Inscribing Kingship in Assyria

When the Northwest Palace of Ashurnasirpal II was constructed, its stone walls, sculpture, and other features were engraved with the king’s inscriptions. How were these inscriptions produced? Who created them and what was the process of their production? The quality of their craftsmanship points to expert artisans and their textual contents are the outcome of Assyrian scholarship. There are explicit references to the production of such inscriptions in Assyrian documents and iconography. But these are normally oblique references in texts and depictions that are concerned with other matters. This book presses beyond such references, to reconstruct the process of producing the Northwest Palace inscriptions on the basis of phenomena observed in the inscriptions themselves. By analyzing textual variation among numerous duplicates of the Standard Inscription and the text on stone colossi, this book attempts to infer a process of their production, from the composition of separate texts for different uses, to the final incising of the texts into the stone architectural components in the Northwest Palace. The result is a contribution to our understanding of how the Assyrians produced and transmitted their kings’ propaganda.