A Companion to Assyria

by Eckart Frahm

  Weißbach, F. 1920. “Sardanapal,” Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft I A 2, 2436–75.

  Wiesehöfer, J. 2003. “The Medes and the Idea of the Succession of Empires in Antiquity,” in: Lanfranchi, Roaf, and Rollinger (eds.) 2003, 391–6.

  Wiesehöfer, J. 2005. “Daniel, Herodot und ‘Dareios der Meder’: Auch ein Beitrag zur Idee der Abfolge von Weltreichen,” in: R. Rollinger (ed.) 2005, 647–53.

  Wiesehöfer, J., Rollinger, R., and Lanfranchi, G.B. (eds.) 2011. Ktesias’ Welt – Ctesias’ World, Classica et Orientalia 1, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

  Yardley, J.C. 1994. Justin: Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus, Trans. J.C. Yardley, Atlanta: Scholars Press.

  Zawadzki, S. 1990a. “Herodotus’ Assyrian History,” Eos 72, 253–67.

  Zawadzki, S. 1990b. “Oriental and Greek Tradition about the Death of Sennacherib,” State Archives of Assyria Bulletin IV/1, 69–72.

  Zecchini, G. 1988. “Una nuova testimonianza sulla translatio imperii (Aristosseno, Vita di Archida, fr. 50 Wehrli),” Klio 70, 362–71.

  Further Reading

  So far there is no monographic treatment of the topic available, but the most important sources are introduced and discussed by Rollinger 2011a. On Semiramis, see in detail Rollinger 2010a. On the Hanging Garden(s) of Babylon and the problem of their localization, see Dalley 2013, Rollinger and Bichler 2005, and now Bagg 2014. The Western concept of tranlatio imperii is discussed with further literature by Wiesehöfer 2005.

  Notes

  1 Polybius 5,51,2, where a city called Libba is mentioned, which might be Libbi‐āli, i.e. Ashur (positive: Lipiński 2000: 256–57; negative: Hauser 1995: 232 n. 50).

  2 Syria is an abbreviated form of Assyria: see Rollinger 2006.

  3 The foundation of Babylon by giants is already attested in the works of some of the Early Church Fathers. The same applies to the vibrant tradition of Babylon as capital of the Assyrians; cf. Markschies 2011: 289–91.

  4 J. v. Arnim, Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, Volume III, 1905, F 11.

  CHAPTER 31

  The Archaeological Exploration of Assyria

  Mogens Trolle Larsen

  The Assyrian empire collapsed in 612 BCE. Its large cities were besieged, captured, and put to the torch, and the population of the Assyrian heartland dispersed, leaving cities and towns empty.1 Assyria’s huge palaces were destroyed and pillaged by Medes and Babylonians, the very people who had previously been subjugated by the Assyrian armies. Not surprisingly, the sons and grandsons of the men who had earlier been conquered, tortured, and killed by the Assyrian kings took their revenge; they went through the halls and galleries, smashing the heads of the Assyrian heroes depicted in their grand moments of victory on the majestic reliefs lining the walls.

  The great Assyrian cities were abandoned, with only a few squatters returning, settling in the shadow of the ruins. Assyria was no more. When the Greek philosopher and general Xenophon led his mercenary army of 10,000 back from Babylonia some 200 years later, he did not know the ancient names of the ruined cities he passed, and he thought they had been built by the Medes, the very people who had destroyed them. The knowledge of the Assyrian empire lived on primarily in the gruesome accounts of the Hebrew Bible, where no kind word about this formidable enemy can be found. Ancient Assyria became a mythical land, dimly remembered in the Bible and in a few classical writers.

  But the local population of northern Iraq never forgot the location of the great capital of the Assyrian empire, Nineveh or Nuniya (just as the site of ancient Babylon continued to be remembered). Nineveh was now a large field of ruins with two mounds and walls stretching for kilometers as grass‐covered hills lying opposite the modern city of Mosul across the river Tigris. One of the mounds was crowned by the mosque thought to contain the grave of the prophet Jonah, who is said in the Hebrew Bible to have been sent to warn the inhabitants of Nineveh against the consequences of their wickedness.

