When Geoffrey Turner passed away on 7 October 2018 due to complications from his long struggle with cancer, the world lost one of its greatest authorities on ancient Nineveh and I lost a close friend whose continuing scholarship had immeasurably influenced my own. To Geoffrey’s own account in the Preface of the genesis and progression of the present book, I would only add that in the course of writing it he would regularly send me chapters to review. From these drafts, which expanded in length and scope with every revision, it was clear that Geoffrey’s book would be the authoritative record of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century excavations in Sennacherib’s palace.
When Geoffrey enigmatically wrote to me in August 2016 “It is all a bit of a race against time”, and the following month reported that he had cancer, I still clearly remember my shock and concern, primarily for my friend, but also for the scholarly project so close to his heart, to which he had devoted the past 18 years. Geoffrey spent the next year completing the manuscript, and in August 2017 I traveled to his home in Brussels to discuss its possible publication. We both felt that his work should ideally be made available as a book, so I offered to serve as editor, with responsibility for getting the manuscript into publishable form and trying to secure a publisher, while Geoffrey would devote his by then somewhat limited energy to assisting with the multitude of questions that arose during the editorial process.
Fortunately, after reviewing the manuscript Brill agreed to publish the book. Upon receiving this wonderful news, the first major task was to convert the manuscript into an electronic format compatible with current publication processes. Geoffrey always worked on a typewriter, so the manuscript was in fact a typescript of nearly 2000 pages, and the only feasible way to digitize a manuscript of that size was to use an optical character recognition (OCR) program. However, most of the typed pages had marks and insertions from manual editing that the OCR program endeavoured to render faithfully with randomly distributed dots and lines, so after conversion each page had to be carefully reviewed and corrected. This I did to the best of my ability, but I still occasionally find errors that I missed, and apologize to the reader in advance for any such lingering faults in the text.
The other major editorial task was preparing the illustrations. Geoffrey had made rough photocopied mock-ups of all the illustration plates on A4 size (21 × 29.7 cm) paper, with plans generally scaled to 1:300 and reliefs to 1:20. For the book, he wished to maintain these constant scales so that readers could readily perceive scale relationships in the architecture and sculptures. This required re-formatting most of his scaled illustrations to fit the 17.5 × 24 cm print format of this chane volume, which often required two-page spreads. In addition, Geoffrey had wanted to include large foldouts of Layard’s N&B plan at 1:600 (its original published scale) and the MS Plan at 1:300 (the smallest scale at which its fine detail is still visible), but this proved impractical. Instead, both plans have been divided into page-sized sections at Geoffrey’s desired scales and included in the “Plans” section at the end. To my knowledge, this is the first publication of the MS Plan at a scale that permits it to be fully legible.
A note should be added regarding the convention used here to render abbreviations in handwritten documents. The nineteenth-century people quoted in this book generally abbreviated words by writing the final letter or letters in superscript, for example Mr and entrce, and often the superscript is underlined, or has one or two dots placed beneath it, or both. Since such dots and underlining are not used consistently, even within the same document, they have the character more of flourishes rather than regular punctuation. In copying such documents Geoffrey rigorously transcribed all of these flourishes. In this book they are rendered according to the method Geoffrey published in Iraq 65 (Turner 2003, 190), with single under-dots placed before the superscript (M.r and entr.ce), double under-dots placed before and after the superscript (M.r. and entr.ce.), and underlining as in the original.
Because of the large number of citations throughout this book to Barnett, Bleibtreu, and Turner, Sculptures from the Southwest Palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh, British Museum Press, 1998 (swps), readers may wish to keep a copy of that publication close to hand. Fortunately, although print copies of that book can be hard to find, at the time of writing a free download is available from Stony Brook University’s “Archive of Mesopotamian Archaeological Reports” (amar) website.
It is a great pleasure to acknowledge the crucial contributions of the many people who assisted in the realization of this massive project. Foremost among these is Geoffrey’s wife, Petra Boekstal. Whether the need was for her to stand atop a tall, precarious ladder to check a book in Geoffrey’s library, to search his files for a missing page or the best photocopy of an archival document, or to make image rights inquiries, Petra was dedicated to ensuring that Geoffrey’s final work would stand as a fitting tribute to his achievements. I am also extremely grateful to the editors at Brill: to Acquisitions Editor Katelyn Chin for undertaking to publish the book and for her continuing assistance throughout the rather challenging process of preparing the manuscript for publication, to chane series editor Jonathan Stökl for supporting publication of the book and for valuable recommendations to enhance its readability, and to Erika Mandarino for shepherding the book through the publication process. I am grateful likewise to David Kertai for agreeing to serve as a reader of the manuscript for Brill, and for his wise and always constructive editorial suggestions. The typesetting of the very complex manuscript was handled by Cas Van den Hof, whose precision and patience with my innumerable odd typographical and formatting requests resulted in a beautifully produced publication that fully realizes all aspects of Geoffrey’s vision.
As noted above, the acquisition of images and copyright permissions was fully as great a task as the digitizing and editing of the manuscript itself. Because of the central role of the British Museum in Geoffrey’s book, it was essential to be able to include a large number of illustrations of items in that museum’s collections and archives. This would have been impossible without the assistance of Jonathan Tubb, the Keeper for the Department of the Middle East, as well as Curator for Mesopotamia Gareth Brereton, Departmental Archivist Angela Grimshaw, and Francesca Hillier, Senior Archivist of the British Museum Archive. Very special thanks go to Beatriz Waters, the Head of British Museum Images, who over the course of nearly a year responded with patience and good cheer to my repeated requests for additional images and permissions. It is largely thanks to her efforts that the book is able to include so many important, beautiful, and previously-unpublished images from the museum’s various archives.
Special thanks also to James Hervey-Bathurst cbe dl, who took new photographs of the two important reliefs in Eastnor Castle, and provided measurements and granted permission to publish them. I am also extremely grateful for the assistance of many other individuals who helped secure images and permissions, including Jonathon Vines and Chris Rawlings of the British Library, Paul Collins and the staff of the Picture Library of the Ashmolean Museum, Nadine Lees of the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Samuel Atkins of the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem, Eric Gubel of the Art & History Museum—Brussels, Irmgard Wagner of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Pauline Sugino of the Honolulu Museum of Art, Richard Keresy and Florent Heintz of Sotheby’s, Rachel Kett of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the staff of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia Photo Archive, and the owners of two private collections. Others who provided essential assistance with permissions include Dylan Leah Brekka, Margarete van Ess, Julian Reade, Ann Searight, and Rupert Wace.
Finally, my heartfelt thanks to my wife Janet Russell, whose constant support throughout this long and demanding process has been appreciated far beyond the power of words to express.
John Malcolm Russell