The severed head is a topic that has always attracted popular attention. In Christian art, for example, it was an image of martyrdom and fearless resistance against suppression. In contrast, popular accounts of headhunting have been used to convey an image of the primitive for Western audiences since the nineteenth century (e.g. Panel 1992). In anthropology headhunting has long been discussed in terms of materialist and evolutionary models. Only recently attempts have been made to place the phenomenon of headhunting in a wider historical and regional context (Hoskins 1987; idem 1996b; George 1991). The headhunter has become a professional recruiter in the search for executives to fill high-level positions. However, most scholars would not look to urban societies when researching the topic of the practice of headhunting, namely the taking of a head. We still habitually perceive it as an expression of violence and primitive warfare that occurs in stateless societies. In opposition to that view, this article will focus on an urban society in which a headhunt was, in at least one case, carried out in a strict anthropological sense: that is the headhunt of Ashurbanipal, described in the annals as the overthrow of the Elamite king Te-Umman and portrayed on the reliefs at Nineveh.

As we walk through the Assyrian galleries in the British Museum, we may observe curious depictions amongst Assurbanipal's reliefs. A scene from the king's lion hunt, for example, shows a lion emerging from a cage, a lion being shot by an arrow in the back and dashing forward in anger, and a lion leaping at the king (Fig. 1). Our eyes follow these images naturally, from right to left, as a series of movements that conclude on the left of the scene. It was E. Unger who first observed this characteristic feature and named it kinematographische Erzählungsform. J. Reade also noted it in his study of narrative composition in Assyrian sculpture, where the style is called the “strip-cartoon effect”. It appeared sporadically throughout the Neo-Assyrian period but became prominent under Assurbanipal. The identification of these animals as the same lion is established by a text on the far left, beyond this scene. This part of the relief only survives in the form of a drawing. It shows the king grasping the lion by the throat and thrusting a sword into the animal's stomach. The epigraph states that a lion was released from a cage in order to be shot with arrows by the king. The lion did not die, however, so he stabbed it with an iron dagger in order to kill it.

The composition of the battle of Til-Tuba from Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh is usually described as a relief depicting a recorded historical event. It is considered a good and solid example of the Assyrian concern with history and the Assyrian propensity for propagandistic depictions of current events. The scene, which is surely saturated in the ideology of empire, has already been discussed from that point of view. Is it true to the historical event? Is it an exaggeration? Did the Assyrians really do these things? How close or how distant is this depiction of the battle from the real historical event of war?

The Assyrian method of representation is generally one that is attentive to minute details and concerned with ethnographic accuracy, even when the composition is hierarchical and representations of the body are stylised into abstract patterns. Realism is certainly a distinctive aspect of Assyrian narrative art and accurate details of dress and landscape were used to create what Roland Barthes would have called the effect of the real.

The choice of this subject originates from the fact that the area of research to which I have been devoting myself recently includes the figurative cultures of Mesopotamia and Syria in the Early Dynastic and the Early Syrian periods, specifically in the field of war. Some of the data resulting from this research focus on the representation of the “head of the enemy”, which appears repeatedly in the documentation of the second millennium BC in Syria but so far seems to be absent in contemporary Mesopotamia. Despite the evident difference between the forms of representation from these two areas, I perceived in the figurative cycles of the Neo-Assyrian reliefs not only the recurrence of this theme but also the intentional display of severed heads, which reaches its climax in the numerous examples from the South-West Palace in Nineveh. My first aim is, therefore, to suggest a plausible approach towards identifying the origin of the display of “severed heads”, previously absent from Mesopotamian scenes of warfare, in the visual communication of the Neo-Assyrian period. My second aim is to offer an interpretation which may help shed light on ideological, cultural and anthropological aspects essential to the Neo-Assyrian political programme and its visual representation.

