Hunter, scholar, boaster, dreamer

The Assyrians placed sculptures of winged human-headed bulls (lamassus) at the entrances to their capital at Nineveh, in modern Mosul, to ward off evil. The mighty lamassu to the right of the Nergal Gate had been on guard for some 2,700 years when Isis vandals took a drill to it in 2015 and blew away its face. Today a copy, crafted out of date syrup cans, stands on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. It wears the oblong beard and proud look of the Assyrian kings.

The original sculpture dated to the time of Sennacherib, who ruled Assyria from 705 to 681 BC, and transformed Nineveh into a magnificent metropolis. No stranger himself to violent desecration, he made his eldest son king of Babylon, but went on the rampage when the Babylonians rebelled and had the ruler dispatched. Sennacherib was later murdered in a conspiracy forged by his elder sons after appointing a younger son heir to his empire.

By the time Sennacherib’s grandson, Ashurbanipal, came to the throne in 669 BC, the succession seemed to be going the way of the ancient storybooks; Babylonian and Sumerian myths brimmed with tales of unexpected usurpations and warring kin. While his older brother had to make do with Babylon, Ashurbanipal assumed power over the more illustrious Assyria, which he would expand until it reached from Egypt to western Iran.

Ashurbanipal was a hunter, a scholar, but above all a boaster. The walls of this tremendous exhibition resound with his words of self-praise. ‘I have read ingeniously written text in obscure Sumerian and Akkadian that is hard to decipher,’ he wrote. There is little reason to doubt him. Four towering bookcases constructed at the centre of the gallery offer the most mesmerising display of a few hundred of the 10,000 clay tablets he owned.