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13 “Imaginal” Landscapes in Assyrian Imperial Monuments
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13 “Imaginal” Landscapes in Assyrian Imperial Monuments mehmet-ali ataç La géographie ancienne ne restituait pas les données d’une science positive, même si, ici ou là, certains sites et paysages sont parfaitement réels. C’était une géographie imaginaire qui nous instruit de la manière dont la terre fut méditée et perçue, le fruit d’une pensée “schématico-cosmographique” selon le mot de B. Landsberger. — Glassner 1984:30 Introduction That ideas of a timeless and philosophical nature could exist side by side with the contemporary and political in the art of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (883–612 BCE) is perhaps best apparent in the orthostat reliefs of the Northwest Palace of Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BCE) at Nimrud (Kalhu). The reliefs, especially those in the throne room, feature what may have been the chief emblematic signifiers of the contemporary Assyrian intellectual tradition. These elements are the antediluvian sages and the socalled sacred tree, which are adjacent to, but not entirely blended with, the series of historical reliefs that depict scenes from the various military campaigns of Ashurnasirpal II (Fig. 13.1).1 As if to counterbalance this separation , unlike the reliefs of the later Neo-Assyrian kings, the full identity of 384 Mehmet-Ali Ataç the historical reliefs is not explicated by captions on the narrative scenes, such that the whole picture is somewhere between chronicle and epic. The capital city of Ashurnasirpal II and its palace stand at the very beginning of the Neo-Assyrian period. Throughout the following three centuries , there is an increase in emphasis on the historical component in the palace reliefs, resulting in the panoramic depictions of a variety of military and other events against their native landscapes in the palaces of Sennacherib (704–681 BCE) and Ashurbanipal (668–627 BCE) in the last capital city of the empire, Nineveh. In the meantime, palace architecture displays a parallel elaboration too, with larger dimensions and an increase in the number of the “state apartments” that surround the two principal courtyards of the palace enclosures. Both the historical and the emblematic modes in the Assyrian visual representation of the 1st millennium BCE extend back to the Late Bronze Age in Mesopotamia, to the Middle Assyrian Period (ca. 1350–1000 BCE), as do Assyrian palace architecture and the royal annalistic tradition. The co-existence of, and sometimes tension between, what is mythical on the one hand and what is political-propagandistic on the other in the his13 .1. Ashurnasirpal II flanked by bird-headed apkallus. Northwest Palace of Ashur nasirpal II at Nimrud. British Museum, ANE 124584-5. Photo: author. “Imaginal” Landscapes in Assyrian Imperial Monuments 385 toriography of the ancient Near East has received fresh scholarly attention in recent years (Liverani 2004, Porter 2005). If, for instance, Ramesses III (Twentieth Dynasty, 1184–1153 BCE) depicted the Battle of Kadesh, fought between Ramesses II (Nineteenth Dynasty, 1279–1213 BCE) and the Hittite king Muwatalli II (1295–72 BCE) around 1274 BCE, anachronistically in his monuments as if he had fought it and won a victory (Hornung 1992:155– 56), are we talking about a ritual reenactment of a historical moment of military glory, or when such ideological elements enter representation and historiography, are we missing certain parameters for a thorough understanding of the ancient historical tradition? I do not intend to resolve this long-standing issue here, but would nevertheless like to point out one particular avenue in the ancient world in which ritual or myth and “reality” are inseparable and blended, and that is geography and cosmology, and their visual representation. My objective in this chapter is to trace ideas of the inhabited earth, juxtaposed to its edges or limits, and what lies beyond in ancient Mesopotamian thought, and inquire if such ideas may have guided the representational and historical tradition of the Assyrian Empire, understood here as a continuum constituted by both the Middle and Neo-Assyrian periods. My goal is also to discuss the relevance of such a formulation of geography and landscape to kingship and notions of universal rule. Finally, I suggest that mythical and philosophical structures were the primary building blocks of the way “reality” per se was perceived and recorded in the ancient Near East. The “Edges of the Earth” in Ancient Mesopotamian Thought Ancient Near Eastern geography made a distinction, as did certain other ancient traditions such as the Greek, between the inhabited or familiar earth—to which I henceforth...