The revealing details of the Assyrian Lion Hunt Reliefs | Curator’s Corner

A small boy releases the lion from the cage and the animal creeps forward with murderous intent. The first arrow is shot hoping to subdue the beast. It hits its mark but far from being stopped the animal is enraged and charges at his assailant. The two foes meet with a mighty roar grappling for their lives. The man shown killing a lion was among the most important individuals of his time and the reliefs from his palace are among the greatest works of art from the ancient world. I'm Paul Collins, Keeper of Middle East and welcome to my corner. These great slabs of stone carved in relief once lined the walls of an enormous palace at the site of Nineveh in what is today northern Iraq. The reliefs show the last great king of Assyria, a man called Ashurbanipal, killing a succession of lions. Assyria is a very ancient kingdom and has its origins around 2500 BC. By the time of Ashurbanipal in the 7th century BC, the empire reached from Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean all the way to Iran. The lions shown in these reliefs are Asiatic lions that were native to ancient Assyria and they were the most dangerous and powerful animals in that region. For the Assyrian king they represented power and authority and the image of the king confronting a lion was a very ancient one in Assyrian symbols. In fact it was carved onto ring seals carried by the senior officials of the empire. Ashurbanipal describes in his text as well as in the carved reliefs how he went out into the countryside and hunted lions but he also tells us how he killed lions in staged events which were rituals designed to receive the blessings of the gods. To understand these reliefs we have to think about how they may have been viewed by the ancient inhabitants of the palace. The reliefs lined the walls of corridors. There was an enormously long corridor which led from the heart of the palace to the outside world through a gate and these showed a procession of courtiers and their donkeys carrying equipment out presumably to the and then on the opposite wall of the same corridor a procession of returning courtiers this time carrying dead lions. So walking through this corridor out of the palace you would effectively be joining the king as he left the palace to go to the hunting grounds and then of course joining him on return but this time with the bodies of the dead lions. Coming back from the hunting fields you would have found yourself at the heart of the palace surrounded by the very reliefs that we have here. The story told in these reliefs can be divided into a number of episodes and we can follow those around the walls. We can begin the story with the preparations for the hunt. Here we see Ashurbanipal at what is almost certainly a significant moment as he prepares for the ritual hunt. The king stands in his chariot but he's sheltered from prying eyes by courtiers holding screens. Magnificent horses are brought to the chariot along a road lined by soldiers and two of the horses are reversed into the chariot one resisting. These carvings are superb and we see the musculature of the groom's arms straining as they push the horses into place. The king is easily identifiable by his very tall crown. The king is joined in the chariot by his driver and other officials who will act to protect him during the hunt and the king is handed his bow but it's a very special bow because we are told in his inscriptions that it belongs to the great goddess Ishtar, the goddess of sexuality and battle and the great supporter of Ashurbanipal. As we move along this episode we come to a hill in which men and women seemingly excitedly move through the woodlands towards the scene of preparation. The people all move in the same direction though a few look backwards to their companions perhaps encouraging them to move quickly. They appear to weave their way through the trees in what may be a landscaped garden. At the top of the hill is a monument showing the king hunting lions and that may signal the place where the hunt will actually take place. It's a field dedicated to the great goddess Ishtar. Now we move along the reliefs to episode two and the hunting field itself and it's clear that the field was surrounded by soldiers, a double row of archers and men holding spears and shields. Into the field a lion has been brought in a cage. A small boy releases the door of the cage and has his own cage to dart back into in case the lion rears back. The lion is driven into the field by cavalry men and then we meet at the heart of the hunting field the king himself Ashurbanipal in his chariot shooting arrows. The king is dressed in his tall elaborate crown and wearing gorgeous clothes with finely incised decoration which probably represents embroidery. The bow he carries that of the goddess Ishtar is also finely drawn. At the tips are tiny heads of lions. Even the jewellery of some of the courtiers in the cab with the king are decorated with lion's heads. On the chariot itself there are representations of the goddess Ishtar. Ishtar appears as a woman wearing