The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Assyrian court sculptors · wall slabs of gypseous alabaster, the stone of northern Mesopotamia often called Mosul marble, carved in low relief · a long continuous band of the arena hunt and further slabs carved in stacked registers · made for Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria, in his North Palace at Nineveh (Kuyunjik), about 645 to 635 BCE · buried when Nineveh was sacked and the palace burned in 612 BCE; excavated in 1853 to 1854 by Hormuzd Rassam, with W. K. Loftus at the site in the same campaign · British Museum, London, the main sequences shown together in Room 10a · scored as one cycle, the surviving slabs of the lion hunt as they now stand, broken, joined and reassembled; the earlier lion hunt of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, the royal seal of Assyria and the rest of the palace programme are context
Mode
Royal narrative relief: a palace cycle of a staged hunt, from the opening of the cage to the offering of the dead
Mythos
The king who masters the lion and holds chaos off his people, completed in sacrifice; the beast’s dignity carried only by the carving
Phase
Carved about 645 to 635 BCE for the North Palace at Nineveh; buried in the sack of 612 BCE; excavated in 1853 to 1854; in the British Museum since, the main sequences together in Room 10a
Presentation
Wall slabs of gypseous alabaster in low relief: a long continuous band and slabs in stacked registers, some broken, joined and reassembled, with gaps in the sequences
Register
Dreadful grandeur in the animals, frenzy giving way to ceremony; a cooler height at the rite
Scale
One king, one rite, many lions
Governing Proposition
On slabs of pale stone that once lined a king’s palace, lions are let out of cages into a ring of soldiers and shields, shot from a chariot, stabbed at close quarters by the king on foot, carried away dead, and offered at a libation, while a crowd watches from a wooded hill. The cycle exists to say that the king masters the wild and holds chaos off his people. The wager of the carving is that the same stone can show, with an exactness the tradition had never had, what that mastery costs: a lioness with arrows in her back dragging her dead hind legs, a lion choking on its blood, each beast dying in its own way on open ground.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work is a cycle of wall slabs carved in low relief for Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria, who reigned from 668 to about 631 BCE. They were made for his North Palace at Nineveh, on the mound now called Kuyunjik, in the decade or so after the middle of the seventh century BCE, about 645 to 635. The stone is the gypseous alabaster of northern Mesopotamia, the soft pale stone often called Mosul marble, and the carving lies shallow on its face, the figures drawn in contour and modelled in low planes.
Nineveh was sacked in 612 BCE and the palace burned. The slabs lay buried for about 2,465 years, until the excavation of 1853 to 1854 by Hormuzd Rassam, with W. K. Loftus working at the site in the same campaign. They went to the British Museum in London, where the main sequences are now shown together in Room 10a. They have been in public view there for about 170 years, a short span set against the twenty-five centuries they spent in the ground.
The unit is the lion hunt as one cycle: the surviving slabs as they now stand, some whole, some broken and joined, the sequences reassembled with gaps in them. How the slabs were arranged in the palace, and in what order, rests on the excavators’ records and on later reconstruction, and nothing here depends on a particular arrangement. What is read is the two kinds of carving the cycle holds: a long continuous band of the arena hunt, and slabs carved in stacked registers that set the hunt out in sequence. The earlier lion hunt of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, the royal seal of Assyria and the rest of the palace programme are context and are not scored.
Movement II
The hunt begins with a door. A lion stands in a cage; above it a boy crouches in a small box of his own and pulls up a lifting door; the lion comes out bounding, into a ring of soldiers with shields and spears. The cage makes the hunt an arena and the lion a released captive. Nothing in the cycle could go with less loss than the rest, and this could not go at all: without the cage there is a hunt, and with it there is a spectacle made by the state.
The long band shows the spectacle at its full extent. The king drives in his chariot within a cordon of shields and spearmen; beaters and mastiffs work the ground; spectators crowd a wooded hill to watch. The carving hides none of it. The cage, the cordon and the onlookers are as plain as the king, and what they make plain can be stated: royal power shows itself by staging a killing, and the hunt that claims to defend order against the wild is manufactured for an audience. That is a meaning, not a mood, and it holds outside Assyria.
Much of this band is also the filling of a wall. The ranks of the cordon, the repeated grooms and horses, the beaters and the crowd on the hill are permitted rather than compelled, and many could go while the argument stood. The scale is set by the rooms, not by the argument. The register divisions too are the palace’s standard, and parts of the long band are laid out to fill rather than to mean. The core of the cycle is required; its extent is not.
