Fred Parhad | |
|---|---|
 Statue Of Ashurbanipal in San Francisco, by Fred Parhad | |
| Born | 1947 (age 74–75) |
| Nationality | Iraqi-American |
| Known for | Painter and sculptor |
| Website | fredparhad |
Fred Parhad (born 1947) is an Iraqi-Assyrian sculptor who is best known for his monument of Ashurbanipal, which stands in San Francisco in front of that city's Asian Art Museum. Parhad is a self-taught sculptor, who, at the beginning of his career, focused on the art of ancient Assyria. [1] [2]
The statue of the Assyrian King, Ashurbanipal, looks across Fulton Street towards the San Francisco Public Library. The king is sculpted in a short tunic. He holds a lion cub to his chest with his right arm and offers a clay tablet with his left. A bronze plaque and rosettes adorn the concrete base of the statue. The clay tablet held by the king is inscribed with Assyrian cuneiform, whose text translates as:
"Peace unto heaven and earth
Peace unto countries and cities
Peace unto the dwellers in all lands"
Ashurbanipal, son of Esarhaddon, was the last great king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (668 BC–c. 627 BC). He introduced the first known systematically organized library, the Library of Ashurbanipal, now at Nineveh. This library was burned along with most of the city of Nineveh, the flames however served to fire some of the clay tablets. This accidental vitrification is the ultimate reason for the survival of the king's name and deeds. [3]
Parhad was born in Baghdad in 1947. Due to the Assyrian genocide just before World War I, his grandfather Dr. Baba Parhad moved four generations of his family abroad. Fred Parhad spent his younger days in Iraq, Iran and Kuwait, where his father, Dr. Luther Parhad, held directorships in the public health sector. [3]
Parhad had a keen interest in sculpture from his early days and pursued this through high school and further, while studying at University of California, Berkeley. Sculpture became a career after he moved to New York in 1976. [3]
The Book of Nahum is the seventh book of the 12 minor prophets of the Hebrew Bible. It is attributed to the prophet Nahum, and was probably written in Jerusalem in the 7th century BC.
Nineveh was an ancient Assyrian city of Upper Mesopotamia, located on the outskirts of Mosul in modern-day northern Iraq. It is located on the eastern bank of the Tigris River and was the capital and largest city of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, as well as the largest city in the world for several decades. Today, it is a common name for the half of Mosul that lies on the eastern bank of the Tigris, and the country's Nineveh Governorate takes its name from it.
Esarhaddon, also spelled Essarhaddon, Assarhaddon and Ashurhaddon was the king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from the death of his father Sennacherib in 681 BC to his own death in 669. The third king of the Sargonid dynasty, Esarhaddon is most famous for his conquest of Egypt in 671 BC, which made his empire the largest the world had ever seen, and for his reconstruction of Babylon, which had been destroyed by his father.
Ashurbanipal was the king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 669 BC to his death in 631. He is generally remembered as the last great king of Assyria. Inheriting the throne as the favored heir of his father Esarhaddon, Ashurbanipal's 38-year reign was among the longest of any Assyrian king. Though sometimes regarded as the apogee of ancient Assyria, his reign also marked the last time Assyrian armies waged war throughout the ancient Near East and the beginning of the end of Assyrian dominion over the region.
Sinsharishkun or Sin-shar-ishkun was the penultimate king of Assyria, reigning from the death of his brother and predecessor Ashur-etil-ilani in 627 BC to his own death at the Fall of Nineveh in 612 BC.
Nimrud is an ancient Assyrian city located in Iraq, 30 kilometres (20 mi) south of the city of Mosul, and 5 kilometres (3 mi) south of the village of Selamiyah, in the Nineveh Plains in Upper Mesopotamia. It was a major Assyrian city between approximately 1350 BC and 610 BC. The city is located in a strategic position 10 kilometres (6 mi) north of the point that the river Tigris meets its tributary the Great Zab. The city covered an area of 360 hectares. The ruins of the city were found within one kilometre (1,100 yd) of the modern-day Assyrian village of Noomanea in Nineveh Governorate, Iraq.
Assyriology is the archaeological, historical, and linguistic study of Assyria and the rest of ancient Mesopotamia and of the related cultures that used cuneiform writing. The field covers Sumer, the early Sumero-Akkadian city-states, the Akkadian Empire, Ebla, the Akkadian and Imperial Aramaic speaking states of Assyria, Babylonia and the Sealand Dynasty, the migrant foreign dynasties of southern Mesopotamia, including the Gutians, Amorites, Kassites, Arameans, Suteans and Chaldeans.
Sardanapalus was, according to the Greek writer Ctesias, the last king of Assyria, although in fact Ashur-uballit II holds that distinction.
