Europe Confronts Assyrian Art
One civilization comes in contact with another
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Footnotes
Layard first identified Nimrud as the site of ancient Nineveh; in fact, it is the site of the Assyrian city of Kalhu, called Calah in the Bible (Genesis 10:11–12). He apparently identified Nimrud with the biblical character Nimrod, who, after founding Babel, “went into Assyria, and built Nineveh” (Genesis 10:11). Layard later moved north to excavate at Mosul, the actual site of Nineveh.
These letters, now in the British Library in London, provide a fascinating glimpse of the very first reactions to the Assyrian discoveries.
See Jacob Rothenberg, “Lord Elgin’s Marbles: How Sculptures from the Parthenon Got to the British Museum,” AO 01:02. Another prominent 18th-century German scholar, Johann Gottfried Herder, objected to the notion that Greek art, or any body of art, could provide a universal standard to which all traditions should aspire. He argued that Egyptian art, for instance, was an independent body of art produced for its own reasons; it therefore had to be understood on its own terms, not by comparison with Greek art.
Endnotes
Frederick Nathaniel Bohrer, “Assyria as Art: A Perspective on the Early Reception of Ancient Near Eastern Artefacts,” in Culture and History 4 (1989), p. 20.
Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, Notes on the Early History of Babylonia (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1854).
John Philip Newman, The Thrones and Palaces of Babylon and Nineveh (New York: Harper and Bros., 1876), p. 360.