In spring 2016, a large relief was accidentally discovered in Harput near Elazığ. The relief, measur- ing 2.72 x 2.4 m, is carved on a local sandstone slab. The main subject of the relief is the capture of a fortress and the presentation...
moreIn spring 2016, a large relief was accidentally discovered in Harput near Elazığ. The relief, measur- ing 2.72 x 2.4 m, is carved on a local sandstone slab. The main subject of the relief is the capture of a fortress and the presentation of war captives to the king. Different episodes of the battle are depicted in registrars arranged horizontally from the bottom to the top. Towards the middle of the relief, a giant wooden tower is pictured close to the fortifications of the attacked city, which is depicted in flames. To the right, a goddess figure with the claws of an eagle and lowered wings is represented stepping over two naked male figures lying on top of the city gate. The hairdo of the goddess shows Egyptian influence while her legs are shown as twisted. This interesting goddess image, who is apparently strangling a naked male figure, finds good comparanda on Old Babylonian cylinder seal impressions and a kudurru from the Kassite Period.
The upper registers of the relief show naked prisoners of war with tied hands, who are brought before the king by armed soldiers. These narrative scenes seem to repeat the conventional repre- sentation of military victory scenes that date back to the Early Dynastic Period in Mesopotamia. On the top right register, the king is depicted sitting on a backless chair on top of naked enemy figures, looking to the right and shown in profile. He holds a fenestrated axe of duckbill type in his right hand.
At first sight, the stylistic and iconographic features of the Harput relief recall an Akkadian style of art, especially the artistic representations of Naram-Sin and his successors. However, it is unique in terms of its use of the monolithic figurative space and displays a more advanced artistic repre- sentation than Naram-Sin. Besides, the relief was discovered in a heavily-burned architectural layer together with Middle Bronze Age I pottery typical of the Elazığ-Malatya region. Therefore, we sug- gest that this relief should to be dated to 2000-1850 B.C.