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Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2) 179–204
C
2007 Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S1380203807002334 Printed in the United Kingdom
‘Source of the Tigris’. Event, place and performance in the
Assyrian landscapes of the Early Iron Age
¨
Om
¨
ur Harmans¸ah
Abstract
Performative engagements with specific, culturally significant places were among the
primary means of configuring landscapes in the ancient world. Ancient states often
appropriated symbolic or ritual landscapes through commemorative ceremonies and
building operations. These commemorative sites became event-places where state
spectacles encountered and merged with local cult practices. The Early Iron Age
inscriptions and reliefs carved on the cave walls of the Dibni Su sources at the
site of Birkleyn in Eastern Turkey, known as the ‘Source of the Tigris’ monuments,
present a compelling paradigm for such spatial practices. Assyrian kings Tiglath-
pileser I (1114–1076 B.C.) and Shalmaneser III (858–824 B.C.) carved ‘images of
kingship’ and accompanying royal inscriptions at this impressive site in a remote but
politically contested region. This important commemorative event was represented in
detail on Shalmaneser III’s bronze repouss
´
e bands from Imgul-Enlil (Tell Balawat) as
well as in his annalistic texts, rearticulating the performance of the place on public
monuments in Assyrian urban contexts. This paper approaches the making of the
Source of the Tigris monuments as a complex performative place-event. The effect
was to reconfigure a socially significant, mytho-poetic landscape into a landscape of
commemoration and cult practice, illustrating Assyrian rhetorics of kingship. These
rhetorics were maintained by articulate gestures of inscription that appropriated an
already symbolically charged landscape in a liminal territory and made it durable
through site-specific spatial practices and narrative representations.
Keywords
mytho-poetic landscape; commemorative monuments; rock reliefs; place;
performance; event; rhetorics of kingship; acts of inscription
Abandoned cities [al
¯
ani nat
ˆ
ute] which during the time of my fathers had
turned into ruined hills, I took in hand for renovation [and] settled therein
many people. Ancient palaces [ekalli mahr
ˆ
ate] throughout my land I built
anew. I decorated them in a splendid fashion [and] stored grain and straw
in them.
Excerpt from the Commemorative ‘banquet stele’ from the Northwest Palace of
A
ˇ
s
ˇ
surnasirpal II (883–859 B.C.); translation by A. Kirk Grayson (1991, 291)
180 note
Introduction: performing the world
Performative engagements with specific, culturally significant places were
a primary means by which political elites configured the landscapes in
the ancient world. Through such performances landscapes constituted
networks of socially significant places and landmarks which became imagined,
mythologized, marginalized and contested in their various representations.
The places that constituted these landscapes were often made durable as ‘sites
of memory’, to borrow Pierre Nora’s (1989, 7) term – les lieux de m
´
emoire.
1
Such sites of memory, he argues, materially demarcate places that exist by
virtue of their relationship with specific historical events and persist through
commemorative practices, those formalized performances that maintain the
durability of places. Commemoration is a performative spectacle of reiterating
the past and a way of ‘socializing’ the world in a particular way: it creates a
narrative account of history at an outstanding climactic moment and relates
it to a particular locale through an active bodily engagement with that
locale (Connerton 1989). The production of space, then, partly involves the
appropriation, acting out and monumentalization of a constellation of places
in the landscape. Their reconfiguration over time and their incorporation into
historical narratives work to configure landscapes as part of the apparatus of
power in early complex polities (Smith 2003).
It is important not to see this process as a transformation of a neutral
or ‘natural’ place into a socialized space. Rather, in diverse and subtle
ways, commemorative practices appropriate already symbolically charged,
culturally saturated landscapes.
These rhetorics of ‘untouched landscapes’ are usually associated with
colonial discourse offering only a ‘representation of space’ (Lefebvre 1991).
Other scholars have spoken of such discursive practices in the form of terra
nullius or ‘virgin soil’ (Gosden 2004, 114–52) or the notion of the ‘pristine
myth’ as explored by Erickson (2006) in the case of the Bolivian Amazon.
Such rhetorics are abundant in Assyrian and Urartian imperial accounts of
founding new cities in ‘uncultivated steppelands’ or places where ‘the earth
was wilderness’ or ‘the rock was untouched’.
2
However, I argue in this paper
that landscapes always carry a subtle imprint of social practices and cultural
imaginations, and they are always in a fluid state of sociality and hybridity.
Ancient states often appropriated symbolic or ritual landscapes, making
them durable through their commemorative ceremonies, acts of inscription
and building operations. These commemorative sites became event-places
where state spectacles encountered and merged with local practices that were
anchored to those places.
3
By definition, commemorative practices are also
ideological. Sites of commemoration, therefore, served as public spheres in
which elite and local ideologies interacted in a set of material and discursive
practices related to notions of kingship and servitude. They constituted loci for
the display and its material embodiment, becoming places through which local
histories were negotiated and written. In this study, I will attempt to illustrate
the Assyrian practice of raising commemorative monuments in peripheral
geographies. One remarkable example of such commemorative activity takes
place at the so-called ‘Source of the Tigris’, where a symbolically charged
landscape was materially transformed and conceptually demarcated by means
‘Source of the Tigris’ 181
of place-making practices. I explore how these monuments were incorporated
into a spatial narrative of imperial landscapes that was constructed through
textual accounts, visual representations and architectural practice.
During their military campaigns, the Early Iron Age Assyrian kings Tiglath-
pileser I (Tukulti-apil-e
ˇ
sarra, 1114–1076 B.C.) and Shalmaneser III (
ˇ
Sulmanu-
a
ˇ
sared, 858–824 B.C.) visited the source of the Dibni C¸ ay (the eastern
tributary of the Tigris) at the site locally known as Birkleyn (alternatively
spelled Birkilin) in Eastern Turkey,
4
located in the midst of a remote,
mountainous but politically contested region (figures 1 and 2). During these
place-events, both kings had their craftsmen carve their ‘images of kingship’
(salam
ˇ
sarrutiya) and royal inscriptions on the walls of the caves from which
the Dibni Su waters emerge at Birkleyn. This impressive site of multiple
caves, gorges and rocky outcrops is known in Near Eastern scholarship as
the ‘Source of the Tigris’ or ‘Tigris Tunnel’ (Shafer 1998, 182–88; Schachner
2006). Notable is the fact that this important commemorative event (carving
of the reliefs and inscriptions, accompanied by feasting and animal sacrifices)
was not only described explicitly in Shalmaneser III’s annalistic texts that were
publicly displayed on an urban monument in Assyria, but also represented
pictorially on bronze repouss
´
e bands installed on the gate of a monumental
building at Imgul-Enlil (Tell Balawat), dated to the time of the same king
(see figures 10–12). This paper approaches the making of the Source of the
Tigris monuments as a spectacular event that reconfigures a socially significant
mytho-poetic landscape into a landscape of commemoration and cult practice,
as part of the Assyrian rulers’ rhetorics of k ingship. It argues that these
rhetorics are located at a specific, performatively monumentalized place, and
operate by both spatializing and narrativizing a shared understanding of
the past. While the king’s agency is distributed through the making durable
of his presence at the imperial frontiers with his rock-carved images and
inscriptions, the spectacles of the state and the performative transformation
of the Source of the Tigris site were transported to the Assyrian urban core
through textual and pictorial representations which performed this place to
an audience beyond its immediate local context.
