Month: February 2024

Today, whilst I was at the Brooklyn Museum with my students, a tourist with a British accent interrupted our discussion of Neo-Assyrian reliefs to ask why some of the Apkallu-figures had wristwatches and handbags. I explained what these were, but it prompted me to look more closely at the buckets (not handbags), where I discovered this image on one of them:

It depicts two bird-headed Apkallu-figures doing their business to the stylized tree (or whatever it is), an image that we see full-scale in other places, including Brooklyn:

In essence, the image on the bucket is the directions for proper use, not unlike modern buckets:

Plus ça change…

Before anyone pillories me as a chauvinist pig on Twitter (or whatever it’s called now), I hasten to point out that a) I don’t have a sister, and b) I’m talking about an object that was made when my ancestors in Scotland were living in crannogs. The object in question is an ivory head (more of a face, really, since that’s all that remains) of a woman excavated at Nimrud in northern Iraq by Max Mallowan in 1952.

It was Mallowan who called her the ‘Ugly Sister,’ evidently in comparison with other more fetching ivories he had excavated. (I recently learned this, by the way, from an article by Henrietta McCall in New Light on Nimrud [2008].) I think this rather unfair. How good would you look if your nose, ears, eyebrows, pupils and part of your forehead were missing? More to the point, how could we know what the Assyrians considered to be beautiful? Based on their relief sculpture, I venture to say they were found of bulging biceps and men with birds’ heads.

Accordingly, I think the Ugly Sister needs a new name; Geraldine, perhaps.