Real and imagined “Hittite palaces” at Khorsabad and elsewhere

Abstract

Between 745 and 700 BC the Assyrian empire established itself in much of the Levant, becoming a Mediterranean as well as a Mesopotamian power. People from former Syro-Hittite states and the coasts of Phoenicia and Palestine were dispersed across the empire, bringing their own social conventions, cultures and expertise in fields ranging from cookery and metallurgy to music and architecture. Many Assyrian kings in previous centuries had demonstrated their respect for these high cultures of the West; Herzfeld (1930: 186–93) was one of the earlier scholars to consider the extent of their indebtedness. Now kings who had visited the West and who had seen how people lived there, built western features into new palaces at Nimrud, Khorsabad and Nineveh.A clear allusion to this process resides in use of the phrase “like a Hittite palace”, literally tamšil ekal mat Hatti, “a replica of a palace of the land of Hatti”, i.e. the kind of palace or palatial structure familiar in the Syro-Hittite, Luwian and Levantine territories which eighth-century Assyrians still called after the Hittites. Tiglath-pileser III, Sargon and Sennacherib all recorded the construction of buildings like this, to which the term bit hilani (with minor variants) was also applied; Esarhaddon recorded building in both Hittite and Assyrian styles, and Ashurbanipal too built a bit hilani. The clearest relevant archaeological evidence consists of some remains on the western side of the main royal palace of Sargon at Khorsabad. P.-É. Botta, the first excavator of these remains, assigned them the name of Monument isolé, Monument X or Temple (henceforward simply Monument X).