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From Sennacherib's bronzes to Taharqa's feet: Conceptions of the material world at Nineveh

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

Allison Karmel Thomason
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Extract

Edward Said argued that since the beginning of western civilization there has been a conception that the rulers of the East, the famed “Oriental despots”, were decadent, obsessed with luxury, and consumed by the collecting of objects (1978: 119, 203). The trope of the decadent Orient is deeply embedded in the western imagination. In the Louvre Museum in Paris sits a masterpiece of French Romantic painting, The Death of Sardanapalus, by Eugène Delacroix (Fig. 1). The painting depicts an Oriental despot, the mythical Ninevite king Sardanapalus, reclining with emotional detachment on a great bed amidst the chaotic destruction of his harem, palace, and empire. He wears a golden crown and earrings and his robe falls in great folds around his hefty body. Extra garments, which he does not need to wear but which he nevertheless possesses, swirl voluminously around his figure. His vast bed, puffy and soft, is richly adorned with red cloth. The pleasures of his life, including the women of his consummately available harem, are wasted at the murderous hands of his mutinous palace slaves. Around his bedroom lie the precious objects of his palace service: golden ewers and cups; lyres and textiles; and jewellery and horse trappings. If we peal back the layers of meaning that this painting holds in its swaths of colour and light, we can begin to comprehend the human fascination with objects.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 66: Nineveh. Papers of the XLIXe Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Part One , 2004 , pp. 151 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 2004 

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Footnotes

*

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

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