Dr. Avary Taylor (NELC)
In the first half of the first millennium BCE, the Assyrian Empire emerged as the dominant political force in ancient West Asia. Ashurnasirpal II (883–859), a king who laid the foundations for later imperial expansion, built a new palace at Kalḫu (present-day Nimrud, Iraq), the walls of which were lined with large stone orthostats carved in relief. These formulaic, larger-than-life images of the king, supernatural beings, attendants, and stylized trees formed a coherent, tightly controlled, and ideologically saturated visual program. Unexpected and easily missed, however, are the tiny decorative and figural embellishments incised into the garments of these figures, which diverge strikingly in scale and subject from the monumental reliefs they inhabit.
This paper considers the minute garment imagery not as subordinate ornament but as an active component of palatial experience. Drawing on phenomenology and miniature studies, I argue that their diminutive size and unanticipated content slowed movement, invited close looking, and elicited affective responses that shaped the viewer’s material encounters. So small they could be covered by a hand and prone to vanish in dim light, these details necessitated an attentive intimacy markedly different from the routinized viewing prompted by the monumental imagery’s repetition. I explore how such encounters may have intensified the palace’s apotropaic force—or, conversely, opened a potential to subvert it.