Five Ways to Conquer a City

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In the spring of 1843, Paul-Emile Botta, the French consul at Mosul in present-day Iraq, invited Austen Henry Layard, then 26 years old and the British ambassador’s secretary in Constantinople, to join him at a site Botta thought was ancient Nineveh: “Come, I pray you,” Botta wrote, “and let us have a little archaeological fun at Khorsabad!”

Although Layard’s notes indicate he was “anxious to visit” the site, he did not actually do so until August 1846. He found it an unhealthy place: “During M. Botta’s excavations, the workmen suffered greatly from fever, and many fell victims to it.”¹ He was also somewhat critical of Botta’s excavation methods and was not very impressed with the remains.

For himself, Layard chose the site of Nimrud, about 35 miles south of Khorsabad. He began excavating Nimrud in 1845 and was soon as handsomely rewarded as Botta with monumental sculptures and other Assyrian treasures—now on display at the British Museum in London.

In 1849 Layard turned his attention to the ruins of Kuyunjik, on the other side of the Tigris River, opposite modern Mosul. Ironically, Botta had been here earlier, in 1842, but he had abandoned the site after a few months without discovering any remarkable remains.²

It turned out that Layard’s site of Kuyunjik, not Botta’s site at Khorsabad, was actually Nineveh. But when Botta published the results of his excavations at Khorsabad, it was under the title Monument de Ninive (five volumes, 1849–1850). Actually Khorsabad was Dur-Sharrukin, literally “town of Sargon” or “Sargonsburg”; Botta had excavated the capital of Sargon II of Assyria, who reigned from 722 to 705 B.C. In 1849, 1850 and 1853, Layard published his own volumes on Nineveh containing most of the reliefs he had excavated at Kuyunjik and at Nimrud (The Monuments of Nineveh [two volumes, 1849 and 1853], Nineveh and Its Remains [two volumes, 1850] and Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon [1853]).

Despite their stupendous finds, Botta and Layard both left much to be desired in excavation technique. Botta was an Italian-born physician turned diplomat, not a trained excavator at all. By modern standards, Layard was only marginally better. He excavated by tunneling along the walls of halls revealed by the discovery of sculptured slabs.

Nevertheless, at all three sites, the two men made discoveries still in many ways unsurpassed—monumental palaces, huge sculptures, major libraries of cuneiform texts and, most important for purposes of this article, 038miles of sculptured slabs that formed the decorations on the walls of the palaces.

At the real Nineveh, for example, Layard recovered almost two miles of sculptured slabs made of Mosul alabaster, in addition to 27 pairs of colossal, human-headed, winged bulls and lions that flanked the entrances to the Southwest Palace. The sculptured slabs formed the wall decorations of a palace with more than 70 rooms and courts. It was built for Sennacherib (704–681 B.C.), who led a major military campaign against Judah in the late eighth century B.C. By his own account, he destroyed 46 Judean cities including Lachish^a and even besieged Jerusalem, although for some reason failed to conquer it. (The Bible describes all this in 2 Kings 18.) Sennacherib decorated several rooms of his palace at Nineveh to celebrate his victory in this campaign. He called it “Palace Without Equal” and intended it to surpass the palaces of all his predecessors.

At Nimrud, Layard discovered two other palaces: one built by Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 B.C.), covering about 6.5 acres, and the other built by Tiglath-pileser III (744–727 B.C.).

Soon thereafter, another palace was excavated at Nineveh by Hormuzd Rassam and William Kennett Loftus. Called the North Palace, it was constructed during the reign of Sennacherib’s grandson, Ashurbanipal (668–627 B.C.), who probably moved there from his grandfather’s palace.

All together, these 19th-century excavations uncovered six Assyrian kings’ palaces decorated with wall reliefs, dating from the early ninth to the late seventh centuries B.C.:

Before this period, palace walls had simply been painted. However, during this period, palace walls in most of the capital cities of Assyria were decorated with sculptured slabs of alabaster and limestone. These slabs were carved in flat relief and then, for the most part, painted and finally aligned along the walls constructed of unbaked brick.

Botta and Layard managed to send some hundreds of tons of Assyrian sculptures back to Paris and London. Even so, only the most magnificent and better-preserved pieces were selected for transport. Many of the smaller fragments—which were less important from the 19th-century treasure-hunting perspective—found their way to the antiquities market, eventually coming to reside in more than 50 museums and galleries on three continents.

