A Companion to Assyria

by Eckart Frahm

  The French resumed their work at Khorsabad in 1852, when a new consul was appointed at Mosul. The career diplomat Victor Place was instructed by the French Academy to “procure the largest possible number of sculptures, vases, jewelry, cylinder seals, and objects of all kinds which are used in daily life, and which the Assyrian Museum [in the Louvre] completely lacks” (Pillet 1918: 2–3). The idea of archaeology as a treasure hunt aimed at filling the halls of the national museums in Europe was characteristic for the time, and the rivalry between the British Museum and the Louvre played a large role in the early exploration of Assyria. It is also clear from these lines that Botta had brought back relatively little from his excavations.

  Place greatly expanded the activities at Khorsabad and produced what was meant to be a complete plan of the palace. Based on the same tunneling technique that Layard had used, it was not exactly accurate, as later American work on the palace would show, but it was for a very long time the only documented attempt to present a complete and coherent plan of one of the enormous Assyrian palaces (Place 1867). Botta had excavated only one wing of the palace, and Layard’s work at Nimrud and Kuyunjik had likewise resulted in plans that remained incomplete, even though Layard calculated that “9880 feet, or nearly two miles, of bas‐reliefs, with twenty‐seven portals, formed by colossal winged bulls and lion‐sphinxes” had been uncovered in the gigantic palace at Kuyunjik (Layard 1853: 589). As we now know, Layard seems to have excavated only about half of the palace (Russell 1991).

  In the spring of 1851 Layard had left Assyria, never to return. The following year Place had begun his work at Khorsabad. It was at this juncture that the British Museum decided to send out Hormuzd Rassam, a native of Mosul, who had been Layard’s close assistant, to maintain the British interests in the exploration of the Assyrian sites. He was a young man of twenty‐three years, the younger brother of the British vice‐consul at Mosul, and Layard had brought him back to England at the end of his first season of work at Nimrud so he might get an education (Reade 1993).

  He resumed the activities at Kuyunjik and Nimrud, and both he and Place now also turned their attention to another Assyrian site, known as Qal‘at Širqaṭ, which was located on the western bank of the Tigris some 50 kilometers south of Nimrud. As it turned out, they were both unable to deal with this complex site and did not make any major discoveries there. At Nineveh, however, their competition gave rise to a bitter controversy that severely damaged their relationship.

  Place and the British resident in Baghdad, Colonel Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, who was deeply involved in the decipherment of cuneiform and had a supervisory role in the British archaeological effort, had reached an agreement concerning a division of Nineveh’s main mound, Kuyunjik. Place was to have exclusive rights to dig one half, Rassam the other. The idea was that both countries had a claim to this site, since Botta had been the first to work there. This proved to be intolerable for Rassam, who wanted to explore the northern, now French part of the mound, especially since he felt that his own sector was proving less interesting. Since Place did actually not work at Kuyunjik because of a lack of funds, Rassam decided on an “experimental examination of the spot at night, and only waited for a good opportunity and a bright moonlight for [the] nocturnal adventure.” On December 20, 1853, he sent a small group of trusted workers across the river in order to dig in three locations he had marked for them. Their first efforts provided no results; the second night they found a wall with pitiful remains of reliefs where only feet were preserved. The third night, his last chance before his activities were bound to be observed by the French in Mosul, Rassam personally supervised the clandestine work:

  My instinct did not deceive me; for one division of the workmen, after three or four hours’ hard labor, were rewarded by the first grand discovery of a beautiful bas‐relief in a perfect state of preservation, representing the king, who was afterwards identified as Assur‐bani‐pal, standing in a chariot, about to start on a hunting expedition, and his attendants handing him the necessary weapons for the chase.

  (Rassam 1897: 25–6)

  Rassam had discovered a new palace, built by the last significant Assyrian king Assurbanipal in the seventh century BCE. Most of the palace was heavily destroyed and eroded so that only the lowest parts of the reliefs had survived, but in some rooms Rassam made spectacular discoveries: reliefs that represented the epitome of Assyrian visual arts, with depictions of the royal lion‐hunt standing out as particularly impressive. Rassam also discovered large numbers of cuneiform tablets, vital additions to the palace library discovered in Sennacherib’s palace by Layard.

