FRIENDS OF ASOR WEBINARS
The Queens of Nimrud’s Northwest Palace: Beauty, Power, and Presence in the Neo-Assyrian World, c. 865–705 BCE
Friends of ASOR present the next webinar of the 2024-2025 season on May 14, 2025, at 7:00 pm EDT, presented by Dr. Amy Gansell. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required. This webinar will be recorded and all registrants will be sent a recording link in the days following the webinar.
Nearly three thousand years ago, at the ancient site of Nimrud (near modern Mosul, Iraq), a succession of ten Neo-Assyrian kings reigned in collaboration with their queens from the magnificence of the Northwest Palace, the seat of the empire and center of their world. Too often overshadowed by the well documented legacy of Neo-Assyrian kings, this presentation illuminates the queens who reigned with them. Dr. Gansell focuses on the queens of Nimrud’s Northwest Palace (c. 865–705 BCE) because it is here, in the late 1980s, that Iraqi archaeologists uncovered their partially intact royal tombs. The tombs contained heaps of precious jewelry and regalia, along with cuneiform inscriptions, and even some skeletal remains. Putting together these artifacts of death and connecting them to the art, architecture, and written record of the palace, we can learn about the names, lives, appearance, royal duties, and religious roles of the queens. Piece by piece, and layer by layer, across about 150 years of evidence, we discover the beauty, power, and presence of Nimrud’s Northwest Palace queens in life, death, and for eternity.
Although research into the deep past inevitably reveals gaps in our knowledge and raises unanswerable questions, what we don’t know can also stimulate curiosity and creativity, which Dr. Gansell applies in offering a virtually rendered snapshot of the world of the queens of Nimrud’s Northwest Palace. If we just said “we don’t know” to all our questions about the queens, soon we’d be left just talking about the kings, and the story of the Neo-Assyrian empire would remain a conventional history of a man’s world.
Dr. Amy Gansell is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art & Design at St. John’s University, where she serves as the Assistant Department Chair and Coordinator for the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Interdisciplinary Minor. She received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University in 2008. From 2008 to 2010, Dr. Gansell held a full-time position with the US Department of State as the Associate Coordinator for Afghan and Iraqi Cultural Heritage. In this capacity, she worked on diplomatic projects to restore and build professional capacity at the Afghan National Museum, the National Museum of Iraq, and the site of Babylon. Dr. Gansell returned to academic life in 2010 as a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University’s Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, after which she taught art history to art and design students at Pratt Institute and the State University of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT).
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The death of a child is perhaps the most painful, heartbreaking, and seemingly unnatural experience we have the displeasure of living with. Yet it is difficult to say with certainty whether this sentiment was shared by the inhabitants of ancient Isarel. Some anthropologists have found that in societies which experience a high rate of infant mortality and childhood death, parents remain emotionally detached from their children and do not mourn their deaths. We know that ancient Israel, like many pre-industrial societies, had a very high rate of infant mortality and childhood deaths. Did Israelites therefore care for their dying children? Did they give them a proper burial? Did they consider their children part of their families? The Hebrew Bible does not offer much information on the subject. Every time a child’s death is referenced, it is as a plot device in a narrative to prove an ethical, moral, or theological point. Abraham must sacrifice his child to show his commitment to God; Elijah shows off his wonder-working skills when he revives a dead child; David and Bathsheba’s first child dies because David committed murder and adultery; and Solomon demonstrates his wisdom when he commands a child to be cut in half. Yet, none of the biblical texts discuss how, or even if, Israelites cared for their dying children. Fortunately, there is another source to which we can turn to answer such questions: archaeology.
Kristine Henriksen Garroway is Professor of Bible at the HUC-JIR’s Skirball Campus in Los Angeles where she joined the faculty in 2011. She received her doctorate in Hebrew Bible and Cognate Studies at the HUC-JIR/Cincinnati in 2009. She has spent time studying and researching in Israel and has participated in excavations at Ashkelon, Tel Dor, and Tel Dan. Garroway’s scholarship focuses on children using archaeology and texts of ancient Israel and Mesopotamia. She has published in various scholarly journals and is a regular contributor to 
Ethics in Archaeological Practice explores urgent topics and issues in archaeology as currently practiced in the classroom, the field, the museum, and the public sphere. While addressed primarily to archaeologists working in western Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, and North Africa, the volume raises contemporary ethical questions around race, gender, disability, climate change, and cultural heritage that are pressing and relevant to archaeology students and professionals worldwide. The fifteen contributors offer fundamental case studies and practical guidance for best practices and models of high standards of ethical practice in professional conduct. Together, they offer new approaches to advocacy and the responsible stewardship of heritage sites, collections, and the environment. These compelling and generative discussions make the case for a 21st century archaeology that is proactive and engaged with discourses addressing equity, social justice, anti-colonialism, and climate change.
To imagine the medieval Silk Road is to conjure up images of exotic commerce: camel caravans crossing wind-swept dunes, bustling city bazaars, silks and spices spilling from saddlebags. If these images loom large in modern imaginations of the Silk Road, how did people actually living in the Middle Ages think about long distance trade and travel? Drawing on textual, architectural and archaeological evidence, this talk explores the social lives of people living not in the city centers of medieval commerce, but in the places in-between, along the road. Specifically, the talk invites us to spend some time along the roadside with medieval people in the Armenian highlands, where special-built caravan inns housed travelers heading for the Mediterranean, to China, to the Middle East, and north into the steppe, and where people had their own imaginaries of the wider medieval world. Kate Franklin will share aspects of her work in the Republic of Armenia which show how global cultures emerge hand-in-hand with local worlds.
Kate Franklin is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at Birkbeck, University of London. Kate is a landscape archaeologist and historian focused on the intersections of local and large-scale social worlds in the medieval landscapes of what is now the Republic of Armenia, where she has been co-PI of the Vayots Dzor Silk Road Survey for nearly a decade. Kate’s most recent book, Landscapes and Environments of the Middle Ages(Routledge 2023, co-authored with Michael Bintley) explores the cultural history of nature in the medieval period.
