TREASURES DRENCHED IN BLOOD
SeReNAded by harp music and feasting on such delicacies as roast mice and fried locusts, guests at the alfresco banquet hosted by King Ashurbanipal of Assyria might have been more relaxed had it not been for a macabre ornament dangling from one of the trees in the royal garden.
Caked with dried blood, and swarming with flies, it was the severed head of the monarch of the neighbouring state of elam who had dared to challenge Ashurbanipal’s control of an empire stretching from egypt to present-day Iran.
That feast, in 653 BC, was being held in celebration of Ashurbanipal’s victory over King Teumman’s forces and took place in the palace at Nineveh — today the war-torn Iraqi city of Mosul, but then the capital of Assyria.
Afterwards, the severed head was moved to the city gates, where it remained for the next few weeks, sending a clear message that Ashurbanipal would stop at nothing in eliminating his enemies.
That lesson had already been learnt by King Teumman. He was humiliated by being forced to drag Ashurbanipal’s chariot through the streets of Nineveh before being beheaded.
And he was not the only member of his family to suffer. Ashurbanipal’s troops also cut the throat of Teumman’s brother and chopped his body into small pieces, which were then dis-tributed around the country as souvenirs.
even that fate seemed bearable compared to that of elam’s military commander, who was skinned alive. Such punishments were typical of those imposed by the Assyrian kings, a dynasty of despots who were the scourge of the Middle east for many centuries until the death of Ashurbanipal — the last major ruler in the line — in around 627 BC.
Their favourite sport was ‘hunting’ lions, a spectacle which saw the creatures released from cages into an arena where they could be shot with bows and arrows — or stabbed to death by those kings brave enough to get close. Although cruel to modern eyes, such contests between man and beast demonstrated a monarch’s ability to protect his nation against all that was dangerous in the world.
And whether they were dealing with wild animals or human enemies, they approached the task with great brutality — as will be revealed in a major new exhibition about Ashurbanipal which opens at the British Museum today.
The exhibition’s curator, Gareth Brereton, describes Ashurbanipal as a ‘ psychopathic bookworm’, a figure all the more intriguing for the fact that his blood-lust was combined with great intellect. He is said to have established the world’s first library, a collection of more than 30,000 inscribed clay tablets which, with the use of paper still to become widespread, served as early versions of books.
Remarkably, many of those tablets survived to be discovered by Victorian archaeologists and they reveal Ashurbanipal’s wide range of interests — from divination of the future by investigating sheep intestines, to incantations for the cure of epilepsy.
And yet a number of the tablets are deeply disturbing, detailing the Assyrians’ reliance on unadulterated terror in vanquishing their opponents, a key tactic in their remarkable rise to power.
In 2600 BC they were still only a small community trading on the banks of the Tigris River in the ancient city of Assur, about 150 miles north of Baghdad.
But, in the words of one historian, they grew to become ‘a race of warri-ors, mighty in muscle and courage, abounding in proud hair and beard, and bestriding with tremendous feet the east-Mediterranean world’.
Those feet were clad in one of the Assyrians’ most important inventions, the army boot.
Replacing sandals with this knee-high leather footwear, hobnailed and with iron plates protecting the shins, enabled them to fight in all weathers and on any terrain.
They were also the first to use weapons made of iron. Harder than bronze, and keeping its lethal edges sharper for longer, this gave them a deadly advantage over their enemies, as did the psychological warfare embraced by Assyrian rulers such as Shalmaneser I, who reigned in the 13th century BC.
When his army went to war with the kingdom of Mitannia which lay to the north, he ordered that 14,000 enemy captives should each have one eye gouged out, thus deterring others considering taking him on.
By THE 14th century BC, the Assyrians had subju-gated much of the Middle east. Their rulers believed it was their duty to inform the gods of their campaigns, which they did in numerous bas-reliefs and inscrip-tions. Once adorning the walls of their palaces, they are now held in museums around the world and illus-trate their ruthless approach to war.
Captured cities were usually plundered and burned to the ground and soldiers were rewarded for every severed head they brought in from the battlefield.
Scribes stood by to count the numbers killed by each soldier.
