assyrians in last 100 years

8/3/2019 Assyrians in Last 100 Years

1/11

T H E ASSYRIANS I N T H E E A S THUNDRED Y E A R S

BY EDITH PORADA

Since the first discovery of Mesopotamian re-mains and the decipherment of cuneiformtexts in the early nineteenth century, ourknowledge of Mesopotamian civilization hasgrown to comprise a development thatstretches over several thousand years. But thisextension of knowledge has not been accom-plished through a single-minded pursuit onthe part of excavators and scholars. Rather,it has grown in different directions, followingthe trends of the times; and while the resultsachieved in each period have naturallyformed the stepping stones for the next gen-eration, they are also characteristic documentsof their own age. Though it may seem sur-prising that ancient Mesopotamian studies,which to many appear completely removedfrom everyday life, had any close relationwith the changing spirit of the times, actuallytheir beginnings were followed with intenseinterest by a wide public.All that was known of the Assyrians andBabylonians before the early nineteenth cen-tury had been derived from the Bible and theGreek historians. But this did not make theman unknown quantity; on the contrary, sinceat that time people in general read the Bible,and especially the Old Testament, more oftenthan today, they were more familiar with Sen-nacherib and Shalmaneser than they are atpresent. Moreover, many of the pictures ofthe Assyrians that they got from the Biblewere based upon the experience of eyewit-nesses. The siege of Jerusalem as described inIsaiah and II Kings, for example, gave theromantic poet Byron the inspiration for his"Destruction of Sennacherib." As for theGreek authors, the account of the end of theAssyrian empire written by Diodorus Siculusprovided Byron with material for a drama,"Sardanapalus," published in 1821. Byroncreated in Sardanapalus an interesting por-

trait of himself, giving his hero many of hisown traits-selfishness, sensuality, and indo-lence, redeemed by courage, humanity, andwit. Nevertheless, the play is a weak one.This, however, is due to Byron's inadequacyas a dramatist rather than to any deficiencyin the subject matter, for the Greek narrativecontains a tragedy of Wagnerian proportions:Sardanapalus, besieged in his town of Nine-veh for three years, learns that the waters ofthe Euphrates (in reality the Tigris) havebreached the walls at one point; he realizesthat this is the fulfillment of an ancientprophecy whereby the city would be doomedonce the river turned against it. He thereforecauses a great pyre to be built, on which heplaces his treasures and wives, and just beforethe enemy storms the city walls the last kingof Assyria steps into the flames.In 1827 Byron's play inspired Delacroix,another great romanticist, to paint his flam-boyant and controversial Death of Sardanapa-lus (see opposite page). The artist's maineffort was concentrated on the contrast be-tween the impassive Assyrian monarch lyingon his couch and the agony of his favoritewomen, horses, and dogs, who are beingstabbed to death before the fire reaches them.

Added to these romantic preoccupationswith the Assyrians there was in this period adesire for factual knowledge that transformedinto scientific endeavors the romantic ten-dencies of those men who at the beginningof the nineteenth century chose the ancientNear East as their field of activity. ClaudiusJames Rich, "political resident of the honour-able East India Company at Baghdad," wasthe first traveler to examine scientifically themounds which, according to a tenacious tra-dition, were once the sites of Babylon andNineveh. Best known among his works arehis detailed reports on the site of Babylon

38


2/11

The Death of Sardanapalus, replica by Delacroix of his Salon picture of 1827, painted underthe influence of Byron's play. In the collection of Henry P. Mcllhennyand a trip to Kurdistan made in 1820. Theircontents so deeply impressed the secretary ofthe French Asiatic Society that he, in turn,conveyed his enthusiasm to Paul 1tmile Botta,the young French agent consulaire setting outfor Mosul. Botta began excavations in 1843on the mound of Kujunjik, which coveredancient Nineveh. One day a dyer from thenear-by village of Khorsabad chanced to visitthe spot. Seeing that every fragment of brickand alabaster was carefully preserved, heasked the reason for what seemed to him astrange procedure. On being informed thatBotta and his assistants were in search ofstone sculptures, he advised them to try themound on which his village was built and inwhich, he declared, many such things hadbeen found when the natives were digging

