#assyriology

[earlgraytay]

Not a drill- the ancient Assyrians had indoor plumbing! Ish.

[ancientbabylon1]

Lioness Devouring a Man, Phoenician Ivory Panel, c. 9th-8th century BCE. From the palace of Ashurnasirpal II, Nimrud, northern Mesopotamia, Iraq.

[garden-of-ophelia]

The Assyrian Lamassu, a celestial being symbolizing divine protection that is often placed at the gates of cities and palaces

[malcolmschmitz]

One of the things my Ancient Medicine class has given me is a profound love for the ancient Assyrians and a profound anger at how much we've neglected to study them.

This is a civilization as old and as complicated and as beautiful (and also weirdly harsh and cruel, natch) as any of the other ancient civs people like to study. They have absolutely gorgeous poetry and art; their societies were complex and ugly in interesting ways; they invented writing to make better spreadsheets.

...And so much scholarship, until this millennium, treats them as a dark mirror of someone else, mostly the ancient Israelites (as seen and studied through a Christian lens). They're worth studying because they hurt the Israelites, or because their distant descendants got their butts kicked by the Greeks and/or Alexander, and not really for any other reason. Anything they did and said gets compared to the Bible, and the Bible gets treated as the more reliable source. (When it was mostly written by people who had a very good reason to hate the Assyrian Empire!)

You know Sennacherib? The "the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold" guy?

If we remember him at all, we remember him as a warmonger, as the guy who sacked Jerusalem and destroyed Babylon. And, don't get me wrong, he absolutely did those things; Assyrian kings were expected to conquer and pillage.

But Sennacherib wasn't just a conqueror. In fact, by Assyrian king standards, he kinda did the bare minimum of bloodthirstiness. He actually changed how the realm kept track of military campaigns- numbering them, instead of tracking them by year- so that he could get away with doing less of them.

He was a builder, first and foremost. He did public works projects for fun. He left catty little inscriptions all through his royal palace about how badly his revered ancestors had mismanaged the place and what he did to fix it. He invented a new kind of tin and was incredibly proud of that. He may have been the one to invent the Archimedes screw (we're not sure of this). He absolutely adored his favourite wife and built her an entire pleasure complex.

...And if we as a civilization remember this guy, at all, we remember him as the Assyrian who came down like a wolf on the fold. Because the Assyrians are the bad guys, the dark mirror of our Noble Intellectual Ancestors. Right?

.... We have more cuneiform tablets than we have scholars who can read them. Most of the really good, non-Bible-Studies scholarship on the Assyrians is from this millenium- the 2000s and later.

And while I'm not considering a career change- I need to write fiction like I need to breathe- I really wish I could do some research of my own in this field, and/or help more people appreciate these guys. Because they're so, so fascinating, and they deserve your love and attention as much as the Greeks or the Romans or the ancient Egyptians.

[phownizzz]

here a sketch of the God NINURTA I made while attending my lectures of archaeology of Western Asia ❤️❤️

I took ispiration by a stone relief from his temple in Kalhu!

[along-the-silkroad]

King Hammurabi (18th century BCE) is depicted here on the Code of Hammurabi, standing in a prayer position before Shamash, the god of the sun and justice. The famous Code of Hammurabi was not as much a legal code, as it was a piece of propaganda designed to showcase the king's sense of justice and his concern for the well-being of his subjects. The laws were likely intended as "enlightened" examples. Local judges retained considerable leeway in their rulings, basing decisions predominantly on customs and prior judgments by judges and kings, similar to English common law to an extent.

The Code was also regarded as the pinnacle of classical Old Babylonian Akkadian. Its literary value was celebrated in the centuries that followed, with many students in scribal schools copying excerpts from the Code as a writing exercise.

The Code was taken from Sippar to Susa, Iran, by invading Elamite armies in the 12th century BCE. French archaeologists later excavated the basalt cone-shaped stele and transported it to the Louvre, where it is currently housed.

[therationaldispatch]

The Kurkh Monolith: 2,900 years ago, Assyrian king Shalmaneser III inscribed a record of his battle against Ahab the king of Israel, in the Battle of Qarqar.

"2,000 chariots, 10,000 soldiers of Ahab the Israelite"

[victusinveritas]

Assyrian frieze of bodies in a river, Vatican Museum.