83. David Kertai: The palaces of Assyria

David Kertai explains all about Neo-Assyrian palaces. What, and who, would we find there? How did they function? What do their design and decoration tell us about how they were used? How visible was the king? 

David's museum page

Music by Ruba Hillawi

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Transcript

Jon Taylor: 0:15

Hello and welcome to the Thin End of the Wedge, the podcast where experts from around the world share new and interesting stories about life in the ancient Middle East. My name is Jon.

Ellie Bennett: 0:26

And my name is Ellie. Each episode, we talk to friends and colleagues and get them to explain their work in a way we can all understand.

Jon Taylor: 0:35

At the heart of the Assyrian Empire was its king, and the seat of his power was the palace. These buildings were huge and designed to be imposing. Their remains were the focus of the earliest excavations, and from the palaces in Nimrud, Khorsabad, and Nineveh come many of the best known objects and texts. But what were these Assyrian palaces like? How did they function? Who lived and worked there, and how did their design achieve their function? Our guest combines expertise in architecture with archaeological training and knowledge of the texts. He guides us through the structure of an Assyrian palace, explaining the components and their significance.

Ellie Bennett: 1:20

So get yourself a cup of tea, make yourself comfortable, and let's meet today's guest.

Jon Taylor: 1:33

Hello and welcome to Thin End of the Wedge. Thank you for joining us.

David Kertai: 1:37

Hello.

Jon Taylor: 1:37

Could you tell us please: who are you and what do you do?

David Kertai: 1:42

Yeah, I'm David Kertai. I am the curator of the ancient Middle Eastern collections at the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden. And before that, I mainly specialised in the late Assyrian period, starting more with architecture and then sort of branching out into court society, art history, the history of archaeology. And yeah, originally, I'm trained as an architect, and after that, I sort of moved on into archaeology and ancient history.

Ellie Bennett: 2:14

So could you tell us: what is an Assyrian royal palace and how many existed?

David Kertai: 2:20

Yeah, that's a simple and complicated question. I guess, basically, it is a building in which the king or the royal court resided. In Assyria, you could say there is like main court resided and the main events took the primary court for 150 years. And then you have the Southwest Palace in Nineveh for the last century, that was built during the reign of Sennacherib. But you do have all kinds of other royal palaces where we don't really know exactly how they functioned or how they related. Like every major city had a sort of military palace which basically replicated the entire royal palace, almost on the same scale. And then you had all kinds of provincial palaces, like the one in Ashur or, yeah, we know several throughout the empire, which were also monumental in their own way, but we don't really know whether they were temporarily used or whether they were provincial governor's residences. So that is sort of where it becomes more complicated.

Jon Taylor: 3:42

Could we talk a little bit about what palace means? Is it a building, or is it an institution?

David Kertai: 3:50

So it is both, both from our modern interpretation point of view, but also from an Assyrian point of view. Technically, "ekallu", the Akkadian or Assyrian name, comes from the word "big house", and to some extent it is a big house, but you can't really separate, like what we would do, like a sort of a private residence from your office. The court is entirely political, and that includes the residents of the court, of the palace of the king itself, so there's no separation. But of course, the royal palace includes much more than a normal house would, because you have these huge scribal offices, storage facilities, treasuries, and all kinds of things that normal houses do not have. But in a sense, it is a big house nonetheless

Ellie Bennett: 4:43

You've mentioned that there are these big, grand palaces that, well, two of them that function for the majority of the Assyrian period. But then you mentioned these military palaces. What differentiates between these main palaces, these big houses, and the military versions of them?

David Kertai: 4:59

So yeah, if we for instance, look at Kalhu, you had the so-called Fort Shalmaneser or ekal masharti in the sort of the Lower Town--a huge complex, probably mostly used for organising the military campaigns, mustering the army. So with workshops to repair war chariots and such and to train. But it also includes a palace with its own throne room, which is as big as the throne room in the ... in the main palace with its own monumental rooms similarly organised as the main palace. So it seems that even though we don't really know much about what happens in these buildings, that they needed similar sized spaces, similarly organised for the king to welcome people and to meet people and to have banquets or other festivities. These also took place at multiple locations.

