Where is lamassu statue

Part of one inscription reads: "I planned day and night how to settle that city and how to raise its great shrines, the dwellings of the great gods, and my royal residential palaces. I spoke and commanded it to be built. At their gates I constructed a portico patterned after a Syrian palace and roofed it with cedar and cypress beams.

At their entrances, I erected animals made of white stone resembling beasts of the mountain and sea. Translate with Google. We use cookies to make our website work more efficiently, to provide you with more personalised services or advertising to you, and to analyse traffic on our website. For more information on how we use cookies and how to manage cookies, please follow the 'Read more' link, otherwise select 'Accept and close'.

Skip to main content Please enable JavaScript in your web browser to get the best experience. Read more about our cookie policy Accept and close the cookie policy. Museum number But the greatest damage has been done in the last two years. When IS turned up, the skyline of Mosul changed forever with the detonation of shrines, minarets, mosques. And in time they turned their attention to Nineveh, and the winged bull, blasting away its face with a drill.

According to al-Gailani, this violent action can be traced back to the ancient world. When cities were sacked, marauding armies engaged in ritualised vandalism. This would involve smashing images of the king on the reliefs along palace walls. You hadn't fully toppled a king till you had also annihilated his images. In Nineveh not only did IS gouge out the eyes of the Lamassu, they also blew up the shrine of the Prophet Jonah - Nabi Younis - who lived in Nineveh after his entanglement with the whale.

There's a photo of Nabi Younis taken in the s, and it shows a road, heavy with traffic, snaking between the tall piles of earth on the excavation site. It has always been difficult to separate everyday human life from the ancient monuments. This was also true 3, years ago. What Lamia al-Gailani remembers most fondly about the Lamassu wasn't its eyes or the ringlets of its beard, but something easy to miss. At the base of the statue, she found faint lines scratched by generations of ancient soldiers.

These guards of the Assyrian empire, when they weren't off campaigning, had to keep themselves occupied on sentry duty, and entertained themselves with a game using a board they carved into the plinth of the august Lamassu. And according to al-Gailani, it looks like a game the people of Mosul still play today, called dana.

It can be so easy to imagine these monuments as power frozen in stone. But in the case of the Lamassu, we remember its stony magnificence, but we also remember those Assyrian guards, who refused to be awed and carried on playing. More from the Magazine. When Hormuzd Rassam was growing up, Mosul was a peaceful place. The city was part of the slowly dying Ottoman Empire, a provincial backwater that offered few prospects for a young man of energy and talent.

But in , when Rassam was 19 years old, he met someone who changed the trajectory of his life - Austen Henry Layard. Layard was an adventurer who had arrived in the Middle East on horseback at the end of the s, armed with plenty of cash and a pair of revolvers.