Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), Her Findings

I read Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree: A History of Interpretations, for the claims a later writer can set beside the flood stories, the Garden of Eden, and the other books on this site. The title page names her, the series Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 230, Academic Press Fribourg, and Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen. The copyright page is dated 2007. The book is in copyright. The quotations below are short excerpts for review and study. Page numbers are the printed page numbers. The opening page of the introduction has no number. The next page is numbered 2, so I call that opening page 1. The conclusion opens without a number. The next page is numbered 198, and the contents list the conclusion at 197.

She abbreviates the motif as the AST. Her subject is the history of what scholars have said it is. She is not impartial. She thinks one of the three main readings was pushed aside. This book does not discuss Atlantis. A search of the volume turns up the Atlantic, in a sentence about ideas that had crossed the ocean, and Atlanta, Georgia, in a bibliography address. There is no chapter on Plato’s island, no shoreline, and no sinking date.

The book at a glance

• Title: The Assyrian Sacred Tree: A History of Interpretations.
• Author: Mariana Giovino.
• Edition I read: Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 230. Academic Press Fribourg. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen. Copyright 2007. ISBN 978-3-7278-1602-4 (Academic Press Fribourg). ISBN 978-3-525-53028-3 (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht). ISSN 1015-1850.
• What she claims: The motif is best defined by the relief behind Aššurnaṣirpal II’s throne in his throneroom at Nimrud. Humans and genies appear to anoint a palmette on a pole. No Assyrian text discovered to date discusses its nature or purpose. Images of it run from about 883 to 627 BC, mostly on seals. On palace walls it is common under Aššurnaṣirpal II and rare afterward. Scholars have offered three readings since 1849: the tree of life from Genesis, a stylized date palm (from 1888, and the popular one), and a constructed cult object (from 1864). She argues the date palm is unlikely, and a constructed object is likely. She then sets the Nimrud relief beside the kiškanû at Ur under Rīm-Sîn, about 1822 to 1763 BC, and says that material does not settle the identity of the AST. Seven apkallu, or sages, lived before the Flood in a Babylonian tradition she reports. She does not give a year for that Flood.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

• The defining picture. Behind Aššurnaṣirpal II’s throne at Nimrud, a palmette stands on a pole, with a ruff of other palmettes and a tracery she finds hard to describe. Humans and genies stand on either side and appear to anoint it. The relief is about 1.93 m high by 5.32 m wide. Layard, in 1849, put it in a recess in the eastern wall behind the king’s throne base (p. 1).
• How often. Stearns, in 1961, thought the tree was used about 130 times in the reliefs of that palace, more often than the king. Russell, in 1998, counted 190 depicted trees. Of those, the type with a winged figure on either side occurs 78 times, which she calculates as 41 percent. That second relief, also from the throneroom, measures 1.18 m high by 1.63 m wide (pp. 1, 9).
• No Assyrian explanation. No Assyrian text discovered to date discusses the nature or purpose of the thing. The secondary literature spans more than 150 years, and she says scholars have not reached a consensus (pp. 1, 2).
• The span of the images. AST images occur repeatedly from about 883 to 627 BC, mainly on cylinder and stamp seals. On the walls of later Neo-Assyrian royal buildings they are rare (p. 9).
• Who dug it up, and which kings. Layard turned to the mound at Nimrud in 1847. Botta had already recovered Sargon II’s palace at Khorsabad in 1843. Layard recovered Aššurnaṣirpal II’s Nimrud palace about 1845. By 1853 the palaces of Tiglath-Pileser III and Esarhaddon at Nimrud, and those of Sennacherib (704 to 681 BC) and Aššurbanipal at Nineveh, had been at least partly excavated. After Aššurnaṣirpal II (883 to 859 BC) she lists a glazed brick of Shalmaneser III (858 to 824 BC) from the review palace at Fort Shalmaneser, Nimrud; a large stone relief and two fragments of Tiglath-Pileser III (744 to 727 BC) at Nimrud; one stone fragment of Sargon II (721 to 705 BC) at Khorsabad; a black basalt stele of Esarhaddon (680 to 669 BC) with the AST and seven other figures; and ASTs carved on Aššurbanipal’s garment (668 to 627 BC) on the walls at Nineveh (p. 9).
• Three readings. 1849: the tree of life of Genesis, abandoned early in the last century and revived in 1993. Early writers tied that tree to the kiškanû known from cuneiform. 1888: a stylized date palm, the popular reading. 1864: a constructed cult object, overshadowed by the date palm theory (pp. 2, 3).
• Her own result. The AST is unlikely to have been a date palm or any other real tree, and likely to have been a constructed object. She has spent less time on what that object signified (p. 197).
• Ur, kept separate. The kiškanû at the Ekišnugal, the moon god’s sanctuary at Ur, may be doubted as the AST, as the Biblical tree of life, and as the Sefirotic tree. It was a tree of some sort. Woolley found an entrance fashioned in places as palm trunks, probably from the Larsa king Warad-Sîn. Texts from the next reign, Rīm-Sîn, about 1822 to 1763 BC, describe his visit to the gate, the apsû, and the cella. Charpin identified a well beside a four-part cistern, southeast of the ziggurat, as the apsû, a holder of holy water and a figure of the freshwater ocean under the earth where Enki lived. She says this material does not settle the AST (pp. 197, 198).
• Metal trees, and a Flood tradition she reports. Two Boğazköy texts list kiškanûs made of silver and gold, and four kiškanûs with gold-ornamented garments (p. 199). On another page she reports that seven apkallu, or sages, lived before the Flood, and that a seventh-century plaque from Aššur shows the same bird-headed, bucket-holding type as the Nimrud reliefs (p. 140). She gives no year for that Flood, and she does not name Noah.

