Diary (June 16, 2020)

Online diary of Karl Jones for Tuesday June 16, 2020.

Previous: Diary (June 15, 2020) - Next: Diary (June 17, 2020)

Diary

Ashurbanipal

Prisoners being flayed during the siege of Lachish, from the Southwest Palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh, 701 BC.

[Context: reply to Facebook post.]

Made me laugh! But also I had to stop and think.

If anyone deserves to have their iconography toppled and smashed, it is Ashurbanipal (685 BC - 631 BC), King of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

Listen, ye women and men of the modern world, to the voice of a true conqueror:

"I built a pillar over against the city gate and I flayed all the chiefs who had revolted and I covered the pillar with their skins. Some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes and others I bound to stakes round the pillar. I cut the limbs off the officers who had rebelled. Many captives I burned with fire and many I took as living captives. From some I cut off their noses, their ears, and their fingers, of many I put out their eyes. I made one pillar of the living and another of heads and I bound their heads to tree trunks round about the city. Their young men and maidens I consumed with fire. The rest of their warriors I consumed with thirst in the desert of the Euphrates."

Which brings us to my question—

Why do we permit this masterwork of atrocity to exist?

Should we not efface the words and destroy the works of this monster Ashurbanipal, as a lesson to would-be conqueror worms, and as a balm to the memory of the countless victims?

No, we should not destroy the works of this monster.

We should preserve the works of this monster, because Art is greater than man.

• Comment @ Facebook

Fiction cross-reference

• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Karl Jones (nonfiction)