All posts tagged Ashurbanipal

I am Ashurbanipal king of the world, king of Assyria @ the British Museum

Ashurbanipal

Ashurbanipal was ruler of the Assyrian Empire from 669 to about 630 BC. From his capital at Nineveh on the edge of present-day city of Mosul in northern Iraq, Ashurbanipal ruled a vast and diverse empire, reaching from upper Egypt, via the eastern shore of the Mediterranean (modern Cyprus, Israel Lebanon and Syria) and along a corridor either side of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers down to the Persian Gulf. During his reign he was probably the most powerful person on earth.

Map showing the fullest extent of the Assyrian empire (in pink) by Paul Goodhead

Map showing the fullest extent of the Assyrian empire (in pink) by Paul Goodhead

This blockbuster exhibition examines the life and times and cultural achievements and social context of Ashurbanipal’s rule alongside detailed profiles of the different kingdoms and cultures which he ruled over and exhaustive accounts of his numerous military campaigns.

Topics

The quickest way to give you a sense of the scope might be to list some of the headings which introduce different areas of the exhibition and displays:

  • Nineveh, a city without rival
  • The royal family
  • Ashurbanipal’s palace in Nineveh
  • Aqueducts and canals (agriculture and pleasure gardens)
  • Training to be a king (featuring numerous lions hunts in which the king displays his mastery of the natural world)
  • The scholar king (in inscriptions he boasts of being able to read numerous languages)
  • Knowledge is power (his surprisingly large library)
  • Coronation
  • Assyria’s world domination (introducing the various kingdoms and people the empire ruled over)
    • The southern Levant
    • Babylonia
    • Elam
    • The kingdoms of Cyprus
    • The kingdom of Urartu
    • Western Iran
    • Aramaean kingdoms
    • Ashurbanipal at war
    • Ashurbanipal conquers Egypt
    • Trouble in the East (Urtak, king of Elam, invades Babylonia)
    • Sibling rivalry (with his older brother Shamash-shumu-ukin)
  • Retaliation (against Elam for its rebellion)
  • Order restored
  • The empire falls apart (after Ashurbanipal’s death)
  • Ashurbanipal’s fate (a mystery to this day)
  • Legend, discovery and revival (Victorian archaeologists uncover the key sites and ship statues and carvings back to the British Museum in London)
Discovery of Nimrud by Frederick Charles Cooper (1810 – 1880) mid-19th century, watercolour on paper © The Trustees of the British Museum

Discovery of Nimrud by Frederick Charles Cooper (1810 to 1880) mid-19th century, watercolour on paper © The Trustees of the British Museum

Highlights

This is the first ever major exhibition to explore the life of Ashurbanipal in such depth and a dream come true for anyone interested in this period. Anyone familiar with the Assyrians knows that they were a strongly militaristic culture characterised, above all, by the immense statues of lions with the heads of bearded men. These tend to covered in cuneiform inscriptions which, when deciphered, amount to world class bragging about the emperor’s might and strength, king of kings, and then go on to give a long list of the emperor’s achievements.

Maybe even more famous are the numerous enormous friezes we have depicting the emperor on one of his countless lion hunts. Elsewhere in the British Museum (rooms 6, 7 and 8) you can walk along a corridor entirely lined by stone friezes depicting the lion hunt which was a central icon and symbol of Assyrian kingship. Why? Because the emperor’s role was to impose order on the world. The lion was the fiercest beast in the world. By beating it, by killing lions single handed (although surrounded by scores of courtiers and warriors) the emperor showed his fitness to rule and, symbolically, enacted the ordering of the world.

Both these types of imagery are familiar to anyone who knows a bit about the ancient Middle East.

Social history

What is new and striking about the exhibition was a lot of the non-military social history. For example, the section on the immense library which Ashurbanipal assembled, and which led him to boast about his learning. His library at Nineveh may have contained as many as 10,000 texts and the exhibition powerfully conveys this by displaying them in a massive glass wall divided into grids, each containing a cuneiform text, carved into a clay tablet, covering a wide range of subjects – astrology, medicine, legends and so on. Ashurbanipal claimed to be unlike his predecessors in that he could read, write and debate with expert scholars.