More than one hundred monumental sculptures of winged human-headed bulls have been identified among the remains of Assyria's capitals, of which around forty come from Nineveh. When these ancient Mesopotamian stone giants re-emerged they became a symbol of Neo-Assyrian power. This article aims to study the genesis of these emblematic figures by looking at the earliest iconographic examples. This genealogical development will lead us to consider the etymology and iconographic transcriptions of the Akkadian terms traditionally associated with the figures of winged human-headed bulls, and to ponder their evolution in the various fields of artistic production.

Forty-three colossal sculptures of winged human-headed bulls have so far been discovered in Nineveh: two at the Nergal gate, a few fragments from the Bit Nakkapti and around forty monumental sculptures in the remains of Sennacherib's Palace. Situated on each side of the main gates, these figures guarded the city and palace entrances. They were carved from monolithic limestone blocks and completed after they had been set up either in gateways, in which case the head is in line with the body, or in the alignment of the walls flanking the entrances, with the head turned at an angle of ninety degrees. Botta suggested that these colossi had originally been surmounted by a straight lintel; however, Place's excavations in Khorsabad revealed the existence of brick arches built above some of the gates. Although they played a real functional role due to their position, their presence does not seem to have been architecturally indispensable because other entrances with similar dimensions were not strengthened in this way. Consequently, it would be better to speak of an “active façade”.

In 671 BCE, Esarhaddon advanced south from the Levant and attacked Egypt, sacking Memphis. About seven years later, in response to repeated Kushite uprisings and following an initial campaign into Lower Egypt, Ashurbanipal's army reinvaded Egypt, marching as far as Thebes where, according to Assyrian accounts, the temples and palaces were looted and their treasures brought back to Nineveh. The Assyrians had been in conflict with Egypt for some time, but these clashes had always taken place in Western Asia, where the two states fought for control and influence over the small Levantine kingdoms. Not until Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal did Assyria penetrate into the heart of Egypt, attacking its two traditional capitals of Memphis and Thebes. This period of intensified antagonism, along with its consequence — increasingly direct contact with Egyptian culture — brought into greater focus Assyria's relationship to the Egyptian imperial tradition. I would like to propose here that Assyrian royal ideology, as expressed in art, developed in part out of an awareness of and reaction to the great imperial power of New Kingdom Egypt, in particular that of the Ramesside period of the thirteenth and early twelfth centuries. Indeed, it is more the reaction against Egyptian tradition that seems to have stimulated what we understand as characteristic and distinctive of Assyrian art, but at the same time, even these elements may owe some inspiration to Egypt. In this way, the New Kingdom Egyptian empire served as both precedent and “other” for Assyria, which began to develop its own imperialist ideology during the contemporaneous Middle Assyrian period.

Edward Said argued that since the beginning of western civilization there has been a conception that the rulers of the East, the famed “Oriental despots”, were decadent, obsessed with luxury, and consumed by the collecting of objects (1978: 119, 203). The trope of the decadent Orient is deeply embedded in the western imagination. In the Louvre Museum in Paris sits a masterpiece of French Romantic painting, The Death of Sardanapalus, by Eugène Delacroix (Fig. 1). The painting depicts an Oriental despot, the mythical Ninevite king Sardanapalus, reclining with emotional detachment on a great bed amidst the chaotic destruction of his harem, palace, and empire. He wears a golden crown and earrings and his robe falls in great folds around his hefty body. Extra garments, which he does not need to wear but which he nevertheless possesses, swirl voluminously around his figure. His vast bed, puffy and soft, is richly adorned with red cloth. The pleasures of his life, including the women of his consummately available harem, are wasted at the murderous hands of his mutinous palace slaves. Around his bedroom lie the precious objects of his palace service: golden ewers and cups; lyres and textiles; and jewellery and horse trappings. If we peal back the layers of meaning that this painting holds in its swaths of colour and light, we can begin to comprehend the human fascination with objects.

