Pride, Pomp And Circumstance: Palace, Court And Household In Assyria 879–612 BCE

Abstract

An essential component in understanding the structure and organisation of the Assyrian imperial court is its physical manifestation. The court as a social institution was set in the spatial framework of the royal palace. Perhaps the most important and best known example of an Assyrian royal residence is the so-called North-West Palace at Nimrud. The North-West Palace is a particularly suitable starting point for a study of the physical setting of the Assyrian court for several reasons. The detailed archaeological record of the physical setting of the Assyrian royal court may be connected to an extensive number of written sources to help form a comprehensive image of the social hierarchy and state protocol in relation to its spatial component. The cold building and the rich food and drink consumed in the 'women's quarters' seem to have taken their toll on the residents. Keywords: Assyrian imperial court; Nimrud; North-West Palace; palace; women's quarters

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 81 citations exist upstream.