Biblical Archaeology Review

This article was written while I was a guest scholar with the research group Picture Power at Scholion, Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies, The Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, fall term 2012–2013.

I. Winter, “When/What Is a Portrait? Royal Images of the Ancient Near East,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 153 (2009), pp. 254–270.

I.J. Winter, chapter 2: “Art in Empire: The Royal Image and the Visual Dimensions of Assyrian Ideology,” On Art in the Ancient East, vol. 1 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), pp. 78–91.

Recalling the bud and lotus garland above the enthroned king on the Ahiram sarcophagus, also painted in tri-color.

The king and crown prince appear again in the eastern entrance to the Tripylon. Under a baldachin the king sits on his throne borne by the peoples of the empire, holding lotus blossom and staff. The crown prince also holds a lotus blossom. The faces of both royal figures are mutilated, and the king’s lotus was erased in an act of propagandistic iconoclasm. The mutilators were fully conscious of the lotus’s significance. It must have signified the continuity of the ruling house.

Irene Winter has shown that as a result of Assyrian expansion in north-Syria monumental architectural form and relief decorations, typically Syrian, were incorporated in Assyrian architecture. Select individual motifs and style were imported, among them the lotus flower. I.J. Winter, “Art as Evidence for Interaction: Relations Between the Assyrian Empire and North Syria,” in H.-J. Nissen, and J. Renger, eds., Mesopotamien und seine Nachbarn, Berliner Beiträge zum Vorderen Orient 1 (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1982), pp. 355–382.

Moreover, in the ancient Semitic languages the flower-scepter appears together with the seat in word-pairs employed in poetic language which signify kingship (compare Psalms 45:7). Y. Avishur, Stylistic Studies of Word Pairs in Biblical and Ancient Semitic Literature, AOAT 210 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1984), pp. 579–600.

See Ze’ev Meshel, Kuntillet ‘Ajrud (Jerusalem: IES, 2012), p. 69. Nadav Na’aman believes he is Jeroboam II (c. 787–748 B.CE.). See “The Inscriptions of Kuntillet ‘Ajrud Through the Lens of Historical Research,” Ugarit Forschungen 43 (2011), pp. 300–324.

P. Beck, “The Art of Palestine During the Iron Age II: Local Traditions and External Influences,” in Christoph Uehlinger, ed., Images as Media, Sources for the Cultural History of the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean: 1st Millennium (OBO 175) (Fribourg and Göttingen, 2000), pp. 165–183.