Relief fragment: cavalryman leading his horse beside a stream

Relief fragment: cavalryman leading his horse beside a stream

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This relief fragment dates to the time of the Assyrian king Sennacherib (r. 704-681 B.C.), and comes from the great Southwest Palace, called by Sennacherib the "Palace Without Rival," at Nineveh in northern Iraq. It shows an Assyrian soldier leading a horse beside a large river, and comes originally from a much larger scene depicting an Assyrian campaign that filled a room of the palace. The soldier is equipped in typical Assyrian fashion with a high conical helmet, a short spear, a bow (seen with quiver on his back), and a short sword, worn at the hip and apparently attached to a strap running across the chest. The body armor, worn over typical Assyrian male clothing of a tunic and wrap, consists of scales that were made of leather or metal, and the hatched pattern seen on the legs above the high boots also represents some kind of protective covering. In his left hand the soldier holds the rein by which he leads the horse. The horse itself wears an elaborate harness, including ornamented cheek-pieces, a crescent-shaped crest rising from the top of the head, and a large tassel at chest-height. Horses were a key part of the Assyrian military, and some campaigns to the empire’s north and east were even fought for the purpose of acquiring them. An unusual characteristic of later Assyrian palace reliefs depicting military campaigns is that they are filled with landscape imagery. In this case, a rushing river is shown as very rich because it is filled with fish. The fish appear to our eyes ‘above’ the water. Their completeness is the standard Assyrian solution to showing animals or objects underwater. Although overlapping and other devices were used extensively in the Assyrian reliefs to indicate spatial arrangements and create depth of field, showing elements complete and as they would appear unobstructed was often prioritized. The location of the campaign is uncertain, though other reliefs from the room suggest that the river may be the Tigris. They also show the river running through hilly and heavily wooded country, indicating an area to the north of the Assyrian heartland. Below the river the trees and landscape were depicted upside-down, a device used to show that the river ran through a steep valley.

Ancient Near Eastern Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Relief fragment: cavalryman leading his horse beside a streamRelief fragment: cavalryman leading his horse beside a streamRelief fragment: cavalryman leading his horse beside a streamRelief fragment: cavalryman leading his horse beside a streamRelief fragment: cavalryman leading his horse beside a stream

The Met's Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art cares for approximately 7,000 works ranging in date from the eighth millennium B.C. through the centuries just beyond the emergence of Islam in the seventh century A.D. Objects in the collection were created by people in the area that today comprises Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean coast, Yemen, and Central Asia. From the art of some of the world's first cities to that of great empires, the department's holdings illustrate the beauty and craftsmanship as well as the profound interconnections, cultural and religious diversity, and lasting legacies that characterize the ancient art of this vast region.