for bricks. After hesitating a little because hehad been too often misled by similar stories,Botta sent a few men to Khorsabad, and soonthey found themselves unearthing wallsformed by slabs bearing sculptures of proces-sions, ceremonies, and scenes of battle. Theyhad come upon the palace of Sargon, fatherof Sennacherib (see ill. p. 40). Commentingupon these exciting discoveries, L'Illustrationsaid in 1847 that the French should considerthemselves fortunate - in this century wheneverything appeared to be known and thefield of discoveries had become sterile - tohave obtained specimens of a civilization al-most as old as that of the Egyptians but "in-finiment plus remarquable."The prominence given Botta's excavationscaused sufficient funds to be turned over to

39


3/11

l;?;iMii ~ from the confines of Syria by a vast blanks tretchi gstretching from Aleppo to the banks of theV;Pllliln^i . U, X i0 Tigris. A deep mystery hangs over Assyria,1,i~ ~;k~ Babylonia, and Chaldaea. With these namesare linked great nations and great citiesrse i dimly shadowed forth in history; mightyI |l naruins,n the midst of deserts, defying, by theirstr i i very desolation and lack of definite form, the~i ~iIdrawn description of the traveller; the remnants ofmighty races still roving over the land; thesTlr t on fulfilling and fulfilment of prophecies; thefel aplains to which the Jew and the Gentile alikeIi1 A:"; look as the cradle of their race."r Layard's excavations soon turned out to be!j Iii ~extraordinarily successful. After having un-qu e Ijjill; tearthed a number of bas reliefs, he found thein cgreat.f r head of one of the great winged bulls thatthos lhad guarded the palace built by Ashurnasir-

!P~ ~! N/palat Calah (see ill. below). Layard's reportP_oi on this event is again characteristically pic-:~ "" ~turesque.One day as he was returning to the

I1M1 excavations, he saw two Arabs urging theiriL?J!. mares toward him at top speed. As they drew:II i near they stopped, crying, "Hasten, 0 Bey,. . . for they have found Nimrod himself."

Assyrian relief from Khorsabad, a drawing in"L'Illustration, Journal Universel,"June, 1847

a young Englishman, Austen Henry Layard, jrto enable him to continue his excavations atNimrud (the biblical Calah), where he hadbegun to dig with private means in 1845. .Layard had a great gift for expression and ina passage in which he described why he felt ;.. . .drawn to Mesopotamia we find crystalizedthe romantic attitude of these early excava-tors: "I had traversed Asia Minor and Syria,visiting the ancient sites of civilization, and "the spots which religion has made holy. I nowfelt an irresistible desire to penetrate to the ,:regions beyond the Euphrates to which his-tory and tradition point as the birthplace ofthe wisdom of the West. Most travellers,after a journey through the usually fre- &quented parts of the East, have the same long-ing to cross the great river, and to explore The discovery of the head of a winged bull.those lands which are separated on the map Romantic sketch made by Layard in 1846

40


4/11

Lowering one of the great winged bulls at Nimrud (i847) before taking it to EnglandWhen Layard arrived at the mound on whichhis expedition was at work he descended intothe trench, and the Arabs withdrew a screenthey had made of baskets and robes, disclos-ing an enormous human head sculptured outof alabaster. Layard saw at once that the headmust belong to a winged lion or bull (similarto those found previously by Botta). "The ex-pression was calm, yet majestic, and the out-line of the features showed a freedom andknowledge of art, scarcely to be looked for inthe works of so remote a period," he wrote."This . . . head, . . . thus rising from thebowels of the earth, might well have belongedto one of those fearful beings which are pic-tured in the traditions of the country, as ap-pearing to mortals, slowly ascending from theregions below."

