The Forms of Violence Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture

Panthera leo Leaping at the Rex's Chariot
Palace of Ashurnasirpal II (883-59 BCE)
Typical instance of Assyrian
alabaster relief sculpture.

Assyrian Art (c.1500-612 BCE)

Contents

• Historical Background
• Characteristics of Assyrian Art
• Compages
• Sculpture
• Ashurbanipal'southward Library
• Neo-Babylonian Empire
• Related Articles

NOTE: For more about the earliest cultures and civilizations,
please see: Ancient Art (2,500,000 BCE - 400 CE).

Man-headed Winged Balderdash and
Panthera leo (lamassu) (883–859 BCE)
From the Gate of Ashurnasirpal'due south
palace at Nimrud.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.

Antiquity
For the Greek-inspired era of
early culture, delight see
Classical Antiquity (from 800
BCE to 450 CE).

Historical Groundwork

As explained in our article on Sumerian fine art (c.4500-2270 BCE), the land of Mesopotamia was ruled by the Sumerians until about 2270 BCE, when information technology was overrun past the Semitic-speaking kings of the Akkadian Empire. The state was united for a menstruum (c.2334-2154) nether the dynasty of Akkad, later on which there was a Neo-Sumerian revival led past the powerful city-state of Ur. The third dynasty of Ur collapsed in 2003 BCE before the Amorites, who moved in from the desert and established their own series of Semitic dynasties. Withal, neither the Akkadians nor the Amorites made whatsoever pregnant contributions to Mesopotamian fine art, which remained true to its Sumerian roots.

Even when the Semite Rex Hammurabi (c.1810-1750 BCE) finally hammered a single Babylonian empire out of the confusion of quarrelling racial groups and jealous city-states, each with its ain rulers and gods, it was once more Sumerian art, rather than anything distinctively Babylonian, that lived on. The metropolis of Babylon now became the capital, giving a new name to the empire, and information technology was, according to existing records, adorned with palaces and temples magnificently conceived and decorated. Unfortunately afterwards invasions, and the decay of Babylonian power before Hittite, Kassite, and finally Assyrian assaults, completely destroyed the architectural monuments. Even the sculpture and minor relics of this period are scarce, and not very important.

The stele containing the Code of Hammurabi (1750 BCE, Louvre, Paris), preserved because it was carried away by a Persian conqueror, is ane of the virtually famous archeological finds of modern times, but its value is primarily sociological. A rounded diorite shaft nearly eight feet in height is inscribed with 3600 lines of cuneiform text, setting along the laws newly codified by Hammurabi for the just conduct of the people of his kingdom. In a higher place the inscription the stele is adorned with a carved relief, showing the sun-god handing the lawmaking down to the male monarch. The workmanship is skilful and somehow the very simplicity of conception makes the work memorable. The standard of official art was thus good, but not distinguished. The stele, hardly more than a routine official piece of work, shows no advance over boilerplate Sumerian sculpture; yet it is competent and bonny, because the date.

In brusk, Babylon's temporary political supremacy added cipher to the artistic civilization established by the Sumerians.

At the fourth dimension of Hammurabi'due south death in 1750, the ancient country of Mesopotamia was divided into two countries: Assyria in the due north, Babylon in the s. Northern Mesopotamia was dominated past the Assyrians, while the southern half was controlled past the Babylonians. Previously a dependency of the more northerly Mitanni and Hatti kingdoms, Assyria emerged as an independent entity during the 15th century BCE, after which it gradually accomplished a ascendant role over all Mesopotamia, eventually (in the 8th century BCE) uniting most of the Centre East - from Egypt to the Western farsi Gulf - within its empire. See also: Hittite Fine art (c.1600-1180 BCE).

Characteristics of Assyrian Art

An Assyrian artistic mode first began to appear around 1500 BCE. It featured finely detailed narrative relief sculpture in stone or alabster - found mainly in the royal palaces - depicting most hunting episodes and armed services affairs. Animate being forms, of horses and lions, are magnificently represented in some particular, although human figures are more rigid. Typical themes include scenes of battle or private combat. The finest examples of this kind of Assyrian rock sculpture include the alabaster carvings of lion-hunts featuring Ashurnasirpal 2 (ruled 883-859 BCE) and Ashurbanipal (ruled 668-627 BCE), now in the British Museum, London.

Assyrian sculptors produced very few statues, except for huge animal or anthropomorphic figures (typically lions and winged beasts with human heads, sculpted in high relief on two sides of a rectangular stone block, with the heads effectively in the circular) which flanked majestic gateways, or other fortified entrances.

Archeologists have found a variety of ancient pottery, besides as some items of goldsmithing and jewellery fine art, and fifty-fifty small examples of ivory carving, but in general, no significant art forms appear until leadership has passed to the Assyrians of the upper Mesopotamian Valley. The Semitic peoples there - origins unknown - had coalesced into an independent state ii centuries before, and had maintained their own character, and, to an extent, their own institutions, under Babylonian domination, while doubtless assimilating Babylonian-Sumerian cultural traits. Shortly after 1300 BCE they began looking to rule the entire Mesopotamian area. It was, however, only after four more centuries of changing fortunes that, in 885 BCE, there came the dawn of the era of Assyrian purple magnificence and expansion, inaugurated past the king-god Ashurnasirpal.