Movement III
On open ground a lioness has been shot. Arrows stand in her back. Her hind legs are dead and drag behind her, and she rises on her forelegs with her mouth open, still roaring. Near her a lion sinks, vomiting blood. Others lie strewn over the stone, each dying in its own way. A lion leaps at the back of the chariot, its claws reaching for the wheel, while spearmen thrust at it. Here the cycle has its centre of gravity: take away the lioness and it loses it.
The making is what carries this. The lions’ bodies are given through contour and through shallow modelling of muscle under hide; the ribs and the strain of the shoulders show as the animal turns; the paralysis of the lioness is legible in the line of her spine and the slackness of her hind quarters. The horses are carved with the same knowledge, their tension held in the reins. Round the dying beasts the stone is left empty. With no ground line under them, the field becomes space, the arena opens, and the empty stone reads as open ground and as silence. Each death is given room.
This is the turn the cycle makes on its inheritance. Two centuries of Assyrian palace relief, Ashurnasirpal II’s lion hunt among it, had given heraldic, stocky figures on a single ground line and a lion that was a formula of mane and claw. Here the lion is known in movement and in collapse, the figures are scattered over open ground, and pathos is given to the victim. Whether the sculptors meant sympathy cannot be known. What the carving brings into the open is the death of an animal seen from inside its body, and with it the cost of the king’s triumph, borne by bodies.
Movement IV
In the registers the king fights on foot and on horseback at close quarters. In one scene a lion rears at him and he holds it by the throat as the sword goes in. This is the image of the state seal, king and lion, made flesh, and it is the one place in the cycle where the king stands as close to death as the beast. It is the claim the whole cycle exists to make: in Mesopotamian kingship the king who masters the lion is the shepherd who holds chaos off his people, and the hunt is a royal rite.
The archetype is built, not evoked. The cycle is constructed on the combat of the ordering ruler and the wild, and the registers set it out as cause and sequence, release, combat, death, rite, read upward through the stone. A painting, a free standing group or a text could not hold both this stacked sequence and the continuous band, nor the relation of a viewer walking along the wall beside the king’s arena as the spectators on the hill stood beside it.
Yet the king in the scene is a formula. He is rigid and unharmed, his face conventional; the soldiers round him are repeated types. The sculptors were free with the animals and bound with the men, and the commission kept its terms. So the cycle runs on two physics, one observed and one conventional, the animal seen and the king displayed. The myth it carries is the state’s own, enacted rather than examined; the counter myth, the beast’s dignity and the hunter as a killer, is present only through the carving of the animals. That tension is the work’s depth, and it is built by the hand, not by the plan.
Movement V
The sequence ends in rite. The dead lions are carried, and the king pours a libation over the bodies of the slain, calm among attendants and musicians. The killing becomes an offering. Set the libation beside the dying lioness, alone on open ground, and one law holds them: everything in the cycle belongs to a single royal rite, from cage to kill to offering, and the animals’ deaths are its matter. The cycle does not contradict itself in plan. It divides in its making, the lions given an inner life and the humans none, and that division is its interest and its fault. Of the orders it holds, the state, the sacred, the natural order, war, the people, labour and death, death is given most fully; there is no family, no city and no inward life among the people.
Its reach in its own time was slight. Nineveh fell within about twenty years of the carving, the tradition ended with the empire, and the Achaemenid reliefs that followed took the heraldic and processional path. The reach came after 1853, when the slabs became a fixture of the modern idea of ancient art and of animal sculpture. The questions they raise stay open: whether the pathos is intended, permitted or an effect of observation alone; whether the cycle glorifies the king or, without meaning to, indicts him; how the arena relates to rite, and to the fall of the empire a generation later; what the short inscriptions on some slabs add to the image. The cycle is not whole. Its great scenes survive legibly, in a stone fire marked in places, cracked and joined.
