Botta also engaged in direct correspondence based on their mutual interests in archaeology. Botta seems generally to have been well intentioned towards Layard, trying to persuade him to come to Khorsabad to help with the excavations there: in the spring of 1843, he urged Layard to “come, I pray you, and let us have a little archaeological fun at Khorsabad” (Waterfield 1963: 113). The topic was taken up again in a letter written on June 1, in which Botta wrote: “I do not know how to draw and therefore I cannot make but bad sketches of the best preserved figures; all the rest will



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be lost…With my small share of knowledge I am unable to be as useful as you should be. Come then” (Larsen 1996: 25). Layard never did join Botta in Khorsabad, but he did write three letters for the Malta Times on Botta’s work. The first letter seems to have coincided with the end of Botta’s excavations in October 1844 (Larsen 1996: 32). This and the other two letters on Botta’s excavations were, as Layard proudly noted (1903b: 108, also 1849a: 13–15), “republished in Galignani’s Journal and in many European newspapers.” His third and last letter, for instance, was republished in The Times on January 30, 1845, and began by noting, in a fine example of British understatement, that a report on Botta’s work “may not be uninteresting.” As Layard was not generally known for his modesty, it is unsurprising that the rest of the letter was rather more effusive in tone. It introduced several topics of discussion and opinions that would dominate the discourse on the value of Assyrian antiquities in the years thereafter. It also touched more broadly on issues including local opposition to Botta’s excavations; the perseverance of the foreigner; and the value of the discoveries, though this was always judged in relation to Greek and Egyptian antiquities. Layard championed the value of Assyrian art and described the finds as “perfectly original both in design and execution.… they are immeasurably superior to the stiff and ill-proportioned figures of the monuments of the Pharoahs.…In fact, the great gulf which separated barbarian from civilized art has been passed.” Layard’s letter, when republished in The Athenaeum on February 1, 1844, was prefaced by a note stating that its author “appears to have a personal acquaintance with the antiquities recovered.”9 The arguments on the valuation of Assyrian art introduced in this article would also be used by Layard to describe his own excavations in his later books.

Layard’s Excavations in the Vicinity of Mosul Navigating Political and Archaeological Considerations Layard began his excavations in the vicinity of Mosul as an unpaid attaché of the British embassy at Constantinople, funded privately by Canning (the British ambassador), around November 5, 1845 (Layard 1903b: 156–58). As Botta before him, he started without permission from the Ottoman state and was therefore sent out by Canning as a “traveler, fond of antiquities, of picturesque scenery, and of the manners peculiar to Asia” (Larsen 1996: 70). He was also instructed to “keep clear of political and religious questions,

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and as much as possible of Missionaries, or native chiefs and tribes regarded with enmity or jealousy by the Turkish authorities” (Larsen 1996: 70). The prerogative to stay out of local politics did not make Layard’s expedition apolitical: on the contrary, it was deeply entwined with the politics of the British embassy at Constantinople, and Layard’s deliberately low profile was intended to allow him to follow local politics and to enable him to change the “inert stones [of Assyria] into imperial trophies” (Malley 2011: 108). Layard would later note that the entire trip was aimed to bridge the time until a permanent appointment at the embassy at Constantinople could be obtained (Layard 1903b: 152). Layard deliberately began excavating at the more distant site of Nimrud (though he believed this to be a part of greater Nineveh), located some 35 km south of Mosul, to avoid raising suspicions that work at the mounds opposite Mosul would certainly have aroused (Waterfield 1963: 116). A room was found on the very first day of digging, which was therefore designated Room A (Fig. 12.2). The room, and the palace to which it belonged, was located in the northwestern part of the citadel, and the palace itself was consequently called the Northwest Palace, a name it retains to the present day. Parts of a second palace, called the Southwest Palace after its location on the citadel, were also discovered that very same day (Waterfield 1963: 121). The Northwest Palace would later turn out to have been constructed in the reign of Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BCE), the king responsible for elevating the city of Kalhu (Nimrud’s Assyrian name) to the status of a Neo-Assyrian capital. Room A proved to be a storage space (approximately 7.5 x 4 meters) within one of the major reception suites located just south of the palace’s main throneroom (Kertai 2015b: 34–38). The reliefs found in Room A, as those in all storage spaces within the monumental part of the palace (Kertai 2015b: 37–40), contained only inscriptions. The decoration of the surrounding rooms had mostly disappeared due to their transport to, and reuse within, the unfinished Southwest Palace of Esarhaddon (ca. 680–669 BCE). On November 28, 1845, Layard’s workmen came upon pictorial reliefs in the Southwest Palace (Larsen 1996: 75) that “could be removed with little care and are well worth sending to England,” as Layard wrote to Canning (Waterfield 1963: 123). Layard (1903b: 160) was satisfied that his work, “employed like the veriest mole in grubbing up the earth,” as he wrote to his mother the next day, was finally leading to success. Unfortunately, it was on the very same day of these great discoveries, November 28th, 1845, that



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12.2 Floor Plan of Northwest Palace at Nineveh. Shows Layard’s original plan (Layard 1849a: plan 3, facing p. 62) overlaid by author with walls discovered or reconstructed at a later time. Rooms in black indicate the storage rooms within the central part of the palace

Mohammed Keritli Oğlu Pasha (lit. “Mohammed the son of the Crete,” an appellation reflecting his place of origin)10 ordered Layard to stop his work (Waterfield 1963: 123). A few days later, after having argued his case in Mosul, Layard returned to Nimrud to find that a fake Islamic burial had been erected atop the tell, excluding the possibility of receiving permission for further excavations (Larsen 1996: 76–78). Layard continued to work regardless, but reduced his team to a minimum to avoid suspicion (Waterfield 1963: 124). When Mohammed Pasha was replaced at the end of December 1845 by Ismail Pasha, who acted as a stopgap until Hafiz Pasha could arrive and take up his duties, the climate in which Layard was working changed somewhat (Layard 1849a: 48–49). Local resentment against his work continued and, with a still precarious situation at Nimrud, Layard promised Ismail Pasha to limit his excavations while he waited for funding and official permission

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from the Ottoman state. Guillois, the new French vice-consul at Mosul, had meanwhile applied for a firman to excavate at Kuyunjik, to the irritation of Layard (Larsen 1996: 90). The Discovery of the Palace Colossi at Nimrud Things finally improved for Layard in the beginning of 1846, when he directed his workmen to excavate the Northwest Palace from the deep gully in the north. On February 20, 1846, the head of a large statue emerged, located in what came to be known as Door a between the Throneroom and Room C (Fig. 12.2; Larsen 1996: 90). This find would feature prominently in the later discovery narrative, which focused on the surprise and astonishment of the locals. Layard knew immediately that the statue belonged to a large winged colossus with human head, similar to such sculptures as were found previously by Botta at Khorsabad. Although these were the first colossi found by Layard with their heads still attached, it is worth noting that smaller headless colossi had already been found in the preceding days in the door of Room BB (Fig. 12.3; Layard 1849a: 47). Layard had also already found the so-called Centre Bulls, another pair of colossi with missing heads, in the previous days (Layard 1849a: 47; Sobolewski 1982: fig. 4), discussing these in a letter to his mother dated to February 21, 1846 (Layard 1903b: 162–63). Notably, although this letter postdates Layard’s discovery of the big head, the new finds are not yet mentioned. By nightfall of February 20, 1846, the head of the second colossus standing in Door a’s opposite jamb had been uncovered (Fig. 12.4; Larsen 1996: 92). These finds led to great excitement in Mosul and required Layard to stop his work once more. Layard wrote Canning on February 21, 1846, describing the new finds as worthy of support and suggesting that they might even “reasonably predict that we shall far exceed the French at Khorsabad” (Larsen 1996: 92). Canning agreed with this assessment (Waterfield 1963: 135–36), responding that “the Bull—gigantic but with a human head—is the very thing for a British museum;—I presume you mean as a type of John Bull.” (John Bull was a personification of Britain sometimes taking the form of a humanoid bull.) Layard also asked Canning to make a public announcement about his finds, stating “a strong public interest in the undertaking would always be very useful” (Larsen 1996: 92). By April 6, 1846, he was able to write further to Canning that the newly discovered colossi had the body of lions “finer

12.3 Drawing of Winged Lion in Door of Room BB, Northwest Palace (Or. Dr. IV, Misc. 4). Courtesy Trustees of the British Museum

12.4 Winged Human-Headed Lion, Door a of the Throneroom, Northwest Palace (BM 118802). Layard 1849d: plate 3

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than anything found at Khorsabad” (Larsen 1996: 94). In April 1846, new lion colossi were found in what Layard assumed to be the entrance of a temple (Layard 1903b: 165–66). This would later turn out to be part of another wing of the palace, leading into Room G. As work progressed, additional colossi were found. All told, Layard would discover thirteen pairs of colossi during his first archaeological campaign (Layard 1849b: 74). These would come dominate the public imagination of Assyria in the years to come (Malley 2004). In April of 1846, Canning asked Layard to send him drawings of his finds, noting that “the more drawings the better, as they strike the eye and interest folks in England” (Russell 1997: 40). In May, he asked further for “anything else which may enable me to inspire into others the interest which we ourselves take in this enterprise” (Russell 1997: 40). While the drawings were intended to help gain support in England, they would not actually be published or become publicly accessible until June 1849 (see below).

Layard’s Discoveries: Reports and Receptions The British Press The first known mention of Layard’s work in the British press is in an edition of The Athenaeum dated February 14, 1846. The report in this case was based on an account published on January 30 in what The Athenaeum called the Gazette d’Augsbourg but which was more commonly known as the Allgemeine Zeitung. The Allgemeine Zeitung’s account was written by its Constantinople correspondent, who had sent in his report on January 1. The information must have left Mosul even earlier, but delays due to the different intermediary stations were common.11 There was still very little to report at the end of 1845, when the report was written at Mosul, beyond the fact that excavations had commenced and then been stopped by the pasha. Both the Allgemeine Zeitung and The Athenaeum focused mostly on Rouet, Botta’s successor as the French viceconsul at Mosul (Waterfield 1963: 116–17), and his discovery of the monumental Assyrian rock reliefs at Maltai in the mountains east of Mosul (Bachmann 1927). The Athenaeum was, however, able to add that the reason for the Nimrud excavation’s suspension was “the intention of the Sultan to create a Museum of Antiquities of his own.” This putative museum is also mentioned in the April 30 issue of the Allgemeine Zeitung, in an article adding that Layard’s work had been stopped in order to establish whether



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Layard’s antiquities would actually be worthy of such museum. The report on which the Allgemeine Zeitung article was based was sent from Constantinople on March 30 and, somewhat unusually, was based on letters from people who had visited Layard’s excavations (such reports by visitors were rare at this point). This report does not appear to have been picked up in the British press. These mentions of a potential Ottoman Museum of Antiquities are worth following up. Strikingly, such a museum is not mentioned in Layard’s own publications. From the first, Layard’s own aim was to send his discoveries on to England, just as Canning and Elgin had done with the reliefs from Halicarnassus and Athens respectively. Already on December 1, 1845, Layard (1903b: 161) wrote to his mother that “some day you will have the pleasure of seeing some of the fruits of my labour in the British Museum or some other public place in England.”12 The British Museum, however, had not yet shown the slightest interest in actually procuring these antiquities. In fact, the Trustees of the British Museum openly voiced their doubt about whether the Assyrian antiquities were worth collecting (Bohrer 2003: 105–31). Talk of an Ottoman Museum of Antiquities resurfaced at the end of Layard’s first campaign in May 1847 (Waterfield 1963: 175–76) and was then taken into account in Layard’s plans for a second campaign, which were written at the beginning of 1849. Layard suggested providing the museum with secondary pieces and noted somewhat condescendingly that “the Turks themselves are becoming aware, if not of the actual importance of ancient remains, at least of the interest they excite in Europe” (Malley 2012: 38). From the start, as indicated both by Layard and Canning’s private correspondences and by the newspapers, Layard’s finds were compared to those recovered by the French. Canning, for instance, wrote to the British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel on 18 April, 1846, that the British Museum “will beat the Louvre hollow” (Bohrer 2003: 102). The Times similarly noted, in its issue of February 6, 1846, that “the discoveries of M. Botta, at Horsabad [Khorsabad], are well known to the learned world. Those in which Mr. Layard is now engaged at Nimroud [Nimrud] promise to be much more interesting and extensive.” The Standard (June 1, 1846) was even more unabashed, asserting that Layard “has cut the French completely out,” a sentiment that was repeated in reports throughout the country.