The canals of Nineveh

Nearby is a section devoted to the orderly agriculture and watering of the capital city, conveyed via a big carving showing canals, tilled fields and a path leading to a gazebo with a happy looking emperor standing in it. Apparently it was Asurbanipal’s grandfather, Sennacherib (mentioned in the Bible) who built the canals which watered Nineveh.

Clever lighting

What brings this all alive is the clever use of lighting which animates bands of blue slowly colouring the canals, and of green, slowly colouring in the fields, and white indicating the path. The information panel tells us that all of these carvings and sculptures would have been brightly coloured. But the use of son et lumiere to animate the colouring was inspired.

Battle scenes

The same goes for several of the battle panels. One of them is maybe 30 feet wide and depicts the Battle of Til-Tuba in 653 BC, as Ashurbanipal led an invasion of the kingdom of Elam. As with many of these battle panels, the figures are carved in horizontal bands, each of which tells a story, in this case the Elamites retreating in panic down a hill before triumphant Assyrians who drive them into a river.

There are information panels along the bottom of the long frieze picking out scenes, but there was also another display of lighting effects for a sequence of spotlights picked out a particular scene – not only picked it out but highlighted the silhouettes of the relevant figures – and then text was projected onto a blank part of the frieze explaining what was going on.

Relief detail of Ashurbanipal hunting on horseback from Nineveh, Assyria (645–635 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Relief detail of Ashurbanipal hunting on horseback from Nineveh, Assyria (645–635 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

The exhibition contains a number of maps and, in the main area you realise that the entire floor you are walking on is a schematic map of the Assyrian Empire.

There are several timelines, twenty of more large information panels and, of course, hundreds of smaller information panels relating to each of the 200 or so artefacts on display.

Partitions

The exhibition is divided into different ‘rooms’ or areas by immense partitions on which are printed patterns and designs found on the tiled rooms of the emperor’s palace, abstract geometric patterns.

In fact these vast decorated partitions dominate the exhibition visually, much bigger than any one object on display, and encourage you to pay attention to the section of the show which focuses on Assyrian tiles and glazed bricks, explaining the evolution of their decorative patterns and styles.

If the central section focuses on Ashurbanipal’s military campaigns, with cases explaining the history and culture of each of the dozen or so areas which made up the empire, and then a series of displays about each of his major campaigns (against Egypt and Elam in particular), there are also plenty of more modest cases highlighting what we know about Assyrian religion, culture, design, even cookery – displaying ‘delicately carved ivories, extravagant metalwork, cosmetic vessels and gold ornaments’ – one case showing an enormous bronze cauldron decorated around the lip with what seem to be dragon heads.

Striding sphinx from ‘Fort Shalmaneser’, Nimrud, Iraq (900 -700 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Striding sphinx from ‘Fort Shalmaneser’, Nimrud, Iraq (900  to 700 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Criticism

Overall the exhibition layout is imaginative and over-awing, and the use of the light animations to bring old stone friezes to life is really inspiring.

However the curators make the same mistake they made with the Viking exhibition. A good number of the information labels are at waist height. When I went the exhibition was absolutely crammed. Imagine the crowd at a football stadium. It was impossible to process through it in sequential order because some display cases were simply unapproachable. Early on, there is a display of a characteristic battle relief, maybe 20 feet long by 7 or eight feet high. As usual it shows a series of incidents during a battle and it was accompanied by about ten informative and interesting panels picking out and explaining specific incidents.

But because they were at waist height, they were completely hidden by the crowd of twenty of more people in front of them. Whereas, there was plenty of space above the relief. Why not put the information panels above the objects where anybody can read them, instead of at waist height, where they are inevitably hidden?