As for the nobles among the defeated, they were often given special treatment: they were often thrown from high towers.
Some even faced the horror of being roasted to death on open fires, with their children revolving on the spit alongside them. One typically blood-thirsty campaign was led in the ninth century BC by King Ashurnasirpal II. Leaving Nineveh with his soldiers and chariots, he sped along the Tigris valley in pursuit of enemies who had fled into mountains ‘as sharp as the tip of a dagger, and which only the birds of the sky could reach’.
After scaling the peaks, the Assyrians took 200 prisoners, whose ‘corpses were strewn like autumn leaves all over the mountains’, wrote Ashurnasirpal.
MEANWHILE, depic-tions in the commemo-rative reliefs found at Nineveh of the Assyrians laying siege to the city of Lachish in Judah the following century show several local dignitaries impaled on stakes while still alive.
yet Sennacherib, the monarch who presided over such eye-watering savagery, had great pretensions to be a cultured ruler. He built at Nineveh what he called his ‘ palace without rival’, a wondrous structure with grounds irrigated by canals that stretched 30 miles up into the mountains to provide a year-round oasis.
So magnificent were these culti-vated terraces that some archaeolo-gists believe they may have been the true site of the Hanging Gardens, one of the Seven Wonders Of The World and long thought to have been in the ancient city of Babylon.
If so, they must have provided welcome respite from the gruesome artworks with which the new palace was decorated.
Its 70 great halls contained two miles of reliefs and Sennacherib surpassed even his predecessors in the grisly details of his wars, including an account of a battle with the Assyrians’ old enemy elam in 693 BC.
‘I decimated the enemy host with arrow and spear. My prancing steeds plunged into the streams of their blood as into a river.’
For reasons unknown, Sennacherib designated his younger son esarhad-don as his successor, infuriating his two older sons.
They plotted to kill their father and in 681 BC he was assassinated, most likely crushed to death by a huge stone statue which was toppled onto him while he was at prayer.
Following Sennacherib’s death,
The British Museum’s new blockbuster show celebrates one of the Middle East’s great civilisations. But, as DAVID LEAFE recounts, it was also unspeakably savage and sadistic Esarhaddon somehow clung to power but failed to learn from the lessons of the past.
When his eldest son died, he repeated Sennacherib’s mistake and instead of choosing the next son in line as his successor, he turned to his younger son Ashurbanipal instead.
On taking the throne in 668 BC, Ashurbanipal found himself fighting off threats from other rulers in the region.
Among those who suffered defeat at the hands of Ashurbanipal’s troops was a king of Arabia who was brought to Nineveh, where he was forced to live in a kennel alongside the dogs and jackals guarding the city gates. Given Ashurbanipal’s taste for barbarity it was somewhat unwise of his aggrieved elder brother — who, as a sop for being deprived of the throne, had been made King of Babylon — to declare war against him but in 652 BC.
In response, Ashurbanipal marched his armies to the walls of the city of Babylon and began a siege which lasted two years. From within the city walls there were reports of people eating their own children to avoid starvation but Ashurbanipal did not relent.
In the end his brother committed suicide by making a pyre of his palace. ‘As for those still alive I myself laid flat those people as a funerary offering,’ wrote Ashurban-- nipal of those who had survived the blaze. Within a few years Ashurbanipal would himself be killed in circumstances which remain mysterious to this day. One Persian account said that he killed himself rather than face defeat when Nineveh fell to his enemies, ordering that his palace be set on fire and dying there alongside his gold, silver and concubines.
In fact, the archaeological evidence suggests that Nineveh did not fall until a number of years after his death, but fall it eventually did. Lost beneath his burning palace walls, his library remained buried for nearly 2,000 years.
But in 1851 its ruins were discovered by the English archaeologist Sir Austen Henry Layard. Rather than destroying the tablets, the great heat of the fire had caused them to become partially baked and preserved them.
And so it is that history has been able to build its case against the king who thought of himself as scholarly and well-read, but will be remembered as the last in a line of tyrants who were surely among the most merciless the world has ever known.
I Am Ashurbanipal is at the British Museum, London, from today to February 24.