The relief behind the throne (p. 1)

She defines the Assyrian sacred tree by pointing at one example.

We encounter it behind Aššurnaṣirpal II's throne in his throneroom at Nimrud.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 1

It is a palmette on a pole, surrounded by a ruff of other palmettes, linked to the pole by a tracery. Humans and genies stand on either side and appear to be anointing it. The same form, and a family of close relatives, appears at Nimrud many times, and also on cylinder seals, jewelry, and depicted textiles. She takes that repetition as a sign that the motif mattered to the Assyrians.

Unfortunately no Assyrian text discovered to date discusses the nature or purpose of this treelike thing.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 1

The footnote sends the reader to Layard, Nineveh and its Remains, volume 1, London, 1849, pages 133 to 134. Behind the king’s throne base, in the eastern wall, a recess held a great sculpted panel. She gives the size herself.

This relief measures approximately 1.93 m high by 5.32 m wide.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 1

Stearns, in 1961, counted the trees in the palace reliefs at about 130. She quotes his judgment on how common the motif is.

the tree is a more prevalent motif in the palace than the king and more widely distributed than any other motif except the genie in the horned miter.

J. B. Stearns, quoted in Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 1

Russell’s 1998 table, which she cites in the same note, raises the count to 190 depicted trees. A third note says the habit of putting all these treelike forms under one name, “the Assyrian sacred tree,” began in 1849, when the reliefs came to light, and that a critical look at that modern category has not yet been attempted. Danthine, in 1937, grouped them because she thought every type was a date palm. Parpola, in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies 52 (1993), pages 200 to 201, grouped them because he thought their nodes, volutes, and circles matched the Sefirotic Tree.

How she frames the argument (pp. 2 to 4)

She calls the sacred tree, probably correctly, the most discussed symbol in the historiography of Assyrian art. Van Buren had said something close to that in 1945. Giovino adds that the number of studies has more than doubled since then. The literature she surveys covers more than 150 years. Three readings organize it.

The 'sacred tree' is often said, probably correctly, to be the most discussed symbol in the historiography of Assyrian art.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 2

The first reading was proposed in 1849, abandoned at the beginning of the last century, and revived in 1993. It says the tree represents the tree of life known from Genesis 2 and 3. Early scholars thought they had secured that reading once they identified Eden’s tree with the tree the cuneiform sources call the kiškanû. A related idea, a world tree or cosmic tree, came in at the same time, attracted little attention, and was mostly discarded. Her note names Lenormant in 1880, 1882, and 1883, and Sayce’s Hibbert Lectures of 1887, among the early discussions. She says Parpola has brought the cosmic-tree idea back.

The second reading was first proposed in 1888 and is much the most popular. The Assyrian tree is a symbol of a real tree, a conventionalized or stylized date palm. In 1890 that theory received a further elaboration.

