Iranica Antiqua, vol. XXXIII, 1998

ASSYRIAN ILLUSTRATIONS OF

BY Julian READE

There are several groups of Assyrian wall-panels which show Nineveh or its neighbourhood. The well-known series, showing the trans- port of colossal figures from the quarry towards the city, stops short of Nineveh itself. Other groups from the reign of Ashurbanipal present various questions, and it is a pleasure to offer a brief discussion of them to the most recent of many western archaeologists to have worked at this remarkable site. One group was carved about 645-643 BC in several rooms of the North Palace. The main subject of the wall-panels in Room C is the royal lion- hunt by chariot, which takes place in a hunting ground, a flat area or arena guarded by dogs and by soldiers with high siege-shields (Barnett 1976: pls V-XIII). The hunt must be happening at home, in or near Nineveh. If the Assyrian word ambassu means or can mean “game-park”, which seems probable if not entirely certain (Oppenheim 1965: 333; Matsushima 1987: 138-41), then Ashurbanipal’s gamepark can be roughly located (Figure 1). Gate 9 of the city, the so-called Adad Gate, in the northern wall near the north-eastern corner, was named abul dadad sa (kur)ambassi, or in another text abul [….] ambassi sa giskir[âti]), “the Gate of Adad of the Game-park” or “Gate of the Gamepark of the Gardens” (Frahm 1997: 274- 5). So the game-park was reached through this corner of the city, and was probably outside the walls. The hunting ground, if not directly part of the game-park, was surely nearby. The wall-panels in Room E, showing lions in a garden, and the famous Room S1 picnic scene of king and queen drinking together in a screened arbour near a marsh, might represent the ambassu itself or the garden which adjoined it (Barnett 1976: pls XIV-XV, LXIV; Frahm 1997: 83). Deller (1987) has argued that the picnic should be located in the qersu, but this in turn could have been within the garden. One of the Room C wall-panels shows, beside the arena, a single tree- covered mound or hill up which spectators are scrambling; on its summit 82 J. READE

Fig. 1. Plan of Nineveh, with author’s restorations. is a stela carved with a scene of a king in his chariot, killing lions (Figure 2). This mound and its stela have not been located, but one may speculate on a connection between it and a story, deriving from the fourth-century traveller Amyntas, which survives in the much later Deipnosophistai of Athenaeus (12: 530). According to this story, the Persian king Cyrus, whose own tomb David Stronach has of course investigated, destroyed a mound with an Assyrian stela on top while besieging Nineveh. Since Cyrus ASSYRIAN ILLUSTRATIONS OF NINEVEH 83

Fig. 2. Mound with stela beside hunting arena (WA 120861-2). Place and Thomas 1867-70: III, pl. 51.3. did not capture Nineveh, the story had undergone some distortion before reaching Amyntas, but there is an area of oddly disturbed ground outside the moat of Nineveh between Gates 7 and 8. At this point the moat was either never dug or has been filled in, and one could imagine a mound out- side it being used to fill the moat, and perhaps even serving as the basis of a siege-ramp. This point overlooks relatively flat ground stretching eastward to that part of the Khosr valley, between the Al-Jilah dams and the point where the river enters the city, which can plausibly be identified with an artificial swamp created by Sennacherib (Thompson and Hutchinson 1929: 115). Presumably lions in this swamp were some of those which so dis- turbed the peace of Ashurbanipal’s subjects (Luckenbill 1927: 363). Appro- priately, one series of wall-panels from Room S (Barnett 1976: pl. LIV) shows Ashurbanipal hunting lions beside a narrow watercourse or canal. There is a rather similar hill, with a different stela on top, in the lower register of one of Sargon’s wall-panels from Room VII at Khorsabad 84 J. READE

Fig. 3. Mound with stela and building beside hunting scene. Botta and Flandin 1849-50: II, pl. 114.

Fig. 4. City-walls and palace facade (part of WA 124938). Drawn by Ann Searight. ASSYRIAN ILLUSTRATIONS OF NINEVEH 85

Fig. 5. Aqueduct, building, stela and park (part of WA 124939). Drawn by Ann Searight.