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Whether Layard’s finds were indeed beating the Louvre all hollow would have been difficult to ascertain from Layard’s own descriptions. Nobody had seen the actual objects discovered from either Nimrud (Layard’s excavations) or Khorsabad (Botta’s excavations) as both Layard’s and Botta’s finds were still a few years from arriving in Europe (see below). Robinson, the diarist, disagreed with the common British sentiment when describing his visit to the Louvre on June 7, 1850: In size they [the objects from Khorsabad] are far superior to our importations. They are quite colossal, and throw ours into the shade. I speak only of the first importation. I dare say Layard brought what the [French] consul [i.e., Botta] would have despised,—small articles, remains in metal, &c. Layard’s last excavations may have been more productive. (Robinson 1869: 400) On May 5, 1846 (Larsen 1996: 99), the English finally received their firman from the Ottoman state and, a week later, articles about Layard’s work were sent by the Constantinople correspondents of The Standard (May 17 / June 1) (Fig. 12.5);13 The Times (May 13 / June 2) (Fig. 12.6); and The Daily News (May 13 / June 3). The Daily News, founded in the beginning of 1846 by Charles Dickens, was the only one to ascribe its information directly to letters of Layard, which had clearly been the source of the other anonymous reports as well. The Daily News’ report ended by opining that Layard deserved “the thanks of his countrymen for the sagacity, energy, and perseverance with which he is performing his important mission.” The Standard’s report on Layard’s work, the first to be published, was reproduced most frequently. On Friday June 12, 1846, and in subsequent days, The Standard’s report appeared all over Britain. Layard’s letters also reached the newspapers through their reading at meetings of learned societies such as the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). At the RIBA meeting of November 2, 1846, for example, George Mair read a paper titled “On an Ancient Structure existing at Al Hather [Hatra], in Mesopotamia, and on some Antiquities recently discovered by A.H. Layard, Esq., at Nimroud.” It included a letter by Layard on his finds at Nimrud. This reading was then reported in papers such as The Athenaeum, which described in its November 7, 1846 issue how the image of the winged human-headed lion “excited considerable attention and curiosity”



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12.5 The Standard (June 1, 1846). Adjusted by Author to Highlight Section on Layard’s Work

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12.6 The Times (June 2, 1846: 7). Adjusted by Author to Highlight News from Constantinople and Section on Layard’s Work

at the meeting. William Tite, who would later become the president of the RIBA, disputed the age of Layard’s finds, arguing that they were Persian rather than Assyrian. His opinions were reported in the December issue of



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The Gentleman’s Magazine. The meeting concluded with the remark that “Government had lent its aid in promoting these researches; and that eight bas-reliefs and other sculptured fragments were on their way to this country” (The Athenaeum, November 7, 1846). Of all of Layard’s increasingly numerous finds, the lion colossi from the so-called temple entrance (the name for what became known as Room G of the Northwest Palace) received the most attention in the press. The lions, indeed, are the only finds mentioned in The Standard. The more extensive article in The Daily News quotes Layard’s own description of them: A pair of winged lions with humans heads, which I have just uncovered, are truly magnificent. They form an entrance into a temple, and are about twelve feet high. The design is admirable ; the muscles and action of the limbs pourtrayed with the greatest spirit; the human head is exceedingly grand. The pair make as imposing a gateway as you could imagine, and give one the highest opinion of the knowledge and civilisation of the Assyrians. Of the gigantic monsters, lions and bulls, I have already found several. (The Daily News, June 3, 1846) How precisely information reached the different correspondents at Constantinople remains unclear. Given that the reports primarily assign credit to Layard rather than Canning, who was officially Layard’s superior, it is unlikely that it was Canning who was responsible for passing on information to the correspondents in Constantinople. It is possible Layard sent letters directly to individual correspondents; he certainly would have known some of them from his own time working as a correspondent in Constantinople (Layard 1903b: 102–104). Alternatively, people such as Henry Alison, the chief interpreter at the embassy, could have acted as intermediary. Before the first articles were published, Alison had advised Layard to prepare “something for the public enlightenment, and—hide neither your talents nor your labors” (Larsen 1996: 88). The timing of the newspaper reports suggests that the press had been intentionally sought out immediately after the firman was acquired. Less than two months after the news of his finds broke, the positive public reception of his discoveries in Europe had reached Layard back in Nimrud (though he had not yet heard of the impact of his excavations in Britain). He wrote to his aunt:

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The discovery is already beginning to make a noise in Europe, and every post brings me letters from people wanting information and offering (scientific) assistance. I only hope that as much interest will be excited in England as on the Continent, and that the Government will not be able to back out of the matter. (Layard 1903b: 173) The summer reports broke before Layard had received much in the way of state support for his work. The Liverpool Mail (June 6, 1846), which copied The Standard’s report (June 1), added its own hope “that measures will be speedily adopted for the conveyance of the precious relics to England” and signaled its knowledge of Iraq by stipulating that the relics “will probably have to be shipped from Bussorah [Basra].” The topic was also raised in a lengthy article in the October 10 issue of The Athenaeum, which was based on a report sent from Constantinople in September. The report mentioned Canning’s personal efforts in helping Layard and berated the British Government for its lack of support. The June 3, 1846, report in The Daily News suggested that “the announcement of his [Layard’s] discoveries will excite no small sensation at the [British] Museum, the arbiters who assign to each monument, marble or granite, its becoming place.” These “arbiters,” however, were far less enthusiastic than the article imagined (Bohrer 2003: 105–31). The Trustees of the British Museum, while they considered Assyrian objects of interest for the historical information that their inscriptions might contain (even if these were not yet deciphered) and as illustrations of Biblical history, did not regard the newly discovered objects as art in their own right, a status that was confined to antiquities from the Classical period, with the reliefs from the Parthenon and Halicarnassus, both held in the British Museum, representing its pinnacle. A similar view was held by many others (cf. Kertai 2015a: 52–55), most notably by Henri Rawlinson, the British consul at Baghdad and one of the main decipherers of cuneiform writing (Larsen 1996: 102–105). Local Reactions and Receptions Although the palace colossi discovered by Layard at Nimrud formed an important feature in the news reports of the summer of 1846, the local Arab reception to them was not mentioned. The earliest reference to this local reception seems to have appeared in The Morning Post, in the issue



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of March 8, 1847. The report had been written in Baghdad on December 27, 1846, by Longworth, the newspaper’s correspondent, after a visit to Layard’s excavations at Nimrud. Layard had met Longworth for the first time in 1839 on his first visit to Constantinople, where Longworth worked as the correspondent of The Morning Post (Layard 1903b: 45–46). The two also resided together for a few months in Constantinople, a period which Layard would later describe as “amongst the pleasantest that I spent in Constantinople” (Layard 1903b: 106). Longworth’s article introduced many of the tropes found in later reports as well as in Layard’s own books. It was also more blunt and pejorative in its account of local peoples and laborers than other accounts: Mr. Layard, on his arrival at Mosul, found everything and everybody opposed to his undertaking; the ill-will and corruption of the local authorities combined with the prejudices of the people to throw ever obstacle in his way.…the most arduous part of the undertaking appears to have been the organization of a body of labourers.…almost all of whom were idle, careless, and dishonest.…The Arabs are certainly the most excitable…they are the Irishmen of the East.…But what amused me most was the superstition of these people.…At the period when Mr. Layard discovered the colossal lions which guard the entrance of the great hall, the first thing that appeared above ground was the enormous human head of one of these monsters, at the sight of which the labourers setting up a shout of “Nimroud! Nimroud!” laid[?] down their implements and fled in every direction.…But the superstition of the Arabs proved a source of serious inconvenience for Mr. Layard. Nimrod, as you are perhaps aware [is] included[?] among the Mussulman prophets, and the Cadi and the Ulema, of Mosul…were greatly scandalized, and declared that the unceremonious way of digging up a prophet’s marbles[?] was a profanation, not to be connived at. (The Morning Post, March 8, 1847) A shorter version of this article was published in many newspapers (e.g., Liverpool Mercury on March 19, 1847 and North Wales Chronicle on March 23, 1847), offering a tamer and less explicitly pejorative account of the local reactions to Layard’s discoveries: “In the course of Mr. Layard’s excavations at Nineveh, the labourers, bringing to light a huge lion body, with a human head, fled, panic struck, and crying ‘Nimrod ! Nimrod !’ The mighty

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hunter, however, did not give chase, and after a while the men were induced to return.” Unfortunately, local responses seem only to have been preserved in western renderings, which describe them as superstitious and backward. But however inadvertently, even these descriptions suggest that locals had their own appreciation of Assyrian antiquities. This appreciation seems not to have followed the western interest in history, which detached the objects from their contemporary Ottoman context, but rather to have imbued the Assyrian antiquities with contemporary religious valuations. Correlations between Assyria and Islam, as through the Muslim prophet Nimrod, were only mentioned to exemplify superstition. Whether Longworth’s rendering of local opinion is correct cannot be ascertained but some caution is warranted as Nimrod was more generally known in Islam not as a prophet but as an idolater king who had battled the prophet Abraham.14 The seemingly widespread local objections to Layard’s work underscores the emphasis placed on its results; on the one hand it fed British national pride but on the other it was regarded as inappropriate and insensitive in its local context. It is perhaps not surprising, in light of these contrary understandings, that in British contexts “local resistance was not represented as the product of an alternative discourse, but of vice” (Anderson 2015: 457). The British Museum It was not until August 1846 that the British Museum began supporting Layard’s excavations (Bohrer 2003: 105),15 making the decision to take over the expedition and to hire Layard as its agent (Waterfield 1963: 156–58). Canning seems to have played a decisive role in this development. Unfortunately, the money allocated to the endeavor was minimal and occurred on the terms of the British Museum and Canning rather than of Layard. Indeed, the contract opened with the words, “Sir Stratford Canning has very liberally offered to the Trustees of the British Museum the results of the researches and excavations made by Mr. Layard under His Excellency’s directions in Kurdistan” (Larsen 1996: 112). Whereas the newspapers associated the Assyrian reliefs with Layard, the Trustees of the British Museum allowed Canning to reassert his agency over these artifacts, much as he had with the Halicarnassus reliefs he had ultimately turned over to the museum. Canning’s frustration at not being recognized for his role in Layard’s discoveries was rivaled by Layard’s frustrations at not being taking



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seriously by the upper echelons of British society—as represented by the Trustees of the British Museum (Larsen 1996: 108–14). In a letter to Layard, the British Museum stressed that the main purpose of his work should be saving “the Monuments of the distant past in ancient Assyria from destruction and bringing them out of their present concealment to the illustration which European knowledge may be able to throw upon their meaning and history” (Larsen 1996: 110). These instructions made clear that Layard was a mere laborer in this great endeavor and would be rewarded—or, more accurately, not rewarded—accordingly: While the Trustees calculate upon Mr. Layard’s readiness to continue on their behalf the superintendence which he has undertaken on behalf of Sir S. Canning...they think it right towards Mr. Layard to state plainly, that when the now contemplated operations in Kurdistan are brought to a close, it will be impossible for them to provide in any way for Mr. Layard’s further employment, or to assist him in any objects he may then have in view. (September 15, 1846; apud Malley 2012: 35) Layard sent his first boxes on to Britain before he was officially hired by the British Museum. On July 27, 1846, Layard wrote about having sent twelve cases on rafts to Rawlinson in Baghdad (Gadd 1936: 32–33; Layard 1903b: 172). The lack of proper tools and capacity to transport heavy objects led Layard to cut out and send only the narrative parts from the reliefs in the throneroom of the Northwest Palace at Nimrud (Layard 1849a: 140). After a delay in Basra, the cases arrived in Bombay in January 1847, remaining here until April 12 (Larsen 1996: 190–91; Waterfield 1963: 301). The members of the Royal Asiatic Society at Bombay were told: The gentleman in whose charge these magnificent relics of ‘hoar antiquity’ now are, would be happy, on the expression by the Society of a wish to that effect, to allow the community of Bombay an opportunity of inspecting them. The meeting readily acted on the suggestion; and we believe that arrangements will be at once made, with a view to the opening of the sculptures to public inspection in the beginning of the ensuing week. It is not too much to say that the exhibition will be one of the most interesting and attractive that has ever taken place on the island. (Allen’s Indian Mail, January 26, 1847)

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The Daily News reported on May 19, 1847, that HMS Grecian had arrived from Bombay the day before at Gravesend, the port at the Thames, with the first cases from Nimrud. The same newspaper, and the Morning Post, reported on June 15 that “several cases of Assyrian sculpture, intended for deposit in the British Museum, have arrived at this port [i.e., London], in the vessel Grecian, from Bombay, and have been landed from the importing ship and delivered, by the special directions of the treasury, free of duty.” The first objects were displayed in the British Museum on June 23 (Waterfield 1963: 178), and The Illustrated London News reported on these finds already on June 26. This seems to be the first time that images from Layard’s excavations appeared in the British press (Fig. 12.7). The Illustrated London News, a prominent and widely read illustrated periodical, would play an important role in reporting on Layard’s works in the following years (Bohrer 2003: 133–42; Malley 2012: 59–75; McGeough 2015: 187–98), but does not seem to have reported on Layard’s finds prior to this point. It was an important stroke of luck for Layard that his antiquities arrived in Europe before those of Botta, though the latter had been earlier excavated. The “Art Gossip” section of the Birmingham Journal noted a letter by Botta announcing his sculptures as having arrived in Baghdad on August 23, 1845. It was not until almost two years later, however, that they would arrive in Paris. Aware of this delay in the shipping of Botta’s antiquities, Layard wrote to Canning in November of 1845 that “I think we might manage to transmit some sculptures to Europe as soon if not sooner than the French. This would be very important for our reputation” (Malley 2012: 33). The Assyrian collection of the Louvre would ultimately open on May 1, 1847, after arriving at Le Havre in December 1846 (Bohrer 2003: 74–76; Gadd 1936: 20). The opening preceded the first display of Layard’s objects in London, which occurred on June 23 (Waterfield 1963: 178), by a few weeks only. On June 30, 1847, the Morning Advertiser published an effusive account of the artifacts obtained from Nimrud by Layard and transferred to the British Museum: “We congratulate our countrymen on the gratifying fact, that the British Museum has just been enriched by some valuable monumental remains obtained from Nimroud.” It continued that the monuments “are happily now our own, [they] are valuable for the light they throw on the ancient costume of the Assyrian empire.” The article further thanked Layard as “the first Englishman to appreciate their worth, and to urge on his countrymen the duty of not allowing them to be carried away by our rivals in the



