The Balawat Gates of Ashurnasirpal II.

• Author: Melville, Sarah C.
• Position: Book review

The Balawat Gates of Ashurnasirpal II. Edited by J. E. CURTIS and N. TALUS. London: THE BRITISH MUSEUM PRESS, 2008. Pp. xvi + 264, plates. $100. [Distributed in North America by David Brown Book Co., Oakville, Conn.]

The volume under review publishes fully for the first time two pairs of gates that Ashurnasirpal II (885-859 B.C.) erected at Balawat (ancient Imgur-Enlil), a small site in northern Iraq about 27 km southeast of Nineveh. The bronze bands that adorned these gates were decorated with scenes of war, hunt, and tribute which place them among the most important Neo-Assyrian artifacts. The better-known pair of gates set up by Shalmaneser III also at Balawat, now on display at the British Museum, has been thoroughly published elsewhere and rightly receives little attention in the present volume (see bibliography for pertinent references).

Working on behalf of the British Museum, Hormuzd Rassam excavated the first set of Ashurnasirpal's gates from the ruins of the royal palace at Balawat in 1878. The second pair, discovered by Mallowan in 1956, came from the Mamu temple. The Mosul Museum displayed the bronze bands from these gates until 2003 when looters ransacked the museum and seized most of the bands. Since only a couple of these pieces have been recovered so far, this book is effectively the only complete record of the Mamu temple gates. The volume's editors, J. E. Curtis and N. Tallis, present a comprehensive study of both sets of Ashurnasirpal II's gates: the history of their recovery, reconstruction, and display; their architectural and archaeological context; photographs and line drawings of the scenes depicted on the bronze bands; copies and translations of the cuneiform epigraphs, and a full array of supplementary charts, graphs, and documents.

In taking on this project the editors faced a number of significant challenges, not the least of which was how to weave generations of scholarly effort into a coherent whole. R. D. Barnett, late Keeper of the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities at the British Museum, began studying the gates in the 1950s, but had not completed work at the time of his death in 1986. Further study was suspended until Curtis and Tallis had the opportunity to marshal the necessary personnel, funding, and time to finish it. During the course of their studies, researchers had to contend with inadequate records, the corroded and fragmentary conditions of the bronze bands, and the disappearance of the...