Ellie Bennett: 5:53

So could you maybe walk us through an Assyrian royal palace? What would it be like for someone who was just walking the halls in one of these buildings?

David Kertai: 6:03

So none of them have been entirely excavated, we have to admit. But you probably enter somewhere a gate into the complex where you got permission to continue. And then you probably had to go to some sequence of forecourts before you enter the main courtyard of the building, which we call the Throne Room courtyard. And that's very specific to Assyria, or very important, is that the first monumental room you encounter walking into the palace is the king's throne room. So we might come back to it later, eh, the discussion whether an Assyrian king is hidden deep inside the palace or publicly accessible. From an architectural point of view, he is very accessible. It's the first one you encounter, is the king's main room, and that's the first time you encounter all the sort of pomp and circumstances of Assyrian architecture with this big decoration, stone reliefs and stuff like that. And then an Assyrian palace is organised in a way that moving through the palace goes through courtyards and corridors, so you don't really move through rooms like maybe you have been to Versailles or some other modern European palace where you sort

of have the sequence of rooms: 7:15

the first bedroom, second bedroom. You have to go through the rooms to reach other rooms, and the servants would sort of crawl through the walls. That's not how Assyrian palaces work. If you want to reach parts of the palace, you go through corridors that connect courtyards together, and then you enter a specific room, like the throne room. And that is surrounded by other rooms that help that part function, like a storage space or a bathroom. And then if, when you're done in that part, you go out into the courtyard again, and then you go to a corridor again to reach other parts of the palace. And you also have other entrances, like there's always an entrance that leads directly into the centre of the palace, so more the residential part, kind of the circumvents the whole monumental core of the palace. And you usually have sort of a connection to the main temple area, which is always located close to the palace.

Ellie Bennett: 8:12

You describe that there's very clear designated areas for specific activities going on in this palace.

David Kertai: 8:18

Yeah, to some extent you can say so. You definitely have a monumental core, which is the biggest rooms which are decorated most monumentally. Then you have a part which you could say is probably more residential in nature, and then you have other parts which are more like storage or secondary in nature. But that's partly interpretation. Like, if you look at the rooms themselves, their architecture, they're basically all the same. There's no such thing as a residential architecture. To some extent that is true to most of our houses, where the architecture of a bedroom does not really exist. It's just it's the place where you put in a bed that makes it a bedroom. Maybe the location within the house might indicate that it's more suited for a bedroom or not. But we usually also don't really have specific bedroom architecture. It's just an empty room and it's the furniture that creates the function. That's true in Assyria as well.

Jon Taylor: 9:19

Okay, well, can we put some people into this palace

now then: 9:21

so who gets to go to the palace and what do they do? How does a palace function? What is the point of a palace, actually?

David Kertai: 9:29

So that's a very complicated question. It's also difficult to separate assumptions from sources we have. So you can look at it from a textual point of view, where we have sources on the palace household and the empire. And you can look at it from an architectural point of view. It's clear that, yeah, the bigger the empire gets, the more people, information, and goods are entering the palace and have to be arranged and dealt with. And at certain times, there, for instance, when all the governors of the empire have to come to meet the king, those are quite substantial groups that would gather. Let's say Assyrian texts and also images provide a view of a fully accessible king. The king is always standing in front of people, and all the letters are directly addressed at the king. And the king directly addresses everybody in return. That can't really be reality. And we do find texts in which people describe how they were unable to actually meet the king, or how they were blocked from meeting the king, or how they met the king, but it was too busy, and they couldn't actually be heard, or they couldn't talk to the king, but it does give a sense that a main part of being an Assyrian king was to meet people from the empire. And the rooms themselves are gigantic, so they easily house hundreds of people. So it does seem that quite a few people had access, but that's of course, a very small amount of the Assyrian population itself.

Jon Taylor: 11:04

Could you say something about the public/private aspect of palace life?