Assyrian magnificence and glory were very militaristic, and in this period we run across a wholehearted devotion to fine art concerned with conqueror-kings and wars and hunts. The heavenly deities are rearranged to bring a war-god to supreme position. Campaign follows campaign under successive corking monarchs - Sargon 2, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and finally Ashurbanipal - until even Egypt is conquered; and the exploits of each campaign is meticulously recorded by courtroom artists and scribes. More blood flows in this pictorial art than in any other in world history.

Architecture

The era is summed up in the magnificent architecture and sculptural adornments of the palaces of Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, and of Ashurnasirpal at Nimrud, (aboriginal Kalhu). Until it became the capital city nether Ashurnasirpal, Nimrud had been no more than a provincial town. In that location are other works, of course: statues and vases and seals. Even the sculptured reliefs of the palace walls are more than a depiction of violent exploits. Nosotros can read in them of gardens and plants, of fishing, excursions, and feasts, of gods and dear, of luxurious carpets and richly embroidered garments, and of women and children. In that location is hither a mine of information, not only for the student of manners and community but for the botanist and ethnologist. In a depicted group of tribute-bearers the characteristics of each concrete blazon can be recognized: the Jews, for example, show those hit facial traits that can be seen in some Jewish people to this day. (The fourth dimension of Sennacherib is the historic period of the prophecies of Isaiah.) But in the subject field-matter of the reliefs war is beginning, hunting a skilful second, and the rest of life an incidental third.

Sennacherib transformed the hamlet of Nineveh into the capital of an empire, maybe to avoid developed cities and elaborate palaces associated with earlier kings. There he set out to build distinctively and gloriously in his ain name. There he erected for himself "the palace that has no rival," which was actually its official name.

The palaces of the Assyrian kings were more than places of royal residence and regal business. Long earlier, the rulers had claimed divine sanction if not divine heritage: the king was function god and directly related by function or nascency to the supreme national deity. So the temple was a wing of the palace, or perhaps its very heart. Merely a wise and practical rex did not leave too much of the business concern of foresight and protection to the gods. The temple-palace was a fortress as well.

There must accept been a striking deviation in visual effect between the outside fortified walls and towers, plain and grim, and the pomp and magnificence of decoration and life within. A whole cityful of favoured people dwelt there: nobles, defenders, favourites, politicians. For the male monarch'southward quarters and those of his wives, the gods, and their priests, the appointments were sumptuous, but the utilitarian outside brick walls were comparatively sheer and blank - a combination to exist noted often in later history, in Byzantine church, medieval continue, Florentine palace, and Spanish castle. A ceremonial doorway brought the colour and enrichment of the interior to the facade in flanking sculpture and inset copper reliefs, and in narrow bands of glazed brick that continued out along the fortress walls. The traditional architectural features were, in most particulars, from the Sumerian past mode of the Babylonian, and the ritual ziggurat or tower dominated; but the spotter figures at the main entry are said to exist of Hittite origin. And of course in that location were luxurious embellishments from farther eastward. Already, also, there had been for long an commutation of art products with Egypt. All this the Assyrian monarchs brought into 1 focus, one show of art. It is likely that the designers and craftsmen were largely imported from other countries - Phoenicia and Syria and Arab republic of egypt - each doing his function without a clear idea of the whole. But the result was grand.

King Sennacherib himself tells of his palace at Nineveh, in a tablet dictated to one of his scribes and translated in our own time at the British Museum: "Cedar, cypress, and pine, timbers from Sinai and thick bars of bronze, did I set in the doorways, and in the dwelling-rooms did I leave openings like lofty windows. Great statues of alabaster wearing crowns with thorns did I attack either side of the doorways, and slap-up winged bulls of white stone did I carve in the Metropolis of Tastriate beyond the Tigris for the great gates, and great copse did I cut from the neighbouring forests to build rafts on which to send them. With much effort and among many difficulties were they brought to the gates of my palace." The temple portion of the building was especially sumptuous, and was described past the male monarch as "rooms of gilded and silver, of precious metalwork, crystal, alabaster, and ivory, built for the dwelling of my God."

In that location is here, in the monarch's planning of dazzling outlays of architectural and decorative works, and in his arrogating to himself as imperial master the products of artistic artists, a prototype of Hadrian and of Louis XIV. But if the "I" of his account is to be taken literally, Sennacherib did indeed have the born constructor'southward sense of sound engineering and inventive building; for he speaks familiarly of problems of lighting successfully met, in ways that dispelled "the darkness of the quondam palaces," and of hydraulic inventions that brought running h2o into the buildings.

To compare contemporaneous design from the region around the Nile, see Aboriginal Egyptian Architecture (3,000-200 BCE) and also the wonders of Egyptian Pyramids Architecture (c.2650-1800 BCE).