The end

The final sections of the show peter out a bit, after the dense concentration of information and huge reliefs depicting his famous victories which dominate the centre.

I was fascinated to learn that we don’t know when Ashurbanipal died. Nobody knows whether he died of natural causes, was murdered or abdicated. The last public inscription about him dates from 638. His kingship may have ended as early as 631 or as late as 627 – there is no written record in the sources of Assyria or its neighbours.

We do know that Ashurbanipal was briefly succeeded by a son, then another one. The significant event was that in 626 a former general, Nabopolassar, claimed the throne of Babylon and started a war of independence which led to the entire empire unravelling. The Iranian Medes led by Cyaxares, joined Nabopolassar and their forces sacked the city of Ashur, home to Assyria’s chief deity. This alliance then marched on Nineveh, the beautiful city of canals and decorated palaces built up by Ashurbanipal’s forebears and himself – and sacked it, burning it to the ground.

The Victorian rediscovery

It was only in the 1840s that Victorian archaeologists began systematically to uncover the site of Nineveh, discovering the massive lions statues, thousands of clay tables covered in writing, and other treasures. Some of these treasures were displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and sparked a short-lived enthusiasm for Assyrian motifs on such things as tankards and dishes, and their use in jewellery and necklaces, a handful of which are on display here.

Until these discoveries, the reputation of the Assyrians and of Nineveh was taken from the Bible, where its rulers are depicted as gross, corrupt, Sybarites, who fully deserved their destruction by the Israelites’ jealous God.

The archaeological discoveries began to overthrow that old view and restore the more rounded view of Assyrian civilisation which, we like to think, we enjoy today.

War and destruction

The final section of the exhibition is staged in a long narrow corridor. It contains a timeline of modern archaeology (i.e. since the 1840s) and two short films.

One uses computer technology to match together aerial photos of the site of Nineveh as it appeared from the 1930s up to the present day, a rough square in a bend of the River Tigris. The camera, or point of view, slowly circles down from the high vantage point of early 20th century photos, spiralling down to show us how the site has changed and developed over the past eighty years or so, until we are at ground level looking up at the rather pitiful remains.

The second film features the head of the British Museum’s Iraq section explaining the scheme whereby archaeologists from Iraq are being brought to London and trained in various techniques, and then supported as they return to Iraq in the task of ongoing digging and preservation of that country’s heritage – the ‘Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Scheme’.

(This isn’t exactly the same one, but covers the same scheme)

I couldn’t help noticing the world class irony here.

For the previous half hour I had been reading numerous inscriptions in which Ashurbanipal had his sculptors inscribe words describing how he not only defeated his enemies in Egypt or Elam, but annihilated them and their cities, leaving not a blade of grass standing, how he ransacked the tombs of their royal families, destroyed their monuments, killed their sheep and goats and left not an animal stirring in the barren wastelands he created.

This is the man who is being held up, not exactly for our admiration but for our awe, a man who destroyed and killed wantonly in pursuit of his worldview, namely that the known world should be ruled by a man like him, with his beliefs.

The irony being that two and a half thousand years later, another cohort of warriors seized control of this region, also convinced that they had a God-given right to rule, to impose their beliefs on all the inhabitants, and to destroy anything, any relics or remains of civilisations which they saw as infidel and blasphemous.

Difficult not to see a certain continuity of culture reaching across two and a half millennia.

Relief depicting Ashurbanipal hunting a lion (645 – 635 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Relief depicting Ashurbanipal hunting a lion (645 – 635 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

There’s a second final thought. Many bien-pensant liberals, as well as hard core identity politicians and virtue warriors, think the British Museum is a guilt-filled testimony to the wholesale looting carried out by the British Empire, and that all of its artefacts, starting with the Elgin Marbles, should be returned to their countries of origin.

But if all of these objects had been in the Baghdad Museum in 2003 or the Mosul Museum in 2015, they would all have been looted or simply destroyed.

