Afterlives of Ancient Rock-cut Monuments in the Near East: Carvings in and out of Time.

• Author: Bilgin, Tayfun

Afterlives of Ancient Rock-cut Monuments in the Near East: Carvings in and out of Time. Edited by JONATHAN BEN-DOV and FELIPE ROTAS. Culture & History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 123. Leiden: BRILL, 2021. Pp. xxiii + 441. $190.

The present work consists of eleven chapters, including an introduction by the editors. Seven of these chapters (2-8) are based on papers presented at a conference on the same theme held in 2017 at Brown University. The last three chapters (9-11) form a subgroup, as they deal with the afterlives of certain mythical/literary monuments.

By rock-cut monuments is meant those carved on the living rock, typically on rock cliffs, and not mobile monuments like steles, statues, etc. And by using the word "afterlives" rather than "lives," an emphasis is placed on the interactions with the monuments after a temporal hiatus from the time of its carving, typically when the original understanding of it has been lost or altered. Hence, the book concerns the interactions with the monuments throughout the Near East in the subsequent centuries up until modern times, and explores how differently they have been perceived by successive cultures that emerged at the same locations. The authors treat various geographical areas of the Near East, such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, Syria, the Levant, and Iran, and those that discuss the same region focus on different time periods. The editors provide a detailed introduction about the reasons for the choice of the theme and emphasize the potential of a multidisciplinary approach that brings in specialists from various branches of the humanities and even the earth sciences.

The chapter titled "Entangled Images: Royal Memory, Posthumous Presence, and Afterlives of Assyrian Rock Reliefs," by Karen Sonik and David Kertai, presents a case study on the rock monuments of Shalmaneser III of Assyria. It is argued that by hewing his image and name on rock next to those of the earlier kings, Shalmaneser III not only establishes his essential presence with a connection to the past, but carries the presence of earlier kings into his present time, and expects them to be carried into the future. The authors also emphasize the importance of the inscriptions accompanying the image, and note that it is the name that establishes the individual identity. While mainly focusing on the lives of Shalmaneser's rock-cut monuments, the study also establishes a connection to the afterlives of the monuments of the earlier kings.

In chapter 3, "Narrating Temporality: Three Short Stories about Egyptian Royal Living-rock Stelae," as the title reveals, Jen Thum and Anne-Claire Salmas cover the topic in Egypt with...