The Writing on the Wall: Studies in the Architectural Context of Late Assyrian Palace Inscriptions.

• Author: Foster, Benjamin R.
• Position: Reviews of Books

The Writing on the Wall: Studies in the Architectural Context of Late Assyrian Palace Inscriptions. By JOHN MALCOLM RUSSELL. Mesopotamian Civilizations, vol. 9. Winona Lake, Ind.: EISENBRAUNS, 1999. Pp. xii + 348, illus. $52.50.

Assyrian palaces and their inscriptions have been the subjects of intense scrutiny since the nineteenth century. This book is the first attempt to bring the two together, including all the relevant evidence from Assurnasirpal II through Assurbanipal. Russell tries systematically to reconstruct the exact placement of every royal inscription that was incorporated in the fabric of an Assyrian palace from this period, such as thresholds, doors, colossi, and the fronts and backs of relief panels. This proved a difficult task. Assyriologists and historians are used to reading the inscriptions in composite editions with little more than a general sense that they were displayed somewhere in a palace. Even scientific publications of the texts routinely Omit their findspots, and the texts they present may in fact be artificial conflations or arrangements of material that was deployed differently in its original context (for example, Shalmaneser III, pp. 74f., 82). Students of art and architecture have often left the te xts aside as a separate, specialized agenda.

Russell has expended considerable effort to identify every inscription and where it was found, so The Writing on the Wall is, in the first instance, a rich and detailed handbook for anyone interested in Assyrian commemorative inscriptions. Much new information has been culled from unpublished excavators' notes and on the scene in Iraq. One could say furthermore that A. H. Layard emerges as a far more thorough excavator and recorder than recent histories of archaeology portray him; more detailed information concerning what he found is available in his notes, drawings, and papers than for some excavations more recently carried out on the same structures. For the philologist, the book is a mine of collations and suggestions, and even the occasional editio princeps--for example, the Esarhaddon arsenal inscription (p. 146) and a new Sennacherib inscription (p. 134) from a copy made in 1854(!). (In this text, perhaps the phrase essis usepis should be rendered to reflect a sense "built in a new way" rather than "bui lt anew"--would not Sennacherib here stress the novelty of his work rather than present it as a reconstruction?).

Fascinating as all this proves to be, Russell...