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Museum of Lost Objects: The Winged Bull of Nineveh

One year ago a man took a pneumatic drill to the statue of a winged bull at the gates of the ancient city of Nineveh, near Mosul in modern Iraq. It's one of countless treasures destroyed by vandals, militants or military action in the region in the past 15 years. This is the first of 10 stories about ancient objects that have now been lost.

The winged bull had the head of a man, the wings of an eagle, and the hulking body of a bull. Known as a Lamassu, other examples had the body of a lion. It was a composite of the most powerful and ferocious creatures known in the region, and this particular sculpture was huge - about 4.5m high, and up to 30 tonnes in weight.

It stood at one of the many gates along Nineveh's city walls, as a protective spirit and a symbol of the power of the Assyrian king.

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"They're very intimidating. Those faces look quite daunting, the wings, the hooves, and the combined creature of many different animals that's very large and menacing-looking. It does strike you a little bit with fear which I suppose is part of the reason for these things," says Mark Altaweel, an Iraqi-American archaeologist.

At the same time, amid its mass of curly hair and its tumbling beard, the Lamassu does have a kind of tight-lipped smile. It is stern, but in its own way welcoming.

It was hewn from a single slab of limestone about 2,700 years ago, in the reign of the Assyrian King Sennacherib, ruler of an empire covering parts of modern Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.

Nineveh, Sennacherib's capital "would have been the city of cities", says Altaweel. "The largest city anywhere on Earth, probably, by the time it reaches its peak in the 7th Century BC. All roads would have literally led to Nineveh."

Link to Full Extremely Interesting Article:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35669056

BBC News

ISIS slayed the ancient Lion of al-Lat in Palmyra

Two thousand years ago a statue of a lion watched over a temple in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra. More recently, after being excavated in the 1970s, it became an emblem of the city and a favourite with tourists. But it was one of the first things IS militants destroyed when they moved in last year.

It's said that there are more than 300 words for lion in Arabic. That's a measure of the importance of the lion in the history of the Middle East. For Bedouin tribes, the lion represented the biggest danger in the wild - until the last one in the region died, some time in the 19th Century.

The animal was feared and admired and this must explain why a statue of a lion twice as high as a human being, weighing 15 tonnes, was fashioned by artists in ancient Palmyra.

With spiralling, somewhat loopy eyes, and thick whiskers swept back angrily along its cheek bones, the lion was clearly a fighter, but it was also a lover. In between its legs, it held a horned antelope. The antelope stretched a delicate hoof over the lion's monstrous paws, and perhaps it was safe. The lion was a symbol of protection - it was both marking and protecting the entrance to the temple.

But no-one could protect the lion when IS arrived and wrecked it in May 2015.

"It was a real shock, because you know, in a way, it was our lion," says Polish archaeologist Michal Gawlikowski, whose team unearthed it in 1977.

For well over 1,000 years, the statue had lain buried in the ruins of the ancient city, though parts had been used as foundations stones in other buildings.

"You could hardly see what it was. I could see it was a sculpture and an old one for Palmyra, so we decided it was necessary to put it together immediately. It wasn't apparent from the beginning what this was - and then we found the head, and it became obvious."

Link to Full Sad Article - Photos:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35720366