  Botta, Layard, and the Rediscovery of Assyria in the Nineteenth Century

  In contrast to Egypt, or for that matter Greece and Rome, Mesopotamian civilization left no magnificent ruins that could tell the visitor about past glory. Only grass‐covered huge mounds stood in the plains, and some travellers in the region did not even notice them, thinking they were features of the natural landscape.2 It was only in the early nineteenth century that the European fascination with the “sublime” in nature and history opened the eyes to the grandeur of the mounds. Austen Henry Layard (1817–94), one of the first explorers in these lands, spoke of “mighty ruins in the midst of deserts, defying, by their very desolation and lack of definite form, the description of the traveller.” His first view of the mound known as Nimrud made on him an “impression that … was one never to be forgotten” (Layard 1903: 311).

  Layard was in no doubt that these mounds covered the ruins of ancient cities, although neither he nor anyone else had any idea of the stratigraphic complexity of these tells, which had in many cases been inhabited for millennia. The dream of digging here in order to expose the ancient Assyrian palaces and temples was in part inspired by the work carried out by the “Resident” for the East India Company in Baghdad, Claudius Rich, who had visited and studied the site of Nineveh in 1820. He had made careful measurements of the mounds and collected antiques from the local people (Rich 1836). One day he had been shown an underground kitchen on the mound with the prophet Jonah’s grave, where the locals had uncovered stones with carved reliefs. A corridor lined with such relief slabs had been partly excavated, but the villagers had filled most of it again since it went underneath other houses that were in danger of being undermined by their efforts (Rich 1836 II: 31). An important building was clearly lying hidden in the ground underneath the modern village.

  The work done by Rich, and the collection of objects he had acquired – a collection that ended up in the British Museum – came to play a major role for the pioneers who initiated Assyria’s archaeological exploration. Rich’s published account inspired Jules Mohl, the secretary of the French Asiatic Society and a very influential man in scientific circles in France, to dream of bringing back glorious antiques from Assyria to the Louvre in Paris. Mohl managed to persuade the authorities to create the position of a French consul in Mosul, and a young man called Paul Émile Botta (1802–1870) was appointed in 1841. Part of his task was to start excavations at Nineveh, in particular on the huge mound known as Kuyunjik, and Mohl had secured funds specifically for this purpose.

  This was the time of amateur archaeology, when archaeological techniques were still rather primitive and people without any special knowledge of the past were supposed to produce history by digging holes in the ground. The large mounds in Assyria had been accumulated through millennia, with settlement following settlement and new dwellings constructed on top of the ruins of old ones. In many cases the top layers contained the ruins of the Neo‐Assyrian period (ca. 1000–612 BCE). After the fall of the empire, only the ancient Assyrian city of Arba’il (modern Erbil) remained an important urban center, which it is still today.

  The ancient city of Nineveh had been truly gigantic, with walls that surrounded an urban area some three kilometers wide and more than five kilometers long. Within this space were two mounds, Nebi Yunus and Kuyunjik; the first was still covered by houses crowding around the mosque; but only a tiny village covered one corner of Kuyunjik. Here Botta was faced with a mound that was almost a kilometer long and over twenty meters high. There was nothing to be seen on the surface that could tell him where to begin his excavations and what to expect.

  Botta sent a team of local men armed with spades and picks across the river to Kuyunjik, hoping that interesting artifacts would turn up. Unsurprisingly, the immediate results were not encouraging. The top layers on the mound were very disturbed by later settlement and agricultural activities, and the large palaces that indeed existed here were hidden so deep under the surface that Botta never reached them. Potsherds, bric
ks, and fragments of stone were produced, but Botta was naturally disappointed.

  However, one day villagers from a site called Khorsabad, located some 20 kilometers northeast of Nineveh, came to visit him with the claim that they had found Assyrian reliefs under their houses. So he sent some workmen to check on this report, and they returned with a confirmation of the claims. Botta thereupon moved his activities to Khorsabad, where he immediately began to uncover the ruins of a gigantic palace. Like Nineveh, although on a smaller scale, Khorsabad was surrounded by huge walls that formed a square of about four square kilometers, with an acropolis in the shape of a large mound at one end of the city. This was where Botta began his work.