A second interpretation, first proposed in 1888 and much the most popular of the three, maintains that the Assyrian 'tree' is a symbol of a real tree.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 2

The third reading was first proposed in 1864 and then overshadowed. The tree is not a tree. It is also not a conventionalized depiction. It is a fairly accurate representation, in the visual language of Assyrian art, of a constructed cult object. She does not name the 1864 author on this page.

rather, it is a representation, a fairly accurate representation given the visual language of Assyrian art, of a constructed cult object.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 3

She says she does not pretend to be unbiassed. The cult object theory has much to commend it. The other theories have many obvious flaws. As she tells the date palm story she tries to undermine it, and as she tells the cult object story she adds archaeological and textual material in support of earlier authors.

In my opinion the cult object theory has been unjustly sidelined.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 3

By the early twentieth century an influential group of scholars had been won round, and the date palm reading changed from a passing consensus into an established fact. Studies then mostly asked what the tree means.

We take it for granted that we know what this thing represents, so most studies of the Assyrian 'sacred tree' for the last seventy-five years have been devoted to analyzing what the 'tree' means.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 4

She thinks the abandoned question is the fruitful one: what manner of thing is depicted. For that question she uses Erwin Panofsky’s term pre-iconography, from his Studies in Iconology (1939) and from Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955). Iconography, in his scheme, comes after the object has been identified. She says scepticism about the identity has been largely abandoned.

Nimrud in 1847, and the kings who come after (pp. 9 to 10)

The attention the motif received, so early in ancient Near Eastern studies, was an accident. In 1847 Layard decided to work at the mound at Nimrud, and the AST images there happened to be numerous and well preserved. Recovery at the other Neo-Assyrian palaces dug between 1843 and 1853 was less impressive.

In 1847 the celebrated archaeologist Austen Henry Layard decided to devote his archaeological attention to the mound at Nimrud.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 9

While AST images do occur repeatedly in the material record from c. 883 to 627 BC, mainly on cylinder and stamp seals, it is rare to find the AST represented on the walls of later Neo-Assyrian royal buildings.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 9

Her notes give the excavation sequence and the later sculpted examples. I put them here as she gives them.

• P. E. Botta recovered the palace of Sargon II at Khorsabad in 1843. That was the earliest successful excavation of a Neo-Assyrian palace on this scale.
• Layard recovered Aššurnaṣirpal II’s Nimrud palace about 1845.
• By 1853, work had at least partly opened the palaces of Tiglath-Pileser III and Esarhaddon at Nimrud, and the palaces of Sennacherib (704 to 681 BC) and Aššurbanipal at Nineveh.
• After Aššurnaṣirpal II (883 to 859 BC): a glazed brick panel from the review palace at Fort Shalmaneser, Nimrud, reign of Shalmaneser III (858 to 824 BC).
• A large stone wall relief and two fragments from Nimrud, reign of Tiglath-Pileser III (744 to 727 BC).
• One stone wall relief fragment from Khorsabad, reign of Sargon II (721 to 705 BC). She points to Pauline Albenda’s The Palace of Sargon for drawings of AST decoration in some rooms there.
• A black basalt stele, or memorial stone, with the AST and seven other figures, reign of Esarhaddon (680 to 669 BC).
• ASTs carved in stone relief on Aššurbanipal’s garment (668 to 627 BC), on the walls at Nineveh.

Figure 2 is another Nimrud type, also from Aššurnaṣirpal II’s throneroom: two winged, bird-headed creatures ritually attending the AST. Russell’s table makes this the common composition.

this composition of AST flanked on either side by a winged figure occurs 78 times (or 41% of the total number of AST compositions).

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 9

This wall relief measures 1.18 m high, 1.63 m wide.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 9

When Layard first saw it, he linked it to the tree of life in Genesis chapters 2 and 3. In 1849 he wrote the lines she prints from volume 2, page 472.

The sacred tree, or tree of life, so universally recognised in Eastern systems of theology, is called to mind, and we are naturally led to refer the traditions connected with it to a common origin.

A. H. Layard, in Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 10

The same quotation says the trees were symbolical and invested with a sacred character, because they keep appearing in groups that show religious ceremonies. A note of Layard’s, which she also prints, sets the tree of life of Genesis beside the sacred tree of the Hindus, and the Zoroastrian Homa, preserved by the Persians almost as on the Assyrian monuments until the Arab invasion.