Aššur-nāṣir-apli I, inscribed maš-šur-PAB-A, “the god Aššur is the protector of the heir,” was the king of Assyria, 1049–1031 BC, and the 92nd to appear on the Assyrian Kinglist. He was the son and successor of Šamši-Adad IV, and he ruled for 19 years during a troubled period of Assyrian history, marked by famine and war with nomads from the deserts to the west. He is best known for his penitential prayer to Ištar of Nineveh.
The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, named after Ashurbanipal, the last great king of the Assyrian Empire, is a collection of more than 30,000 clay tablets and fragments containing texts of all kinds from the 7th century BC, including texts in various languages. Among its holdings was the famous Epic of Gilgamesh.
The Battle of Nineveh is conventionally dated between 613 and 611 BC, with 612 BC being the most supported date. Rebelling against the Assyrians, an allied army which combined the forces of Medes and the Babylonians, besieged Nineveh and sacked 750 hectares of what was, at that time, one of the greatest cities in the world. The fall of Nineveh led to the destruction of the Neo-Assyrian Empire over the next three years as the dominant state in the Ancient Near East. Archeological records show that the capital of the once mighty Assyrian Empire was extensively de-urbanized and depopulated in the decades and centuries following the battle. A garbled account of the fall of the city later led to the story of the legendary king Sardanapalus.
The Department of the Middle East, numbering some 330,000 works, forms a significant part of the collections of the British Museum, and the world's largest collection of Mesopotamian antiquities outside Iraq. The collections represent the civilisations of the ancient Near East and its adjacent areas.
The art of Mesopotamia has survived in the archaeological record from early hunter-gatherer societies on to the Bronze Age cultures of the Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian empires. These empires were later replaced in the Iron Age by the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires. Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia brought significant cultural developments, including the oldest examples of writing.
Ashurbanipal, also known as the Ashurbanipal Monument or the Statue of Ashurbanipal, is a bronze sculpture by Fred Parhad, an artist of Assyrian descent. It is located in the Civic Center of San Francisco, California, in the United States. The 15-foot (4.6 m) statue depicting the Assyrian king of the same name was commissioned by the Assyrian Foundation for the Arts and presented to the City of San Francisco in 1988 as a gift from the Assyrian people. The sculpture reportedly cost $100,000 and was the first "sizable" bronze statue of Ashurbanipal. It is administered by the City and County of San Francisco and the San Francisco Arts Commission.
The Statue of Gilgamesh at the University of Sydney, Camperdown, was created by Lewis Batros on commission from the Assyrian community, and unveiled in 2000. The 2.5m statue depicts Gilgamesh, an ancient Sumerian king of the city-state of Uruk whose legendary exploits are told in the Epic of Gilgamesh, an Akkadian epic poem written during the late second millennium BC, based on much earlier material.
The Sargonid dynasty was the final ruling dynasty of Assyria, ruling as kings of Assyria during the Neo-Assyrian Empire for just over a century from the ascent of Sargon II in 722 BC to the fall of Assyria in 609 BC. Although Assyria would ultimately fall during their rule, the Sargonid dynasty ruled the country during the apex of its power and Sargon II's three immediate successors Sennacherib, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal are generally regarded as three of the greatest Assyrian monarchs. Though the dynasty encompasses seven Assyrian kings, two vassal kings in Babylonia and numerous princes and princesses, the term Sargonids is sometimes used solely for Sennacherib, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal.
Assyrian sculpture is the sculpture of the ancient Assyrian states, especially the Neo-Assyrian Empire of 911 to 612 BC, which was centered around the city of Assur in Mesopotamia which at its height, ruled over all of Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt, as well as portions of Anatolia, Arabia and modern-day Iran and Armenia. It forms a phase of the art of Mesopotamia, differing in particular because of its much greater use of stone and gypsum alabaster for large sculpture.
The royal Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal is shown on a famous group of Assyrian palace reliefs from the North Palace of Nineveh that are now displayed in room 10a of the British Museum. They are widely regarded as "the supreme masterpieces of Assyrian art". They show a formalized ritual "hunt" by King Ashurbanipal in an arena, where captured Asian lions were released from cages for the king to slaughter with arrows, spears, or his sword. They were made about 645–635 BC, and originally formed different sequences placed around the palace. They would probably originally have been painted, and formed part of a brightly coloured overall decor.
Libbali-sharrat was a queen of the Neo-Assyrian Empire as the primary consort of Ashurbanipal. Libbali-sharrat married Ashurbanipal before he became king, probably in 672 BC, and may have lived beyond her husband's death, as documents from the reign of her probable son, Ashur-etil-ilani reference the "mother of the king". Libbali-sharrat enjoys the distinction of being the only known individual from ancient Assyria who was not a king to be depicted holding court since she is depicted in one of Ashurbanipal's reliefs as hosting him at dinner in the palace garden, surrounded by her own female servants.
The Assyrian conquest of Egypt covered a relatively short period of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 677 BCE to 663 BCE.
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