Layard retained the first stage in the trans-port of one of these winged bulls in a sketchin which he pictured himself as he had ac-tually watched and directed the performancefrom the top of the earth wall (see ill. above).No detail of the principal action has beenomitted. The tilted bull is being gently let

down by ropes onto rollers as the supportingbeams are removed. Barren masses of earthrise above the white alabaster slabs in effec-tive contrast, and in the distance tiny figuresof camels and of Arabs in flowing garmentsprovide appropriate accents.This sketch is characteristic of the time atwhich it was made and of the romantic atti-tude, reflected in the combined rendering ofancient ruins, a strange people, and a foreignlandscape. The same features are apparent inthe little drawing of the finding of the wingedbull's head on page 40, which also shows howwell the earlier nineteenth-century Englishstyle of drawing lent itself to the reproduc-tion of the classical simplicity of the sculp-tures of Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 B.c.) foundat Nimrud. On the other hand, the elegant,ornate reliefs of the later king Sargon (721-705 B.C.) from Khorsabad seem the ideal ob-ject for the French manner of that period(see ill. p. 40), which satisfied the prevalenttaste for long curly black beards, large darkeyes, aquiline features like those of Sargon,plush, and tassels.

41


5/11

Reconstruction of the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud after a sketch made by a mid-Victorian architect. From Layard's "Monuments of Nineveh" (1853)In the same way that the spirit of the 1840'sand 50's manifested itself in the drawings of

Assyrian sculptures, it re-created Assyrianarchitecture as if it had been intimately re-lated to the style of the Crystal Palace. Infact, the architect who made the reconstruc-tion of the palace of Ashurnasirpal reproducedabove actually designed the Nineveh Courtin the Crystal Palace. He had little to go by,of course, except for the ground plan, andno more information was forthcoming at thattime, for the romantic period of excavationstopped abruptly after Layard and his aideshad uncovered most of the palaces at Nimrudand those of Sennacherib and Ashurbanipalat Kujunjik and Botta and his successors haddone their work at Khorsabad. The reasonwas the Crimean War, upon which both theEnglish and French Governments concen-trated their financial efforts and which drewmen like Layard away from excavations. Butas the field was deserted by the artisticallyinclined pioneers, who had all had sometraining or at least interest in painting andarchitecture, men of a different type stepped

in and took the lead. They were the languageand Bible students, whose main interest laynot in the ancient works of art but in thetexts.

If we try to relate the mental attitude ofthese men to the prevailing spirit of the times,we cannot turn to any movement in art orliterature but have to look at the develop-ment of historical thought and scholarship inthe humanities. In the introduction to hisStudy of History, Arnold Toynbee describedthis development as the industrialization ofhistorical thought, characterizing it as thetype of scholarship which sees its main taskin the assemblage of raw materials-inscrip-tions, documents, and the like. He speaks of"a generation in which the prestige of theindustrial system imposed itself upon the 'in-tellectual workers' of the Western World."

Egon Friedell, in his often unscientific butsometimes entertaining Kulturgeschichte desAltertums, stresses an aspect that was perhapsespecially characteristic of the German schol-arship of the time. In a reflection on thechanges in historical authority, he notes that42

I-: X_. *.P, v aI 9I xr ! v


6/11

in the Middle Ages only those authors wereconsidered reliable who were based on theinspired writings; in the Renaissance onlythose who were based on the classics-Livy,Sallust, and others. As historical research inthe later nineteenth and the early twentiethcentury depended mainly upon administra-tive and diplomatic records, Friedell drew theconclusion that the Middle Ages relied on theauthority of the Church, the Renaissanceupon antiquity, and the nineteenth and twen-tieth centuries upon bureaucracy. A few titlesof the studies for which the Assyrian materiallater lent itself-"Assyrian Laws," "Royal Cor-respondence of the Assyrian Empire," "Bu-reaucracy in Assyria"-are sufficient to indi-cate the influence of this approach.For the tale of how the western world cameto discover the key to the texts written in

I m ! Tf d ' it I ! ;P

t; I . ; '. , . .

