Court VI reliefs of the Southwest Palace at Nineveh (fig. 1) are the only instances of an Assyrian king depicting the construction and transportation of lamassu statues. Unsurprisingly, these unique depictions of engineering achievement come from Sennacherib, whose administrative policies focused heavily on technological and societal advancements. On a cursory glance, Sennacherib’s actions as king make little sense. Although Assyria was a highly militaristic society, Sennacherib focused a great deal of effort on rebuilding the Assyrian heartland and advancing the engineering prowess of his empire. As a result of his apparent disinterest in conquest, Sennacherib became a figure misunderstood both in the past and in modern scholarly work. In …show more content…
What is remarkable about Sennacherib is the amount of space and attention to detail he gave to representing Assyria’s innovation (Russell 1992). Scholars have long questioned the reasoning behind Sennacherib’s fascination with engineering and technological knowledge, as his motives remain unclear from his palatial reliefs and texts alone. What is discernable from these sources, though, is that Sennacherib took increased care to accurately depict the intricacy of those building projects undertaken in and around Nineveh during the early years of his reign on a uniquely grand scale (Neumann 2021; Russell 1987, 536). The increased appearance of scenes of royal engineering in the Southwest Palace accompanied the disappearance of multiple traditional motifs of Assyrian kingly power. Foreign tribute processions and royal hunting scenes, long used to demonstrate financial, political, and physical strength, are nearly absent from Sennacherib’s corpus of wall reliefs (Ataç 2006, 74; Degrado 2019; Russell 1992, …show more content…
A third way Sennacherib utilized Court VI to demonstrate his power was through its representation of his political policies. As king, Sennacherib believed the role of a powerful king was to provide for their loyal citizens (Lumsden 2017, 187). While building a massive palace for himself at Nineveh, Sennacherib simultaneously led multiple building projects intended to improve the lives of his royal subjects. These include the building of large public courtyards at Nineveh, improvements to transportation infrastructure in and around the capital, and improvements to the canal and water systems of the city and its hinterlands (a topic I will discuss further) (Elayi 2018, 184; Ur 2005). According to Sennacherib’s building inscriptions, he even divided the newly irrigated meadowland in Nineveh’s periphery so that the citizens could own farmland (Elayi 2018, 184; Russell 1987,