by Eckart Frahm
In the 1950s Iraqi archaeologists began working at Nineveh in an effort to reach a comprehensive understanding of the entire site. Muhammed Ali Mustafa started excavations at Nebi Yunus, while Tariq Madhloom re‐excavated and restored some of the most important rooms in the palace of Sennacherib, turning the throne‐room suite into an open‐air museum. Unfortunately, during the chaos in the mid‐1990s several of the reliefs from there were illicitly removed and sold on the antiquities market (Russell 1998), and in April–May 2016, the whole throne‐room suite was demolished by ISIS. Madhloom also worked on some of the city’s ancient monumental gates, partly in an effort to protect what remained of the site from further encroachment by roads and building projects (Madhloom 1967, 1968, 1969).
Some of the most recent efforts to explore the city of Nineveh have been undertaken between 1987 and 1990 by a team from the University of Berkeley (further work was prevented by political events). David Stronach and Stephen Lumsden were the first to systematically study not only the mound of Kuyunjik but also the lower town, work that showed the huge potential for a real understanding of how the gigantic ancient city was organized and functioned (Stronach and Lumsden 1992; Russell 1991).
The expansion of the Assyrian state that began in the mid‐14th century led to the incorporation of huge areas outside the Assyrian heartland. In recent years a number of Assyrian provincial capitals in Syria and southern Turkey have been partly excavated. The most important of these sites, the ancient city of Dur‐Katlimmu, has been explored since 1978 by a German team led by Hartmut Kühne (Kühne 2010). Located on the eastern bank of the Khabur river, Dur‐Katlimmu had become an important center in the Middle Assyrian period that had reached its greatest extent during the time of the Neo‐Assyrian empire in the eighth and seventh centuries. Dur‐Katlimmu consists of a tell and a very large lower town, all surrounded by a city‐wall. In a palatial building on the tell the excavators discovered an important Middle Assyrian archive (Cancik‐Kirschbaum 1996), and in the lower town they found very extensive elite buildings, one of which contained an archive belonging to a high official from the seventh century BCE (Radner 2002). Somewhat surprisingly the lower town does not seem to have been inhabited by ordinary town‐dwellers in more modest houses.
Since 1997 a team led by Timothy Matney has excavated a site called Ziyaret Tepe in the upper Tigris valley. Ziyaret Tepe can be identified with the ancient city of Tušḫan, a major provincial center in the late phase of the Assyrian empire. During this period, Tušḫan guarded the northern border of the Assyrian Empire, housed a regional governor and his staff, and served as a center for exploiting the natural resources (timber, stone, and metals) of the Taurus Mountains in the north.
Archaeology in Assyria began with the exploration of the huge palatial complexes in the Assyrian heartland and the search for impressive artifacts to be displayed in the national museums, which grew in importance in the nineteenth century. Excavations were at that time large scale operations usually conducted with poor digging and recording methods. While the latter is regrettable, it must be said that the application of modern excavation methods, when faced with these enormous buildings, is only possible within research projects on a much smaller scale.
One problem is that the intense preoccupation with palaces and temples led to a situation where we are far from a proper understanding of the late Assyrian royal cities in their entirety. Mallowan suggested that the people in the lower town of Nimrud lived in tents, which goes to show how little we know about the way in which these large urban sites functioned. It has been suggested that a third of the terrain within the walls of Nineveh was taken over by the military during the Neo‐Assyrian period, which would tell us something significant about Assyrian urbanism; and the Berkeley excavations showed that a particular area north of Kuyunjik was taken over by various industries and crafts. But we have no idea of how the various city quarters were organized, where the elites and the ordinary people lived (Lumsden 2005). The study of Andrae’s excavation records from Ashur has given us some understanding of that city, especially during the Neo‐Assyrian period (Miglus 1996), but Ashur was fundamentally different from the large, centrally planned royal metropolises further north.
Interest in Assyrian landscape archaeology began with the American excavations at Khorsabad in the 1930s, when Thorkild Jacobsen examined some of the extensive canal systems that had been constructed by Assyrian kings to secure a steady water supply for the large royal cities. Jacobsen and Seton Lloyd (1935) investigated and described an aqueduct built by Sennacherib at Jerwan not long after 700 BCE, a type of structure unknown elsewhere before Roman times. The canal to which the aqueduct belonged was traced from the gorge of the Gomel River, where we find the well‐known “Bavian inscriptions,” to the Khosr River above Nineveh. David Oates (1968) identified the elaborate canal system that served the capital city Kalḫu, and Julian Reade (1978) traced an extensive system of canals in the regions north of Nineveh. In recent years satellite photography has facilitated the reconstruction of this vast hydraulic network, mostly created during the reign of Sennacherib. Jason Ur has suggested that it was designed in large part to provide irrigation for an intensified agricultural production in northern Assyria, from which the huge imperial cities profited more than anyone else (Ur 2005; see also Chapter 1 of this volume).
The rediscovery of ancient Assyria and the decipherment of the cuneiform writing system were met with great interest in Europe and the US in the nineteenth century, primarily because the new discoveries seemed to have a substantial impact on Christianity and the understanding of the sacred history outlined in the Bible. According to the Bible mankind’s earliest history was closely connected with Mesopotamia – the Garden of Eden, Ur of the Chaldees, Babylon and Nineveh are some of the names that appear many times in the books of the Bible. Today, however, the preoccupation with Biblical scripture has lost some of its interest, and other concerns, including the social, economic, and environmental history of Assyria, have become more prominent.
