School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemAn analysis of the Palace of Sargon II at Khorsabad: its organisation and function( 1994)“Palace of Sargon prefect of Enlil, priest of Assur the mighty king, king of the universe, king of Assyria.....Following the prompting of my heart, at the foot of Mount Musri, I built a city and called its name Dur-Sharrukin.....Palaces of ivory, maple, boxwood, mulberry, cedar and cypress, juniper, pine and pistachio-wood I built therein and erected a bit-hilani, patterned after a Hittite palace, in front of their gates, and beams of cedar and cypress I placed over them.....Whoever destroys the work of my hands, who obliterates my noble deeds, may Assur, the great lord, destroy his name and his seed from the land.” Thus does the proud voice of king Sargon II of Assyria speak out to us across the millennia. Inscribed on tablets hidden in the walls of his royal palace, on the gigantic lammasu figures guarding its entrances and on the paving stones of the city gates, similar messages promise his imprecations to those presumptuous enough to deface his monuments. Unfortunately for this mighty Assyrian king, his exhortation to later generations to preserve his palace's “of ivory and boxwood...” at his newly built capital, Dur-Sharrukin, utterly failed. Barely a year after his new city's dedication in 706 B.C.E., Sargon was killed in battle. His son and successor Sennacherib decided to abandon the not yet complete royal city and move the royal residence and Assyrian capital to the site of Nineveh, where it remained until the fall of the Empire in 612 B.C.E. Dur-Sharrukin, standing ignored and unfinished, would never again capture the attention of an Assyrian monarch. As it slowly disappeared beneath amorphous mounds of earth and stone, so too did its memory drift into myth and oblivion. However, in 1843, after spending almost two thousand years lying deserted and buried in both the earth and the minds of man, the efforts of two Frenchmen digging at the small village of Khorsabad in northern Iraq, brought the “Palace without a rival” of King Sargon II of Assyria into the light of day once more.