Sennacherib's representations of military events on the reliefs which decorate his residence in Nineveh offer some of the most remarkable images of camps. Their iconographic aspect deserves to be explored, especially considering their role in the visual narrative. Unfortunately, many drawings of lost slabs with representations of camps are totally isolated and unrelated to the narrative episodes; the reconstruction of their role in the dynamics of the story is possible only when a nearly complete cycle is preserved.

The spatial shape of Sennacherib's camps is exclusively an elliptical line which encloses a space in which there are various items. The items are arranged either together or as alternatives, and consist of representations of the king sitting on the throne, two priests celebrating a ritual (Collon 1999: 24–5), tents, accommodation for the soldiers and the people that followed the Assyrian army when on campaign (Postgate 2000: 89–93). Sennacherib's sculptors defined the Assyrian type of camp by a curved enclosing line, partially reproducing earlier visual modules. A broad band, which could be either a road or a wall, is found inside it. In addition, the band divides the military camp into an upper and a lower part, and the internal space is sometimes divided into rows which are superimposed and aligned. The rows serve to arrange the distribution inside the elliptical perimeter; similar way to the way slabs are subdivided into registers, the rows inside the camps contribute to organising and setting each item in a fixed and precise place. The structural skeleton, formed by the curving perimeter and internal division into two or more departments (registers) is the foundation of the shape of Assyrian military camps, a well-defined and unchanged icon, always clearly recognizable, especially in Sennacherib's sculptures.

During the last century of Assyria's existence the urban landscape was characterised by a bipolar structure. The old capital Ashur was still the religious, ceremonial and cultural centre, while Nineveh was the seat of royal power (Maul 1997). Both cities were not only the oldest urban entities of the Assyrian heartland, flourishing at least from the third or even fourth millennium BC onwards; they both also represented two different regions within Assyria with very specific geomorphologic environments and distinctive socio-ecological conditions. While the Ashur region is situated at the southernmost edge of the dry farming belt, the Nineveh area is one of the most fertile regions in northern Mesopotamia (Fig. 1).

The political fates of the two cities were unconnected for a long time. Ashur became an important trading centre and an independent kingdom at the beginning of the second millennium, whereas for a long time Nineveh stood in the shadow of more powerful neighbours. But in the seventh century it was Nineveh that became the capital of Assyria and the outstanding urban structure of the whole Near East. The refounding and enlargement of the city by Sennacherib was by far the most ambitious town-building programme ever realised in Assyria. Furthermore, it marked the end of a long process of moving the political centre of the country from the Ashur region northwards to the Nineveh region, which coincided with the rise of Assyria from a small kingdom to a world empire. During this development there were several (other) temporary capitals, all of them new foundations like Kār-Tukultī-Ninurta, Kalhu and Dūr-Šarrukēn.

Space, or spatiality, has generally been relegated to the background by historians and social scientists (Soja 1989). The Cartesian worldview demands a separation between thinking and the material world, between mind and matter. In this view space is seen simply as something that can be objectively measured, an absolute, a passive container (Merrifield 1993: 518).

An alternative view, propounded mainly by postmodern geographers, regards space as a “medium rather than a container for action”, something that is involved in action and cannot be divided from it (Tilley 1994: 10). Space is not an empty, passive container, but an active process that is both constituted and constitutive (Merrifield 1993: 521). So, in this view the social, historical, and the spatial are interwoven dimensions of life (Soja 1999: 263–4). History and society are not understood if space is omitted; there is, in fact, no unspatialised social reality (Soja 1989: 131–7; 1996: 46, 70–6).

The philosopher Henri Lefebvre's concept of the social production of space plays an important part in this latter view of the active role of space in social processes. Lefebvre criticises the notion that space is transparent, neutral and passive, and formulates in its place an active, operational and instrumental notion of space (Lefebvre 1991: 11). He argues that it is the spatial production process that should be the object of interest rather than “things” in space, and that space is both a medium of social relations and a material product that can affect social relations (Lefebvre 1991: 36–7; Gottdiener 1993).