Rhetorics of kingship: images, texts and events
The Upper Mesopotamian and Anatolian states of the Late Bronze and Early
Iron Ages had a special interest in engaging with their environments and
transforming their imperial landscapes through large-scale programmes of
building operations, from the foundation of new cities to the plantation of
orchards, from the construction of irrigation systems to the carving of rock
reliefs.
5
Intriguingly, A
ˇ
s
ˇ
surnasirpal’s statement cited in the epigraph does not
refer to a particular building project but captures a pervasive landscape policy
meant to transform the built environment which he claims to have inherited.
His words evoke a collective and admirable past world that has declined, but
which he now sets out to restore in the social imagination. As Sue Alcock puts
it, ‘the king is actively engaged in the construction of social memory’ (2002, 1).
These material engagements with landscapes were not uniquely Assyrian.
Hittite, Urartian and Syro-Hittite elites employed pictorial and textual
narrative accounts to fashion strikingly similar discourses over their
182 note
Figure 1 Map of Upper Mesopotamia during the Early Middle Iron Age.
‘Source of the Tigris’ 183
Figure 2 Detail map of Upper Tigris River Basin and the area of the Tigris Tunnel.
historically significant accomplishments. It is this set of practices that I refer
to here as ‘the rhetorics of kingship’ (see chart 1). In one definition, rhetorics
of kingship are a discursive, representational practice with distinct social
interests.
6
In the Near E astern context, it has come to be associated with
the construction of the narrative accounts of historical events in textual and
pictorial form, often displayed in monumental contexts of public spaces.
Nevertheless, my approach adopts a wider definition of these rhetorics of
kingship, in which the rhetorical discourse is not limited to the confines of
language and imagery, but refers to all kingly ‘signifying’ activities in the
public domain (Holliday 2002). As such, the spatializing and performative
rhetorical acts such as state ceremonies, urban spectacles, sacrificial rituals
and royal hunts must be included in this definition. All are articulate
monumental ‘gestures’, forms of social power and public performance that
shape political landscapes in close reciprocity with their reception in the public
sphere. These rhetorics of kingship are necessarily performative; they are both
located and locating, in the sense that they materialize in the complex layering
of specific sites and potent landscapes, where textual and pictorial narratives
are used in the kingly acts of inscription and commemoration.
The study of commemorative practices comes with dichotomies of its own.
On the one hand, commemorative monuments are frequently considered as
ideological statements of the ruling elite, thereby as vehicles for securing social
prestige and political power (compare this to Shafer 2007; Marcus 1995). On
the other hand, Peter Holliday (2002, pp. xv–xxv) has argued that rhetorical
acts of the ruling ideology ‘effectively constitute culture’ and ‘confer meaning
on the world’. The production of monuments as a social practice cannot
therefore be disengaged from the cultural practices of the society. In this
paper, I argue that the study of powerful event-places such as the Source of
the Tigris is crucial to understanding the state’s relationship with landscape as
both spectacle and everyday performance of its symbolic repertoire of power
and social order.
184 note
Chart 1 Royal rhetoric, memory practices and the making of spatial narratives in the ancient Near East.
An eventful landscape
In 1862 J.G. Taylor visited the Tigris Tunnel or the source of Dibni Su site,
made note of the Assyrian rock images and inscriptions and presented a
detailed, evocative description of the landscape around the site in the Journal
of the Royal Geographical Society of London (Taylor 1865, 41–43). It is
worth quoting Taylor here as his description illustrates the archaeological
richness and the geological peculiarities of the place; it also presents yet
another performative engagement with this culturally saturated landscape:
About three miles below the sources the river [Dibni Su] enters a high
cave, 80 feet high and two miles long, running northeast and southwest,
and emerges from it near the village of Korkhar, at a point where the
‘Source of the Tigris’ 185
rocks are smooth and hard. Here, just outside the cave, on the right bank,
and some twenty feet up the face of the rock, is the figure of an Assyrian
king, with ten lines of a cuneiform inscription, in excellent preservation ...
During the spring floods, the river, confined in a narrow gorge with
high perpendicular cliffs, comes down with immense force; the north-east
end of the cave is naturally, therefore, a mass of fallen rock and smaller
fragments ... I am inclined to believe that from the numerous d
´
ebris which
now choke the stream, and the cave-like appearance through which it runs,
this subterranean channel of the Tigris, or Dibeneh Su, extended close up
to its sources, and thus gave some countenance to the fabulous length of its
underground course as mentioned by Strabo. At one side of the cave, but
perched up on the top of the mountain it has pierced, are the ruins of a small
ancient fort. From it a flight of narrow steep steps, cut out of the face of the
rock, leads down to a shelf, from which, entering by a narrow doorway,
another stair, tunnelled in the solid stone, conducts to an opening in the
roof of the cave, at a considerable height, however, from the water, which,
as there is no reason to believe that the stair was intended for anything
else than as a means of supplying the garrison of the fort with water, must
have been obtained by a bucket and rope. At the base of the hill is a small
level spot, round the edges of which are the remains of old buildings and a
dilapidated arch ... (Taylor 1865, 41–43).
German philologist Ferdinand Lehmann-Haupt was the first Assyriologist to
publish the inscriptions and reliefs, following his visit to the site accompanied
by his colleague Waldemar Belck in 1899 (see Lehmann-Haupt 1907, 15–18).
The Tigris Tunnel is a series of ‘efflux’ or ‘resurgence’ caves (Halliday and
Shaw 1995; Waltham 1976) through which the eastern tributary of the Tigris,
namely the Dibni C¸ ay, emerges in the mountainous zone approximately
90 km north-east of modern Diyarbakır. It lies only 24 km from the town of
Lice, which is provisionally identified with Up
¯
umu/Uppumu, the Early Iron
Age Hurrian capital of the
ˇ
Subria (Kessler 1995; Parpola and Porter 2001;
see here figure 2). The site is located immediately above a small but well-
protected agricultural valley watered by the Dibni C¸ ay and delimited by the
I
·
nceburun mountains to the north of the Diyarbakır plain. The modern road
that connects the Diyarbakır plain to Bing
¨
ol, Lake Van and the highlands
of Eastern Anatolia goes through this small valley, passing immediately to
the east of the Tigris Tunnel (Schachner 2006, 77–78). At this geologically
ubiquitous site, the Dibni C¸ ay emerges at the end of a 900-meter-long tunnel
underneath Korha Mountain (figure 3).
