Religion, Art, and State Ideology

The royal court in the capital city formed the pivot around which the empire was structured and organized. As a social institution, it was set within the spatial frame­work of the imperial palaces.

Assyria had a number of royal and provincial palaces, and the imperial capital moved several times. During the early empire, Tukulti-Ninurta I (ca. 1244-1208 bce) made an effort to move his residence from its traditional seat in Assur to a newly constructed city on the opposite bank of the Tigris River. He failed, and was ultimately murdered, in part presumably due to the resistance to his project by the urban elites of Assur. The first successful relocation of the seat of royal power took place in the early ninth century bce when Assurnasirpal moved the state capital to the city of Kalhu, almost 100 kilometers upriver.

The urban layout and program of decoration chosen for this new royal palace reflects the confident self-perception of a reviving empire. It reinterprets the tradi­tional functions of a royal seat and publicizes abstract concepts of rule and universal dominance through the symbolic appropriation of space. Its art was set to glorify the ruler and celebrate the universal empire. It emphasizes social hierarchies and defined actions, mobilizes societal core ambitions, forming a system of communi­cation and representation and an instrument of state integration through the sym­bolic language of power.^[294] Monumental inscriptions were carved onto the palace walls in the cuneiform script; together with statuary and stone reliefs, they form an artistic unit, set to convey an official notion of kingship that justifies both political convergence and the physical separation between ruler and ruled.^[295]

It is hard to say to what extent such monumental backdrops contributed to the formation of a state-wide elite identity, but there were clearly competing ideas about hegemony in circulation.

Beyond the visual apparatus of the royal palaces, a characteristic imperial ico­nography was designed and disseminated through smaller media. A distinctive design kit co-opted well-known and easily recognizable symbols of power into par­ticular contexts, including royal furniture, jewelry, and drinking sets. Such mate­rial elements of elite culture were appropriated by both local and foreign leaders, and used to legitimize and accentuate current relations of power through imitation. As the empire expanded and became increasingly culturally and politically diverse, graphic representations took on a growing importance as a vehicle for immediately decipherable and translatable claims to political authority. Significant parts of this “royal package” were ultimately passed down alongside the palace blueprint to suc­ceeding states from India to Iberia.^[300]

Assyria bolstered its dominance in elite art through the development of a dis­tinctive iconography that tied certain symbols directly to the executive power of particular institutions.

Particular to Assyrian visual art was the extensive use of historical narrative to relay imperial claims to universal power.^[302] The astonishing scale on which the state represented itself through this medium is unrivaled in the ancient world, with more than three kilometers of decorated relief panels uncovered in the so-called North­West Palace of Assurnasirpal II at Kalhu alone. A new historiographical genre was developed alongside the visual representations^[303] to situate and explain political events through lengthy poetic discourse.

The impact of such vehicles of imperial ideology upon its audience is perhaps best revealed by the systematic way in which they were targeted by the forces who laid waste to the empire in the late seventh century bce.^[304] Hundreds of images were labo­riously altered through chiseling and hammering to relay a counter-message of liber­ation and imperial collapse. In one example, a lion—the Assyrian king's enemy—was set free from the hold of the king by someone cutting its tail in the image.^[305] In another elaborate example, the king's face was mutilated, his wrists severed, and his bowstring cut.^[306] This pointed destruction underlines the importance of imperial iconography and hints at the power of its imagery.

Assyrian imperial religion and ideology legitimized domination and provided a rationale for territorial growth, but a particular creed was not proselytized.^[307] Religion was inclusive in character and the power of deities was considered uni- versal.^[308] A theologization of the cult of Assur was introduced during the early em­pire period, which promoted his image in particular as world ruler.^[309] Kingship had in essence been religious in character at least since the city-state period,^[310] but with the rise of the empire, the king's role as interlocutor of Assur's property be­came increasingly emphasized in state-sanctioned representations.^[311] The ruler was portrayed as the result of a separate act of creation, and sometimes stated to belong to a distinct physical category between gods and humankind.^[312] However, unlike Egypt or Hatti, deification of the king (living or dead) did not take place. The ruler was a physical agent and a link between humans and deities; he was presented alter­nately as a being of supernatural perfection, and the humble shepherd under God's bidding. The historical role of the king as a primus inter pares thus remained con­ceptually intact, even if it had become increasingly hypocritical in practice.