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pursuit of antiquarian art.” It also acknowledged Canning “who, before the interest of the Government could be awakened, encouraged the excavations and researches of Mr. Layard at his own expense.” The Government, however, was berated for not doing more. The July 3, 1847, edition of The Builder reported on the latest meeting of the Royal Institute of British Architects, where there was read a letter by Sydney Smirke, the architect of the Reading Room of the British Museum,16 “relating to the architecture on the bas-reliefs from Nirmrood, now in the British Museum.” It asserted that “Since the Elgin marbles were brought to England, no similar arrival has occurred so calculated to excite the interest of artists and archaeologists as these Assyro-Babylonian remains, and it is most gratifying to reflect, that on this occasion we have not allowed our continental rivals to prevent England from enjoying the fruits of English enterprise.” On July 28, 1847, the Aberdeen Journal was able to add that the “Nimrood Marbles recently added to the national collection are deservedly attracting a great deal of interest.” A second shipment of 23 cases had been sent from Nimrud already on December 25, 1846 (Layard 1849a: 370–71), but it would not arrive in England until much later. The cases were moved to Basra, but were not shipped until the first months of 1848, when fifty cases had accumulated. These would ultimately arrive in London only in October 1848, after a calamitous journey on the Jumna (Gadd 1936: 42–50; Pallis 1956: 301). The boxes had also been opened in Bombay, causing considerable damage to the finds and destroying valuable information about their provenance (Layard 1849a: xii– xiii; Larsen 1996: 190–91). The removal of the palace colossi to England was especially delayed due to a lack of both proper tools and funds. Layard decided, consequently, to move two of the smaller colossi first and leave the more magnificent examples from Door a in the throneroom for later (Layard 1849b: 74). By March 22, 1847, Layard was able to write that the bull colossus from Room S was down on the banks of the Tigris awaiting transport (Layard 1903b: 177). The lion colossus from Room G was moved shortly thereafter (Fig. 12.2). Both left Nimrud on April 22 together with various palace reliefs (Layard 1849b: 103–104). The removal of the colossi was reported in the June 26 issue of The Builder, in which a letter from Layard describing his finds appeared. The publication of the article coincided with the first public display of the objects



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from Layard’s Assyrian excavations at the British Museum. Layard’s letter ended with “I hope to be enabled to send them to England. The pair would make a splendid entrance to an Assyrian museum, or ‘Hall of Nineveh.’” This prospect aroused considerable public interest. A shorter version of Layard’s letter was published in The Times on June 28, and republished by the Stamford Mercury on July 2 (albeit here with the addition of a long note highlighting Layard’s family origins in the vicinity of Stamford). During July 1847, newspapers all over Britain were repeating the short report that “among the antiquities which will be forwarded to England from the ruins of Nineveh are two large winged bulls, about ten feet square, and a pair of colossal winged lions.” Despite the hopes expressed in these articles, in October 1848, when Layard was writing the preface to his book, he lamented: The great winged bull and lion, which, I had hoped, would have speedily formed an important portion of the national collection, are still lying at Busrah [Basra]; and there is little prospect, at present, of their being brought to this country. Surely British ingenuity and resources cannot, as is pretended, be unable to remove objects which have already with very inadequate means, been transported nearly a thousand miles. (Layard 1849a: xii)

“NINEVEH” AND ITS REMAINS: PUBLISHING ASSYRIA IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY Archaeological, Economic, and Political Considerations While Layard was laboring to transport and publish his finds from Nimrud, Botta was similarly engaged with his discoveries from Khorsabad. But, just as it took longer for Botta’s finds to reach Europe than it did for those of Layard, it also took longer for the publication of his work to appear (Botta 1849–1850). Botta’s publication, unlike that of Layard, was generously supported by his government, permitting him to assemble what remains today one of the most monumental works ever to be published on Mesopotamian archaeology. Its appearance, however, was delayed by the overthrow of the French monarchy in July 1848: “Botta’s historical misfortune is to have successfully excavated the remains of an ancient king, under

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the sponsorship of a modern one, at the very moment that kingship itself [in his native France] was under attack” (Bohrer 2003: 73–74). When the 300 copies of Botta’s five-volume publication finally appeared in 1849 and 1850, moreover, only the wealthiest of citizens could afford to purchase a set. In contrast to the significant support received by Botta from the French government, the British government refused to financially assist the British Museum in publishing Layard’s work. Layard’s books were therefore published commercially by Murray, one the major publishers of the day (Bohrer 2003: 143). At Murray’s urging, Layard’s account, far from concerning itself solely with archaeological discoveries, became “a rich diet of biblical history, excavation, adventure, and salacious devil-worship,” one specifically designed to attract an avid and sensation-seeking public (Malley 2012: 48– 49). Its altered tone, dictated by the necessity of selling copies, is indicated by its lengthy subtitle “With an account of a visit to the Chaldean Christians of Kurdistan, and the Yezidis, or Devil-worshippers; and an Inquiry into the Manners and Arts of the Ancient Assyrians.” Nineveh and its Remains was published in late January of 1849 (Malley 2012: 45) and became an instant sensation (Layard 1903b: 191). On February 22, a few weeks after its publication, the diarist Henry Crabb Robinson could already describe the book as “the most popular book of the day.”17 Layard had by then returned to Constantinople as an unpaid attaché of the British Embassy (Waterfield 1963: 188) and so was unable to witness the popularity of his work firsthand. But it may have been some consolation for Layard to receive a note, on February 16, from his publisher that “If you were to stop over to England at this moment, you would find yourself famous.…I expect soon to hear…that the F[oreign] O[ffice], ashamed of their ingratitude, have given you a proper position in the diplomatic ranks” (Malley 2012: 37). This prediction indeed came to pass some two months later, when Layard was employed as a paid attaché at the embassy in Constantinople but specifically placed at the disposal of the British Museum (Layard 1903b: 190). This allowed the museum to forgo the expense of employing Layard directly. One of the first and most positive reviews of Layard’s book appeared anonymously in The Times on February 9. This was in fact written by Layard’s aunt Sara Austen at the behest of Murray (Malley 2012: 46), and successfully served its purpose: Sara’s husband Benjamin Austen described the review as being “in everyone’s mouth immediately and [as doing] more



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good than all the reviews put together” (Bohrer 2003: 153).18 The review characterized the book as “the most extraordinary work of the present age” (The Times, February 9, 1849) and praised Layard profusely. It also quoted the passage in the book detailing the discovery of the first complete humanheaded colossus (in Door a of the Northwest Palace’s throneroom) and the reaction of the local Arabs. Perhaps more importantly, it also included numerous gripes about the government, among these the complaint that the colossi of Nimrud were lying “in the mud at Busrah [Basra], waiting for a conveyance to this country, no ship in the British navy having been employed to bring any of Mr. Layard’s discoveries to this country” (The Times, February 9, 1849). This type of public exposure of the conditions of Layard’s excavations combined with intense public interest in his discoveries finally impelled the Trustees of the British Museum to assume responsibility for the transport of the colossi on April 5: Considering the interest excited by the publication of Mr. Layard’s work in respect to the Antiquities discovered at and near Nineveh, and considering that the largest and some of the most important of those Antiquities, namely the gigantic Lion and Bull, have now been deposited at Bussorah [Basra] for more than three years, and that no incidental opportunity of transporting them even to Bombay has yet occurred, it becomes the duty of the Trustees formally to represent to Her Majesty’s Government that it is most expedient that measures be forthwith taken to receive on board one of Her Majesty’s Vessels at Bussorah the Antiquities above specified and to convey the same to England. (Malley 2004: 12) It is perhaps not a complete surprise, despite this declaration, that the money required to pay for this transport was still not forthcoming. In April 1849, Edward Hawkins, the Keeper of Antiquities at the British Museum, complained to Layard that “I am in great wrath about the Bull and the Lion which alone remain at Busrah [Basra].…I am tired of waiting for the expectation that these animals may walk into the museum without our assistance” (Malley 2004: 16–17). It would take until August of 1849 for the Apprentice to finally be dispatched to Basra to collect the colossi in question (Malley 2004: 12–13); these would arrive and be installed in the museum a year later (Stauffer 2005: 371).

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CONCLUSION Mosul and its Remains: Politics, Religion, and Archaeology Despite the archaeological treasures located in its vicinity, most European travelers showed little interest in or sympathy for the city of Mosul, often ignoring or omitting it from published travel accounts. Layard himself, who lived in the city for considerable periods, is mostly silent on the city, preferring to focus on the different Bedouin tribes living in its vicinity. This may reflect, in part, something of his own interests but it is also tied into European characterizations of the Ottoman Empire as a somewhat primitive tribal society. Contemporary drawings made by westerners reflect these biases: a drawing of Nineveh by Frederick Charles Cooper (1821–ca. 1880) serves as a useful example (Fig. 12.8).19 Cooper, who trained and exhibited at the influential Royal Academy of Arts at London, accompanied Layard on his second campaign but was sent home after barely a year. In 1851, he produced a quite successful Diorama of Nineveh in London (Barnett et al. 1998: 16; Bohrer 2003: 183–84; Malley 2012: 129–39). Cooper’s Nineveh is a barren land without any agricultural activity, appearing quite different from the description of the city by modern historians (e.g., Khoury 1997; Shields 2000). Tax payments in 1830, moreover, suggest that the village of Ninua, shown in Cooper’s drawing, was among the more productive villages belonging to Mosul (Khoury 1997: 229). This contemporary landscape is only acknowledged in the oldest map of Nineveh: Rich’s survey of 1820 (Reade 2016: fig. 1), which shows Nineveh covered with agricultural lands, including groves and melon fields closer to the Tigris. Mosul seems to have had less than 50,000 inhabitants during the 1830s and 1840s, with a Christian minority of a few thousand families of different denominations and a few hundred Jewish families (Ainsworth 1840: 529; Aucher-Éloy 1843: 198; Buckingham 1827: 289–90). Western interest in Mosul was mostly restricted to its Christian minorities, and to attempts to convert them to various western denominations. As missionaries became more common during the nineteenth century, competition for converts between the different Christian denominations increased. A Dominican monastery had been established in Mosul in 1750 (Shields 2000: 47) and later attempts were made to establish new churches. Horatio Southgate (1812– 1894), a deacon of the American Protestant Episcopal Church who visited



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12.8 Watercolor, Nineveh from the North-East, 1849, by Frederick Charles Cooper (SD.255). Courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum, London (see also color insert)

Mosul in February 1838, describes Catholic France’s support for papal attempts to convert the Christians of Mosul (Southgate 1840: 258–87). The sultan did not authorize the construction of new churches in Mosul, but did give permission to divide existing Syrian Orthodox Churches in half.20 Southgate (1840: 277) recollected: “while I was in Mossoul, I could hear, when attending service on one side, the people engaged at their worship on the other.” Little sympathy existed in Anglican Britain for such Catholic endeavors. This is exemplified by an article published on the Nestorian Christian populations around Mosul in the January 25, 1844, issue of The Times. The article, written in Constantinople, describes the British fear that the Nestorians might join the Catholic realm through the efforts of Botta, the local French vice-consul, and missionaries of the pope, “that ill-used agent of France.” This fear was not unwarranted. Rémi Aucher-Éloy, a French pharmacist and botanist who travelled the Middle East collecting plants between 1831 until his death near Isfahan in Persia in 1838, spent time in Mosul in 1834 and 1835. Aucher-Éloy (1843: 205–206) noted in his travel account that Botta’s mission as vice-consul could not fail as the local Christians still considered the French to be their natural protectors. While missionaries continued to play an important role in the region, later being instrumental in bringing several Assyrian reliefs home to their

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own institutions, especially in the United States (Kelly 2011; Porter 1989; Russell 1997), the precise nature of their influence on the region was hotly debated. An example of these debates and their chief concerns can be found in the introduction to the American edition of Layard’s Nineveh and its Remains, which was written by the noted Biblical scholar Edward Robinson (1794–1863) in March 1849, only two months after the original British version had been published. Robinson began by describing the Assyrian finds as the “crowning historical discovery of the nineteenth century,” although he acknowledged that “the century as yet is only half elapsed” (Layard 1849c: iii). Robinson was, however, significantly more interested in the fate of the local Christian communities than the antiquities, and used his introduction to refute the idea that American missionaries were culprits in their demise.