7
The site constitutes therefore an
excellent example of DINGIR.KASKAL.KUR, a particular Hittite/Hurrian
landscape feature attested in cuneiform Hittite and hieroglyphic Luwian texts
and usually translated as the ‘Underground Water-Course’ or the ‘Divine
Road of the Earth’. This natural feature has been modified by a series of
rock reliefs and monumental inscriptions carved on the limestone surfaces
of the entrances of two main caves. Lehmann-Haupt was able to identify the
monuments belonging to the Assyrian kings Tiglath-pileser I and Shalmaneser
III. The inscriptions and reliefs were carved during multiple visits of the kings
which stretched across several centuries of the Early Iron Age.
186 note
Figure 3 Plan of the Tigris Tunnel area (after Waltham 1976).
Figures 4 and 5 Birkleyn gorge and the course of Dibni Su (author’s photographs).
Approaching the site along the shallow river course, a narrow but
spectacular gorge appears, and one arrives at the lower tunnel through
which the Dibni C¸ ay still flows. This is a limestone ravine that cuts through
an otherwise largely volcanic landscape (Waltham 1976, 31). As acutely
described in Taylor’s text, Dibni waters emerge from the lower tunnel at
a place where the cave ‘brow’ covering the limestone gorge had collapsed
‘Source of the Tigris’ 187
Figures 6 and 7 Entrance of Cave I and Cave II (author’s photograph).
Figure 8 Entrance of Cave II (author’s photograph).
in a rockfall or ‘collapse window’, opening up large breaks on its course.
At the mouth of this broken stretch of the bedrock where direct sunlight is
allowed to penetrate the water and rock surfaces the Assyrian rulers located
the first set of the reliefs and accompanying inscriptions. Immediately outside
the exit of the tunnel and in a prominent position about four meters above
the knee-deep water is the relatively small (about one meter high), but deeply
carved, relief image of Tiglath-pileser I, who is depicted performing ubana
tarasu, the so-called ‘stretching-the-finger’ gesture, with the raising of the
right hand (figure 9). This highly symbolic prayer gesture became common
in the iconographic repertoire of Assyrian monuments, seal impressions and
other media where the king addresses ‘one or more full-figured images of
deities’ (Shafer 2007, 137). Ursula Magen (1986) has suggested that ubana
188 note
Figure 9 Relief image of Tiglath-pileser I on the Lower Cave (Cave I) walls, with Tigris 1 cuneiform
inscription to his left (author’s photograph).
tarasu can be understood as a gesture of speech that established a ‘positive
communication’ between human subjects and the divine ones, putting the
king in direct contact with the divinities.
The brief ten-line inscription on the left-hand side of the image (Tigris 1)
refers to Tiglath-pileser’s campaigns to the Nairi lands, mountainous
landscapes located to the east and north of the site.
With the help of A
ˇ
s
ˇ
sur,
ˇ
Sama
ˇ
s (and) Adad, the great gods, my lords, I,
Tukulti-apil-E
ˇ
sarra, king of the land of A
ˇ
s
ˇ
sur, son of A
ˇ
s
ˇ
sur-r
¯
e
ˇ
sa-i
ˇ
si, king
of the land of A
ˇ
s
ˇ
sur, son of Mutakkil-Nusku, king of the land of A
ˇ
s
ˇ
sur as
well, the conqueror (of the territory) of the great sea of the land of Amurru
[the Mediterranean Sea] and the sea of the land of Nairi [Lake Van], went
three times to the land of Nairi.
8
The first set of Shalmaneser’s images and inscriptions, however, are located
further inside the Lower Cave and, therefore, are far less visible. The two
distinct groups of reliefs and inscriptions (Tigris 2 and 3) of Shalmaneser III
were dated to his seventh and fifteenth regnal years, 852 and 844 B.C.
respectively, and, therefore, they were raised in the course of at least two
separate expeditions to the site (Shafer 2007, 141; Schachner et al. 2007).
The earlier inscription is a brief account of campaigns to the lands Gilz
¯
anu
and Nairi, while the later and longer inscription summarizes campaigns to
Babylonia and his confrontation with the twelve kings of Hatti from coastal
Syria.
9
It is important to note that in the earlier and longer inscription
(Tigris 2), Shalmaneser III describes the extent of his conquests with the
phrase ‘I subjected [the territorry from] the source of the Tigris to the source
of the Euphrates, from the Sea of Inner Zamua to the Sea of the land of Kaldu’
(Grayson 1996, 95). In this description the sources of the two rivers appear
to mark the edges of the king’s imagined territory. Shalmaneser III completes
the second inscription (Tigris 3) with the phrase ‘At the source of the Tigris,
I wrote/inscribed my name.’ Accompanying the first of the two inscriptions
is a worn, incised rather than carved, image of Shalmaneser performing the
same gesture as his predecessor (Schachner 2006, 79).
To see the other set of inscriptions and the relief of Shalmaneser III,
one has to climb northwards some 50 meters over the rock outcrop and
‘Source of the Tigris’ 189
through the vertically rising gorge to the mouth of a larger cave, situated
on a higher elevation. This is the largest of the caves at the Birkleyn site,
approximately 25 meters in height and 30 meters in width, and extending
some 250 meters in length. Andreas Schachner of the University of Munich
and his team have recently, in the summer of 2004, conducted a survey of
the area. During that survey the team identified Iron Age and Byzantine-
period ceramics within this cave from the surface as well as in robbers’ pits
(Schachner et al. 2007; Schachner 2006). Medieval architectural remains are
immediately visible on the western side of the cave. The relief and two sets
of inscriptions of Shalmaneser III are again dated to his seventh and fifteenth
regnal years (Tigris 4 and 5) and were carved on the northern face of the
cave’s entrance. In 1984 a British Institute of Archaeology team was able to
discover further reliefs, unnoticed by Lehmann-Haupt as they were covered
with lichen (Russell 1986).
The Birkleyn/Dibni C¸ ay valley was part of an extensive region rich in
metal as well as agricultural resources, including the Upper Tigris valley, other
tributary river valleys and the foothills of the eastern Anatolian (south-eastern
Taurus) mountains. Between the late second and the early first millennium
B.C. it was a critical and complex frontier zone between Assyria,
ˇ
Subria
and Urartu, as well as the Syro-Hittite states such as Malizi and Bit Zamani
(Schachner and Radner 2000; Russell 1984; Kessler 1995; Karg 1999; Parker
2001; K
¨
oro
˘
glu 2002). The immediate area of the Tigris tunnel, the Taurus
Piedmont region, was under the control of the Mitanni, the Hurrian state
during the Late Bronze Age, while in the Early Iron Age the kingdom of
ˇ
Subria
controlled the area (Radner and Schachner 2001, 757).
ˇ
Subria was centred at
two main urban centres, Up
¯
umu and Kullimeri, the former of which was most
probably associated with the modern town of Lice, immediately south-east of
the Birkleyn site (Kessler 1995, 57). The Assyrian programmes of settlement
in the Upper Tigris river basin during the Late Bronze (Middle Assyrian) and
Early Iron (Neo-Assyrian) Ages have recently been explored through surveys
and excavations (Parker 2001; 2002; 2003; Parker et al. 2003).