  The Crimean War that broke out in 1853 and involved Russia, Turkey, England, and France made further archaeological activities in Assyria very difficult, and both Place and Rassam returned to Europe. Place’s efforts during years of hard work in Assyria ended in disaster. The main finds from Khorsabad were sent on rafts to the south in order to be loaded onto a ship at Basra, but things went catastrophically wrong in the marshes south of Baghdad when the rafts sank and disappeared in the river. Of the 235 cases sent off from Mosul only twenty‐eight survived. Nearly all of the colossi and reliefs from Khorsabad were lost. Almost all of Place’s personal belongings were gone, including his notes and plans from the excavation. Only a trumpet and a fish wrapped in a straw mat were saved (Pillet 1962).

  While this sad event marked the end of French excavations in Assyria, the British Museum continued to send Rassam out to work both in the north and the south of Iraq. His most interesting discovery in Assyria was made at a small site called Balawat, where he found well‐preserved huge gates decorated with fourteen bronze bands showing scenes from the wars and other activities of the ninth‐century kings Aššurnaṣirpal II and Shalmaneser III. A reconstruction of these monumental gates now stands in the British Museum together with most of the original bronze bands (Barnett 2008; Schachner 2007). Otherwise archaeology in Assyria was dead for a long time, and the British Museum clearly felt that it now possessed a sufficient and satisfactory sample of Assyrian art.

  Twentieth Century Excavations of Assyrian Sites

  At the beginning of the twentieth century British archaeologists working on behalf of the British Museum returned to Kuyunjik. They included Leonard William King and Reginald Campbell Thompson, who found the Temple of Nabû, the god of writing. In 1927 a new series of campaigns directed by Campbell Thompson led to the discovery of the Ištar temple (Thompson 1934; Reade 2005). Max Mallowan, a member of Campbell Thompson’s team, dug a deep sounding on the mound, a pioneering effort that helped define the sequence of prehistoric periods in Assyria (Thompson and Mallowan 1933).

  At this point, archaeological interest was focused primarily on the south of Iraq, where tens of thousands of mounds are spread across the landscape, and where the beginnings of what became the classic Mesopotamian civilization were waiting to be uncovered. Large cities reaching back to the fourth millennium BCE were excavated and large numbers of cuneiform texts written in Sumerian and Akkadian were brought to light.

  Germany now also began to take part in the exploration of the ancient Near East. The newly founded Deutsche Orient‐Gesellschaft selected a series of royal cities in various countries for excavation, including the enormous Hittite capital Ḫattuša in central Anatolia as well as Babylon, the ancient capital of Babylonia, in southern Iraq, where work was conducted from 1898 to 1917 under the direction of Robert Koldewey (Koldewey 1913; Andrae 1952). Here, a young man trained as an architect, Walter Andrae, took part in the excavations, learning advanced excavation and recording techniques from Koldewey. In 1903 Andrae moved to Qal‘at Širqaṭ in the north, the site of the ancient city of Ashur, Assyria’s first capital, and worked there every year until the beginning of the First World War in 1914.

  As mentioned before, Place and Rassam had tried their luck at Qal‘at Širqaṭ half a century earlier, but without significant results. The site represented substantial archaeological challenges, for even though
it had served as the capital of Assyria until Aššurnaṣirpal II moved his residence to Nimrud in the ninth century BCE, it did not contain the huge palatial complexes that had been uncovered at Nimrud, Khorsabad, and Kuyunjik. Consequently, one could not simply look for a wall with reliefs and then follow it. Excavators had to work with mud brick architecture as in southern Mesopotamia, and the site’s intricate and enormously complex stratigraphy created additional problems.

  With Andrae’s excavations at Ashur archaeology in Assyria entered a new phase, away from treasure hunt to a new emphasis on stratigraphic analysis and a detailed understanding of the exact location and context of finds. There was no way Andrae could conduct meaningful excavations here in the manner adopted by Botta, Layard, Place, or Rassam. His work in the end produced a wealth of new information concerning the history of Assyria from the third millennium until the fall of the Assyrian empire in 612 BCE (Andrae 1938).