i ' ; , , :.5 - . i.s Ii .,

Assyro-Babylonian cuneiform, we have to takea step backward. In 1812 Grotefend, a Ger-man school teacher and cipher expert wholiked to occupy himself with acrostics, rebuses,and so forth, became interested in the cunei-form inscriptions of the Persian kings, someof which had been published. They were ob-viously written in three languages, but in oneof them the signs were far simpler thanin the other two. Grotefend had learned thatthe inscriptions of the Persian kings alwaysbegan with "So and so, the great king, kingof kings, son of So and so." By fitting thenames of the best-known kings into thesesigns, he found that one of the inscriptionsnamed Darius, son of Hystaspes, and anotherXerxes, son of Darius. He thus obtained theequivalent of a number of Persian cuneiformsigns.

n

,i

.

; ttP

Ij

t :ili

I1

Modern reconstruction of the facade of the Nabu temple at Khorsabad43

i - Jo.,i" . ^.".1

:??-.5XI?;." '''?I?i:?i??

"--^IIr


7/11

Assyrian couch made in 909o. Although it was copied after an Assyrian relief,it conforms to the prevailing gingerbread style of interior decoration.

Using the same method, Henry C. Rawlin-son, a young British officer, began work in1835 on the great trilingual inscription ofDarius carved on the almost inaccessible rockof Behistun in Persia. He copied it as hestood on the topmost step of a short ladder,having only his left arm to steady himselfwhile his left hand held the notebook and hisright the pencil. Rawlinson was soon able toread large parts of the Persian inscription,and he and others proceeded to decipher theaccompanying Babylonian one by combiningtheir knowledge of the Persian text with whatlittle had hitherto been learned about theAssyro-Babylonian tongue and script. Almosttwenty years passed, however, before the Bab-ylonian signs could be read with reasonablecertainty. Just when this point had beenreached, around the middle of the century,Ashurbanipal's library was discovered atNineveh. Its thousands of tablets, containingreligious, literary, mathematical, philological,and administrative texts, to name only someof the categories represented, provided ma-terial for generations of scholars. Moreover,

Babylonian excavations, which had been be-gun as a result of the success of those carriedout in Assyria, produced additional masses oftablets. However, the results of the scholarlywork done with this material contained littlethat would have interested the layman. Notuntil 1872 did the Assyro-Babylonian recordshave an interlude of wide popularity, whenan assistant at the British Museum, who wasengaged in cleaning, reading, and fitting to-gether the tablets, found an Assyrian textcontaining an account of a deluge somewhatsimilar to the one in the Bible. Even Gilbertand Sullivan took account of this popularinterest and had the Major General in their"Pirates of Penzance" say, "I can write awashing bill in cuneiform."After that no effort was made to appeal tothe public which in Layard's time had so en-thusiastically received the Assyrian monu-ments and so avidly read his lively and in-formative accounts. Most of the excavationsmade between 1860 and 1914 were carried outin Babylonia (southern Mesopotamia) andwere reported in special periodicals or in

44


8/11

to Mesopotamian antiquity. As in the earlynineteenth century, the public experienced apassionate interest in man's past, but thistime in a past that went beyond the historicalremains of the Assyrian empire to t;he verybeginnings of human evolution. This devel-opment is almost too near to permit objectivecomment upon its causes, but it seems to be

- . - a final summit in human achievement. This

^H,c,I ";J'N^4 BS^f'I -^ tl rest civilizations. These included Ur, in south-b>f^^ '.*Hy ern Mesopotamia, where rich treasures were

-_ 8 found in the so-called royal tombs datinginofrom bout 2500 B.., and mounds insouthern and northern Mesopotamia, under

-*-rtl^^^ * fl -which there were discovered traces of settle-

Head of a human-headed bull, about 2600B.C., ancestor of Assyriancomposite monsters.In the University Museum, Philadelphia ,

oversized monographs. Although the ancient -works of art discovered during these incldeesd U, inantedated the Assyrian, none received wide-spread attention. One reason for this was that ithey were little publicized, another that .neither the prevailing schools of art, such asl 'fi> _3 'impressionism, nor the popular taste had any _ "affinity with them. The interest of laymen,which was of course shared by many scholars l_

expression in an article published in Der Alte __ _Orient in 1gog. The learned writer pointedout that various objects copied from Assyrianreliefs, including the couch reproduced hereon page 44, could take a place of honor at ^ -the side of the most select products of themodern furniture industry. ead of a woman, about00 B.C., oneofn theAfter the end of the first World War a fun- earliest Mesopotamian sculptures. In thedamental change took plac e e approach 'Iraq Museum, Baghdaddamental change took place in the approach 'Iraq Museum, Baghdad45


