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‘I am Ashurbanipal’ – A Retrospective on an Exhibition

Tom Langley



Between 8th November 2018 and 24th Feb 2019, the British Museum held an exhibition devoted to the last great Assyrian King, Ashurbanipal. (As a result, if you’re reading this to find out whether or not you should go to it, this is your warning.) Ashurbanipal (born 685, ruled 668-627 BC) is a tantalising figure: the level of surviving source detail makes it tempting to try and recover something beyond bare biographical information, and to speculate more on character and motivations (however impractical this may be in reality). We have numerous depictions of him, letters which survive in his own hand (including childhood attempts at first writing), much of his palace library, the colours of a lively family tragedy, and the piquancy roused by his empire’s impending extinction.


Strictly, one cannot really try to reconstruct, Ozymandias-like, the personalities of ancient rulers; there is nonetheless something intriguingly intimate about viewing a future emperor’s childish scrawl boasting of being able to read letters, write in his own hand, debate with scholars, and to identify the many portents through which the gods manifest their will to men. And perhaps unexpectedly, some of the portraits which do survive from earlier Mesopotamian history are not monarchical: the accidents of clay tablets’ survival mean that we are often well-informed about the personal dealings of merchants, priestesses and scribes as much as of royals, though the voices of power nonetheless predominate.

As powers go, Assyria was a relative upstart, at least by the standards of its time. It had its first geopolitical flowerings in the early-mid, and then again in the late, second millennium BC.

The Neo-Assyrian Empire which Ashurbanipal inherited and expanded began as a tenth century BC polity based in the rain-fed uplands of northern Iraq/eastern Syria, rather than amongst the more ancient flood-irrigated cities of southern Mesopotamia. By Ashurbanipal’s accession, the empire covered Babylonia, Syria, the southern Levant, and effectively flexed its military muscles against its neighbours. Ashurbanipal fully annexed Egypt and definitively crushed Elam in south-eastern Iran, steps which probably overextended the empire, for this expansionist foreign policy was compounded with internal dissension. Despite the consistent intervention of the Assyrian royal women to keep the peace, Ashurbanipal’s elder brother Shamash-shummu-ukin, ruler of Babylon, roused Arabs, Elamites and other restive subjects to rebel against Ashurbanipal’s hegemony: a revolt which lasted for four bloody years between 652 and 648 BC. The revolt was forcefully suppressed, and for the moment Ashurbanipal’s power seemed unassailable – or at least, that is how the man who was the centre of his subjects’ universe likes to tell us. In reality, Assyria’s hegemony collapsed shortly after his death, picked apart by a variety of rebellious subjects and opportunistic outsiders.


Ashurbanipal Pouring a Libation

Entering the exhibition, we were greeted with murals of the king hunting lions, before moving on to displays which detailed the power struggles within the family, and to contemporary Assyrian courtly and literary culture. These in total occupied around half of the exhibition space, the remainder being devoted to the wider world around Assyria, and toAshurbanipal’s wars and Assyria’s subsequent collapse. Although Ashurbanipal received a fair degree of personal attention and acknowledgement, one of the exhibition’s strengths was the attention it gave to the rich and interesting environment in which ‘the King of the World’ paraded his royal magnificence. A linked but subtler danger that was the prospect of over-emphasising the more familiar cultures of antiquity, again something that was largely avoided. Assyria’s less well-known neighbours in Elam, Urartu (based around what is now Armenia) and the post-Hittite cities of Syria received coverage alongside Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece and (even) Etruria. In fact, another of the exhibition’s strengths was to stress the ties and influences which bound these societies together: pointing to the use of griffon motifs in Etruscan metalwork and suggesting the influence of Assyrian ugallu or lion-men was a typical example. The exhibition perhaps faltered in implying that we should see this in terms of the emulation by a less prestigious culture (Etruria) of a more politically powerful one (Assyria). Whileemulation certainly is a feature of cultural and artistic development, the motifs employed by Assyrian artists were as much the common products of Mesopotamian and Nilotic interaction as they were of any one society or region. It is a rather banal and yet endlessly interesting fact that common motifs receive distinct elaboration in differing cultural vernaculars, and the protean variety of sphinxes (and half-human/half-animal forms) across the ancient cultures on display in the exhibition was particularly interesting in this regard. The lamassu (a winged, centaurine protector-spirit with the body of a bull and the head of a magnificently-bearded man) and the sphinx (normally bearded, but with the bull replaced with a lion) were prominent Assyrian motifs. (If this exhibition has taught me anything, it is that the Assyrians anticipated and surpassed the hipsters where facial hair is concerned.) While Greek and Egyptian art also used the sphinx, they jettisoned the bull-body of the lamassu, though in the Greek case supplying the deprived human torso with the option of a horse’s base, but again altering the sphinx’s sex. (Not that beards necessarily demarcated sex to the Assyrians: the goddess Ishtar is generally depicted in a bearded fashion.) The sphinxes of Carchemish and the rest of the Syro-Hittite cities, although close in form to the Assyrian pattern sine beard, had their own artistic particularity.

