Look on my works ye mighty and despair
Barnaby Rogerson is transported back to ancient Iraq through the astonishing sculptures of Assyria, one of the world’s great civilisations
On one level, this exhibition is a bit of a cheat, as most of the prize exhibits already live in the British Museum and have merely been moved around the corner (or up from the basement stores) for a fee-paying show. On every other level, it’s a triumph.
It’s highly accessible, without dumbing down, tightly focused on a single lifespan—that of King Ashurbanipal, who reigned over the Assyrian empire of the ancient Middle East from 668bc to 627bc—and culturally diverse: it includes artefacts from half a dozen of Assyria’s subjectallies, such as Cyprus and Phoenicia, as well as some of her foes—urartu to the north and Susa to the east.
The exhibition shows the British Museum in the best possible light: engaged in relevant research —for the past 170 years, the museum has been patiently reassembling a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle formed from the shattered clay tablets of the royal library of Assyria— and deeply invested in the training of a new generation of Iraqi archaeologist-restorers in their own homeland.
In my youth, the quasi-imperial role of the museum was faintly embarrassing (even to my own patriotic eyes, it sometimes looked like a pirate’s hoard of loot), but, since the iconoclasm of ISIS in both Syria and Iraq, we can now take justifiable pride in the institution as a safe (and free)
‘By a happy freak of history, his vast library was preserved for us by being baked in fire’
place for the preservation of world culture.
The first star of the show is King Ashurbanipal, presented as he cared to show himself through a series of vast and magnificently detailed carved reliefs. These once decorated the walls of his North Palace, which stood within the royal citadel of the walled city of Nineveh. We see him in the formal occasion of a royal lion hunt, through the incidents of half-a-dozen military campaigns and then, finally, in his garden under a trellis of vines on a couch beside his wife.
Assyrian stone carvers delighted in hairstyles (which doubled as ethnic identifiers), the details of horse trappings (which indicated rank) and the musculature of knee and calf.
Ashurbanipal was not brought up in the murderous atmosphere of the ruling palace, for, as the youngest son of the youngest (and bastard) son of King Sennacherib, no one thought him likely to sit on the throne. However, despite this, during his reign, the Assyrian empire reached its territorial apogee.
We see its conquests in the carved reliefs: the Assyrian army subduing Egypt, fighting the camel-riding Bedouin tribes of the Arab desert, besieging Elamite fortresses in the foothills of the Zagros mountains and waging a savage civil war beside the rivers of Mesopotamia.
Ashurbanipal was a most unlikely character to rule over this terrifyingly efficient military state. The Assyrian empire funnelled all its resources into maintaining a professional standing army that went on campaign year after year for more than 1,000 years.
It was the duty of every free-born male Assyrian to serve in
this army and new dynasties were invariably founded by successful generals, yet King Ashurbanipal never went to war and never led an army in the field. Instead, he was an exceptionally well-educated, scholarly prince, who could read the signs of ritual divinations and translate any ancient script as well as his scribes or priests.
He assembled a vast royal library of more than 10,000 clay volumes, which, by a happy freak of history, was preserved for us by being baked in fire when Nineveh was destroyed. Thus, and only thus, have we been able to read the story of Gilgamesh and also ponder on mythic tales of the flood and creation that influenced the Bible.
Assyria was always proudly conscious of its direct cultural link back to the ancient civilisation of Akkad, at the same time as presiding over the emergence of the first universal language, Aramaic.
This is where we meet the second star of this show: the person who designed the lighting. I normally hate anything that smacks of a son et lumière, but I was amazed by the ingenious use of highly focused spotlit colour to elucidate only three carvings—suddenly, the monotone of the grey stone is coloured, as it originally would have been. First, the irrigation channels flow with blue, then the walled Paradise garden turns green again and, finally, the temple-sanctuary glows with gold and scarlet.
Later, two vastly confusing battle scenes (carved on four, cartoon-like registers) come alive as individual scenes are outlined and pinpointed, accompanied by martial music and textual translations of the cuneiform. Thus we can follow the narrative sequence, yet also appreciate that two quite separate events have been combined.
I will not ruin the story, except to say that even the nicest Assyrian monarch took pride in state terrorism.
Is this mere propaganda? Did a peaceful intellectual monarch need to look tough to his own generals, in the manner of the Emperor Claudius, or did he delight in distant military victories, as did our own Prince Regent, proudly telling stories of Waterloo?
We will never know, as Ashurbanipal’s palace was burned to the ground less than 20 years after his death. This exhibition is horribly fascinating; it teaches us a great deal, but also makes us shudder.
‘I am Ashurbanipal: King of the World, King of Assyria’ is at the British Museum, Great
Russell Street, London WC1, until February 24 (020–7323 8000; www.britishmuseum. org). An accompanying cata
logue, edited by the exhibition’s curator Gareth Brereton, is published by Thames & Hudson/the British Museum (£30) Barnaby Rogerson’s latest book is ‘In Search of Ancient North Africa’, published by Haus (£20) Next week The art of fakes and forgeries