The ancient Egyptian galleries of the British Museum are justly renowned. What some people don't realise though, is that equally remarkable objects can be seen in the galleries next door. Here you'll find relics of another ancient civilization, that of the Assyrians. One exhibit outshines all the rest and provides a startling insight into the Assyrians'rich, though sometimes brutal, culture. At the heart of the Assyrian galleries...
Lies an extraordinary set of stone carvings. They depict a group of warriors engrossed in an unusual and violent pastime. Led by a tall, behatted figure who is clearly their king.
The men are shown hunting and killing a large number of lions. Unsettling to some. wondrous to many more. These are the extraordinary lion hunt reliefs. The death agonies of the lions, meticulously recorded by the ancient sculptors, are extremely vivid.
For some people they are very strong meat. Many others, though, see a grandeur and a beauty here, which more than compensate for the harshness of what's being portrayed. It is great art and like all great art it is the product of a religious act in which the artist has opened himself to the soul of everything, has made himself a channel for the universal soul and it comes through the work to the viewer with impact that will last forever. King doesn't matter. He's a forget-about-it king.
The lions are what matter. They are as real as the sculptor could make them, and their reality persists in the alabaster. It persists through all the centuries, between the time of their carving and now.
Obviously in a world that's very concerned about cruelty to animals, I think people are concerned with these. But actually these are not about cruelty to animals. They are about the nobility and the force of an animal. And I think they are some of the greatest things in the British Museum.
The Assyrians have got that notion of animals in movement and I can't think of anything else of this date that has this level of understanding, sophistication and achievement and just sheer beauty. One could look at these, I think, forever. Well, I started coming to the museum when I was about 15 or 16. I stumbled into this collection and I've been coming back ever since.
I think they are a profound experience if you just kind of let yourself go and look at it as a time when mankind was struggling to almost kind of win control of the world and they didn't know what the world was. Whenever I have friends who come to London, I always make sure that we kind of amble down here. And I can say, probably about 50% of them have kind of sat up a bit straight and say, this is a totally different sculptural, artistic, intellectual experience than probably anywhere else.
Although they aren't perhaps quite as popularly celebrated as a few of the British Museum's other exhibits, the Lion Hunt reliefs attract thousands of visitors each year. This pleases the staff who care for them because they realise not only how important the reliefs are, but how lucky it is that we're able to see them at all. Created around 645 BC, while the Assyrian Empire was at its height, the reliefs were buried under tons of rubble for over two and a half thousand years. They might never have come to light again if not for one man, an all but forgotten Victorian archaeologist called Hormuzd Rasam. Rassam looked and acted like a typical English gentleman.
But he wasn't English at all. Nor was he, as many people thought, a Turk. He was in fact what we today call a Turk. ...they would call an Iraqi. Iraq back then wasn't the war-torn country known to us.
In fact, it wasn't a country at all. It was a province of the Ottoman Empire, ignored by almost everyone except those who had an interest in the ancient past. They were drawn to the region because... they knew that some three to four thousand years earlier, the fertile land surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers had given rise to some of the world's earliest civilizations, including arguably the greatest of them all, that of the Assyrians. The man who discovered more Assyrian remains than anyone else was an English explorer called Austin Henry Layard.
He carried out many successful digs in the region during the 1840s. One of these took place on the site of the ancient city of Nineveh. This happened to lie just across the Tigris River from the town of Mosul, which is where Hormuzd Rassam had his home. Soon after arriving in Mosul for the first time in 1842, Layard met Rassam and instantly identified him as someone who could help him with his work.
Layard needs to have a secretary, interpreter, an assistant, someone to actually manage the whole affairs, all the difficult and day-to-day administration, and my great-grandfather, Horowitz Rossam, takes up that role, and does it so. well that they both become quite good friends within a matter of weeks. Rassam managed the money, he did a lot of managing the workmen, and he was clearly so capable that Layard found he could hardly work without. him.
And then later on, when Layard himself gave up archaeology and took up a career in politics in England, the British Museum wanted someone to go out and work for them in northern Iraq. The best person that they could find was Hormuzd Rasam. Taking over from Henry Layard was a huge responsibility for Hormuzd Rasam.
who was only 26 years old at the time, he was keen to continue and expand on Layard's work. But he knew from the start that he didn't enjoy the full confidence of the British Museum's trustees. They were rather suspicious of him because he wasn't a traditional English gentleman.