David Kertai: 11:09

Yeah, I find it a very difficult or problematic distinction that is often used. Private is a very modern concept. I don't believe most ancient societies have something like that, that we would call"private", eh? Things that we would consider private, like what happens in the bedroom, eh, the creation of the new Crown Prince, so to say, that is a very political event. So I don't think you should see these palaces as being divided into public or private duality. So they are about, in my view, are about organising access which is flexible. It depends on the context. Obviously, a lot of people don't have access, but access is a much more flexible thing. And that's how the palaces are organised. So you can very easily move through a palace, because you only need to cross one courtyard, go through a corridor, and then you are in the middle of the palace. But it also means you only need to close one door for that whole part to be sealed off. And even if you're in the courtyard, you don't have access to any rooms unless provided. So that makes it very flexible. And I think that also is true for what I call the sort of residential part of the palace. Those are basically reception rooms, rooms where people ... that are meant to meet people. So probably the queen or princess would use these spaces during the day to meet their own staff, their own households, so to say, and only in the evening would they be turned into bedrooms. So there's all kinds of groups and people meeting in the palace, not only the king.

Jon Taylor: 12:52

I imagine for many people, the chance to get that close to the king would be a real privilege. It's a benefit. It's maybe a once in a lifetime thing. But there's perhaps also another group for whom it was not quite such a positive. So I'm thinking, is this a place where there's a secure facility where you can incarcerate political prisoners, say? Or if you think Sennacherib, when he puts Bel-ibni on the throne of Babylon, he talks about how he grew up as a puppy in his

palace. Or Esarhaddon: 13:19

we have the scribes in chains copying tablets. Is there a group of people who are in the palace and are locked in a storeroom, as it were, in a secure facility out of the way? Or should we imagine them in a separate building somewhere else?

David Kertai: 13:34

Archaeologically, that's, of course, very difficult to trace, unless you find chains on the floor or something like that. Like we do know in Nineveh that foreign princes, and also probably the Assyrian princes like Ashurbanipal, they grew up in the military palace. That's where they were trained. And we have several letters indicating that also foreign princes. That's one of the things Assyria In the core of the Assyrian palaces, that does not look like did, is bring foreign princes or princesses to Assyria for education in the hope that then they would be more friendly towards Assyria when they were put back on the throne. So that seems to happen in the military palace. So it's possible that that part of this group that you mentioned would be residing there. to be the place where this kind of thing happens. But for instance, Nineveh, we don't really have the areas where scribes would have been working. That part has not been excavated, so we don't really know much about that part. And it is like most high officials, even the ones that worked on a daily basis in the palace, they did have their own houses, certainly some security guards. There must have been guards throughout the night as well. But how many actually lived in the palace is difficult to know. Probably not in the monumental core of the palaces that we know most about.

Ellie Bennett: 14:58

We're talking about control and access to these places. So if someone was wanting to move through this space, and as you said, close a door to stop someone from doing that, what kind of evidence do we have of these bottleneck points? Do we just have the excavated floor plan, or do we have doors? Do we have locks? Do we have texts talking about people standing by the doors?

David Kertai: 15:27

So the main evidence, archaeologically or architecturally, is the placement of big door sockets that indicates, as are not all internal doors seem to have had door sockets and therefore probably didn't have monumental doors. And then we have textual evidence, but those are mostly for functionaries, so we do have guards and people responsible for the locks. It's a bit complicated, because there with the murder of Sennacherib, things also change. So sometimes the social organisation of the palace changes, or who is involved in security, for instance. But the architecture itself does not seem to change. So the architecture seems to be relatively stable. And throughout this 250 years, in this sense, and it's mostly seem to have changed on on how people were organised, what kind of function they had. And we do not have texts about a lot of things happening in the palace, or where people, how security was organised, or these kind of things we really do not know anything about. We only know names of functionaries, but that's basically it, with a few exceptions when it comes to banqueting, for instance. But we do not have people describing how they walk through a palace, how they move through a palace. And all the images we have, so we have a lot of images of the king meeting with people, but they are always in a blank background. They are not situated architecturally. We assume it's in the palace, but that's not really shown on the images themselves.

