Coordinates: 36°30′34″N 43°13′46″E / 36.509537°N 43.229315°E
Dur-Sharrukin ("Fortress of Sargon"), present day Khorsabad, was the Assyrian capital in the time of Sargon II of Assyria. Khorsabad is a village in northern Iraq, 15 km northeast of Mosul, which is still today inhabited by Assyrians. The great city was entirely built in the decade preceding 706 BC. After the unexpected death of Sargon in battle, the capital was shifted 20 km south to Nineveh.
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Sargon II ruled from 722-705 BCE. In 717, Sargon ordered the construction of a new palace-city at the confluence of the Tigris and the Greater Zab rivers. The demands for timber and other materials and craftsmen, who came from as far as coastal Phoenicia, are documented in contemporary Assyrian letters. The debts of construction workers were nullified in order to attract a sufficient labour force. The land in the environs of the town was taken under cultivation, and olive groves were planted to increase Assyria's deficient oil-production. The great city was entirely built in the decade preceding 706 BC; after the unexpected death of Sargon, the capital was shifted back 20 km south to Nineveh.
The court moved to Dur-Sharrukin in 706 BC, although it was not completely finished yet. Sargon was killed during a battle in 705. His son and successor Sennacherib abandoned the project, and relocated the capital with its administration to the city of Nineveh. The city was never completed and was finally abandoned a century later when the Assyrian empire fell. [1]
The town was of rectangular layout and measured 1760 * 1635 m. The enclosed area comprised 3 square kilometres, or 700 acres. The length of the walls was 16280 Assyrian units, which corresponded to the numerical value of Sargon's name. The city walls were massive and 157 towers protected its sides. Seven gates entered the city from all directions. A walled terrace contained temples and the royal palace. The main temples were dedicated to the gods Nabu, Shamash and Sin, while Adad, Ningal and Ninurta had smaller shrines. A temple tower, ziqqurat, was also constructed. The palace was adorned with sculptures and wall reliefs, and the gates were flanked with winged bulls shedu statues weighing up to 40 tons. Sargon supposedly lost at least one of these winged bulls in the river.
In addition to the great city, there was a royal hunting park and a garden that included "all the aromatic plants of Hatti[2] and the fruit-trees of every mountain", a "record of power and conquest", as Robin Lane Fox has observed.[3] Surviving correspondence mentions the moving of thousands of young fruit trees, quinces, almonds, apples and medlars.[4]
"On the central canal of Sargon's garden stood a pillared pleasure-pavilion which looked up to a great topographic creation: a man-made Garden Mound. This Mound was planted with cedars and cypresses and was modelled after a foreign landscape, the Amanus mountains in north Syria, which had so amazed the Assyrian kings. In their flat palace-gardens they built a replica of what they had encountered."[5]
Dur-Sharrukin is roughly a square, one mile on each side, covering around 280 hectares. The border was marked by a city wall 24 meters thick with a stone foundation pierced by 7 massive gates. A mound in the northeast section marks the location of the palace of Sargon II. At the time of its construction, the village on the site was named Maganuba. [6]
The site was first noticed by the French Consul General at Mosul, Paul-Émile Botta in 1842. Botta believed, however, that Khorsabad was the site of biblical Nineveh. The site was excavated by Botta in 1842-44, joined in the later stages by artist Eugène Flandin. [7] [8] Victor Place resumed the excavations from 1852 to 1855. [9] [10]
A significant number of the items recovered by the French at Dur-Sharrukin were lost in two river shipping incidents. In 1853, Place attempted to move two 30-ton statues and other material to Paris from Khorsabad on a large boat and four rafts. All of the vessels except two of the rafts were scuttled by pirates. In 1855, Place and Jules Oppert attempted to transport the remaining finds from Dur-Sharrukin, as well as material from other sites being worked by the French, mainly Nimrud. Almost all of the collection, over 200 crates, was lost in the river. [11] Surviving artifacts from this excavation were taken to the Louvre in Paris.
