14 - 20 February 2002
Issue No.573
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 February 2002 Issue No.573 |
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Assyria and Indiana Jones
La Conquete de l'Assyrie 1840 -- 1860 (The Conquest of Assyria), Mogens Trolle Larsen, Paris: Hachette, 2001. pp452
The ancient kingdom of Assyria, located in what is now northern Iraq, is mentioned in both the Old Testament of the Bible and in Ancient Greek sources, yet until the middle of the 19th century European historians considered its existence to be mythical, or at least unproven. However, that changed in 1842, when Paul-Emile Botta, a French diplomat, and AH Layard, a British adventurer, jointly stumbled upon archaeological remains from what appeared to be a hitherto- unknown ancient civilisation centred in what is now northern Iraq.
Dying lion, a wall panel from the palace of the Assyrian king Assurbanipal at Nineveh in northern Iraq (c.645 BC)
Over the years that followed, Botta and Layard, supported by funds provided by the French Government and by the trustees of the British Museum in London, excavated remains at the sites of Khorsabad and at Nimrud, among other places, shipping magnificent statues and reliefs back to Europe to the fascination of the 19th-century public. As Mogens Trolle Larsen, a Danish academic, writes in La Conquete de l'Assyrie, a history of how these discoveries were made and how they were interpreted, the works of art, inscriptions and evidences of a highly evolved and powerful civilisation found at the sites had immediate consequences, not only for the received history of ancient Near-Eastern civilisations, but also for European self-understanding.
For one thing, fitting these discoveries in with the conflicting versions of Assyria given in the Old Testament and in Ancient Greek sources proved difficult. For another, the magnificent statues and reliefs, still on display in the British Museum and in the Louvre in Paris, challenged the prevailing assumption that Ancient Greek art, having achieved its highest expression in Periclean Athens, was not only the highest form of ancient art, but was also the highest form of any art and was the foundation of all subsequent civilisation.
When Botta and Layard met in Mosul, north of Baghdad, in 1842, however, controversy of this sort still lay some years away. Then a provincial town in the Ottoman Empire, ruled by a Pasha sent from Constantinople who had only tenuous control of the surrounding areas, Mosul's one attraction lay in the existence, some kilometers from the town on the other side of the Tigris river, of two enormous mounds, first described in detail by the Dane Carsten Niebuhr in the 1780s. Botta, believing these mounds to be the remains of the legendary Assyrian city of Nineveh, began excavations there, before turning his attention to the more promising site of Khorsabad some distance away. Before long the first Assyrian reliefs started to appear, and these were then shipped back to Paris, arriving there in 1847.
Meanwhile, Layard, a kind of 19th-century Indiana Jones, had turned his attention to Nimrud, a vast site to the north. Here he discovered the remains of what appeared to be a royal palace, complete with miles of wall reliefs and colossal statues of human-headed lions and bulls. More importantly still, he also discovered cuneiform inscriptions commenting on the images represented in the wall reliefs, the decipherment of which would allow them to be dated and the history of the site reconstructed. In at least one case, that of a black obelisk apparently showing foreign rulers bowing before the Assyrian king, the inscriptions were in several languages. The earlier discovery of the "Rosetta Stone" by French troops had allowed Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs to be deciphered, and the Assyrian black obelisk, together with the inscriptions found on the palace walls and on baked clay tablets at the site, seemed to promise similar success in the decipherment of the cuneiform script.
One theme to emerge from Larsen's study is the Anglo- French rivalry over first the discovery and then the proper interpretation of the finds. Under Napoleon Bonaparte's post- revolutionary regime, the Louvre had emerged as the most important European repository for works of art, as French troops stripped Italy of its treasures to send back to the new national museum in Paris. Having invaded Egypt in 1798, it was only French defeat at the battle of Aboukir that caused the antiquities destined for the Louvre, among them the Rosetta Stone, to end up in the British Museum instead. Thus, while Botta had considerable local opposition to contend with in carrying out his excavations, not least from the Ottoman authorities in Mosul who suspected him of treasure- hunting at their expense, his main rivals, causing operations to continue at unusual speed, were the English, who also wanted a magnificent national museum. This rivalry was to continue, to greater or lesser degrees of intensity, for the rest of the 19th century.