Some of the major pieces were lost in transport. Botta’s first shipment from Sargon’s palace at Khorsabad, intended for the Louvre, sank in the Tigris River when the rafts upon which it had been loaded overturned in treacherous rapids on the way to the Persian Gulf.

Fortunately, we have in public museums not only the pieces that survived, but also the original drawings made on the spot by superb artists who were both talented and careful.

A young artist named Eugène Napoléon Flandin copied the sculptures found at Khorsabad. Between May and October 1844, he made about 150 drawings of the wall reliefs of Sargon’s palace. These drawings are undoubtedly the best ever made of Assyrian wall reliefs, and were published as engravings in Botta’s Monument de Ninive. Recently, in 1986, Flandin’s original drawings—now kept in the Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France in Paris—were published for the first time in Pauline Albenda’s The Palace of Sargon, King of Assyria (Paris, 1986).

In addition, the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities in the British Museum has about 500 original drawings of Assyrian wall reliefs from the ninth to the seventh centuries B.C. Layard himself probably made about half of these. Although Layard was not a professional artist, he was a very gifted amateur. His drawings are of a high standard and very faithful.

Many of the drawings illustrate remains that have since disappeared. Most of the slabs not chosen for transport to a European museum by the 19th-century excavators were reburied in the rubbish of the site.

The slabs that decorated the walls are masterpieces of Assyrian art. It took enormous effort and talent to create them. The slabs first had to be transported from the quarries to the capital cities of the Assyrian empire, then carried through courts and corridors to the rooms in which they were to be used. The slabs were attached to the walls of the palaces by sinking them partly below floor-level. Clamps were probably used to tie them to the walls at the top.

To decorate the slabs, outlines of the scenes were first sketched on the flattened stone, probably following a model in clay that had been approved by the king. Thereafter a team of artisans executed the main scenes by carving away the background around the figures. Another group of stonemasons probably added the minor details, such as the mountain-scale pattern and the pattern of foliage on the trees. Still another team of artisans painted certain details in the reliefs; traces of red and black paint can still be seen on some of the slabs, for example on the shoes of the king and his courtiers in the Nimrud Gallery of the British Museum.

The result was a massive pictorial record of major events in the kings’ reigns and the illustration of important ritual activities in which the kings took part.

Pictorial means of communication were more immediately effective than oral or even written storytelling. Pictures could reach illiterate people and people who spoke languages other than the Akkadian used by their Assyrian overlords. We do not know who was 041allowed to enter the palace, apart from the king’s family and his courtiers. Therefore, we cannot say whether these wall decorations served as a kind of political propaganda to impress foreign visitors, or whether they were meant as a kind of religious demonstration to show that the will of the gods was being continually fulfilled in glorious Assyrian victories.

Scenes of warfare and Assyrian victory provide the themes of the reliefs—the conquest of foreign peoples, the deportation of prisoners, the inspection of spoil and booty and its transportation to Assyria. But above all was the superiority of the Assyrian army, whose victory was ordained by her gods, according to whose command the Assyrian kings led their campaigns.

The realistic representations on the wall reliefs depict various units of the Assyrian army—infantry, chariotry and cavalry. We see well-trained Assyrian soldiers fighting alongside auxiliaries from all parts of the Near East. We see too the enemies of the Assyrians. The wall reliefs also depict the tactics and strategies employed in order to conquer so many fortified cities.

Obviously, there is an enormous amount to be learned from these extraordinary reliefs. Here we shall concentrate on one aspect of them—what they teach us about the means by which walled, strongly fortified cities were conquered.

Five different methods can be distinguished. However, a combination of two or more of these methods can usually be observed at each site of attack.

We will describe these methods generally and illustrate them more particularly from the Assyrian palace reliefs:

1. One way to penetrate a fortified walled city was to use ladders to get over the top of the wall and inside the city. Scaling ladders were used to break the resistance of the defenders who fought from the city’s towers and parapets. By this method, at least some of the attackers could enter the city from the top of the fortifications. Prior to the attack, however, trees had to be cut and ladders constructed to a suitable height for the walls surrounding the besieged city.

