Camels in the Assyrian Bas-Reliefs

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to give a brief survey of the representations of camels in the Assyrian bas-reliefs of the first millennium BC. The available evidence consists of actual sculptures in museum collections and also of original drawings made by the excavators, who did not bring back all the reliefs they found, but did make drawings to record many of those now still in the soil. The British Museum holds the drawings made by Austen Henry Layard and draughtsmen working under him at Nineveh and Kalḫu (Nimrud). These, conventionally referred to as Or.Dr. (Original Drawings), are mounted in seven bound volumes in the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities, and copies made from a selection of these were published in Layard, Monuments I [steel engravings] and II [lithographs]. The appropriate drawings have been published, together with those actual reliefs which were removed from the sites and which match them, in the volumes by R. D. Barnett and his collaborators on the sculptures of Tiglath-pileser III, Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal. The appropriate references to these volumes are given in the entries below. Drawings made by Eugène Flandin of the sculptures of Sargon found at Khorsabad are kept in a bound volume in the Département des Antiquités Orientales in the Louvre, and have been published in Albenda, Sargon. Steel engravings taken from these were published in Botta and Flandin, Monument. Photographs of the actual reliefs from Khorsabad dispersed in different museums, which have appeared in various publications, are republished in the volume by Albenda.

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