In 1856 Dartmouth College, which is both my alma mater and the institution where I teach, became home to six relief slabs that originally decorated the walls of the Assyrian palace of King Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 B.C.E.). This palace had been discovered in 1845 amid the ruins of Ashurnasirpal’s capital city of Nimrud, about 20 miles south of modern-day Mosul, Iraq , by the British adventurer-cum-archaeologist Austen Henry Layard.
If you know Dartmouth, you know that it—like several other educational institutions that received Ashurnasirpal reliefs (Amherst, Bowdoin, Middlebury, the University of Vermont, Williams)—is a relatively small school located in what was, in 1856, the hinterlands of rural New England. Yet if you know the larger corpus of Ashurnasirpal’s reliefs (a catalog of about 320), you know that they are among the crown jewels of major world museums: the British Museum, the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You also know that these reliefs are treasured because of their magnificent imagery and exquisite workmanship, which vividly demonstrate how grand the palace that first housed the panels must have been. It was at least 258,000 square feet (24,000 meters square) and included a stunning banquet room overlooking the Tigris River.
So how did reliefs from this most splendid palace end up in the various remote outposts of New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts? The answer, in part, has to do with the sheer number of relief panels that Layard’s excavations uncovered and the fact that his major sponsor, the British Museum, quickly ran out of space for displaying them. The Museum thus instructed Layard to send only reliefs whose images did not duplicate exemplars already in their collection, leaving Layard with a surplus. At about the same time, the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions received permission from authorities of the Ottoman Empire to open a station in Mosul.2 The first American to be dispatched, in 1850, was Dwight Henry Marsh.
Because of his missionary bent, Marsh’s imagination was seized by Layard’s discoveries and “the illustration which they afford of passages in Holy Writ.”3 Marsh further believed that the full significance of this “illustration” was unappreciated. The British had focused only on the reliefs’ ability to “illuminate obscure passages” in the Hebrew Bible (by comparing, for example, the bird-headed, winged figures of the Assyrian panels to the descriptions in Ezekiel 1:5–11 of winged creatures with the features of a man, lion, ox and eagle).4 Marsh, however, embraced the reliefs’ “evangelizing” potential: the possibility that Ashurnasirpal’s reliefs could encourage viewers, including American college students, to commit to the Christian faith, first, by proving to them the “truth” of the Bible (since the very Nimrud from which Ashurnasirpal’s reliefs came—or Kalhu/Calah, to give the city its ancient name—is mentioned in the Bible, in Genesis 10:11–12). More important, Marsh believed the reliefs would prove the superiority of Biblical religion (based on his assumption that any viewer of the reliefs would immediately cede that the ineffable God of the Bible was far more worthy of devotion and worship than the reliefs’ winged geniis).
Thus Marsh, after securing for Williams College two of Layard’s surplus relief panels (and the first two to reach the United States, in 1852),5 wrote to the college’s president about the edifying effect he hoped these images would have on Williams students as they considered “the glory of the incorruptible God changed into an image made like to corruptible man and four-footed beasts and creeping things.”6 Likewise, Henry Lobdell, a missionary-physician, joined Marsh in Mosul in 1852 and shortly thereafter procured reliefs for Amherst, his alma mater.7 Lobdell described Nimrud and kindred sites as “perpetual monuments … of the truth of Scriptural prophecies” and claimed that “the servants of the one living and true God … find in them … witness to the truth of the Old Testament Scriptures.”8
Whether the six reliefs that came to Dartmouth actually had the effect on the institution’s students that these missionaries intended, however, is a matter of some debate. For, although Dartmouth’s reliefs were acquired for the college by Austin Hazen Wright, a missionary colleague of Marsh’s and Lobdell’s, any plans this churchman had for using Ashurnasirpal’s reliefs for their “proselytizing potentialities”9 seem to have been overridden by Oliver Payson Hubbard, Dartmouth’s librarian and Wright’s major contact at the college. Hubbard’s reason for bringing “these most interesting relics”10 to the college was instead historical: The reliefs could bring to life “the Kings and race of Ancient Nineveh”11 and in so doing, bring to life the political, cultural, social and religious world in which the Bible arose.
I mentioned above that Dartmouth is my alma mater; it’s also the alma mater of several other contemporary Biblical scholars whose names may be familiar to the readers of BAR—for example, W. Boyd Barrick, Eric Cline, Robert Gagnon and Eric Meyers—as well as some of the great Biblical scholars of the 074early part of the 20th century, most notably Francis Brown, author of the Brown, Driver and Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Because we’re a small school, this surfeit of biblicists among our graduates has always taken me a bit by surprise, but I’ve come to think Oliver Payson Hubbard had something to do with it. By bringing the world of the Bible to Dartmouth more than 150 years ago, Hubbard inspired generations of Dartmouth students to take the study of the Bible back out into the world.
In 856 Dartmouth College, which is both my alma mater and the institution where I teach, became home to six relief slabs that originally decorated the walls of the Assyrian palace of King Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 B.C.E.). This palace had been discovered in 1845 amid the ruins of Ashurnasirpal’s capital city of Nimrud, about 20 miles south of modern-day Mosul, Iraq , by the British adventurer-cum-archaeologist Austen Henry Layard. If you know Dartmouth, you know that it—like several other educational institutions that received Ashurnasirpal reliefs (Amherst, Bowdoin, Middlebury, the University of Vermont, Williams)—is a relatively small school located in […]
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This is the title of Chapter 1 of John B. Stearns, Reliefs from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II (Archiv für Orientforschung 15; Graz, 1961), p. 1.
2.
Dorthea Seelye Franck, “Missionaries Send Bas-Reliefs to the United States,” in V.E. Crawford, P.O. Harper and H. Pittman, Assyrian Reliefs and Ivories in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Palace Reliefs of Assurnasirpal II and Ivory Carvings from Nimrud (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980), p. 40.
3.
The Illustrated London News, 26.VI.1847, pp. 409–410, as quoted in John Malcolm Russell, From Nineveh to New York: The Strange Story of the Assyrian Reliefs in the Metropolitan Museum and the Hidden Masterpieces at Canford School (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, in association with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1997), p. 37.
4.
Russell, From Nineveh to New York, p. 39.
5.
Kenneth G. Hoglund, “The Museum Trail: The Collections at Yale University,” Biblical Archaeologist 47 (1984), p. 161.
6.
As quoted in Stearns, Reliefs from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II, p. 2.
7.
Franck, “Missionaries Send Bas-Reliefs to the United States,” p. 40.
8.
As quoted in Stearns, Reliefs from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II, p. 3.
9.
Stearns, Reliefs from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II, p. 3.
10.
Letter from Oliver Payson Hubbard to Austin Hazen Wright, June 29, 1854, as transcribed in Oliver P. Hubbard, An Account of How Dartmouth College Obtained Its Collection of Nineveh Slabs [n.p.], p. 3.
11.
Letter from Austin Hazen Wright to Oliver Payson Hubbard, June 5, 1855, as transcribed in Hubbard, An Account, p. 15. The use of “Nineveh” in this quote is explained by John Malcolm Russell: “Layard and his contemporaries generally referred to all the Assyrian discoveries as coming from ‘Nineveh,’ regardless of whether they actually came from Nineveh, Nimrud or Khorsabad. This was due … to the belief that ancient Nineveh [the main capital city of the Assyrian empire] encompassed all of these cities and that they all shared a ‘Ninevite’ culture.” See Russell, From Nineveh to New York, p. 15.
