who he was we simply don't know but the astonishing quality of his work means that for many people he's the true hero of the lion hunt reliefs the Stone Cutters were brilliant technicians but whoever furnished the design the concept the ability to put so much narrative into a Continuum in proportion with life in it and and and and um all that detail as well as the overall impression that person was of course a major artist great artist that he was though the designer of the reliefs had to pay very close attention to the views of someone far more powerful than him the king who had ordered him to create them in the first place represented in every one of the reliefs the king must have taken a great interest in what they portrayed and how they looked his power was such that any change he requested would have been carried out as a matter of course the king certainly supervised it and probably interfered quite a lot he might say well this is lovely I don't like this we given up this kind of Chariot and I think I'm slightly taller than my agitant so make me look bigger or something but when they got all the detail sorted out in the way that the king approved the Stone Cutters came in and did their job even as the relief neared completion the king is thought to have asserted his Mastery over the project by demanding last minute changes interestingly his dissatisfaction seems to have related not to the way he and his men were portrayed but to the way in which the sculptors had depicted the Lions the artists that created these wonderful images of the Lions really understood the animal themselves the muscles the textures they're all very familiar to the sculptor and yet occasionally when we look at these release we find that they actually made mistakes or at least someone thought they had made mistakes for example if we look at this lion lying on its back and the end of its tail the TFT here has actually been shortened and we can see in the relief the outline of the original tail carved here then smoothed away and recarved at a slightly lower level here somebody perhaps even the king himself had come along and realized that the tales were too long it's possible that hus draam never asked himself how big a role the king who featured in the lion hunt reliefs had played in their production and design but he was very keen all the same to find out who that King was within days of uncovering the first of the reliefs he came across some ancient inscriptions which seemed to hold the key he knew they probably refer to the King by name but frustratingly for him he couldn't work out what they said they were written in cuniform an ancient form of writing he couldn't understand this was a problem of course but it didn't trouble him for long what Rasam did was he copied some of the inscriptions he found in the palace and he sent them off to rollinson in Baghdad rollinson could read cuniform and he was able to send back a message saying this is a palace of the sahadan of uh King ashab banipal and this is indeed what it turned out to be nothing much was known about King ashab banipal when his name first came to light nowadays though we know a great deal he wasn't in fact a ruler to be remembered one of the greatest of all the Assyrian Kings he conquered Egypt and created a tremendous Empire which embraced a huge sthe of what we call today the Middle East and these weren't his only claims to fame he was a multifaceted personality he wasn't just a lion killing and enemy slicing Monarch um as you might get the impression he was complex and he was interested in literature and the tradition language and literature of his own culture and um this is a case in point this is one of the tablets from ashab Pal's own Library he collected tablets from all over um Iraq brought them uh to the Palace to be copied for his own use and this is the the reverse the back of the tablet and this area here is what we call the caon it's the bit which explains that it belongs to ashab banipal um who he says was very wise he was given wisdom by the gods and he was able to read K form inscriptions even ancient ones and argue with Scholars um unlike any King who went before him Asha banipal was clearly a remarkable man even by the standards of Assyrian Kings even so people new to the reliefs might find it hard to accept that he could possibly have hunted and killed so many lions especially fanciful at first first glance is a scene which seems to imply that he liked to engage in what you might call hand topor combat with his leonine prey can anything like this really have occurred the answer on the face of it would have to be no big cats aren't to be trifled with as everybody knows these cats part of a breeding program being carried out at the cotor Wildlife Park in Oxfordshire are Asiatic lions like those featured in the lion hunt reliefs slightly smaller than the African lions we're more familiar with today they are extremely ferocious all the same could ashab banipal and his men really have Tangled with beasts like this armed solely with swords Spears and Bows strange as it may seem the true answer appears to be yes one reason is that much older carvings like this one also show Kings killing Lions suggesting that the practice had been going on in Assyria for hundreds of years another is that contrary to what one Might at first think the reliefs don't record a totally uncontrolled event taking place in the wild if you look closely at the reliefs you can actually see that the