Layard thought the winged, bird-headed figures had inspired Ezekiel, whom he placed in exile in Assyria. Giovino’s footnote corrects the geography from Ezekiel 1:1-3, in Moshe Greenberg’s Anchor Bible translation. Ezekiel was among the exiles by the Chebar canal, in the land of the Chaldeans. The vision fell in the fifth year of King Jehoiachin’s exile. The Chebar canal is believed to lie near Nippur, on the evidence of a document from the Murašu archive. She is reporting Layard’s reading, and then marking where his “Assyria” does not match the biblical verse.

The date palm, as Bonavia argued it in 1888 (p. 27)

The date palm chapter opens with the split she has already announced. Some scholars were calling the AST an actual object. Others were calling it an actual tree. In 1888 Emanuel Bonavia, a physician and botanist working in India and specializing in date palms, published a description that treated the AST as an abstracted date palm. He pointed at the trunk decorated with chevrons, her figure 2.

In 1888 Emanuel Bonavia, physician and botanist working in India (specializing in dates palms), published a description of the AST in which he characterized it as an abstracted form of a date palm.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 27

She then prints Bonavia’s own sentence from “Sacred Trees of the Assyrian Monuments,” The Babylonian and Oriental Record 3/1 (1888), page 7.

The central portion or stem of this is, I think, unmistakably intended for the date tree.

Emanuel Bonavia, in Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 27

Bonavia read the upward projections on the stem as the triangular bases of leaves, which stay on a young date palm after the leaves decay or are cut, and which on an old tree drop away and leave transverse scars. Giovino’s objection is formal. Some ASTs have no chevrons on the trunk. The chevron also appears on some of the palm fronds that crown the AST. Representations of real date palm trunks published before Bonavia, including the Black Stone, her figure 3, prefer a diamond pattern for the leaf bases. A chevron, on that comparison, is an odd choice if the artist meant a date palm.

Bonavia catalogued six types on wall reliefs and cylinder seals, and he believed each came from a real species.

He catalogued six different types of ASTs appearing on wall reliefs and cylinder seals, believing each had originated in an actual species (i.e., date palm, vine, pomegranate, conifer ['fir'], oak, and 'unknown').

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 27

Of the six, he thought the date palm the most commonly represented, and the basic type on Aššurnaṣirpal II’s reliefs. Her note says Bonavia introduced date varieties from the Near East into northern India and Pakistan in 1869, and that Paul Popenoe later called him the pioneer authority on date culture in India. Wilhelm Baudissin, in 1878, and some writers before Baudissin, had already called the AST a real tree. With Bonavia, she says, we get the first sustained argument that it must be one.

Genies, cherubs, and seven sages before the Flood (p. 140)

On this page she is still inside the date palm theory’s later history, and the topic is the figures beside the tree. Stephen Langdon, in The Babylonian Epic of Creation (Oxford, 1923), called the kurību and the Hebrew kerûb identical. Both, for him, were a mythical monster who acted as intercessor and protector. When he pictured a kurību he did not picture a winged angel from the scriptures. He pictured the goat-fish known in Mesopotamian texts and art. One text has been read as a figure with the head of a kurību and human hands and feet. Another mentions laḫmu-monsters and kurībus of reddish gold, facing each other. Scholars have identified other guardian figures from the texts in the art. They have not yet identified a kurību.

The winged bird-headed genies who sometimes attend the AST are a separate identification. Scholars have been calling them apkallu, the Seven Sages.

According to Babylonian tradition, seven apkallu (or sages) lived before the Flood.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 140

Neo-Assyrian ritual instructions prescribe sets of protective figurines in different forms, including winged figures with bird faces, holding a bucket and a purifier. A plaque found at Aššur, under an incantation priest’s house, dates to the seventh century BC. It shows a winged bird-headed figure holding a bucket and a cone. The match with the large bird-headed genies on Aššurnaṣirpal’s palace walls at Nimrud is close enough, she writes, that plaque and reliefs represent the same protective type, the apkallu.

A plaque found at Aššur underneath an incantation priest's house, dating to the seventh century BC, shows a winged bird-headed genielike figure holding a bucket and 'cone.'

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 140

Her notes send the apkallu identification to Anthony Green’s 1983 dissertation, to Mallowan in 1983, and to a 1995 discussion in which a griffin-demon is set beside the apkallu as sage. She is reporting that chain. She does not, on this page, give the Flood a year, a mountain, or a ship.

What she concludes (pp. 197 to 201)

She returns to the distinction between pre-iconography and iconography. Her principal interest has been the identity of the object the AST denotes. Meaning comes second, because the first problem was hard enough.