The increased interest in the Neo‐Assyrian period during the past decades is to a significant extent due to the large “State Archives of Assyria” project directed by the Helsinki scholar Simo Parpola, which has made a large part of the documents found in the palaces on Kuyunjik available to the scholarly community. The study of the diplomatic and political correspondence of the Assyrian kings has resulted in a much better understanding of the history and structure of the Assyrian empire. Combining this recent philological and historical work with a new archaeological effort in Assyria would undoubtedly lead to important new insights, but the destruction of many Assyrian sites by ISIS terrorists, and the ongoing political unrest in the area in which Assyrian civilization once flourished, present formidable challenges to the progress of Assyrian studies.
References
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Andrae, W. 1938. Das wiedererstandene Assur, Berlin: J.C. Hinrichs.
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Barnett, R.D., Bleibtreu, E., and Turner, G. 1998. Sculptures from the Southwest Palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh 1–2, London: British Museum Press.
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Herrmann, G., Laidlaw, S., and Coffey, H. 2009. Ivories from Nimrud VI: Ivories from the North West Palace, London: British Institute for the Study of Iraq.
Hussein, M.M. 2016. Nimrud: The Queens’ Tombs, Chicago: The Oriental Institute.
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Jacobsen, T. and Lloyd, S. 1935. Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan, OIP 24, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Koldewey, R. 1913. Das wieder erstehende Babylon, Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs.
Kühne, H. (eds.) 2010. Dūr‐Katlimmu 2008 and Beyond, Studia Chaburensia 1, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Larsen, M.T. 1996. The Conquest of Assyria: Excavations in an Antique Land, London and New York: Routledge.
Layard, A.H. 1849. Nineveh and its Remains 1–2, London: John Murray.
Layard, A.H. 1853. Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon; with Travels in Armenia, Kurdistan and the Desert, London: John Murray.
Layard, A.H. 1903. Autobiography and Letters from His Childhood until His Appointment as H.M Ambassador at Madrid, London: John Murray.
Loud, G. 1936. Khorsabad, Pt. 1: Excavations in the Palace and at a City Gate, OIP 38, Chicago: Oriental Institute.
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Lumsden, S. 2005. “The Production of Space at Nineveh,” Iraq 66, 187–97.
Madhloom, T. 1967. “Excavations at Nineveh: A Preliminary Report,” Sumer 23, 76–9.
Madhloom, T. 1968. “Excavations at Nineveh: The 1967–68 Campaign,” Sumer 24, 45–51.
Madhloom, T. 1969. “Excavations at Nineveh: The 1968–69 Campaign,” Sumer 25, 43–9.
Mallowan, M.E.L. 1966. Nimrud and Its Remains, 3 vols., London: Collins.
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Marzahn, J. and Salje, B. (eds.) 2003. Wiedererstehendes Assur: 100 Jahre deutsche Ausgrabungen in Assyrien, Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern.
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Miglus, P.A. 1996. Das Wohngebiet von Assur. Stratigraphie und Architektur, WVDOG 93, Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag.
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Further Reading
An extensive history of the early exploration of Assyria is found in Larsen 1996. For Layard see Waterfield 1963. Russell 1998 discusses the decoration of Assurnaṣirpal II’s Northwest Palace in Nimrud. The texts from the British excavations at Nimrud have been published in the series Cuneiform Texts from Nimrud 1–6, British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 1972–2001. The ivories are published in Ivories from Nimrud 1–6; see especially Herrmann, Laidlaw, and Coffey 2009. For the reliefs from Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh see Barnett, Bleibtreu, and Turner 1998. The State Archives of Assyria series (Helsinki), which has currently reached volume 19, provides editions of many Neo‐Assyrian texts from Nineveh and other sites. The results of the German excavations at Ashur have been published in a series of monographs by various authors in Wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichungen der Deutschen Orient‐Gesellschaft. The excavations at Dur Katlimmu are documented in the series Berichte der Ausgrabung Tall Šēḫ Ḥamad/Dūr‐Katlimmu, with volume 22 published in 2016.
Notes
1 I wish to thank Julian Reade for his constructive and enlightening comments.
2 Niebuhr 1774–78 presents a map of Nineveh where the long walls are absent.
CHAPTER 32
Assyrian Christians
Aaron Michael Butts
Introduction
It is well known that various individuals and groups associated with Syriac Christianity and the Syriac heritage are today called Assyrians.1 What is less understood is when, how, and why this identification came about. This has unfortunately led to a good deal of controversy and misunderstanding. Within the Syriac communities, the so‐c
alled “name debate” continues to be a hotly discussed topic, especially in the diaspora (see recently Atto 2011). Discussions about the relationship of the Syriac heritage to the ancient Assyrians are also to be found within the academy, with some scholars supporting the connection, e.g., Parpola (2004: 21–2), and others doubting it, e.g., Coakley (1992: 6, 366 [“bogus ethnology”]). The present essay is not concerned with evaluating the legitimacy of connections between the Syriac heritage and ancient Assyria. Rather, it assumes as a given that certain individuals and groups associated with the Syriac heritage have in the past identified as Assyrian and continue to do so until the present. The essay does, however, take up the task of outlining the historical background for the events that led to the promotion of this identification in the nineteenth century and to the ensuing development of an Assyrian ideology within Syriac communities.
The essay begins with a discussion of the use of Assyria and Assyrian in pre‐modern Syriac sources. It then looks at how nineteenth‐century literature from the West represented Syriac Christians as Assyrian. Following this brief foray into the western literature, the essay turns to the use of Assyrian as an identity marker in Syriac communities from the mid‐nineteenth century onward, beginning first with the Church of the East and then moving to the larger Syriac heritage. The essay concludes with a recapitulation of the previous sections, drawing connections between them.