Lions when the Story begins are in cages and they are released from cages brought to in a an enclosed space and the King then has ample opportunity safely to dispatch them when wild animals are released from cages I think whoever is in the arena is in some form of danger uh but the king is always well protected he has guards standing around with Spears and when he's in his Chariot he's accompanied by spear bearers who fight off attacking lions Not only was the lion hunt much more of a controlled event than first meets the eye it also seems to have involved masses of people this panel easily overlooked on first viewing shows a group of Spectators climbing a nearby Hill either to get a better view of the hunt or because they're terrified of what's going on it tells us that the King was on public display when he killed the Lions and this may well have been Central to what the hunt was all about out presumably Ash babal had a good breakfast and went out and slaughtered them one by one and there must have been cheers and screams and everybody was um uh suitably impressed at the power of their great king a reasonable question is whether Asha barupal was really like that or whether he was a peing coward who hated to do it and had to get drunk first and and was glad and it was all over his father Esau Haden probably would have needed to bolster himself with some kind of chemicals but I think ashab pal lapped it up and um enjoyed it wholeheartedly having demonstrated his Supremacy by slaughtering so many beasts King ashab banipal seen here in some striking Victorian reimaginings of his lion hunting Feats would naturally have wanted to remind people of his prowess later in life this it's now thought is what prompted the production of the reliefs but who were the carvings meant to impress fewer people it seems than one Might at first suppose the reliefs themselves come from a corridor which led away from the main area of the palace and it's possible that this was the route that the king actually took on the way to the hunt and so it's likely that the people who saw the reliefs were the king himself of course his courtiers and perhaps some visiting dignitaries who were allowed to accompany him to the hunt accessible only to a few back in ancient times the reliefs are now viewable by all a considerable number of people these days take the trouble to go and see them surprisingly though that wasn't the case when they were first unveiled about 150 years ago the lack of interest in them that seems to have existed back then is hard to understand this is not least because certain other Assyrian relics most notably the huge winged and human headed bull and lion figures which still dominate the British Museum's Assyrian galleries had made an enormous Splash when they'd arrived at the Museum a few years before the public interest in those exhibits had been so great it had caught the Museum's trustees off guard they put them in a basement their first Consignment of fines and appointed just one curator to take people round so so they were really um very very surprised when the whole thing took off and the public flocked to see them there were lots of people who had worked out in the Middle East or people with relatives who'd lived in the Middle East photography was just beginning and people were hunting tigers in India and having great um photographs of themselves with heaps of dead animals and themselves with their rifle on top and I think that that struck Accord with the victorians and when they went to the museum they would see this as a right activity for a colonial power interest in ancient Assyria was so great at one point that it stimulated the production of a wide range of household goods demonstrating their comparative lack of impact though the lion hunt reliefs themselves don't seem to have played much of a part in the trend a great many objects were designed to capture this new craze for ancient Assyria and a lot of them show LS in various forms but the only object which I feel was directly inspired by the discovery and then display in the British Museum of ashaba Neal's L hand was this bracelet which does show exactly some of the scenes which are displayed on those reliefs the fact that visitors to the British Museum today are much more appreciative of the lion hunt reliefs than their Victorian predecessors is good news so far as the Museum's curators are concerned they hope that public awareness of them will grow still more in the years ahead attracting long overdue recognition for homu draam discovering the lion hunter Leafs should have brought him both fortune and fame but for several reasons including perhaps disdain for his ethnic Origins neither of these things actually came his way somehow or other he never himself got perhaps the attention he merited he wrote stal books about it he gave many lectures but I think there were parties in the British museum who took a gin him and tried to Black and his name and uh all in all he's never become a household name a household figure which I think in terms of the history of archaeology he Jolly well deserves just as Rasam is at last getting his rightful recognition so are the great lion hunt reliefs these extraordinary carvings so Dynamic and full of movement so realistic and so accomplished are some of the most remarkable ancient artifacts ever found his name will live on certainly in the lion hunt they're moving they're deep they're powerful they're beautiful and it will be there forever