I have argued that it is unlikely to have been a date palm or any other real tree and likely to have been a constructed object.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 197

One possibility she leaves open is that the constructed object itself represented a real tree. Mesopotamian evidence, she says, does show real trees represented by artificial trees. Some of the best of that evidence is the kiškanû, already discussed in her first chapter. She does not let that word settle the Nimrud relief, the Biblical tree, or the later Jewish diagram.

Whether the kiškanû should be identified with the AST or the Biblical tree of life or the Sefirotic tree of medieval Kabbalah may be doubted, but it certainly was a tree of some sort.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 197

Following Margaret Green (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1975, especially pages 185 to 191) and Geo Widengren in 1951, she lists four possibilities. The kiškanû was an actual tree connected to temples, or an artificial tree connected to temples, or part of a sacred grove, or used in a cultic role similar to a standard. Widengren had regarded it as a special cult tree, living or artificial, planted in a grove near Enki’s sanctuary. She wants a last look at this material because it is suggestive. She says again that it does not settle the AST.

One set of Sumerian texts describes kiškanûs as part of the Ekišnugal, the moon god’s sanctuary at Ur. Woolley excavated the entrance, fashioned in places as palm trunks, and probably built under the Larsa king Warad-Sîn. From texts of the next reign we learn how the sanctuary looked to the worshippers of Sîn, and what part the kiškanû trees played.

It was from texts written during the succeeding reign of Rīm-Sîn (c. 1822-1763 BC) that we learn how the sanctuary appeared to Sîn's worshippers and the part played by kiškanû trees.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 197

Rīm-Sîn visited the Ekišnugal and went in order to the essential places: the gate, the apsû, and the cella. The main gate, presumably in the southeast corner of the temenos, brought him to two sets of guardian gods who welcomed him. They are described as standing, which she reads as statues guarding the gateway. Those gods were then understood to conduct him to the apsû. She thinks the apsû stood on the ziggurat terrace, southeast of the ziggurat and near the main gate. Woolley found a well there next to a cistern with four compartments.

The translator of these Sumerian texts, Dominique Charpin, identified this well as the apsû, a receptacle for holding holy water in the temple courtyard and representing the freshwater ocean lying deep beneath the earth where Enki lived.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 198

The text is the one Charpin published as UET VI 105, 46 lines, in Le clergé d’Ur au siècle d’Hammurabi (Geneva, 1986). She prints his French. I am not copying that block out. The lines that matter for this review say that the Abzu is the holy, sublime sea of the Ekišnugal, that the gods of its gate stand guard, and that immense kiškanû trees multiply there. In her own sentence, just below:

'Magnificent kiškanû-trees,' together with guardian gods, decorate the doorway of the apsû.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 199

She also prints shorter English versions. E. J. Wilson in 1994: “The gods of the gate stand guard, In this place exalted kiškanû-trees luxuriate for you.” G. Cunningham in 1997: “in this place the majestic kiškanû-tree flourishes for you.” A Susa brick relief, her figure 86, is one way to picture a doorway with guardians and trees. Other possibilities are artificial trees or plants in metal or wood. Line 17 of the Ur text may describe gold and silver reeds set up as symbols. Wilson reads those metals as symbolic representations of reeds, and he does not follow Charpin’s suggestion of an actual reed hut.

Could the kiškanûs have been made of similar materials? She points to two texts from Boğazköy, discussed by H. Güterbock in 1973.

One text itemizes silver and gold kiškanûs, while the other refers to four kiškanûs placed together with garments adorned with gold ornaments.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 199

The texts, as she cites them, are KBo XVIII 154 and KUB XII 1 iii 29. Güterbock also compared them with thirty pomegranates in the second text, a fruit that can be cracked and roasted and also copied in precious metal as an ornament. I am not treating that comparison as her identification of the kiškanû with a pomegranate. It is his remark, in her footnote.

Living trees remain possible. Woolley read the weeper-holes in the ziggurat at Ur as drainage for trees grown on a lower stage, between chambers and the terrace edge. He called the ziggurat a high place, an artificial mountain for gods whose original temples stood on heights the lower Euphrates valley does not have, and he thought planting it with trees carried that idea through. Green thought the kiškanû could have been planted at the sides of temple doorways, or portrayed on the doorframe as an artificial tree. Her 1975 dissertation also puts kiškanûs at sanctuaries in Eridu and Nippur. A further note of Giovino’s mentions sacred groves at Susa destroyed by Aššurbanipal, and temple gardens in which gods, as statues, enjoy themselves. Wilson connects the mes-tree, the tamarisk, the cedar, and the juniper with the apsû, and a mastakal-plant with the purification ceremony there.

