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The Palace of Tiglath-Pileser III

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

J. E. Reade
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Extract

Tiglath-Pileser III's palace at Nimrud is the only building, among those discovered by Layard in the last century, so far to have received the thorough treatment by modern scholars which they all deserve. Barnett and Falkner's handsome publication brings together almost all the information now available, and the supplementary remarks which follow could hardly have been made without it.

It does not seem to be generally known that the legs of two figures from the vicinity of the palace are still visible in position at Nimrud. One set belonged to a bull facing west (Plate XVIIIa), and the other to a lion facing east (Plate XVIIIb); both are inscribed with the remains of Ashurnaṣirpal II's standard inscription. The figures were probably winged and human-headed; like the bulls and lions outside Ashurnaṣirpal's throneroom, they clearly stood back to back on a façade buttress, to one side of a central door. There is, however, a narrow space between them, and this must have been occupied, as in the palaces of Sargon and Sennacherib, by the figure of a genie: obviously the one found, in just such a position, by Rassam. As Rassam's genie faces left, towards the west, the other buttress of the façade, with a genie facing right, should also have been situated in that direction. This supposition would at least make sense of the way in which the three free-standing monuments in the area were arranged: Ashurnaṣirpal's fragmentary “obelisk” will have been placed directly in front of the central door of the façade, Shalmaneser's “Black Obelisk” will have been added outside the eastern side-door, and the statue of a courtier found to the east will have been in a less imposing position further along the wall.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , Spring 1968 , pp. 69 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1968

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References

1 R. D. Barnett and M. Falkner, The Sculptures of Tiglath-pileser III, referred to in this article by the abbreviation STP.

2 Ashurnaṣirpal's one partly surviving throneroom lion seems to have remained unpublished (see Plate XVIIIc). The existence of a central door to that king's throneroom, as shown in the plan in Iraq 27 (1965) pl. XXXIIGoogle Scholar, is supported by Layard's observation of a depression in the area and his failure to find mudbrick (Nineveh and its Remains II, pp. 111 and 203Google Scholar); by Layard's later advocacy of the idea (Nineveh and Babylon, p. 654); by a door-socket capstone discovered nearby and now lying in the throneroom; and by the visible limestone foundations of the buttresses themselves which have a 10 m. gap between them.

3 STP p. 4 and pl. CXXVII; p. 2 includes a detailed plan of all the remains found in the neighbourhood.

4 Layard, A. H., Nineveh and its Remains II, p. 15, and plan, p. 14.Google Scholar

5 STP pl. CXXX.

6 F. Thureau-Dangin, Arslan-Tash, plan at end of text. The comparison is not invalidated by the fact that rooms XXXII–XLI in the Arslan-Tash “palace” suggest that the building was, at least in part, a Nabu temple; the two functions could well have been combined.

7 STP p. 13.

8 STP p. 24.

9 III R pl. 9, no. 1; annals 90–101.

10 STP p. 28: no. 6 on wall q. The remaining slabs in the group were on walls a, n, and r (STP, p. 21, plan). It should be noted that a back-wall needs to be restored in the south block of Esarhaddon's palace, opposite walls a–b; it is thereby transformed into a building much like those to the south and west of court XIX in Sennacherib's palace, and apparently like the earlier palace at Arban in Syria (see Layard, , Nineveh and Babylon, plan opposite p. 67, and pp. 275–278Google Scholar).

11 P. Rost, Die Keilschrifttexte Tiglat-pilesers III. References to subsequent work are to be found in Wiseman, D. J., Iraq 18 (1956), pp. 117–129CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with a supplement in Iraq 26 (1964) pp. 119–121Google Scholar; the earlier Syrian campaigns are discussed by Tadmor, H. in Scripta Hierosolymitana 8 (1961) pp. 252–258.Google Scholar

12 I am indebted to Mr. J. V. Kinnier Wilson for advice on some of these texts.

13 This fragment could equally well refer to one of the later Babylonian campaigns.

14 This text might be dated to 740 B.C., but the city of Kinalia, whose conquest it records, stands first in the list of towns resettled at the end of 738. Kinalia (= Kinalua, Kunalia, and Kunulia) lay in the Amuq or Unqi district, between Arpad and the sea. Whether it should be equated with Kullani (= Kullania, or Kulni), which the eponym chronicle gives as prime objective of the 738 campaign, remains uncertain; the possibility was not favoured by Gelb, when he discussed the names in AJSL 51 (1935) pp. 189–191Google Scholar, but the two towns cannot have been very far apart.

15 STP pl. LXV; Rost failed to realize that the surviving fragment of this inscription (his pl. XXIV b) belonged at the beginning of the fuller copy which he was to reproduce as pl. XXVIII.

16 One or both of the related texts assigned to this year could refer to the campaign of 739 B.C., which was also directed at Ulluba and Mount Nal; but the list of tributaries in lines 83–89, even if it belongs at the start of another year (735, or possibly 734), should surely be attributed to the period following Tiglathpileser's first advance from northern into central Syria, and there is as yet no evidence at all that this happened in 740 rather than in 738.