A gripping fusion of beauty and brutality
Astounding detail present in a horse’s elaborate harnesses or every last ringlet of the king’s beard is enhanced by the show’s dramatic lighting
I am Ashurbanipal: King of the World, King of Assyria British Museum
T★★★★★
he self-styled King of the World relaxes in a luxurious garden after one of his greatest victories, his wife seated at his feet, as musicians pluck harps and birds flutter in the trees overhead. And what is that dangling among the branches? Only the head of one of Ashurbanipal’s principal enemies.
This scene, from an exquisitely carved stone frieze, is intended as a warning to anyone considering crossing the most powerful ruler of his day, whose empire stretched from the Eastern Mediterranean to Western Iran. Ashurbanipal (ruled 669-631BC), last of the great Assyrian kings, had his capital at Nineveh, near Mosul in present-day Iraq, stronghold of Isil from 2014 to 2017, where vast quantities of ancient artefacts were recently destroyed. If that lends a certain poignancy to this exhibition, once you’re actually in it, you’re immersed in Ashurbanipal’s world, where brutalities to dwarf the worst excesses of Isil went hand in hand with extraordinary refinement and sophistication.
While the British Museum’s “lion hunt” friezes – probably the most famous works of Assyrian art – can’t be moved from their customary position in the Assyrian Galleries, the museum has dozens more little-seen friezes to draw on, and these form the core of the current exhibition, running through each room like the pages of some extraordinary graphic novel.
A colossal stone head looms over the first room, from one of the human-headed winged bulls that guarded the gates of Nineveh, a “vast metropolis surrounded by massive walls and gates”, as it was described by its founder, Ashurbanipal’s grandfather Sennacherib. The horns wrapped around the towering headdress denote supernatural power, while the long, curly hair and beard are essential attributes of virility, sported by Ashurbanipal himself, needless to say, in the first of many lion hunt friezes.
Assyria was a state based on conquest, established over three centuries prior to Ashurbanipal’s accession.
Lion hunts – far from being mere sport – were essential rituals of this militarised state, in which the king, as representative of the gods, imposed order on the chaos of nature. The hunts took place in carefully tended “wildlife parks”, outside the city walls. The cage from which the lion was unleashed is graphically depicted in the amazingly well-preserved frieze, along with the armed guard who stands ready to defend the king as he, casually, runs a lion through the heart with his sword. With their muscular beasts and leaping horses, these images have an extraordinary vitality. The astounding detail present in a horse’s elaborate harnesses or every last ringlet of the king’s beard is enhanced by the show’s dramatic lighting.
Aggressive, virile power is in evidence at every turn: life-size, lion-headed guardian spirits wielding knives, or snarling hunting dogs. Yet there are moments of lyrical beauty, too, in scenes in Nineveh’s pleasure gardens, for instance, where a tame lion walks beside harp-playing musicians.
Every figure, whether a servant carrying immense bunches of grapes, or a warrior hacking apart an enemy, wears the same inscrutable half-smile that contributes – not entirely paradoxically – to the sense of overpowering, implacable authority.
Proof that Assyria wasn’t simply a mindless warrior autocracy comes from towering glass cases that contain the remains of the library of Nineveh: terracotta fragments each crowded with cuneiform writing, most of them detailing omens, divined by seers and astrologers, through which the empire was guided. Poetry appears in The Epic of Gilgamesh (discovered in the ruins of the library of Ashurbanipal in the 19th century), arguably the world’s first work of literature.
Ashurbanipal prided himself on his literacy. In friezes he appears with a pen, rather than a sword, in his belt. We’re shown his “autobiography”, scratched on to a clay prism – an octagonal pillar – that was buried beneath the palace as a sort of time-capsule, broadcasting his attributes and military achievements to the future. Whether he personally wrote this text, we’ll never know. He doesn’t claim to have gone into battle himself. Yet his victories, represented in reliefs of extraordinary detail and complexity (the wars to crush his elder brother, and against the Elamites and Babylonians) were understood to emanate from his semi-divine person, with mass beheadings and flayings-alive ensuing.
Alongside the friezes we’re shown intricate gold jewellery, huge drinking cauldrons spouting griffin heads, finely wrought armour for men and horses. Yet the same images keep reappearing: endless lines of soldiers and slaves, the killing of the lion on the royal seal – one of the earliest representations of the subjugation of nature by man, which has been an essential component in what we’ve come to call “civilisation”.
Yet rather than making you think “so this is how it all started”, these endless smiling processions are more likely to bring to mind contemporary North Korean propaganda imagery or Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the Nuremberg rallies, in which Nazis scurry smilingly at the bidding of the Fuhrer.
It seems, then, that the methods, promises and visual imagery employed by totalitarian despots have barely changed over the millennia. Nor indeed have the fates they often eventually meet. The army of Babylonians and Medes who ransacked Ashurbanipal’s palace following his mysterious demise – “died, abdicated or deposed” the wall texts speculate – took the trouble to gouge his and his queen’s faces from many of the friezes, before burning the place to the ground.
So was Ashurbanipal a true monster of the ancient world? Someone who could have given Putin and Trump lessons in ruthlessness and hubris, and taught even Hitler a thing or two about cruelty? Or was he simply typical of his time, doing what was expected of him as a ruler? Looking at the art of rival powers, which is also on show, you see much the same imagery: naked captives beheaded, vultures feasting on enemy dead.
The thing is, compared with Ashurbanipal’s friezes, these works are pitifully crude. You leave this enlightening exhibition suspecting that we remember Ashurbanipal not so much because he had the bravest warriors and the cleverest generals, but because he had by far
the best artists.