The maps get fancier and fancier each time. I am having fun with my little animations, even if they are pretty crude. The sharp eyed among you will notice that the city of Huzirina moved during the episode – this is because Tukulti-Ninurta’s itinerary strongly suggested that it was further south than my estimates from Adad-Nirari’s annals, plus the really vague maps I found online. Siting cities like these, which have only a handful of mentions, is frequently a lot of guesswork, and in this case my guess changed as I read and re-read the itineraries involved while animating the episode. It doesn’t really matter for the story, but it is a good reminder that all these city locations are extremely approximate, and given the crudeness of my map, even more approximate.
Anyway, Tukulti-Ninurta II really seems like a different sort of character than other Assyrian kings. I play up these character differences in the show, at least the ones I perceive, but in the annals and other royal sources, all Assyrian kings really do write about themselves in very strict, stylized ways. This makes it very hard to see them as anything other than competent, arrogant, violent, and pious. But especially as I was recording this while writing about his son, Assurnasirpal II, there does seem to be various shifts in focus which I can only attribute to either the different kings deliberately wanting to focus on different aspects in their propaganda, or to the kings having different underlying personalities. Of course, if it is the first, why would they want to emphasize different focuses unless they had different underlying personalities? So I assume that these men really were different from each other, and where I can see it I want to highlight it to give the story more flavor.
Given that, though, do I actually think that Tukulti-Ninurta was skipping boyishly through the Wadi Tharthar? No, I don’t. But when the AI generated that image, I knew right away that it was a keeper. Full image below – no copyright since it is AI, and it amuses me to no end. What is the balance between playing up a king’s personality and maintaining the royal tone of the actual source material? I genuinely don’t know, but it feels right to me to play up the personalities, even if I end up overplaying them, because we have so little else to go on. And I think it makes Tukuti-Ninurta more memorable – his place in history was in building foundations and in these extremely important “camping trips” he was able to establish Assyrian presence both in and out of the empire, establish diplomatic relationships on Assyrian terms, and handle administrative matters in newly conquered regions. Cheerful Tukulti-Ninurta built buildings personally and delegated military campaigns, and loved to hang out in trendy Nineveh. It seems to be a sketch which comports with both his deeds and what little we get of his personality.
Anyway, maps and images below – No copyright on any of them as usual, since it is all AI except the maps:
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