In my youth, I was awfully down on the Neo-Assyrian Empire. My first exposure to it was during a visit to the British Museum. There, around the corner from the Elgin Marbles, is a long stretch of alabaster reliefs originally from the North Palace of Nineveh in modern-day Iraq that depict the empire’s ruler King Ashurbanipal (reigned 669–631 BC). Not satisfied with ruling a state that stretched from Egypt and the Levant to Babylon and western Persia, he made a point of proclaiming his bravery by engaging in ostentatious lion hunts, which are portrayed on these reliefs. 

The idea was that Ashurbanipal was acting heroically, like the god Ashur himself, in overcoming the forces of chaos, epitomised by the lions. The lion hunt was a sort of sacrament. As Ashur, the national god of the Assyrians, brought order to a perilous cosmos, so did Ashurbanipal to the temporal sphere by taming the fury of ‘the ferocious mountain breed’, as he described the lions. But the whole thing was a sham. Ashurbanipal liked to be pictured as a valiant warrior, standing boldly on a chariot with bow, arrow and spear, but in reality he almost never went on campaign. He didn’t really hunt the lions either. They had been rounded up, left in cages, probably starved and maybe even drugged before being released, to be chased down by the heavily armed king in front of an obediently rapt audience. I remember feeling terribly sorry for these lions. As each of the noble animals writhed in their death agonies, they appeared to have more individuality and character than any of the Assyrians, who all wore a fixed expression, like the children in Village of the Damned. 

Yet Ashurbanipal had one redeeming feature that I overlooked in my youthful visit to the British Museum. Both Selena Wisnom and Moudhy Al-Rashid point it out in their new books. While making a brave show with his array of armaments, he still insisted on carrying a pair of styluses