JOHN MALCOLM RUSSELL University of Chicago Press, 1991. 350 pp.; 139 b/w ills. $45.00

The study of ancient Near Eastern cultures is fundamentally different from that of others. No living tradition links us to the Sumerians or Assyrians, the Hittites or Hurrians. Further, the record, both material and textual, is unstable, discontinuous, and difficult of access. Much of almost two centuries of scholarship has focused on retrieving, organizing, describing, and decoding material and textual remains. There have been, however, intermittent periods of synthesis and interpretation. Almost half a century ago, the art historians Henri Frankfort and Anton Moortgat articulated their views on the evolution of visual expression in ancient Mesopotamia. Similarly, the philologists Thorkild Jacobsen and A. Leo Oppenheim worked in the realm of text. Inspired by their programmatic statements, the field went back to work and, after a phase of data gathering and trenchant analysis infused with theory and methods from diverse disciplines, some scholars are again standing back to assess this difficult yet fascinating material.

John Russell is working in one of the richest periods of artistic production in the ancient Near East, the Assyrian empire, which began its territorial expansion as the first true empire in the 9th century B.C. During the next three centuries, the Assyrian imperial machine, using systematic coercion and military force, controlled vast lands and heterogenous populations from capital centers at Nimrud, Khorsabad, and Nineveh, all near the Tigris River in what is now northern Iraq. At the center of the empire was the king. His residence, the palace complex, was an imperial microcosm in which a program of text and image, deployed in a majestic architectural space, projected the inevitability of Assyrian hegemony. In his study of Sennacherib's "Palace without Rival" (the so-called Southwest Palace) at Nineveh, Russell undertakes to describe the material and textual remains of the king who, from 704 to 681 B.C., ruled Assyria at the height of its power, and also to explore the motivations for, and the viewer's response to, radical changes in both the form and the content of visual expression. To move beyond description and categorization of the record and attempt interpretation demands assumptions about the values, priorities, and cognitive patterns of a culture that are logical and not just familiar. I will return to this theme.

Unlike most of the peoples of the ancient Near East, the Assyrians were never lost to history. Both Herodotus and the Bible insure the Assyrians a place near the beginning of the Western tradition. In 1847, when the British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard (who excavated Assurnasirpal II's palace at Nimrud as well as the Southwest Palace of Sennacherib and the North Palace of Assurbanipal at Nineveh) uncovered Sennacherib's Room XXXVI to reveal the limestone slabs carved with the Assyrian defeat of Lachish, he knew, on reading the cuneiform epigraph carved above the seated king, that he was looking at the first independent attestation of an event recorded in the Bible (2 Kings 18:13-14). The walls of Sennacherib's palace, like those of his predecessors, were lined with miles of stone slabs, most carved with representations of military victories, picturing what was verbally reported in the records of the military campaigns--the central activity of the imperial enterprise.

While several scholars have focused on aspects of Sennacherib's material remains, Russell's study is the first to consider the palace as a whole. It draws on his doctoral thesis completed in 1985 at the University of Pennyslvania's Department of the History of Art under the direction of Irene J. Winter. In preparing the text for publication, Russell was able to call on new sources of information to make several substantive revisions. Most important, he was given access to the large number of unpublished drawings of the reliefs made when they were first uncovered. It is a tribute to Russell that the keeper of the Western Asiatic Department of the British Museum allowed him to publish a considerable number of these drawings for the first time. And no doubt Russell's research encouraged the British Museum to give the facsimile publication of those drawings high priority.

Russell's book is divided into twelve chapters, with two appendixes containing the numerous preserved epigraphs and a helpful concordance of previous publications. Russell's interest is to study "the images and texts of the palace decoration together in their original context, as integral components of the overall decorative scheme of an Assyrian palace" (p. 4). He rightly sees the "Assyrian palace decoration as a synthesis of text and image" functioning jointly to glorify the monarch and empire.

In chapter 2 Russell examines the changes introduced in the reign of Sennacherib in the physical relationship of the cuneiform text to both the architectural setting and the visual imagery carved on the reliefs. The most radical change is the displacement of large blocks of cuneiform text from the image field to the underbelly of the lamassu, colossal guardian beasts flanking each important gateway. It is immediately apparent that this shift has profound ramifications for the structure of the imagery carried on the relief slabs themselves. Each text is now given only once. Previously, the various types of texts (campaign annals, campaign summaries, and building inscriptions) were repeated throughout the palace. This practice gradually diminished and finally ended with Sennacherib, for whose reign each text is unique. It is clear that removal of the text from the image space opens up the image field; but scholars have yet to reach an understanding of the relationship between the reduction and final disappearance of textual repetition and attendant changes in the image conventions.

