Nathan Morello
Documentum, Monumentum.
The Assyrian Royal Inscriptions: Written Monuments and Monuments to Writing
Lecture and workshop.
The Assyrian Royal Inscriptions are the official documents that celebrate the kings of the Assyrian empire (10th-7th century BC), on military and building grounds. As it becomes clear analysing their texts, the materials used for their composition (their media), and their setting contexts, these documents appear to have had a central function as written monuments, defined as objects of celebration for eternal memory. Monuments to the king, of course, and to the divinity - to whom they are dedicated - but also monuments to writing itself. The writing on the walls of public buildings was, in fact, exclusive attribute of royalty (actual "portrait" of the suzerain alongside the figurative one). However, the essence of monumental writing is not limited to its being a royal prerogative - and, therefore, an ideological tool of incomparable effectiveness - but it is also linked to the immanent nature of writing itself, its being conceived as corresponding (equal) to the object that it describes. The truthfulness of the message derives from that equality between reality and representation, as in the case of a military campaign and its account, or a palace and the description of its construction (further proved by its actual existence, in front of the people who saw the inscriptions).
Under this general perspective, during the lecture and the following workshop, some questions will be considered. The relation between the inscription and its visibility (e.g. attached to the walls or buried in the palace foundations): who were the intended recipient of these documents? The relation between medium and message: which kind of (philological, historical, symbolic) relationships can be drawn between message, writing and inscribed object? The question of context, which is certainly related to the original display of the documents, but also to the case of those inscriptions found out of their original context but whose displacement can be historically reconstructed (for example, datable restoration works), becoming a new context reliable of analysis: does an inscription cease to be monument when taken out of its context?
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