Ellie Bennett: 17:05

Could you elaborate on this change in personnel and the way that the internal hierarchy of how or infrastructure of how security works after Sennacherib? Why after that particular Assyrian king, and what kind of changes you see in the security personnel in the palace?

David Kertai: 17:26

So maybe I should take one step back and say a bit about our textual sources. The problem there is that we don't have that many sources about the earlier centuries. So most of our sources come from sort of the Nineveh period. Before Nineveh is turned into the new capital of the Assyrian empire around, let's say, 700 BCE, Sennacherib's father Sargon starts constructing a new royal capital in Dur Sharrukin not far from Nineveh. But that is sort of doomed the moment that Sargon dies on the battlefield; that is seen as a bad omen. And then the court moves to Nineveh, where this huge new palace is built. Then Sennacherib gets murdered. I think there's another podcast episode discussing the details about that, but clearly after that, we see all kinds of new functionaries appearing in the administrative sources. That sort of suggests that they created new positions and that they reorganised the hierarchy of security. But the problem with most of the Assyrian administrative sources is they do not really explain who is in charge of each other. So you have all kinds of people with lists, but it's not always said that this functionary is then responsible for that specific group or not. So we have it difficult to reconstruct a real hierarchy within this security.

Ellie Bennett: 18:55

So we just basically have a list of a whole bunch of new names that we're like, "Oh, we didn't see these in the textual sources before"?

David Kertai: 19:02

Yeah, new names and new job titles. So over time, the Assyrian empire creates new job titles as the situation arises. For instance, the Mother of the King, that title, yet is just called the Mother of the King, but we do not find it in earlier times, so it's possible that it did not exist. And also, the Wife of the Crown Prince is a title that seems to emerge only through time. It's possible that it's just a coincidence of our sources, but it also seems that over time, more titles and more specificity is added as the empire becomes more complex.

Jon Taylor: 19:40

Should we maybe discuss royal women and the question of the harem?

David Kertai: 19:45

Of course, when the Assyrian palaces were first excavated in the 1840s and so, of course, in the middle of the Orientalism heyday, always in near East or Middle Eastern archaeology, there's a tendency to take the present and project that back. So you often read about people like saying, "Well, when we are excavating in Iraq, we sleep on the roof, so surely the king would do the same", as if that ... as if there's no, if you can sort of just translate it one to one. So the benchmark for an Assyrian palace has always been the orientalist idea of the Ottoman Empire and Topkapi palace, where you of course, clearly have things like harems and eunuchs, even though those are much more complicated, or complex than often thought, and that has often been projected back to Assyria. Architecturally, what has been excavated is very limited when it comes to residential spaces. So in the Northwest Palace, the best known palace, and the central residential areas consists basically of three units. So three bedrooms. Usually it says one for the king, one for the queen, and who knows who else. That already assumes that the king and queen were not sharing one space. But however you want to organise the royal court, it does not provide a lot of space for huge amounts of people. And that is seems to be true in other palaces as well. And then it's a question of how to interpret the texts, which to be more explicit, it's almost all administrative lists, where you find all kinds of titles and which are usually not very helpful in reconstructing what this refers to. And there, I think most of my colleagues would have assumed that there is such a thing as a harem, which means that the palace community would be much bigger. I'm more skeptical, though it's certainly it's clear that the system is more complex, and Assyrian kings were, we know from Esarhaddon and Sennacherib that they have... their mothers were not always the queen of their fathers, but we also don't know what the position of those women were when they gave birth. So still, quite a lot unknown.

Ellie Bennett: 22:02

Could you go into a bit more detail about what some scholars believe a harem to be in this period? Do you think that people are using it just as a placeholder term, or do they have a very specific idea of what a harem in an Assyrian palace would be, what they would be doing, what that looks like? I know you don't ascribe to it, but maybe we could just explain what this assumption means and what this term means?

David Kertai: 22:35

So that is very complicated, because almost nobody has really written explicitly about it. You can sometimes read, almost in footnotes, that there is such a thing as a harem, but how they envision that, or architecturally or socially, how big is it? How was it created and maintained? Who are these women? Of course, it then relates to the question whether there are eunuchs in the Assyrian empire or not. But this is rarely made explicit or argumented. So that makes it very difficult to really discuss other people's arguments, since it's almost always implied what this entails. And it's often interpretation of some of the administrative texts in which there are groups of women being mentioned. And so you could interpret those to be at the number of harem women. But in such administrative lists, you also have groups of men, and that often seem to me generic groups that then receive some product--grain or wine or depending on the context.

