Excavations at Nineveh - Part 1_ Assyrian Art, Technology, Trade

So where we are now is one of the palace rooms of the palace of Nineveh. Nineveh was the power base of the king Sennacherib we were just talking about just now. So you've got the Amun statue which is the link between Egypt and the Assyrian campaigns in terms of what's going on in Biblical history. And Tihaka of course came to help the Israelites because Hezekiah asked him to. But Tihaka got defeated and sent away and Sennacherib carried on his campaign. So Sennacherib was an incredibly powerful king and his army were extremely powerful and very scary to say the least. And the Assyrians, we have to say, when you get the Assyrians coming against the Hebrew people in the Bible, the Assyrians are brilliant. There's no question. They're geniuses. They're highly educated, most of them. And they understand all kinds of things that we think we discovered later on. I mean, you know, we British, we think we discovered everything anyway. But modern people think they discovered all these things. And so you wind back in your minds to 700 years before Christ. That's exactly the time when a panel like this is being made. Because what's happening is King Sennacherib has left his palace. He is on his way down through Israel. It's going to take him a long time because the Assyrian army, like many in those days, practiced the siege. So you turn up at your intended target, which in, say, Israel, usually cities on hills. We call them cities, but they're just big villages with huge defensive walls around. And if you turn up and try and attack them, you invariably lose because they're in this defensive fortress. And they can throw all sorts of things at you and, you know, make life very hard. But Sennacherib and others like him don't do that anymore. What you do is you turn up to your city on a hill and then you just camp. You camp all around it and then you sit there, you know, you tune into Netflix, you get the football out, you light the barbecue, you know, and you wait. And you'll wait weeks or months or sometimes more than a year if you want to. Because what's happening on the hill is there's no water going in, there's no food going in, and the people will just die. So your defensive fortress has become your tomb. And then eventually, when everybody's nearly dead, the king says, off you go, boys. And you walk in, you take your stuff and you carry on. But it takes a long time, which is why Hezekiah down in the south, because Israel's not very big, Hezekiah down in the south, he has loads of time to worry about what's going to happen. Because it's city by city by city. And one thing Hezekiah does do, by the way, in Jerusalem, which is a good thing, because, you know, trusting in God is not always a case of just sitting on a chair and waiting for God to solve all your problems. You have to do stuff, you know, take steps of faith. And one of the things he does is he builds a tunnel under the city of Jerusalem. You've been there? You've been there. So it's just the most incredible thing. I always ask people who've been to Israel, people are like, oh, yeah, yeah. Did you walk through Hezekiah's tunnel? They go, there's a tunnel? And it's probably, you know, it's amongst my top five things to do in Israel when you're there. Because he builds a tunnel under the city through the solid rock. I mean, it hasn't moved an inch since it was built nearly 3,000 years ago. And it's not an escape room. What it is, it brings water from the Gion spring outside into the confines of the city. So what that does is it buys you time. If you've got water, you know, you can live a little longer than if you haven't. And it takes about half an hour to walk through. The water from the spring still flows. Depends what time of year you go as to whether you're this deep in the water or this deep in the water. Ice cold, fresh water flowing through. It's the most incredible experience. And not only that, the tunnel's about this tall. So you bang the top of your head on all the marks that Hezekiah's picks and axes made. Let's go home with some scars from Hezekiah's men. That's a great, great souvenir to take home. Anyway, that's all by the way. At the same time, Sennacherib's on his way down to Israel. His palace is being remodelled. And this section here tells us about that remodelling. This is a big tile that's going to get stuck onto the walls. It would have been painted. But just look at it. I mean, we're nearly 3,000 years BC. And there's an incredible amount of advanced technology going on here. First of all, you notice this winged bull lying on a cart. Can you see him now? He's sideways. If you look down through the doorway, you can see an example of one. We're going to see some huge ones in a minute from another palace. So that weighs probably about five tonnes. And it's on a cart. We walk in the quarry. Compared to the ones we see, it's very plain. But again, think about Solomon and the Temple of Solomon. This was carved in outline in the quarry. Brought into the palace, put in its place, and then the fine detail work has come and do all the beautiful carving and decoration which we'll see in a moment. And how are they moving a thing like that? Well, look at that. They're using levers and fulcrums and cantilevers and ropes and pulleys and all that kind of stuff. Things that we thought we invented much later on. They're just doing it quite normally. All sorts of other things going on. Look up in the sea there. The tigress it is. You've got coracles, round boats. You've got international trade taking place with all kinds of wonderful goodies coming in and out of the country. You've got fish in the sea. You've got crabs and eels. And then down to the left, in the left-hand third, you've got two men riding headless pigs. So what's going on there? Did the sculptors cut the heads off the pigs by mistake? And the answer is no. It's exactly as you would see in those days. You know, in those days you would take your animal, pig, sheep, goat, whatever it is, you would gut it, skin it, you would use everything inside it, not just for food but for all sorts of things. But these guys were going to sew the skins back together, take them down to the river, blow them up, and then you've got your own personal fishing vessel. So they would go out on the tigress, floating on the pigs, inflated pig skin. I mean, you know, they're pretty clever. You've got to give it a go. There's all sorts of amazing things going on. But I'll give you a slight inspection. The key thing is, you know, how did these ancient peoples do all these massive projects? It's with people. The power behind it, all of this was people. And here we've got some pictures of the workforce. Interestingly, the top line there, you see the top line with their hair, there's the cut-off beards and the cut-off hair, the wavy hair. That tells you these were Assyrians themselves. Now you're not signing up for this sort of work because it's not very nice, as the foreman above lets you know. This is slave work, so presumably these are convicted criminals or whatever. They're being pressed into building the king's palace. Down below, there's another, at the bottom, another row of Assyrian slaves. But in the middle, and there's no dispute about this, in the middle here, you've got a row of men who are wearing different clothes. The point of the sculptures, the point of Synagogues, we need to notice this, right? Because it makes them bigger. And here, what you've got, notice, these are Hebrew slaves from the Sennacherib campaign down into Israel. So as he goes down into Israel, city by city, he is sending back tens or hundreds of thousands of slaves who do the 600-mile walk back to Nineveh, and then they start work on his palace. So that's remarkable, because you've actually got images there of the slaves caught up in the Sennacherib campaign, the Assyrian campaign down into Israel, 701 B.C. So that's quite striking.