Search Results (3)

The topos of Vienna as the “stronghold of Christendom” emerged soon after the 1529 unsuccessful siege by the Ottomans. The city’s new strategic status not only spurred the building of new urban fortifications, it also stimulated the production of a large variety of printed texts and pictures that emphasized the necessity of Christian unity among divided Christians. In this context, this article aims to shed new light on the use of one Old Testament episode whose significance and polysemy has been largely overlooked for sixteenth-century Vienna: the attack of Jerusalem by the Assyrian King Sennacherib and his subsequent defeat through divine intervention under the city wall. Instrumental in defining a common spiritual approach to the fight, this Old Testament story can be considered a seminal basis for the paradigm of Vienna as a Jerusalem of unity and unanimity. To analyze the significance of this theme in Vienna, this article will first focus on its representation in Hanns Lautensack’s 1558/1559 famous cityscape before demonstrating that it originated from a far less known source: the 1532 sermons by the Bishop Johann Fabri. Full article

The narrative of 2 Kings 18:17–19:9a, 36–37 (“Source B₁”) recounts pre-exilic religious collective trauma surrounding Sennacherib’s military advance against Judah in 710 BCE and its aftermath. In this narrative, the Rabshakeh uses the keywords “בטח” and “נצל” to assert that Yhwh has turned against Judah. However, his claims were subverted by the withdrawal of the Assyrian army and the later death of Sennacherib, facilitated by the divine intervention of Yhwh following Hezekiah’s supplication. Despite its significance, only a few studies have examined this narrative as that of trauma. Drawing on Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of the social process of cultural or collective trauma, this study argues that the function of this narrative is that of religious trauma narrative. It reconstructs the collective trauma of Sennacherib’s campaign to theologically defend the Davidic kingship and Yhwh and ultimately suggests a revised identity for the Judaean community to foster solidarity, even under the ongoing influence of Assyria following the military campaign. Full article

The impressive hydraulic system built by the Assyrian King Sennacherib is composed by different archaeological areas, displaced along the Land of Nineveh, in Iraqi Kurdistan. The extensive project we are working on has the aim of mapping and geo-referencing any kind of documentation in order to design an archaeological-environmental park able to preserve and enhance the archaeological complex. Unfortunately, the area is failing a topographic documentation and the available cartography is not sufficient for planning and documentation purposes. The research work presented in these pages moves towards this direction, by exploiting Pleiadés Very High Resolution (VHR) images (in both nadir and stereo configuration) for an accurate mapping of the site. In more depth, Pleiadés nadir VHR images have been used to perform a pansharpening procedure used to enhance the visual interpretation of the study area, whilst stereo-pair have been processed to produce the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of the study area. Statistical evaluations show the high accuracy of the processing and the reliability of the outputs as well. The integration of different products, at different Levels of Detail within a unique GIS environment, besides protecting, preserving and enhancing the water system of Sennacherib’s, paves the way to allow the Kurdistan Regional Government to present a proposal for the admission of the archaeological complex in the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List (WHTL). Full article