Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T14:33:18.840Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The production of space at Nineveh

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

Stephen Lumsden
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Space, or spatiality, has generally been relegated to the background by historians and social scientists (Soja 1989). The Cartesian worldview demands a separation between thinking and the material world, between mind and matter. In this view space is seen simply as something that can be objectively measured, an absolute, a passive container (Merrifield 1993: 518).

An alternative view, propounded mainly by postmodern geographers, regards space as a “medium rather than a container for action”, something that is involved in action and cannot be divided from it (Tilley 1994: 10). Space is not an empty, passive container, but an active process that is both constituted and constitutive (Merrifield 1993: 521). So, in this view the social, historical, and the spatial are interwoven dimensions of life (Soja 1999: 263–4). History and society are not understood if space is omitted; there is, in fact, no unspatialised social reality (Soja 1989: 131–7; 1996: 46, 70–6).

The philosopher Henri Lefebvre's concept of the social production of space plays an important part in this latter view of the active role of space in social processes. Lefebvre criticises the notion that space is transparent, neutral and passive, and formulates in its place an active, operational and instrumental notion of space (Lefebvre 1991: 11). He argues that it is the spatial production process that should be the object of interest rather than “things” in space, and that space is both a medium of social relations and a material product that can affect social relations (Lefebvre 1991: 36–7; Gottdiener 1993).

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 66: Nineveh. Papers of the XLIXe Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Part One , 2004 , pp. 187 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 2004 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

The Carsten Niebuhr Institute, University of Copenhagen.