The desk sets it level with Lascaux and with Laocoön and His Sons at 8.6, the other great ancient image of animals and the other body in agony at the hands of a power, and level with Persepolis at 8.6, the Achaemenid successor whose reliefs took the processional path. It stands two tenths above The Narmer Palette at 8.4, royal relief of the ruler mastering disorder made three thousand years earlier, and above The Bayeux Tapestry at 8.4, another frieze of a ruler’s deed, and three tenths below The Epic of Gilgamesh at 8.9, the literary measure of Mesopotamian kingship, which articulates a human condition where the reliefs show a royal rite. It is held from the summit by The Swerve and by Pressure on Tradition. The king pours over the dead, and the lioness still rises on her forelegs.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged slab by slab and scene by scene. Some parts resist subtraction absolutely. The cage and its opening make the hunt an arena and the lion a released captive. The king’s close combat is the claim the cycle exists to make. The libation turns the killing into rite. The dying lions are where the cycle’s force lives: take away the lioness and it loses its centre of gravity. But a palace frieze is also a filling of wall, and much here is permitted rather than compelled: the ranks of the cordon, the repeated grooms and horses, the beaters, the spectators on the hill, the near identical lions carried away. The core is required; the extent, set by the rooms, is not.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Something can be stated, and it holds outside Assyria. Royal power shows itself by staging a killing: the lions are brought in cages, released into a ring of shields and killed before a crowd, and the hunt that claims to defend order against wild nature is a manufactured spectacle. The carving does not hide this; the cage, the cordon and the onlookers are as plain as the king. The second disclosure is the death of an animal seen from inside its body. Whether the sculptors meant sympathy cannot be known, and the cycle states the king’s triumph, but what it brings into the open is the cost of that triumph, borne by bodies. Held at the gate rather than above it: the condition is shown, not articulated across the cycle, and the human figures carry ideology and no inwardness.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Elevation is frequent and of the dreadful kind. The lion that leaps at the back of the chariot, claws reaching for the wheel, as spearmen thrust at it. The lioness rising on her forelegs, mouth open, her hind quarters dragging. The lion vomiting blood as it sinks. The released lion bounding from the cage as the boy in his box above pulls the door. The king on foot, a lion rearing at him, held by the throat as the sword goes in. Grandeur and terror recur along the band and through the registers, and the open ground left round the dying beasts gives each death its space. The rite at the end, the king pouring over the lions to music, is a cooler height. Held below the summit because the human figures never reach the height of the animals.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Built, not evoked. In Mesopotamian kingship the king who masters the lion is the shepherd who holds chaos off his people; the image of king and lion was the state seal, and the hunt was a royal rite. Here the archetype is load-bearing: the cycle is constructed on the combat of the ordering ruler and the wild, and on its completion in sacrifice, the dead lions offered at the libation. The particular stays particular: each lion dies in its own way, and the cage, the arrows and the blood are specific. Held short of the top because the myth is wholly the state’s own, enacted rather than examined, and the counter myth, the beast’s dignity and the hunter as killer, is present only through the carving of the animals, built by the hand and not by the plan.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is two centuries of Assyrian palace relief, Ashurnasirpal II’s lion hunt at Nimrud among it: heraldic, stocky figures on a single ground line, the lion a formula of mane and claw. The departure is large: a knowledge of the lion in movement and in collapse that the tradition had not had; figures scattered over open ground with no ground line, so that the field becomes space and the arena opens; the scene made a sequence through registers; and pathos given to the victim. The stake was real but bounded. This was court work for a king whose image it served, inside a programme whose terms it kept: the king stays formulaic, rigid and unharmed, the soldiers repeated types. The swerve is in what the sculptors were free to do with the animals, not in the frame of the commission.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form and much goes. Low relief on wall slabs, read along a wall and up through registers, makes the hunt a procession the visitor walks beside, so that the court passing in the palace stood to the king’s arena as the spectators on the hill did. The shallow relief, with contour carrying almost everything, gives the lions’ musculature as line and lets the empty stone round them read as open ground and as silence. The registers allow cause and sequence: release, combat, death, rite. A painting, a free standing group or a text could not hold both the continuous band and the stacked sequence, nor the viewer moving along the wall. Held below the top because the register divisions are the palace’s standard, and much of the long band is laid out to fill rather than to mean.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over promise: about 170 years of looking since the excavation, in art history, in Assyriology and by the general public, with open questions that keep yielding. Whether the pathos of the dying lions is intended, permitted or an effect of observation alone. Whether the cycle glorifies the king or, without meaning to, indicts him. How the arena hunt relates to rite, and to the fall of the empire a generation later. How the band and the registers were read in place, and what the short inscriptions on some slabs add to the image. The formal questions yield too: the empty ground, the anatomy, the differing hands. Held below the summit because the yield gathers in the few great slabs and in one question, sympathy against triumph; the bulk of the cycle has been read and largely exhausted.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is Neo-Assyrian and ancient Near Eastern relief of the seventh century BCE. Intrinsic force is high: within its field these slabs reorganise what a relief could do with an animal body, with space and with sequence, and the dying lioness is a mark in the representation of animals in any ancient art. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own time it is weak. Nineveh fell within about twenty years of the carving, the tradition ended with the empire, and the Achaemenid sculpture that followed took the heraldic and processional path rather than this one. The reach came only after 1853, and being delayed it is credited and discounted: the slabs became a fixture of the modern idea of ancient art and of animal sculpture, though no particular later work can be named that they redirected. Force, with a reach that is late and general.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about two and a half millennia. Form: the defining scenes survive legibly, the great slabs whole or nearly so; but the cycle is not whole. Slabs are broken and reassembled, the sequences have gaps, some fragments are dispersed, and whatever colour there may have been is gone. Presence: none for about 2,465 years, buried and unknown after the sack of 612 BCE; continuous and wide since the 1850s, in one of the most visited museums in the world. The fame of the dying lioness is presence and lifts the figure at most a tenth. Fabric: alabaster, fire marked in places, cracked and joined. A survival of millennia, charged for loss and for the long absence, and placed in the middle of its band.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged as command of low relief in alabaster, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: everything the cycle discloses is carried by the carving. The lions’ bodies are given through contour and shallow modelling of muscle under hide, the ribs and the strain of the shoulders shown as the animal turns, the paralysis of the lioness legible in the line of her spine and the slackness of her hind legs. The horses are carved with the same knowledge, their tension in the reins. The placing of figures on open stone is exact, and the rhythm of the long band is controlled over its length. Costs are charged: the human figures are formulae, stiff and repeated, the king’s face conventional, the soldiers’ ranks pattern, the quality uneven between hands. Below Las Meninas at 9.8, above The Starry Night at 9.0 on control.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the dying lioness, alone on open ground, and the king pouring his libation over the dead, calm among attendants and musicians. One law holds them: everything in the cycle belongs to a single royal rite, from cage to kill to offering, and the animals’ deaths are the matter of the rite. The range of tone is wide, from frenzy to ceremony, from the beast’s agony to the court’s order. But the law strains. The carving gives the lions an inner life and the humans none, so that the cycle runs on two physics, one observed and one conventional, the animal seen and the king displayed. That double law is the work’s interest and also its fault. It does not contradict itself in plan, which keeps it high; it divides in its making, which holds it below 9.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The orders held: the state, in the king and his claim; the sacred, in the hunt as rite and the libation; the natural order, in lions, horses, dogs and the wooded hill; war and the army, in the cordon and the weapons; the people, as spectators on the hill; labour, in grooms, beaters and the boy at the cage; and death, given more fully than any of the others. They are integrated by the rite, each with its place in one staged event. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or present only as type: no family, no consciousness in any human figure, no history beyond the king’s present, no city, no individual life among the people. Wider than most single images, as a cycle should be; narrower than a cycle that holds a world.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.2, The Imperishable at 8.9, then The Sublime and The Archetypal Deep at 8.8. A carving in which everything disclosed is carried by contour and shallow modelling, the lioness’s paralysis legible in the line of her spine; great scenes legible after about two and a half millennia, most of them in the ground; a dreadful elevation recurring along the band and through the registers; and the myth of the king who masters the lion built into the cycle and completed in sacrifice.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: the state, the sacred, the natural order, war, the people, labour and death are held in one staged rite; the family, the city, history beyond the king’s present and any consciousness in a human figure are absent. Below the rest of the twelve, The Inevitable and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2: much of the frieze fills wall rather than argues, and a force that reorganised relief reached nothing in its own time, its field ending with Nineveh. Then The Swerve at 8.4: a large turn made inside a commission whose terms it kept.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two of five: The Imperishable at 8.9 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5 and The Unconcealment meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 falls a tenth short, a large turn made inside a programme whose terms it kept, and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 falls three tenths short, its reach in its own time cut off with the empire and its modern reach general. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Inevitable and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. The aggregate stands below 9.0 in any case: the twelve sum to 102.6, an average of 8.55 that displays 8.6, in the Canonical tier.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the reliefs, of their publication and photographs and of their display, known well for the famous slabs, their subjects, their carving and their history of discovery, less well for the arrangement of the rooms and the order of the slabs, which rest on the excavators’ records and later reconstruction, and thinly for dimensions and for the inscriptions. The unit scored is the lion hunt carved for Ashurbanipal’s North Palace at Nineveh, about 645 to 635 BCE, as one cycle: the surviving slabs of gypseous alabaster as they now stand in the British Museum, London, the main sequences together in Room 10a, some whole, some broken, joined and reassembled, with gaps in the sequences. The slabs were excavated in 1853 to 1854 by Hormuzd Rassam, with W. K. Loftus at the site in the same campaign. Loss, breakage, fire marks, dispersed fragments and the absence of any colour are weighed on The Imperishable only. The earlier lion hunt of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, the royal seal of Assyria, the Til Tuba campaign of the same reign in the Southwest Palace and the rest of the North Palace programme are context and are not scored. The makers are the court sculptors of the reign, unnamed; the differing hands are not attributed. No words are quoted: some slabs carry short inscriptions in the king’s voice, and their words are not given. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the lettering of the rooms the slabs came from and which sequences came from which room, the dimensions of the slabs, the depth of the relief, whether and how far the reliefs were painted, and the number and whereabouts of fragments held elsewhere.