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Emphasis and Eloquence in the Reliefs of Tiglath-pileser III

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

Elise Auerbach
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Extract

When Aššurnaṣirpal II commissioned his artists to carve scenes of battle on stone, an artistic tradition was created which was to last for two hundred years of Assyrian history—a tradition which perfectly reflected the ideology and served the propaganda purposes of empire. Narrative was ideally suited to express such concepts as the insurmountable power of Assyria, the inevitability of its victory over its enemies, and the empire's wide extent embracing varied peoples and lands under one mighty and invincible king. These concepts underlie all the manifestations of the narrative art of the Assyrian palaces. The basic elements and subjects remain the same—foreign peoples dressed in their native clothes, enemy cities under siege, victorious Assyrian soldiers killing enemies, and, of course, the king, sometimes seated on his throne, sometimes standing in his chariot or hunting lions. However, the means by which these elements were deployed to express these concepts changed perceptibly over time—from the vigorous introduction of the genre under Aššurnasirpal through the imaginative inventiveness of Sennacherib to the finesse of Aššurbanipal. With this in mind, it would be instructive to examine a few examples of the narrative technique used under one king, Tiglath-Pileser III who reigned from 745 to 727 B.C., both to determine in what way stylistic devices were employed to express this ideology and as a means of further defining what that ideology was.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 51 , 1989 , pp. 79 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1989

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References

1 Barnett, Richard and Faulkner, M., The sculptures of Aššur-naṣir-apli II (883–854 B.C.), Tiglath-Pileser III (745–727 B. C.) and Esarhaddon (681–669 B. c.) from the Central and South-West Palaces at Nimrud, (London: The British Museum, 1962), xixGoogle Scholar.

2 These illustrations represent only the top registers of slabs the bottom registers of which depict scenes unrelated to the top register and are therefore not discussed in this article.

3 The first two slabs (illustrated here as Plate Va and b) have not been universally agreed upon as beginning the sequence. Barnett and Faulkner, for instance, did not consider them to be part of the same sequence as Plates VI and VII [Sculptures, Plate CXXVIII). The problem is that the slabs were not found in situ on walls. According to Austen Henry Layard, who described the discovery of the slabs: “Above one hundred slabs were exposed to view, packed in rows, one against the other, as slabs in a stone-cutter's yard, or as the leaves of a gigantic book … as they were placed in a regular series, according to the subjects upon them, it was evident that they had been moved, in the order in which they stood, from their original positions against the walls of sun dried brick; and had been left as found, preparatory to their removal elsewhere” (Nineveh and its remains, Volume II, (London: John Murray, 1849), 19)Google Scholar.

Reade, however, has persuasively argued that Plates Va and b do indeed begin the sequence continued by Plates VI and VII. He pointed out that the narrative not only of the top registers of the slabs but that of the scenes depicted in the bottom registers of the same slabs becomes more logical if the scenes illustrated here as Plate Va and b are included at the beginning of the sequence. Moreover, he notes that his reinterpretation better suits Layard's numbering of the slabs (The Palace of Tiglath-Pileser, III, Iraq 30 (1968), 71)Google Scholar.

4 Luckenbill, D. D., Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia I, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926), 270Google Scholar.

5 Julian Reade kindly pointed out to me that the slabs in Plate VII were rediscovered in the recent excavations at Nimrud. See Mierzewski, M. and Sobolewski, R., Polish Excavations at Nimrud/Kalhu/1974–6, Sumer 36 (1980), 156–7, figure 7Google Scholar.

6 Reade, J. E., “Shikaft-i Gulgul: Its Date and Symbolism”, Iranica Antiqua 12 (1977), p. 37–8Google Scholar. This inter-pretation supersedes the one presented in Barnett, and Faulkner, , Sculptures, p. 10Google Scholar., which states that the symbols represent, from left to right, the moon god Sin, the sun disc of Samas and the maltese cross representing Istar.

7 I would like to thank the Trustees of the British Museum for allowing me to reproduce the plates. I would also like to thank the following people for reading this paper and making numerous helpful comments: Dr. Julian Reade, Professor Helene Kantor, Professor McGuire Gibson, Dr. Guillermo Algaze, and especially Professor Irene Winter whose innovative work on Assyrian reliefs and challenging classroom instruction originally inspired me to write this paper.