That doesn’t settle the debate about the Marbles or thousands of other objects, but these are the thoughts which the final section, all about the Iraq War and ISIS, leave you pondering.

Video

Here’s an excellent visual overview of the show from Visiting London Guide.

Related links

Other British Museum reviews

1 Comment
by Simon on January 24, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, Art, Exhibition
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Posted by Simon on January 24, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/01/24/ashurbanipal-king-of-assyria-british-museum/

Every room in the British Museum

A friend’s son comes to stay from Spain. He’s studying art and culture and so we spent two days, from 10am till chucking out time at 5.30pm, on a mission to visit every room in the British Museum. And we did it.

The British Museum owns some 8 million artefacts, of which fewer than 1% are on display, amounting to around 50,000 objects. It is the most popular tourist attraction in the UK with nearly 7 million visitors annually. Before the doors even opened at 10, the crowds flocking into the main forecourt reminded me of the crowds heading for the turnstiles at a football match.

Confusing layout

The official floorplan gives 95 numbered rooms, but closer examination shows several are missing. For example, I couldn’t find mention of the 80s, whereas some numbers are used two or three times: eg 18, 18a and 18b are the rooms dedicated to the Elgin Marbles – or 33, 33a and 33b, sound like one number but turn out to label the long hall running along the north wing of the building, the room at the end and a long narrow hall running south from it, which between them contain all of India and China: two distinct and massive subjects/areas, covering a profusion of sub-subjects – all contained by one innocent sounding 33.

The collection is spread vertically between levels -2 to level 5, so there are lots of floors and lifts. But not all the stairs give access to all the levels ie some stairs only go from one level to another, or only to one or a few room: like the steps which only go from room 21a down to rooms 77 and 78 (devoted to Greek and Roman architecture, an interesting collection of just the tops of classical columns which allow you to get close to the various decorative styles and patterns, and to classical inscriptions). Or the one staircase (the North stairs) which are the only way to get up to the Japan displays (rooms 92 to 94).

The way some rational sequences of numbered rooms are suddenly interrupted or require a detour up or down back stairs, give the place a pleasing element of chance or randomness eg the way room 67 (the Korea Foundation Gallery) continues seamlessly into room 95 (the Sir Joseph Hotung Centre for Ceramic Studies). But overall, the visit prompted two big questions:

Why are the Egyptian and Roman and Greek collections split up?

The massive long hall-type room 4 contains a wonderful collection of Egyptian sculptures and next to it are rooms displaying the similarly huge Assyrian sculptures (rooms 6 to 10) and then loads of rooms – 11 to 23 – displaying the development of Greek sculpture (including the vast Duveen Galleries showing the Elgin Marbles). But then you have to go across the Museum and up to level 3 to visit the completely separate suite of rooms – 61 to 66 – displaying Egyptian mummies and sarcophaguses, in carefully explained chronological order. Why are the Egyptians split up like this? Why not have everything Egyptian all together? Similarly why, after you’ve done the evolution of Greek sculpture, do you have to go across and up to level 3 (rooms 69 to 73) to see more Greek pots and find out about the Greek colonies in the south of Italy before the rise of Rome?

Why is the chronological account of civilisations sometimes done in rooms numbered sequentially, but sometimes done against the order of the rooms?

For example, rooms 11 to 23 on the ground floor take you through the history of Greek art in a nice logical sequence, from the earliest, primitive cycladic figures through to the artistic heights of the Parthenon, then on to Alexander the Great and the Romans. Whereas on the third floor, rooms 52 to 59 have to be visited in reverse order to experience the chronological progression, with 59 introducing the Levant ie Mesopotamia, Persia, Turkey – and then rooms moving forward in time as the numbers decrease (room 56 Mesopotamia 6000 to 1500, room 55 Mesopotamia 1500 to 539 and so on). Similarly, the history of Europe starts in room 51 (Europe and Middle East 10,000 to 800) then proceeds through rooms which count downwards: room 50 for Britain and Europe 800BC to 43 AD, room 49 for Roman Britain. Just when you’re getting used to this backwards progression, you have to leap straight to room 41 (Sutton Hoo and Europe 300 to 1100) and room 40 (Medieval Europe 1050 to 1500), because the missing rooms in between – rooms 46, 47, 48 (admittedly off to one side) turn out to contain rather unexpected and rather odd displays of Europe 1400 to 1800, Europe 1800 to 1900, and Europe 1900 to the present, respectively (mostly made up of ceramics, pottery, vases and plates).

