Ashurnasirpal II

Assyrian king (r. c. 883-859 b.c.e.)

• Born: c. 915 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Ashur, Assyria (now Ash Sharqāţ, Iraq)
• Died: 859 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Kalhu, Assyria (now Nimrud, Iraq)

Ashurnasirpal II created the Neo-Assyrian Empire, expanding its boundaries to the Mediterranean coast and into the mountainous regions north and west of the Tigris homeland. At Kalhu, he built an enormous fortress capped by his magnificent palace, which featured the first extensive use of decorated bas-relief.

Early Life

The royal name Ashur-nasir-apli means “the god Ashur protects the son (as heir).” On each decorative slab in his palace, Ashurnasirpal (ah-shewr-NAH-zihr-pahl) II noted the names of his father, Tukulti-Ninurta II, and his grandfather, Adad-nirâri II, along with a summary of his military and architectural achievements. He knew that his great-grandfather Ashur-dan II had “freed cities and founded temples,” setting in motion the process of reorganizing and expanding the Assyrian Empire, which had been reduced to the capital area.

Adad-nirâri II had made the first Assyrian attack to the east, into the Tigris River’s tributary basin. South of the Diyala River, he had defeated the Babylonian king, precipitating a revolution in Babylon and ensuring the perpetuation of the peace treaty by intermarriage. By treaty renewal during a period of eighty years, from the reign of Tukulti-Ninurta II through that of Ashurnasirpal’s grandson, Shamshi-Adad V, parity was maintained by Assyria and Babylonia, which secured Assyria’s southern front.

Adad-nirâri II told of making new plows throughout Ashur-land, heaping up grain, and increasing the breed and quantity of horses. Tukulti-Ninurta II had continued this economic development, which served as a base for serious expansion.

The Nairi states to the north were fragmented remains of the Hurrian kingdom, which had been demolished by royal Assyrian predecessors five centuries earlier. These states were related to the territory known as Hanigalbat and to the important Urartian mountain kingdom around Lake Van. To the northwest were Aramaean tribal states, related to peoples beyond the Euphrates River. It was against these states that Tukulti-Ninurta had begun campaigning when his reign prematurely ended.

Life’s Work

Ashurnasirpal II came relatively young to the throne, but he continued the expansion begun by his grandfather and father with unparalleled energy. The army was reorganized, with cavalry units introduced for the first time to supplement infantry, which were accompanied by chariotry. The latter afforded mobility during long treks. The bas-relief art of Ashurnasirpal portrays improved vehicles of six-spoked wheels pulled by four horses, with three men standing on the armored platform. Ashurnasirpal fired bow and arrow from such a chariot, and the increased firepower was a significant development for his military strategy and tactics. The army was furnished with battering rams and other siege machines. The former appear as a kind of pointed-nosed tank with four wheels, propelled against city gates by the strength of the many men who could be sheltered under its armored top and sides. It was during Ashurnasirpal’s reign that elephants were first employed by a king on campaign.

With Ashurnasirpal came an advanced art of beleaguering cities, and few were prepared to withstand his attack. Sculptures show these sieges, the prodigious amounts of tribute garnered, and a propagandistic expression of the requisite levels of brutality. In his inscriptions, Ashurnasirpal claimed to have employed this brutality so that conquered domains would not again rebel by withholding tribute. Minor princes saw the better part of valor in paying the requisite tribute before the siege and annually thereafter.

Ashurnasirpal’s army employed its innovative tactics in continuous campaigns throughout his reign, although specific details are fully documented only for his initial years, from 883 to 878 b.c.e. Some scattered, undated events of the following decade and a half can be identified, but during this later period, the main energy of the king was given over to architectural construction and artistic enterprises recording the events of the first years.