Layard in Later Life, the British Press, and Assyrian Archaeology The excavations at Nineveh, and the publicizing of these through the British press and through his own books, ultimately served as a springboard for Layard’s lengthy subsequent political career; this career included periods as parliamentarian for Aylesbury and ambassador in Madrid and Constantinople. In his later autobiography, however, Layard would profess a reluctance to use the press to win public support: I have always had a dislike to newspaper publicity, and have never taken the slightest pains to conciliate newspaper writers and correspondents with a view to obtaining their praise and to influence public opinion in my favour. (Layard 1903b: 104)21 In light of the reconstruction of the news flow provided in this study, this statement seems rather disingenuous. It is striking how often the newspapers adopted Layard’s own valuation of the Assyrian antiquities he had discovered and berated both the British government and the British Museum on his behalf. News reports also placed much less emphasis on the opinions of and roles played by Canning and Rawlinson, who were the most powerful British individuals related to Layard’s work and who had their own agendas when it came to the publication of the Assyrian finds. These agendas were routinely discussed in the private letters between these three: Rawlinson was mostly interested in presenting himself as the main decipherer of cuneiform, while Canning sought credit for the excavations undertaken



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with his funding and under his authority. It is notable that, although Canning was generally recognized as instrumental in obtaining permission for Layard’s excavations, he was not otherwise acknowledged in the larger discovery narrative. What the news reports outlined above indicate is that Layard was, in fact, quite media savvy, and very adept in promulgating narratives that served to bolster his own reputation and disseminate his own views. His skill in self-promotion would have been honed by the practice he had previously gained in Constantinople of promoting Stratford Canning and Paul Émile Botta; the evidence suggests Layard adopted those same strategies that had proven so successful with respect to others to promote his own self and works around Mosul. Underlying Layard’s success in self-promotion, then, was his understanding of how newspapers actually gathered the information they published. Reports were frequently based on letters, many written by the principals involved in a particular action or by their surrogates, which were often published in full or extensively quoted. As the letters pertaining to the excavations at Nineveh were primarily written by Layard himself, he had a remarkable opportunity to act as the main reporter on his own work, interpreting his finds for a larger audience and shaping public perception thereby. The writing and receiving of letters was, at the time Layard was active, an extremely important means both of sustaining and increasing one’s network and of gathering information. Since Layard does not seem to have sent letters directly to the newspapers, he was dependent on the actions of intermediaries such as the Royal Institute of British Architects. The meetings of RIBA, which were widely reported in the papers, saw famous architects enthusiastically read out Layard’s letters, ensuring their contents a very wide distribution. Close friends and relatives, such as Layard’s aunt, also acted as advocates, surrogates, and intermediaries. These types of professional and personal networks were essential to the social fabric of Victorian Britain, and played an enormously significant role in defining the importance of Layard’s discoveries and, ultimately, in advancing his archaeological and subsequent political career. Layard’s finds would ultimately be integrated into a broader Victorian Britain success narrative, with an article in the April 19, 1850, issue of The Times including Layard’s work among the signal achievements of the day:

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12.9 Punch (May 12, 1855: 187): Layard as Bull Colossus in “Baiting the Nineveh Bull”

“This is an age of adventure. We are excavating the site of Nineveh, trying to cut the Isthmus of Panama, to discover a north-west passage, and to remove every other obstruction that presumes to interfere with the freedom of our movements.” As for Layard himself, he came in later life to be closely identified with his finds. He was variously referred to as “Nineveh Layard”



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12.10 Punch (May 19, 1855: 202): Layard as Bull Colossus in “Palmerston’s Nightmare”

(Robinson 1869: 422), as the parliamentarian from Nineveh (McGeough 2015: 131), and as the “Nineveh Bull,” and he was famously depicted as a bull colossus in Punch (Figs. 12.9, 12.10), the prominent satirical periodical founded in 1841 and circulating widely among the middle classes (Malley 2012: 119–25; McGeough 2015: 224–25, 251–55, this volume). This broad comprehensibility as caricature is perhaps the most striking testament, of all the accomplishments discussed here, to the extraordinary popular acclaim achieved by Layard and his archaeological works in Victorian Britain. NOTES:

12.1 This study is dedicated to Holly Pittman, Professor of Near Eastern art at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a generous colleague and kind friend, and she has demonstrated, throughout her career, a deep commitment to uncovering both the historical and the ongoing contemporary significance of Assyria. 12.2 For contemporary criticism of Elgin’s actions, see Tolias 2011: 82–87. 12.3 Botta was not the first naturalist to collect plants in the Mosul area. The French botanist Rémi Aucher-Éloy spent time in Mosul in 1834 and 1835. The Austrian botanist Theodor Kotschy, who became a curator at Vienna’s herbarium in 1852,

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traveled through Ottoman territories collecting specimens between 1835 and 1843, also visiting the Mosul area in 1841. 12.4 Buckingham’s description of Tal Hermoosh roughly fits Kuyunjik, but implies that his Tal Ninoa was located further to the north. 12.5 The mill is not named on Jones’ original 1852 map. It probably appears as Armousheeah—the name is illegible, but longer than Armush—on his 1855 map (Reade 2016: fig. 2) and as Armush on Smith’s version of Jones’ map in 1875 (Reade 2016: fig.3). 12.6 A much longer report on the topic was published in the same journal in 1846. 12.7 Buckingham (1827: 309) does, however, describe the presence of sundried bricks two spans long and one span deep (c. 45 x 23 cm); this is comparable in length, though not in height, to an Assyrian mudbrick. 12.8 See, for the drawings sent by Botta, Albenda 1986: pls. 1–4. 12.9 This letter is quoted by Bohrer (2003: 100) and Russell (1997: 37) as Layard’s first discussion of Assyrian art. This distinction, however, is better ascribed to his original article in the Malta Times or to its first reprinting in The Times. 12.10 Mohammed Keritli Oğlu Pasha is alternatively rendered as Giritli Mehmet (Shields 2000). 12.11 The Allgemeine Zeitung had in fact already reported on Layard in an article on Persia in its edition of February 18, 1845, which was itself based on a report by the London Geographical Society. 12.12 Layard’s book dates this letter to 1846, but the context and content suggest this to be a typo. 12.13 The first date refers to date of Constantinople dispatch; the second date refers to the date of publication. 12.14 Layard questioned the local knowledge about Nimrod: “nor did Ismail Pasha very clearly remember whether Nimrod was a true-believing prophet, or an Infidel” (Layard 1849a: 68). 12.15 The British Museum’s support was apparently not yet known when the October 10 issue of The Athenaeum was published. 12.16 Robert Smirke, Sydney Smirke’s older brother, was the main architect of the British Museum. 12.17 Robinson added that Thomas Babington Macaulay’s The History of England from the Accession of James the Second (1848) was equally, if not more, popular. 12.18 Robinson bought Layard’s book on March 13 and noted in his diaries a week later: “I have this morning been reading Layard’s Nineveh in bed. It has gained great popularity owing to favourable criticisms. I wonder where he got his learning. He has shown an industry for which no one gave him credit, though I told his mother he would turn out well when he had sown his wild oats” (Robinson 1938: 688). 12.19 The drawing was reproduced as plate 70 in Layard’s 1853 book, A Second Series of the Monuments of Nineveh. 12.20 The precise date of this story is unclear. Ainsworth (1840: 529) describes being joined in January 1840 on his route to Mosul by a Catholic bishop and priest who had gotten permission from Constantinople to divide the existing Syrian Orthodox Churches. Southgate (1840: 277) dates the splitting of churches to the year 1837. The sultan in question is either Mahmud II (1808–1839) or Abdülmecid I (1839–1861). 12.21 Layard’s comments came in reaction to his own success in promoting the views and character of Canning as a correspondent in Constantinople (Layard 1903b: 103–104).



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REFERENCES Ainsworth, William. 1840. Notes Taken on a Journey from Constantinople to Móṣul, in 1839–40. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 10: 489–529. Albenda, Pauline. 1986. The Palace of Sargon, King of Assyria: Monumental Wall Reliefs at Dur-Sharrukin, from Original Drawings Made at the Time of Their Discovery in 1843–1844 by Botta and Flandin. Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations. Anderson, Benjamin. 2015. “An Alternative Discourse”: Local Interpreters of Antiquities in the Ottoman Empire. Journal of Field Archaeology 40.4: 450–460. Aucher-Éloy, Rémi. 1843. Relations de voyages en Orient de 1830 à 1838. Paris: Roret. Bahrani, Zainab. 2011. Untold Tales of Mesopotamian Discovery. In Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914, ed. Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Çelik, and Edhem Eldem, 281–329. Istanbul: SALT. Barnett, Richard David, Erika Bleibtreu, and Geoffrey Turner. 1998. Sculptures from the Southwest Palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh. London: British Museum Press. Bazzaz, Sahar. 2016. The Politics of Secular Pilgrimage: Paul-Émile Botta’s Red Sea Expedition, 1836–39. In The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Yota Batsaki, Sarah Burke Cahalan, and Anatole Tchikine, 131–142. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Bohrer, Frederick N. 2003. Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Botta, Paul Émile. 1849–1850. Monument de Ninive, 5 vols. Paris: Imprimerie nationale. Brackman, Arnold C. 1978. The Luck of Nineveh: Archaeology’s Great Adventure. New York: McGraw-Hill. Buckingham, James Silk. 1827. Travels in Mesopotamia. London: H. Colburn. Ceylan, Ebubekir. 2011. The Ottoman Origins of Modern Iraq: Political Reform, Modernization and Development in the Nineteenth Century Middle East. London: I.B. Tauris. Eldem, Edhem. 2011. From Blissful Indifference to Anguished Concern: Ottoman Perceptions of Antiquities, 1799–1869. In Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914, ed. Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Çelik, and Edhem Eldem, 281–329. Istanbul: SALT. Flandin, Eugène, and Pascal Coste. 1840–1841. Voyage en Perse, 6 vols. Paris: Gide et J. Baudry. Gadd, Cyril John. 1936. The Stones of Assyria; the Surviving Remains of Assyrian Sculpture, their Recovery, and their Original Positions. London: Chatto and Windus. Galter, Hannes D. 2013. Am Anfang stand Babylon. Claudius James Rich und die

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Anfange altorientalischer Sammlungen. In Kultur(en). Formen des Alltäglichen in der Antike. Festschrift für Ingomar Weiler zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Peter Mauritsch and Christoph Ulf, 853–871. Graz: Grazer Universitätsverlag. Habermas, Jürgen. 1962. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü. 2008. A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kelly, Amanda. 2011. A Neo-Assyrian Relief in the Weingreen Museum of Biblical Antiquities, Trinity College Dublin—a Case Study in Artefact Acquisition. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 112C: 1–33. Kertai, David. 2015a. Imagining Second Storeys in Late Assyrian Palaces: The Architectural Reconstructions of James Fergusson and Jean-Claude Margueron. In How Do We Want the Past to Be? On Methods and Instruments of Visualizing Ancient Reality, ed. Davide Nadali and Maria Gabriella Micale. Regenerating Practices in Archaeology and Heritage 1, 49–76. Piscataway: Gorgias Press. Kertai, David. 2015b. The Architecture of Late Assyrian Royal Palaces. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Khoury, Dina Rizk. 1997. State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire: Mosul, 1540–1834. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kinneir, John Macdonald. 1813. A Geographical Memoir of the Persian Empire. London: John Murray. Kinneir, John Macdonald. 1818. Journey through Asia Minor, Armenia, and Koordistan in the Years 1813 and 1814: with Remarks on the Marches of Alexander and Retreat of the Ten Thousand. London: John Murray. Knowlton Jr., Edgar G. 1984. Paul-Émile Botta, Visitor to Hawai’i in 1828. The Hawaiian Journal of History 18: 13–38. Larsen, Mogens Trolle. 1996. The Conquest of Assyria: Excavations in an Antique Land, 1840–1860. London: Routledge. Layard, Austen Henry. 1849a. Nineveh and its Remains: With an Account of a Visit to the Chaldæan Christians of Kurdistan, and the Yezidis, or Devil-Worshippers; and an Inquiry into the Manners and Arts of the Ancient Assyrians, vol. 1. London: John Murray. Layard, Austen Henry. 1849b. Nineveh and its Remains: With an Account of a Visit to the Chaldæan Christians of Kurdistan, and the Yezidis, or Devil-Worshippers; and an Inquiry into the Manners and Arts of the Ancient Assyrians, vol. 2. London: John Murray. Layard, Austen Henry. 1849c. Nineveh and its Remains: With an Account of a Visit to



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the Chaldæan Christians of Kurdistan, and the Yezidis, or Devil-Worshippers; and an Inquiry into the Manners and Arts of the Ancient Assyrians, vol. 1. New York: G. P. Putnam. Layard, Austen Henry. 1849d. The Monuments of Nineveh. From Drawings Made on the Spot. London: John Murray. Layard, Austen Henry. 1853. A Second Series of the Monuments of Nineveh, including Bas-Reliefs from the Palace of Sennacherib and Bronzes from the Ruins of Nimroud; from Drawings Made on the Spot, During a Second Expedition to Assyria. London: John Murray. Layard, Austen Henry. 1887. Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana, and Babylonia. London: John Murray. Layard, Austen Henry. 1903a. Autobiography and Letters from his Childhood until his Appointment as H.M. Ambassador at Madrid, vol. 1. London: John Murray. Layard, Austen Henry. 1903b. Autobiography and Letters from his Childhood until his Appointment as H.M. Ambassador at Madrid, vol. 2. London: John Murray. Lloyd, Seton. 1947. Foundations in the Dust: A Story of Mesopotamian Exploration. London: Oxford University Press. Malley, Shawn. 2004. Shipping the Bull: Staging Assyria in the British Museum. Nineteenth-Century Contexts 26: 1–27. Malley, Shawn. 2011. The Layard Enterprise: Victorian Archaeology and Informal Imperialism in Mesopotamia. In Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914, ed. Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Çelik, and Edhem Eldem, 99–123. Istanbul: SALT. Malley, Shawn. 2012. From Archaeology to Spectacle in Victorian Britain. Surrey: Ashgate. McGeough, Kevin M. 2015. The Ancient Near East in the Nineteenth Century: Appreciations and Appropriations. I. Claiming and Conquering, Hebrew Bible Monographs 67. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press. McGovern, Francis H., and John N. McGovern. 1986. “BA” Portrait: Paul Émile Botta. The Biblical Archaeologist 49.2: 109–113. Mühl, Simone. 2013. Siedlungsgeschichte im mittleren Osttigrisgebiet: vom Neolithikum bis in die neuassyrische Zeit, Abhandlungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 28. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Pallis, Svend Aage. 1956. The Antiquity of Iraq: a Handbook of Assyriology. Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard. Porter, Barbara Nevling. 1989. Assyrian Bas-Reliefs at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Brunswick: The Museum.