In other words, finding your way around the British Museum is neither logical nor intuitive, making the visit of anyone with a limited amount of time really quite demanding. Especially if you’re trying to please impatient hectoring children. Don’t give up! It’s not you, it’s the museum.

On the other hand, if you do have the time or the opportunity to visit more than once, then the quirky layout, with countless unexpected and hidden treasures to stumble upon, maybe adds to the mystery and romance of the place…

Highlights

Obviously, not any kind of official highlights, this is a list of things that made me stop and think or want to make a note:

A dentil is a small block used as a repeating ornament in the ‘bedmould’ of a cornice. Picture of dentils.

African wooden fetishes contained the spirits of gods, ancestors or spirits. Banging nails or bits of metal into them activated the god, woke up the spirit. Photo of African fetish

Porcelain was invented around 600AD in China and was a practical cheap new way of making dishes, pots, cups etc.

In a traditional Korean house the male area or sarangbang, was prized for its simplicity and clarity: here the man of the house studied, worked, wrote poetry. The woman’s room, or anbang, was highly decorated, painted, adorned and ornamented.

Ganesh, the Hindu god, has the head of an elephant because his father, Shiva, cut off his human head in a fit of anger and said he’d replace it with the head of the first thing he saw.

The Buddhist chant Om mani padme om means ‘hail to the jewel in the lotus’.

The hands of the Buddha in statues can represent a number of meanings, in fact they are broken down into categories. The palm raised towards the viewer is the abhayamudra, which symbolises reassurance. (The right hand in this image.)

Many of the Indian statues are posed in the traditional tribhanga posture where the body is slightly bent at the neck, waist and knee, giving it a sensuous S shape. Tribhanga Wikipedia article

The Egyptian cat god was named Bastet. Epitomised by the famous Guyer-Andersen cat. The udjat-eye hieroglyph on its chest is a symbol of protection.

Egyptians were buried on the west bank of the Nile (eg the Valley of the Kings) right on the edge of the desert. They were buried facing east, facing back towards the living.

No-one knows who the mysterious figurines found in earliest cycladic sites represent or why they were nearly all female. Cycladic figure.

King Ashurbanipal of Assyria (685 to 627 BC) held lion hunts, where caged lions were brought to an enclosure and released so the king could chase after them on his chariot. He is depicted with one lion leaping up into the chariot and, while two soldiers hold it back with spears, Ashurbanipal in person leans forward to deliver the coup de grace with a short sword. Ashurbanipal killing a lion 640BC.

Egyptians believed the scarab beetle symbolised the sun, because each day as the sun rose beetles emerged from their dung balls or holes. Egyptian scarab statue.

At the temple complex of Kom Ombo in Upper Egypt, where crocodiles were worshipped as symbols of caring and nurturing, but also images of fear (?), over 300 mummified crocodiles have been found. The mummies include mummified versions of their tiny baby crocodiles, placed along the mother croc’s back. The crocodile god is Sobek.

My favourite thing in the Japanese gallery wasn’t the magnificent Samurai armour, it was the painted screen, ‘Pine trees at Maiko-no-hama beach‘, by Mori Ippo (1847).

Farming was invented about 12,000 years ago. Writing was invented about 5,000 years ago. Money was invented around 600AD.

The Queen of the Night dates from 1800 BC in Mesopotamia.

