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Fifth-campaign Reliefs in Sennacherib's “Palace without Rival” at Nineveh1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2014

Joshua Jeffers
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Abstract

Scholars had once assumed that all of the relief programmes in Sennacherib's “Palace Without Rival” at Nineveh depicted events solely from his first three military campaigns. In 1994, however, E. Frahm successfully reconstructed a heavily damaged epigraph from the throne room specifically identifying the city of Ukku as the topic of the relief programme on Slabs 1–4 of this room's western wall. We know from Sennacherib's annals that Ukku was a target of the king's fifth campaign, aimed at enemies to the north of the Assyrian heartland in the Zagros mountain range. I have therefore re-examined the palace reliefs in order to identify other fifth-campaign programmes that have previously been overlooked. In this article, I argue that Rooms XXXVIII and XLVIII, in addition to the images on the western wall of the throne room, contain representations of Sennacherib's fifth campaign. With this identification substantiated, I then explore the typological aspects of these fifth-campaign programmes to classify their visual features.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 73 , 2011 , pp. 87 - 116
Copyright
The British Institute for the Study of Iraq © 2011

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Footnotes

1

The present article is the product of research collected for a presentation I gave in Dr Holly Pittman's class on the Assyrian Palace Reliefs at the University of Pennsylvania. I would like to express my gratitude to Dr Pittman for her support and helpful comments in my preparation of this article. Also, I wish to extend my thanks to Drs Richard Zettler, Grant Frame, and Stephan Kroll for their valuable comments and suggestions.

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