Of the surrounding lands, only Babylonia in the south was not invaded during Ashurnasirpal’s reign. The most significant results of Ashurnasirpal’s campaigns were in the north and northwest. The land of Nairi (later Armenia) and the Habur region were secured. He forced the ruler of Bit-Adini on the Euphrates to pay tribute and thus secured a bridgehead across that river, allowing not merely his army but also his merchant envoys to pass without duty. Later campaigns took him as far as the Mediterranean, where in a traditional gesture he dipped his weapon into the sea to symbolize its incorporation within his empire.

The methods of drawing conquered peoples into the Assyrian Empire were redefined. Adopting the words of an ancient predecessor Tukulti-apal-Esharra I (also called Tiglath-pileser), Ashurnasirpal affirmed, “To Ashur’s land I added land, to Ashur’s people I added people.” His annexation proceeded in three ways. First, peripheral states were assumed to owe lavish tribute, which was collected whenever the Assyrian army was at their borders. Second, interim states submitting directly to Assyria paid yearly, nonruinous tribute and retained native rulers and almost complete self-government. The Assyrian official who remained to see that tribute was sent regularly to the capital could call on the army to enforce compliance. Third, conquered neighboring states became direct provinces, receiving an appointed governor supported by a military garrison. These states were under the same administrative system as Assyria itself and were required to pay the same taxes in goods or in conscripted labor and military service.

To control an empire conceived in these new ways with enlarged levels of displayed military power required not only a new capital city but also a revised conception of its fortresslike structure. The new capital at Kalhu was laid out by Ashurnasirpal on the east bank of the Tigris, nineteen miles north of its junction with the Greater Zab; its walls enclosed an irregular rectangle some 7,000 feet east to west by 5,500 feet north to south, an area of 884 acres (358 hectares).

Two citadels formed the southeast and southwest corners within the walls that Ashurnasirpal completed. The ekal masharti, or arsenal, occupied the somewhat lower southeast citadel, but it was not fully completed until the days of his son Shalmaneser III (named for Shalmaneser I, whom Ashurnasirpal knew to have begun the original fortifications on the site of Kalhu).

On a height some 65 feet (20 meters) above the plain, the original acropolis of the southwest citadel formed an irregular rectangle because of the abutment of its western edge along the original bed of the Tigris. In the northwest corner, the remains of the ziggurat rose to a conical peak 100 feet (30 meters) high; at its base Ashurnasirpal built the temple for the war god Ninurta.

To the south of the ziggurat and accompanying temple, a huge palace complex occupied 6.5 acres (2.6 hectares); on its rediscovery in the mid-nineteenth century it was dubbed the Northwest Palace of Ashurnasirpal II. At its northern end was the administrative wing, with a variety of bureaucratic chambers, including a records repository, surrounding a great open court area used for ceremonial and reception functions. At the southern end were the domestic suites, including harem quarters. In neither of these wings were the walls decorated with bas-relief slabs.

Beginning from the south side of the great open court of the northern administrative wing, stretching southward to the southern domestic wing, was a central ceremonial block, which opened impressively off the southern side of the great courtyard through two massive, magnificently decorated gateways leading to the largest room of the palace, the throne room. With the exception of one built by Sennacherib at Ninua (Nineveh), the room is the largest within any Assyrian palace, measuring 154 feet by 33 feet (47 meters by 10 meters). Tribute bearers from all parts of the empire were led into this room, as the bas-relief slabs of the entrance document, with details such as the type of tribute borne and the garments worn by the divergent ethnic representatives.

On the south side of the throne room lay an inner courtyard. Beyond, through a series of gateways, was a maze of chambers, many of them decorated, like the throne room, with huge bas-relief slabs standing at least 7 feet (2 meters) high from floor level. Only the throne room walls portray the fury of the king as hunter of lions and destroyer of cities. Another nine rooms have slabs with a single large relief, cut across the middle by a band of inscription right over the figures. Each room shows minor variations in lines of text or exact detail of royal campaigns during the first six years, reflecting the sequence in the construction process. In one corridor leading to the throne room, an inscribed stela of 864 b.c.e., with a relief portraying the king, records a celebration of the completion of the great palace and an exotic arboretum—a banquet at which 69,574 people from the extent of the empire, including the 16,000 inhabitants of Kalhu and 1,500 palace officials, were in attendance. The menu was varied and prodigious, and the feast lasted ten days.

