A quiet scene with a clue in it
A man walks calmly beside two horses, holding them on a short lead. Nobody fights, nobody hunts. It looks like the most ordinary moment in an Assyrian palace, and that is exactly why it is worth a second look.
The clue is the groom. His hairstyle and clothing differ from those of the Assyrians carved around him, while the horses wear full Assyrian harness: rosettes on the cheek-pieces, tassels, and tall crests rising from the headstall. The Metropolitan Museum, which owns a fragment with the same subject, reads him as a foreigner in a delegation bringing tribute to the king, with the horses as the tribute. They arrive already dressed for the Assyrian court, and the man who raised them walks them in.
Why horses?
For an Assyrian king, few gifts mattered more than a good horse. The empire’s army depended on chariots and, more and more, on cavalry, and the best horses did not come from Assyria itself. The best animals came from the mountains and plateaus to the east and north, and they reached the king as tribute, as booty or through trade. A procession of foreigners leading fine horses showed a supply line working: the empire’s neighbours were feeding its war machine.
There was a political message too. Sargon II came to the throne in 721 BCE after pushing aside Shalmaneser V, and he needed to look like a legitimate, unshakeable king. Rows of foreigners arriving with their best, groomed and in step, told every visitor the same thing: the world was coming to Sargon.
A palace built to impress
The panels come from Dur-Sharrukin, Sargon II’s new capital at Khorsabad, begun around 717 BCE and inaugurated in 706. Its palace walls were lined with tall slabs of gypsum alabaster showing the king’s wars, his court and the arrival of tribute, and colossal winged bulls guarded its gates. The Louvre’s panel, almost three metres high, comes from the façade known as L, where it was one figure in a long row of foreigners bringing gifts.
The carvers spent their detail where it counted. The horses’ anatomy is simplified but alert, with pricked ears and full chests. Two horses overlap, one slightly behind the other, so a single outline suggests a pair without cluttering the slab. The groom keeps his elbows close and the ropes short, and the pose alone says control.
The colours we no longer see
Today the slab is the pale grey of the stone, but it was painted. In 2009 a team of British Museum scientists used a new imaging technique to detect Egyptian blue on sculptures from Sargon’s reign. Despite the name, Egyptian blue is an artificial pigment: a coloured glass-like compound of calcium, copper and silica, cooked at high temperature and ground to powder. It glows under infrared light, which is how the team could find invisible traces of it. The rosettes and straps that look bare now were once picked out in colour, readable along a corridor.
How the slabs travelled
The French consul Paul-Émile Botta excavated at Khorsabad in 1843 and 1844 and sent large groups of reliefs to Paris, the core of the Louvre’s Assyrian galleries. His successor Victor Place was less lucky. In 1855 the rafts and boats carrying most of his finds down the Tigris were attacked and sank, and the reliefs went to the bottom of the river. Later excavations by the University of Chicago sent more pieces to Chicago, and others reached London and New York.
A different groom: the horses of Ashurbanipal’s hunt
Search for this subject and you will also meet a later scene. In the lion hunt reliefs carved around 645 to 635 BCE for Ashurbanipal’s North Palace at Nineveh, grooms lead the king’s horses towards an enclosure where the royal chariot is being prepared. One horse is pushed into position while another has its harness tightened. The theme is close; the purpose is different. At Nineveh the horses serve the king’s hunt. At Khorsabad they are a gift to him.
Where to see it
The Louvre panel stands in the Cour Khorsabad in Paris, among other reliefs and the winged bulls of the same palace. The Metropolitan Museum in New York has the fragment with a foreign groom (33.16.1), and the British Museum in London has the Nineveh grooms in its lion hunt gallery. Check gallery openings before you go.
Sources
- Musée du Louvre, “Servant leading horses”, Khorsabad, façade L, AO 19883.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Foreign groom in a tributary procession” (33.16.1).
- P. Albenda, The Palace of Sargon, King of Assyria: Monumental Wall Reliefs at Dur-Sharrukin (1986).
- G. Verri, P. Collins, J. Ambers, T. Sweek and St J. Simpson, “Assyrian colours: pigments on a neo-Assyrian relief of a parade horse”, British Museum Technical Research Bulletin 3 (2009).
- P. Collins, “From Mesopotamia to the Met: Two Assyrian Reliefs from the Palace of Sargon II” (2012).
- British Museum, lion hunt reliefs from the North Palace, Nineveh, collection records.