Ellie Bennett: 23:45

In your view, that seems more that we should leave that idea to one side and think of women just being grouped together, just for ease of however the scribe is organising their thoughts almost.

David Kertai: 23:59

So I would say two things. I think that, for me, easiest is, of course, to come from it from an architectural point of view. And then my argument would be, is that, especially in the Northwest Palace, there is just not a lot of space for a huge amount of people to reside, unless you believe that women were sort of sleeping as if it's like a youth hostel. I don't really see a lot of potential for a huge residential palace community. Second, I think the main thing is the royal inscriptions about the conquest of foreign palaces. And there we do see that groups of women from the palace are being brought into Assyria. And the problem is we ... they sort of disappear from our sources. It's not really easy to then trace them. Who are these women to begin with, and what happens with them once they get to Assyria?

Jon Taylor: 24:52

Can we perhaps turn back to a more architectural perspective? You mentioned about sleeping on the roof, and you said earlier that linguistically, at least a palace is a big house. And they certainly are big in terms of the floor space they cover, but the height of them is incredible sometimes. Are they functionally, architecturally, big houses, or are they something distinct? Should we imagine basements? Are they sleeping on the roof, working on

the roof? This big question: 25:21

is there a second story? in of the only ways to get light in

David Kertai: 25:24

Well, there are multiple questions here. But is an Assyrian palace a big house? For many purposes, the answer is"yes". And that is not ... like we won't go into Babylon or Babylonia, but there, the royal palace is clearly different from the residential houses that we know from Babylon. The same is not true for Assyria. All Assyrian houses, from the sort of middle class to the highest elite to the royal palace, they all share the same throne room as the central part of their building. So if you're an elite--that assumes mostly men, but it could also be others of course--the way to welcome guests is architecturally by having a throne room. And what is a throne room in Assyria? It's basically a reception room, which is to say it's a big room that we don't really know the specific use of, but it is a room with a Second it's already a huge unknown how light staircase. And that is exceptional, because in almost is through your roof. Yeah, I think all in all, there's very all cases, it's the only staircase that is present in a building. Then the question is, why there in the throne room? A little evidence that there would be a second story on top. And staircase in the throne room does not really make sense if it is meant to provide access to a residential second story, because then everybody, if they want to go to sleep, has to go through the throne room. Probably it is that it provides access to the highest roof of the building. That's true in the royal palace, but it's also true, of course, in middle class or elite houses. We do have texts about the importance of cultic activity on the roof, and that is probably these spaces are humongous. So even a royal bathroom is 30 why it is there. So we have a few sources archaeologically that sort of indicate that a royal throne room would be, let's say, 15 or 18 meters high. And we haven't really discussed square meters, which is bigger than probably the apartment of dimensions yet, but a throne room is like 50 by 10 meters in dimensions. So altogether, that's an apartment building of four or five stories high. It's an enormous space, which also means it's enormous undertaking to reach up to the roof, and there are no other staircases generally in a palace. So all of this suggests that there's no second story in these palaces. some of our listeners.

Jon Taylor: 28:14

I guess we are familiar with the Assyrian palaces primarily from the carved reliefs that were found in them. So can we talk then about what decoration you do find in a palace and what the function of it was? Is this part of a fixed royal formulary? Or did the king get to change it and manipulate it? Do fashions change? How does decoration work?

