Even the most schematic representations are executed with meticulous attention to overall symmetry and balance. Animal, human, or supernatural figures usually flank the tree, while a winged disk hovers over the whole. In more elaborate renditions, the trunk regularly has joints or nodes at its top, middle, and base and a corresponding number of small circles to the right and left of the trunk. Nevertheless, its features stand out even in the crudest examples and make it easy to distinguish it from its predecessors.Įssentially, it consists of a trunk with a palmette crown standing on a stone base and surrounded by a network of horizontal or intersecting lines fringed with palmettes, pinecones, or pomegranates. The hundreds of available specimens of the Late Assyrian Tree exhibit a great deal of individual variation show that the motif and most of its iconography were inherited from earlier periods. Its importance for imperial ideology is borne out by its appearance on royal garments and jewelry, official seals, and the wall paintings and sculptures of royal palaces, as in the throne room of Ashurnasirpal II in Calah, where it is the central motif. With the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, this form of the Tree spread throughout the entire Near East and continues to be seen down to the end of the 1st millennium. The question of whether the concept of the Tree of Life actually existed in ancient Mesopotamia has been debated.Ībout the middle of the 2nd millennium, a new development in the iconography of the Tree becomes noticeable leading to the emergence of the so-called Late Assyrian Tree under Tukulti-Ninurta I.
THE TREE OF LIFEĪ stylized tree with religious significance occurs as an art motif in 4th-millennium Mesopotamia, and, by the 2nd millennium B.C., it is found everywhere within the ancient Near Eastern provinces, including Egypt, Greece, and the Indus civilization.’ The meaning of the motif is not clear, but its over-all composition strikingly recalls the Tree of Life of later Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist art.
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