Born: Unknown, Iraq (assumed)
Died: After 631 BCE
Country most active: Iraq
Also known as: Ashur-sharrat
The following is excerpted from “400 Outstanding Women of the World and the Costumology of Their Time” by Minna Moscherosch Schmidt, published in 1933.
So far as the known record goes, Ashur-sharrat the true wife of Ashur-bani-pal took no part in politics. We know her best from her portrait on the relief which portrays her sitting in sympathetic fellowship with her husband while he is celebrating his victory over his redoubtable foe, Teumman, King of Elam. The head of the defeated King hangs from the arbor which forms the background of the relief.
The Queen is dressed in gala attire, and the representation shows that she had at her command embroidered fabrics, jewels and the ministrations of a friseur. According to the standard of her time and nation she is not unattractive.
It is a strangely domestic scene — only a husband and wife, with servants, gloating over an enemy in defeat who had given Ashur-bani-pal many a day of hard fighting through the years. In Assyrian art as we know it, most such scenes of jubilation over victory are official state affairs. Almost the only other thing we know about this Queen is that her sister-in-law wrote her a nasty letter while she was still only a princess, though destined to be a Queen. The sister-in-law speaks as the ‘’King’s daughter” to the woman who was “only a daughter-in-law, the house-mistress of Ashur-bani-pal, the crown prince of the Succession House, son of Esar-haddon of Assyria.” But Ashur-sharrat lived through those days of disdainful treatment, and has come down to the present in a lordly scene drinking to the victory of her husband. What happened to her disagreeable sister-in-law we do not know.