Following his discussion of the texts and their placement, Russell describes the archaeological and visual evidence, summarizing what we know from the excavation records and the reliefs. On the basis of field work he undertook in 1989, during a brief lull in the turbulent Iraqi political climate, he substantially revises his initial reconstruction of the palace. He then turns his attention to the reliefs themselves, beginning with the acquisition and transport of the stone, reprinting a discussion that originally appeared in the pages of this journal.(1) After reviewing the stylistic and iconographic criteria for distinguishing the reliefs of Sennacherib from those of his grandson Assurbanipal (668-627 B.C.), who redecorated parts of the Southwest Palace early in his reign, Russell summarizes the subjects depicted on the reliefs. He demonstrates that certain details of architecture and landscape are diagnostic of Sennacherib's second and third campaigns to the east. One of Russell's goals is to identify as many subjects as possible in order to discern structure in the total palace program. He observes that in most rooms only a single campaign is depicted. Of the three exceptions, two are courtyards (Courts VI and XXX) whose size and central location make "them suitable for ideologically motivated visual juxtapositions of subjects". The other room having multiple subjects is the large reception Room XLIII. Processions of captives from several parts of the empire line its walls, leading Russell to suggest that here the king reviewed foreign prisoners and booty. Russell also shows that the reliefs of the Throne Room suite form a programmatic unity: the first subject to be encountered is the Babylonian campaign in Court H, then the western campaign in Room I, and the eastern campaign in Room v and Court VI.

Russell's treatment of the archaeological, textual, and visual record from Sennacherib's reign is extremely useful, making this rich material readily available to a wide audience. In the domain of interpretation, he offers a systematic explanation of the motives behind the innovations introduced under Sennacherib. In formulating these explanations, Russell makes assumptions about formal issues of perception and representation that touch on the debate about the realistic status of images.(2) In this debate, Russell is a realist. He argues that under Sennacherib, two fundamental and independent changes in Assyrian pictorial conventions caused representation to be more realistic. One was the opening up of the picture plane through the removal of the central band of inscription, which separated two narrow parallel strips. Now a single uninterrupted image field some eight feet in height was available. The other formal change was a shift in the vantage point, from the so-called worm's-eye view, in which receding depth is indicated through overlapping figures on a single groundline, to the consistent use of a bird's-eye view, which creates the illusion of depth by stacking figures on a unified ground beneath a high horizon line. While Russell correctly observes that all of Sennacherib's representations use the bird's-eye view, a closer comparative study of individual scenes may show that the Assyrian artists employed systematic variations to solve local problems in the representation of depth. In evaluating the effects of these changes on the Assyrian viewer, Russell assumes that the bird's-eye view is more natural because it approximates more closely how human beings see the world around them (p. 214).

In considering why Sennacherib's artists would seek a more realistic mode of representation, Russell assumes that the king was "unsatisfied" by the previous solutions, in particular with those of his father Sargon, because they were inadequate for the message he wished to project. Russell argues that the target audience for the reliefs changed during the reign of Sennacherib. From among twelve types of audience for the reliefs (both targeted and incidental), Russell thinks that Sennacherib consciously privileged external populations, in particular newly conquered peoples to the east and west. This is the most important factor in understanding the motivation for the formal as well as thematic innovations because, Russell concludes, the new system of representation, more closely replicating human vision, would have been intuitively comprehensible to these people, who presumably had never seen large-scale narrative representations. As a corollary, Russell suggests that members of the Assyrian court, accustomed to the mixed perspectival system used under previous kings, may have had a difficult time comprehending the new mode of representation, that is, the consistent application of the bird's-eye view. Having established this position, Russell extends his line of reasoning to explain that the reintroduction of registers into the wall reliefs of Assurbanipal is a reversion to the old system, motivated by the fact that Sennacherib's more realistic mode was deemed too difficult for Assurbanipal's audience to grasp.

