The inscriptions of Ashurnasirpal II : a reappraisal of the available editions

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:The Iraqi State Department of Antiquities and the Polish expeditionunder the late Janusz Meuszynski and Richard Sobolewski, assistedlater by Samuel Paley (Buffalo), set themselves the goal to locate,identify and to reconstruct the original arrangement of the reliefsfrom the Northwest Palace of Ashurnasirpal II. The majority of thereliefs are scattered all over the world in museums and institutionsfrom Leningrad to Los Angeles, mainly due to the style ofarchaeologists and opportunists from the previous century who removedthese reliefs from the Nimrud Mound. Section A of the dissertationattempted to complement the achievements of the combinedIraqi-Polish-American effort through the study of the StandardInscription which was carved across and in between the reliefs ofAshurnasirpal.Subsequently, this somewhat audacious and time-consuming project waslaunched to trace the present whereabouts of those reliefs outsideIraq in a bid to study each text seperately. This was achieved in theend in that the inscriptions were studied from the original sculpturesor from photos provided by the institutions in whose care the reliefsare at present. Each exemplar was eventually copied, transliteratedand reproduced in its original room setting of the North-Vest Palace.In order to reproduce each text as an entity in its own right and inan accessible way (in direct opposition to previous attempts whereby amyriad of text-critical data was simply reduced to footnotes),available computer software initially had to be experimented with before a suitable program could be decided upon.Eventually T3of TOI Software Research was selected on mainlyuser-friendly and font-adaptability grounds. The interested scholar isnow in a position to see at a glance how the texts, which wereoriginally engraved onto sculptured slabs in the close proximity ofone room, vary from one another. The remainder of Ashurnasirpal'stextual corpus was treated in Section B. These inscriptions werestudied and collated on the original monuments in London and New York.The texts were finally collated, revised and transliterated in astandardized form from photographs, provided by the institutions inwhose care they are at present.In order to facilitate the progress of research on the Ashurnasirpalinscriptions, it was decided to make all the textual materialavailable in the electronic medium of two 2.1 megabyte floppy disks(cf. the envelope attached to the back cover). The data is stored inT3volumes (73VOLS). The latest T3version (2.3) has a conversionprogram for converting T3documents to YordPerfect 5.0, making thematerial of this research more accessible to non T3users.Thanks to the initiatives of the Tubinger Atlas des Vorderen OrientsProject which provides the critical historian with a much neededhistorico-geographical footing, the unique summary of conquests orso-called standard titulary sections in the royal inscriptions ofAshurnasirpal were examined in search of a historically verifiablemethodology. These passages were collected not only from the Calah inscriptions, but especially from other provenances like Ashur andNineveh on the assumption that a definite correlation exists betweengeographic references and the chronological sequences of events in theAshurnasirpal II royal inscriptions. These summary sections providea useful summary in titular form of the king's conquests comprisingessentially geographic material. They emanated stylistically from thepreceding sections on the king's genealogy, titulary, filiation andtheological legitimation. They were in a constant state of editorialflux impending on the successes of the king's expansionist policies.The modern historian can now utilize these summaries, orhistorico-political titles, not only as a fixed point of departure,historically speaking, but also as a normative tool to unravel biasedmilitary reports of the king's military activities in both theannalistic and display type of inscriptions. A new approach on thehistorical reconstruction of the reign of Ashurnasirpal II (883-859B.C.) with its implications for the study of the Old Testament can nowbe anticipated.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University