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Rassam, Hormuzd. 1897. Asshur and the Land of Nimrod: Being an Account of the Discoveries Made in the Ancient Ruins of Nineveh, Asshur, Sepharvaim, Calah, Babylon, Borsippa, Cuthah, and Van. Including a Narrative of Different Journeys in Mesopotamia, Assyria, Asia Minor, and Koordistan. Cincinnati: Curts & Jennings. Reade, Julian E. 1993. Hormuzd Rassam and His Discoveries. Iraq 55: 39–62. Reade, Julian E. 2016. The Gates of Nineveh. State Archives of Assyria Bulletin 22: 39–93. Rich, Claudius James. 1813. Memoir on the Ruins of Babylon. Fundgruben des Orients 3: 129–162. Rich, Claudius James. 1836. Narrative of a Residence in Koordistan, and on the Site of Ancient Nineveh: with a Journal of a Voyage Down the Tigris to Bagdad and an Account of a Visit to Shirauz and Persepolis. London: James Duncan. Robinson, Henry Crabb. 1849. Letter from Henry Crabb Robinson, 30 Russell Square to Mary Wordsworth. Dated 22d Feb: 49. Wordsworth Trust 2015. http://collections. wordsworth.org.uk/wtweb/home.asp?page=Letters&letterPrefix=&lettername= wll-robinson-henry-crabb-14&submitButton=Search / Accessed August 22, 2015. Robinson, Henry Crabb. 1869. Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson. London: Macmillan. Robinson, Henry Crabb. 1938. Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, 3 vols. London: J. M. Dent. Russell, John Malcolm. 1997. From Nineveh to New York: The Strange Story of the Assyrian Reliefs in the Metropolitan Museum and the Hidden Masterpiece at Canford Manor. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shields, Sarah. D. 2000. Mosul Before Iraq: Like Bees Making Five-Sided Cells. Albany: State University of New York Press. Sobolewski, Richard P. 1982. The Shalmanaser III Building in the Central Area of the Nimrud Citadel. In Vorträge gehalten auf der 28. Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale in Wien 6.–10. Juli 1981, Archiv für Orientforschung Beiheft 19, ed. Hans Hirsch and Hermann Hunger, 329–340. Horn: Ferdinand Berger. Southgate, Horatio. 1840. Narrative of a Tour Through Armenia, Kurdistan, Persia and Mesopotamia: With an Introduction, and Occasional Observations Upon the Condition of Mohammedanism and Christianity in Those Countries. New York: D. Appleton & Co. Stauffer, Andrew. 2005. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Burdens of Nineveh. Victorian Literature and Culture 33: 369–394. Tolias, George. 2011. “An Inconsiderate Love of the Arts”: The Spoils of Greek Antiquities, 1780–1820. In Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman



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Empire, 1753–1914, ed. Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Çelik, and Edhem Eldem, 7193. Istanbul: SALT. Waterfield, Gordon. 1963. Layard of Ninekveh. London: John Murray.

13 Assyrian Style and Victorian Materiality: Mesopotamia in British Souvenirs, Political Caricatures, Theatrical Productions, and the Sydenham Crystal Palace 1

Kevin M. McGeough Keywords: Austen Henry Layard; Assyrianizing; British Museum; Sardanapalus; museum souvenir; orientalism; Crystal Palace

INTRODUCTION

A

usten Henry Layard’s 1845 discovery and excavation of the Neo-Assyrian Period (911–612 BCE) city of Nimrud, and the subsequent installation (1849–1853) of its newly excavated artifacts and monuments in the British Museum, inaugurated a new period in the reception and public consumption of Mesopotamian art and architecture. Following centuries during which Assyrian culture was mediated through Biblical and Classical literature, as well as through colorful accounts of the occasional eastern traveler, Mesopotamia visual culture became directly accessible to the public for the first time through the British Museum—and became able to inspire Victorian interpreters.2 With new access to “authentic” examples of Mesopotamian art, Victorian scholars and artists became somewhat constrained by the veristic ethos of the era. The imagined Mesopotamia of William Blake and Lord Byron was now tempered by material exemplars of the ancient visual culture, and Victorian designers drawing on Mesopotamian motifs and elements operated under new requirements to be able to claim that their work was realistic. Despite possessing the technological capabilities for doing so, these interpreters chose (and often continue to

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choose) not to directly imitate or reproduce Assyrian materials but rather to refashion and reimagine Assyrian visual culture in ways that suited their respective presents, the specific media of reception, and the larger ideologies of the context of reception. As Lynn Meskell (2004) has demonstrated for Egyptian antiquities, when Mesopotamian visual culture is reproduced in new settings, new (if sometimes still related) meanings are created. How were ancient things made into modern things—and why does it matter? If we follow Heidegger (1971 [1950]), then we cannot take “things” as mere physical objects but must regard them as a gathering of meanings in a physical presence. There is more to these Victorian versions of ancient things than mere imitation. The development of a style that hybridizes the ancient and the contemporary in different forms reflects an interpretive engagement that makes the past meaningful for the present. Marian Feldman (2014: 65) offers a definition for “style” that sees these artistic practices as a “physical embodiment of social practices.” Feldman (2014: 52) reads “style” from a Bourdieuian perspective, understanding it (in the Iron Age context she is discussing) as having “functioned as a material practice contributing to collective memory(ies).” Feldman (2014: 63) further argues, following Bourdieu, that “style constitutes community identity rather than simply reflects it.” Style, according to Feldman (2014: 61) is so powerful a contributor to the construction of communal identity because it often goes unquestioned (as does doxa generally according to Bourdieu) and it speaks so directly to “emotive elements.” Yet she also cautions that these communal identities should not be understood as monolithic: the identities and relationships constituted through style were constantly shifting. If style reflects a collective memory that is neither stable nor monolithic, what is one to make of the resumption of very specific styles after an almost three thousand year hiatus and emergence into a different continent and context altogether? Presuming these readings of “things” and “style,” the creation of new Victorian objects and visual culture in reference to Assyrian materials cannot be dismissed as mere eclecticism. The adoption of ancient styles in a new setting reflected the constitution of new communal identities in reference to another community, or, more accurately, in reference to how another community was imagined in the present. As style was refashioned (physically), Assyrian became Assyrianizing, and these styles and objects were reimagined in ways that made sense within their new context(s). The creation of such “things” was a means through which the social was



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inscribed upon and within the physical in a manner that evoked a multiplicity of meanings, although constrained to some degree by Assyrian objects themselves and their reception history. These newly created things have a greater importance than one might assume upon first encounter. Bill Brown (2001: 5) encourages the consideration that perhaps things have agency, that they have a power to be constitutive elements in a society. Brown asks: If a society seems to impose itself on the “corporeal imagination,” when and how does that imagination struggle against the imposition, and what role do things, physically or conceptually, play in the struggle? How does the effort to rethink things become an effort to reinstitute society? [italics original] By rethinking things, artists, scholars, philosophers, and consumers have the opportunity to participate in a wider discourse about their larger community and the relation of that community to others, both past and present. Objects play a role in this dialogue, for they carry with them various meanings that they have accumulated directly and indirectly. For ancient Near Eastern objects, this reception is complicated by their textual presence in Classical and Biblical literature, the academic orientalism that framed their archaeological rediscovery, and the teleologies of technocratic progress that were widely embraced in the Victorian era. Thing theorists like Daniel Miller (2010) have shown that identities are actively mediated and negotiated through objects. These mediations, when enacted through specifically Assyrian visual inspiration, tend to connote traditional orientalist messages about the nature of the exotic and control over the Other. The demonstration of control over Mesopotamian antiquities implies nationalist and personal power in different ways. Part of the new context for these Assyrian and Assyrianizing things was typical of the “things” of the globalizing world, physical manifestations of the colonial periphery in the cosmopolitan metropolis (Baird 2013: 8). Yet the meanings of these refashionings extend well beyond the strictly imperialist. Mesopotamia, when reimagined in new visual forms, also conveyed and conveys messages about progress, technology, past precedent, and teleological views of history. Assyrianizing objects allow for embodied experiences of the past that help situate the experiencer in a particular mode of futurity,

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allowing the experiencer to remake his or her own present or, conversely, to accept willingly such a remaking of the present by nationalist, corporatist, artistic, or anti-state actors. Ancient objects have a peculiar power in the present, a power that is much explored in gothic literature, where “ruins” exercise undue agency over the people of the present, a power that thing theorists refer to as auratic. For Walter Benjamin, an auratic culture was one that, while perhaps quite far away in time and space, still had an unusually powerful influence. This power, according to Benjamin, was eroded by the reproduction of the auratic culture’s materials. Meskell offers quite an alternative view: she suggests that the act of possessing things related to an auratic culture in fact makes for a more active engagement with that culture and may even enhance the influence of that culture. Meskell (2004: 183) argues that Egyptian artifacts specifically are auratic in the sense that Benjamin meant, but that the power these objects hold is increased through their reproduction rather than minimized. While it is undoubtedly the case that Egyptian visual culture exercises a more significant influence on contemporary culture than Mesopotamian (which is an interesting issue in its own right), Meskell’s argument can be extended to include the ancient more broadly. What, then, is the power of the institutions that mediate our relationships to these objects? Museums themselves, as Anthony Shelton has argued (2006: 492), are “threshold institutions constructed between major intellectual, historical, and social fault zones.” Objects from the periphery (temporal and geographic) are brought to bear on contemporary issues through the institutionalization of a specific gaze in relation to present-day concerns. Within the context of the museum, the display of artifacts provides seemingly material evidence of whatever arguments are constructed along those fault zones. There is also what Susan Pearce (1994: 20, 23) has called a “power of the real” that creates an added interest for the viewer of an object; when “real” objects are brought into association with unrelated concepts or issues, they come to act as signs that often go unquestioned. This process is not limited to the “real” for, as Baudrillard (1983: 5, 11) has shown, the hyperreal can be just as powerful a means of ordering society; here are representations that are taken as being rooted in the “real” but, in effect, represent something that never was or is not. What becomes refashioned in reference to Assyrian visual culture may be archaeologically or veristically inspired but the act of reimagining creates something that



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is new. For Frederick Bohrer (2003: 5), Mesopotamia was a floating signifier in the nineteenth century, an unstable concept that was mutable for a multiplicity of refashionings and reimaginings. Victorian interpreters, as he understood them (Bohrer 2003: 3), treated the visual culture of Assyria like “shared dreams” or “social projections”; the new context of an ancient and geographically distant culture in the space of the modern offered vast interpretive possibilities, still constrained by academic orientalism and the reception history of Assyria. Bohrer’s reading should not be separated from Martin Meisel’s (1983: 229–30) more general treatment of nineteenth-century historical representation. Meisel sees historical representation during this time as fundamentally rooted in the transformation of the strange into the known and the old into the new, a process that he describes as dream-like. Of course, the refashionings and reimaginings of Assyrian art did not occur in a vacuum. Zainab Bahrani (2001) and Ada Cohen and Steven Kangs (2017) have explored how chromolithographs of reconstructions of Ashurbanipal’s Palace that accompanied Layard’s publications were both inspired by and inspiring for other nineteenth century artistic and design trends. While these were legitimate attempts at reimagining what an ancient Assyrian Palace might have looked like, the reimaginings could not help but capture the concerns and styles of the time. The works of artists like John Martin, who painted Mesopotamian palace scenes before any Mesopotamian palaces had been excavated, also had a persistent influence. It is not so much the inaccuracies in Layard’s reconstructions that interest these scholars but rather how these images reflect Assyria mediated through a nineteenth-century worldview—as well as the kinds of arguments conducted through visual means. This study surveys a variety of material engagements with Assyria in order to explore the different ways that Assyrian and Assyrianizing visual culture was made Victorian. The survey begins with the reception of Assyrian materials at the British Museum through the production of miniature souvenirs. These would ultimately become one of the first and most intimate points of contact between Londoners and Assyrian art; through its reproduction in the form of souvenirs, the ancient art is domesticated, not just made smaller but refashioned to evoke the kinds of art that would be appropriate to display in a middle class home, referencing the exotic but through more classical forms. Ancient art could be and frequently was reframed as

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political satire, and this chapter examines how Assyrian aesthetics were evoked in the satirical periodical culture of the mid-Victorian era, referencing both Austen Henry Layard as a politician and the ancient east as part of a contested European sphere of influence (Kertai, this volume). While the use of Assyrianizing styles was overtly part of political discussions in satirical news publications, Assyrian art was also invoked as part of larger material discussions of style, design, and aesthetics. This chapter, consequently, explores the appearance of Assyria first at the Crystal Palace at Sydenham (1854–1866) and then at the World’s Fairs of the latter half of the nineteenth century. In these contexts, Assyria stood as a foil for contemporary progress, though it also offered alternatives to contemporary design, especially through its monumentality and vivid color. The study concludes with a consideration of Assyria as it was both rebuilt and performed in theatrical settings. As at the fairs, stage sets invoking Assyria allowed an embodied reconstruction of ancient times even as the stage provided a different kind of commentary, one that was propelled through the viewing of performed narrative fiction. This kind of historical fiction made (and still makes) very convincing arguments if the sets and stage design offer an ethos of authenticity. Contemporary values can be made to seem universally normative if the actors are bedecked in convincing historical costume.

