Affiliation: St. John's University
Dr. Amy Gansell is Professor of Art History in the Department of Art & Design at St. John’s University, where she serves as the Assistant Department Chair and Coordinator for the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Interdisciplinary Minor. She received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University in 2008. From 2008 to 2010, Dr. Gansell held a full-time position with the US Department of State as the Associate Coordinator for Afghan and Iraqi Cultural Heritage. In this capacity, she worked on diplomatic projects to restore and build professional capacity at the Afghan National Museum, the National Museum of Iraq, and the site of Babylon. Dr. Gansell returned to academic life in 2010 as a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University’s Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, after which she taught art history to art and design students at Pratt Institute and the State University of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT).
Dr. Gansell’s current research focuses on the architecture, art, and artifacts that help to tell the stories of ancient Mesopotamia’s Neo-Assyrian queens (c. 865–612 BCE). Her monograph on this subject is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Dr. Gansell has co-edited CyberResearch on the Ancient Near East and Neighboring Regions (Brill, 2018) and Testing the Canon of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology (Oxford University Press, 2020), and her scholarly essays have appeared in prestigious international journals including the American Journal of Archaeology, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, and the Journal of Archaeological Science. Dr. Gansell’s research and publications have been supported through two National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants as well as a grant from The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TAARI).
In ancient Assyrian art, the body of the rarely depicted queen was generally obscured in loosely draped robes. Evidence for the sexual aspect of her power may, however, be found in small-scale ivory sculptures depicting idealized, fantastical, and nude female figures excavated from the main bedroom suite and surrounding residential areas of the Northwest Palace at Nimrud (near modern Mosul, Iraq). In the ninth and eighth centuries, these ivories adorned furniture and objects that could have passed through royal hands and been contemplated by royal eyes, including those of queens who may have seen themselves in the sculptures. Not only were some figures depicted wearing the same types of necklaces and earrings as queens wore, but, also, the ivories were imported from the Levant—the very land from which many Assyrian queens may have hailed as diplomatic brides. For a queen, a nude ivory could have called to mind her own body and its sexuality. A king might have conflated the ivories’ sexual allure with that of his queen. Considering the iconography and archaeological deposition of the sculptures in relation to royal images, queenly regalia, and palace architecture, the Northwest Palace ivories have the critical potential to illuminate the sexual aspect of Neo-Assyrian queenship and perhaps the sexual bond empowering the imperial couple.
Selected Bibliography
Gansell, Amy. “The Iconography of Ideal Feminine Beauty Represented in the Hebrew Bible and Iron Age Levantine Ivory Sculpture,” pp. 46-70, in Image – Text – Exegesis: Iconographic Interpretation and the Hebrew Bible, ed. J. M. LeMon, et al., New York: Continuum/T&T Clark, 2014.
Gansell, Amy. “Images and Conceptions of Ideal Feminine Beauty in Neo-Assyrian Royal Contexts, c. 883-627 BCE,” pp. 391-420, in Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art, ed. M. Feldman and B. Brown, Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2013.
Free PDFs of many volumes of catalogues: Ivories from Nimrud, The British Institute of Archaeology: https://www.bisi.ac.uk/publications/open-access-publications/ivories-from-nimrud/
The ancient Assyrian Crown of City Walls (the “mural crown”) looks like a wall with crenelated towers that encircles the head. In ancient Mesopotamian culture, it is best known through bas-relief sculptures portraying the seventh-century Assyrian queen Libbali-sharrat, who is shown wearing it as she sits upon a throne. Scholars today recognize it as the crown of Assyrian queenship, at least in her era, the Sargonid dynasty. However, no archaeological example of such a crown survives. Excavations from the ninth- and eighth-century Assyrian queens’ tombs at Nimrud did reveal an array of elaborate gold headdresses, but no mural crown. Therefore, the general, logical consensus is that the mural crown was only worn during the Sargonid dynasty. I, however, look at even more ancient Assyrian images to explore the possibility of a long tradition in which the mural crown was worn by centuries of pre-Sargonid as well as Sargonid queens as an enduring statement of Assyrian queenship. Why did Nimrud’s queens have so many other headdresses, and why have no archaeological examples of a mural crown been found? I theorize that queens — just as Queen Elizabeth II did — may have owned many crowns, one mural crown was passed down for centuries from queen to queen until the fall of the empire.
Selected Bibliography
Gansell, Amy. 2018. “Dressing the Neo-Assyrian Queen in Identity and Ideology: Elements and Ensembles from the Royal Tombs at Nimrud,” American Journal of Archaeology 122: 65-100; for online supplemental image gallery and appendix, see: https://ajaonline.org/article/3574/.
Hussein, Muzahim Mahmoud. 2016. Nimrud: The Queens’ Tombs. Edited and translated by Mark Altaweel. Edited with additional notes by McGuire Gibson. Baghdad: Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage; Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago; free download of book: https://isac.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/shared/docs/misc-2016-Nimrud-Queens-Tombs-web.pdf
Maier, Christl. 2012. “Crown.” In Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, edited by Dale C. Allison, Jr. et al., 1072–76. Boston: Walter de Gruyter.
Nearly three thousand years ago, at the ancient site of Nimrud (near modern Mosul, Iraq), a succession of ten Neo-Assyrian kings reigned in collaboration with their queens from the magnificence of the Northwest Palace, the seat of the empire and center of their world. Too often overshadowed by the well documented legacy of Neo-Assyrian kings, this presentation illuminates the queens who reigned with them. I focus on the queens of Nimrud’s Northwest Palace (c. 865–705 BCE) because it is here, in the late 1980s, that Iraqi archaeologists uncovered their partially intact royal tombs. The tombs contained heaps of precious jewelry and regalia, along with cuneiform inscriptions, and even some skeletal remains. Putting together these artifacts of death, and connecting them to the art, architecture, and written record of the palace, we can learn about the names, lives, appearance, royal duties, and religious roles of the queens. Piece by piece, and layer by layer, across about 150 years of evidence, we discover the beauty, power, and presence of Nimrud’s Northwest Palace queens in life, death, and for eternity.
Selected Bibliography
Gansell, Amy. 2018. “Dressing the Neo-Assyrian Queen in Identity and Ideology: Elements and Ensembles from the Royal Tombs at Nimrud,” American Journal of Archaeology 122: 65-100; for online supplemental image gallery and appendix, see: https://ajaonline.org/article/3574/.
Hussein, Muzahim Mahmoud. 2016. Nimrud: The Queens’ Tombs. Edited and translated by Mark Altaweel. Edited with additional notes by McGuire Gibson. Baghdad: Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage; Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago; free download of book: https://isac.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/shared/docs/misc-2016-Nimrud-Queens-Tombs-web.pdf
Oates, Joan, and David Oates. Nimrud: An Assyrian Imperial City Revealed. London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 2001.