As my girlfriend sagely observed, the sphinx of Syro-Hittite art is ‘an absolute unit’.

But as interesting for this viewer, as a Classicist, was the presence of smaller pieces of historical jetsam that remind one suddenly of Greece and Rome. Thus Assyrians employed diptych-style wax tablets for the conveyance of messages, made use of eunuchs in administration, cursed their enemies with halitosis via invocatory tablets, poured libations, hunted wild beasts as a kind of semi-public spectacle, read portents in the stars, and in so many ways anticipated similar Greco-Roman customs. We know of course in abstract that Greek and Roman society was deeply (if often indirectly) influenced by the Near East. But it can be strangely dissociating to see familiar elements of that ‘Classical’ (‘proto-Western’?) society reflected in the baked clay and weathered mud-brick remnants of the Fertile Crescent: especially those practices which we, who often think of ourselves as their heirs, have since abandoned.


One common and unnerving feature of Ashurbanipal’s many murals from which we might like to dissociate ourselves was the prevalence of violence: a prominent feature of the exhibition’s final section. The giant murals of Ashurbanipal’s victory over the rebellious Elamites deserves special mention: on it we find enemy soldiers drowning, speared, beheaded and worse during the flight of Elam’s army. Some of the elite are singled out for special treatment, perhaps as a warning to any tributary kings or recalcitrant noblemen who might be plotting dissension (and who would have had time to contemplate these grand and gruesome scenes while awaiting their audience with their supreme overlord). On one panel, we find two sons obliged to grind up their traitorous father’s bones. On another, two Elamite lords have their tongues extracted, skin peeled, and are finally disembowelled.

Even Ashurbanipal’s more idyllic reliefs of garden paradises themselves depicted a tree hung with the severed head of one his enemies.

The point, as was emphasised, was the imposition of order and civilisation: hence scenes of the king hunting lions with which the exhibition opened. Enemies of the king of the world, like wild beasts, were enemies of civilisation. This dehumanisation perhaps explains the peculiar brutality of the Assyrian murals which detailed the massacre of Arabs: the killing of women is (unusually) given special attention, reflecting an animosity perhaps springing from the cultural aversion of urbanites towards those people who did not bind themselves to cities or settled agriculture. This violence can at times be stomach-turning, and it foregrounded well the exhibition’s final section: which focused on the messy disintegration of Assyrian hegemony after Ashurbanipal’s death, juxtaposed with the troubles of modern northern Iraq and eastern Syria, a land referred to for generations after the empire’s fall as ‘Assyria’. The rich and interesting reception of Ashurbanipal, as well as the nineteenth-century excavation of Assyria’s remains, had disappointingly little coverage as a result. That said, the parallel of the recent human tragedy in Iraq and Syria, the contemporary jihadist destruction of much of the region’s Assyrian heritage, and the Museum’s current involvement with in situ conservation and training projects made this relatively light treatment more understandable.


Ending on the destruction unleashed by imperial collapse and civil war, then and now, was a melancholy way of finishing. (This melancholy did not, it must be said, prevent the British Museum from following the proud example of its Victorian forebears and offering a veritable smorgasbord of Assyria-themed souvenirs in the gift shop immediately afterwards. Yours truly was pleasantly surprised by a rather fine pair of lamassu cufflinks for Christmas some months later.) Yet this finale did itself capture a particular melancholic strain of the Mesopotamian literary tradition, particularly that of the Epic of Gilgamesh. This classic text was present in Ashurbanipal’s library, and its descriptions of a king who slew lions, destroyed the bodies of his enemies, and ruled his city in justice and magnanimity reflected (and perhaps influenced) the paradigm of royal deportment which Ashurbanipal sought to embody. But by the end, Gilgamesh is forced to confront his own mortality, and even that of human civilisation (crushed before by the gods in a divine flood). Nonetheless, life springs anew for Gilgamesh and for Assyria, even if nowadays through the pages of a modern printed codex rather than spoken aloud from cuneiform clay tablets. As the British Museum’s offering deftly demonstrated, the world of Ashurbanipal is not yet silent.

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