In some of the reliefs, archers and spearmen are shown climbing up the ladders. Helmets, shields and different kinds of body armour protect the attackers from the missiles that the defenders throw from above. Soldiers on the ground, shooting arrows, provided additional protection to those on the ladders.

2. A second method of attack involved penetration through a city wall or a city gate, the latter being the weakest point in the fortification. The wooden doors of a city gate could be easily demolished by setting them on fire, even when they were sheathed with bronze.

A wall or gate could also be forcibly penetrated by means of battering rams. In the Judahite cities Sennacherib says he conquered, he claims to have used battering rams, a claim consistent with the portrayal of the conquest of Lachish depicted on his palace walls, where several battering rams can be seen.

Battering rams from the ninth century B.C. are depicted as being heavy, six-wheeled engines. Later they 043became lighter and more mobile. The later battering rams were covered with raw hides to protect them against fire.

Before a battering ram could be used, a path had to be created to get it to the appropriate place at the appropriate height in the wall. To accomplish this, a siege ramp had to be built so that the battering rams could be rolled up it to the upper part of the wall.

Several carvings on the reliefs show different methods of building these ramps. In some cases they were built of rows of bricks. In others, regularly shaped stones appear to have been used with branches of trees as fillers between the layers. The quantity of stones needed to build a siege ramp was enormous. That is why bricks had to be used in Mesopotamia, which is a largely stoneless area. In some cases wooden tracks were used on the surface of siege ramps, as the ramps had to be smooth for the wheels of the battering rams.

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3. It was possible for an attacker to go not only over the wall and through the wall, but also under the wall. To penetrate the city wall from underground was less dangerous for the attacker, but it was technically more difficult. Iron implements were used to dig what was in effect a tunnel from which the wall could be undermined. At the beginning of this effort, it was especially important to protect the diggers from attacks from above. Shield-bearers provided this protection. The great body-shields with curving tops, as shown in the reliefs, proved particularly useful in this regard.

4. A city could also be conquered without having its walls attacked by force. To conquer a strongly fortified city without attacking its walls by force, it was necessary to lay siege to it for as long as required. A siege could last several months or even years. Much depended on the supply of water and food inside the besieged city. Outside the city, the besieging army established its own fortified camp (or camps). The site of the besiegers’ camp was on raised ground whenever this was available. This offered some security from counterattack by foraging city defenders.

The siege camps are always shown in the reliefs in a maplike representation. In the ninth century B.C., the groundplans are generally circular, square or rectangular; in the seventh-century reliefs, they all have oval shapes and are surrounded by their own fortified walls.

The reliefs depict two different types of tents inside the siege camps. The more elaborate are closed tents that are open to the sky in the middle. This type was used by the king, or by the chief commander of the army, or by high-ranking officers. The soldiers used ordinary tents with open sides. In the reliefs, we see inside these tents and thus observe the daily life of the soldiers—slaughtering animals or cooking and baking. In one fragment of a slab, a returning Assyrian archer is seen drinking beside his open bed.

5. The final method of conquering a fortified city involved cutting off its water supply. A scene from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II probably depicts the cutting off of the water supply of a city under siege. (It is certainly not so easy to illustrate ruses that were sometimes used to conquer a city.)

Once a city was conquered, much of it was destroyed, especially its fortifications. Soldiers of various units are seen in the reliefs systematically demolishing city walls. Then the city itself was put to the torch.

Once the battle was over, the Assyrians boasted of their prowess and bravery by delivering severed heads to a scribe, who registered the heads for a special reward. Usually a pair of scribes is illustrated, one using a two-part writing board covered with wax, and the other using a scroll of leather or papyrus. Thus, Assyrian valor was recorded for posterity and for the gods.

In the spring of 1843, Paul-Emile Botta, the French consul at Mosul in present-day Iraq, invited Austen Henry Layard, then 26 years old and the British ambassador’s secretary in Constantinople, to join him at a site Botta thought was ancient Nineveh: “Come, I pray you,” Botta wrote, “and let us have a little archaeological fun at Khorsabad!” Although Layard’s notes indicate he was “anxious to visit” the site, he did not actually do so until August 1846. He found it an unhealthy place: “During M. Botta’s excavations, the workmen suffered greatly from fever, and many fell victims to it.”1 […]