It is reasonable to think that these territorial and regional states had
material interests in the region, considering the significant concentrations
of iron, copper and silver ores in the area. Ergani Maden (ancient Arqania)
to the west of the Source of the Tigris has always been one of the best-known
copper sources for northern Mesopotamia in antiquity (figure 2). The lower
plains south of the Tigris sources, the Upper Tigris basin, were an important
Middle and Neo-Assyrian frontier region, where the Assyrians attempted to
control agricultural production through the regional capital of Tu
ˇ
shan on
the Tigris (modern Ziyarettepe) and a series of frontier fortresses across the
region (Matney 1999; Parker 2001). In 882 B.C. A
ˇ
s
ˇ
surnasirpal II refounded
the city of Tu
ˇ
shan, as one of the provincial centres within the region, and it
is now identified with the recently excavated Ziyarettepe in the Diyarbakır
province in Turkey (Radner and Schachner 2001, 758).
10
On the Kurkh stele,
another commemorative stele from the region, he also mentions that T
¯
ıdu
and Sin
¯
abu, towns along the Upper Tigris near Tu
ˇ
shan, had already been
garrisoned by Shalmaneser (I) (Grayson 1991, 256–62, text A.0.101.19). The
rock monuments at the Source of the Tigris essentially marked the northern
190 note
limit of this fertile and politically contested geography, where the Assyrians
attempted to establish a frontier through urbanization, especially against the
independent kingdom of
ˇ
Subria to the north.
Also significant for the present discussion is the Early Iron Age kingdom
of Malizi/Melid, which evidently was crucial in the political landscape of the
Iron Age. Settled in the intermontane Malatya-Elbistan and Tohma Su basins,
immediately west of the Birklinc¸ay valley, the ‘Country Lords’ of Malizi of
the 12th and 11th centuries B.C. raised a large number of commemorative
monuments, including stelae and rock reliefs featuring pictorial imagery as
well as hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions, demarcating the territorial limits of
this regional polity (Hawkins 2000). The rock monument from the narrow
gorge of the Upper Tohma Su valley near G
¨
ur
¨
un, for instance, was raised by
the Malizian ruler Runtiyas, some time in the second half of 12th century
B.C. Tiglath-pileser I, the first king who had his image carved at the Source
of the Tigris, is known at that time to have visited Melid in the course of
his expedition to the lands of Nairi and Dai
¯
eni in Eastern Anatolia, where
according to his inscriptions he received the yearly tribute o f lead ore. Urartian
forts and rock-carved monumental cuneiform inscriptions are also present in
these territorial frontiers, especially along the Euphrates, from the 9th century
B.C. onwards. The practice of carving rock reliefs that structured imperial
landscapes was part and parcel of the interregional rhetorics of kingship
shared among Near Eastern polities of the Iron Age. Seen in this context, the
Birkleyn site, where the Assyrian kings performed commemorative spectacles
in multiple instances during the Early Iron Age, was an event-place where
political contestations in this frontier zone as well as cult practices associated
with a local mytho-poetic landscape were already materialized and gathered.
In the next section I will argue that this potent place was transformed into
a site of memory through the acts of inscription, particularly through the
inscription of the king’s bodily image (salmu) and his words (
ˇ
sumu).
Distributing the king, transporting the place
The Birkleyn caves were evidently a site of major symbolic significance in
the Early Iron Age, and were repeatedly visited by particular Assyrian kings.
These visits involved a multiplicity of commemorative activities that made
the site durable through the performative acts of kingship and the acts
of inscribing the place with images and inscriptions. Especially from the
Early Iron Age onwards, Assyrian monuments appear overwhelmingly in
the contexts of peripheral territories, being used to mark rural landscapes at
strategic, symbolically charged places such as mountain passes, stone quarries,
springs or river sources (Shafer 1998). These commemorative monuments
appear either as free-standing stelae raised in public spaces (such as city
gates, temple courtyards, urban plazas, ruined mounds, newly founded cities
and so on) or as rock reliefs in powerful landscapes.
11
Assyrian annalistic texts make occasional references in both text and im-
agery to the raising of such monuments, and quite consistently identify them
as nar
ˆ
u – that is, a stele or inscribed monument.
12
The pictorial component
was usually described as salam
ˇ
sarrutiya, ‘the image of (my) kingship’, or
salam bunnann
ˆ
ıya, ‘the image of (my) physique’. While nar
ˆ
u signified the
‘Source of the Tigris’ 191
entire monument itself, either a free-standing stone stele or a rock-carved
monument as a combination of text and image, salmu referred to the pictorial
image of the king represented within the monument. Assyrians, however,
did not distinguish between relief images on stelae, orthostats (monumental
wall slabs), rock reliefs or even the statues, as they were all collectively
understood as salmu. The image of the king appeared in these representations
as a ‘culturally mediated, conventionally coded’ representation of kingship,
an idealized rather than a naturalistic likeness of the king’s body (Bahrani
2003, 123). In contrast to Western post-Enlightenment conceptualizations of
portraiture, the salmu acted as the king’s double, an indexical representation
of the king’s corporeality, fully endowed with the efficacious powers of the
king’s body. Salmu, as a uniquely efficacious material object, transported and
established the king’s own flesh in foreign landscapes.
The commemorative inscriptions, on the other hand, narrate the historical
circumstances surrounding the making of the monument and place it into
a narrative context of imperial geographies. In the course of an Assyrian
territorial expedition, the making of the nar
ˆ
u monuments appears to be
introspective moments of reflection, when the king had his scribes and
craftsmen articulate a narrativized account of their immediate expedition in
verbal and visual form. The immediacy of the present was made durable
through an act of inscription. The pictorial representation and the texts
together then communicated complex rhetorics of kingship, as discussed
above, but they also emerge at unique historical moments at specific sites
where the linear rhythm of the expedition was halted for commemorative
performances and productive engagements with those sites or lieux de
m
´
emoire. This practice can be characterized as the making of official
histories of the state in an impressively performative and spatializing way:
narratives of the state are anchored to places.
13
In this way, the sites of
commemoration were transformed into mnemonic repositories of textual
and visual narratives, and become spaces of social memory maintained
through continuous construction activities and related ceremonies. The
raising of each of the commemorative monuments was a climactic event in the
course of the expedition, and through such spectacles of spatial articulation
distinct places were incorporated into the spatial narratives of the territorial
state.
A striking example of such a commemorative place-event is found in
A
ˇ
s
ˇ
surnasirpal II’s annals:
At that time I made an image of my physique [salam bunnann
ˆ
ıya] [and]
wrote thereon the praises of my power [tanatti ki
ˇ
s
ˇ
s
¯
utiya]. I erected [it] on
the Eq
¯
u Mountain in the city called URU.A
ˇ
s
ˇ
sur-nasir-apli at the source of
the spring [r
¯
e
ˇ
s
¯
eni].
