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Theory of the design. ASIRIA.
Their accomplishments are, in spite of the multiplication that is the luck of
the won ones, impressive: Gigantic palaces, sculptorisc ornamentation on scale
of the architecture. Without a doubt, everything would be inspired with
propagandistic aims: it was necessary to convince and to make an impression.
Asirios, which they will be now, who will impose their law to a world that
already had been under other much domination, were not in him strangers. No of
the masters who, about two thousand years ago, had imposed their dominion on
Mesopotámia, could show a similar antiquity to hers. Already in the origins of
history, one is to them established in the region of the Tigris Stop. And when,
in century VIII to of J. C., it writes was put to record in a table the list of
the asirios kings, one was whereupon, by the documentation that was facilitated
to him, it had to write, one after another one, 107 names of sovereigns. To
these number has to add other 9 to arrive at from 116 kings, which they were
those that occupied the throne of Assur, from the origins to the ruin of the
empire. Similar continuity does not occur in any other part and it is to much
distance of the 2 kings of Accad, the 5 of III the dynasty of Ur, the 2 of the I
dynasty of Babylonia and, even, of the 36 kassitas kings. However, it agrees to
indicate that that impressive series asiria does not mean, absolutely, a
continuous independence, far from it the hegemony. Assur and Nínive had to
undergo the foreign conquest: the Acadios and the Sumerians de Ur had trimmings
in these cities and they behaved in them like gentlemen. But Asiria for that
reason did not let subsist. She gave tests of his dynamism when people hers
founded on Anatolia factories, where prospered, from end of III the millennium
and principles of the II, many and flourishing colonies.
Asiria participated in the mesopotámic civilization, and it took it to the
foreigner, to the time that it adopted for himself, without modification some,
its plastic manifestations. The temple of Ishtar, in Assur, has provided us
presargónic statuaries, interchangeable with which we know by Man, the Diyala or
Lagash. The headless statue that sometimes is attributed to Zariqum was entirely
within the tradition of Gudea. Normal thing, since the inhabitants of the high
part of the country did not have reason some to resist to the magical attraction
of a civilization developed in the plain towards where she lowered the river,
whose northern borders occupied they. With Shamsi-Adad I (or Shamsi-Addu) it was
when, surely, Asiria had to acquire conscience of its true force and the new
destiny that the future reserved to him. The tablets of Man have removed to
total light to this sovereign who, during thirty and three years, nonsingular
had the language of a great head, but who, in addition, added the facts to the
words. With the occupation of Man, where he established to one of his children,
to Iasmah-Adad, the king of Assur created an empire that included to Tigris and
the Euphrates and extended beyond those two rivers.
To this time (century XVIII to of J. C.) it is necessary to
attribute, in opinion ours, the origin of the hegemony plan that the dynasty
asiria impelled until limits end of its possibilities and their will. But it did
not obtain it to the first attempt. In order to resist it, it was, in first
place, nothing less than Hammurabi, thus as also the presence of the Kassitas,
together with the one of the Mitannios, more dangerous still, because its
ambition had taken them until Tigris. It is not precise to draw up here the
stages of this conquest of the world, nor the implacable progression that took,
of king in king, and, within each reign, of year in year, more and more far,
towards the West, to the armies of Nínive and Assur. Bastions with indicating
its end points: the Persian gulf and the Elam, to the East; the mountains of
Armenia, in the North; the Mediterranean and the island of Cyprus, in the West;
Egypt, the Tebas of the one hundred doors and the deserts of Arabia, in the
South Never a town had gone so far from its borders in are of conquest. The
civilization and the art marched to the unisonous one this political commotion.
And having itself always not produced the progression with the same rate, it is
possible to be observed the two following great phases: one, from century XIII
to the environs of the year 1000, and another one, from year 1000 to the ruin of
Nínive in 612 before J. C. First it goes from the local and regional
emancipation to the beginning of the great military expeditions outside
Mesopotámia. Two names of sovereigns: Tukulti-Ninurta I (1243-1207), that won to
Babylonia, and Tiglatpileser (1112-1074), that arrived until the Mediterranean.
