This article presents three rock reliefs of the Parthian era in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, documented in Amadiya/Amedi by Columbia University's Mapping Mesopotamian Monuments survey project in 2013. The paper discusses the iconography, style and date of the reliefs and the methods that the Columbia team used to document them, including photogrammetry, perspectival corrected and perspective controlled stills, and 360° immersive, processed panoramas. At the same time as presenting a reading of the relief imagery, the article offers a preliminary self-reflective consideration of the documentation methods we have been utilizing for the study of rock reliefs in the past seven years. These technological advances, enormously useful for digital image capture, are nevertheless a form of imaging and must be understood as such methodologically. The final results of these kinds of technically advanced images of rock reliefs must rely on modes of visual interpretation that remain subjective and dependent on visual analytical skills based in historical knowledge, stylistic and iconographic analyses, as well as on-site, close up material-tactile studies of surfaces, of carving styles and methods. Finally, taking architectural context and landscape into account, the paper makes the case that the location of the reliefs dating to the Parthian era, at the citadel's entry, guided and inspired the Seljuk era monumental portals of Amadiya/Amedi that were subsequently erected and sculpted in dialogue with the ancient remains.
This article presents the results of excavations conducted at the site of Umm al-Aqarib, in the Dhi Qar Governorate of Iraq, in the years 1999–2002 and 2008–2010. Despite significant practical difficulties, the excavations revealed an Early Dynastic city of major importance, with monumental architecture including two large temples, called here the White Temple and Temple H, and a palace. In interpreting the excavation results, the author argues that Umm al-Aqarib, and not Jokha (Umma) as has previously been thought, was the central settlement of the kingdom of Gišša during the Early Dynastic III period, and that the White Temple, the largest yet known from Early Dynastic Sumer, is to be identified as the temple of Šara, city god of Gišša.
Recent excavations by the Department of Archaeology of the University of Babylon (Iraq) have brought to light the ruins of a temple at Tell al-Deylam, about 30 km south of Babylon. Thanks to a number of inscribed bricks it can securely be identified as “E-Ibbi-Anum”, the temple of Dilbat’s city god Uraš, which confirms earlier attempts to identify the site with that city. The Sumerian text of the inscriptions allows a secure dating of the building to the Kassite period, more precisely, the reign of a king named Kurigalzu (probably I).1
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