ASSYRIAN ANTIQUITIES ON DISPLAY AND AS MUSEUM SOUVENIRS In the latter half of the nineteenth century CE, the Neo-Assyrian discoveries of Austen Henry Layard represented one of the major attractions of the British Museum and a major draw for visitors (Fig. 13.1). Despite a group of trustees who were less than enamored of things Assyrian (McGeough 2015b: 115), Layard’s discoveries caught the imagination of the public, buoyed by his best-selling accounts of his adventures in Mesopotamia and by a periodical press that marvelled at the technological daring of transporting the discoveries back to London (McGeough 2015a: 198–99; Kertai 2015 and this volume). What was perhaps most immediately striking for the museum visitor was the size of these objects. Carved from stone, most of the first Assyrian objects to go on display were architectural sculptures from Ashurbanipal II’s Northwest Palace at Nimrud. Massive orthostat reliefs (Feldman, this volume) bore images of that ancient king’s



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13.1 Illustrated News of London (October 26, 1850): “Human-headed and Eagle-winged Bull from Nimrud”

exploits, including scenes of Ashurnasirpal II hunting lions, a theme (hunting) that was still prominent in nineteenth century CE painting. Colossal and stone-carved mythical creatures called lamassu were installed to guard the doors of the museum space just as they had in ancient times, gazing ahead sphinx-like and evoking eastern mystery, decadence, and despotism. When the British Museum’s Assyria Gallery was opened in 1853, the materials from Nimrud came to function as a chronological pivot between the older Egyptian antiquities and the Elgin Marbles of Classical antiquity. At the time, the merchandizing of such exhibits was still in its infancy and, more generally, issues surrounding museum public outreach were still under debate (McGeough 2015b: 120–27). It is doubtful that the same profitmotive that drives the contemporary museum gift shop was an explicit motive of museum merchandizing of the era (it was not yet a major source of revenue), although it is possible this was at least discussed in hushed tones at the museum. Rather, the creation of museum souvenirs reflected the Victorian urge for object memories, for “things” designed in ancient fashions through the new machines of the present. Buying had become a productive activity within the new commercialism of the era, a way for people to actively participate as members of a community in public spaces. Souvenirs were materialized memories—objects that helped transform an ephemeral

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13.2 Parian Porcelain Souvenirs designed for the British Museum. Museum number 1987,0109.1. Courtesy Trustees of the British Museum

event into an enduring thing. The first stirrings of a consumer-object oriented approach to museum outreach are apparent in the crafting of Assyrian souvenirs by Aaron Hayes and Richard Jarvis, two attendants at the British Museum (Fig. 13.2). Hayes was an amateur sculptor, whose initial letter of recommendation for employment at the museum was provided by Richard Westmacott, designer of the pediment over the British Museum entrance. This pediment, called “The Story of Progress,” articulated one of the significant underlying themes of the institution (Rudoe 1991: 30–31). Less is known about Jarvis, although it seems that, upon his retirement, his pension was reduced for some kind of unspecified misconduct (Rudoe 1991: 30–31). Whatever their personal stories, the two men, beginning in 1868, fashioned a series of eight souvenir miniatures inspired by, though not precisely replicating, objects from the Assyrian collection. These miniatures, manufactured by W.T. Copeland & Sons (a Staffordshire pottery manufacturer that operated from around 1840 until 1970), were crafted in white Parian porcelain, a bisque porcelain intended to imitate marble (even though marble is not in fact typical of Mesopotamian sculpture). The museum sold these miniatures in its gift shop, presumably to middle class patrons who could afford such items, as opposed to working class patrons, who could not, or upper class patrons, who could readily purchase their own antiquities in this era.



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The souvenir miniatures evoked the discoveries of Austen Henry Layard even as they diverged from these in both minor and major respects. In addition to the decreased scale of the souvenir sculptures as compared to the originals, a number of overt features mark the souvenirs as specifically Victorian rather than Assyrian. Perhaps most pertinent is the fact that they are all small-scale sculptures in the round, comprising a type of porcelain miniature that was popular for display in Victorian homes amongst those classes that could not afford to decorate with original antiquities. The sculptures from Nimrud that inspired the souvenirs, in contrast, were neither fully three-dimensional (and certainly not intended to be seen from behind) nor portable. The humans depicted in the souvenirs, moreover, possess naturalistic physiques that are more in keeping with Victorian miniature traditions (see Atterbury 1989) than with the figural conventions of Neo-Assyrian art (see Bahrani 2017). Since Assyrian sculptures were also not made of marble, the choice of Parian porcelain is also interesting. Here, it seems clear that the Assyrian monuments were crafted as part of a miniature tradition explicitly modeled after Classical sculpture. The rendering of Near Eastern art in Greco-Roman guise presumably helped make it more suitable, tasteful, and understandable to the Victorian audience for which it was intended. In form as well as in function, then, the souvenir sculptures departed from historically authentic replicas. The human figures especially were of a type already commonplace in Victorian homes but with little in the way of analogues from ancient Mesopotamia.3 In addition to the souvenir sculptural miniatures, a vase stylized out of a colossal winged-bull and bookends of a winged-bull or a winged-lion were also available from the museum (Fig. 13.2). In each of these cases, the ancient colossal sculpture was reformed into a small-scale household object, domesticizing Neo-Assyrian artworks and artifacts into functional pieces intended for display in public parts of the home. The impulses evident in translating the ancient objects from one type of object (possessed of specific types of functions) to another (with various distinct or even wholly divergent functions), while yet retaining some meaningfully identifiable visual aspects of the original objects, are common to the reproduction of ancient art in new settings. The transformation of monumental Assyrian art into bookshelf size domestic objects hints at some of the striking features of the souvenir as

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a type of memory object. For Levi-Strauss (1966: 23), the miniaturization of an object was a means of making it (or ideas related to it) more readily understandable, more controllable, and more definable. Thus, the souvenir not only renders a larger object smaller, but also renders it into an icon or symbol of a place and an experience. It makes a memory manageable and an ephemeral event conceptually permanent. The materiality of the souvenir makes the memory tangible. The creation of the miniature version of a larger object associated with tourism is perhaps part of what McCannell (1999: 44–48) calls the process of “site sacralisation,” in which a space is transformed into a hyperreal tourist site, set off from everyday lived experience and explicitly made distinct from the host community. In the case of museum objects, these have already been separated from their host culture and recontextualized into a space distinct from everyday life. The replication of the object as a miniature that can be purchased further sacralizes it and allows it to become a material possession of the tourist. Here, then, the purchase of the souvenir facilitates the performativity of memory, not only through the act of purchasing but through later processes of display in the purchaser’s home. The act of memory becomes also an act of identity formation, as the experience of the owner is displayed as a material signifier of that owner’s past cultured activities. Thus, whatever is evoked by “Assyria” for the purchaser is reframed as part of that owner’s identity; it is not a replica for study but a new hybridized thing that connects ancient Mesopotamia, the British Museum, and the domestic space of the purchaser. Even beyond issue of scale, the new souvenirs were not exact replicas of the original. Part of the process of rendering the Assyrian art into souvenirs was to transfigure it into forms more palatable for Victorian bourgeois sensibilities. Some features of the originals were retained, necessarily so in order to evoke the otherness of Assyria, but other elements were transformed to be more evocative of Classical antiquity and the Victorian present. These transformations were not random. Subject-wise, the modes in which different types of souvenirs were presented (and altered) offer some insight not only into Victorian understandings of Assyria but also into larger Victorian conceptualizations of and interests in antiquity more generally— especially as these had been shaped by exposure to the artworks, artifacts, and monuments of the Classical world—but also into contemporary issues and concerns of Victorian England itself.



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(1) The souvenir winged lions and bulls replicate with varying degrees of verisimilitude the physical features of the lion and bull colossi discovered by the British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard in the Neo-Assyrian palace of Nimrud (Kertai, this volume). (2) The souvenir male figures are a different case. Their naturalistic rendering (as discussed above) conveys postures in keeping with Classical and neoclassical rather than Assyrian traditions. Holding staffs or rods, the male figures stand in positions signifying heroic leadership. This is the same kind of message as would have been presented by such figures in Assyrian contexts but the figures themselves have been updated to present these arguments in a visual language accessible and comprehensible to a nineteenth-century CE audience. (3) The souvenir female figure straddles the pictorial conventions of the two eras. She bears one cup in front of her face in a pose typical of Assyrian relief work and holds another in front of her body. Such figurines were commonly fashioned as souvenirs of Victorian theatrical performances and the commemoration of Assyrian characters (historical and traditional) should be understood within this context. Plays, which were themselves ephemeral events, were memorialized through souvenirs of individual figures. Victorian playgoers could buy souvenirs of famous dramatic personalities (especially Shakespearean figures) or stock characters. Here, perhaps, is further evidence of the relationship between the performativity of the museum and other more explicitly dramatic and performative spaces that has been noted by others (Malley 2007). The souvenir acts as an enduring commemoration of a kinetic event in which bodies interact with visual culture that is distinct from everyday life. Beyond the aesthetic appeal of such objects, the particular character that was purchased provoked distinct, but perhaps fluid, evocations related to the typical reception of the figure and the purchaser’s own experiences. The identities of the specific Assyrian figures depicted in the Victorian era souvenirs from the British Museum is also worth noting, as the choice of figures to be represented also reflects very closely the interests of the period in which the souvenirs were created. The characters depicted were known not just from the British Museum but also from the literary and theatrical popular culture of the time. One of the characters depicted (Fig. 13.2) is the Neo-Assyrian king Sennacherib (r. 705–681 BCE), whose famous Southwest

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Palace at Nineveh was excavated by Layard in 1849 and 1851. Two others represent Sardanapalus and his queen (Fig. 13.2), little known in the present day but well-known figures in the nineteenth century. Sardanapalus was the last king of Nineveh in the Classical tradition, as well as the subject of a play of the same name written by Lord Byron in 1821. Byron’s play would become a major and frequently performed theatrical spectacle—most famously performed by the actor Charles Kean (discussed below). For the Victorian visitor to the British Museum, the reliefs of Nimrud that had been excavated by Layard, and that were originally mistaken as being those of Nineveh, would have been entangled with the Byronic story of the collapse of a kingdom of excesses. Moving forward 150 years in time to the present day, such souvenirs as were innovated in the Victorian Period have become central to the British Museum visitor experience. Replicas like those created by Hayes and Jarvis are now less common for the Assyrian collection, in keeping with the general decline of public interest in Mesopotamia, but the winged bull bookends are still available (now made of resin rather than porcelain). Along with replicas of reliefs (like that depicting a dying lion from a royal hunting scene), these kinds of products can be purchased alongside what are more clearly novelty items tied to specific exhibitions and galleries in the museum. The Neo-Assyrian sculptures discovered by Layard specifically have now become well established as fundamental signifiers of the British Museum and, as a corpus, represent one of its celebrity attractions. And yet, entangled as they are with the identity of the British Museum, which is itself entangled with London’s international touristic identity (the British Museum is one of the key destinations for visitors to the city), the narratives surrounding the Mesopotamian materials are no longer well known amongst non-specialists and the artifacts themselves lack the kind of “name” (as that of the Rosetta Stone or the Gayer Cat) that instantly evokes excitement. And, since Assyrian antiquities are not unique to the British Museum (they can be seen in major museums in continental Europe and the United States), visitors do not have to go to London to experience the “real thing,” that is, the artifacts themselves. The items fashioned by Hayes and Jarvis, moreover, have become objects displayed as part of the museum exhibition itself, inextricably incorporated into the museum they were designed to represent, part of the solipsistic self-reflection of the institution’s own presentation of representation.



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Souvenirs, Consumerism, and the Negotiation of Personal Identity A new set of souvenirs have now replaced those of Hayes and Jarvis in the various souvenir shops within the museum, with an Assyrianizing bookend in resin commemorating not only Mesopotamian but also, necessarily, Victorian-era craftsmanship. The selling of such objects is not just a means for the museum to increase its revenue; souvenirs are an important part of the ritual of the museum visit and are a very important means through which visitors, especially non-specialist visitors, make sense of their experience. Using the example of the Gayer Cat, Lynn Meskell (2004: 179–80) has shown how such products are not just crass consumerism but a kind of democratization of ancient things. The tourist, though unable to physically touch or hold the real ancient artifact, has the opportunity to physically interact with the souvenir on his or her own terms (assuming a purchase of the object). The consumer act of buying a product as part of a cultural or educational experience is one means that the tourist has of extending the ephemeral experience of the museum visit and further serves as a means of incorporating that visit into his or her own display of identity as mediated through things. It is part of the ritual of the museum visit and part of the faux productive activity that accompanies tourism. The tropes of touristic behaviour suggest that one should not just view objects but engage in some kind of activity and the easiest means of participation in a consumer culture is to shop (McGeough 2015a: 309–10; Urry 1990: 136–40). By displaying a souvenir object in his or her home, the museum visitor can lay claim to a museum experience as having been somehow formative or meaningful. Meskell (2004: 183) here, contra Benjamin, sees the auratic nature of ancient culture as gaining in power through its reproduction in mass-produced souvenir form. Following Daniel Miller (2010: 118), the ownership of such things is an important means of creating and negotiating personal identity, so that the souvenir of an ancient artifact that one might have seen at the British Museum communicates certain messages about travel, cultural taste, and historical knowledge that are quite polyvalent; the context of the souvenir’s display would also shape its message, perhaps located in a place of prominence by an earnest first-time visitor or set amongst other kitsch by a jaded graduate student, with each owner using the object to make his or her own individually specific and self-aware claim to a connection with the ancient culture.

