Assyrian Illustrations of Nineveh

Iranica Antiqua, vol. XXXIII, 1998 ASSYRIAN ILLUSTRATIONS OF NINEVEH BY Julian READE There are several groups of Assyrian wall-panels which show Nineveh or its neighbourhood. The well-known Sennacherib 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 outside 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 disturbed 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 registers showed scenes from campaigns, and those of the upper registers showed triumphs in Assyria 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.

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