A king who needed a fresh start
Start with the name. Sargon is the Akkadian Šarru-kīn, “the king is legitimate”. It was an old royal name, borne long before by Sargon of Akkad, and it was also a statement. Sargon II came to the throne in 722 BCE after his predecessor Shalmaneser V was pushed aside, and whether he had any right to it is still debated. A ruler who has to call himself “the legitimate king” usually has reasons.
Assyria already had grand cities. Assur was the old religious heart; Kalhu (Nimrud) had been the capital for over a century, full of earlier kings’ palaces and the people loyal to them. Sargon chose instead to build from nothing, on open land in the triangle between Assur, Nineveh and Arbela, the most secure part of the empire. A new site let him control everything: the plan, the timing, the omens and the story.
A city designed around one man
Dur-Sharrukin, “Fortress of Sargon”, covered about 300 hectares inside a wall with seven gates and 157 bastions. Even its measurements were tied to the king: Sargon’s inscriptions link the length of the wall to the numerical value of his name. The work also needed land, and his inscriptions say that owners were compensated, in silver or bronze or with fields elsewhere. Building a capital was a legal operation as well as an architectural one.
The palace stood on a raised terrace astride the city wall, looking out over the countryside and down into the town. Visitors came up through gates and courtyards lined with carved slabs of gypsum alabaster: tribute bearers, among them a foreign groom leading two horses, campaigns, banquets and hunts. These are some of the best-known Assyrian palace reliefs, and the message of the route was simple: order flows from the king.
Bulls at the doors
At the main gateways of the palace and of the city stood pairs of colossal human-headed winged bulls, the lamassu, carved from single blocks weighing many tonnes. They guarded the thresholds and turned each doorway into a declaration of power, with long inscriptions celebrating Sargon carved between their legs.
Built fast, left faster
The city went up in about eleven years, mostly in mudbrick, quick to make in huge quantities, with stone, fired brick, paint and metal fittings reserved for the surfaces that mattered. Sargon’s son Sennacherib, acting as regent while his father was on campaign, oversaw much of the building. In 706 BCE the palace was inaugurated, and the foundation inscriptions express the king’s hope to grow old in it.
He had one year. In 705 BCE Sargon was killed in battle in Tabal, in south-eastern Anatolia, and the enemy overran the Assyrian camp. His body was never recovered, which meant no royal burial, a terrible fate in Mesopotamian belief. A later text known as “The Sin of Sargon” shows Sennacherib asking the gods what his father had done wrong. Whatever the answer, Sennacherib left Dur-Sharrukin, moved the capital to Nineveh and began his own building projects there, including, some scholars argue, a famous garden. Khorsabad lost its role as capital almost as soon as it had gained it.
Rediscovered, and partly lost again
In 1843 the French consul Paul-Émile Botta began digging at Khorsabad, thinking he had found Nineveh. His reliefs and drawings, published in 1849 with plates by the artist Eugène Flandin, made the Assyrians famous in Europe, and his finds became the core of the Louvre’s Assyrian galleries. His successor Victor Place excavated much more, but in 1855 most of his finds sank in the Tigris when the boats carrying them were attacked. The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago dug again from 1928 to 1935 and mapped the city, which is why Chicago has a colossal bull of its own.
Where to see it
The Louvre’s Cour Khorsabad in Paris reassembles part of a palace façade with its bulls and reliefs. The ISAC Museum in Chicago has a lamassu and reliefs from its own excavation, and the British Museum in London and the Iraq Museum in Baghdad have more. The site itself lies near the village of Khorsabad, north-east of Mosul. Check current travel advice before planning a visit to northern Iraq.
Sources
- Ministère de la Culture (France), Khorsabad website: “A new city”, “An unfinished city”, “The death of Sargon”.
- G. Loud, Khorsabad, Part 1: Excavations in the Palace and at a City Gate, OIP 38 (1936); G. Loud and C. B. Altman, Khorsabad, Part 2: The Citadel and the Town, OIP 40 (1938).
- A. Fuchs, Die Inschriften Sargons II. aus Khorsabad (1994).
- P. Albenda, The Palace of Sargon, King of Assyria: Monumental Wall Reliefs at Dur-Sharrukin (1986).
- P.-É. Botta and E. Flandin, Monument de Ninive (1849-1850).
- Musée du Louvre, “The Palace of Sargon II: the Cour Khorsabad”.
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