The king's head

Abstract

The composition of the battle of Til-Tuba from Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh is usually described as a relief depicting a recorded historical event. It is considered a good and solid example of the Assyrian concern with history and the Assyrian propensity for propagandistic depictions of current events. The scene, which is surely saturated in the ideology of empire, has already been discussed from that point of view. Is it true to the historical event? Is it an exaggeration? Did the Assyrians really do these things? How close or how distant is this depiction of the battle from the real historical event of war?The Assyrian method of representation is generally one that is attentive to minute details and concerned with ethnographic accuracy, even when the composition is hierarchical and representations of the body are stylised into abstract patterns. Realism is certainly a distinctive aspect of Assyrian narrative art and accurate details of dress and landscape were used to create what Roland Barthes would have called the effect of the real.