The person who they felt they could rely on was Henry Rawlinson, the British consul in Baghdad. Rassam was answerable to Rawlinson, but in practice Rassam worked as an independent agent and took all the decisions himself. The biggest decision Rassam had to take concerned an unfortunate agreement that Henry Rawlinson entered into with a rival archaeologist, a Frenchman called Victor Plas. Plas had asked Rawlinson for permission to carry out excavations in the northern part of the Nineveh site.
Rassan was deeply opposed to this idea, because he believed that a large mound which dominated this area concealed the remains of an ancient Assyrian palace. For reasons that are hard to understand, though, Rawlinson, who was the British consul, let's not forget, chose to grant the Frenchman's request, causing a great problem for Rassan. He agonized for months over what to do. Then, unwilling to see the French walk off with the prize which he felt ought to go to Britain, he took a decisive step.
Without telling Rawlinson, he instructed his workmen to go ahead and excavate the mound. To avoid detection by Monsieur Plas, they were further instructed to work at night. This nocturnal adventure could easily have backfired on Hormuz Dressam, and for a while, it looked as though it would.
The first night's dig produced a few ancient objects, the second night's a few more, but the finds weren't big or exciting enough to shield him from the trouble he'd face if word leaked out of what he was doing. By night three, he'd become seriously concerned. He needed a breakthrough, and luckily for him, one occurred. It was the first sight of a great work of art, hidden for more than 2,000 years.
One division of the workmen, after three or four hours hard labor, were rewarded by the first grand discovery of a beautiful bas-relief in a perfect state of preservation. The delight of the workmen was naturally beyond description. They all rushed to see the new discovery, and after having gazed at the bas-relief with wonder, they collected together and began to dance and sing my praises with all their might.
Rassam's most pressing problem had now been solved. Thanks to the principle of finders keepers, which prevailed among archaeologists at the time, no one could now force him off the site. Unhampered by any need for secrecy, he ordered his men to dig a massive hole in the mound. As expected, this laid bare the remains of a royal palace. The mud brick building itself had all but disappeared, but the stone slabs which had once decorated it had survived.
As soon as he laid eyes on the Great Reliefs, Rassam realized that he'd found a masterpiece of ancient art. He wrote to Henry Layard saying, they surpass everything yet discovered in the ruins of ancient Assyria. And that's a view that's become widely accepted since.
150 years on, the brilliance of their execution continues to astound British Museum staff. The amount of fine detail the ancient carvers managed to incorporate in their work is what particularly strikes Paul Collins, the man in charge of the light. in the Ryan Hunt Gallery. Stepping close, you get a totally different appreciation of the quality of carving.
The extraordinary detail on these reliefs needs the person to get up, the viewer to come within inches... really to see the little lion's head at the top of the king's bow, complementing the idea of this is a lion's hunt. The lion is picked up again on the bracelets of some of his officials that accompany the king in the hunting chariot.
And looking at the costume of the king himself, we see extraordinary embroidery that may have been picked out in colour originally, finely incised over the head of the king. over his entire body, rosettes and images of the king himself, about a centimetre high, picked out in fine detail. How did the Assyrian sculptors achieve this extraordinary level of detail?
Nobody can say for sure, for nobody's entirely certain how the reliefs were produced. To shed more light on what the process might have been, we asked sculptor Sue Nelson to make a copy of one of the lions, using modern tools but working in the same material, alabaster, that the original sculptors used. Copying the lion itself she found relatively easy, but she couldn't work out how her ancient counterparts had managed to achieve the spectacular level of detail apparent in certain parts of the relief, such as the king's costume. The thing about alabaster is you have to keep everything very sharp and so that probably would have been quite a problem for them because it's likely that they wouldn't have had hardened steel.
The little rosettes where they've taken the ground out, it's so fine, you think, well, how did they do that? I've used a masonry tool and it's pretty tiny, but it's still not tiny enough to do some of those little rosettes which are minuscule and so neat. Sue Nelson may not have come to a firm conclusion about how the most delicate carving was done.
But she has a definite opinion about something else. She believes that contrary to what some experts have argued, the reliefs could not have been carved in situ on the palace walls. It's hard work working upright, because you're using energy to keep a mallet or something in the air.
So that's why I think they would have laid the things out in a workshop. They would have designed the thing in a workshop. The cleverness and ingenuity of their overall design, the way that one event is juxtaposed with another, sometimes foreshadowing modern art forms such as comic strips and film, are commonly agreed to be the relief's greatest attributes. It's widely agreed, too, that the design must have been the work of one artist.