14
Although the geographical location of this place is unknown, it is understood
that the king claims to have raised his commemorative monument at the
source of a spring on a mountain, precisely where he had founded (or
refounded) a new city named after himself, i.e. the city of A
ˇ
s
ˇ
sur-nasir-
apli. Here two commemorative acts, two place-events, literally overlapped:
the foundation of a new city and the raising of the nar
ˆ
u monument at a
192 note
symbolically charged landscape (Harmans¸ah 2005, chapter 3). But perhaps
more importantly, here two event-places are merged into one: the
mountainous site of a spring as a place of sacred character and a newly
founded provincial urban centre.
A significant aspect of the nar
ˆ
u commemorations is the fact that the sites of
these monuments are visited repeatedly by the Assyrian kings. As a matter of
fact, discovering the monuments raised by former kings in foreign landscapes
and deciphering their inscriptions was considered a major accomplishment
in and of itself. One might suggest here that this landscape-memory practice
is well paralleled by the Mesopotamian practice of excavating foundation
deposits or inscriptions of former builder-kings in the course of the renovation
or restoration of a truly ancient building. This ‘archaeological’ interest in the
ancestral past as anchored in ‘topographies of remembrance’ was particularly
prevalent among Neo-Babylonian kings (Winter 2000; Jonker 1995).
Likewise, in foreign landscapes the king would raise his own monuments
right next to those of his ancestors. For instance, A
ˇ
s
ˇ
surnasirpal II claims in
his display inscriptions on the orthostats of the Ninurta Temple in Kalhu
that in the course of his second campaign he had his craftsmen fashion
his royal image at the source of the Subnat river, beside the images of the
former kings Tiglath-pileser I and Tukulti-Ninurta II.
15
In Mt Lebanon,
Shalmaneser III claims to have located a salmu of Tiglath-pileser I and raised
his own (Yamada 2000, 284–85). At the site of Kurkh, near Diyarbakır, J.E.
Taylor discovered in 1861 two steles on an ancient mound, one belonging
to the time of A
ˇ
s
ˇ
surnasirpal II and the other to that of Shalmaneser III.
16
In
this sense the Source of the Tigris monuments are not unique as repeatedly
visited, materially maintained, resymbolized ancestral landscapes.
In her 1998 dissertation on the ‘Neo-Assyrian monuments on the
periphery’, Ann Shafer suggested that the Assyrian commemorative
monuments cannot simply be explained by their widespread functionalist
interpretation as markers of the borders of military conquest. Instead, she
argued that the stelae and rock reliefs gathered ritual performances around
them and that with their presence they constituted sites of cult practice. As
illustrated in many literary and pictorial representations of the making of
these monuments, Assyrian landscape commemorations involved not only
the carving of the king’s image and inscriptions, but also cultic activities such
as sacrificial rituals, washing and raising of the sacred ‘weapons of A
ˇ
s
ˇ
sur’, and
feasting. The king also often received tributes and offerings at these occasions.
We know from the monumental inscriptions of Shalmaneser III that this was
the case for the commemorations at the Source of the Tigris:
In my seventh regnal year ... I went as far as to the source of the Tigris [r
¯
e
ˇ
s
´
ıd
¯
eni
ˇ
sa
´
ıd
Idiqlat], the place where the water comes out. I washed the weapon
of A
ˇ
s
ˇ
sur therein, made sacrifices to my gods, [and] put on a celebration
banquet. I fashioned a splendid royal image of myself [ salam
ˇ
sarr
¯
ut
¯
ıya],
inscribed thereon the praise of A
ˇ
s
ˇ
sur, my lord, [and] all the heroic deeds
which I achieved in the lands, [and] set [it] up therein (Grayson 1996, 65).
This is an excerpt from a public monument with a pictorial and a textual
narrative, known in the scholarship as the ‘Black Obelisk’, which was
‘Source of the Tigris’ 193
Figure 10 Bronze door reliefs of Shalmaneser III, Tell Balawat (Imgur-Enlil) (King 1915).
raised in a public setting on the citadel of Kalhu (Nimrud), the Assyrian
capital at the time of A
ˇ
s
ˇ
surnasirpal II and Shalmaneser III. ‘Obelisks’ are
Assyrian commemorative monuments that were extensively raised in the
public realms of Assyrian capital cities during the Early Iron Age. They
are tall, free-standing, pillar-like stelae with tapering form, usually with a
rectangular cross-section and pictorial narrative scenes carved on all four sides
in registers. The Black Obelisk had 20 relief panels in five registers, presenting
a visual account of the submission of foreign kings and their tribute-bearing
processions, in particular those of the regional states of Gilz
¯
anu, Humr
ˆ
ı, Suhu
and Patina, identified in the epigraphs. Some of the well-preserved obelisks
have long annalistic inscriptions on them, such as the Black Obelisk. However,
almost all of these monuments also consistently have epigraphic inscriptions
that identify particular pictorial scenes.
This practice is comparable to another type of public monument of
A
ˇ
s
ˇ
surnasirpal II and Shalmaneser III: the bronze repouss
´
e reliefs that fastened
monumental timber gates, largely known from the city of Imgur-Enlil (Tell
Balawat – see figure 10). In the Balawat bronze-gate narratives, selected
scenes of culminating ceremonial events were captioned with short epigraphic
inscriptions identifying the particular event, often with the names of specific
figures taking part in the scene and the location of the event, such as the scenes
of the king receiving tribute, the making of commemorative monuments
in foreign landscapes or the conquest of a city. This aspect of the bronze-
gate reliefs and obelisk narratives suggests that they were intended for wider
audiences and were, therefore, constructed as public monuments.
The B lack Obelisk’s lengthy annalistic inscription provides a relatively
detailed description of the making of the Source of the Tigris monuments,
pointing to a complex series of events including the washing of the sacred
‘weapons of A
ˇ
s
ˇ
sur’, animal sacrifices and a ceremonial banquet. However,
the place-event did not appear on the individual pictorial scenes. For such
a visual representation of the Source of the Tigris events, one must turn to
the series of bronze strips from the gates of Tell Balawat dated to the time
of King Shalmaneser III. Tell Balawat, ancient Imgur-Enlil, was founded by
194 note
Figure 11 Bronze door reliefs of Shalmaneser III, Tell Balawat (Imgur-Enlil), Relief Panel 10 (King 1915).
Figure 12 Bronze door reliefs of Shalmaneser III, Tell Balawat (Imgur-Enlil), Relief Panel 10, detail (King
1915).
A
ˇ
s
ˇ
surnasirpal as a medium-sized, orthogonally planned settlement, located
15 km north-east of Kalhu (Oates 1974). Limited archaeological work at the
site has uncovered a temple complex dedicated to Mamu, a deity associated
with dreams and dream oracles. Two sets of bronze strips fastened to
monumental wooden gates were excavated in a palatial building: the earlier
and more fragmentary set dates to the time of A
ˇ
s
ˇ
surnasirpal, while the better-
preserved set dates to Shalmaneser III (figures 10–12).