She then states eight conjectures. They cannot be proved on the evidence she has. They are a plan for where to look, and she says they are not a summary of completed research.

It seems quite possible that the AST-image is an accurate representation of a cult object.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 201

This cult object was perhaps set up in the sanctuary of a temple in Aššur, and replicas may have been set up elsewhere.

Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree (2007), p. 201

The rest, in her numbering:

• Similar objects, not identical ones, may have stood in sanctuaries of temples across Assyria.
• The object in her figures 1 and 2 may have denoted Aššur. Related types may have denoted other deities. The Khinnis and Bavian type may have denoted Mulissu, Aššur’s consort.
• The objects may have represented trees.
• Whether or not they represented trees, they were possibly considered substitutes for gods.
• They may have received sacrifices and prayers, and undergone purification rituals.
• Like other cult statues in the ancient Near East, the AST-object may have taken on sacred power in its own right.

The book closes her work on the historiography. She hopes it does not close the iconography. A note points to her own essay, “Assyrian Trees as Cultic Objects,” in a 2006 Warburg Institute volume, pages 110 to 125, for a development of some of these conjectures.

Where I leave the book

I used the introduction, the opening of the Garden of Eden chapter, Layard’s 1849 quotation, the opening of the date palm chapter, the apkallu page, and the conclusion. Parts II and III are her long history of the date palm theory after 1900 and of the cult object theory after 1900, including the Khorsabad metal bands. Part IV surveys artificial trees in the archaeological record before the conclusion repeats her result. I am not going to turn that historiography into a second list of every author who agreed with Bonavia.

What I can set beside other writers is this. The picture is the Nimrud throneroom of Aššurnaṣirpal II, 883 to 859 BC, a panel about 1.93 by 5.32 metres, with a second type at 1.18 by 1.63 metres. The counts are about 130 (Stearns) and 190 (Russell), of which 78, or 41 percent, show the winged attendants. The images continue, mostly on seals, to about 627 BC. No Assyrian text explains the motif. The tree-of-life reading starts with Layard in 1849 and ties, in other writers, to the kiškanû and later to Parpola’s Sefirotic Tree. The date palm reading starts its sustained form with Bonavia in 1888, who listed date palm, vine, pomegranate, fir, oak, and an unknown plant. Her own result is a constructed cult object, perhaps kept in a temple at Aššur, perhaps denoting the god Aššur, with a Khinnis and Bavian variant that may denote Mulissu. The kiškanû at Ur is a different tree, in texts of Rīm-Sîn, about 1822 to 1763 BC, at the gate of an apsû that Charpin reads as Enki’s freshwater ocean. Metal examples, silver and gold, come from Boğazköy texts. The Flood enters once, as the time before which seven apkallu lived, and the bird-headed genie with bucket and cone is the figure she is identifying, on a seventh-century plaque from Aššur as on the Nimrud walls.

She does not discuss Atlantis. She does not give Eden a map of her own. Layard’s Eden reading, and the kiškanû passage that Sayce and Lenormant treated as a Mesopotamian garden, are interpretations she records. The Chebar canal, near Nippur, is her correction of Layard’s “Assyria” for Ezekiel’s exile.

Where to read it

The copy I used is Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 230, Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree: A History of Interpretations, Academic Press Fribourg and Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen, copyright 2007. The two ISBNs are 978-3-7278-1602-4 and 978-3-525-53028-3.

FAQ

What is the object, and where does she put it?

A palmette on a pole, with a ruff of palmettes, humans, and genies who appear to anoint it, behind Aššurnaṣirpal II’s throne at Nimrud. The panel is about 1.93 m high by 5.32 m wide (p. 1). A second throneroom relief, with two bird-headed creatures, is 1.18 m high by 1.63 m wide (p. 9). She thinks the image is likely a constructed cult object, and unlikely a date palm or any other real tree (p. 197). One conjecture places such an object in a temple sanctuary at Aššur, with replicas elsewhere, and lets the Nimrud type denote the god Aššur (p. 201).

What dates and kings does she use?

