Read on Twitter
If you’re someone like me who sometimes has a difficult time picturing ancient history, here are some of my favorite and accurate artistic representations/photos of ancient Mesopotamia
This drawing is my favorite of all time, it shows the ancient citadel of Dūr Šarru kîn, the capital of the Neo-Assyrian empire under King Sargon II (Loud and Altman 1938)
Here’s another artistic reconstruction of the palace complex from the Oriental Institute of Chicago:
A.H. Layard's artistic rendition of the inner palace and throne room of a palace in ancient Nineveh:
Sketch of two Lamassu deities excavated from the earth in Nimrud:
Architect Félix Thomas’ reconstruction of the gates of Dūr Šarru Kîn (right), pictured here next to the rebuilt Nergal Gate in Nineveh (left)
This is a 4,000 year old street from the ancient city of Ur, pictured here with Iraqi workers holding pottery of the 2nd millennium. This may not be too far off from what a Sumerian city could have looked like.
An artist’s drawing of domestic life of prehistoric peoples living in modern day Jordan (Eric Carlson)
The ruins of the Ziggurat of Babylon in 1920, compared to a plaster reconstruction of the 7-story structure by German assyriologist Eckhard Unger
Peggy Sanders’ (1982) painting of the East Mound of Nippur, compared to a photo of the real mound, taken by John Sanders (1974)
An artistic reconstruction of an Early Dynastic temple from Sumer
Modeled reconstructions of the city of Uruk, Sumer, from the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut:
a reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, now in the Pergamon, Berlin
A reconstructions (of debated accuracy) of the Adad (right) and Mashki (left) gates of Nineveh, photographed by National Geographic. These gates were destroyed by ISIS in 2015.
most of these images were taken from the Oriental Insitute’s publication “Picturing the Past,” (2012) by Jack Green, Emily Teeter, and John A. Larson. you can download the publication here: https://oi.uchicago.edu/research/publications/oimp/oimp-34-picturing-past-imaging-and-imagining-ancient-middle-east
Other sources/citations too long to list here, so ask and you shall receive!
