Assault and Abduction: the Fate of the Royal Image in the Ancient Near East

Abstract

MethodologyThe implications of deconstruction for the study of art history have recently been discussed by a number of scholars, who have called for a self-conscious semiotic or politicizing approach to art-historical research, including a deconstruction of historical narratives presented as epistemological truths, and the incorporation of the present context within analysis. 1 Deconstructive criticism is a method of reading and interpreting. Its main premise is the semiotic view that all forms of writing, including historical, are partial, because they are motivated by their own interests and desires, and affected by their own blindness." Since it is concerned with the conditions and assumptions that frame discourse, deconstruction can be a political approach, setting out to dismantle established hierarchical relations, or methodological givens, on which interpretation depends, and to situate interpretation within its own socio-political sphere. The traditional philosophical opposition of concepts or terms such as speech/writing, philosophylliterature, mind/body, allows one category or term to dominate the other. Thus, the structure of these oppositions is one of conflict and subordination, and the revealing and undoing of the positions and conclusions generated by the dependence on such oppositions is the aim of deconstruction. 3 This entails, first of all, the identification of such bi-polar oppositions, and an investigation of the factors that go into their construction. For instance, feminist criticism uses this approach to point to the ways various discourses have created the concept of man by casting woman as the negative opposite.Historical narratives, conceived in this way, can no longer be considered immune to the hegemonic influence of economic or political domination. A postcolonial perspective is now being developed by cultural historians and literary theorists who have challenged what allegedly objective and realistic western discourses have to say about the history and cultures of 'subordinate' peoples." In this view, Otherness constitutes the symbolic domain of social identification, and the articulation of cultural difference -the definition of alien culturesalways involves alterity.The East has long been placed in the position of the Other in western discourse. Beginning with the writings of the ancient Greeks, western culture has been portrayed as the norm, while the East has been used as the negative foil against which to compare it. Several Classical scholars have investigated how the casting of the Persians in the barbaric role was necessary in order to invent

Imperialist Networks: Ancient Assyria and the United States

“…The lack of recognition on the part of the Assyrians must have been so offensive that the final strike on the haughty imperial center and its lavish palaces went beyond mere destruction. This time around, the enemies took revenge by annihilating one substantiation of the kings and courtiers themselves: they carefully hacked out the eyes and faces of Assyrians rendered in victorious poses on the wall reliefs (Bahrani, 1995). …”

The king's head

“…The destruction of images and monuments that took place in Mesopotamia can be seen as a supernatural destruction, an annihilation of a record, which in the end was a fate worse than death in a society whose greatest ideology was that immortality is achieved through history, monuments and memory. 13 Bahrani 1995. "Bahrani 1995…”

How Idrimi came to London: Diplomacy and the division of archaeological finds in the 1930s

“…7 In her discussion of Neo-Assyrian palace reliefs Bahrani, 8 and other scholars such as Irene Winter, 9 have emphasised that the separation of text and image is an entirely artificial construct of modern scholarship deeply influenced by classical and Judeo-Christian/Western ideals in a discipline still lagging behind in addressing its own history through post-colonial critical methods. 10 Curses on royal statues often invokejust as the one on Idrimi's face -the sterilization of an aggressor or the destruction of his progeny. According to Bahrani this is based on the lex talionis, in that the destruction of a king's image endangered his very being.…”