Mesopotamia, in particular Assyria and Babylon, occupies a foundational place in Western cultural identity derived from classical and biblical texts. Material traces, however, were scarce until large-scale excavations in what is now northern Iraq began in the mid-nineteenth century. In Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Frederick Bohrer examines the complex reception of ancient Mesopotamia through the lens of reception theory and postcolonialism. With the “discovery” and acquisition of monumental sculpture from sites such as Khorsabad, Nimrud, and Nineveh in the 1840s and their subsequent introduction to European audiences, a new engagement with the “ancient Orient” unfolded, partly dependent, as Bohrer argues, on preexisting expectations and partly in reaction to the shocking revelation of this previously unimagined artistic corpus.

Among the diversity of responses that these finds elicited, Bohrer focuses primarily on what he calls the aesthetic horizon of expectation: that is, whether and how Mesopotamian artifacts were understood as “art” apart from, or in addition to, their valuation as historical or moralizing documents. As indices of aesthetic reception, he concentrates on two main bodies of evidence from nineteenth-century France, England, and Germany: print media, including publications by the “pioneering” archaeologists Paul Emile Botta and Austen Henry Layard, as well as journalistic reporting, especially in popular illustrated journals; and the appearance of Mesopotamian motifs and themes in art both before and after the discoveries. While Bohrer analyzes the well-known corpus of “orientalist” paintings, he also examines other forms of artistic production, such as operas, plays, small-scale objets d’art, and international expositions. This expanded field of inquiry, in which the so-called major arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture are explored within a broader constellation of material-culture production, leads to refined visual readings and constitutes a major contribution of the book.

Bohrer opens with two chapters that set the stage methodologically and topically. Chapter 1 presents the study’s theoretical underpinnings, beginning with a review of “orientalism” as a scholarly approach derived from Edward Said. Bohrer, however, argues for the term “exoticism” instead of “orientalism” in order to avoid the simplistic binary of Orient-Occident (17). He then proceeds with amplifications of reception theory, in particular that stemming from Hans Robert Jauss and Walter Benjamin, and postcolonialism with special reference to Homi Bhabha. Bohrer faces the difficult task of bringing together disparate bodies of knowledge, namely several aspects of postmodern art history and Mesopotamian archaeology. This requires a fine balancing act and carries the risk of elaborating on what may seem like the obvious. On the whole, Bohrer does an admirable job of interweaving the theoretical background information with various ongoing critiques and his own reassessments. The second chapter opens with an overview of exoticism in nineteenth-century European art in general and then turns to two Mesopotamian-themed paintings that predate the main archaeological discoveries of the 1840s—John Martin’s Fall of Nineveh (1828) and Eugène Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus (1827). Contrasting these two paintings, which depict the same story, Bohrer demonstrates both the fluidity of Mesopotamia as a signifier and the differences between the ways in which this referential flexibility was manifested in France and England. Such considerations of multiple, fragmentary, and locally conditioned “Western” conceptions of the “East” endow the study with depth and nuance.

The remaining six chapters explore, in varying degrees of detail, the histories of reception in France, England, and Germany through an analysis of artistic and literary production. France and England receive the greatest share of attention given their chronological precedence in excavations (chapters 3–7). Botta, working for the French government of Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy, made the first large-scale discoveries at the Assyrian city of Khorsabad, and a gallery devoted to the colossal carved sculptures and reliefs from this site opened at the Louvre in 1847. Initial French reception to these finds, however, was muted, a phenomenon that Bohrer attributes to the overthrow of the monarchy in the revolution of 1848. As Bohrer discerns, “Botta’s historical misfortune is to have successfully excavated the remains of an ancient king, under the sponsorship of a modern one, at the very moment that kingship itself was under attack” (73).

This situation stands in stark contrast to that of England, where Layard’s work in Assyria, first at the city of Nimrud (originally thought to be ancient Nineveh) in the 1840s and later at Nineveh itself in the 1850s, set off a frenzy of excitement and controversy that extended from elite museum and academic spheres to the increasingly influential middle class. While Assyrian discoveries enjoyed widespread popularity in Victorian England, as manifested in an array of “material culture” products, such as jewelry and novelty porcelains, as well as in visual referencing by painters like Ford Madox Brown and Edwin Long, Bohrer documents a general resistance to viewing them as items of aesthetic worth within the learned community, including the directors and trustees of the British Museum where the works were (and still are) housed.