Finely decorated in repouss
´
e technique, Shalmaneser’s bands depict a
narrative account of his first 13 expeditions to various lands. Each band has
two horizontal registers of pictorial imagery, which are occasionally captioned
with brief epigraphs that identify the scenes. Michelle Marcus (1987; 1995)
argues that the overall layout of the narratives is arranged geographically
rather than chronologically. She suggests that the entire visual programme ac-
ted as a narrativized map of the king’s travels across the empire’s frontiers. The
episode on Relief Panel 10, which narrates the king’s seventh-year campaign,
culminates with a ceremonial scene, understood as Shalmaneser’s visit to the
Source of the Tigris, where he received the submission of local kings, made
offerings to the gods, celebrated a banquet and had his craftsmen carve his
images and inscriptions on the rock faces (figure 11). In this outstanding scene,
the cultic and ceremonial activity is depicted in great detail, while the rock
‘Source of the Tigris’ 195
faces, the river and the caves from which the Tigris emerges are represented in
articulate spatial specificity. In the upper register a sacrifice takes place, while
within a large cave-like space the image of the king is carved attended by a high
Assyrian official standing on a raised platform. In the lower register, while a
series of sacrificial animals are being led to the scene from the left, the stele-
shaped image of the king is carved by the artisan on the rock face. Given our
knowledge of the actual topography of the Birkleyn caves, the interpretation
of this scene as a depiction of those performative acts at the Source of the
Tigris is compelling. The cave on the upper register represents a large and
clear cave space, just as it is in the upper cave at the Birkleyn site, whereas the
topography of the lower register reminds us of the multiple breaks in the bed-
rock that covers the river. The spatial representation on the Balawat bronze
bands is remarkably commensurate with the topography of Birklinc¸ay caves.
In both textual and pictorial narrative programmes of the time of
Shalmaneser III, the commemorative performances at the Source of the Tigris,
the Birkleyn site, were transported to one of the major Assyrian cities in the
Land of A
ˇ
s
ˇ
sur, the core territory of Assyria, and put on public display. This
constituted a performative act which, I propose, made the Source of the Tigris
commemorations available to an urban Assyrian audience. In their presence a
state spectacle performed on the empire’s frontiers was re-enacted in an intim-
ate interaction with the making of social memory. While the acts of inscription
at the Birkleyn site distributed the Assyrian king’s symbolic body into this
frontier landscape, a liminal place, the representational monuments at the
Assyrian urban core reincorporated the commemorative frontier perform-
ances of the remote landscapes of the north into the narratives of the state.
Such indexical extensions of places and bodies from the centre to the edge,
and from the edge to the centre, constituted the landscape as a complex web
of material interactions, spatial engagements and corporeal cartographies.
Placing the rhetorics of kingship: appropriating symbolic landscapes
In this final section I would like to return to the Birkleyn site, the Source
of the Tigris, and revisit my argument that landscapes are always already
configured by the material practices and cultural representations that are not
simply related to places but are, perhaps, often generated by those places.
Ancient states frequently appropriated such places through the performative
enactment of commemorative events that built upon the already existing and
dense socio-symbolic associations and materialities of places. In this way,
particular landscapes were woven into narratives of the state, which, by their
linear mentality, might hinder or mask such rich layers of human interaction
in generating rhetorics of kingship and official histories. It is the task of the
archaeologist to ‘excavate’ such place-palimpsests that the elite-dominated
representational record of the past usually obfuscates.
Shalmaneser III’s craftsmen, who produced the Balawat bronze bands, had
an unusual interest in depicting the topographical specificity of the Source
of the Tigris site as evidenced by the decision not to represent the event
with much more generic pictorial conventions. This suggests to the viewer of
the Balawat monumental gates that he/she is dealing with an extraordinary
locale. The site’s specificity also derives from the fact that it constituted a
196 note
liminal space between the underworld and the lived world, according to the
Anatolian Hittite/Hurrian conceptualization of similar geological landscapes.
As discussed earlier, the idea of setting up rock reliefs and commemorative
monuments to demarcate symbolic landscapes was in fact not unique to
Assyrians in the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age, but it was a practice shared
interregionally among Upper Mesopotamian polities. In Anatolia and North
Syria the 13th-century B.C. Hittite rulers of Hattu
ˇ
sa and Tarhunta
ˇ
s
ˇ
sa, and
several rulers of the Syro-Hittite Iron Age, produced monumental inscriptions
on stone monuments and rock faces, especially in Luwian using the ‘Hittite’
hieroglyphic script (Stokkel 2005; Ehringhaus 2005; Kohlmeyer 1982). The
Hittites particularly favoured constructing elaborate cultic installations at
prominent rocky landscapes and sacred springs. Due to its ubiquitous
karstic geology with copious underground drainage, the Anatolian landscape
is particularly abundant in springs, natural ‘tunnels’ or caves through
which rivers and streams flow briefly, as well as poljes (‘blind valleys’,
‘karst windows’ or ‘potholes’ in geological parlance) where surface-flowing
streams disappear underground (Gordon 1967). Scholars have identified such
geological formations with the cuneiform phrase DINGIR.KASKAL.KUR
of Hittite texts, with a one-to-one correspondence with the Hieroglyphic
Luwian expression DEUS.VIA+TERRA, translated as ‘Divine Road of the
Earth’ (Hawkins 1998, 76). These Divine Roads of the Earth, or the
DINGIR.KASKAL.KUR sites, were considered liminal spaces, entrances to
the underworld. Occurrences of this phrase in the Late Bronze Age texts are
understood as ‘fixed geographical points in frontier descriptions, and also as
divine witnesses to treaties joined with the mountains, rivers, and springs’
(Hawkins 1998, 76). Hittites often transformed such miraculous sites into
cult places taking the form of sacred pools and dams, usually accompanied
by rock reliefs and royal inscriptions. In fact, the Hittite practice of building
sacred pool complexes, for example the S
¨
udburg ‘Sacred Pool Complex’ at
Hattu
ˇ
sa, was recently associated with the DINGIR.KASKAL.KUR (Hawkins
1998, 75–76). Along with Hittite divinities, mountains, rivers and springs,
DINGIR.KASKAL.KUR sites were often invoked as divine witnesses, to the
signing of treaties settling boundary disputes (for sample texts see Gordon
1967, 71 ff.; especially texts 2, 3 and 4). In antiquity, then, while springs, river
sources and potholes already constituted symbolically charged and mytholo-
gically potent liminal places where communication with the underworld could
be established, they also signified the thresholds of political territories.
