Lions! At the British Museum

Yesterday I visited the lions at the British Museum. Not the ones by the front entrance, although I might have said hello to them (silently) as I walked past, but the ones in the Assyrian collection (Room 10, to the left of the main entrance). These lions once adorned the walls King Ashurbanipal’s (c. 668-627 BCE) North Palace in Nineveh. The labels do a marvellous job of telling us how the wall panels would have been placed within Ashurbanipal’s palace, and also where the palace would have been situated in Nineveh. (Not that a virtual re-imagining of what it might have looked like would not also be lovely – get on that, British Museum!)

I visited the lions because they are one of my favourite exhibits in the British Museum, but also because I am working on a project for my friend Rebecca Moss, who has created a fantastic piece of public art involving a different kind of lion. Her work features Chinese guardian lions, an ornamental tradition of placing lion statues at the gates of important buildings as protection. Lions are not native to China, and this tradition is thought to have originated in the Asiatic lions which were given as tribute by Central Asian states during the Han dynasty. The same species of lion, then, that would have roamed the hills of Mesopotamia and that were commemorated in Ashurbanipal’s wall panels.

© Trustees of the British Museum

The label next to the reliefs draws our attention to the fact that while lions have been represented in Mesopotamian art for a long time before the Neo-Assyrian period (c. 911-609 BCE), these were sculpted with particular care and vividness. Lions were seen as a worthy opponent of the king, and it was the king’s particular duty to protect his people by hunting and killing them – no one else was permitted to do so. (There exists a letter from an anxious writer who wants to know what he should do about a lion trapped in his loft – apparently it was eventually sent to the king in a cage.)

In the British Museum, we see Ashurbanipal shooting arrows at lions, throwing javelins at lions, holding a club (only partially visible) over a lion, rescuing foreign princes from lions, and stabbing a lion while holding it by the throat. (The fact that one of the consequences of his focus on lions is a statue in San Francisco, commissioned by the Assyrian diaspora, showing Ashurbanipal tenderly cuddling a lion-cub  is a source of endless delight.)

This is royal propaganda, to be sure, but there are many interesting things going on apart from the sheer display of power. The special hat of the king, for one; a special hat, according to Julian Reade, which only the king was allowed to wear, and which consisted of a felt helmet and a sort of tied up bandana. The one worn by Ashurbanipal is always decorated with flowers, some of which resemble the star of Ishtar. We know that Ashurbanipal aligned himself with Ishtar in several of his public statements – one of his inscriptions narrates a vision in which Ishtar promises to aid him in battle, and to fight in his stead. Perhaps these ornamentations are another way to signal this affiliation? I now have a mind to go through every sculpted portrait of Ashurbanipal just to examine the specifics of his flower symbolism.

© Trustees of the British Museum

There is variety among the flowers as well. When I started looking for specifically Ishtarian symbols, I realised how many flowers there were; tied to Ashurbanipal’s wrists and elbows as bracelets, filling the fabric of his clothes, even decorating the reins on his horses. I also noticed that he is the only one wearing decoration-filled garments – everyone else, courtiers as well as servants, are shown wearing plain clothes. What does this say about him? Was he the only one allowed decorative symbols in his clothes, or is this a sculptural point about how the King is very very special?

But to return to the lions. Ashurbanipal’s display of his lion-killing prowess may have a hint of head-of-state-wrestling-with-tigers, but what I find fascinating is the fact that he draws attention to its performativity. In two of the panels, we see that the lion is caged; we also see a little boy, with a cage of his own (Health and Safety in the Neo-Assyrian court!), who is clearly tasked with releasing the lion. Ashurbanipal is showing us that his lions were delivered to his palace for him to kill at his leisure. (There is a wonderfully sarcastic label next to this, pointing out that the King apparently found it more convenient this way.) 

© Trustees of the British Museum

And this is interesting. He could have presented himself killing the lions in the wild, and those of us looking at him 2600 years later would never have known. So why does he do this? What kind of power is he trying to display here, a king deliberately portraying himself as cautious? What kind of cultural logic is at work here?

There is also a tame lion depicted in one of the panels, sharing a wall with a dog on a leash. Perhaps these sculptures are less about Ashurbanipal (well, insofar as anything commissioned by Ashurbanipal is ever about anything else – he is very committed to his self-branding, which is one of the reasons I find him so endearing) than about lions. A dog is a wild animal which needs to be tied up in order to be allowed in the King’s garden. But a lion, the King’s enemy and equal, may enjoy it at his ease.

 © Trustees of the British Museum

Sources:

• Augusta McMahon, ‘The Lion, the King, and the Cage: Late Chalcolithic Iconography and Ideology in Northern Mesopotamia’, Iraq, 71 (2009), pp. 115-124.
• Arthur Piepkorn, Historical Prism Inscriptions of Ashurbanipal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933).
• Julian Reade, Assyrian Sculptures (London: The British Museum Press, 1983).
• Edward H. Schafer,  The Golden Peaches of Samarkand, a Study of T'ang Exotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963).