In Mesopotamian belief the city was the result of an act of creation, a tangible sign and visible image of the cosmic order, and a necessary element to guarantee and safeguard the continuation of the creation's order. To demonstrate this we can read a Babylonian liturgical text (CT 35–8), commonly called the Bilingual Creation of the World by Marduk, inserted in a ritual text for the renewal of a temple. There the city is seen as the first act of creation even before the making of the world and the birth of mankind: when all the land was only sea, Eridu was raised from the middle of Apsû, Babylon was built and Esagila was completed.

When a king builds or rebuilds a city he acts, ritually, in the same way as the god of creation in mythical time. This act has strong ideological implications because, as asserted by Liverani, “colloca il re fondatore nella lista degli esseri (in ordine di tempo: divini, eroici, regali) che hanno contribuito all'opera di ordinamento del mondo”. It is from this perspective, proven by a large quantity of extant documentation, that the attention given by the Assyrian kings to the founding of a city has to be evaluated. The building processes of the founding, or most of the time the refounding, of the city are the expression of the state's renewal and of the reconstitution of the cosmic order.

Though for over two millennia much has been written and said about the Hanging Gardens, they remain elusive. Neither the extensive excavations at the city of Babylon nor the abundant contemporaneous cuneiform records have yielded convincing evidence for these gardens and their associated structures. Herodotus says not a word about them. Instead, we have the descriptions of five later writers, who were themselves quoted and paraphrased by others and whose accounts of the gardens are often opaque, contradictory, and technologically baffling at best.

Briefly and in approximate chronological order, the principal sources are as follows: first, the Babyloniaca of Berossus, written about 280 BC, which does not survive save in quotations and condensations from it in other sources, among them two works by the first-century AD Josephus, who twice quotes the short note about the gardens; second, the listing in “On the Seven Wonders”, a text preserved solely in a ninth-century Byzantine codex whose Hellenistic source, often doubted, may be Philo of Byzantium, Alexandrian author of engineering treatises about 250 BC; third, a long description by Diodorus Siculus in the mid-first century BC, which he apparently based on the undoubtedly second-hand accounts in the now lost History of Alexander by Cleitarchus of Alexandria and on the fanciful description of Babylon by Ctesias, a Greek physician at the Persian court around 400 BC; fourth, a passage in Strabo's Geography of the early first century AD, which he may have based on a lost text of Onesicritus, a contemporary of Alexander the Great; and fifth, a passage in the mid-first century AD History of Alexander written by Quintus Curtius Rufus, probably also based on Cleitarchus and Ctesias.

The patterns used to decorate Neo-Assyrian fabrics are known mainly through their use in the arts. Stone bronze and ivory sculptures and wall paintings incorporate decorations, sometimes enhanced with a variety of colours. The patterns for which we have evidence varied through time and in response to the use the fabric served. The secondary nature of the evidence allows only inferences on the techniques used to create the decorative patterns, but not certain knowledge. At Nineveh the subtlest distinctions in fabric patterning on stone relief survive. At Nimrud the most complex symbolic motifs are used as fabric decorations. At Til Barsip the most varied and colourful patterns are seen. At Khorsabad stone reliefs with colour-enhance patterns survive. The consistency with which some decorations are used exclusively for the king's garment suggests that there may be a symbolic value for a few decorative patterns.

“Well, as for Nineveh, skipper, it was wiped out long ago. There's not a trace of it left, and one can't even guess where it was. Babylon's over there [pointing it out], the place with great towers and a huge wall round it — but before long it will be just as hard to find as Nineveh” (Lucianus Charon 23). Lucianus evidently did not know much about the Assyrian Empire and its capital Nineveh. The same goes for most Greek authors. Xenophon passed by Mespila, which he calls a Median city, without being aware that it was Nineveh (Xen. An. 3.4.10–12). The Greeks knew even less about the Neo-Babylonian empire, but they thought they knew quite a lot about the city of Babylon. Classical authors were especially interested in the wonders of Nineveh and Babylon and in the founding stories of both cities. Unfortunately, most texts discussing the founding of Nineveh and Babylon have been lost, but enough remains to get a picture of the development of these founding stories, which show a mixture of Babylonian and Greek elements. The founding of Nineveh is always attributed to Ninos, and the founding of Babylon sometimes to Semiramis and sometimes to Belos. When Christianity began to spread, new motifs were introduced, as historians tried to reconcile the Greek founding stories with what was said about Babylon and Nineveh in the Bible.

