MOSUL, Iraq – The Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH) has announced that a massive alabaster statue of an Assyrian guardian deity has been excavated, according to The Art Newspaper.
The excavation would be exciting news in itself: the statue depicts a lammasu, which has a human head, the body of a bull, and wings like a bird, and is about 12.5 feet by 12.8 feet (3.8 by 3.9 meters), weighing 18 metric tonnes. But beyond the object itself, the story of its excavation is a fascinating account of how archeologists and citizens have struggled to preserve artifacts in the face of looting and political turmoil.
The excavation of the lammasu at Dur-Sharrukin near Mosul, Iraq [Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage]
According to Hyperallegic, French archeologists mentioned the statue in records of their campaigns during the 19th century. It was not until 1992 that Iraqi archeologists uncovered the statue, finding it still in incredible condition. However, in the turmoil caused by the aftermath of the Gulf War, which damaged much of Iraq’s heritage sites, the statue was damaged by looters. The looters cut off the lammasu’s head, cut it into pieces, and attempted to smuggle it out of the country, but they were stopped by customs authorities.
The reconstructed head is now in the collections of the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad – a remarkable survival itself, given that following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, looters broke into the museum and stole over 15,000 objects. But the lammasu’s head remains in place today.
The excavation of the lammasu was halted following the looting of the head, as there were no resources available to continue the work in the face of crippling economic sanctions placed on Iraq by the United Nations following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. The lammasu was reburied for safekeeping.
The nearly three decades between the burial of the statue and its recent re-excavation saw tremendous upheaval in Iraq. The American invasion in 2003 led to the Daesh insurgency, which held the area around Mosul during the mid-2010s. Daesh engaged in a program of cultural destruction, targeting the Mosul Cultural Museum in 2014 and destroying many of the artifacts in its collection. (The Mosul Cultural Museum has only recently begun to host exhibits again.)
According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), the lammasu statue was spared a similar fate when residents of the nearby village of Khorsabad – about 10 miles north of Mosul – hid its location from Daesh before fleeing the area.
Now, the lammasu is finally uncovered once again, having hopefully come out on the other side of the cultural destruction of the past few decades.
“I never unearthed anything this big in my life before,” said Pascal Butterlin, a French archeologist from the University of Paris – Pantheon-Sorbonne involved in the project. “Normally, it’s only in Egypt or Cambodia that you find pieces this big.”
Excavation of the lammasu at Dur-Sharrukin, near Mosul, Iraq [Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage]
The lammasu was commissioned for the ancient city of Dur-Sharrukin by Sargon II, who reigned between 722 and 705 BCE and had intended for the city to be his new capital. After Sargon’s death, the capital moved to Nineveh and Dur-Sharrukin was largely forgotten. The lammasu would have stood at Dur-Sharrukin’s gates and provided protection for the city.
Archeologists hope to reunite the body of the lammasu with its head, though there are some issues with performing that reconstruction – the neck was damaged when the looters cut the head into 11 pieces. There is also the question of whether the complete statue should reside in Baghdad or Mosul. For now the excavated statue remains on site near Khorsabad under heavy protection from looters and the weather.
That said, that such an incredible artifact has survived at all is a source of pride and wonder for the archeologists. “The attention to detail is incredible,” says Butterin.
The Wild Hunt is not responsible for links to external content.
To join a conversation on this post:
Visit our The Wild Hunt subreddit! Point your favorite browser to https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Wild_Hunt_News/, then click “JOIN”. Make sure to click the bell, too, to be notified of new articles posted to our subreddit.