a high crown at the centre of a flaming star which represented her celestial body, the planet we call Venus. The king shoots an arrow and it's shown flying through the air and unlike other Assyrian reliefs where the background is crammed with detail here there's no detail and so the focus is very much on the king and his activities. Behind the king two attendants fend off a raging lion with spears. The bearded man is probably a member of the nobility whereas the beardless man is a eunuch unable to produce a family to rival the king. Both were senior members of the royal court and thereby trusted to join the king in the hunt. And all around the king are lions. Some are dead, some are dying, both male and female animals. There are 18 lions in total and we know from a text from the time of Ashurbanipal that there was a ritual in which 18 lions were killed probably to magically protect the 18 gates into the city of Nineveh. So Ashurbanipal killing these lions protects both his city but by extension his empire and receives the blessing of the gods. These lions may have been raised from cubs. We know from inscriptions that the Assyrian kings went out into the countryside and gathered animals into essentially zoos. The lions that haven't been killed rush towards the edge of the hunting field where they meet the lines of soldiers who now raise their spears and are joined by mastiffs and their handlers to turn back the lions into the field where they'll be slaughtered. These soldiers mark the edge of the hunting field but also the end of episode two. Opposite this hunting scene is yet another one but with even more drama and excitement. An ancient visitor to the palace would have found himself therefore surrounded by images of the king in his chariot hunting lions as if he was standing in the ancient hunting field. In this episode we see an unusual arrangement. The king is shown twice standing in a chariot. The two vehicles are rushing towards each other separated only by a rearing lion. In one chariot the king kills lions using a sword and in the other he uses a spear. So along with the bow that he'd used in episode two he's demonstrating himself as the master of all weapons. The king is surrounded by dead and dying lions. A lioness has been pierced by an arrow which has broken her spine and she drags her paralyzed legs in agony. This is cruel and brutal to our eyes but for the Assyrian king was an expression of his great power, a demonstration of the defeat of his enemies. The lions also represent untamed nature and so the king confronting them and killing them is his attempt to control the forces of chaos. It is clear that the sculptors understood these animals intimately and took great care to depict them as real living and dying creatures. Here we can see the outline of a first attempt to carve the end of a tail which has been chiseled away and the tail carved shorter. By carving the lions so accurately the Assyrians understood them to become real animals and therefore their deaths also became real. What's really interesting here is that the artist may have conflated two stories. When Ashurbanipal kills a lion with a sword he wears the same jewellery as in the preparation scene, a double ring armband with a rosette, a symbol of the goddess Ishtar. However if we look at the armband the king wears while using a spear it is a different shape but the same as the one he wears while shooting arrows in episode two. It seems unlikely that Ashurbanipal would have changed jewellery halfway through a hunt and this suggests that we may be looking at two separate ritual encounters with lions in which the king wore specific jewellery. Perhaps the events took place at different times of the year but here time has been compressed into one truly dramatic spectacle. So these reliefs show the Assyrian empire at its greatest, the Assyrian king controlling the forces of nature and dominating a region from Egypt to Iran. Within 20 years of the death of Ashurbanipal however the Assyrian empire collapsed. It was invaded by armies from Babylonia to the south and the Iranian Medes to the east. It was somebody's job from the invading army to walk through the corridors and rooms of the palace and identify the images of the king because these images retained in Assyrian thought the power and authority of the monarch and so very carefully with very calculated precision the images of the king were damaged and in this particular example that we showed at the very beginning of this film we can see how the grip of Ashurbanipal's sword has been cut, his arm holding a lion has been severed, releasing the animal back to freedom, releasing them from the grip of Assyrian power. Nineveh was then abandoned and the mud brick walls of the palace crumbled and decayed burying these reliefs and they lay underground for two and a half thousand years before they were excavated and once again the power and splendor of Ashurbanipal's lion hunts was revealed to the world. Next week we are moving from Assyria to South Asia for the curator's tour of our Ancient India exhibition. 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