Meanwhile in late-nineteenth-century France, a changing social, artistic, and archaeological environment brought the possibility of renewed aesthetic appreciation of Mesopotamia. With the general shift from realism to symbolism and the excavation of non-Assyrian archaeological finds from Susa and Telloh, the stage was set for Mesopotamian art to effect a realignment of the aesthetic horizon of expectation. Yet this potential remained confined to a minority of the avant-garde community and had little long-term impact.

The final chapter looks at Germany, which, with its newly emergent nationalist and imperialist agenda at the end of the nineteenth century, was a latecomer to Mesopotamian archaeology. Unlike France and England, which uncovered sculpture-rich Assyrian palaces in northern Mesopotamia, the Germans excavated Babylon, located in the south where stone was scarce. The relatively unimpressive artistic finds from this site, in contrast to the monumental statuary of the French and English excavations in Assyria, conspired with the growing predominance of a philological tradition in German academia to solidify what Bohrer calls “an absorption of artifacts into meaning, of object into text” (278), thereby sealing the fate of any dynamic aesthetic reception of Mesopotamia. Indeed, Bohrer concludes that French and English archaeological discoveries and their mid-nineteenth century reception effectively fixed the “horizon of expectation” for how Europe viewed “its ancient other” (312).

A current running through the narrative, but only hinted at by Bohrer, is the fundamentally acquisitive nature of museums (e.g., 232). This theme deserves further pursuit, especially in light of its continued centrality in an antiquities market that remains a driving force behind the present looting catastrophe in Iraq. The study might also have profitably plumbed the development of ethnography (244) and, in particular, ethno-linguistics (291), which were major factors in the nineteenth-century intellectual organization of ancient cultures. Within these emerging disciplines, race was intimately bound up with language and both were linked to cultural and moral evaluations. Thus, the Sumerians and their linguistically isolated language were contrasted to Semitic-speaking Assyrians and Babylonians, who in turn were set in opposition to Indo-European/Indo-Aryan–speaking Persians, establishing a pseudoscientific justification for the racism and anti-Semitism that Bohrer notes in chapter 8. A nineteenth-century specialist, Bohrer betrays occasional lacunae in his knowledge of Mesopotamian art and archaeology, though for the most part these lapses do not materially affect his argument. In some places, however, the discussion could have been enriched by a deeper knowledge of ancient works. For example, the French aesthetic valuation of Assyrian art, which tied it more closely to Greek statuary than the comparable British aesthetic valuation (77), can be directly attributed to stylistic differences between the Assyrian reliefs from Khorsabad in the Louvre and those from Nimrud and Nineveh in the British Museum. Khorsabad boasts carvings in much higher and more rounded relief, especially the so-called Gilgamesh figure often mentioned by Bohrer, relative to the uniplanar, almost engraved, style of relief-carving found at Nimrud and Nineveh—an ancient stylistic distinction rooted in the historical specificity of Khorsabad as the new capital of a usurper who actively employed artistic motifs and styles in the ideological representation of kingship. Thus, while some differences in reception between France and England derived from their culturally distinct preconceived horizons of expectation, the internal variations of formal elements among the ancient finds themselves also contributed to shaping these very horizons.

None of these observations, however, detracts from the book’s achievements. Bohrer’s scholarship is exemplary in its integration of careful visual analysis with social and institutional histories that are inflected by elegant postcolonial readings. To give just one example, Bohrer deftly compares an early-twentieth-century German champagne advertisement with its Assyrian model, a relief of a royal garden scene (309). The formal shift in how the king’s, queen’s, and servants’ heads are placed in the two works reveals and affirms the hierarchical differences relevant to each society, from an Assyrian differentiation along the lines of status to a twentieth-century distinction based on gender.

Given that this is a book dedicated to the analysis of reception, its reception among scholars of the ancient Near East and scholars of nineteenth-century Europe will be intriguing in its own right. In many ways, this book is itself a hybrid “in-between” of the sort Bohrer describes (34), and its novel inspection of Mesopotamian art poses something of a challenge to both areas of study. Mesopotamian art continues to be an unsettling entity within the typical schema of “Art History” (witness the small number of art-history departments that employ a Mesopotamian specialist), and likewise, the practice of art history still fits uncomfortably within the discipline of ancient Near Eastern studies, which is dominated by archaeology and philology. Bohrer’s fascinating and illuminating study of the aesthetic reception of Mesopotamia in the nineteenth century and his understanding of the ultimate petrifaction of the “horizon of expectation” that eventually subsumed Mesopotamian discoveries provide an acute historiographic perspective on Mesopotamia’s place in the intellectual and popular imagination that persists even today. It is thus important reading not just for scholars of nineteenth-century Europe and postcolonialism, but also for those interested in the development of the disciplines of Near Eastern studies and art history.