  In Ashur Andrae uncovered several temples, of which the two most important ones were dedicated to the national god Assur, who shared his name with the site itself, and to the goddess Ištar, whose sanctuary could be traced back to very modest beginnings in the early third millennium BCE (Andrae 1922). Temples had in fact been found both at Nimrud and at Khorsabad (although Place did not understand them as such, labeling the area where they were found the “harem”). But the buildings at Ashur had a long and complicated history, with numerous reconstruction efforts that could be related to and elucidated by foundation documents in cuneiform.

  The temple to the god Assur was located on a rocky spur that juts out into the river Tigris, and in a band along the northern edge of the city lay a series of ziggurats, palaces, and temples. This area was the main focus of Andrae’s activities, but he also worked extensively in other parts of the town, where he found many private houses. This was in fact the first time that such urban areas were investigated in Assyria. In one sector Andrae uncovered an entire urban neighborhood with a large number of Neo‐Assyrian houses, large and small (Miglus 1996).

  Some 10,000 cuneiform texts came to light in the course of Andrae’s excavations, and thanks to the meticulous recording of the finds it is often possible to study the archaeological contexts from which they emerged (Pedersén 1985–6). Many came from the area where the main temples and public buildings were located, but others were found in private houses. In the ruins of one of these houses, a large library belonging to a family of incantation priests was recovered, while in other instances Andrae found just a handful of documents, often title deeds to the house and proof of ownership of slaves. Projects directed by Johannes Renger and Stefan Maul in Berlin and Heidelberg have reinvestigated in recent years the finds from Andrae’s excavations at Ashur (Marzahn and Salje 2003).

  Andrae’s work established the basis for an entirely new understanding of Assyrian history, reaching back at least to the late third millennium. However, the early phases of this history were only dimly illuminated by the finds from Ashur. A few royal building inscriptions dating to the first centuries of the second millennium BCE were found, mentioning early kings and their work on city walls and temples. They seemed to show that Ashur was a typical provincial city‐state like so many known from southern Iraq.

  But shortly after Andrae’s excavations at Ashur had come to an end, a drastically different picture of this early Ashur began to emerge, thanks to the discovery of large archives of cuneiform tablets in central Anatolia, more than 1,000 kilometers away from Ashur. These tablets showed that Ashur, during the period known to archaeologists as the Middle Bronze Age, had played a central role in the commercial networks that crisscrossed the Near East and Iran, with links to Central Asia and the Indus valley. Traders from Ashur had established a series of commercial colonies in central Anatolia, with their administrative center at Kaniš, modern Kültepe, a site some 20 kilometers northeast of the modern Turkish city of Kayseri. Illicit diggings there had produced thousands of cuneiform texts since the 1890s, many of which were bought by European and American museums and collections. Efforts to publish them in a serious manner began in the wake of World War I. In 1948 regular excavations were initiated at Kültepe under the direction of Tahsin Özgüç, who uncovered large palaces and temples on the main mound and hundreds of private houses in the lower town. Many of these turned out to have belonged to Assyrian traders and their families, and they contained the archives left when the settlement was burnt down in ca. 1835 BCE. Until today some 23,000 texts have been found, and they have shown that during the period from around 2000–1700 BCE Ashur was a major transit center for the international trade (Veenhof and Eidem 2008). Strangely, despite Andrae’s meticulous excavations at Ashur, no evidence for this international commercial system was found there, a clear indication that his long years of work did not exhaust the potential of the site.

  Between 1928 and 1935, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago initiated a new investigation of Khorsabad, focused both on the area of the palatial complex excavated by Botta and Place and other areas of the large site. On the terrace in front of Sargon’s palace the excavators found a series of smaller palaces that had belonged to high royal officials; and in close proximity to this terrace, they discovered the main temple of the city, dedicated to the god Nabû. Place’s plan of the palace was shown to be fundamentally correct, although not nearly as regular and precise as his drawing indicated (Loud 1936; Loud and Altman 1938).