9/11

The winged bull in the Metropolitan Mu-seum. One of a pair of monsters given byJohn D. Rockefeller in 1932

ments dating back respectively to the fourthand fifth millenniums. The evidence thusobtained, together with that provided by evenearlier finds in Palestine, permitted scholarsto reconstruct, despite some gaps, the story ofhuman development "from the Stone Age toChristianity."In addition to this interest in the begin-nings of civilization, another factor helped

bring Mesopotamian monuments out of theirformer seclusion. Contemporary artists imme-diately accepted and appreciated the art ofthe rediscovered civilizations, particularly thesculpture. Perhaps this was due in the mainto the fact that one of its characteristic traitsis restriction to essentials, which is the avowedgoal of modern art. In addition, the reactionagainst the individualistic and emotional ten-dencies of romanticism had brought about ademand for discipline in modern sculpture,for the submission of the individual to thegeneral and of the moment to permanence.Such a discipline was ever present in Meso-potamian art, of which one of the earliestexamples is the head of a woman on page 45.While the early Mesopotamian monumentswere valued, studied, and cited by modernartists and their critics and thus came to in-terest a wide public, Assyrian sculpturesslipped into the background. It was almostas if they were discarded because they wereassociated with an outmoded school of nine-teenth-century art.Even to archaeologists they were of interestonly as the last link of the chain that beganat the "dawn of history." The chief impor-tance of the ninth- to eighth-century Assyrianbulls-to quote only one example-was, thatthey showed the ultimate transformation of afantastic monster created by Mesopotamianartists at the beginning of the third millen-nium B.C. (see ill. p. 45). Typical of the ar-chaeologist's attitude towards the late Assyri-ans was the fact that the expedition of theOriental Institute of the University of Chi-cago used Khorsabad as a place where differ-ent methods could be tried out before theywere applied to the second- and third-millen-nium site of Eshnunna, the excavation ofwhich was the "main task of the expedition."Nevertheless the methods employed pro-duced excellent results. Some of them con-sisted in the reinterpretation of the groundplans drawn by Botta and his successor, Vic-tor Place. For example, the series of roomswhich Place had determinedly identified as aharem turned out to be a complex of temples;and a chamber which had obviously puzzled

46


10/11

Botta because of its seclusion was found to bethe king's bathroom.The reconstruction which one of the archi-tects of the Chicago expedition made of thefacade of the temple of the god Nabu (p. 43)presents a striking contrast to the reconstruc-tion of Ashurnasirpal's palace on page 42.Actually, Assyrian architecture was fairly uni-form and only minor features could have dif-ferentiated the external aspects of the palaceat Nimrud from the temple at Khorsabad.The contrast in the two reconstructions istherefore due first to the greater knowledgeof Assyrian architecture possessed by the mod-ern draughtsman and secondly to the differ-ence in architectural ideas. Probably it willbe fifty years before we shall know how muchof Rockefeller Center went into the recon-struction of the facade of the Nabu temple atKhorsabad or whether our present interest insanitation has misled us into finding bath-rooms adjoining most of the sleeping roomsin the Assyrian residences. After all, althoughPlace's efforts toward objectivity were no lesssincere than those of modern excavators, hisromantic interest in the Near Eastern haremcaused him to make an erroneous statementconcerning the Assyrian palace at Khorsabad.The second World War once again put anend to most excavations. However, certaintrends in the Mesopotamian field which havemade themselves felt in the last few years de-serve mention. One is the tendency of pho-tography, which since the last war has laid itsaccent on line, light, and texture, to turnfrequently to Mesopotamian monuments forsubject matter. And works of photographicart like those on these two pages lead us tolook at these monuments in a new manner,to note details and effects which have so farescaped us altogether. It seems possible thatwith such photographs the Assyrians may bebrought back into popular favor.The other trend concerns the scholars' pres-ent approach to the Assyro-Babylonian ma-terial, especially to the texts. Instead ofmerely assembling facts, recent studies haveaimed at combining these facts, archaeologi-cal as well as philological, and have tried to

