The shape of Sennacherib's camps: Strategic functions and ideological space

Abstract

Sennacherib's representations of military events on the reliefs which decorate his residence in Nineveh offer some of the most remarkable images of camps. Their iconographic aspect deserves to be explored, especially considering their role in the visual narrative. Unfortunately, many drawings of lost slabs with representations of camps are totally isolated and unrelated to the narrative episodes; the reconstruction of their role in the dynamics of the story is possible only when a nearly complete cycle is preserved.The spatial shape of Sennacherib's camps is exclusively an elliptical line which encloses a space in which there are various items. The items are arranged either together or as alternatives, and consist of representations of the king sitting on the throne, two priests celebrating a ritual (Collon 1999: 24–5), tents, accommodation for the soldiers and the people that followed the Assyrian army when on campaign (Postgate 2000: 89–93). Sennacherib's sculptors defined the Assyrian type of camp by a curved enclosing line, partially reproducing earlier visual modules. A broad band, which could be either a road or a wall, is found inside it. In addition, the band divides the military camp into an upper and a lower part, and the internal space is sometimes divided into rows which are superimposed and aligned. The rows serve to arrange the distribution inside the elliptical perimeter; similar way to the way slabs are subdivided into registers, the rows inside the camps contribute to organising and setting each item in a fixed and precise place. The structural skeleton, formed by the curving perimeter and internal division into two or more departments (registers) is the foundation of the shape of Assyrian military camps, a well-defined and unchanged icon, always clearly recognizable, especially in Sennacherib's sculptures.