(Figure 3); this is the end of a composition showing a bird-shoot. Beside Sargon’s hill is a columned building partly projecting over a watercourse, apparently the place where the party celebrated after the shoot, as shown in a composition in the upper register of the same wall-panels. It seems likely that there existed in the Assyrian countryside, at least from the reign of Sargon onwards, places which in some ways anticipated the celebrated parádeisov gardens of later Persian kings. Sargon’s combination of stela, columned building and watercourse is repeated in another group of Ashurbanipal panels, which were in Room H of the North Palace. In this room, as in Room XXXIII of the South-West Palace and Room I of the North Palace, the wall-panels were divided into two registers. In the other two rooms the surviving parts of the lower reg- isters showed scenes from campaigns, and those of the upper registers showed triumphs in after victory; this was probably the case in Room H also, but there the only surviving parts of the upper register derive from a corner of the room which was isolated between two doors. There 86 J. READE

Fig. 6. The upper dam at Al-Jilah, Nineveh: part of an elaborate system of waterworks requiring detailed survey. R. Campbell Thompson photograph (British Museum). was apparently inadequate space for a full narrative composition, and only the landscape was shown. There have been divergent views about the order of the surviving wall- panels (Gadd 1936: 197; Reade 1964: 5; Barnett 1976: 41), as it was not properly recorded at the time of excavation, but it can now be reconstructed with confidence. A narrow slab 6, on the left, is lost. Next to the right was slab 7, WA 124938, showing a walled city and palace (Figure 4). To its right was an inner corner; this was formed either by a narrow slab that was left unnum- bered and is now lost, or more probably by the left edge, sawn away and lost, of slab 8, which corresponds to the left-hand side of WA 124939, showing a garden (Figure 5). The right-hand side of WA 124939 is part of a separate adjoining wall-panel, slab 9, the right-hand side of which reached an outer corner; WA 124940 is the remainder of slab 9, originally round the corner, and closes the scene. Slab 9 must have been sawn in two after excavation, to facilitate packing; the saw-marks, cutting transversely back behind the faces of the two pieces, are still visible. ASSYRIAN ILLUSTRATIONS OF NINEVEH 87

Fig. 7. Rock-cut memorial at Bahandawaya, seen from the south/south-west. The niche is approached by steps and surrounded by double rows of circular hollows cut to accommodate pillar bases; the king is carved at the back of the niche. The egress of a water tunnel appears at lower left. Author’s photograph.

There is then the question of where the city and the garden were located. The garden of slabs 8-9 is on a hill, irrigated by an aqueduct; there is no sign of a city-wall, but more trees are visible at a higher level on the left. The aqueduct is like the one built by Sennacherib at Jerwan, which brought the waters of the Khazir, via the Khosr valley and the vicinity of Khorsabad, to Nineveh. Yet the Jerwan aqueduct was hardly built to irrigate gardens immediately around it, as this one does, and there could perhaps have been other such aqueducts much closer to Nineveh (Figure 6). On top of the hill there is a summer-house with Aeolic columns, a royal stela, and an altar on the slope in front. In a somewhat similar arrangement at Bahandawaya, at the head of Sennacherib’s Wadi al-Milh canal, steps lead up to a rock-cut stela in a niche, and holes in the rock around presumably functioned as the bases of supporting columns (Figures 7-8). Evidently there could have been several such monuments, Urartian in inspiration like 88 J. READE

Fig. 8. Bahandawaya niche viewed from west/south-west. Author’s photograph. the canal-system itself. Alternatively the Room H landscape could be another version of the scene on the Khorsabad wall-panel. Finally there are the streams of water irrigating trees on the side of the hill, which could be in any one of the gardens built by Sennacherib or a later king (e.g. Luckenbill 1927: 177, 269, 322). Sennacherib’s garden of the game-park (Frahm 1997: 83) is perhaps the one place near Nineveh which could have combined all these features. So far as we know, however, it was a long way from the royal palaces. Alternative proposals for locating the garden on Kuyunjik explain the proximity of the city in the composition (Dalley 1994); they do not explain the additional trees in the background, nor the relationship of the garden to Kuyunjik’s defensive wall and east gate. The double city-wall on slab 7 could certainly be the west face of the city- wall of Nineveh, with Gate 13 at the bottom, and the wall of the citadel rising behind it (Figure 9); it is unclear if the city-wall was continued on a panel to the right. If this is Nineveh, the palace facade should be a western facade of the South-West Palace, with colossal bulls and three pairs of ASSYRIAN ILLUSTRATIONS OF NINEVEH 89