The site of Khorsabad was excavated 1928-1935 by American archaeologists from the Oriental Institute in Chicago. Work in the first season was led by Edward Chiera and concentrated on the palace area. A colossal bull estimated to weigh 40 tons was uncovered outside the throne room. It was found split into three large fragments. The torso alone weighed about 20 tons. This was shipped to Chicago. The preparation and shipment of the bull back to the Oriental Institute was incredibly arduous. The remaining seasons were led by Gordon Loud and Hamilton Darby. Their work examined one of the city gates, continued work at the palace, and excavated extensively at the palaces temple complex. [12] [13] [14] [15] Since Dur-Sharrukin was a single period site, and was orderly evacuated after the death of Sargon II, few individual objects were found. The primary discoveries from Khorsabad are within the study of Assyrian art and architecture.
In 1957, archaeologists from the Iraqi Department Antiquities, led by Fuad Safar excavated at the site, uncovering the temple of Sibitti. [16]
KHORSABAD, a Turkish village in the vilayet of Mosul, 121 m. N.E. of that town, and almost 20 m. N. of ancient Nineveh, on the left bank of the little river Kosar. Here, in 1843, P. E. Botta, then French consul at Mosul, discovered the remains of an Assyrian palace and town, at which excavations were conducted by him and Flandin in 1843-1844, and again by Victor Place in 1851-1855. The ruins proved to be those of the town of Dur-Sharrukin, "Sargon's Castle," built by Sargon, king of Assyria, as a royal residence. The town, in the shape of a rectangular parallelogram, with the corners pointing approximately toward the cardinal points of the compass, covered 741 acres of ground. On the north-west side, half within and half without the circuit of the walls, protruding into the plain like a great bastion, stood the royal palace, on a terrace, 45 ft. in height, covering about 25 acres. The palace proper was divided into three sections, built around three sides of a large court on the south-east or city side, into which opened the great outer gates, guarded by winged stone bulls, each section containing suites of rooms built around several smaller inner courts. In the centre was the serai, occupied by the king and his retinue, with an extension towards the north, opening on a large inner court, containing the public reception rooms, elaborately decorated with sculptures and historical inscriptions, representing scenes of hunting, worship, feasts, battles, and the like. The harem, with separate provisions for four wives, occupied the south corner, the domestic quarters, including stables, kitchen, bakery, wine cellar, &c., being at the east corner, to the north-east of the great entrance court. In the west corner stood a temple, with a stagetower (ziggurat) adjoining. The walls of the rooms, which stood only to the height of one storey, were from 9 to 25 ft. in thickness, of clay, faced with brick, in the reception rooms wainscoted with stone slabs or tiles, elsewhere plastered, or, in the harem, adorned with fresco paintings and arabesques. Here and there the floors were formed of tiles or alabaster blocks, but in general they were of stamped clay, on which were spread at the time of occupancy mats and rugs. The exterior of the palace wall exhibited a system of groups of half columns and stepped recesses, an ornament familiar in Babylonian architecture. The palace and city were completed in 707 B.C., and in 706 Sargon took up his residence there. He died the following year, and palace and city seem to have been abandoned shortly thereafter. Up to 1909 this was the only Assyrian palace which had ever been explored systematically, in its entirety, and fortunately it was found on the whole in an admirable state of preservation. An immense number of statues and bas-reliefs, excavated by Botta, were transported to Paris, and formed the first Assyrian museum opened to the world. The objects excavated by Place, together with the objects found by Fresnel's expedition in Babylonia and a part of the results of Rawlinson's excavations at Nineveh, were unfortunately lost in the Tigris, on transport from Bagdad to Basra. Flandin had, however, made careful drawings and copies of all objects of importance from Khorsabad. The whole material was published by the French government in two monumental publications.
See P. E. Botta and E. Flandin, Monument de Ninive (Paris, 18 491850; 5 vols. 400 plates); Victor Place, Ninive et l'Assyrie, avec des essais de restauration par F. Thomas (Paris, 1866-1869; 3 vols.).
(J . P. PE.)
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