David Kertai: 28:38

Yeah, there's multiple aspects to that. To begin with, Assyria is quite unique in using stone reliefs as sort of a wallpaper around the monumental buildings. I don't know many other palaces that use that type of decoration. And it's also very typical for Assyria, which, yeah, the emphasis is always on the inside of the rooms, especially of the big reception rooms. So yeah, to reiterate, in the Assyrian palace, you always enter to the biggest room, as if you enter a house into the living room, and only then you have smaller buildings. But it comes from a tradition from Syria, Turkey, where stone reliefs were used much more in an urban setting. But that's not what the Assyrians are interested in. And over time, they add more and more sculpture into the interiors of their rooms. And they start adding more stone sculptures, metal sculpture, pillars. It becomes very baroque place, at least according to the texts. So this is very specifically Assyrian, and that remains until the end of the palace. It is a royal prerogative. There are no elite houses that also use stone reliefs, and so the corpus is quite small. There's a few royal palaces that were also decorated with stone reliefs. Most of them were never finished. So that allows us to compare it somewhat. And then you can see that architecture is quite conservative. It's basically ... we can talk about all kinds of changes, but you can recognise an Assyrian palace easily, but the decoration changes quite a bit from, let's say, Sennacherib's Palace, which is basically entirely full of military campaigns, whatever room we're talking about--the throne room, storage room, the king's private bathroom, or whatever private means in this context--it's all military scenes. Whereas 150 years earlier, in Ashurnasirpal's palace, only the most important gathering spaces had narrative scenes. All the other rooms were decorated with divine figures, gods or other apotropaics or helping. So they were mostly about protecting spaces, rather than showing the king's adventures or the royal court itself. So there you can see a lot of things changing and a lot of personal choices within an architecture that is much more conservative.

Jon Taylor: 31:04

Who are they for these things, primarily? Is it the king, so he can congratulate himself on how great his army is, or how well he's protected? Is it for the courtiers, to impress upon them how powerful the king is? Or is it for visitors, you know, the ambassadors? Are you supposed to terrify the ambassadors before they come and meet the king? What's the point of decoration?

David Kertai: 31:25

It's probably a bit of everything. It is clearly for the courtly elite itself, but it's also for visitors, probably. But some like, as I said, in Sennacherib's palace, why decorate what is clearly a storage space which was probably filled with chairs, tables and such, where nobody would ever... why put all the effort into a room that can't really have been viewed often? Maybe not at all, because it was sort of stacked with maybe libraries or furniture. So there's clearly something in making it even without an audience, and some like the throne rooms were clearly meant to have an audience. And then the question is, yeah, how much time did you have to actually walk? It's not a museum where you slowly walk. Can leisurely take your time. How much cultural baggage do you need to understand what is being shown? So you probably understand an Assyrian army conquering a city, but sometimes there's a much more intellectual level with all kinds of references that probably only the creators would have picked up on, especially the more divine protection and what kind of monsters or divine creatures were shown. Only the expert will really have understand what their symbolism or what the rationale was behind those choices.

Jon Taylor: 32:52

That brings us very nicely onto perhaps the final question. You work in a museum, and you have this perspective. You know, a lot of the major museums at the moment are in the process of thinking about redisplay. How do you think we can best communicate to a visitor what an Assyrian palace was like, what it was for, how it functioned, with the limitations of the material that we have now? Have you seen an example where it's done very well, or the things that we don't tend to do, that we could do?

David Kertai: 33:23

Yeah, the problem is, of course, that the buildings themselves are not really easily visible, or you can't really experience the Assyrian palace anymore. And what we have left are, yeah, fragmentary stone reliefs. So in the British Museum, yeah, you can have the biggest scope of them. But even that doesn't really bring in the dimensions of the spaces that they already decorated. And nobody's going to have an Assyrian throne room reconstructed in all these dimensions. So that almost brings you to other modes of reconstruction, whether it's in drawings or three dimensional to sort of give a sense of the enormity or the scope. When I was teaching this topic, I would find a space that was like 50 meters long and have students walk through it and just to experience how much already walking through a space like that creates an atmosphere of kingship and power differences that's very difficult to replicate if you don't experience it.

Jon Taylor: 34:22

Thanks very much, David. I appreciate your time.

David Kertai: 34:25

Thank you for having me.

Ellie Bennett: 34:26

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Jon Taylor: 34:48

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Ellie Bennett: 36:09

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Jon Taylor: 36:23

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Ellie Bennett: 36:37

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Jon Taylor: 36:53

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