The Lion Hunt Reliefs of Ashurbanipal
About 645 to 635 BC
Along the walls of a narrow gallery, carved in low relief on pale stone, the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal hunts lions. He rides in a chariot and shoots arrows, he stabs a leaping lion with a sword, he grasps another by the tail. Lions are released one by one from cages into an arena ringed by soldiers with shields, and the crowd watches from a hill. The hunt was a ritual of kingship: the ruler protecting his people from chaos, staged and recorded in stone for the walls of his palace at Nineveh in northern Iraq.
The lions are the reason these reliefs are famous. Look at the dying lioness dragging her paralysed hindquarters, her head still raised and roaring, or the lion vomiting blood as arrows pierce his body. The sculptors gave the animals more feeling than the humans, who remain impassive and formal. Muscles, veins and the texture of the mane are cut with a precision that anticipates nothing in art for centuries. The scenes were originally painted, and they read like a strip cartoon, a sequence in time rather than a single moment.
The reliefs were excavated in the eighteen fifties by Hormuzd Rassam from the North Palace of Ashurbanipal, the last great king of Assyria, whose library of clay tablets also came to the museum. Nineveh fell in six hundred and twelve BC and the palace was burned, which is why some slabs are cracked and blackened. In the neighbouring galleries you can see the winged bulls and the earlier reliefs of Ashurnasirpal the Second at Nimrud. The lion hunt gallery is small and easy to miss, but it holds some of the most moving animal sculpture ever made.
Did You Know? An inscription on the reliefs boasts that Ashurbanipal killed the lions himself, but lions were bred in the royal park and released from cages so that the hunt was carefully staged.
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