Palaces you could read
Assyria took its name from the city of Assur, on the Tigris in northern Iraq, and from Ashur, the god who lived there. Between the ninth and seventh centuries BCE its kings ruled an empire from the Gulf to the Mediterranean, and they lined the rooms of their palaces with pictures of how they did it.
The material was gypsum alabaster, a pale local stone so soft (2 on the Mohs scale of hardness) that you can scratch it with a fingernail. That softness is why the detail is so fine. Slabs about the height of a person, or taller, were carved in low relief and set side by side along the base of the mudbrick walls, so that a room became one continuous picture. They were painted, too. Most of the colour has gone, but traces survive.
The subjects repeat from palace to palace: the king at war, the king hunting, the king receiving tribute, and protective spirits at the doors. What changes over two and a half centuries is the storytelling, from single emblematic scenes to long sequences that follow one campaign or one hunt from start to finish.
Nimrud: winged spirits and a text that runs through everything
The story starts at Nimrud, ancient Kalhu, where Ashurnasirpal II built his Northwest Palace from about 879 BCE. He is the first Assyrian king known to have lined a palace with carved stone on this scale. Huge winged spirits flank the doors and tend a stylised sacred tree; in the throne room the king hunts lions and bulls and leads his army across rivers and against cities.
Almost every slab carries the same cuneiform text, the Standard Inscription, cut straight across the figures, robes and wings. It lists the king’s titles and conquests and tells how he built the city. Once you know it, you will spot it in museums around the world. The British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard began digging at Nimrud in 1845, sent slabs back to London, and in 1849 published Nineveh and Its Remains, a bestseller that brought Assyria into Victorian drawing rooms. Slabs went to many collections after that, and the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum in New York have the largest groups.
Many of those left on site did not survive. In 2015 Islamic State militants wrecked much of the Northwest Palace with bulldozers and explosives.
Khorsabad: a capital built from scratch
Around 717 BCE Sargon II began a new capital at Khorsabad, Dur-Sharrukin, “Fortress of Sargon”. Its palace had long relief programmes of tribute bearers, courtiers and campaigns, and at the main gates colossal human-headed winged bulls carved almost in the round. The French consul Paul-Émile Botta began excavating here in 1843, two years before Layard, and the Louvre’s Cour Khorsabad now reassembles part of a palace façade with its bulls and reliefs.
Nineveh under Sennacherib: the siege of Lachish
Sargon’s son Sennacherib moved the capital to Nineveh and built what he called the “Palace without Rival”, today known as the South-West Palace. One room told a single campaign: the siege of Lachish, a fortified town of the kingdom of Judah about 40 km south-west of Jerusalem, taken in 701 BCE.
The slabs read like a war report. Assyrian troops push siege engines with battering rams up earth ramps, defenders throw torches from the walls, captives are executed, and families leave with carts and cattle. At the end Sennacherib sits on his throne while a cuneiform caption says that the spoil of Lachish passed before him.
Lachish is a rare case where one event can be checked from three sides. The Bible mentions Sennacherib at Lachish (2 Kings 18), and excavations at Tel Lachish in Israel uncovered the Assyrian siege ramp that the reliefs show.
Nineveh under Ashurbanipal: lions and a garden party
The most admired Assyrian reliefs come from the North Palace of Ashurbanipal, Sennacherib’s grandson, carved around 645 to 635 BCE and excavated by Hormuzd Rassam in 1852 to 1854. Lions are released from cages into an arena ringed by soldiers, and the king kills them from his chariot and on foot. The animals steal the show. The carvers watched how a lion’s body moves, strains and collapses, and the most famous panel shows the dying lioness, pierced by arrows, dragging her paralysed back legs.
The same palace produced the scene often called the Banquet of Ashurbanipal. The king reclines on a couch under a vine, the queen sits opposite, servants fan them and musicians play. Hanging from a tree on the left is the head of Teumman, the king of Elam defeated in battle, which turns a garden party into a victory scene.
How the carvers told a story
A few rules make any of these walls easier to read. Size shows rank: the king and the gods are larger, and the king’s face stays calm while everything around him is in motion. Bodies are shown in profile, so the action stays clear even when figures overlap. Ground lines and registers, horizontal bands stacked one above another, guide the eye along the wall. Ashurbanipal’s carvers went further and showed the same figure several times as a story unfolds, a device called continuous narrative, a little like the panels of a comic strip.
Where to see them
The British Museum in London has the largest collection, with Nimrud slabs, the Lachish reliefs and the lion hunts. The Louvre in Paris has the Cour Khorsabad. The Metropolitan Museum in New York has a large Nimrud group, and the ISAC Museum in Chicago has a Khorsabad bull with reliefs. The Iraq Museum in Baghdad has its own Assyrian gallery. Galleries close for works from time to time, so check the museum’s website before you go.
Sources
- British Museum, gallery and collection pages for the Lachish reliefs and the lion hunts of Ashurbanipal.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “The Assyrian Sculpture Court” (essay).
- Musée du Louvre, Cour Khorsabad; ISAC Museum, Khorsabad gallery.
- A. H. Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains (1849).
- R. D. Barnett, Sculptures from the North Palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh (1976).
- J. M. Russell, Sennacherib’s Palace without Rival at Nineveh (1991).
- D. Ussishkin, The Conquest of Lachish by Sennacherib (1982).
- C. E. Watanabe, “The ‘Continuous Style’ in the Narrative Scheme of Assurbanipal’s Reliefs” (2004).
- UNESCO, statements on the destruction of Nimrud (2015).