  In 1949 British archaeologists returned to Nimrud to continue the work carried out there by Layard and Rassam, now using modern excavation techniques. The excavations were directed by Max Mallowan, followed by David Oates and Jeffrey Orchard, and lasted until 1963 (Mallowan 1966; Joan and David Oates 2001). Much of the work was focused on the acropolis, where the palace of Aššurnaṣirpal II was re‐examined and new rooms excavated, and where the first finds of tablets in the palace were made. New buildings, such as a few private houses belonging to palace staff, were excavated, and major governmental buildings such as the Governor’s Palace and a temple to the god Nabû were found, as were many tablets. In front of a badly burnt throne in the temple the excavators found the tablets with the treaty that had been forced on Median chieftains in 672 BCE, sixty years before the sack of Nimrud, smashed by their sons and grandsons, clearly an act of revenge for the indignity and humiliation suffered by their ancestors (Wiseman 1958; Parpola and Watanabe 1988).

  Although the lower town of Nimrud was not systematically investigated, one of the main discoveries was in fact made outside the acropolis. The British team discovered the ruins of a vast palatial complex in a corner of the lower town, the military arsenal usually referred to as Fort Shalmaneser, built in the ninth century by Shalmaneser III, the son of Aššurnaṣirpal II, who had built the Northwest Palace on the mound. This enormous complex had been a site for various military activities, but it was found to also have fulfilled a number of other functions. An elaborately carved throne base was discovered in one of the large courtyards, and a large number of precious objects in ivory were found in the storerooms (more came to light in several wells inside the palace on the mound). These carved ivory pieces are of extraordinary beauty. They had originally been covered in gold leaf and served as part of the decoration of elaborate furniture. The gold had been ripped off and the naked ivory had been thrown into the wells by the conquerors of the town at the end of the Assyrian empire in 612 BCE (Mallowan 1978).

  Although all this work led to a much better understanding of the site of Nimrud, very few buildings were completely excavated. This was also true for the Northwest Palace, and it fell to an Iraqi team of archaeologists led by Muzahem Hussein to finally produce a complete plan of Aššurnaṣirpal’s greatest construction project. In the process Hussein made some extraordinary discoveries: between 1988 and 1992, he detected a series of four royal tombs under the floors of rooms in the private quarters of the palace (Hussein and Suleiman 2000).

  These were not the first royal tombs ever found in Assyria. Andrae had
discovered a series of king’s tombs with large stone sarcophagi underneath the Old Palace in Ashur, but these had all been plundered in antiquity. What Muzahem Hussein found at Nimrud turned out to be queens’ tombs, and they were largely intact and full of the most amazing wealth of jewelry, objects of precious metals, and in one sarcophagus layer upon layer of carbonized textiles, the entire wardrobe of a queen brought with her into the grave. Because of the political turmoil in Iraq the objects were stored in the vaults of the central bank in Baghdad and have so far been published and studied only in a preliminary fashion (Hussein and Suleiman 2000; Hussein 2016), but the elaborate jewelry casts new light on the luxurious life led by the inhabitants of the vast Assyrian palaces.

  In 1974 a Polish team led by Janusz Meuszynski began its path‐breaking work of excavation and documentation at Nimrud. A main goal was to investigate the poorly preserved ruins of a central palace built by Tiglath‐pileser III in the eighth century BCE, a building that had been uncovered earlier but never properly studied. In the course of their work, the excavators discovered a cache of relief slabs, taken down from their original positions in anticipation of reuse elsewhere. The Polish archaeologists also sought to accurately record all the reliefs from Aššurnaṣirpal’s palace, locating each slab in its original place and providing detailed documentation for the entire decoration program. This work built upon studies previously undertaken by Julian Reade as part of the British work at the site (Reade 1979a and b, 1980a and b). Meuszynski’s death in 1976 put an end to the excavations, but Sobolewski and Paley have carried on the work (Meuszynski 1981; Paley and Sobolewski 1987, 1992). The meticulous documentation thus created has become even more valuable after ISIS destroyed large parts of Aššurnaṣirpal’s palace in April 2015.