  We now know that Khorsabad was built by the Assyrian king Sargon II at the end of the eighth century BCE, named Dur‐Šarrukin, and abandoned shortly after the king’s death; but Botta had no way of knowing all this. In fact, he did not even know what kind of a building he was excavating and prudently referred to it as “a monument.” The cuneiform writing system was still a mystery to interested scholars, and the reports on Assyrian history found in the Hebrew Bible and various Greek historians were imprecise and often seriously garbled. Botta’s excavations produced a significant number of long inscriptions that eventually played an important part in the decipherment of cuneiform, but it took ten years before scholars could begin to read them.

  It turned out that excavating on the acropolis of Khorsabad was a relatively simple project, for Botta operated in an area where relief slabs were standing along all the walls of a royal palace. Botta could simply follow these walls to draw up a plan of the building. In this way he uncovered a number of rooms that had once formed part of an enormous edifice whose rooms were adorned with large slabs of alabaster covered with images cut in low relief. These showed military campaigns with Assyrian soldiers attacking enemy cities, and in other places ritual and ceremonial scenes involving men who were obviously rulers or high officials. At the main gates in the building stood colossal figures of human‐headed bulls, some up to six meters high, obviously guarding the entrances.

  The sensational results of Botta’s work were communicated to the learned world by Jules Mohl in Paris (Mohl 1845), and in May 1847 the Louvre could open the first exhibition in the world with Assyrian sculptures. Botta’s workmen had laboriously transported some of the heavy sculptures from Khorsabad to the bank of the Tigris and had loaded them onto rafts, which carried their cargo to the port city of Basra. From there the sculptures were sent by boat to Europe. Obviously Botta could only take down and send a limited number of his finds. After returning to Europe, he never resumed his work as an excavator, but he produced an elaborate report together with the artist Flandin, whose drawings of the reliefs, both those brought to Paris and those left behind, gave the publication an exceptional interest, showing the majesty and beauty of Assyrian art and architecture (Botta 1849).

  In November 1845, Austen Henry Layard had begun his own activities at another site, the ancient city of Kalḫu now known as Nimrud, which was located south of Mosul on the east side of the Tigris. He came here as a private individual without any permission from the Turkish authorities, and his work was paid for out of the personal funds of the British ambassador in Istanbul, Sir Stratford Canning. Layard tried at first to fool the Ottoman pasha in Mosul by claiming that he was on a hunting expedition.

  The site of Nimrud was very much like Khorsabad, with an enormous mound, 650 by 350 meters in length and width, representing the acropolis of a large town whose walls could still be seen surrounding an area of some four square kilometers. Layard, accompanied by a friend from Mosul and six workers hired from the neighboring villages, began to scan the ground, searching for remains of reliefs which would indicate that he might find here what Botta had discovered at Khorsabad. In fact, on his first day of work Layard managed to locate not just one but two palaces. In both buildings he uncovered a few stone blocks, but to his disappointment they only carried inscriptions and no reliefs.

  In the course of the next weeks of excavation one of the palaces, located in the north‐western corner of the mound, turned out to be a veritable treasure‐house with hundreds of meters of reliefs lining the walls of several rooms. Of particular importance was the discovery of the throne‐room of the palace. At one end of this 50 meter long room stood the platform for the throne, and behind it was a large relief depicting two kings in a ritual pose approaching a sacred tree. Along one of the walls Layard found a series of images depicting a king hunting lions and wild bulls, plus a number of military campaigns, with Assyrian armies attacking and conquering various foreign cities. Only about half of the slabs originally adorning the throne‐room were preserved, as most of the opposite long wall had disappeared in antiquity. The main gates of the room were guarded by colossal figures of lions and bulls with majestic human heads.

  Layard had found the oldest Assyrian palace known to this day that had been decorated with relief slabs; it had been built around 865 BCE by King Aššurnaṣirpal II. When Layard presented his discoveries to the public in a hugely successful book, published in two volumes in 1849, the cuneiform texts were still undeciphered, and Layard thought he had been excavating the ruins of the Assyrian capital city of Nineveh, and therefore gave his book the title “Nineveh and its Remains.” The book is an engaging account of the excavations, but also of Layard’s own experiences in the exotic lands of the Middle East. It includes descriptions of his visit to the main shrine of the Yezidis, the so‐called “Devil‐worshippers,” Layard’s complex relations with the Ottoman authorities in Mosul, his meetings with local Arab tribesmen, and his contacts with the Christian communities, the Nestorians, which at the time were under threat from a group of Kurdish tribal leaders. The book created great interest in the ancient Assyrians and went through many editions. For the British public, it provided important background information on the sculptures that were arriving from Assyria to be exhibited in the British Museum (see Figures 31.1 and 31.2). An abbreviated version was translated into several languages.