In order to understand the unique reception of ancient Assyria in nineteenth-century America, it is necessary to describe the British public's own reception of the earliest British Museum exhibits, together with the marketing of publications of Layard and others. And, in order to grasp something of both Britain's and America's keen fascination with the earliest images of Assyria, I must introduce you briefly to the changing perceptions and tastes in admissible historical representation that, I believe, drove this fascination.

The British public's breathless enthusiasm for the monuments from Bible lands had radical origins in English soil. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquarians surveyed, sketched and wove theories about the prehistoric relics that dot the English landscape, occasionally linking them with a mythical Christian past. William Stukeley, for example, student and first biographer of Sir Isaac Newton, made something of a career out of surveying Avebury and Stonehenge, in an early eighteenth-century quest for evidence that could link the Britons of Celtic fame with the peoples and the received timeline of the Bible. By the early nineteenth century, the Gothic Revival movement had begun in earnest. Its proponents saw this project as a moral mainstay in the revitalization of English society and culture. English prehistoric and medieval monuments would be measured, drawn, catalogued, published, and ultimately by so doing, laid at the feet of the British public. The Napoleonic wars accelerated this movement, for Continental sightseeing was impossible, so the classic Grand Tour evaporated down to an insular walking tour. This of course fuelled the sense of British national destiny:

Während vieler Jahrzehnte wurden sogenannte Antik-, Monumental-, Kolossal- oder Sandalenfilme von Seiten der Altertumswissenschaften kaum beachtet, da sie mit dem wissenschaftlichen Verständnis antiker Kulturen nur wenig zu tun haben — die Geschichtsphilosophie der Filme ist meistens simpel und im Vordergrund steht das Spektakel. Doch das Phänomen der großen Beliebtheit dieser Filme — vor allem in den 1910/1920er sowie den 1950/1960er Jahren — rechtfertigt eine Untersuchung dieses artifiziellen und virtuellen Antikenbildes seitens der Altertumswissenschaft. Diese hat vor allem in den letzten fünf Jahren zunehmend an Bedeutung gewonnen.

In allen filmproduzierenden Ländern wurden von Anfang an die einschlägig bekannten antiken sowie biblischen Themen und Legenden als Filmstoff aufgegriffen. Dies geschah zum einen, weil sie einem Großteil des anvisierten Publikums vertraut waren und daher eine gewisse universale Gültigkeit aufwiesen. Zum anderen eigneten sich solche Sujets aufgrund ihrer Inhalte und narrativen Struktur hervorragend für eine spektakuläre, den Zuschauer in ihren Bann ziehende Inszenierung. Erzählungen aus dem Alten und Neuen Testament sowie aus der antiken Geschichte und Mythologie lieferten auch diesem Medium “große Stoffe”. Freilich mussten sie, wie beispielsweise das Buch Judit oder der seit Ktesias' tradierte Mythos der Semiramis, für die frühesten Filmproduktionen extrem verkürzt werden, so dass in aller Regel nur Kernstücke oder dramatische Höhepunkte umgesetzt wurden. Bezüglich des Alten Orients ist bemerkenswert, dass der frühe Film nahezu ausschließlich all diejenigen Sujets und Motive aufgriff, die sich spätestens im 19. Jahrhundert durch die Blütezeit des Orientalismus sowie aufgrund der beeindruckenden Funde aus den großen Ausgrabungen in Vorderasien zum festen Themenrepertoire einer populärkulturellen Vorstellung vom antiken Mesopotamien konsolidiert hatten.