Images from about 883 to 627 BC (p. 9). Aššurnaṣirpal II, 883 to 859 BC, at Nimrud. Shalmaneser III, 858 to 824 BC, glazed brick at Fort Shalmaneser. Tiglath-Pileser III, 744 to 727 BC, at Nimrud. Sargon II, 721 to 705 BC, at Khorsabad. Esarhaddon, 680 to 669 BC, a basalt stele with the AST and seven other figures. Aššurbanipal, 668 to 627 BC, the motif on his garment at Nineveh. Sennacherib, 704 to 681 BC, is named for a palace at Nineveh partly excavated by 1853. At Ur, Warad-Sîn built a palm-trunk entrance, and Rīm-Sîn, about 1822 to 1763 BC, is the king of the kiškanû texts (p. 197). The Aššur plaque of the bird-headed figure is seventh century BC (p. 140).

Who are the people and the beings?

Aššurnaṣirpal II, and the kings just listed. Layard, who dug Nimrud and in 1849 called the motif a tree of life. Botta at Khorsabad. Bonavia, who in 1888 called it a date palm and listed six plants. The genies beside the tree. The kurību, which she says is still not identified in the art, and which Langdon pictured as a goat-fish. The apkallu, seven sages who lived before the Flood, matched to the bird-headed figures. At Ur, Sîn the moon god, guardian statues at the gate, Enki in the freshwater ocean Charpin reads under the well, and the kiškanû trees at that doorway. In the conjectures, the god Aššur, and Mulissu his consort at Khinnis and Bavian.

Does she describe a flood, Eden, or Atlantis?

Eden enters as Layard’s 1849 reading, and as the early scholars’ attempt to equate the tree of life with the kiškanû. She doubts that equation (p. 197). The Flood enters as the Babylonian tradition that seven apkallu lived before it (p. 140). She gives no year, no ship, and no landing place. She does not discuss Atlantis.

Does she think the matter is settled?

The identity, yes, in the direction of a constructed object, with the date palm set aside. The meaning, no. The eight statements on p. 201 are conjectures and a plan of work. The kiškanû file is suggestive and does not identify the AST. She says there is not yet enough textual evidence to decide whether such trees were sacred in themselves or sacred because they referred to a deity.

Related on this site

1. Zénaïde A. Ragozin, The Story of Chaldea: a nineteenth-century reading of Chaldea, with a flood tablet, a ship, and a mountain. Giovino’s Flood is one clause, seven sages before it, on p. 140.
2. Where Was Atlantis: locations proposed by other writers. Giovino’s places are Nimrud, Khorsabad, Nineveh, Aššur, Ur, Eridu, and Nippur.
3. Timaeus and Critias: Plato’s island, its size, and its date. This book does not discuss that island.

Sources

The book

• Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree: A History of Interpretations. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 230. Academic Press Fribourg. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen. Copyright 2007. ISBN 978-3-7278-1602-4. ISBN 978-3-525-53028-3. ISSN 1015-1850. The quotations above are short excerpts from this edition.

Pages used

• Introduction, pp. 1 to 4. The throne-room relief, the three interpretations, and her refusal to treat the date palm reading as settled.
• Chapter 1, pp. 9 to 10. Layard in 1847 and 1849, the king list, and the Ezekiel footnote.
• Chapter 3, p. 27. Bonavia in 1888 and the six plants.
• p. 140. Kurību, apkallu, and the seventh-century plaque at Aššur.
• Conclusion, pp. 197 to 201. Her result, the kiškanû at Ur, the Boğazköy metals, and the eight conjectures.

Names she cites, on those pages

• A. H. Layard, Nineveh and its Remains, 1849. Volume 1, pp. 133 to 134, for the recess behind the throne. Volume 2, p. 472, for the tree of life.
• J. B. Stearns, Reliefs from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II, 1961, about 130 trees.
• J. M. Russell, American Journal of Archaeology 102 (1998), p. 689, table 1, 190 trees, and 78 of the winged composition.
• S. Parpola, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 52 (1993), pp. 200 to 201, the Sefirotic Tree.
• Emanuel Bonavia, The Babylonian and Oriental Record 3/1 (1888), p. 7.
• S. Langdon, The Babylonian Epic of Creation, Oxford, 1923, on the kurību.
• Dominique Charpin, Le clergé d’Ur au siècle d’Hammurabi, Geneva, 1986, and the text UET VI 105.
• Margaret Green, “Eridu in Sumerian Literature,” University of Chicago, 1975.
• E. J. Wilson, 1994, on the gold and silver reeds and the kiškanû at the gate.