[MUSIC PLAYING] TIM POTTS: I think the most important takeaway about Assyria is it was the greatest empire of the ancient world. The Assyrian Empire was basically ancient Iraq plus bits of Syria, Turkey, and Iran. And their heyday was 900-600 BC. Assyrian kings were obsessed with their power. The Assyrian palaces and the reliefs in them were absolutely meant to intimidate anyone who came into the presence of the King. Within one of the largest palaces, there could be anything up to six miles of walls telling the story of the King's conquests-- the great battles he fought, all the people he killed. Even today when you walk up to these reliefs, you have this sense of an incredibly powerful imagery that is all about overwhelming the visitor. Inside the palaces, the light was mostly torchlight. And the fact that they have a three-dimensional quality makes them so much more real. Reliefs themselves were at least partly colored in bright blues and yellows and reds. The Assyrian reliefs are like graphic novels. They show scenes of the Assyrian war machine slaughtering, beheading the enemies-- these limp bodies impaled on these massive stakes. You resist the king and you disobey him at your peril. In the scenes of battle, the Assyrians, of course, always win. The enemies of the Assyrians always lose. The King would simply make his enemies. And two of the Elamite rulers are forced to prepare meals for the king and his queen. Being forced to serve a king when you, yourself, were a ruler was one of the greatest humiliations you could have. One of the most extraordinary reliefs is of King Ashurbanipal reclining on his couch with his queen, and in the tree beside him is the head of the Elamite king he had killed in battle. Most of the great art of ancient Assyria is expressing the power and propaganda of the king. But it's a phenomenon that goes right up to the present day. Indeed, Saddam Hussein saw himself as a latter-day ruler of Assyria and Babylonia, the stories that the Assyrian kings told still reach out to us 3,000 years later.