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| "Ashurbanipal", by Saadya Jaffa Museum, Israel October 5 – December 30, 2017 Curator: Ilan Garibi “Strap your sword upon a hero's thigh...” (Psalms 45: 4) |
The king depicted here is not my hero. He is, however, the hero of my hero.
My hero is a Jewish poet who lived in the 7th century BCE in exile in Babylon, then moved to Jerusalem: one of the early Zionists. The poetry he wrote in both locations was to shape Jewish religious experience down through the ages, and many of his verses, whole and in fragments, have made their way into central portions of the Hebrew prayerbook. In their own day too they influenced contemporary Hebrew literary productions such as the Book of Yonah. Yes indeed: a hero of mine, all around.
His hero — for he uses that word to describe him in Psalm 45, a poem written for this king in the year 663 BCE, in Nineveh, on the occasion of his 'wedding' with the daughter of Tyre — was King Ashurbanipal: the last great ruler of the Assyrian Empire, and by his own account the first truly literate one, who could read scripts in Sumerian and the older forms of Akkadian.
My hero is a Jewish poet who lived in the 7th century BCE in exile in Babylon, then moved to Jerusalem: one of the early Zionists. The poetry he wrote in both locations was to shape Jewish religious experience down through the ages, and many of his verses, whole and in fragments, have made their way into central portions of the Hebrew prayerbook. In their own day too they influenced contemporary Hebrew literary productions such as the Book of Yonah. Yes indeed: a hero of mine, all around.
His hero — for he uses that word to describe him in Psalm 45, a poem written for this king in the year 663 BCE, in Nineveh, on the occasion of his 'wedding' with the daughter of Tyre — was King Ashurbanipal: the last great ruler of the Assyrian Empire, and by his own account the first truly literate one, who could read scripts in Sumerian and the older forms of Akkadian.
Ashurbanipal's military conquests created an empire of greater geographical extent than any that had existed before; he also assembled what was perhaps the world's first great royal library. To that end he employed an army of scribes to collect and copy ancient texts from temples of all the peoples that fell to his rule (a favorite being The Epic of Gilgamesh). One of those scribes, so I maintain, was a young Jewish poet — my hero, and the author of most of the psalms that bear the attribution "Bnei Korah" in their opening verse.
Of course this parallelism is hardly decisive for the identification of the king, if that was all there is. But it's an indication of being in the right zone, and one day, if I live, I'll spell out the whole bloody argument about the ten Bnei Korah poems and their unitary author and what was going on in those years.
Now back to this particular paperfold hanging in the Jaffa Museum. Ashurbanipal's prowess and virility and might are beyond doubt and he was more than a capable scholar-soldier. Yet this man, like other great emperors before and since, like Cyrus and Alexander and Caesar and Napoleon, leaves me entirely cold.
I've depicted him in as stiff and as stylized a way as I could, in high relief, blending an origami aesthetic with a Mesopotamian one so as to echo in paper some of what was done in stone. And stylized those representations certainly were. Just as from the epithets and self-descriptions alone it can be hard to tell one Assyrian king from another who lived centuries before, so with some of the sculpted reliefs, it's as if all these rulers were born with the same rounded eyes & brows, sported the same hairdos and had the same blocky beards: every one of them patterned, evidently, to a template they thought divine. "For this, Elohim, your God, annointed you in oil of joy above your peers."
Saadya Sternberg
August 2017
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postscript (September)
I had the museum to myself for a few minutes during the day for delivering the artworks, and slipped into the Antiquities section to see how my “Ashby” stacked up against some of the old things there. The objects in the cabinets are from an earlier period (13th century BCE) when the empire ruling here was Egypt rather than Assyria, and “Israel” was the name of just one people among several then flourishing in Canaan. Still I could not resist the juxtaposition.
Post-postscript (December)
Here are the texts in the Assyrian annals, paralleling the lines from psalm 45 that recount the same event: the taking posession of the "daughter of Tyre". Being able to firmly state the identity of the king in the psalm and the event it describes is what allows us (me) to give an exact date to the composition of this poem.
Psalm 45 /// equivalents in /// Historical Prism Inscriptions of Ashurbanipal, Edition B
Bat tsor /// His [Ba'ali, King of Tyre's] daughter
Kol kbuda bat melech pnima /// his heavy tribute [ka-bid-tu] I received
Betulot ahareha, re'oteha, muvaot lach /// and his nieces he brought before me to be ladies in waiting.
Some of the other idioms from earlier in the psalm are also similar from the Assyrian annals, e.g:
Hitzecha shinunim amim tahtecha yiplu /// Against Egypt and Ethiopia I sharpened my weapons and established my authority.
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| "And your majesty: conquer, ride on ... Your arrows, pointed ..." (Ps. 45: 5-6) Ashurbanipal hunting on a horse with a stylus tucked into his belt. Photo: British Museum |
Of course this parallelism is hardly decisive for the identification of the king, if that was all there is. But it's an indication of being in the right zone, and one day, if I live, I'll spell out the whole bloody argument about the ten Bnei Korah poems and their unitary author and what was going on in those years.
Now back to this particular paperfold hanging in the Jaffa Museum. Ashurbanipal's prowess and virility and might are beyond doubt and he was more than a capable scholar-soldier. Yet this man, like other great emperors before and since, like Cyrus and Alexander and Caesar and Napoleon, leaves me entirely cold.
I've depicted him in as stiff and as stylized a way as I could, in high relief, blending an origami aesthetic with a Mesopotamian one so as to echo in paper some of what was done in stone. And stylized those representations certainly were. Just as from the epithets and self-descriptions alone it can be hard to tell one Assyrian king from another who lived centuries before, so with some of the sculpted reliefs, it's as if all these rulers were born with the same rounded eyes & brows, sported the same hairdos and had the same blocky beards: every one of them patterned, evidently, to a template they thought divine. "For this, Elohim, your God, annointed you in oil of joy above your peers."
Saadya Sternberg
August 2017
------------
postscript (September)
I had the museum to myself for a few minutes during the day for delivering the artworks, and slipped into the Antiquities section to see how my “Ashby” stacked up against some of the old things there. The objects in the cabinets are from an earlier period (13th century BCE) when the empire ruling here was Egypt rather than Assyria, and “Israel” was the name of just one people among several then flourishing in Canaan. Still I could not resist the juxtaposition.
I made a few more studies in this series, all too late to make it into this show. Here's one that did make it into the Zaragoza museum (EMOZ) 2020 exhibit.