It is then necessary to understand the Source of the Tigris site, with its 900-
meter-long tunnel through which a major tributary of the Tigris flows, in this
cultural context of local practices of marking territory. Assyrian kings were
possibly appropriating the Anatolian practice of the DINGIR.KASKAL.KUR
in ritualizing sacred topographies and settling their political disputes with
Hurrians of
ˇ
Subria. It is also notable that a great deal of the Hittite texts
attesting to DINGIR.KASKAL.KUR or DEUS.VIA+TERRA refer to Hurrian-
related contexts. Given the fact that Early Iron Age
ˇ
Subria was still a heavily
Hurrian cultural domain, the local cultural imagination of the Source of
the Tigris site as a Divine Road of the Earth is more than likely. This
corresponds well with our discussion of the salmu of the Assyrian kings
‘Source of the Tigris’ 197
at the site. In the absence of the representation of any deities, it may be
possible to suggest that the Assyrian king is himself interacting here with
the underground world of divinities at the site. In this way it is possible to
establish that the representation of the Assyrian king’s image is not solely
distributing the agency of kingship to the site through his salmu , but that his
salmu is indeed performatively engaging with the place as a sacred, god-filled
landscape.
Through the transportation of the Source of the Tigris performative event
into the public realm by means of pictorial representations and display
inscriptions, the Assyrians are presented with a state spectacle, curiously
located in a remote and exotic mytho-poetical landscape charged with
associations of the world’s edge. On the other hand the king’s own body and
its efficacious powers were distributed to the imperial frontiers through such
commemorative, spatializing acts, which were re-presented in the narrative
programmes of the state. However, seen from the Anatolian point of view,
when we closely scrutinize the Assyrian king’s activities at the Source of the
Tigris, it is notable that he is appropriating not only an already symbolically
charged powerful landscape, but also that cultural landscape’s cult practices
and political gestures. In doing so he acknowledges the efficacy of Anatolian–
Hurrian practices of engaging with DINGIR.KASKAL.KUR sites. In this
way, they were most likely speaking to a local Hurrian/
ˇ
Subrian audience
in negotiating their presence, which was made durable with the reliefs and
inscriptions and with their performances.
In dealing with the representational record of the past, elite practices and
issues such as rhetorics of kingship, archaeologists and ancient historians are
increasingly confronted with a disturbing polarization between ideologically
defined state discourse and the bedrock of the social world, namely human
practices on a mundane and everyday scale. Likewise, in the scholarship of the
ancient Near East, little attempt has been made to look for the relationship
between imperial rhetorics and the social sphere. Assyrian royal inscriptions,
for instance, are usually studied with a presumed definition of ideology as
‘illusion, distortion and mystification’ of phenomena, suggesting that ideology
creates a form of ‘false consciousness’ in the public domain (Eagleton 1991).
As an epiphenomenon of social reality a nd detached from the structures of
everyday life, ideology simply misrepresents the world in alignment with the
imperial propagandistic agenda.
17
However, this very idea that a minority of e lites monopolizes the
construction of a world view on behalf of its subjects, while the rest of the
people ‘blunder around in some fog of false consciousness’, has been called
to question rather vigorously in the last few decades (Eagleton 1991, 11).
18
It seems much more productive for the purposes of the present argument to
move beyond the question of such epistemic falsehood (i.e. beyond worrying
whether these ideological statements are true or false), and to approach such
texts as rhetorical discourses with distinct social interests. These rhetorics
of kingship may indeed be regarded as a social reality in their own right.
Thus Terry Eagleton (1991, 30) has argued that the stuff of ideological
discourse does not simply arise ‘from the interests of a dominant class but
from the material structure of society as whole’. This has been articulated
198 note
exceptionally well recently by Peter Holliday in the preface to his work on
Roman commemorative monuments:
Anthropological studies have suggested that the symbolic actions of ideology
effectually constitute culture. Such analyses argue that an ideological
statement is not simply a misconceived understanding but a rhetorical
act that draws its power from its capacity to ‘grasp, formulate, and
communicate social realities that elude the tempered language of science.’
Ideology’s symbolic actions thus confer meaning on the world. This
approach leads toward a semiotic concept of culture as an interlocked
system of construable signs. Rather than constituting that through which
society mediates and makes visible the material interests that organize it,
culture is itself the primary agency of the social constitution of the real
(Holliday 2002, pp. xx–xxi).
Source of the Tigris monuments in south-eastern Turkey were made during
a series of commemorative events at a frontier site charged with powerful
mytho-poetics and local symbolic associations. The Assyrian performative
engagements with the place and the acts of inscription made the site
durable in the Assyrian cultural imagination, by specifically identifying this
extraordinary landscape, the Birkleyn site, with the source of the Tigris,
the river that was the source of life to all Assyrian core landscapes. These
place-events are transported to the urban sphere of the L and of A
ˇ
s
ˇ
sur in
specific and detailed narrative representations of the Assyrian expeditions
in the foreign landscapes. In the construction of these official histories one
can easily see a window into the complexity of situated human–nonhuman
interactions through the performance of place. The Birkleyn site, as a unique
locale where human practices, imaginations and engagements are gathered,
asserts its agency into official histories of Assyrian kingship, as a place with
a cultural biography of its own.
Eviatar Zerubavel, in his recent work on collective memory (2003, 8),
referred to the idea of shaping the past as the coagulation of ‘noncontiguous
patches of history into a single, seemingly continuous experiential stream’.
This form of narrativity was not only accomplished by means of the textual
and visual media with the formulation of a complex royal rhetoric, but
also in the configuration of social space through commemorative building
activity. In the case of the Source of the Tigris monuments, the spectacular
natural topography of the Birkleyn caves was coopted into the spectacle of
the state while the commemorative activities of the Assyrian rulers at the
site generated further localized spatial practices at this marginal landscape.
Landscapes are active components of the processes of social signification.
They are the domain of social practices and cultural representations in every
sense, materially produced and mentally constructed in a collective manner,
but they also hold the agency to affect the social constitution of culture.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Christopher L. Witmore, Ian Straughn,
Peri Johnson and three anonymous reviewers of Archaeological dialogues,as
well as my students in the ‘Architecture, body and performance’ seminar,
‘Source of the Tigris’ 199
taught at Brown University in the autumn of 2006, for their encouraging,
valuable, substantial comments on the paper. Peri Johnson has prepared the
base map for figure 2.
Notes
1
Pierre Nora speaks of lieux de m
´
emoire as places ‘where memory crystallizes and secretes
itself’ created by a ‘play of memory and history’ (1989, 7). It represents a moment of
rupture within the uninterrupted continuity of the past into the present, and the so-called
‘environments of memory’. This breaking of a temporal continuity by means of a social
performative act imbues places with an aura of symbolic action that defines itself by
means of its distancing from the past. It recalls what Michel de Certeau termed ‘the
historiographical operation’, the writing of history as an act of inscription that highlights
certain aspects of collectively shared histories/memories while silencing or destroying
others (de Certeau 1988).
2
Here I am paricularly referring to the inscriptions of the Assyrian Tukult
¯
ı-Ninurta I
(1233–1197 B.C.) on the founding of K
¯
ar-Tukult
¯
ı-Ninurta (modern Tulul ul-Aqar) in
the Middle Tigris region across the river from A
ˇ
s
ˇ
sur, and the inscriptions of the Urartian
king Argi
ˇ
sti I (c.785/80–756 B.C.) on the founding of Argi
ˇ
stihinili (modern Armavir)
in the Ararat plain of Transcaucasia. For a more detailed discussion, including textual
references, see Harmans¸ah (2005, 130–32).
