The "Sumerian Tree of Life" Was Never a Tree: Here's What It Really Was

There is a tree carved into stone slabs in museums from Brooklyn to Baghdad, repeated almost two hundred times across a single Assyrian palace, and for over a century it has been called the Sumerian Tree of Life. No ancient text uses that name, no Sumerian source confirms that meaning, and the Sumerian and Assyrian evidence are separated by a thousand years and several hundred miles. So was this ever a tree at all? In this video: • The Brooklyn, Met, Yale and Royal Ontario Museum reliefs and what their own catalogues actually say • How the "Tree of Life" label spread through spirituality blogs with no excavation records or citations • The excavation history of Nimrud, from Layard in 1845 to Mallowan in 1949 to the 2015 destruction by Islamic State • The real Sumerian huluppu myth, and why it is not the cosmic tree people imagine • The three competing scholarly readings: date palm, cult object, and tree of life • Why no Assyrian text ever explains what the carved tree meant Chapters: 0:00 The Brooklyn Museum Tree 0:42 A Motif Repeated Everywhere 1:33 Myths Spreading Online 2:13 What Museums Actually Hold 3:13 The Popular Legend 8:29 Excavating Nimrud 16:24 The Sumerian South 21:28 Weighing The Interpretations 31:07 Early Scholarly Theories 45:34 Testing The Evidence 56:01 Names In The Clay 1:09:48 New Tools, Old Silence This film draws on the catalogues and collection records of the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery and the British Museum, on Mariana Giovino's book The Assyrian Sacred Tree: A History of Interpretations, on the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, and on reporting from UNESCO and the Penn Museum's Iraq Heritage Stabilization Program. If you like documentaries that go back to the actual tablets and objects, please subscribe; we're a small channel and every subscriber helps. #Mesopotamia #Assyria #AncientHistory #Archaeology #Nimrud