Sculpture

Whether he had taste or artistic vision to weld this endeavour into a unity or a sustained and vigorous style is more than open up to question. Certainly the winged bulls that he had such trouble with before he got them installed at his front gate were dull and lifeless enough. (Two similar ones, from the palace of Ashurnasirpal, now repose in the entry hall of the Metropolitan Museum in New York.) And one suspects a very mixed result in the interiors. They were colourful and showy, no doubt, with sculptured alabaster panels, glazed-tile insets, painted stucco murals, and lots of furnishings ready around. But the restorations of the archeologists and the recovered fragments themselves will not convince the mod observer of a subtly designed ensemble or a distinctively beautiful way.

The obsession with hurting, torture, and conquest is illustrated especially in the alabaster reliefs and terracotta sculpture with which the brick walls were lined inside the main rooms. Some are of Sennacherib'due south time. The ones better known to the public are of Ashurbanipal'southward era, ii reigns subsequently. There is no reason to read sadism into these records of violence and suffering; they demonstrate rather the candid realism of rulers who lived by a philosophy of "might is right." The king spread out a picture-book of his career every bit he would similar his subjects to think of it. His predecessors were depicted trampling their dead enemies or holding nets filled with severed heads. His artists must bear witness more heads in his net and greater heaps of the slaughtered and trampled. Information technology is a signal of honor that they outdo all earlier chroniclers in setting along the magnitude of his conquests. They conveniently forget any defeats and reverses - what patriotic artist does not? - and they exaggerate the numbers of the enemies slain or of the lions killed.

They convey the grisly lessons of war effectively and in item. But information technology is when they come up to the depiction of animals in the hunt that they display deep emotional feeling, also as a more than sensitive paw in delineation. The human figure is almost without exception stiffly conventional, fifty-fifty wooden. Simply the animals are observed with a sort of cold sympathy and are superbly drawn. They are living, nobly stiff, lithe. Most lifelike of all are the hunted lions when they are wounded. The artist has observed these dying beasts with a photographic camera eye and has got down the salient and telltale facts, the drag of paralyzed legs, the snarling jaws, the fury of the final bound.

The merit here is, of course, one of realism. The reliefs impact a loftier spot in pictorial Mesopotamian sculpture, but ane mayhap not and so loftier every bit the Victorian discoverers of the Nineveh treasures judged. The stone murals found a remarkable achievement; they tell stirring stories in an idiom ornamentally formalized, if a bit heavy, with thrusts into compelling realism at intervals; but in general they lack the architectural unity of superlatively great sculpture. Inside a traditional formalization in that location is disturbing reversion to naturalistic imitation for its own sake. Every rosette on a costume is worked out minutely, every nail on a hand, all the reins from charioteer to horses, and every feather in a wing. Seldom does the placing of the figures on the background, or the grouping, arroyo the intuitive compositional sense long before displayed in Egyptian sculpture and stonework. We are aware of the achievement of records as jumbo and audacious equally the kingly dictators could have desired. But we are seldom aware of the artist's vision transcending his mission and his materials.

Ashurbanipal'south Library

Although we may experience disturbed at the thought of visual art whose sole task was to glorify a politician, we know that it was as much a victim of established Babylonian-Assyrian tradition as of Ashurbanipal'due south selfishness. As a affair of fact, there is other show of Ashurbanipal's genuine involvement in the things of the mind. He took an epochal footstep forward when he gathered documents and books and established ane of the earliest known libraries. The 22,000 inscribed tablets, collected at his order to preserve accumulated knowledge in fields of religious tradition, scientific discovery, history, and full general literature, and systematically catalogued, take been found in the ruins of the palace at Nineveh. Ashurbanipal himself made a special point of the fact that, as a prince, he had learned reading and writing, in addition to the more noble arts of riding and hunting and ruling.

Neo-Babylonian Empire

After the autumn of Assyria, which came about, the historians say, because besides many men were taken from the farms and impressed into the army, the ruling ability passed southward once more, to Babylon, now resurgent under another invading people, the Chaldeans. These were destined to rebuild the Mesopotamian empire, to boss the Virtually East briefly, then to encounter their Neo-Babylonian empire collapse because the ruling grade overreached the limits of safe exploitation. This downfall marked the stop of Babylonian-Assyrian independence, the last stand of the local Semites against a succession of foreign overlords; foreign domination began in 538 BCE with the Persians, and continued into the twentieth century.

Notation: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (c.600 BCE), presumed to have been located at Babylon or Nineveh, were designated every bit one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient Earth, by the Greek poet and commentator Antipater of Sidon.

Related Articles

- Art of Ancient Persia (3,500 BCE onwards)
- Egyptian Art (3100 BCE - 395 CE)
- Etruscan Art (c.700-90 BCE)
- Greek Sculpture (650-27 BCE)
- Greek Pottery (from 3,000 BCE)
- Roman Architecture (c.400 BCE - 400 CE)

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