Second it saw the continuation and extension of the hegemony, harder every time,
and more and more extended, with accelerated March. A true Pleiad of kings
existed that collected campaigns, from Assurnasirpal II (883-859) to
Assurbanipal (668-631), to the final disaster, that is to say, the fall of
Nínive (612 to of J. C.). If it is not had continuously presents/displays east
historical panorama, it is not gotten to include/understand nothing of the
asirios civilization and the art. The development of that and the inspiration of
this are in narrow and direct dependency of which it happened in the
battlefields. It is lived already, in all the line and all the senses of the
term, within the age of the iron. The mercy for the Asirios is a word without
sense. All its will is directed towards the success and this it will be looked
for at all costs.
The Asirios, however, continued being faithful the traditions. Assur, that,
towards this time, is the city which better we know, was populated with
sanctuaries dedicated to the old mesopotámic divinities: Ishtar, Without,
Shamash, Anu and Ea, to which there is to add Adad, God of the storm, and Assur,
that the place of Enlil occupies. Thus, then, all the greater divinities of the
old pantheon were reunited in two triads essentials. For them worthy residences
of kings were prepared. Sometimes these are more imposing by association from
some zigurat. The capital asiria counted three and one fourth raised to
kilometers beyond Tigris, in Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta, city founded by the sovereign
of this name, to commemorate its victory on Babylonia. The reconstruction of
this sacred architecture is difficult, since the monuments have undergone
serious destructions and damages, to which some times have contributed the
restorations. There is no more remedy than to go to the representations that
exist here or there, in the cylinders or impront of cylinders, where one occurs
us, together with the cash settlement of the buildings, the general tone of an
architecture that feels predilection by the pilasters, the towers and the lines
of battlements. We know, in addition, by fragments gathered in the excavations,
that the palace of Tukulti-Ninurta I had the walls decorated with paintings. Is
a subject already well known there, the one of the antithetic animals, located
on both sides of the sacred plant. It now serves this as pretext for a
stylization every greater time and than one separates deliberately from the
nature, not using it to it more than with decorative aims, without excluding,
for that reason, entirely, his symbolic meaning. The lines broken or waved and
the frisks of rosettes constitute, certainly, a language that, of insurance,
would include/understand that contemplated it.
The permanence of ancestral traditions is a fact that
illustrates the relief well, so mentioned, discovered in Assur, in the temple of
Assur. The central personage is a bearded man, whose hairdo and tunic are
furrowed of imbrications. God of the mountain and, simultaneously, divinity of
the vegetation, since, in addition to which leaves to him the tunic, it
maintains with the individual hands branches with buds, to which go to ramonear
goats. On both sides of this reason, treaty in robust style, two feminine
geniuses of small stature and fixed eyes maintain with the hands a glass of
which flows waves that, either fall to earth, or to another glass put in the
ground. All these subjects are mesopotámic: the man, half of whose body it is a
mountain; the antithetic animals ramoneando the branches; the divinities with
manante glass. But the disposition and the execution are enough indictments,
reason why we preferred not to attribute them to a hand asiria, because this one
had shown less lack of skill. All the works indicate that about that time it had
been reached, in effect, great security and, sometimes, an undeniable elegance.
Before disappearing, the civilization asiria, as it was possible to hope,
reflects the characteristics of those tumult events. Everything is gigantic in
her, beginning by the palaces that are between the most extraordinary
architectonic accomplishments of all the times. The
palace of Sargón, in Jorsabad, is in this aspect a characteristic,
insurmountable example as far as amplitude and arrangement, as well as far as
the wealth of the ornamentation and the perfection of the facilities. Record was
raised in a created city of end to end and in a time (six years). The king could
celebrate this triumph in the denominated inscription "of the Fastos": "In that
time, I constructed to a city with [the work] of the towns of the countries that
my hands had put under, that Assur, Nabu and Marduk caused that they were put on
my feet, so that they underwent my yoke, on the foot of the Musri mount, above
of Nínive. |
