Assyrian sacred tree

Is it a tree of life?

No Assyrian text calls it one, and few scholars have said so since the late nineteenth century. Mariana Giovino, whose 2007 book traces the debate from Layard onwards, finds three main readings: the tree of life known from Genesis, a stylised date palm, and a cult object that people made. The date palm has led since 1890, when E. B. Tylor proposed that the winged figures were fertilising it, and the Met’s reading follows that line: an emblem of fertility and of the prosperity of Assyria, so that the winged figures who protect the tree and the king are protecting the Assyrian state. Giovino argues for the cult object.

The tree of life came back in 1993, when Simo Parpola, an Assyriologist at the University of Helsinki, published “The Assyrian Tree of Life: Tracing the Origins of Jewish Monotheism and Greek Philosophy”, an article that, Giovino writes, surprised many of his colleagues. Parpola took the throne-room tree as the model for the Sefirotic Tree of Jewish Kabbalah. Working backwards from medieval mystical writings, he read it as a mystical diagram of the divine world order which was also an image of god and of the ideal man, so that the king could be shown as the “Perfect Man”. His ideas have met with opposition in the field, Giovino records, and she points to Jerrold Cooper’s critique in the Journal of the American Oriental Society (2000) and to Barbara Nevling Porter’s study of the iconographic evidence (2003). His opponents call his views “eccentric”, yet the 1993 article has made its way into the footnotes of mainstream work on the tree. Seth Richardson, who proposed that the tree stands for all the dead kings of the Assyrian King List, set his reading against Parpola’s: the image renews kingship, he wrote, without dismissing nature for “a schematized theological representation (as Parpola would have it)”. For the wider family of world trees, see the tree of life.

The winged figures beside it

The figures who tend the tree are not great gods. The Met describes them as part of the crowd of supernatural beings that animated every part of the world for ancient Mesopotamians, eagle-headed or human-headed, wearing horned crowns and usually winged. Because they look like figurines buried under doorways whose names are known from ritual texts, they have been identified as apkallu, the sages of the distant past; the Met’s curator Sarah Graff describes the apkallu as the seven sages who lived before the flood in the land of sweet waters. Reliefs from the palace are in the Metropolitan Museum’s Assyrian Sculpture Court. Others stood in the Northwest Palace at Nimrud until its deliberate destruction, which the Met describes as including explosives and heavy earth-moving machinery.