Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal

They show a formalized ritual "hunt" by King Ashurbanipal (reigned 669–631 BC) in an arena, where captured Asian lions were released from cages for the king to slaughter with arrows, spears, or his sword. They were made about 645–635 BC, and originally formed different sequences placed around the palace. They would probably originally have been painted, and formed part of a brightly coloured overall decor.

The slabs or orthostats from the North Palace were excavated by Hormuzd Rassam in 1852–1854, and William Loftus in 1854–1855 and most were sent to the British Museum, where they have been favourites with the general public and art historians alike ever since. The realism of the lions has always been praised, although the pathos modern viewers tend to feel was perhaps not part of the Assyrian response. The human figures are mostly seen in formal poses in profile, especially the king in his several appearances, but the lions are in a great variety of poses, alive, dying, and dead.

The carvings come from late in the period of some 250 years over which Assyrian palace reliefs were made, and show the style at its most developed and finest, before decline set in. Ashurbanipal was the last great Assyrian king, and after his reign ended the Neo-Assyrian Empire descended into a period of poorly-recorded civil war between his descendants, generals and rebelling parts of the empire. By 612, perhaps as little as 25 years after these were made, the empire had fallen apart and Nineveh been sacked and burnt.

Assyrian lion hunts

For over a millennium before these reliefs, it seems that the killing of lions was reserved in Mesopotamia for royalty, and kings were often shown in art doing so. There may have been a religious dimension to the activity. A surviving letter on a clay tablet records that when a lion entered a house in the provinces, it had to be trapped and taken by boat to the king. The Asiatic lion, today only surviving in a small population in India, is generally smaller than the African variety, and much later records show that their killing at close quarters, as depicted in the reliefs, was not an impossible feat. When the sword is used, it seems likely that, as in relatively recent times, the actual technique was that "the lion-killer wrapped his left arm in a huge quantity of goats'-hair yarn or tent-cloth" and tempted the lion to attack this, while the sword in the right hand despatched him. This padded defence is never depicted. More often, the king shot arrows at the lion; if these failed to stop him and he leapt, the huntsmen close beside the king used their spears.

An earlier king, Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859), who had erected other lion hunt reliefs in his palace at Nimrud some 200 years before, boasted in inscriptions of about 865 BC that "the gods Ninurta and Nergal, who love my priesthood, gave me the wild animals of the plains, commanding me to hunt. 30 elephants I trapped and killed; 257 great wild oxen I brought down with my weapons, attacking from my chariot; 370 great lions I killed with hunting spears". Ashurnasirpal is shown shooting arrows at lions from his chariot, so perhaps this was a more conventional hunt in open country, or is also in an arena.

In the later reliefs captured lions are released into an enclosed space, formed by soldiers making a shield-wall. Some are shown being released from wooden crates by an attendant in a smaller crate sitting on top, who lifts up a gate. Despite the hunting, lions survived in Iraq until 1918.

The lions may sometimes have been raised in captivity. Ashurnasirpal II, in an inscription boasting of his zoo, stated: "With my fierce heart I captured 15 lions from the Zagros Mountains and forests. I took away 50 lion cubs. I herded them into Kalhu (Nimrud) and the palaces of my land into cages. I bred their cubs in great numbers."