3
I borrow the concept of event-place from Bernard Tschumi (1996), who suggests that
‘there was no architecture without event’ and that architecture is seen as a combination
of spaces, events and movement. Similarly, one could argue that there is no landscape
without event, and that landscapes are event-ful. Also useful in discussing performative
engagements with place is Kaye (2000). See also Massey (2006) for an argument for
seeing landscapes and places as events. For an anthropological approach to public events
see Handelman (1998).
4
Birkleyn or Birkilin is the local Kurdish name of the site, presumably derived from the
Arabic birqat al-‘ayn, which literally means ‘source of the river’. Local inhabitants also
refer to the Dibni Su as Birkilin or Birkleyn C¸ ay (Schachner 2006, 77–78).
5
For a detailed discussion of the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age landscape
transformations in Upper Mesopotamia and Anatolia, see Harmans¸ah (2005, 128–251).
6
My definition of the rhetorics of kingship owes a great deal to Irene J. Winter’s (1981)
concept of ‘royal rhetoric’. It is important to note here, however, that I also adopt Michel
de Certeau’s (1984) creative use of ‘rhetorics’ as distinct performative strategies and ways
of everyday acting.
7
The height of this natural tunnel ranges between 20 and 45 meters. For a topographic
plan of the site see Schachner (2006, Abb. 3). T he plan of the Tigris Tunnel/Birkleyn
area that I present in figure 3 is derived from A.C. Waltham (1976), who carried out a
preliminary speleological survey of the caves.
8
After Radner (2007) and Grayson (1991, 61, Text A.0.87.15). A translation and new
edition by Karen Radner was posted at http://www.vaa.fak12.uni-muenchen.de/Birkleyn/
html_englisch/cave_1.htm (viewed May 2007).
9
See Grayson (1996, 92 ff., Text A.0.102.21) for t ranslations. A preliminary new edition
of the text by Karen Radner can also be found at Schachner et al. (2007): http://www.
vaa.fak12.uni-muenchen.de/Birkleyn/html_englisch/cave_1.htm (viewed May 2007).
10
The foundation of Tu
ˇ
shan was recorded in A
ˇ
s
ˇ
surnasirpal II’s annalistic texts (Grayson
1991, 202, Text A.0.101.1 ii 1–9) and its identification with Ziyarettepe has been
discussed by the excavators (Matney et al. 2003).
11
Shafer (2007, 133) notes that approximately 50 such Assyrian monuments are known
archaeologically, and a similar number of undiscovered monuments are mentioned or
described in Assyrian texts (see also Hawkins 1969, 119). In fact an early and unusual
example of such commemorative monuments is mentioned in Tiglath-pileser I’s annals,
where the king describes his raising of bronze lightning bolts inscribed with a narrative
200 note
of his conquests, to be set up on the ruins of a city (Hunusu) that he had just destroyed
(Grayson 1991, 24, Text A.0.87.1, lines v.15–17).
12
The Chicago Assyrian dictionary (s.v. ‘nar
ˆ
u’) gives three different definitions of the
word with respect to different contexts: ‘1. stone monument inscribed with laws and
regulations; 2. boundary stone; 3. memorial monument set up by a king’. It is a
loanword from Sumerian
NA
4
NA.R
´
U.A. The use of the word in the third meaning is
specific to Old Bablyonian–Old Assyrian and later texts. In such contexts, nar
ˆ
u refers
to free-standing stelae, rock reliefs as well as foundation inscriptions deposited in the
foundations of public monuments. For RlA entry for Neo-Assyrian reliefs, see J.M.
Russell, ‘Neoassyrische Kunstperiode III. Reliefs’ RlA 9 (1998–2001, 244–65). There are
a number of important scholarly studies on the Neo-Assyrian carved monuments. B
¨
orker-
Kl
¨
ahn’s (1982) comprehensive survey covers essentially most of the known monuments.
Morandi’s article (1988) focuses on the nar
ˆ
u monuments, from a more interpretative
point of view. Shafer’s dissertation (1998) is comprehensive, especially in its discussion
of individual monuments in the catalogue, but due to its particular focus it excludes
the monuments in the Assyrian centre. Shafer’s study covers both the archaeologically
known monuments and those that were referred to in royal inscriptions. Yamada (2000,
273–99) discusses the textual evidence for the commemorative monuments raised by
Shalmaneser III during his campaigns to the west.
13
An even more ambitious form of such introspective moments was the refoundation of
foreign cities, which constituted places of Assyrian imperial presence through provincial
administration. One interesting account of such a project is A
ˇ
s
ˇ
surnasirpal II’s report on
the foundation of Tu
ˇ
shan (see Grayson (1991, 202, Text A.0.101.1, lines ii. 2–12).
14
Grayson (1991, 198, Text A.0.101.1, col. i, lines 68–69). The text is the orthostat
inscriptions of the Ninurta temple at Kalhu.
15
‘At the source of the River Subnat, where the salmu of Tiglath-pileser [I] and Tukulti-
Ninurta [II], kings of the Land of A
ˇ
s
ˇ
sur, my forefathers, I built the image of my kingship
[salam
ˇ
sarrutiya] raised with them. At that time I received tribute from the land Izalla,
oxen, sheep, [and] wine’ (Grayson 1991, 200, Text A.0.101.1, lines 104–5). D
¨
onbaz and
Galter (1997) and Hawkins (1969) identify the Sources of the Subnat monuments with
a stele of A
ˇ
s
ˇ
surnasirpal, found in the village of Babil in south-eastern Turkey, 25 km
south-west of modern Cizre, at the Syrian–Turkish border and on the River Tigris. To
my knowledge, the identification has not been confirmed archaeologically.
16
Translations and discussions of the texts of these stelae, now located in the British
Museum, are offered by several scholars (Grayson 1991, 256–62, Text A.0.101.19;
Shafer 1998, 148–51; Radner and Schachner 2001, 754 ff.). The location of the village
of Kurkh, visited by Taylor in October 1861, is unsure. Taylor mentions that it was
located 14 miles from Diyarbakır (Taylor 1865, 22). In his brief commentary to the
publication of the text, Grayson notes that ‘the scribe who engraved the text on the stele
made several errors, some of which he attempted to correct. This suggests ... that he was
working hastily under a deadline’ (Grayson 1991, 257).
17
This assumption is especially present in the work of Liverani, who states that ‘ideology
has the function of presenting exploitation in a favourable light to the exploited, as
advantageous to the disadvantaged’ (1979, 298). In his model, Assyrian rulers are
‘authors’ of ideology and the subjects are passive ‘victims’ (ibid., 299). Ideology therefore
emanates a ‘false consciousness’ and it is ‘not the mirror of physical and economic reality,
but its inverted image’ (ibid., 298).
18
Cherry (1987, 170) has similarly argued that ideology can no longer be considered
epiphenomenal, or understood as an ‘ex post facto development to justify a previously
established political hierarchy’.
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