A second theme is the adjustments that the discoveries caused to be made to the accepted history of the ancient Near East, enveloped as that was at the time in all manner of myths and distortions. Ancient Greek writers, such as Herodotus and Xenophon, had referred to their "barbarian" eastern neighbours, the Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, with awe and respect. Seldom, however, did the stories they recounted correspond to those to be found in the Old Testament, and while the Greeks wrote many centuries after the events they described, the Old Testament writers referred to the Assyrians only when conflict with them arose.
Thus, while every cultivated 19th-century European, educated in the classical authors and in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, would have been familiar with exotic- sounding names, such as those of Assyrian cities like Nineveh, and of Assyrian kings like Sargon and Sennacherib, such a person would have had no conception of the historical reality behind them. It was for this reason that Layard's discoveries caused a sensation when they were displayed at the British Museum in the late 1840s, his account of the excavations becoming a rapid bestseller and his work attracting the attention of the Prince Consort, among others.
A third theme is the aesthetic impact of the discoveries. The German aesthetician Winckelmann, writing in the 18th century, had formalised a eurocentric, classical notion of artistic excellence, which saw Ancient Greek art as the origin, and summit, of European artistic endeavour. Henry Rawlinson, one of the main decipherers of the cuneiform script, considered that, when compared with the "Elgin Marbles" from the Parthenon in Athens, the Assyrian statues and reliefs shriveled, revealing their worthlessness as works of art. Summarising the 19th-century view, Larsen says that the Assyrian artworks were considered valuable only in so far as they illustrated the "chain of art", going from the earliest and most primitive forms of art to later, higher ones and achieving a kind of apotheosis in the arts of ancient Athens.
The 19th-century Europeans, fascinated by such developmental schemes, desired to illustrate them in grand, national museums where the relative position of various ancient civilisations could be shown by reference to Ancient Greece and modern Europe, the inheritor and end of the chain.
Larsen is never less than interesting on all three themes. Nevertheless, the method employed can distract from them, which seems a pity. While it is no doubt right, from the point of view of historical justice, that the important contributions of an Irishman, Hincks, be recognised in the decipherment of cuneiform, and that the contributions of Hormuzd Rassam, a naturalised Englishman, be admitted in the discovery of the palace of Assurbanipal at Kuyunjik, the last great Assyrian king and conqueror of Egypt, when 19th-century sources wrongly attribute this to Rawlinson, there is a danger that the author, in devoting many pages to long-forgotten personal battles of this sort, is losing sight of the wood for the trees.
More on the 19th-century museum, the reception of the Assyrian artworks in Europe and the conditions of their display and interpretation would have been welcome, even at the expense of pages given over to the usual picturesque descriptions of the local Iraqi Bedouin and their occasional conflicts with European explorers.
However, the book's main drawback is the absence of illustrations -- even, aside from two examples, of the cuneiform script -- making it unnecessarily difficult to follow the narrative. Even the best description of the Assyrian statues and reliefs and the most sensitive analysis of portraits of Botta, Layard and others, cannot make up for the absence of all illustration. There is not even a map to show the extent of the Assyrian Empire, which at its height in the 7th Century BC took in territory as far afield as Egypt, and to show the location of sites discussed in the text.
Yet, on closing the book, the reader will have learnt much not only about Assyria, but also about the conditions under which 19th-century archaeology was carried out and the assumptions that governed this then undeveloped discipline. Miles of reliefs at the sites were lost forever, since, once exposed to the air, they quickly crumbled if not protected, Layard and others approaching their task more as fortune- hunters than as specialists wanting to reconstruct the history and character of the civilisation they had found. The details on the rivalry between British and French archaeologists is also fascinating, showing how the French government was prepared generously to finance expeditions by Botta and his successors, while the British was unwilling to spend anything at all.
Larsen has nothing to say about the present state of conservation of the Assyrian sites, or about those of ancient Babylon and Sumeria, which are also in Iraq. A quick trawl through the Internet reveals little concerning these sites' current condition. The author also says nothing about the claim of the European museums to the Assyrian collections that they hold from this period, an issue publicised by the conflict between the Greek Government and the British Museum over the Elgin Marbles and by Nigerian claims to the Benin Bronzes, also in the British Museum. This is despite devoting several pages to the doubtful character of the various firman (permissions) obtained by Layard from the Ottoman authorities in the 1840s to conduct his digs and remove the finds.
Reviewed by David Tresilian
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