Russell's argument rests on the contention that the Assyrian artists (more or less consciously) confronted the problem of the representation of deep space through the application of a consistent system of perspective that more closely approximated how human beings actually see the world. While there is little doubt that this explanation lay behind Alberti's invention of optical perspective, and indeed it is arguably what was central to the Greek construction of perspectival representation originating in theatrical scenery, it may be ethnocentric to assume that the Assyrian artists of the 7th century problematized the representation of depth. The abiding interest of Western artists in capturing the illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface has profoundly influenced how art historians think about representation. While Sennacherib's reliefs make it clear that the representation of spatial relationships was of interest to the Assyrian artist, there is nothing that identifies optical perspective as the central challenge to the ancient artistic imagination.

As an alternative hypothesis, I suggest that other concerns, specifically the viewer's experience of images in their setting, were of greater importance than the problem of the representation of depth. This hypothesis seeks to place the radical changes of Sennacherib's reign in the wider context of Assyrian wall programs, from the earliest program preserved through its copy carved on the 11th-century-B.C. White Obelisk,(3) through to Assurbanipal's North Palace in the late 7th century. From this vantage point, Assyrian artists may be seen as actively exploring relationships among architectural setting, narrative program, and viewer response. To judge from the White Obelisk, the earliest Assyrian wall programs were set up in mirror relationship, each segment reflecting more or less literally the scene on the opposing wall of a long, narrow room. This arrangement encompassed the viewer and allowed him to become an agent who participated by identifying with figures symmetrically placed in the mirroring representations lining the walls. In the 9th century, Assurnasirpal II broke this mirroring and encompassing relationship by stacking the two narrative strips on the same wall, without, of course, retaining strict formal symmetry between them, thereby creating a linearly organized narrative restricted to each wall independently of the other. Now the picture plane itself and not the space defined by the opposing picture planes became the primary focus for the viewer. Sennacherib's artists returned to an interest in the space enclosed by the images in their architectural setting. In the "Palace without Rival," the viewer stood in the middle of a room lined with a single narrative that moved through space and time. As in the White Obelisk program, images surrounded the viewer, but no longer did they absorb the viewer into the action through the conceit of mirroring. The viewer was returned to the theater of action, but as a spectator. Sennacherib's artists accomplished this through opening up the image field and employing bird's-eye perspective to create the illusion of deep space. On this interpretation, their motivation was not to replicate natural human vision but to explore the potential of a total environment. In early imperial wall programs, the ideal viewer (certainly the king) became the subject of representation through reflection. By the reign of Sennacherib, the viewer was rendered passive, surrounded by the endless victories and colossal accomplishments of the Assyrian monarch. The direction of artistic changes under Sennacherib's grandson, Assurbanipal, seems to confirm this hypothesis. Assurbanipal does not simply return, as Russell states, to the register system. Rather he returns to representation as a mirroring system. But now it is not the viewer who is absorbed into the mirroring images; rather, registers mirror each other. For example in Room F in the North Palace, each register begins with the king and proceeds around the room back to the image of the king located at the beginning of the upper mirror-reversed register. If we assume that the creation of environment through the relationship of image to the viewer was a central problem for Assyrian artists, Sennacherib's innovations make sense in their larger Assyrian context.

Russell's study is more than merely a welcome contribution to the ancient Near Eastern field. He has drawn together and synthesized one of the best preserved and most interesting monuments of antiquity, making it widely accessible. Although the quality of the photo reproductions is limited, the volume is offered at an affordable price. While in my estimation his interpretative approach fails to capture the culturally situated mindset of Assyrian artists as it involved to address the distinctive needs for visual expression demanded by a changing empire, Russell's ideological explanations shed interesting light on "the power of images." Scholars and students engaged by relationships among imperial ideology, visual representation, and verbal propaganda can learn much from Sennacherib's Palace without Rival at Nineveh.

(1.) John Russell, "Bulls for the Palace and Order in the Empire: The Sculptural Program of Sennacherib's Court VI at Nineveh," Art Bullettin, LXIX, 1987, 520-39.

(2.) See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, Indianapolis, 1976; and W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, Chicago, 1994, esp. chap. 11.

(3.) Holly Pittman, "Unwinding the White Obelisk," Die Bietrage Heidelberger Studien zum Alten Orient, VI, forthcoming.

HOLLY PITTMAN 
Department of the History of Art 
University of Pennsylvania 
Philadelphia. Pa. 19104