When Ashurnasirpal died in 859 b.c.e., his body was laid to rest in a gigantic sarcophagus made from a single block of diorite weighing 18 tons, at the old capital of Ashur, the source of the Assyrian royal tradition. His inscribed memorial stela was placed in the row with those of his predecessors.

Significance

Numerous portraits of the king came from the sculptured rooms. Sections of this bas-relief have been excavated and sent to many parts of the world, making Ashurnasirpal’s face the best known of all Assyrian kings’. A variety of quasihuman, quasidivine creatures are shown accompanying the king in the performance of ritual duties. The inner core of the ceremonial midsection of the palace was the setting for a peculiar mix of propagandistically displayed belligerence, formally arranged processionals, and mysterious rites of purification. The effect was that the farther the king and his advisers penetrated into the inner chambers, the more they perceived the need for exorcism. Fearful things of humans and gods surrounded Ashurnasirpal II. Empire was an awesome matter, even for its creator.

He was succeeded by his son Shalmaneser III, grandson Shamshi-Adad V, and great-grandson Adad-nirâri III, who attempted to match the achievements of their distinguished predecessor. At a later date, Sargon II remodeled a section of the great palace for his own use, leaving inscriptional tribute to his ancestor. Esarhaddon rebuilt the ekal masharti and the canal that provided water from the Zab, but was, at his death, in the process of dismantling the Northwest Palace so that he might use the reverse of its wall slabs in the decoration of a palace that he had only begun to construct. Ashurbanipal reconstructed the Ehulhul Temple at Harran, which Ashurnasirpal II had founded, and honored the earlier king’s work. Then began that silence from which his memory was not disinterred until A. H. Layard began excavations at Kalhu on November 9, 1845, and brought to light the remarkable bas-reliefs, the inscriptions, and the monumental buildings of Ashurnasirpal II.

Bibliography

Brinkman, J. A. A Political History of Post-Kassite Babylonia, 1158-722 B.C. Rome: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, 1968. This standard of historiographic excellence mines all material pertinent to the period, with enormous bibliographic detail in its extensive notes.

Grayson, A. K. From Tiglath-pileser I to Ashur-nasir-apli II. Vol. 2 in Assyrian Royal Inscriptions. Wiesbaden, Germany: Otto Harrassowitz, 1976. A complete reediting in English translation of all source materials is the intention of this series. A consideration of Ashurnasirpal II occupies about half of this volume.

Mallowan, M. E. L. Nimrud and Its Remains. 3 vols. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1966. Sir Max Mallowan reexcavated the principal features of Kalhu between 1949 and 1962. These volumes, the third of which contains maps and plans, detail the history of the site, the previous excavations, and the materials found in the remains of Ashurnasirpal’s Northwest Palace.

Oates, Joan, and David Oates. Nimrud: An Assyrian Imperial City Revealed. London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 2001. Written by two of the excavators from the Kalhu site, this volume is copiously illustrated and summarizes the history of Nimrud as revealed by excavations from the 1800’s to the early twenty-first century.

Paley, S. M. King of the World: Ashur-nasir-pal II of Assyria 883-859 B.C. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Brooklyn Museum, 1976. Many museums around the world received examples of the bas-relief slabs from the Northwest Palace. The Brooklyn Museum used the occasion of publishing its own holdings to reconstruct the plan of the palace and identify the original location of all known examples.

Stearns, J. B. Reliefs from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II. Osnabrück, Germany: Biblio, 1984. Stearns began the effort to identify all surviving examples of Ashurnasirpal palace relief slabs held in museum collections around the world and to classify their types and functions.