Ninive. Il Palazzo senza eguali di Sennacherib

Turin, Archivio di Stato, July-September 2007

At the end of the 8th century B.C. and in the heart of the Assyrian empire, in that Nineveh mentioned in the Bible for its grandeur and subsequent ruin, Sennacherib founded a splendid residence, decorated according to the Assyrian tradition with a cycle of very interesting bas-reliefs. The volume presents the results of a documentation campaign inside the palace royal suite, started in 2002 by the Central Institute for Restoration of Rome and Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi di Torino per il Medio Oriente e l'Asia in collaboration with the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage of Iraq, the Iraq Museum of Baghdad and the Direction General for the Archaeological Heritage of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities. A first section gathers introductory essays and specific contributions on the works carried out on the bas-reliefs (photogrammetric survey, photographic documentation, petrographic analysis, individuation of the orthostats damage typologies, restoration project). A second section contains a remarkable part of the precious photographic documentation of the site state just before the last war in Iraq.