Thursday, August 26, 2010

Nineveh drawings

I have finished working on the technical illustrations for the upcoming publication of the UC Berkeley excavations at the ancient Assyrian site of Nineveh (on the outskirts of Mosul, Iraq). My PHD advisor, David Stronach, excavated the Halzi Gate in 1989 and 1990. The results were quite spectacular, a destruction layer complete with a crowd of skeletons seemingly killed during the sack of the city. Needless to say, one of the best preserved finds are the arrowheads. I have drawn about a dozen now. He is in the process of producing the final publication with several of his graduate students (now professionals or professors): including Diana Pickworth-Wong, Eleanor Barbanes, Tony Wilkinson and others as a part of the NEH "lost empires" project http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2004-11/lostempires.html

Other illustration projects are forthcoming. It may be necessary to re-draw a part of the excavated sections (profile slices through the soil, which show the stratigraphy of the deposit) for the Nineveh project.

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