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This paper aims to explore the material practices related to the creation of the urban landscape in ancient Mesopotamia.

Within the Assyrian tradition, two opposing narratives of city founding co-existed. The rhetoric of one relates that the king rebuilt the city from a ruined and dilapidated state, improving and renovating it. The rhetoric of the other describes the king founding a city where none had existed before. The material practices relating to these narratives were the inscriptions incorporated into the urban landscape. The paper will examine the case studies of Kalhu and Kar-Tikulti-Ninurta, looking at what role the materiality of the past plays and, for the latter, looking at the concept of terra nullius. The Neo-Babylonians were more actively related to their material past, consciously undertaking excavations to discover the remains of older structures. The paper will examine the ways in which this material past was used, and the way in which it was recorded, using the Assyrian practices as a comparison.

The ways in which the Assyrian kings Assurbanipal II and Tikulti-Ninurta I and the Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus interacted with and viewed the past urban landscapes differed greatly; however, they shared a consciousness of their past that was expressed in the material practices of their present, and this will be the cohesive argument of the paper.

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