Shlama — peace, in Assyrian Neo-Aramaic — is carved in bronze across the top of a tall granite plinth, installed on the open lawn of Los Altos Hills, California, in 2017. The letters rise directly out of the stone rather than sitting on a separate base, so that from a distance the word seems to grow out of the ground itself.
The monument carries no image of a king, a battle, or a god — a departure from the Assyrian bas-reliefs Fred spent a career studying and reinterpreting. Where Ashurbanipal and the Lion Hunt speak to a people’s history, Shlama speaks to what that history was, in the end, in service of: a plain word, in plain bronze, asking for the one thing a nation that has survived war, exile, and dispersal has the most reason to want.