Fig. 9. Plan of Neo-Assyrian Kuyunjik, with author’s restorations. 90 J. READE columns on lion-bases in front of the doors, as described by Sennacherib (Luckenbill 1927: 169). One such facade, probably the only one, has been partly excavated (Russell 1991: 76). No column-bases were identified, but this is unimportant as no attempt to look for traces of them is recorded, and they were anyway made of metal and would have been removed in antiquity. There were, however, pairs of bulls back to back, with protec- tive spirits in between them. On slab 7, in contrast, there is only one bull on each side of the visible (central?) pair of columns, and these have not three legs visible from the side, as would be usual in seventh-century Nin- eveh, but four. This is the style of Khorsabad, where we know of another palace facade incorporating columns on lion-bases (Luckenbill 1927: 37-8); it seems improbable, however, that Khorsabad had city-walls and citadel- walls of this complexity. If the city is Nineveh and the sculpture is inaccurate, omitting signifi- cant detail, then the same imprecision may have affected the garden scene, in which case the sequence might represent the entirety of Sennacherib’s achievements, in creating canals, gardens, palace and city-wall, compressed like a military campaign into one composition. This seems to be the expla- nation most easily compatible with the available evidence. The third group of wall-panels can probably be dated to the later part of Ashurbanipal’s reign. They were in Room XXII of the South-West Palace, where earlier wall-panels of Sennacherib had been erased (Layard 1853: 230-3). One wall showed a peaceful celebration in which people wore foliage (once thought to be feathers), on their heads; the subject-matter suggests Assyria. The panels on another wall are lost, but drawings of the two ends of the composition are preserved, and show a peaceful land- scape again suggestive of Assyria itself. At the right-hand end of the Ashurbanipal composition, beside what appears to be part of an earlier and otherwise erased Sennacherib compo- sition, is the corner of a city with double walls (Figure 10: Room XXII, slabs 8-9); as at Nineveh itself, the outer wall is plainly stone (footnote 1). This could correspond to the south-western corner of the city, with two gates. The narrow watercourse, somewhat surprisingly flanked by low trees, would be the moat; and the watercourse at the bottom would be the Tigris. The detached wall on the right would then be an outer fortification,

1 I have had the pleasure of discussing this scene with Stephen Lumsden, David Stronach’s colleague in the field. ASSYRIAN ILLUSTRATIONSOFNINEVEH

Fig. 10. Left: corner of city-wall (Ashurbanipal). Right: part of another composition (Sennacherib).

British Museum: Original Drawings IV, 78. 91 92 J. READE

Fig. 11. Left: irrigated gardens. Right: building and trees. British Museum: Original Drawings IV, 77. ASSYRIAN ILLUSTRATIONS OF NINEVEH 93 alongside the canal from the Khosr which ran outside the eastern wall of Nineveh before presumably turning west to flow into the Tigris. Because of the horses inside the city, part of a military review scene, Parpola (1987: 39) has identified this panel as showing the Review Palace (Nebi Yunus), which should have been located further to the left. The exigencies of space will have required any illustration of a review scene to occupy more space within the walls than it is likely to have done in reality. At the top right of another panel near the left-hand end of the compo- sition (Figure 11: Room XXII, slabs 2-3 and part of 4), trees above the roof of a columned summer-house suggested to Layard a hanging garden. Alternatively they may be regarded as in the background. This fragment not only recalls the Room H garden, but raises exactly the same issues of effective narrative versus visual reality. The garden could be on Kuyunjik or on Nebi Yunus or outside the city-wall. Further left, and probably not quite adjoining the summer-house frag- ment, are two panels representing, according to Layard, the same river as that at the right-hand end of the composition. It narrows as it proceeds left, and then widens or is connected with a lake. Another watercourse is flow- ing in from the top of the panel. Trees and bushes are ranged in straight lines alongside small canals. This is a landscape that could correspond to that outside the city-wall, on the western or north-western side of Nineveh, where the Khosr or canals entered the Tigris from the east. Sennacherib repeatedly describes his creation of orchards and gardens for the people of Nineveh (e.g. Luckenbill 1927: 162, 172). Gate 11 at this corner was orig- inally named digisigsig musammeÌ Òippati abul giskirâti, “Igisigsig who makes the orchards fruitful: Gate of the Gardens” (Frahm 1997: 274). Virtually the same name was subsequently applied to Gate 14: digisigsig musammeÌ Òippati muslalum sa giskirî, “Igisigsig who makes the orchards fruitful: Gate down to the Garden” (Frahm 1997: 274). Although it is not possible to prove that this last sequence of panels rep- resented Nineveh, it is difficult to imagine an alternative interpretation. Further work at the site may confirm or refute these suggestions. A large proportion of what we know or think we know about the city and its surroundings is based on armchair research, and needs intelligent correla- tion with the remains of the ancient landscape. This is part of what David Stronach and his team have been doing at Nineveh, and hopefully the time will come when they can return there, to fulfil the promise of their prelim- inary investigations. 94 J. READE

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