A body that tells the truth
Look at her from the back forwards. Three arrows have struck her, one close to the spine. Her back legs have stopped working and drag behind her, turned out and useless. Her front legs still push, claws spread against the ground. Her head comes up, mouth open, and blood runs from the wounds.
Why the back legs? An injury to the spine cuts the nerves that run to the hind limbs, so the animal keeps its front half and loses the rest. That is exactly what the sculptor shows. Somebody in the royal workshop must have watched a wounded lion die, and carved the detail that a less careful artist would have missed.
Searches usually call it the Dying Lion, but the famous figure is a lioness. She is one episode in a long series of lion hunt reliefs made for King Ashurbanipal’s North Palace at Nineveh, carved in low relief on slabs of gypsum alabaster and originally painted.
A hunt in an arena
The hunt in the reliefs did not take place in the wild. Assyrian kings had long kept lions: Ashurnasirpal II, two centuries earlier, boasted of capturing lions and breeding their cubs in cages at his capital. In Ashurbanipal’s reliefs the animals are released one by one from wooden cages by a keeper standing inside a smaller cage of his own. Keepers with dogs and a line of soldiers with tall shields ring the arena so that nothing escapes. Elsewhere grooms bring out the horses for the royal chariot, the king shoots and spears lions from the chariot and on foot, and at the end he pours a libation over the dead animals laid out in a row.
The slabs lined the walls of palace rooms and passages, so the hunt unfolded as visitors walked. Across the series the same king, horses and lions appear again and again as the action moves on, a device called continuous narrative. Overlapping bodies and diagonal lines pull the eye from one moment to the next, and the lioness is the point where the story slows down.
Triumph for them, tragedy for us
For an Assyrian viewer the scene was reassuring. Lions stood for the wild forces outside the ordered world, and killing them was a royal duty: the king proved that he could protect his land and his people. The stronger and more dangerous the lions look, the greater the king appears, and the lioness’s agony was evidence of his skill with the bow.
Modern viewers tend to react differently. We feel sympathy for her, which the palace audience may not have shared. That gap is part of what makes the panel so striking now. Lions were real neighbours of the Assyrians, too: the Asiatic lion survived in Iraq into the early twentieth century, long after the palaces had fallen.
How the carvers did it
They spent their precision in a few places and kept everything else simple. The arrow wounds, the twist of the spine, the dead back legs, the strained shoulder muscles and the veins on the face carry the story. Around her the ground is bare, so nothing competes with the body. Gypsum alabaster helped: it is soft and takes a crisp incised line, ideal for fur, whiskers and sinews, and shallow carving keeps outlines readable from across a room.
Where to see it
Hormuzd Rassam excavated the North Palace between 1852 and 1854, and the lion hunt slabs were shipped to London, many of them broken and later reassembled. The lioness is in Room 10a of the British Museum, with the rest of the hunt around her. Compare her with the calmer reliefs from Sargon II’s palace at Khorsabad, carved about seventy years earlier, and you can see how far Assyrian sculptors had moved towards close observation of animals in motion. Check the gallery’s opening before you go.
Sources
- British Museum, lion hunt reliefs from the North Palace of Ashurbanipal, Nineveh, collection records (including 124856); “Assyria: Lion hunts” (Room 10a).
- R. D. Barnett, Sculptures from the North Palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh (668-627 B.C.) (1976).
- C. E. Watanabe, “The ‘Continuous Style’ in the Narrative Scheme of Assurbanipal’s Reliefs”, Iraq 66 (2004).
- A. K. Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC I, RIMA 2 (1991), inscriptions of Ashurnasirpal II.
- Smarthistory, “Ashurbanipal hunting lions”.
