chicago | The Bible relates the tale of a battle in 701 B.C. for the city of Jerusalem, waged by the Assyrian King Sennacherib.
The Bible tells it from the side of the Jewish King Hezekiah, and says “an angel of the Lord went forth and slew 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians,” driving their king away.
King Sennacherib, however, describes a different version in words recorded on a 2,700-year-old, six-sided clay post that now stands in the newest gallery of the museum of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute.
“(Hezekiah) like a caged bird, I shut up in Jerusalem, his royal city. The terrifying splendor of my majesty overcame him, and he sent rich tribute to me,” to lift the siege, the tiny cuneiform text reads.
The clay post, hardly bigger than a loaf of bread, is one of several items in the Oriental Institute’s collection that reference events or people in the Bible. It’s also an example of how historical accounts of the same events can be very different.
“There’s definitely spin about who won, even though they both agree on the fundamental fact that the city was not — at this time — conquered by the Assyrians,” museum director Geoff Emberling said .
The institute’s new gallery, “Empires in the Fertile Crescent: Ancient Assyria, Anatolia and Israel,” holds more than 1,000 artifacts from the region, which was named for its crescent shape stretching from the shores of the Mediterranean on the west, along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers toward the Persian Gulf.
The artifacts, up to 8,000 years old, illustrate the power and majesty of the ancient civilizations that correspond to parts of modern-day Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Israel, along with the ways the cultures influenced one another’s religious, artistic and literary development.
The new exhibit opens with a series of beautifully carved reliefs from an eighth-century B.C.E. palace. Some show bearded men bringing riches and horses to the court of King Sargon II of Assyria; in others, the king is shown riding through a pine forest in his chariot, his head shielded from the sun by a servant holding a parasol.
The reliefs would have lined the walls to a private chamber of the king, accessed only by trusted staff and family members, said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute.
“We’ve set them up in such a way as to give museum visitors a real sense of what it would have been like to walk down this corridor … into the most private chambers of the king,” Stein said. “It’s the equivalent of standing in the Oval Office.”
Another highlight is a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the few pieces in the United States, in which the writer praises the virtues of humility and of studying the Torah.
The Oriental Institute is a major center for U.S. study of the ancient Near East, and most of its collection was excavated in the first half of the 20th century, when University of Chicago archaeologists conducted large-scale expeditions.
The artifacts are especially valuable because, unlike objects bought on the art market, the museum can trace exactly when and where they were found and what other objects accompanied them, Stein said. Excavations in what is now Israel reveal “a picture of a very cosmopolitan culture,” around 1,300 B.C.E., that was influenced by Egypt, Greece, Anatolia and Mesopotamia, he said.
“It’s knowing the archaeological context that gives you that tremendous added dimension of knowledge.”