  Figure 31.1 Transportation of a monumental bull colossus from the ruins of Kalḫu (in the background) to the bank of the Tigris during the excavations undertaken by Layard.

  Source: Layard 1849: II, frontispiece.

  Figure 31.2 Arrival of an Assyrian bull colossus at the British Museum in London. Illustration in Illustrated London News 28 February 1852: 184.

  Source: Reproduced with permission of M.T. Larsen.

  In the meantime, Layard had gone back to his job as an unpaid assistant to the ambassador in Istanbul. His book, published while he was there, immediately turned him into a celebrity. Lord Ellesmere, the president of the Royal Asiatic Society, declared that his was “the greatest achievement of our time,” and that “no man living has done so much or told it so well.” It was clear that a new expedition to Assyria was a possibility, and the Trustees of the British Museum secured funds for such an undertaking.

  Layard first turned his attention to Kuyunjik, where, having better luck than Botta, he had made some significant discoveries during his earlier expedition; most importantly, he had found there a vast palace built by Sennacherib around 700 BCE. He now expanded his work and uncovered hundreds of relief slabs, most of which he eventually had to leave behind, sometimes not even recording them in the form of drawings. In order to access the areas with the reliefs, he dug tunnels into the mound and then simply followed the walls of rooms, corridors, and courtyards – the rooms themselves were normally not excavated. Layard, claiming that this was a reasonable procedure, described his efforts as follows:

  The subterraneous passages were narrow, and were propped up when necessary either by leaving columns of earth, as in mines, or by wooden beams. These long galleries, dimly lighted, lined with the remains of ancient art, broken urns projecting from the crumbling sides, and the wild Arab and hardy Nestorian wandering through their intricacies, or working in their dark recesses, were singularly picturesque.

 
(Layard 1853: 69)

  Despite these crude and primitive excavation methods Layard was able to develop some initial ideas on the development of Assyrian art, for it was immediately obvious that the reliefs found at Kuyunjik were quite different from those he had discovered at Nimrud, and, in fact, also quite distinct from the ones from Khorsabad. At Nimrud most figures were standing firmly on a baseline that defined the scene, and this was also true for most of the reliefs from Khorsabad. At Nineveh, in contrast, the perspective of many of the reliefs represented a kind of bird’s eye view, with large numbers of smaller figures scattered over mountain areas or other landscape types. This applied in particular to scenes of warfare, where the character of the landscape through which the Assyrian army moved was clearly indicated. Layard was particularly impressed by a series of reliefs that showed the quarrying of the great bull colossi and their transportation across the Assyrian landscape on sleds and rollers (see Figure 25.3).

  One of Layard’s most important achievements at Kuyunjik was the discovery of a large room filled with mostly fragmentary clay tablets covered with cuneiform writing. This was the first major find of tablets made in Assyria, for none had been found at Nimrud or at Khorsabad, and it seemed clear that Layard had discovered part of the palace’s archive and library, which would eventually – once the texts could be read – provide detailed information about life at the Assyrian court and many other issues. Several thousands of tablets and fragments were taken from this room and shipped to the British Museum.

  Another find of singular importance was the so‐called “Lachish Room,” whose reliefs showed the capture of the large fortified Judean town of Lachish by the Assyrian king Sennacherib. These reliefs came to play a special role, partly because most of them were taken down and transported to the British Museum, where they served as a brilliant example of the narrative art of the Assyrians. But even more important was that the Lachish reliefs could be linked directly to a passage in the Hebrew Bible about Sennacherib’s campaign against Judah, during which he conquered Lachish and laid siege to Jerusalem (Ussishkin 1982). The account of this dramatic event in an inscription left by Sennacherib played an important role in the final decipherment of the cuneiform script (Rawlinson 1851; Larsen 1996: 293–305). A caption accompanying one of the scenes from the Lachish room mentions Sennacherib, providing final proof on whose palace Layard had been excavating (Figure 26.3).