The winged lion in the Metropolitan Mu-seum. This photograph and the facing oneare by Charles Sheelerreconstruct from them the pattern of the civi-lization which they record. An example inpoint is the far-reaching synthesis by W. F.Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity,the title of which was used above as the mostappropriate definition of the scope of discov-eries made in the last decades.In several other studies published in thelast few years the complete objectivity and

47


11/11

impersonality that were the goal of the laternineteenth and early twentieth centuries havebeen somewhat modified.One of these studies is "The Rise of the

Assyrian Empire" ("Der Aufstieg des Assyr-reiches"), which came out in Berlin in 1939.Here Wolfram von Soden comments on thedestruction of Babylon by Sennacherib inwords which recall the vocabulary of theMinistry of Propaganda: "This feat has sofar been unilaterally regarded as the destruc-tion of irreparable cultural values and hasbeen accordingly censured, but it constitutes,politically speaking, an incredibly courageousattempt not only to destroy an external en-emy but also to counteract the interior dis-integration of the empire which was beingbrought about by the Assyro-Babylonian cul-tural counterpoint." Further along in the ar-ticle he suggests that warlike traits in theAssyrians which he greatly admires should beascribed to Indo-Aryan racial influence.As a contrast we have an article publishedin America in 1943 by a Danish professor,entitled "Primitive Democracy in Mesopota-mia." In this article the word democracy isused in its classical sense "as denoting a formof government in which internal sovereigntyresides in a large proportion of the governed,namely, in all free, adult citizens without dis-tinction of fortune or class." The article con-tains evidence that prehistoric Mesopotamiawas organized along such democratic lines.Obviously both the Dane and the Germanchose those themes and materials which con-formed to their own ideologies.As we have seen here, Assyriology and an-cient Mesopotamian archaeology are no ivorytowers that afford mental protection againstthe upheavals of the second World War andthe period preceding it. Like all other hu-manities this field is subject to the influences

of the times, and the results achieved beartheir imprint. This is true of the pioneer ex-cavations and first decipherments of the ro-mantic period, of the painstaking collectionsof material of the industrial age, of the reveal-ing discoveries of the decades after the firstWorld War, and of the syntheses, the studies,and appreciations of the present. It seemsalmost commonplace to conclude that onlythe sum total of all these different approachesand their results can give us an ever-wideningview of the ancient Near East, in which liethe sources of our Western civilization.The history of the discoveries in the fieldof the ancient Near East has been made thesubject of several studies, the most compre-hensive of which is H. V. Hilprecht andothers, Explorations in Bible Lands duringthe Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1903).More specialized studies are R. C. Thompsonand R. W. Hutchinson, A Century of Ex-plorations at Nineveh (London, 1929); C. J.Gadd, The Stones of Assyria (London, 1936);and Sir Wallis E. A. Budge, The Rise andProgress of Assyriology (London, 1925). Anextremely useful survey, which comprises thecourse of the most recent discoveries, is con-tained in the first chapter of W. F. Albright'sbook From the Stone Age to Christianity(Baltimore, I940), which has been mentionedin the text.

The illustration on page 39 is reproducedthrough the courtesy of Henry P. Mcllhenny;those on pages 43 and 45 through the cour-tesy of the Oriental Institute of the Universityof Chicago and the University of ChicagoPress respectively from Khorsabad (Chicago,1938), part II, plate 44, by Gordon Loud andCharles B. Altman, and More Sculpture fromthe Diyala Region (Chicago, 1943), figure i,and plate 49 B, by Henri Frankfort.

48

assyrians in last 100 years

Documents