Shaming the Enemy in Assyrian Palace Reliefs and Royal Inscriptions

Enemies play a key role in the Assyrian royal inscriptions and palace bas-reliefs: they might even be considered co-protagonists – at least in their prevalence – of the Assyrian king in the verbal and visual narratives related to the war campaigns. The present chapter presents a selection of verbal and visual images within which enemies are not only presented but also represented as a key code of the message the Assyrian king sought to convey. Beyond the too-simplistic idea of images as alleged propaganda, the study contextualizes the representation of the enemy within the Assyrian ideological discourse: images and descriptions of shaming and degradation shape the idea of enemy as “other,” contrasting with the self-centered idea of the god Ashur and his legitimate representative, the Assyrian king. This chapter further examines the question of the audience to whom representations of the humiliated enemy were addressed and the effects on this audience of this type of verbal description and visual representation in the Assyrian sources.