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That the commodification of museum artifacts reflects a consumerist approach to the articulation of identity, even if the actors in these processes are not fully cognizant of the meanings behind such purchases, is not surprising. What is perhaps more interesting to consider is how these individual choices in amateur connoisseurship reflect larger social issues. Thinking of Anthony Shelton’s (2006: 492) argument that museums display a society’s “fault lines,” both antiquities and souvenirs are locations of material engagement with the major issues that are debated within a polity. The discoveries of Layard themselves represented one of these fault lines (McGeough 2015a; Kertai, this volume), and were also invoked within the visual culture of Victorian political satire. What may seem geographically or temporally peripheral (in this case Neo-Assyrian antiquities within the context of Victorian society), as I have argued elsewhere (McGeough 2015b: 7), may be appealed to as a locus for discussions that are deeply central to public life.

ASSYRIAN ANTIQUITIES AS “FAULT LINES” Political Satire, Parody, and Victorian Public Life The invocation of ancient Assyria in public debate on contemporary Victorian issues is strikingly clear in the political satire of the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially after Layard had retired from archaeological work and been elected as a member of parliament (McGeough 2015a: 251–55; Kertai, this volume). A comic published in Punch from April 7, 1855 is typical of the kind of political commentary that references Assyrian sculpture (Fig. 13.3). We see Layard, equipped with only a shovel, depicted heroically excavating a colossal artifact; the comic bears the caption: “The member for Nineveh digs out the British bull.” The colossal artifact shown is, in fact, a colossal Assyrian-style winged-bull: its head, however, has been altered so that it bears a British face beneath a top hat and bow tie. The Assyrian colossus is thus transfigured into John Bull, the personification of the British state. The dirt from which John Bull emerges bears the words “routine, jobbery, incompetence, muddle, patronage and red tape,” all signifying aspects of problematic or inefficient governance. Here, Layard the excavator is rescuing the British state just as he rescued the Assyrian sculptures. The specific issue satirized by this comic pertains to Layard’s controversial accusation that



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13.3 Punch (April 7, 1855: 135): “The Member for Nineveh Digs Out the British Bull”

parliament was attempting to make a patronage appointment by posting him to a position unrelated to international affairs. Layard’s refusal of the appointment was taken by the media as a stance against government corruption and here Punch lauds his decision. Shawn Malley (2012: 123) also recognizes in this comic a deeper argument, one with implications beyond a fleeting political scandal: that government corruption could lead to a fate similar to that of Assyria. In the Victorian construction of Assyrian history, King Sardanapalus allowed the state to collapse; his palace literally burned down around him as he satisfied his own lusts and appetites. He embodied the amoral and corrupt orientalist despot in its most extreme form and represented a powerful example of the danger that a debased government can pose. What is at the heart of this political cartoon, then, is a fear of collapse and a conceptualization of progress that was encouraged and reified by Victorian discoveries of complex civilizations that had vanished into oblivion and been replaced by local cultures that, according to nineteenth-century European modes of thinking, were at lower stages of evolution.

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13.4 The Nineveh Court; Interior view of The Crystal Palace in Sydenham. Lithograph, tinted with one tint stone, unknown artist, 1854. Purchased with the assistance of The Art Fund, the National Heritage Memorial Fund, Shell International and the Friends of the V&A. Courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum, London



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VICTORIAN CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF THE (HISTORY OF THE) WORLD For the Victorians, Mesopotamia (Assyria especially) represented an important stage in the historical development of the world, situated specifically in what came to be thought of as the western tradition (McGeough 2015a: 142–49). Given the very preliminary chronological understanding of the relationships between ancient Near Eastern polities that prevailed at this time, it is perhaps unsurprising to find the Victorians took Egypt (rather than Sumer in southern Mesopotamia) as the first complex civilization, one eventually overshadowed by Assyria (this chronological conception is to some extent reflected in Biblical and Classical sources). Assyria was regarded as the second-to-last of the major orientalist states, succeeded by the Achaemenid Persian Empire, which would ultimately be chastened by the Delian League and later obliterated by Alexander the Great. Assyria, for the Victorians, represented the apogee of the orientalist state as world power, dominant in a technocratic and political sense—at least for a brief period until Sardanapalus allowed his kingdom to fall—yet simultaneously envisioned as morally and culturally deficient (McGeough 2015a: 58–72). In one of the important Victorian conceptions of the history of the world, only one polity stood at the center of world culture at any given moment; in the nineteenth century the British and the French vied to claim the position of inheritors of the place that had once been held by Egypt, Assyria, Greece, and then Rome (McGeough 2015a: 144–56). It was in the Victorian era that the great material presentations of global history designed for mass audiences emerged, first in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham and later in the world expo phenomenon. Assyria’s privileged place in world history meant that its material products were important subjects of study. It is notable that the Victorians usually considered Assyria and Persia to be entangled polities—a conceptualization materially manifested in the “Nineveh Court” in the Fine Arts Court at the Crystal Palace, which recreated and fused architecture from Assyrian Nimrud and Persian Persepolis (Fig. 13.4). This sense was supplanted in the mid-twentieth century by scholarly and political sentiments that saw more borders than connections between the two, especially in relation to nationalist projects within Iraq and Iran.

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The “Nineveh Court” at the Crystal Palace at Sydenham The Nineveh Court (also known as the Assyria Court and the Nineveh Palace) was a hybrid Mesopotamian-Persian complex that fused architectural elements from Mesopotamia and Persia, purposefully highlighting different eras. It was imagined by the Scottish architectural historian and Indologist James Fergusson and authenticated by Austen Henry Layard. Fergusson, as well as Owen Jones, one of the major designers of the Fine Arts Court, had both worked with Layard previously and so the inclusion of Layard’s vision of Assyria was not just due to the region’s popularity amongst London audiences of the time. Fergusson (1849: 266–68, 272–79) had also previously argued that contemporary architects needed to consider Assyrian architecture from an evolutionary perspective and so the Nineveh Court also functioned as a material formulation of that argument. It was Fergusson more than any other figure who provided the rhetorical basis for inserting Assyria into the unilinear evolutionary schemas of the day, especially from a material culture perspective. Guidebooks to the Crystal Palace also emphasized Biblical connections to Assyria and conflated Israelite architecture (given the lack of excavated examples at the time) with that of Assyria (McGeough 2015b: 327). Assyria, then, was presented not just as a yardstick for progress but also as a material exemplar for Biblical life. The Fine Arts Court of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham was a presentation of the most important stages of the world history of architecture in an amusement park setting, with different sections of the main building constructed to represent historical architecture from different parts of the world. It was one large building, divided into separate courts, each of which recreated some aspect of world architecture in ephemeral plaster and wood. The committee responsible for the creation of the Crystal Palace wanted, essentially, to create a material encyclopedia of world cultures that would offer lessons on design, style, and composition and be transformative in British architecture. The importance of the Crystal Palace for the dissemination of a specific vision of world history to the public cannot be overemphasized. By 1855, the end of its first year of operation, over 1,332,000 visitors had walked through its turnstiles (Picard 2005: 229), compared to the 395,564 people thought to have visited the British Museum over the same period. The Crystal Palace was the first infotainment complex, where visitors could have an educational embodied experience of both the past and of



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contemporary but unfamiliar other parts of the world by walking through hyperreal presentations of different regions and eras. Samuel Laing, the chairman of the company that operated the Crystal Palace, called it an “illustrated encyclopedia” and claimed that it “combined scientific accuracy with popular intention” (Piggott 2004: 132; McGeough 2015b: 301–302). The Nineveh or Assyria Court within the Crystal Palace was the largest of all of the courts, surpassing in size even Egypt’s court, which also showcased colossal architecture. Much of the Nineveh Court’s display consisted of casts of the reliefs and sculptures that had been excavated by Layard from Nimrud. This might seem something of an odd choice of replicas given that visitors could almost as easily see the real objects themselves at the British Museum. Yet, this choice also reflects one of the central arguments of the Crystal Palace—that the British could manufacture all of the most extraordinary architectural feats of world history, and do so more quickly and cheaply than the original civilizations that innovated them. What may have been more interesting to viewers, who might have assimilated this argument without being fully cognizant of it, was the juxtaposition of casts of British Museum materials with casts of Assyrian objects held by the Louvre Museum in Paris. The French consul at Mosul, Paul-Émile Botta (1802– 1870), had excavated Dur-Sharrukin (Khorsabad), an ancient capital of Assyria, and it was his excavations that had inspired Layard’s own at Nimrud. However, the political instability of France in the mid-nineteenth century, the relative inaccessibility of Botta’s publications, and Layard’s own considerable self-promotion (Kertai, this volume) had made Layard more associated with Assyria in the public imagination than the French scholar. The French had also been less successful in removing large Assyrian artworks in single pieces, instead cutting them into smaller elements and reconstructing them in the Louvre. When Assyrian orthostats and statues were brought to the Louvre in 1845, then, they received far less attention than the later installation of similar materials in London. Other courts at the Crystal Palace presented casts of antiquities as well; the Victorian practice of studying casts of large pieces of ancient art was well-accepted as pedagogically essential and so these reconstructions affirmed the educational goals of the enterprise, rhetorically at least even if not practically. From both an encyclopedic and educational perspective, it was important that a representative sampling of these Assyrian materials be represented at the Crystal Palace even if some were already accessible at the British Museum.

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A more novel aspect of the Crystal Palace was its architectural fusion: the lower storey was modeled after Sargon II’s palace at Khorsabad; the main hall mostly invoked the Northwest Palace of Nimrud (but was bedecked with copies of columns from Persepolis and Susa); and the upper storey was assembled from a combination of isolated architectural details found at Persepolis and Susa. Despite the fact that the Nineveh Court was allocated more space than any other exhibit in the Crystal Palace, it was still necessary to shrink the scale of each of its sections and its interior space was designed as a means of displaying copies of ancient sculptures more in the fashion of a museum rather than as a functioning palace court. What was striking to reviewers and visitors alike was that all of the art in the Nineveh Court was brightly colored, contrasting in this respect with the monochrome appearance of the original artifacts at the British Museum. In fact, the original sculptures were also once highly colored, but the pigments had mostly faded by the time of their excavation and display in western museums. The replication at the Crystal Palace was intended to reflect the architecture as it once had looked in a living context, not to render it as a recontextualization of “ancient art.” The Nineveh Court’s coloration was consistent not only with the historical reconstruction favoured by the designers of the Crystal Palace but also with their argument that British designers needed to reconsider color as a component of architectural style and move away from the drab browns, greys, and blacks that dominated the Victorian city (McGeough 2015b: 306–307, 330–31). Here was a direct attempt to influence Victorian British design through reference to a nonclassical antiquity, and to turn it towards a more globally eclectic aesthetic. When a fire destroyed the Nineveh Court in 1866, it was not rebuilt (unlike other damaged exhibits, which were reconstructed). This may suggest that audiences had not responded well to the sculptural copies, with the real specimens situated in such close proximity at the British Museum itself. Still, while it was open, the Nineveh Court had allowed an embodied experience of the Assyrian style, where visitors could see the orthostat reliefs not so much as museum pieces but as fully integrated architectural features, oriented as originally intended in their Neo-Assyrian contexts (on context and contextualization, see Rubinson, this volume). While individual Assyrian kings and historical events were not celebrated at the Sydenham version of the palace—as they were through the original palace orthostat reliefs—Sydenham perhaps captured the propagandistic and aesthetic



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function of such monumental art in a manner similar to that of the originals. The very existence of the reliefs at the British Museum, and in replica at the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, argued not only for the impressive grandiosity of ancient Assyria but also for the power of the British Empire to stand at the pinnacle of world history. The Assyrian era, from this vantage point, was framed as an early stage in a technocratic teleology in which Britain, through its capacity to replicate and master the past, assumed a primacy in both design and production skill. All of the world’s important design trends led to and culminated in Victorian Britain and, by educating its future architects through these object lessons, Britain positioned itself for the future.

Mesopotamia at the World Expos: Technology and Prestige The relationship between antiquity and futurity in Victorian Britain was even more readily apparent in the embodied experiences of the world’s fair or expo phenomenon than it had been in the Crystal Palace. In these contexts, Mesopotamia was invoked as an explicit marker of technological and whiggish progress, included as part of historical exhibitions juxtaposed with showcases of future technologies. The expo movement emerged from the trade fair, and it was only when the French added arts and culture to such shows that this type of historical presentation became desirable. The Crystal Palace’s court structure was replaced by a more flexible and explicitly temporary pavilion structure. Some pavilions dedicated to the ancient world, such as the ancient Egyptian pavilions, had a clear national organization to sponsor them. This was not the case for the Assyrian materials, which were sometimes included as part of the Ottoman pavilion and other times situated in more general historical presentations. Perhaps Benedict’s (1983: 7) Maussian reading of the expo as a “total prestation,” a symbolic display of competitive prestige within an imagined community (in this case the nations of the world), offers an explanation for the only occasional claim of Assyrian materials by the Ottomans. From the perspective of the international competition and rhetoric typical of expo culture, the Ottoman Empire had little to gain by presenting Assyrian materials, to which the corporate leaders who organized the pavilions felt little connection. Even barring Assyria’s (questionable) utility as a symbol of Ottoman prestige, it remained a powerful signifier in the expos’ larger schema of a universalized and corporatist world culture, in which differences in space,

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time, and degree of sophistication was differentiated by technological skills (Gilbert 1994: 17). The fundamental orienting theme of the world’s fair was and is progress: Assyria was selected as one of the cultures through which that motif was marked, used to present evidence of how capitalist and technological achievements drove global social evolution.

