Enemy punishment and the creation of the Assyrian world: Ashurbanipal’s Teumman-Dunanu narratives in reliefs, epigraphs, and prisms

This dissertation examines the representation of enemy punishment in prisms, reliefs, epigraphs, and epigraph tablets of the Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (c. 668-627 BCE). The ‘Teumman-Dunanu’ narratives which form the basis of this study use the events of military campaigns waged against Elamite king Teumman in 653 BCE, and subsequently against a number of Teumman’s allies in southern Babylonia, as a basis to construct narratives about enemy punishment and its role in an ordered Assyrian world. I deal with a small group of sources from the Assyrian city of Nineveh: the reliefs of Room XXXIII of the Southwest Palace, and Rooms I and (to a lesser extent) S1 of the North Palace, Epigraph Text A and fragmentary parallel epigraph texts, and Prism Editions B and A. These sources have received varying degrees of attention, with the Southwest Palace reliefs of Teumman’s beheading a particularly well-explored topic. However, I demonstrate that even this well-studied depiction can be understood with greater complexity when read with the other narratives examined here and in the wider context of the theme of ‘enemy punishment’. The aim of this study is twofold: 1) to investigate how we should understand the intellectual world in which these sources were created, and 2) to carry out ‘close-readings’ of these sources in order to understand how enemy punishment functioned to construct and maintain that Assyrian world. To this end, the first part of this dissertation examines the knowledge, function, and worldview of Ashurbanipal’s court. The second part examines the Teumman-Dunanu narratives in detail, first presenting an overview of their context and narrative content, and then carrying out close-readings in various, interrelated areas. The study demonstrates that it is correct to consider such sources as both expressive and generative of Assyrian elite realities—about themselves, the gods with whom they were in communication, and the enemy other. The study further demonstrates that close-reading of related narrative sequences is a fruitful means of detecting new meanings in the narratives themselves, and of understanding the wider Assyrian world