More Figurative Responses to Assyrian Domination
NOSELESS IN NIMRUD: MORE FIGURATIVE RESPONSES to ASSYRIAN DOMINATION Barbara nevling porter ABSTRACT In 1980 Carl Nylander proposed that the famous copper head depicting an ancient Akkadian ruler (perhaps Sargon I), discovered at Nineveh in a severely damaged state, had been the victim of deliberate mutilation, probably at the hands of Medes after Nineveh fell in 612 BCE to a joint Median-Babylonian attack. There are also clearly deliberate mutilations in scenes involving Elamites in bas-reliefs at Nineveh, which Julian Reade suggested represent a similar figurative revenge on Assyria, perhaps by Elamite soldiers who helped capture that city. Reade later identified further examples of selective mutilation in Nineveh palaces. Here, I point out figurative mutilations in a second Assyrian city, Kalḫu, focusing on a little-noticed Assyrian bas-relief at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine that shows extensive mutilation, particularly of the face and body of the king, in a pattern echoing and extending the mutilations seen at Nineveh. As Nylander first suggested, such mutilation appears to be an act of “political iconoclasm” by Assyria’s former subjects. In the Bowdoin relief, the winged divinity following the king has also been subjected to mutilation (an apparently unique case). A third figure has also been added, crudely sketched on the stone. This figure, facing the king, appears to wear the hat of an Elamite king. The addition of an image of the much-demeaned (and quite dead) rulers of Elam, placed here in a position of power before the disfigured image of their Assyrian counterpart, went beyond figurative revenge to announce the birth of a new political order, in which the long-conquered peoples of southern Mesopotamia would see their independence, their political identity, and their much-abused honor at last restored.
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