ABSTRACT
The most frequent fate of heads is to become booty for counting. At Mari, the heads of enemies were very frequently fated to become a tribute of loyalty to the king on the part of vassals and other allied kings; this was almost a sort of macabre privilege, since it exempted the human remains from merely being quantified as booty. The first Neo-Assyrian sovereign to introduce headless corpses and the display of severed heads into the images as well was Ashurnasirpal II, in the ninth century bc. Heads may be hung from trees located in open and accessible spaces, and from those standing outside and inside towns where the remains are exposed to the gaze and the judgement of the collectivity or of the majority, acting as a warning to the allies of the moment and to enemies.
