skins. Their destination is a fort where their compatriots await them.
The artist showed the fort as if it were in the middle of the river, but it
must, of course, have been on land, perhaps at some distance from
where the escapees entered the water. The artist’s purpose was to tell
the story clearly and economically. In art, distances can be compressed
and the human actors enlarged so that they stand out from their envi-
ronment. Literally interpreted, the defenders of the fort are too tall to
walk through its archway. (Compare Naram-Sin and his men scaling a
mountain,FIG. 2-13.) The sculptor also combined different view-
points in the same frame, just as the figures are composites of frontal
and profile views. The river is seen from above; the men, trees, and fort
from the side. The artist also made other adjustments for clarity. The
archers’ bowstrings are in front of their bodies but behind their heads
in order not to hide their faces. The men will snare their own heads in
their bows when they launch their arrows! All these liberties with op-
tical reality result, however, in a vivid and easily legible retelling of a
decisive moment in the king’s victorious campaign. This was the
artist’s primary goal.
PALACE OF ASHURBANIPALTwo centuries later, sculptors
carved hunting reliefs for the Nineveh palace of the conqueror of
Elamite Susa, Ashurbanipal (r. 668–627 BCE). The Assyrians, like
many other societies before and after, regarded prowess in hunting
as a manly virtue on a par with success in warfare. The royal hunt
did not take place in the wild, however, but in a controlled environ-
ment, ensuring the king’s safety and success. In FIG. 2-23, lions re-
leased from cages in a large enclosed arena charge the king, who, in
his chariot and with his attendants, thrusts a spear into a savage lion.
The animal leaps at the king even though it already has two arrows
in its body. All around the royal chariot is a pathetic trail of dead and
dying animals, pierced by what appear to be far more arrows than
needed to kill them. Blood streams from some of the lions, but they
refuse to die. The artist brilliantly depicted the straining muscles, the
swelling veins, the muzzles’ wrinkled skin, and the flattened ears of
the powerful and defiant beasts. Modern sympathies make this scene
of carnage a kind of heroic tragedy, with the lions as protagonists. It
is unlikely, however, that the king’s artists had any intention other
than to glorify their ruler by showing the king of men pitting himself
against and repeatedly conquering the king of beasts. Portraying
Ashurbanipal’s beastly foes as possessing courage and nobility as
well as the power to kill made the king’s accomplishments that much
grander.
The Assyrian Empire was never very secure, and most of its
kings had to fight revolts in large sections of the Near East. Assyria’s
conquest of Elam in the seventh century BCEand frequent rebellions
in Babylonia apparently overextended its resources. During the last
years of Ashurbanipal’s reign, the empire began to disintegrate. Un-
der his successors, it collapsed from the simultaneous onslaught of
the Medes from the east and the resurgent Babylonians from the
south. Neo-Babylonian kings held sway over the former Assyrian
Empire until the Persian conquest.Neo-Babylonia and Persia
The most renowned of the Neo-Babylonian kings was Nebuchad-
nezzar II (r. 604–562 BCE), whose exploits the biblical Book of Daniel
recounts. Nebuchadnezzar restored Babylon to its rank as one of the
great cities of antiquity. The city’s famous hanging gardens were
among the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, and the Bible im-
mortalized its enormous ziggurat as the Tower of Babel (see “Baby-
lon, City of Wonders,” page 48).ISHTAR GATE, BABYLONNebuchadnezzar’s Babylon was
a mud-brick city, but dazzling blue-glazed bricks faced the most im-
portant monuments, such as the Ishtar Gate (FIG. 2-24), actually a
pair of gates, one of which has been restored and installed in a Ger-
man museum. The Ishtar Gate consists of a large arcuated(arch-
shaped) opening flanked by towers, and features glazedbricks with
molded reliefs of animals, real and imaginary. Each Babylonian
brick was molded and glazed separately, then set in proper sequence
on the wall. On the Ishtar Gate, profile figures of Marduk and Nabu’s
dragon and Adad’s bull alternate. Lining the processional way lead-
ing up to the gate were reliefs of Ishtar’s sacred lion, glazed in yellow,
brown, and red against a blue background.Neo-Babylonia and Persia 472-24Ishtar Gate (restored), Babylon,
Iraq, ca. 575 bce.Glazed brick.
Vorderasiatisches Museum, Staatliche
Museen zu Berlin, Berlin.
Babylon under King Nebuchadnezzar II
was one of the greatest cities of the
ancient world. Its arcuated Ishtar Gate
featured glazed bricks depicting Marduk
and Nabu’s dragon and Adad’s bull.