13.5 Egyptian House (left) and Assyrian House (right), 1889 (de Parville 1890: fig. 43)

Take, for example, the Assyria House of the 1889 Paris exposition universelle, part of Charles Garnier’s L’histoire de l’habitation exhibit (Fig. 13.5). The exhibit presented freestanding houses from different periods, showcasing how different cultures had or had not contributed to the history of architecture. Garnier, who was most famous for designing the Paris Opéra, was commenting on what he thought was the terrible state of contemporary Parisian architecture, including the Eiffel Tower, which was built for this expo (Çelik 1992: 71). Assyria, within the context of his complex, was one of the “primitive civilizations,” which were ordered in what was at the time the accepted chronological order of antiquity: Egypt was regarded as the oldest, followed by Assyria, and then came Phoenicia and the Hebrews. Based on the images that have survived of Assyria House, Garnier’s concerns for historical veritas were less than his desire to make specific arguments about nineteenth-century design, and it would



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be difficult, without labels, to differentiate the Assyrian, Phoenician, and Hebrew houses. However, the winged sun disc located on the upper facade of the tower, the modelling of the walls, and the shape of the towers of Assyria House are all indebted to images seen on Assyrian reliefs, likely those in the Louvre. A more corporatist vision of Assyria could be seen at the same exposition in the l’Histoire du travail pavilion. Here, visitors could walk through a series of chronologically arranged static tableaus that showed how different kinds of work had improved through technological developments over the centuries. In the context of the industrialization of the late-nineteenth century, the exhibit offered visitors a reassuring argument that the technological changes transforming their own lives were both “natural” and “improving.” In this vision of world history, Mesopotamia appeared twice. Chaldaea, referring to the older Sumerian culture of southern Mesopotamia, had chronological primacy here, reflecting the new understanding of chronology that emerged in the late 1880s; it was followed by Egypt, and then the exhibit moved back to Mesopotamia to present Assyria. In practice, however, Mesopotamian design was mixed throughout the display. A tableau of King Gudea (ca. 2100 BCE), imitating the unibrow and awkward handholding of the ancient sculptures of the king but otherwise rendered naturalistically, sat in front of Assyrian-style (first millennium BCE) reliefs (Fig. 13.6). Some elements of the aesthetics of Gudea’s portrayal were taken as iconic of the era; the non-naturalistic style of the king’s actual sculptures were taken as an evolutionary deficiency of “Chaldaean” art—and corrected in the replica created for the expo. The expo, then, created a world that was simultaneously real and dreamlike. What made this fantasy world so compelling was that it could be touched (Jackson 2008: 68). The act of making casts of statues and creating copies of the original architecture of Mesopotamia and Persia, altering the copies in ways that balanced veritas with spatial constraint, exemplified the Victorian impulse towards imaginatively engaging with antiquity through material media (see also Moser [2012] and Nichols [2015] for discussions of the depictions of other ancient regions). This impulse has not been forgotten in archaeological work: museum conservators and National Geographic illustrators take a similarly imaginatively reconstructive approach and the idea of “reconstructing” the past is often one of the justifications for any archaeological work (Rubinson, this volume).

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13.6 Statue of Gudea, 1889 (Monod 1890: 301)

ASSYRIA IN VICTORIAN THEATRICAL PRODUCTIONS: BYRON’S SARDANAPALUS The creation of dream-like worlds in material form, as at the expos, merges with narrativity on the theatrical stage. The rediscovery of Assyria was the subject of multiple dramatic presentations in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As already noted, Lord Byron’s Sardanapalus was written in 1821 and told the story of the fall of Assyria as presented in Classical sources. The most successful production was that of Charles Kean in 1853, in which he “corrected” the historical errors of Byron’s original play based



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on what had been learned of Assyria in recent years. The sets were based on the reliefs in the British Museum and costumes and props were likewise inspired by those newly excavated sources. Austen Henry Layard “certified” the accuracy of the details and the playbill for the production offered notes on the sources used. Kean (1853: 4) informs his audience that Layard’s discoveries have made the production possible, explaining: “until the present moment, it has been impossible to render Lord Byron’s Tragedy…upon the stage with proper dramatic effect, because, until now, we have known nothing of Assyrian architecture and costume.” Archaeology has made this “more accurate” dramatization possible. Frederick Lloyds was responsible for the painted backdrops for Kean’s Sardanapalus (Fig. 13.7), which featured both internal and external views of the quasi-fictional king’s palace, inspired by Layard’s and Fergusson’s reconstructions of the Northwest Palace of Nimrud (Cohen and Kangas 2017: 60). The external view (Fig. 13.8) show a multi-story palace set on the banks of a river; stone sphinxes gaze across the palace from the other side (McGeough 2015c: 115–17). The effect is similar to that of Fergusson’s and

13.7 Design for Scenery for ‘Sardanapalus’ by F. Lloyds, ca. 1853 (V&A D. 1447-1901). Courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum, London (see also color insert)

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13.8 Design for Scenery for ‘Sardanapalus’ by W. Gordon, ca. 1853 (V&A D.1446-1901). Courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum, London (see also color insert)

other artist’s imaginings of Mesopotamian palaces at the time (discussed below), which fill in unknown or ill-understood details of Mesopotamian architecture with those known from Greco-Roman, Arabesque, and South Asian architecture. The interior scenes combine orientalist imagery (flowing curtains, elaborate carpets) with winged colossi and reliefs like those found in Nimrud. No effort was made to accurately reproduce the archaeological orientations of the Neo-Assyrian artworks; these were placed for effect, especially to give a sense of monumentality (Feldman, this volume) and depth. The costumes of the actors were based on the figures found in the reliefs, with beards, robes, and headpieces all intended to be recognizable to the audience as Assyrian. Kean’s spectacle was rooted in a new interest in historically veristic productions. What constituted verism in these dramatic productions was the material culture deployed as set, prop, and costume. Ziter (2003: 160) has traced this blending of positivist intention and artistic aesthetic as particularly Victorian, and Kean’s membership in the Society of Antiquaries made it easy for him to consult prominent authorities for many of his



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productions. Meisel (1983: 43) argues Kean was really after the production of a particular historical atmosphere, what Bann (1984: 57–59) has called the “reality effect,” in which the material culture signifies to the audience that what they are seeing is, in fact, “real.” Here, the drawing on archaeologically authentic Assyrian material culture, which was on public display at the British Museum, signalled to the audience that the show was a type of “knowledge” (Malley 2007: 141). This appealed to the improvement culture of the era; one could actually learn while viewing. It is worth noting that Malley (2007: 142) sees in Kean’s production less a faithful reconstruction of ancient Assyria as known in the Victorian era and more a celebration of the fact that Britain’s archaeologists were able to recover the history of that ancient civilization. Assyria and Britain, in this view, are entangled in the performance, respectively representing the first and the most recent great imperial powers. As continues to be the case, the (at least avowed or seeming) accuracy of material details is the primary basis for evaluating interpretations of the reception of the ancient world in dramatic form. Story, character motivation, and other less tangible elements are often ignored, even though a consideration of these would be necessary for a meaningful effort at historical reconstruction. Kean’s Sardanapalus, if the most famous, was not the last presentation of Sardanapalus’s story on the stage. Charles Calvert produced a British touring show, also advertised as informed by studies of artifacts in the British Museum, that ran from the 1870s until well into the 1890s. The show was a great success in the United States, especially in New York City (where it ran for 113 shows), but its reception in London was less than enthusiastic. The Adam Forepaugh Circus presented a similar type of show, demonstrating the destruction of Nineveh through reference to Layard’s excavations (Long 2006). As a circus horse show, The Sublime Historic Bible Spectacle, Fall of Nineveh focused more on horse stunts and scenes of fiery destruction than the romantic themes of Byron’s plays. Also, for its American audience, the Biblical elements of Nineveh’s story were emphasized and the prophet Jonah played a major role in the show.

CONCLUSION More than one hundred years after American circus-goers thrilled to the destruction of Assyria in a horse-based spectacle (The Sublime Historic

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Bible Spectacle, Fall of Nineveh), the Islamic State would present its own destruction of ancient Assyria. The Islamic State, having captured Nimrud, created what Harmanşah (2015: 175) has called a “hyperreal reality show,” a spectacle of destruction in which those Neo-Assyrian sculptures (and casts) remaining at the site were demolished, horrifying the international community. That the Islamic State would make such an act a public spectacle speaks to the persistence of established tropes in the reception of Assyrian antiquities. For the Islamic State, the ancient sculptures were invoked as symbols of Western imperialism, of the secularist regime that had previously ruled Iraq, and of the pre-Islamic traditions that were rejected by the polity. Using sledgehammers and, later, explosives, the performers in these video accounts of destruction smash the palace colossi (the monumental winged bulls and lions) with a jubilant but ill-planned violence. The difficulties encountered by the saboteurs in physically destroying the monuments ironically emphasized the extraordinary durability of the ancient sculptures and graphically illustrate the mastery of the Neo-Assyrian sculptors. And yet, in the videos the ancient monuments are still ultimately destroyed, permitting the Islamic State to, at least temporarily, claim triumph over those who would wish to preserve them. In my own experiences giving popular lectures on the ancient Near East, I find that audience familiarity with the Neo-Assyrian material culture and style is inconsistent, and often dependent on whether individuals have recently visited a museum with a Neo-Assyrian collection. Unlike Egyptian or Greek materials, which are readily recognizable, the colossal winged bulls and orthostat reliefs from the Neo-Assyrian palaces often require the provision of a wider context. Despite or perhaps as a result of recent political events, knowledge of the Neo-Assyrian material culture and visual style continues to fade, and Neo-Assyrian elements are little deployed within North American and European shared visual culture. It is striking how tied Neo-Assyrian sculpture has been to contemporary political events since its rediscovery in the nineteenth century, which perhaps has made its reception more ephemeral or inconsistent than the reception of other types of ancient sculpture. Yet there are still consistent elements within this reception history and the public is still sporadically reminded of Assyria in specific contexts; Assyria signifies power over the other, technological progress, and the delineation of identities through control over these materials and images. The spirit of the political, and especially statements of



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power relations, seem to persist with this style, whether staged as part of an ancient king’s throneroom, drawn as a Victorian political cartoon, or destroyed as part of a spectacle of subaltern rage. NOTES:

13.1 This paper is dedicated to Holly Pittman with much appreciation. Not only did she introduce me to methods for studying ancient art, she also taught me a great deal about teaching. In fact, I have shamelessly stolen many of her pedagogical techniques, especially her methods for helping students deconstruct ancient visual culture in a group setting. Perhaps most influential, however, was the permission she granted me to work through the Napoleonic Description de L’Egypte in the course of a graduate assignment; this early work has shaped a major component of my contemporary research, of which this particular paper is an offshoot. 13.2 The continued role of international or universal museums as the curators and recontextualizers of ancient or “other” things, as emerged in the nineteenth century, is not uncontroversial. In 2002, eighteen museums signed a “Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums” as a response to calls for the repatriation of ancient objects, in which a universal culture rather than national cultures was held up as a model for collection management. A more thorough consideration of the role of universal museums was offered in Cuno et al. (2006), in which prominent museum directors argue that museums must continue to develop collections and mediate those collections for national and international audiences, despite criticisms of elitism or colonialism. George Abungu, (2004), the Former Director General of the National Museums of Kenya, offered perhaps the best-known dissent to these views, articulating concerns about how universal museums define themselves and exclude other museums. He suggested, indeed, that the declaration was merely a justification to avoid returning looted materials. For more on his and other criticisms of the universal museum, see, for example, Kaplan (2016). 13.3 That is not to say that small sculptures were unknown in Mesopotamia. Figurines are a frequently attested material culture class in Mesopotamia and were typically associated with cultic activities and found in temple and domestic contexts. These, however, were not the types of artifacts that were imitated in Victorian souvenir form.

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Bahrani, Zainab. 2017. Art of Mesopotamia. New York: Thames & Hudson. Baird, Ileana. 2013. Introduction: Peregrine Things: Rethinking the Global in Eighteenth-Century Studies. In Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context ed. Ileana Baird and Christina Ionescu, 1–16. Burlington: Ashgate. Bann, Stephen. 1984. The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), Inc. Benedict, Burton. 1983. The Anthropology of World’s Fairs. In The Anthropology of World’s Fairs: San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 ed. Burton Benedict, 1–65. Berkeley: Lowie Museum of Anthropology. Bohrer, Frederick. 2003. Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Bill. 2001. Thing Theory. Critical Inquiry 28.1: 1-22. Carrott, Richard G. 1978. The Egyptian Revival: Its Sources, Monuments, and Meanings. Berkeley: University of California Press. Çelik, Zeynep. 1992. Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cohen, Ada, and Steven E. Kangas. 2017. Inside an Assyrian Palace: Looking at Austen Henry Layard’s Reconstruction. Hanover: University Press of New England. Cuno, James, ed. 2006. With contributions by James Cuno, Philippe de Montebello, Glenn D. Lowry, Neil MacGregor, John Walsh Jr., and James N. Wood. Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust. Princeton: Princeton University Press. de Parville, Henri. 1890. L’Exposition universeel orné de 700 vignettes. Paris: J. Rothschild. Feldman, Marion. 2014. Communities of Style: Portable Luxury Arts, Identity, and Collective Memory in the Iron Age Levant. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fergusson, James. 1849. An Historical Inquiry into the True Principles of Beauty in Art, More Especially with Reference to Architecture. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. Gilbert, James. 1994. World’s Fairs as Historical Events. In Fair Representations: World’s Fairs and the Modern World, ed. Robert W. Rydell and Nancy E. Gwinn, 13–27. Amsterdam: VU University Press. Harmanşah, Ömur. 2015. ISIS, Heritage, and the Spectacles of Destruction in the Global Media. Near Eastern Archaeology 78.3: 170–177. Heidegger, Martin. 1971 (1950) The Thing. In Poetry, Language, Thought. trans. Albert Hofstadter, 161–184. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.



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