References

Berquist, J. L., 1999: Theories of Space and Construction of the Ancient World, http://www.cwru.edu/affil/GAIR/papers/99papers/jberquist.html. Accessed 10 November 2002.Google Scholar
Berquist, J. L., 2002: Critical Spatiality and the Uses of Theory. http://www.cwru.edu/affil/GAIR/papers/2002papers/berquist.html. Accessed 10 November 2002.Google Scholar
Casey, E. C., 1996: How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time. In Feld, S. and Basso, K. H., editors, Senses of Place. Santa Fe: 13–52.Google Scholar
Cosgrove, D., 1989: Power and place in the Venetian territories. In Agnew, J. A. and Duncan, J. S. (eds.), The Power of Place. Boston: 104–23.Google Scholar
Creswell, K. A. C., 1989: A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture. Revised and supplemented by Allan, James A.. Cairo.Google Scholar
Dalley, S., 1994: Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens: Cuneiform and Classical Sources Reconciled. Iraq 56: 45–58.Google Scholar
Dalley, S., 2002: More about the Hanging Gardens. In Werr, L. al-Gailani et al. (eds.), Of Pots and Plans. Papers on the Archaeology and History of Mesopotamia and Syria Presented to David Oates in Honour of his 75th Birthday. London: 67–73.Google Scholar
Deacon, D., Pickering, M., Golding, P. and Murdock, G., 1999: Researching Communications: A Practical Guide to Methods in Media and Cultural Analysis. London.Google Scholar
Flanagan, J. W., 1996: Construction of Ancient Space. http://www.cwru.edu/affil/GAIR/Constructions/xtrapapers2000.html. Accessed 10 November 2002.Google Scholar
Flanagan, J. W., 2000: Postmodern Perspectives on Premodern Space. In Adam, A. K. M. (ed.), Handbook of Postmodern Biblical Interpretation. St. Louis: 239–44.Google Scholar
Flanagan, J. W., 2001a: Ancient Perceptions of Space/Perceptions of Ancient Space. Semeia 87: 15–43.Google Scholar
Flanagan, J. W., 2001b: Mapping the Biblical World: Perceptions of Space in Ancient Southwestern Asia. In Murray, J. (ed.), Humanities Group Working Papers 5. Windsor, Ont: 1–18.Google Scholar
Foucault, M., 1977: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York.Google Scholar
Gottdiener, M., 1993: A Marx for our Time: Henri Lefebvre and the Production of Space. Sociological Theory 11/1. From An Architektur 01 (2002). http://www.anarchitektur.com/aa01-lefebvre/gottdiener.html. Accessed 28 January 2003.Google Scholar
Kostof, S., 1991: The City Shaped. London.Google Scholar
Kostof, S., 1994: His Majesty the Pick: The Aesthetics of Demolition. In Celik, Z., Favro, D. and Ingersoll, R. (eds.), Streets: Critical Perspectives on Public Space. Berkeley: 9–22.Google Scholar
Lefebvre, H., 1991: The Production of Space. Oxford.Google Scholar
Lumsden, S., 2000: On Sennacherib's Nineveh. In Matthiae, P. et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the First International Congress of the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East. Rome: 815–24.Google Scholar
Lumsden, S., 2001: Power and Identity in the Neo-Assyrian World. In Nielsen, I. (ed.), The Royal Palace Institution in the First Millennium BC. Monographs of the Danish Institute in Athens 4. Aarhus: 33–51.Google Scholar
Lynch, K., 1960: The Image of the City. Cambridge, Mass. Google Scholar
Marcus, M. I., 1995: Geography as Visual Ideology: Landscape, Knowledge, and Power in Neo-Assyrian Art. In Liverani, M. (ed.), Neo-Assyrian Geography. Rome: 193–202.Google Scholar
Merrifield, A., 1993: Place and Space: A Lefebvrian Reconciliation. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers N.S. 18: 516–31. http://www.rgs.org/trans/93184/93184006.pdf. Accessed 10 March 2003.Google Scholar
Meuszynski, J., 1981: Die Rekonstruktion der Reliefsdarstellungen und ihrer Anordnung im Nordwestpalast von Kalhu (Nimrud). Baghdader Forschungen 2. Mainz-am-Rhein.Google Scholar
Mitchell, W. J. T., 1986: Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago.Google Scholar
Mitchell, W. J. T., 1994: Imperial Landscape. In Mitchell, W. J. T. (ed.), Landscape and Power. Chicago: 5–34.Google Scholar
Moriarty, S., 1996: A Philosophical Discussion of Representation. International Visual Literacy Association, Cheyenne, http://spot.colorado.edu/~moriarts/reprsntn.html. Accessed 21 March 2003.Google Scholar
Paterson, C., 1915: Assyrian Sculptures: Palace of Sinacherib. The Hague.Google Scholar
Prendergast, C., 1996: Paris and the Nineteenth Century. Oxford.Google Scholar
Randolph, R., 2001: New Technologies and Space – Spatiality as a Key Concern of Understanding Social Transformation in the Information Age. 5th Conference of the European Sociological Association, Helsinki. http://www.valt.helsinki.fi/staif/ktoiskal/ESA/. Accessed 22 May 2003.Google Scholar
Reade, J. E., 1978: Studies in Assyrian Geography. Part 1: Sennacherib and the Waters of Nineveh. Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archéologie orientale 72: 47–72, 157–75.Google Scholar
Reade, J. E., 1998: Assyrian Illustrations of Nineveh. Iranica Antiqua 33: 81–94.Google Scholar
Reade, J. E., 2000a: Alexander the Great and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Iraq 62: 195–217.Google Scholar
Reade, J. E., 2000b: Ninive (Nineveh). Reallexikon der Assyriologie 9, 5/6: 389–433.Google Scholar
Russell, J. M., 1991: Sennacherib's Palace Without Rival at Nineveh. Chicago.Google Scholar
Seamon, D., 2002: Phenomenology, Place, Environment, and Architecture: A Review of the Literature. http://www.phenomenologyonline.com/articles/seamonl.html. Accessed 2 February 2003.Google Scholar
Sneddon, A. C., 2002: Worlds Within Worlds: Perceptions of Space, Place and Landscape in Ancient Greece. Journal of Ancient Civilizations 17: 59–75.Google Scholar
Soja, E. W., 1989: Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. New York.Google Scholar
Soja, E. W., 1996: Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Cambridge, Mass. Google Scholar
Soja, E. W., 1999: Thirdspace: Expanding the Scope of the Geographical Imagination. In Massey, D., Allen, J. and Sarre, P. (eds.), Human Geography Today. Oxford: 260–78.Google Scholar
Tadmor, H., 1999: World Dominion: The Expanding Horizon of the Assyrian Empire. In Milano, L. et al. (eds.), Landscapes: Territories, Frontiers and Horizons in the Ancient Near East. History of the Ancient Near East Monograph III/1. Padua: 55–62.Google Scholar
Thomason, A. K., 2001: Representations of the North Syrian Landscape in Neo-Assyrian Art. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 323: 63–96.Google Scholar
Tilley, C., 1994: A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford.Google Scholar
Winter, I. J., 1981: Royal Rhetoric and the Development of Historical Narrative in Neo-Assyrian Reliefs. Studies in Visual Communication 7: 2–38.Google Scholar
Winter, I. J., 1998: The Affective Properties of Styles: An Inquiry into Analytical Process and the Inscription of Meaning in Art History. In Jones, C. A. and Galison, P. (eds.), Picturing Science and Producing Art. London: 55–77.Google Scholar