The walls of ancient Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian empire in the 7th century BC, are now cheek-by-jowl with the modern Iraqi city of Mosul, which is currently held by forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

The most beautiful statue I saw was of Antinous, the young man beloved of the Roman emperor Hadrian.

I learned that it was during the Hellenistic period after the death of Alexander the great (323BC) that Greek art became more individualised. When Greek statues reached their peak in the Athens of Pericles (495 to 429 BC) they depicted idealised images of power which reflected the communal values of the city state. After Alexander the Great (died 323 BC) effectively unified the Mediterranean world in one cosmopolitan culture, the rich became more individualistic, collecting rare and precious objects, and wanted to be depicted as they actually appeared. So by the time the Roman republic reached its peak and then became the Empire (27 BC), although bodies were still depicted with the Greek idealism – the super-defined muscles and bone structure etc – the faces had become the faces of individuals. Hence the faces of the Roman emperors, which are so individualised and evocative.

The invention of the pendulum clock in 1656 by Christiaan Huygens was a massive step forward in accurate measure of time and therefore of all kinds of processes, from the movement of the planets to new industrial or chemical processes. The super-accurate telling of time was one of the foundations of the industrial revolution and of the West’s dominance over the rest of the world.

When wound up this Mechanical Galleon, made in Germany in the 1590s, played music from a little organ as it trundled over the dinner table until it came to a stop and the model guns fired little puffs of gunpowder.

The Ram in a Thicket is one of a pair of figures excavated in Ur in southern Iraq. They date from 2600 to 2400 BC.

I’d heard of most of the other cultures mentioned here, but never of Urartu, a kingdom in the east of Turkey near Mount Ararat. This is a bronze winged bull’s head from the handle of a large cauldron, 8th to 7th century BC.

King Ashurbanipal established the world’s first library (as far as we know) consisting of thousands of clay tablets from the 7th century BC. The British Museum is embarked on a large project working with the University of Mosul to digitise the original texts and translations, making the entire library available online.

The double headed snake was important in Aztec mythology. The Museum houses an elaborate sculpture of a double headed snake covered in hundreds of tiny fragments of turquoise. What interested me is that this nearby mosaic skull also has snake motifs curling around the eyes of the nose and down to the lips.

A cabinet of curiosities is a display case an Enlightenment or Victorian collector might use to display his collection of interesting and unusual objects. It is in stark contrast to a ‘treasure room’ (exemplified by room 2, the The Waddesdon Bequest, donated by Baron Ferdinand Rothschild MP (1839 to 1898)) which contains objects of exquisite beauty and craftsmanship designed to highlight the owner’s refined taste. I preferred the cabinets.

Room one

Room 1 runs the length of the ground floor, along the right hand side as you enter the courtyard. The entry, opposite the east part of the bookshop, looks like a dusty old library, but don’t be put off: room 1 is dedicated to a permanent exhibition, in seven themed sections, showing why the Enlightenment period (roughly the 1700s) saw a new fashion among the rich and educated for collecting everything – stones, flints, flowers, trees, books, manuscripts, languages, paintings, sculptures, machinery, statues – you name it, someone somewhere, rich aristocrat or modestly funded vicar, was collecting it.

And how it was from the urge to collect and assess and categorise and compare all these innumerable specimens, that many of the disciplines we know today emerged – most notably archaeology, the science of dating and naming and categorising and understanding all the objects from the human past.

It may look a bit unexciting, but room 1 not only contains many objects which are fascinating in their own right, but provides just the right introduction, not just to the museum but to the whole ‘idea’ of a museum and what museums are for. And since the British Museum was founded with the bequest of one such personal collection, that of the physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane, in 1753, room 1 is the ideal place to begin to understand the urge to collect and the urge to view, see and understand, which underlies the whole place and explains why you’re there.

Related links

Other British Museum reviews

1 Comment
by Simon on December 29, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, European History, History, Middle Ages
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on December 29, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/12/29/every-room-in-the-british-museum/

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